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An Agatha Christie murder mystery but everything is done according to 5e rules. Make a Charisma check to bluff your way out of an accusation, make a Dex check to scale the outside of the manor house and catch the monsignor in the act.
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Dec 16, 2021 02:48
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sebmojo posted:Following adventuring parties around providing services to the stunned, bound and gagged monsters they leave in their path Big Pharma - The bad version, adventures that heal defeated parties/foes/etc to force them into debt to the players.
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Dec 16, 2021 02:54
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Azathoth posted:An Agatha Christie murder mystery but everything is done according to 5e rules. Make a Charisma check to bluff your way out of an accusation, make a Dex check to scale the outside of the manor house and catch the monsignor in the act. oh you mean.... disco elysium sebmojo posted:Following adventuring parties around providing services to the stunned, bound and gagged monsters they leave in their path
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Dec 16, 2021 03:24
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Hey guys, need some help coming up with a boss monster for my current Eberron adventure. The party was hired by House Orien to steal an experimental prototype potion being developed by House Cannith and its formula. They managed to sneak into the facility at night and play Scooby-Doo with the roving guards before getting into a fight, finding the formula, and taking the elevator to the basement. The basement featured two more guards, and 6 large glass vats each filled with a different mystery potion. Over the course of the fight, vats get smashed, potion spills everywhere, and anyone walking through the potion gains it's effects. At the end of the fight, the potions of Cold Resistance, Fire Breath, and Giant Strength had been spilled and are flowing into the drain. As the party is walking back to the elevator with the prototype potion, a giant bubbling mass pops out the drain, the result of hundreds of gallons of spilled and mixed potions. I was going to treat this as a Living Spell, starting with the CR 5 Living Lighting Bolt but I think it'll be a bit too much for my lvl 3 party. I also want to theme it to the three spilled potions somehow. Any ideas on where to begin or is there already like an alchemy golem or something that could work?
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Dec 16, 2021 03:49
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Super Waffle posted:Hey guys, need some help coming up with a boss monster for my current Eberron adventure. The party was hired by House Orien to steal an experimental prototype potion being developed by House Cannith and its formula. They managed to sneak into the facility at night and play Scooby-Doo with the roving guards before getting into a fight, finding the formula, and taking the elevator to the basement. Look into the Ravnica weirds, they're basically two elementals smashed together by science and have different attributes, most are lower than CR 5
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Dec 16, 2021 03:50
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Also look into Arcadia #2 by MCDM the elemental stuff in there is real fun to run
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Dec 16, 2021 04:00
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Super Waffle posted:Hey guys, need some help coming up with a boss monster for my current Eberron adventure. The party was hired by House Orien to steal an experimental prototype potion being developed by House Cannith and its formula. They managed to sneak into the facility at night and play Scooby-Doo with the roving guards before getting into a fight, finding the formula, and taking the elevator to the basement. R.O.U.S.'s
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Dec 16, 2021 04:17
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Jobbo_Fett posted:R.O.U.S.'s Rodents Of Unusual Size? Pfft, I don't think they exis- AHHH!
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Dec 16, 2021 04:20
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Fire breathing R.O.U.S.'s!
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Dec 16, 2021 04:20
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Super Waffle posted:Hey guys, need some help coming up with a boss monster for my current Eberron adventure. The party was hired by House Orien to steal an experimental prototype potion being developed by House Cannith and its formula. They managed to sneak into the facility at night and play Scooby-Doo with the roving guards before getting into a fight, finding the formula, and taking the elevator to the basement. Use the Living Lightning Bolt but don't use its multiattack?
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Dec 16, 2021 04:27
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sebmojo posted:What do you do with them when they wake up, though
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Dec 16, 2021 04:28
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When the enemies wake up you all jump out and say "SURPRISE!" and then you convince them its their birthdays and it was all a dream 
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Dec 16, 2021 04:33
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Infinite Karma posted:Unless you want your party to get gritty and extra-cynical at best, or become murderhobos at worst, you don't make the players regret leaving enemies alive and unconscious by having it bite them in the rear end. If you do, they'll just be justified in murdering them "in self-defense" instead of taking prisoners. Yeah, we just got to the (heavily modified) boss fight in wave LMoP and faced 3 mooks that we left alive on various occasions + the boss and underlings. That felt kinda eh.
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Dec 16, 2021 10:03
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Devorum posted:This article lays out the origin of Orcs pretty well. Thanks for sharing!
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Dec 16, 2021 11:25
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Facebook Aunt posted:So switch Orcs to normal people and Elves to "usually evil". Bunch of hoity toity fuckers who think they are better than everyone else, how is that not evil? They are still living beautiful lives in their forests and ivory towers. They aren't necessarily expansionist, but they are the ultimate NIMBYs and very hostile to the wrong sort of people moving in nearby. That's the difference between relative "evil" and absolute evil. Orcs aren't evil because they're mean to elves, they're evil because they were created to be evil by an evil god and, in LOTR, they can't be otherwise. Their souls are stained and their twisted nature and looks spawn from that. That's also what people of Tolkien's generation thought about non-whites. They were debased white people with stained souls. Our entire concept of "orcs" follows from those assumptions. Siivola posted:This is a pro click y'all. Make sure to read the second part too. You're welcome! It really is a great article, both parts, and it cemented a lot of what I'd had rattling in my head on the subject for a while. Devorum fucked around with this message at 14:06 on Dec 16, 2021 |
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Dec 16, 2021 14:03
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Devorum posted:This article lays out the origin of Orcs pretty well. This was good.
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Dec 16, 2021 15:12
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Kaal posted:Maybe the town shouldn't be colonizing the ancient goblin lands or encroaching on the endangered habitats of "demonic" wildlife. You can "what about" this stuff all day. You're still creating good guys and bad guys. Nonsense. You could claim the same thing about real world issues. Do you genuinely believe that political parties are "good guys" and "bad guys?" I am theoretically aligned with a political party but I think some of the party platform is problematic and I have sharp disagreements with a subset of politicians in that party while being generally supportive of others. Does that make the politicians I disagree with "bad guys?" The point is that there is a rules system that provides what could be claimed as objective facts about the fantasy world and its inhabitants. TSR invented and copywrote beholders. While your game is your game and you can do whatever you want, however much it contradicts the rules, there's still an expectation if you sit down to play 5E D&D that the game will observe a sufficient number of the written rules to justify saying you are playing 5E. An experienced DM will happily throw out or contradict setting details, and experienced players will enjoy or complain as suits their interests. A new DM picking up Volo's Guide to find out about beholders who arrives at the Roleplaying Beholders section will probably take what is written there as canon, at least initially. Given that the purpose of the section (all those charts) is to provide guidance and inspiration to that new DM about the varieties of different beholder personalities they could employ, deleting part of the section which LIMITS the possibilities and claims that all beholders share specific traits seems like an excellent decision. No "what about" required. You want to make all your beholders bad guys? The changes to Volo's Guide do nothing to stop you. Enjoy posted:Orcs can be irredeemable if we want them to be. I know you're capable of lengthier engagement with ideas given the setting posts you've shared here. My response: 1. Please demonstrate how the edits made to Volo's Guide and other sources prevents you from running a 5E D&D campaign where orcs are irredeemable. If they don't, then what does your comment contribute? How have you lost anything? 2. You've designed (and are designing) a 5E setting based somewhat on "Dark Age" Europe. If someone purchased your setting to run a campaign and decided to make Jews irredeemable, that would be on them. If you released a sourcebook characterizing various groups in your setting and your character notes on Jews were full of racist stereotypes, that would be on you. And because you are creating and designing the setting, you could indeed make setting decisions about actual groups of people who exist in the real world and decide things like their alignment, their behavior, even whether they have souls. Are you suggesting that your decision about such a thing in designing your setting shouldn't involve anything beyond whether you want Jews in your setting to be irredeemable or not? I'll add, just in case it's needed, that claiming "Jews are real and orcs aren't" misses the point: if you had a recognizably Jewish culture in your game setting but called them Orcs, that would still be problematic, wouldn't it? And conversely, science fiction and fantasy writers have been writing about real-world racial issues through invented races for as long as the genres existed. PeterWeller posted:See, I take "just wants to watch the world burn" as being quantitatively more evil than "Evil that can be worked with". I don't see a nuance there. I see "evil" and "so evil you can't even talk to them". I have lots of thoughts here, which I'll try to truncate. I do think that you're stuck with some of these elements but that creative employment of them, coupled with good characterization and storytelling, can be a reasonable cure. Some brief examples: The Glorantha setting for Runequest has Chaos, which is "watch the world burn" evil, and a Chaotic race called Broo. One of the most common cultures for PCs sees Broo as contaminated (accurate) and needing to be completely exterminated (debatable). Another culture, an imperialist one based on Rome & the Byzantine Empire, teaches that the Broo can be redeemed by making them a part of the world, rendering them no longer Chaos. And they are demonstrably right. But in other ways, this empire is itself evil, and that idea of Broo redemption gets caught up in the Lunar Empire's other practices. The result is the kind of huge mess that a campaign can opt to ignore by confronting PCs only with the "so evil" Broo, or can opt to explore by forcing the PCs to question their views of reality. The latter option has real power, especially as it's unclear that "fixing" the Broo against their will is any better than killing them. I ran a campaign for seven real years in a setting where the details pretty much called out two different individuals as likely BBEGs for the campaign ending. By campaign's end, the PCs had befriended one of them--while unquestionably evil, he'd committed evil acts in the name of saving the nation and its people, and he was not being actively evil over the time they knew him--and accepted the other's surrender and exiled her to another world, where she was trying to redeem herself through her deeds. A secondary PC group went to check on her and came back with a largely positive assessment. I should add that the second BBEG was a beholder. Because the vast majority of the world villains had specific character traits and motivations, and because the "right" thing to do was rarely obvious, the fracture was very much along the "can be worked with" or not lines, although a few of that sort crossed boundaries that brought them into the "can't talk" category for at least a while. I didn't design that campaign (in 2E/3E days) to promote ideas of racial equity, I designed it to have vibrant and interesting NPCs and to force my players to make some difficult and consequential decisions which would change the course of the campaign and of the setting. There can be a comfort in the same old formula, and for a short campaign, there's nothing wrong with that, but the real potential comes in complicating the formula. D&D absolutely allows for that, but it does take more work; I'm glad to see the 5E design team taking even small steps to facilitate that complication, especially for new DMs. Narsham fucked around with this message at 18:00 on Dec 16, 2021 |
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Dec 16, 2021 17:55
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Narsham posted:I know you're capable of lengthier engagement with ideas given the setting posts you've shared here. My response: I just don't feel like this discussion needs any longer engagement than has already been had in the past few pages  Narsham posted:1. Please demonstrate how the edits made to Volo's Guide and other sources prevents you from running a 5E D&D campaign where orcs are irredeemable. If they don't, then what does your comment contribute? How have you lost anything? Like I said before, it's harder to add that stuff back in after WotC deletes it, than it is to ignore/delete it if WotC keeps it Narsham posted:2. You've designed (and are designing) a 5E setting based somewhat on "Dark Age" Europe. If someone purchased your setting to run a campaign and decided to make Jews irredeemable, that would be on them. If you released a sourcebook characterizing various groups in your setting and your character notes on Jews were full of racist stereotypes, that would be on you. And because you are creating and designing the setting, you could indeed make setting decisions about actual groups of people who exist in the real world and decide things like their alignment, their behavior, even whether they have souls. Are you suggesting that your decision about such a thing in designing your setting shouldn't involve anything beyond whether you want Jews in your setting to be irredeemable or not? But which real-life culture are DnD Orcs based on? If you are going with the guilt by association of Tolkien, like TheGreatEvilKing said, fantasy Orcs being brutalised/supernaturally cursed/corrupted by evil doesn't even necessarily imply European racism: TheGreatEvilKing posted:Tolkien gets brought up for making orcs racist stereotypes a lot, but Tolkien's orcs are explicitly soldiers in the servants of an outright Satanic/fascist overlord. The orc leaders are explicitly coded as white people (Melkor's fair form) and the orcs are bad not because they were born bad because they were corrupted by service to Melkor and Sauron, whose stated goals are literally domination over others.
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Dec 16, 2021 18:14
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Lotta goons need to put the D&D books back on the shelf and pick up something more age appropriate. Fiction is fiction. The amount of  is a reminder of the large sign at the local hobby shop that explicitly states that customers who have a difficult time distinguishing between a game and other people will be asked to leave.
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Dec 16, 2021 18:20
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Enjoy posted:Like I said before, it's harder to add that stuff back in after WotC deletes it, than it is to ignore/delete it if WotC keeps it Not true. I've never had a harder time then trying to convince a DM to let me play a neutral aligned Drow back when Drizzt was like the only exception. Once the rules basically stop saying a certain thing is the only way to let people have fun the way they want to. 5e has been the easiest era in which for me to play as special snowflake characters. Enjoy posted:But which real-life culture are DnD Orcs based on? Do you... Really not know?
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Dec 16, 2021 18:23
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ninjoatse.cx posted:Fiction is fiction. the most pathetic and harmful quote:I've seen in TG in a while. Must be nice to only ever read things at a completely surface level though.
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Dec 16, 2021 18:29
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Yeah I certainly wouldn't give credit to WotC or anything. But this time right now is by far the best time I've ever had as like a black dude playing D&D and other TTRPGs, as far as the community of players I find locally and at cons.
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Dec 16, 2021 18:30
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Raenir Salazar posted:Not true. I've never had a harder time then trying to convince a DM to let me play a neutral aligned Drow back when Drizzt was like the only exception. Once the rules basically stop saying a certain thing is the only way to let people have fun the way they want to. Dexo posted:Yeah I certainly wouldn't give credit to WotC or anything. But this time right now is by far the best time I've ever had as like a black dude playing D&D and other TTRPGs, as far as the community of players I find locally and at cons. Oh yeah I was mostly thinking from the perspective of the DM... letting WotC publications do some of the heavy lifting in terms of worldbuilding is good IMO. I think the inclusiveness of DnD doesn't depend on rulebooks having/not having setting specific lore though, I think it's a trend in society as a whole Raenir Salazar posted:Do you... Really not know? Is it chavs... Warhammer Orks/Orcs are chavvy
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Dec 16, 2021 18:43
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ninjoatse.cx posted:Lotta goons need to put the D&D books back on the shelf and pick up something more age appropriate. I'm not going to call off my Saturday's LMoP game because of that or anything, but it is kind of a weird thing to play now that I think about it. Siivola fucked around with this message at 18:47 on Dec 16, 2021 |
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Dec 16, 2021 18:44
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ninjoatse.cx posted:Lotta goons need to put the D&D books back on the shelf and pick up something more age appropriate. The Turner Diaries are also fiction. Imagine being proud of being incapable of spotting fiction based on, and propagating, lovely real life bigotry.
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Dec 16, 2021 19:08
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Realizing that subtext is a thing is like 3rd grade reading level lol
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Dec 16, 2021 19:13
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Bottom Liner posted:Realizing that subtext is a thing is like 3rd grade reading level lol RPG writers: 
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Dec 16, 2021 19:14
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The worst part is it isn't even that hard to avoid all of this. Unless your party is going into Orctopia and dealing with their Usually Chaotic Evil noncombatants and children, just put a violent word in front of their name. If a human can be killable by making them a Cultist or a Marauder or a Slaver, then just do the same for orcs. Its easy! Then you can have intelligent foes with occasional boble dissenters, without needing to get into the poo poo a 1950s pop scientist would come up with to demonize the Other.
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Dec 16, 2021 19:21
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ninjoatse.cx posted:Lotta goons need to put the D&D books back on the shelf and pick up something more age appropriate. Don't just pop into this thread to insult people.
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Dec 16, 2021 20:14
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WotC are handling this in just about the worst way possible but "always chaotic evil" races are dumb and hamper worldbuilding so I don't miss those going away.
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Dec 16, 2021 20:47
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D&D is a game played by many, many people where assumptions about the game's fiction are going to influence how all those people write their homebrew games and content. I dont think we're discussing any especially heady and while I know these discussions aren't for everyone I think there's some value in discussing what makes for better, more inclusive games. A lot of it is splitting hairs and some of it is just mentally filed under "this is potentially problematic" in your brain but then you move on if nobody is being hurt. Pointing out the potential critiques of media does not make that media less enjoyable and in fact it should be a facet of enjoyment.
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Dec 16, 2021 21:00
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Did anyone ever read Animorphs? That series had a number of largely antagonistic alien species that had reasons for being antagonists beyond "inherently evil". The primary antagonists, the yeerks, have nearly blind sluglike bodies that can enter into a creature's body and interface with their brain, giving the yeerk control over the body while the host's consciousness is rendered powerless (though they have to exit the host's body every three days for a period of time, during which the host is imprisoned by other yeerks until reinfestation). The yeerks don't have to hijack bodies to live, but many don't want to have to live their entire lives as sluglike beings when they can possess bodies capable of doing and experiencing more. Those yeerks who think taking over a person's body for their own pleasure is wrong are forced to go along with the yeerk empire's invasion efforts or die. The taxxons are aliens used by the yeerk empire as berserkers that kill and eat any living thing they can, but only because they have been taken from their food rich homeworld and are constantly ravenously hungry. The howlers are marauders who travel from world to world killing and destroying without any identifiable reason, never making any demands. The truth is that the howlers were created by a godlike alien entity called Crayak with an inability to identify other creatures as beings capable of suffering, an inability to recognize that they themselves can die, and to kill not with feelings of hate or anger, but childlike glee. This last one in particular is similar to the idea of an evil god creating living creatures as minions, but, unlike Sauron or Gruumsh's orcs, the howlers are just having fun and have no idea they're doing anything more evil than a person "killing" NPCs in a video game. Even the leaders of the supposed good guy aliens of the series, the andalites, are revealed to have participated in activities such as trying to deprive the yeerks the ability to conquer and control a species of peaceful but physically powerful aliens called the hork-bajir by wiping them all out first with a virus. Hexmage-SA fucked around with this message at 22:29 on Dec 16, 2021 |
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Dec 16, 2021 22:13
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PeterWeller posted:Don't just pop into this thread to insult people. This thread moves fast. It'd take a ton of effort posting to address everything. If you're reading Devorum posted:This article lays out the origin of Orcs pretty well. and TheGreatEvilKing posted:effort post and still coming across the orc creation mythos as being racist substitute for Asians, there really isn't anything that will convince anyone otherwise. You get the author's account of their origins, and then a skewed interpretation of what was written decades after the author died. The subtext of the monstrous races is anything but subtext. Changelings steal babies to sacrifice and Minotaurs eat people because people they love the taste, because they're written that way. Calling a fantasy race evil and stupid works just fine in a story telling perspective because that's their story telling function. D&D's rewriting of the CE races is just throwing the ball down the field both in terms of the enemy/ally treadmill (yesterday's BBEG is now today's PC) and/or attempting to humanize them, in which case there's no real story telling purpose for them to be of the CE race to begin with. Everything begins and ends with Human motivation, there's no high fantasy element needed... well, other than the magic to explain the methods.
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Dec 16, 2021 22:31
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I read somewhere (here?) that the 50th edition of D&D will have a new world with each region being ruled by a Dragon. It seems like a good way to redefine good/neutral/evil based on how each dragon relates to other dragons countries. I don't think WotC is good enough to pull it off though, they seem to have lost their vision.
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Dec 16, 2021 22:52
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ninjoatse.cx posted:This thread moves fast. It'd take a ton of effort posting to address everything. Calling a race evil and stupid is just lazy writing.
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Dec 16, 2021 23:00
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ninjoatse.cx posted:The subtext of the monstrous races is anything but subtext. Changelings steal babies to sacrifice and Minotaurs eat people because people they love the taste, because they're written that way. Calling a fantasy race evil and stupid works just fine in a story telling perspective because that's their story telling function. while this is generally true, it leads to a lot of problems when left unchecked. for example, i have evil spirits in my world which are mindless destructive impulses created as the aftereffects of wiping souls of sins and malice accrued over their lifetime. these are mindless evil creatures and thus killing them indiscriminately is fine. in a fantasy world we create subtext that, say, goblins are inherently evil. killing goblins is understood to be at worst a neutral act, but because they are evil, to kill a goblin is an inherently beneficial act. we can also say goblins are capable of speech and have families. there are goblins societies that live and raise young. as a group of adventurers, encountering such a goblin settlement, are you then morally justified and correct in slaughtering the babies you encounter?
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Dec 16, 2021 23:09
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Like how is it even possible to have an all-evil race anyway, they'd have all killed each other long ago. It's impossible to build a society where everyone is evil because no one would work together. Plus that completely kills the opportunity for players to play as those races because no one would want to be in the same party as an evil character. Kaiser Mazoku fucked around with this message at 23:23 on Dec 16, 2021 |
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Dec 16, 2021 23:20
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ninjoatse.cx posted:The subtext of the monstrous races is anything but subtext. Changelings steal babies to sacrifice and Minotaurs eat people because people they love the taste, because they're written that way. Calling a fantasy race evil and stupid works just fine in a story telling perspective because that's their story telling function. The subtext that makes them problematic is not that some textually evil creature doing textually evil things; but its that there's real world groups that these creatures are a proxy for. People regularly still make homebrew settings that largely are explicitly "this area is fantasy China and here is fantasy Europe" while implicitly coding various fantasy races according to real world groups; you can pretty easily see this in World of Warcraft or Fantasy Warhammer. Kaiser Mazoku posted:Like how is it even possible to have an all-evil race anyway, they'd have all killed each other long ago. It's impossible to build a society where everyone is evil because no one would work together. Wasps exist.
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Dec 16, 2021 23:24
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Raenir Salazar posted:Wasps exist. we talkin the insect or...?
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Dec 16, 2021 23:27
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Right. Plus since people in the real world believe some groups are inherently evil irl, any inherently evil group has the potential to become a proxy for a real world people in the hands of the correct rear end in a top hat. I think evil races are just sort of lazy. Like having some races be aggressive or primitive or just different and alien is cool but even that is rife with potential abuse. If you want orcs to be evil, for instance, you first have to code them as xenophobic, because otherwise their racial monolith makes no sense. I guess that's thing, is you have to explain why a race is evil. And that requires figuring out what their motivations are, what their culture is like, etc, and at that point if youre a writer with any creativity at all you begin to see how stupid it is that a whole people is just hostile to the rest of the known world. Like 'all orcs want to maraud and destroy' is boring. 'The orcs of Red Mountain keep raiding the peasant villages in the valley' is more interesting even if they just want to steal poo poo they don't nessecarily want to kill everybody because they, presumably, need those peasants to keep farming. Or maybe they have a territorial dispute. Or a religious misunderstanding so alien it's almost impossible to reconcile. But all of those have more story hooks than, "because I said so." And it might not even inform your next encounter with a different orcish culture!
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Dec 16, 2021 23:34
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