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Xiahou Dun posted:Nah there’s perfectly good design space you’re ceding solely to GM fiat there, and storygames can play around in that space too. Its funny that I'm struggle to come up with quite the right adjective given that we its a valuable concept in chemistry, cuz the strict noun would be like, "ignition source," and so the tag I'd use is igniting which is just using a gerund as an adjective. Anyway GM fiat is a little more narrow than what I was going for (note that not all of the games I listed even actually have GMs, though yes I did say "when the GM says" that's a pure mistake on my part). What I'm going for is that two things would come to pass: there's a fictional reason something would light on fire, combined with a metafictional reason why something against the PC's interest would happen. The thought experiment proposed is that even with those two things present, the PC would invoke a third metametafictional layer to block the fictional consequences from coming to pass. The other thing I guess that's throwing me is the basic attitude that if something is not expressly permitted, it is by default forbidden.
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Dec 24, 2022 06:54
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Tulip posted:Its funny that I'm struggle to come up with quite the right adjective given that we its a valuable concept in chemistry, cuz the strict noun would be like, "ignition source," and so the tag I'd use is igniting which is just using a gerund as an adjective. Ah then maybe I'm misreading your post because what I'm objecting to in specific is that you seem to assuming that this has to be as part of some kind of narrative free space (the conversation to keep using PbtA terms) while I'm arguing that there's good mechanical space in there. I don't think legalistic arguing about properly citing which spells may or may not do cool-ranch damage is a particularly fun implementation of that design space, but that's not the only way it can go. Another way to think about it would be like having a rigorous way of balancing FATE aspects. Also I thought about "igniting", decided using a gerund was a coward's way out, then tried out "ignite-itory" which had the mouth feel of a razor slug. Uggh. Really weird gap in language... lightrook posted:Incendiary, maybe? Or maybe phlogistic would be more appropriate. gently caress! Thank you for freeing me from my own silly trap. That was secretly a very thoughtful Christmas present.
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Dec 24, 2022 07:09
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Xiahou Dun posted:No those are “makes burn very much” and “capable of spontaneously combusting” which are getting really close but neither is encoding the causative nature. Wouldn’t want to trample over all the inchoate fire’s niche. If you enjoy the word "hypergolic" you should get a copy of Ignition! It's a book about the development of rocket fuels and it is delightful.
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Dec 24, 2022 07:34
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while I'm sympathetic to the basic idea that there are two wolves inside D&D, I'm a little doubtful of the practical corollary that it would at all be profitable / productive to actually make that division latent across two separate games that is, the ecosystem of D&D players is pretty well committed to playing D&D, regardless of what it's actually suited for, and even in the days of "4e was dedicated to tactical combat with a heroic, high fantasy theme", people still did play that a lot, appropriate-ness be damned, and notwithstanding the rift created with/by Pathfinder the grognard argument was always that they should have made 4e into its own separate game, either not named D&D at all, or named D&D but with a different subtitle and existed as a system separate-and-apart from whatever they envisioned a non-4e iteration of 3e would be, and even if such an effort was made in good faith, I'm not entirely convinced that both of these two diverging lines would receive enough attention to make them viable
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Dec 24, 2022 07:44
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Xiahou Dun posted:
Happy to help, and thanks for all the language effort posts!
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Dec 24, 2022 08:26
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D&D has resurrection spells that are more and more integrated with the system in every edition. Death is just an annoying inconvenience.
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Dec 24, 2022 09:02
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Xiahou Dun posted:Ah then maybe I'm misreading your post because what I'm objecting to in specific is that you seem to assuming that this has to be as part of some kind of narrative free space (the conversation to keep using PbtA terms) while I'm arguing that there's good mechanical space in there. I don't think legalistic arguing about properly citing which spells may or may not do cool-ranch damage is a particularly fun implementation of that design space, but that's not the only way it can go. Another way to think about it would be like having a rigorous way of balancing FATE aspects. Nono you're fine, I wrote unclearly. I think we're largely on the same page that I think its totally possible to make a space where legalistic arguments over tags and their logic is a space for a decent game, I play zachtronics games after all and there are people who tell me they enjoy MTG. I haven't seen an RPG successfully implement it however, and I think in the case of TTRPGs outside of the specific ways AW and friends use tags (Legend of the Elements I think drove it a little further than most for example), this mechanic space hasn't really been deliberately designed but instead emerged from lack of clarity over fiction-first vs mechanics-first, poor editing leaving orphan mechanics that imply the absence of fiction in other places, and of course lack of clarity over the nature and style of how adversarial the table is to be to each other. That last one I think might even be the biggest gripe I've got with DnD. AW is designed for players to be adversarial to each other but for the GM to be "a fan of the PCs," who makes hard moves against them because its interesting and gives the PC something to overcome. Warhammer 40k is explicitly designed around the actual players being adversarial, but there are well-stated and developed norms about the limits of that adversarial relationship and a real sense of what "good sportsmanship" looks like. "Old school" RPGs are often quite muddled on this, having both mechanics and encouragement for intraparty conflict but having a far more overwhelming set of mechanics that require near perfect coordination and cooperation, and having an intention of PC-GM adversarial relations that are difficult to make sense of since the GM officially can just "rocks fall everyone dies." I am not doing a good job of making my thoughts more clear.
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Dec 24, 2022 09:03
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There's a third, lonely and malnourished wolf inside D&D: High-level domain play, where adventurers who survived bankroll weaker adventurers to put down material fires while their eyes turn to planar matters. It's the endgame of the shitfarmer game but I think it's also distinct: The characters are legitimately powerful at this juncture and their lives aren't cheap any more, and their narrative power's grown because they're now leaders of NPCs (or even spare PCs, if you go the troupe route). The power level is similar to the epic Realms-shaking campaigns, but I'd argue domain play has to be sandboxy instead of planetrotting simply because the heroes' power is so tied to their domain: It's where all their stuff is. You can still see its tracks in the assumption that characters might spend weeks or months in downtime, and the completely incoherent crafting rules that spring from that assumption. It's also lurking in the 2014 Starter Set: Despite the A plot of the abducted dwarf, it's structured around a place with guest givers in it, and the reward for doing the adventure is an annual income. I'm told the Essentials Kit is even sandboxier.
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Dec 24, 2022 09:08
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Tarnop posted:I've bought my parents Wingspan. They love birds and card games so I hope it's a winner You should get them Cubirds next, it's one of the best bird-themed card games I've played
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Dec 24, 2022 11:58
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Whybird posted:You should get them Cubirds next, it's one of the best bird-themed card games I've played That looks neat, thanks for the recommendation! We tried a game called Birds of a Feather a few years ago and it was a let-down so I was trying to play it safe this time
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Dec 24, 2022 14:12
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A silly and not even drunk thought; Santa Claus and related characters, copyrighted or otherwise, in Scion 2e. I feel like that's almost too easy. And yes, Will Ferrel in Elf is probably a Scion.
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Dec 24, 2022 14:28
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Personally, I just play a game that's actually mechanically developed, like GURPS and make adjustments to fit the campaign. But, honestly, i think a lot of people into d&d and reskinning into other things do it because they're at a high level of mechanical familiarity and once they're past that stage it's a lot easier to experiment in the space than to learn a whole new language(another system).
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Dec 24, 2022 15:42
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i'd argue many or most people who play d&d and only d&d are not at a high level of mechanical familiarity with d&d, they're at a high level of familiarity with what they think d&d probably says somewhere
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Dec 24, 2022 15:55
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bbcisdabomb posted:If you enjoy the word "hypergolic" you should get a copy of Ignition! It's a book about the development of rocket fuels and it is delightful.
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Dec 24, 2022 16:21
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bbcisdabomb posted:If you enjoy the word "hypergolic" you should get a copy of Ignition! It's a book about the development of rocket fuels and it is delightful. poo poo this would’ve been a great little gift for my dad. Keeping that for next year/being lazy and just giving it to him in January. Thanks!
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Dec 24, 2022 16:51
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Countblanc posted:i'd argue many or most people who play d&d and only d&d are not at a high level of mechanical familiarity with d&d, they're at a high level of familiarity with what they think d&d probably says somewhere Most people who play D&D haven’t spent forever in ttrpg spaces online that can suck the fun out of pretty much anything while calling everything a nickname that they read online. The paradox is these are the players who are always the most available to play.
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Dec 24, 2022 17:31
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Xiahou Dun posted:Ah then maybe I'm misreading your post because what I'm objecting to in specific is that you seem to assuming that this has to be as part of some kind of narrative free space (the conversation to keep using PbtA terms) while I'm arguing that there's good mechanical space in there. I don't think legalistic arguing about properly citing which spells may or may not do cool-ranch damage is a particularly fun implementation of that design space, but that's not the only way it can go. Another way to think about it would be like having a rigorous way of balancing FATE aspects.
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Dec 24, 2022 17:53
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ninjoatse.cx posted:Most people who play D&D haven’t spent forever in ttrpg spaces online that can suck the fun out of pretty much anything while calling everything a nickname that they read online. sounds like something a pick me would say Drakyn posted:If it makes you feel any better, once when I was around twelve both my sisters simultaneously forgot how to spell 'of.' Tentative theory was 'o-v-e.' OK was going to respond with stories from my family but this is loving unbeatable.
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Dec 25, 2022 02:06
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Happy Christmas, ya goddamn nerds.
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Dec 25, 2022 14:10
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Maxwell Lord posted:I’m increasingly convinced that there are two versions of D&D that can never fully be reconciled. 4e actually gets significantly more gnarly if you turn the healing surges right down, the gently caress you zone in eberron did that and it was great. In general 4e was really good at being tweaked because of its basic mechanical solidity, like how revenge of the iron lich turned everything up to 11.5
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Dec 25, 2022 21:37
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gnarly's not really enough though are you gonna get 4E character creation down to under 5 minutes so you can reroll characters without either a break in the action or tons of homework? do you have a way of reconciling the attrition-based balance (to say nothing of the GM workload) of 4E combat, with combat as a failure state that clever play should be able to bypass? 4E does have fairly robust support for non-combat encounters using up combat-centric resources, so that's a point in its favor
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Dec 25, 2022 22:18
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:gnarly's not really enough though
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Dec 25, 2022 22:28
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Nessus posted:Isn't there some kind of guidance for doing quick-picks for a character in 4e? Not to, uh, continue to fight the skeleton war too hard. But you could quick-pick that poo poo with a coupon for a respec into your proper bizarre concept at the next meaningful downtime. I guess you can crank out a new character in under 5 minutes if you've got Character Builder installed, beeline all the premium powers in each slot, and avoid doing anything too weird? The other solution is that 4e character building is so fun you probably have like at least three backups kicking around anyways, so the real limiting factor if anything is going to be porting sheets into your preferred VTT, although that's not strictly necessary either. The real problem with running a high-lethality meatgrinder in 4e is that combat is so darn fun that the response to losing a fight isn't to take fewer fights but to squeeze blood from stone even harder until you end up with really degenerate builds and tactics like three controllers to consistently rearrange the enemies into one catatonic pile, or like all vampire hybrids to adventure forever without long rest, but that could also just be me being insane.
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Dec 26, 2022 00:45
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Do what my group did in 3e: erase the character's name and write a new one. Or just add roman numerals.
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Dec 26, 2022 00:49
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Tulip posted:Do what my group did in 3e: erase the character's name and write a new one. Or just add roman numerals. Or in Call of Cthulhu, someone I knew played the McGirk brothers: Buck, Chuck, and Huck. Adventuring family dynasties.
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Dec 26, 2022 01:05
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"you can run a high lethality dungeon crawl by adjusting the CR of the monsters" is the 4e equivalent of "you can run a cyberpunk game in 5e if you just add rules for guns and hacking!"
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Dec 26, 2022 02:29
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Nessus posted:Isn't there some kind of guidance for doing quick-picks for a character in 4e? Not to, uh, continue to fight the skeleton war too hard. But you could quick-pick that poo poo with a coupon for a respec into your proper bizarre concept at the next meaningful downtime. Yes. Making a 4e character is time consuming if you're A) starting at mid to high level and B) doing a lot of research to try to squeeze out maximum value for money. A level 1 character generally consists of seven or eight choices (race, class, class feature, two at-wills, one encounter, one daily, one feat, maybe another feat for a human or second daily for a wizard) but a lot of those cascade such that earlier ones make later ones for you or are basic expertise/proficiency taxes that are foregone conclusions no matter what you're making. Little stops you from just coming to the table with a folder of templates, slapping a "Jr." on your guy's name, or indeed just biting the bullet and assuming you'll have ten minutes before the remaining PCs make it out of the dungeon and back to town rather than five.
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Dec 26, 2022 06:25
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My take on this is more 'why use a very crunchy combat system for a game where combat is a fail state'. Like yeah you could probably tweak the 4e numbers to the point where combat's sufficiently rocket-tag-y for that sort of OSR play but it's still a very combat mechanic heavy system for a mode of play that frankly isn't interested in combat.
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Dec 26, 2022 07:06
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Drakyn posted:If it makes you feel any better, once when I was around twelve both my sisters simultaneously forgot how to spell 'of.' Tentative theory was 'o-v-e.'
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Dec 26, 2022 13:33
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mellonbread posted:"you can run a high lethality dungeon crawl by adjusting the CR of the monsters" is the 4e equivalent of "you can run a cyberpunk game in 5e if you just add rules for guns and hacking!"
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Dec 26, 2022 13:35
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Doctor Zaius posted:My take on this is more 'why use a very crunchy combat system for a game where combat is a fail state'. Like yeah you could probably tweak the 4e numbers to the point where combat's sufficiently rocket-tag-y for that sort of OSR play but it's still a very combat mechanic heavy system for a mode of play that frankly isn't interested in combat. *e: excluding obviously various flavours of "my wizard casts Bigby's Everyone Runs Away" Splicer fucked around with this message at 13:50 on Dec 26, 2022 |
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Dec 26, 2022 13:48
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Doctor Zaius posted:My take on this is more 'why use a very crunchy combat system for a game where combat is a fail state'. Like yeah you could probably tweak the 4e numbers to the point where combat's sufficiently rocket-tag-y for that sort of OSR play but it's still a very combat mechanic heavy system for a mode of play that frankly isn't interested in combat. Yeah, i'd rather play it in a system made for it, either a light, breezy experience where the players are running playing pieces(OSR) or a more developed skill-based game(GURPS). If fighting isn't the main thing, I don't think 4e has a lot to recommend it, other than 'it's d&d'.
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Dec 26, 2022 14:37
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Splicer posted:Nothing says fun, engaging gameplay like needing an 18 to hit. Fun? "Fun"?! I thought I was talking to real gamers here. Oh yeah I want to be outmatched by enemies such that actually fighting them is basically a loss condition but obviously that shouldn't mean they hit me more easily than I hit them! Next you're going to ask for a thief with a better than 12% chance of climbing a wall.
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Dec 26, 2022 17:03
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"How am I supposed to solve traversal problems or outwit monsters when so many of my spells have either cast times or effect durations measured in minutes??" Skill issue. Get good.
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Dec 26, 2022 17:53
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Ferrinus posted:"How am I supposed to solve traversal problems or outwit monsters when so many of my spells have either cast times or effect durations measured in minutes??" Skill issue. Get good. This reminds me of the guy who streamed Disco Elysium and every time he failed he would just reload and when his chat was yelling at him, he countered with "any game is like Dark Souls if you try hard enough."
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Dec 26, 2022 17:58
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Tulip posted:This reminds me of the guy who streamed Disco Elysium and every time he failed he would just reload and when his chat was yelling at him, he countered with "any game is like Dark Souls if you try hard enough." YOU CRIED
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Dec 26, 2022 18:40
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Ferrinus posted:Fun? "Fun"?! I thought I was talking to real gamers here. Oh yeah I want to be outmatched by enemies such that actually fighting them is basically a loss condition but obviously that shouldn't mean they hit me more easily than I hit them! Next you're going to ask for a thief with a better than 12% chance of climbing a wall. Ferrinus posted:"How am I supposed to solve traversal problems or outwit monsters when so many of my spells have either cast times or effect durations measured in minutes??" Skill issue. Get good.
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Dec 26, 2022 18:53
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Splicer posted:I genuinely don't get what bit you're doing here. I don't really see the basis for complaining that you can only hit an enemy monster on an 18 if the point is to make enemy monsters too strong to reasonably challenge unless you've scraped together some big advantage beforehand. It feels like a lot of the complaints about 4e (not yours) oscillate opportunistically between players being too strong and too weak, such that the actual complaint is that certain character builds/gameplay styles which used to be vastly stronger than others have now been brought into parity with them. But if what someone's ostensibly asking for is a crushing meatgrinder in which the mechanics of the game effectively serve as a punishment for a failure to persuade the DM of your plan's effectiveness on the largely-unrolled narrative layer, well, all you need for that is a reasonably accurate CR system such that you can make sure to be cranking the dial way too far to the right most of the time.
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Dec 26, 2022 19:40
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I think 3e D&D had a lot of fun edge case spells and the loopy naturalistic language did mean you could twist out interesting solutions to problems. However, those also weren't the kind of spells casters prepared on the daily. Those were the kind of spells you put in scrolls, rings, wands, wondrous items, etc. for utility use. And plenty of them were ported to 4e that way, or as rituals, or could just as easily be mocked up in 4e as magic items or rituals if they weren't already there. The amount of times a caster might learn a stone shape spell, gentle repose, Tenser's floating disk, legend lore, transmute mud to rock, or even the water breathing spell relative to how often they were actually used was very low. I do think the permanent duration illusory wall could be handy in cases where one with a short sustain duration would not. If the PCs were trying to make a secret hideout and wanted to make sure the entrance was easily disguised, or similarly if they want to lay out some traps by a hideout and disguise it. There's nothing really stopping a 4e wizard (or anyone in 4e with the Ritual Caster feat, since that opened up the possibility for tons of people to access similar utility powers) from crafting a ritual to do that either, though. And these are still edge cases that will almost never show up in a D&D campaign. This all seems to be a broader issue with just how magic itself works in D&D than anything. The idea that these niche spells exist is exciting. It's fun to think of creative ways to use them. They almost never actually find a use that justifies preparing them over say, grease, or finger of death, or polymorph, or baleful polymorph. These are powers that probably should be confined to rituals and magic items anyone can pick up and use, just to make it that much more likely that someone figures out when to use them. But when you take away the ability to "cast them freely" somehow that's more limiting. Nevermind that acquiring a spell like this was either effectively "paid" upfront by a wizard or sorcerer in spending a limited space level up slot on it, or a wizard having to take the time to research and acquire the spell and the process to transcribe it into a spellbook DMs never enforced, or how a lot of these spells had expensive material costs DMs also never enforced. The illusory wall being a permanent duration with no cost is honestly a bit generous to me, and it probably should have had an expensive component to pay to establish that. You know, similar to how all 4e rituals cost a bit of money and time to cast.
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Dec 26, 2022 19:43
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4e actually had a higher-level "create or enchant a large building" ritual that did include a subsidiary option to include various annoying illusions and stuff scattered around the place, and those lasted indefinitely by default (specifically, the thing had a duration measured in weeks or months that you could extend by paying a healing surge per day, and once you'd paid the cost for long enough it became permanent). It just took an hour or so to raise in the first place. Separately, there were actual cast-in-the-space-of-one-action spells of the Leomund's Tiny Hut/Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion/whatever line, which you could indeed just whip up and gently caress off into in the face of hostile monsters or an exploding volcano or something, but those were utility powers and therefore competing for space with other combat-relevant utility powers and also limited in their durations. So it always comes down to haggling. It's not just that someone needs to be able to reshape the environment or cast illusions, they need to be able to do it instantly and for free but also to permanent effect. Why? Well, I guess because they'd be too weak in combat otherwise. But I thought we wanted to be weak in combat...?
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Dec 26, 2022 19:49
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