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4e still has a defiling option. Like, I feel the need to point that out. It's just not exactly the same as the 2e one.
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Jan 1, 2019 21:20
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theironjef posted:Yeah, I was real surprised to get such a vociferous response about it. He really liked the thematics of having to choose between lovely spellcasting and destroying the world, I guess. People like the weirdest details. I once went to play Planescape with a group who were really into the magic items losing a +1 for every plane away from their home plane (and stuff that worked differently in general). For them, a big part of the fun was finding and trading for (or stealing) the exact right gear for their upcoming mission. They had lists and charts. That stuff isn't my idea of fun, but hey, they'd been going for years, playing oldschool "find out what the current specific trick is" D&D but in Planescape. E: and 2e defilers aren't about reining wizards in. Preservers are normal 2e wizards. They don't get penalties. Defilers get faster advancement at the cost of ruining the world. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 21:50 on Jan 1, 2019 |
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Jan 1, 2019 21:47
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ProfessorCirno posted:4e still has a defiling option. Like, I feel the need to point that out. It's just not exactly the same as the 2e one. I feel like that wasn't at question and has even been mentioned a couple times? 
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Jan 1, 2019 22:16
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While I've got no strong feelings about the 2e version of defiling, I did feel like the incentive in 4e to consider defiling was pretty limited. Its a reroll on a daily arcane power, which is nice, but in turn also damages all your allies within 20 squares. Between a lot of dailies already doing some measure of damage or effect even on a miss, and the various other ways to get rerolls a lot of class/race combos have, it just never seemed to be a significant temptation to use in our campaign. There are some paragon paths defiling unlocks, but there are also preserver paths that play a little better with a group anyway. I mean, I get from a balancing perspective why you don't want defiling to be too awesome, but as a temptation thing for PCs it was too situational to feel like much of a concern when we play.
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Jan 2, 2019 00:52
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Desiden posted:While I've got no strong feelings about the 2e version of defiling, I did feel like the incentive in 4e to consider defiling was pretty limited. Its a reroll on a daily arcane power, which is nice, but in turn also damages all your allies within 20 squares. Between a lot of dailies already doing some measure of damage or effect even on a miss, and the various other ways to get rerolls a lot of class/race combos have, it just never seemed to be a significant temptation to use in our campaign. There are some paragon paths defiling unlocks, but there are also preserver paths that play a little better with a group anyway. Absolutely. On top of that, there are other sources of rerolls if you're really worried about "wasting" your daily, and few-to-none of those cause damage to your allies and, narratively, kill the world.
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Jan 2, 2019 01:02
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I'm curious, has there ever been any research done into what proportion of groups use a published setting vs the DM's own homebrew setting vs not really in a setting (i.e. adventures start and end at the dungeon entrance)?
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Jan 2, 2019 04:12
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re: Warframe we know the devs play Pathfinder, so they'll probably just solve everything with spells Saryn is a full progression Wizard and Wukong is a Fighter
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Jan 2, 2019 11:58
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Goa Tse-tung posted:re: Warframe Warframe being a teetering mess of underexplained and overextended systems makes a lot of sense all of a sudden. 
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Jan 2, 2019 12:12
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Sion posted:Warframe being a teetering mess of underexplained and overextended systems makes a lot of sense all of a sudden. That's just MMOs in general.
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Jan 2, 2019 12:42
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Desiden posted:While I've got no strong feelings about the 2e version of defiling, I did feel like the incentive in 4e to consider defiling was pretty limited. Its a reroll on a daily arcane power, which is nice, but in turn also damages all your allies within 20 squares. Between a lot of dailies already doing some measure of damage or effect even on a miss, and the various other ways to get rerolls a lot of class/race combos have, it just never seemed to be a significant temptation to use in our campaign. There are some paragon paths defiling unlocks, but there are also preserver paths that play a little better with a group anyway. I ended up letting it substitute for ritual components, too, but even that didn't feel like enough. And recovering a Daily felt like too much. Maybe recovering an Encounter power? Allowing damage re-rolls without damaging your allies in return? I dunno. It's overall fine, though; it's rarely a good idea for player-facing mechanics, and the rest of the implementation is simply phenomenal.
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Jan 2, 2019 19:07
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If it's meant to represent a hideously wasteful expenditure for minimal (but tangible) personal gain, then it succeeds.
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Jan 2, 2019 19:28
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Nthing that 4E Dark Sun is excellent. Also, the 5E megadungeon that just dropped Dungeon of the Mad Mage has a level with a portal to the Stardock, a Githyanki outpost in an asteroid in orbit around Toril (including an illustration showing the old style gravity plane). Also, there's a stranded Spelljamming vessel (named as such) with crew on another level. So they are at least throwing in references to Spelljammer in a recent module for whatever that's worth.
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Jan 2, 2019 22:44
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dwarf74 posted:Yeah, Defiling was poorly-implemented in a lot of ways in 4e. It also directly hurt your allies - like, by a lot. Half a healing surge worth, IIRC - or 1/8th of their max HP - without negatively affecting your enemies. This cut back on the 'destruction of nature is its own penalty' nature, for me. Yeah, we've enjoyed 4e Dark Sun on the whole a ton, so the defiling mechanic as a PC thing mostly just stands out as awkward compared to all the other good stuff. If I really had to balance it to make it tempting, I'd probably do something like either reroll or recover an encounter power, at the cost of some sort of non-enemy living scenery within range (plant life or neutral NPCs, whatever) or some number of healing surges from allies. For my game, I've generally skipped worrying about the specific battle mechanic and done temptation via rituals. We're already doing fixed enhancements and scarcity of magical items, so access to rituals for magic item creation is one of the more available routes to get additional bennies...but most of the accessible sources for those rituals are from defilers. There's also going to be some upcoming options to try to use creepy ancient defiler magic to solve some of their problems if they want to go that route.
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Jan 3, 2019 02:24
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I thought the issue with defiling wasn't so much the player level, although of course you could still gently caress up a village by slinging spells around: it was that the career path for defiler went something like defiler -> sorceror-king -> the Dragon
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Jan 3, 2019 07:32
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mkultra419 posted:Nthing that 4E Dark Sun is excellent. Stardock was originally published as an FR-Spelljammer crossover in 2e.
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Jan 3, 2019 09:45
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I think there are Paragon Paths and Epic destinies that take you down the road of the Sorcerer Kings, but the Dragon is like a level ridiculous enemy intended to really challenge a whole max level party. If I remember in 2e they had a book all about the various physical transformations and how to achieve them and hitting Dragon was crazy hard since you needed to essentially destroy an entire nation to get enough sacrifices to start the transformation.
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Jan 3, 2019 09:54
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Kwyndig posted:I think there are Paragon Paths and Epic destinies that take you down the road of the Sorcerer Kings, but the Dragon is like a level ridiculous enemy intended to really challenge a whole max level party.
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Jan 3, 2019 12:42
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Nessus posted:See that was great because then you look at why all the sorceror-kings have these nations that snipe at each other when they don't really need that and you go: Oh. oh I think 2E outlining the routes to Dragonhood was useful not because it was ever expected that any PC would actually do that, but to illustrate a) what the Dragon must have done to get that way and b) what any particular sorcerer-king might be trying to do, and (by implication) what the PCs need to disrupt in order to stop that. For the era it came out in, it's actually a nice bit of worldbuilding-by-system-design.
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Jan 3, 2019 13:05
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Based on the rules it is wild that so many Sorcerer Kings are as far along as they are in the transformation. The setting barely seems to have big populations, and yikes the number of sacrifices are high.
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Jan 3, 2019 13:23
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Lord_Hambrose posted:Based on the rules it is wild that so many Sorcerer Kings are as far along as they are in the transformation. The setting barely seems to have big populations, and yikes the number of sacrifices are high. They've been around for a long time, so presumably they get by on sacrificing a couple dozen here and there over centuries. (The number of sacrifices assigned to that progression was a number pulled out of someone's rear end with no consideration for the established setting lore.)
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Jan 3, 2019 13:39
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Oh yeah you look at The Dragon's expected sacrifices and it's like "... but there's not that many people?"
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Jan 3, 2019 14:15
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Didn't some of the sorcerer kings have this explained by the fact that they'd genocided some of the regular D&D humanoid types that didn't exist in the setting? Like I think one of them had killed off the Athas gnome population or something, and another one had done for ogres.
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Jan 3, 2019 14:33
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Would someone kindly fill me in on the requirements, or drop a link so I can read it? Everyone's making it out to be in the tens of millions. I'm not familiar with the setting, but human populations can't be so low that losing (I'm guessing 50K people) would doom the race? Unless we're talking like 200K people spread across a landmass the size of The Americas?
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Jan 3, 2019 14:50
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Yeah a lot of them have been stuck at their current stage for a long rear end time, having reached it via personally enacting the genocidal apocalypse that made Athas such a shithole.
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Jan 3, 2019 14:52
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Weren't it like just 1k sacrifices a year to keep the former boss of the sorcerer-kings shackled? I mean the Aztecs killed a shitload more irl and it was on just a smaller expanse.
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Jan 3, 2019 14:59
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Chakan posted:Would someone kindly fill me in on the requirements, or drop a link so I can read it? Everyone's making it out to be in the tens of millions. I'm not familiar with the setting, but human populations can't be so low that losing (I'm guessing 50K people) would doom the race? Unless we're talking like 200K people spread across a landmass the size of The Americas?
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Jan 3, 2019 15:37
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There's a bunch of folk who live in the wilderness, of course, so I guess the city-states do a lot of raiding and slave-capturing in order to make up the sacrifice numbers when necessary. Arguably the fact that the system is not sustainable under its current parameters is a feature of the setting, not a bug - we come to Athas at the point where something's gotta give, and the PCs get swept up in all that.
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Jan 3, 2019 15:46
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Lemon-Lime posted:They've been around for a long time, so presumably they get by on sacrificing a couple dozen here and there over centuries. I don't have the 2e book handy to look at numbers, but I do recall part of what made the sorceror-king of Tyr different was that he was essentially trying to bypass this, and go through all the stages in rapid succession via sacrificing his whole city. So yeah, the implication seemed to be that the rest just worked through their thing at a very slow rate. (There was also a bunch of other goofy stuff with obsidian orbs you had to do, and a whole thing where for a bunch of the stages you essentially went mad and were just a ravening monster, so there were other logistics areas to worry about to become a dragon as well)
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Jan 3, 2019 15:51
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Warthur posted:There's a bunch of folk who live in the wilderness, of course, so I guess the city-states do a lot of raiding and slave-capturing in order to make up the sacrifice numbers when necessary. The main issue is that the folks who remain alive on Athas are, universally, tough enough that taking them alive requires no small amount of effort, so it's not really a sustainable practice for mass live sacrifices. Plus, like, I'm pretty sure that the elf raiders and the halfling cannibals and the thri-kreen are all more than willing to die rather than become defiler sacrifices.
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Jan 3, 2019 16:25
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Mors Rattus posted:The main issue is that the folks who remain alive on Athas are, universally, tough enough that taking them alive requires no small amount of effort, so it's not really a sustainable practice for mass live sacrifices.
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Jan 3, 2019 16:28
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https://sla-cs1.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders/project_updatesquote:New Year Announcement regarding canon for SLA Industries I thought this was rather interesting.
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Jan 3, 2019 16:53
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Are they unhappening the stuff that had to do with their Saint Elsewhere secret backstory, or the stuff that didn't?
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Jan 3, 2019 17:05
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Mors Rattus posted:Are they unhappening the stuff that had to do with their Saint Elsewhere secret backstory, or the stuff that didn't? You mean The Truth? That’s kind of hinted at everywhere, including the core.
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Jan 3, 2019 17:07
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Wait, SLA Industries is making a new book?
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Jan 3, 2019 17:07
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Are they deprecating their brand new book or is there a difference between "SLA Industries: Cannibal Sector 1" and just "Cannibal Sector 1"?
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Jan 3, 2019 17:16
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some loving LIAR posted:Are they deprecating their brand new book or is there a difference between "SLA Industries: Cannibal Sector 1" and just "Cannibal Sector 1"?
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Jan 3, 2019 18:07
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Yeah, Cannibal Sector 1 is the setting for their new minis game (SLA:CS1). It's gonna have a good chunk devoted to setting stuff, which updates the old setting stuff from their 2007 "Cannibal Sector 1" rpg book.
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Jan 3, 2019 19:08
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It's really, really weird to me that they keep pushing SLA Industries. I don't think it ever really picked up very much steam but the Nightfall guys just keep trying to make SLA a thing and putting out new products at a slow drip. Why SLA and not, say, Tales of Gargentihr or A|State or any number of other UK indie games which mashes up a really weird setting with a really pedestrian game system?
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Jan 3, 2019 19:20
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Warthur posted:It's really, really weird to me that they keep pushing SLA Industries. I don't think it ever really picked up very much steam but the Nightfall guys just keep trying to make SLA a thing and putting out new products at a slow drip. Well, in A|State’s case it’s because Contested Ground are out of the RPG business and don’t want to license the ip to anyone else. Which is fair enough.
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Jan 3, 2019 23:09
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Jesus, SLA is getting a minis game? I thought it was just a joke setting for edgelords, like Lobo for TTRPGs
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Jan 3, 2019 23:51
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