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thespaceinvader posted:Oh goddammit what the poo poo. Kaysette posted:It’s cool, the problem is they picked a lovely name for it and a lot of DMs run it the way you described. The reason it's confusing is that Take 10 was a thing introduced in 3e from the very outset, and then "Passive Perception" was introduced later, but Passive Perception was specifically only to be used for Perception, and not for any other skill. Take 10 is functionally similar, but is still something that you have to explicitly declare that you're using/doing, and tends to be more restricted in its use. You can read 5e's rules/description of passive skills as something that can apply to all skills, but even the examples are geared towards Perception and Investigation, so it's understandable that one might think that it's not actually something that can/should be used with anything else. If anything, to read it this way would be like saying "they didn't write Take 10 into the rules, but there's definitely still a use for Take 10 while playing 5e, so let's bring back Take 10 as a houserule"
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Mar 19, 2019 06:09
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Nash posted:High school DnD trip report. This is really good, guys. I assume you’re a nerd teacher training the next generation. I’d love a little breakdown of what kind of characters these kids made.
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Mar 19, 2019 06:25
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gradenko_2000 posted:You can read 5e's rules/description of passive skills as something that can apply to all skills, but even the examples are geared towards Perception and Investigation, so it's understandable that one might think that it's not actually something that can/should be used with anything else. Not near my books and phoneposting but... can you really? What would a passive acrobatics skill even do?
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Mar 19, 2019 06:50
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:Not near my books and phoneposting but... can you really? For the player who automatically parkours everywhere they go.
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Mar 19, 2019 07:35
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For what it's worth, 4e had an Epic Destiny, the Legendary Thief, that gained a passive stealth score. And yep, so long as you chose, you were just passively invisible to anyone who couldn't beat it.
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Mar 19, 2019 08:39
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:Not near my books and phoneposting but... can you really? That would just mean that you can pass anything requiring an acrobatics check if the DC is less than [10 + your modifiers] If it's higher than that, then you would have to roll. If you're under some kind of pressure, then you would have to roll even if the DC is less than [10 + your modifiers]. And that second clause is still in keeping with how "Passive Perception" tends to be used anyway - the assumption is that Passive Perception doesn't work if you're rushing through a room at full clip.
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Mar 19, 2019 08:52
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:Not near my books and phoneposting but... can you really?
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Mar 19, 2019 09:14
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It may make more sense if you replace "passive" with "unhurried" even for Perception. Or "relaxed"? Something that implies that it's what you use when you're not in a huge rush or being attacked. The "passive" does a good job describing the average use for perception, i.e. when you don't know something is there so you're not actively scrutinizing the area harder than usual, but it sucks as a name for many of the other uses of the passive skill mechanic. I dunno, maybe this is something that could be looked at in a hypothetical 5.5 revision since it isn't a bad idea at its core. BattleMaster fucked around with this message at 09:40 on Mar 19, 2019 |
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Mar 19, 2019 09:37
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:Not near my books and phoneposting but... can you really? Infinity Gaia posted:To be perfectly fair, you don't expect the 8 STR Wizard to be able to lift a heavy rock, so I don't see why it's so absurd that the 8 CHA Fighter is bad at talking people into things. Disagreeing with that is disagreeing with ability scores as a whole, at which point why even still play D&D instead of something better at what you want? A "common sense" approach to these things only works in a system where every (well made) character has roughly comparable breadth of utility. Forcing rolls in D&D 5E locks the Fighter out of a lot more game than the Wizard. Also Wizards get various Bypass A Heavy Rock spells anyway. In an ideal world (or a well designed stats and skills system) you can and should have your ability to converse directly match your stats. In D&D you need to give things a lot of leeway. Splicer fucked around with this message at 11:19 on Mar 19, 2019 |
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Mar 19, 2019 10:48
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Toplowtech posted:Ask the level 11 rogues experts in acrobatic and at 20 dex with Reliable Talent, who can never roll under 23 on their acrobatic check. Splicer posted:Too lightfooted to trigger a trap even if you didn't consciously notice it. Automatically not to take damage after falling less than X feet. Good poo poo. More of this sort of thing.
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Mar 19, 2019 11:19
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:Good poo poo. More of this sort of thing. Passive Athletics: That door was locked but you know what never mind. Splicer fucked around with this message at 11:48 on Mar 19, 2019 |
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Mar 19, 2019 11:39
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Passive Medicine: Turns out they were a hypochondriac and they're fine now. Passive Survival: Somehow always has a wad of beef jerky in their mouth like chewing tobacco. Passive Religion: Wears a fedora.
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Mar 19, 2019 11:44
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Passive Aggression: If you don't know what it does I'm not going to tell you.
Splicer fucked around with this message at 11:51 on Mar 19, 2019 |
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Mar 19, 2019 11:48
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On that note, I'm considering using Slayer Exploits as a mechanic for all martial to give them long rest powers. Ideally they'd also get some utility exploits too though. Easy enough at low levels, can do stuff like replicating Jump/Longstrider, temporary expertise on Str/Dex checks etc. What might be some appropriate things at higher tier that remain 'non magical' but extraordinary and mechanically on par with some caster stuff?
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Mar 19, 2019 11:51
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Razakai posted:What might be some appropriate things at higher tier that remain 'non magical' but extraordinary and mechanically on par with some caster stuff? Sky's the limit. Jump real far/high. Like "seven times his own height carrying seven times his own weight" kinda high/far. Once. Alternatively, just double the jump stuff at all times I guess? Run up/along walls, or even out onto thin air for a handful of paces. Or if you prefer, you can climb and make little leaps at your normal movement speed. Shrug off any blow, once. It just doesn't affect you at all. You get to decide after you know the damage and effect of the blow. The kind of berserk where everyone (every enemy?) within 2 squares / 10 feet of you takes damage if they end their turn there. Just straight up kill a motherfucker stone dead forever, if they fail a save. They still take some huge amount of damage even if they pass. Use a weapon to bat spells that target you back at the caster, hitting them but not you, once. As above, as many times as you like, but it blows both of you up instead of only the caster. Suddenly appear next to an ally and absorb a blow intended for them, dealing half the damage back to the attacker. Become immovable by any mundane or magical means until the end of the fight, unless you choose to be moved. When you would target an enemy, target as many enemies within 30' as you want. Walk between the rain, becoming immune to mundane missile fire until the end of the fight. Until the end of the fight, you can't die. I mean, you'll be dead, but you don't fall down and you just keep fighting until it's over one way or another. Ends one round after all enemies or all allies are KO'd or dead, giving you time to snatch a pyrrhic victory and/or say some famous last words. If a spell is targeted at something within 30' of you, as a reaction you can catch it on your shield, annulling it. Works on anything, even poo poo like charm person. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 12:23 on Mar 19, 2019 |
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Mar 19, 2019 12:08
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*slowly pulls Hercules and Cuchullainn into view* For inspiration go through the various spell lists and honestly ask yourself how many are explicitly magical. Wall of Stone: you punch the ground so hard a wall appears. Fear/Dominate Person: Flex your muscles and just put the fear of You into them. Stun/Confusion: It's called a concussion. Irresistible Dance: Dance off bro.
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Mar 19, 2019 12:18
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Splicer posted:*slowly pulls Hercules and Cuchullainn into view* Plus Beowulf, the various Eddas, Heimskringla, and a bunch of asian legends that I'm not that familiar with but are kickass and I hope someone shows up who can remind me what they're called. e: Hell, a bunch of the king arthur mythology fits extraordinary but not magical.
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Mar 19, 2019 12:44
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Combat stuff is pretty easy to do at least. I've come up with plenty of special weapon attacks, buffs and so on. 'You can run on air as long as you end your turn on a solid surface' and 'teleport via jumping' are fun high level ideas. It's that sorta stuff that was tricky to think of - rather than just making martials better at killing stuff it'd be good to give out of combat utility. The mind affecting stuff via persuasion/intimidation is a good idea too. Maybe combine it with the skill system so you can do amazing stuff in skills you have profiency with.
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Mar 19, 2019 13:06
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Passive ________ skills are a legalistic solution to a legalistic problem that never needed to exist in the first place. It's an incredibly dumb rule based entirely around "we much never, ever give the players advice on when to and when not to roll." How about instead of long convoluted "take 10" rules you just actually try to teach DMs not to make players roll for loving everything?
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Mar 19, 2019 13:22
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Razakai posted:it'd be good to give out of combat utility. You can always find north. You always arrive in the nick of time. When doing mundane work, you effortlessly do the work of 5/10/50/100 men. You're a hero, everyone knows your name and nearly everyone thinks you're awesome. You unlock the smartass toughguy solution to puzzles. See alexander and the gordian knot. You have an entourage of noncombatants. You have learned to do some noncombat spells as rituals. You can do true multitasking, such as reading a book while holding a conversation, or writing a different message with each hand at the same time. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 13:29 on Mar 19, 2019 |
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Mar 19, 2019 13:23
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ProfessorCirno posted:Passive ________ skills are a legalistic solution to a legalistic problem that never needed to exist in the first place. It's an incredibly dumb rule based entirely around "we much never, ever give the players advice on when to and when not to roll." because you then run into the issue we just got done discussing where the question of awarding automatic successes instead of rolling is dashed against the rocks of niche protection for classes granted, you CAN avoid that by, as you said, the book telling the DM how to adjudicate it correctly, but D&D also tends to shy away from coming down too hard on the "player skill vs character skill" debate, which is why we end up in this awkward situation
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Mar 19, 2019 13:31
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I agree that DMs have players roll too much and there's nothing that explicitly tells them "hey dumbass don't have players roll for stuff that needs to happen for the plot to continue unless you have a good out" or other good practices. But I think that "passive" skills are not really all that complex and reduce rolls when properly applied by saying characters are competent enough to do certain things with no failure chance in calm situations, if they are competent enough. I think the problem is that the game doesn't give enough guidance one when these are useful so they DMs have players roll for like 50% failure rates on doing routine things, and then let them do it again until they succeed. edit: A good DM could just not do that and say it happens, but the "passive" skills give you a number you can use if you don't want to or aren't good at judging it yourself. BattleMaster fucked around with this message at 13:39 on Mar 19, 2019 |
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Mar 19, 2019 13:36
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Splicer posted:*slowly pulls Hercules and Cuchullainn into view* Wrestle a river out of the way. Punch down a castle wall. Sneak in anywhere. Steal anything, including intangible qualities of people. Intimidate an entire parliament into obeying your will just by staring them down. Just have a loving army at your beck and call. Break any restraint, on you or others. Animals obey your will, including those owned by your opponents. A simple call can cause an enemy army's horse to buck them clean off. Straight up ignore a single attack. From anything. The Monk's projectile return feature. But for trebuchet stones, dragon breath, and spells. Etc.
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Mar 19, 2019 13:40
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Get just about anything done by glancing meaningfully at your weapon and watching people get to work. Respond to "you and what army?" by pointing out the window and smiling.
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Mar 19, 2019 13:47
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No living being can stop you. Just. Walk. An army is in your way? Just walk, their weapons can't touch you? Bear? Nah. Python? Scarf. Dragon? Can't even shift your weight off the floor if you don't want it to.
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Mar 19, 2019 13:59
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Social skills should be houseruled by every DM to cease to exist. That wouldn't solve all this argument about skill checks but it would help!
mastershakeman fucked around with this message at 14:16 on Mar 19, 2019 |
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Mar 19, 2019 14:14
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:Get just about anything done by glancing meaningfully at your weapon and watching people get to work.
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Mar 19, 2019 14:15
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mastershakeman posted:Social skills should be houseruled by every DM to cease to exist
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Mar 19, 2019 14:20
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ProfessorCirno posted:Passive ________ skills are a legalistic solution to a legalistic problem that never needed to exist in the first place. It's an incredibly dumb rule based entirely around "we much never, ever give the players advice on when to and when not to roll." Oh absolutely, it would be rad if new DMs were onboarded well enough to not have to pick up "don't make players roll for dumb stuff", but when the game's designer is running campaigns where stuff is gated behind investigation checks, there's a problem with the sort of like, knowledge-by-osmosis that has taken place As a player, having "I take a 10" in 3.5 was a way to get around combative DMs who would do stuff like disallow the rogue to open a locked chest in a room with no enemies and no time constraints because they failed on their random chance That sort of thing doesn't make any sense! But it happens all the time. A codified way to give the player some rules "power" over what their character is actually good at was a nice thing
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Mar 19, 2019 14:26
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Kaysette posted:You can talk your way through most of Dragon Heist and I enjoyed sinking into the different gangs and factions in Waterdeep. I was a Bregan D'aerthe lackey, another player worked for Xanathar, and another was a member of the city guard! We had fun figuring out how we all got involved in the plot, balancing our different motivations, and deciding what to do with the score at the end. The combat side was a bit lacking and you'd obviously need to scale up encounters when they happened but the city setting made for some fun non-combat hours. It's not a perfect adventure as many will attest but it's a good tableau for what you're interested in. Thanks! I'll take a look through and see how it feels to me before I buy it. After working on some plotting yesterday, I think I'm generally bad at improvising social encounters (I'm fine improvising inside the encounter but slow to come up with one) so I feel like I should be spending more time just preparing plot-point NPCs I can throw at the party depending on how they're progressing.
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Mar 19, 2019 14:35
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Passive skills are just GM fiat if the GM knows what the players' skills and is also setting the DC. I can't choose to do a "clean room" guess at how hard is this trap to spot - I know that either they see it automatically if I choose number X, and don't if I choose Y.
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Mar 19, 2019 15:45
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Which is why passive perception and investigation are actually useful - they take away the 'I try to find the hidden guy oh no I rolled a 1, everyone else roll to see if we can find him' thing without needing the awkwardness of DMs doing hidden rolls on player skills. He rolls a number checks everyone's passive perception (or asks for it), and then he knows whether the dude is hidden and from whom.
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Mar 19, 2019 15:55
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mastershakeman posted:Social skills should be houseruled by every DM to cease to exist. That wouldn't solve all this argument about skill checks but it would help! Then you run into the problem of how to adjudicate persuading or lying to NPCs if the players aren't charismatic. Is every character just inherently ultra charismatic? Do you base it on roleplay and thus gently caress over players who aren't good at talking IRL? There needs to be a skill so people who aren't socially capable can roleplay as being so, like how the weak can roleplay as being strong and the dumb as being smart.
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Mar 19, 2019 16:25
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I am failing to get why rolling for social skills is a bad thing to some of you? Like, what have you had happen in games that would convince you of this?Nash posted:High school DnD trip report.
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Mar 19, 2019 16:37
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I don't like the mechanical incentives for one guy to do most of the talking. I don't have an answer besides "don't call for them very often" unless you want a full-blown social combat subsystem. In general I'd rather you say what your character would say and maybe then roll if the other person doesn't want to act but you have leverage, or you're lying overtly, or something like that. I don't think you gotta be an expert liar to lie in-game but I want to hear what you say. This is distinct from lifting heavy things because "players speaking as their characters" is a core part of a tabletop RPG to me in a way that lifting heavy things isn't.
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Mar 19, 2019 16:42
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That's just a blatant hypocrisy and double-standard though. Saying you don't have to be an expert liar is one thing, but then expecting them to explicitly come up with an expert lie out of game for the chance to maybe convince someone in-game is inherently unfair for no reason. It puts excess pressure on someone to be able to do something that they might want to, but be unable to, do. Is it really so hard to accept a summary or an idea of what they want to say? Lotus Aura fucked around with this message at 16:51 on Mar 19, 2019 |
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Mar 19, 2019 16:48
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I don't think it's unfair to ask people to do things out of game and in fact deciding what should be a roll versus what should just be accepted is a big part of running the game. I don't think they have to come up with an expert lie but they gotta come up with something. There's not really a time limit either, I'm not requiring they respond in real-time or anything, but it's most fun if they do. The game regularly tests the player to do things their character might know implicitly - I don't think "what lie do you tell?" is any less valid a question than "what action do you take in the fight against these mummies?" - a fighter PC might well know better than their player what tactics to use, but we still have the player decide, because we've decided that decision is part of the game. I think speaking as your character is part of the game also.
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Mar 19, 2019 16:55
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:The game regularly tests the player to do things their character might know implicitly - I don't think "what lie do you tell?" is any less valid a question than "what action do you take in the fight against these mummies?" I agree, it's not! Which is why, oh I don't know, "I tell him that I'm the lost heir to the crown" is a valid answer. What makes it not one?
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Mar 19, 2019 16:58
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Dragonatrix posted:I agree, it's not! Which is why, oh I don't know, "I tell him that I'm the lost heir to the crown" is a valid answer.
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Mar 19, 2019 17:02
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:I don't think it's unfair to ask people to do things out of game and in fact deciding what should be a roll versus what should just be accepted is a big part of running the game. I don't think they have to come up with an expert lie but they gotta come up with something. There's not really a time limit either, I'm not requiring they respond in real-time or anything, but it's most fun if they do. The reverse situation should also apply--even if the player has a good lie in mind, if they roll poorly, they should play to their character and the roll result (low CHA and/or unlucky choice of lie).
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Mar 19, 2019 17:03
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