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But then what will I dump stat on wizard?
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Jan 17, 2023 18:48
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Charisma, as is tradition.
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Jan 17, 2023 18:51
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Anyone going to captain con? I'm debating taking the bus down to Rhode Island but hotel is stinking expensive...
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Jan 17, 2023 19:55
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GetDunked posted:Charisma, as is tradition. 
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Jan 17, 2023 20:00
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I've seen that pic before more than once but I only just now noticed the little bird feet on the boots, lol they're headless penguins, aren't they
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Jan 17, 2023 20:04
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gradenko_2000 posted:https://twitter.com/mattcolville/status/1615091245520678912 Why even change the names of the six stats if the only difference is that you ran a thesaurus over it?
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Jan 17, 2023 20:07
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I've always felt that if you're going to wrangle with a Constitution/Stamina/whatever stat at all, just mash it in as part of Strength. But better yet, ignore it completely so it gets easier to dodge rocket tag scenarios triggered by someone having "failed" to properly invest in being sturdy. Just say the wizard is resistant to being flattened because of magic force fields, the rogue is resistant to being flattened because they know how to roll with punches or turn them into glancing blows, and yes, the warrior can tank them with armor, muscles and shields. Hit point differences for PC's largely are only meaningful if there are some kind of tanking/aggro/cover mechanics or solid AoO mechanics that allow players to utilize big lumps of hit points as a tactical tool.
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Jan 17, 2023 20:09
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what's that, a stat that affects how many hit points you have? that already exists, dumbass, it's called MAN CALIBRE and it's also your loving level.
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Jan 17, 2023 20:11
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BattleMaster posted:Why even change the names of the six stats if the only difference is that you ran a thesaurus over it? orruks, aelfs, duardin, etc. etc. just file the names off and you're good, right it's like the sovereign citizen approach to intellectual property laws, if you do the right incantations and put gold fringe on your statblocks then you do not create enjoinder and can't be sued for copying D&D e. i bet elminster created a high-level spell called Create Enjoinder
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Jan 17, 2023 20:11
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Leperflesh posted:orruks, aelfs, duardin, etc. etc. Except in this case it works a lot more often because Wizards doesn't have the time or energy to taze someone's balls off while dragging them away from an InDesign template as they shout "am I being C&D'd" over and over.
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Jan 17, 2023 20:15
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You can’t judge stats in a vacuum. If a game’s premise is such that a thing might regularly be tested, have a stat for it. If it’s likely to be a fringe case don’t.
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Jan 17, 2023 20:15
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Leperflesh posted:orruks, aelfs, duardin, etc. etc. You actually can't copyright rules though, except for a specific expression of them, so it actually does work.
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Jan 17, 2023 20:30
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He goes into slightly more detail in the comments about why there are 6, but it still feels... vague. But there isn't even a system there yet, so benefit of the doubt. The tl;dr is that character classes will be defined by two of the six attributes. So like a Mighty Intellect might be a musclewizard or something, or an Intuition Agility might be a thief idk. It's weird and I feel like it reminds me of something, but I can't quite pinpoint exactly what.
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Jan 17, 2023 20:31
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PerniciousKnid posted:You actually can't copyright rules though, except for a specific expression of them, so it actually does work. It "works" in that it's not illegal to make six identical stats with synonymous names, but by the same token, it's completely unnecessary and accomplishes nothing. You can just use the six standard stats, as-named. If it were illegal to use the six as-named stats, simply using synonyms wouldn't be the magic incantation that defeated the judge.
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Jan 17, 2023 20:35
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gradenko_2000 posted:https://twitter.com/mattcolville/status/1615091245520678912 I told him to switch Intellect to Reason and then call it the ARMPIT system. Edit: Because it stinks
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Jan 17, 2023 20:40
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I am honestly baffled there isn't a wojak version of this
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Jan 17, 2023 21:26
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That Old Tree posted:Except in this case it works a lot more often because Wizards doesn't have the time or energy to taze someone's balls off while dragging them away from an InDesign template as they shout "am I being C&D'd" over and over. Wizards hit Robert Bodine with a C&D about his stat blocks the other year and he happily sent them back a lawyer letter and that was apparently that. Helps that he’s a lawyer, though.
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Jan 17, 2023 21:40
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Does anyone happen to have the Napoleon grunt telling someone not to bother the grognards, because they're grumpy and ill tempered?
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Jan 17, 2023 21:54
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PurpleXVI posted:I've always felt that if you're going to wrangle with a Constitution/Stamina/whatever stat at all, just mash it in as part of Strength. Huh. Again not like a personal critique I just think its really interesting that you've come from such a different gaming experience than me. My own paradigm about game stats is that there's two questions: is it going to come up, and is it something you want one PC to better or worse at than another PC. Apocalypse World still stands out to me as the default TTRPG, even if its not my #1 most favorite, and it has a "tough" stat that I think is both very good and has little to do with strength: "Cool." From the rulebook Apocalypse World 2nd Edition posted:Cool, meaning cool under fire, rational, clearthinking, calm, calculating, I think it's fairly obvious what it means in practice for a character to have high or low Cool, and the corresponding basic move, do something under fire, tells a lot about how it plays out. Characters with low cool can find themselves paralyzed, struggle to finish what they start, find situations where they're on their backfoot compounding in bad ways, while characters with high cool will deal with unexpected crises smoothly and efficiently. And obviously this isn't the only way to do it. Legend of the Elements' "Solid" is probably the closest to a straight "toughness" stat, though a lot of the stuff that would be covered by "Cool" in AW is instead covered by "Fluid" in Legend, while Solid also covers some stuff that people would probably use "Hard" for in AW. Monster of the Week however is closer to what you proposed, and while it still has "Cool" from AW a lot of the functions of being tough are rolled into, well, "Tough," the basic violence stat. These different ways of laying out stats and what they cover give a different idea of what a character is supposed to do and be like. LotE's most striking choice is the stat "Natural," which is used for both diplomacy and meditation, its both your connection to the broader world and your ability to well "act naturally" in a situation where not being a dick is the right move. And then there's the other side where my favorite illustrative example is Nice Marines. PCs in Nice Marines have no combat stats. Why would they? If there's a fight, they just win, no contest no roll no distinction between one battle-brother and the other. Anyway tl;dr without any context for what somebody's trying to accomplish with the stat layout for PCs in a game, I have no idea if a given stat layout is good or not.
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Jan 17, 2023 21:57
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Venger Satanis is writing a book on "GMing from spiritual, occult, and humanist perspectives". https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/vengersatanis/advanced-game-mastering-like-a-loving-boss quote:.. view the craft as an attempt to be like God ourselves, creators who forge and nurture our creations, looking after the people and places and everything that exists in those worlds - independent of our imagination! This is not meant as blasphemy but celebration. There is divinity inside of us, all human beings, endowed by our creator.
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Jan 17, 2023 23:47
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Venger Satanis is perennially crowdsourcing kicks in the genitals.
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Jan 18, 2023 00:51
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Tulip posted:Again not like a personal critique I just think its really interesting that you've come from such a different gaming experience than me. My own paradigm about game stats is that there's two questions: is it going to come up, and is it something you want one PC to better or worse at than another PC. I mean it's fair for one PC to be better or worse at taking hits than another PC, but... if it's more than a piddling minor difference, it quickly turns into stuff where you need to tune up damage that would completely obliterate one PC to even scartch another. D&D constitution has always suffered from the issue that it's usually far less meaningful than the stuff you get from your class, it doesn't contribute to any skill rolls, the only save it's for tends to be associated with save-or-dies that only jackass GM's whip out and the class toughness differences often create situations where, say, an AoE attack that would do meaningful damage to the warriors would completely vaporize the mages if they rolled anything but minimum damage(the original Dragonlance modules are a great example of this bullshit...). That sort of difference would be less difficult if the game actually featured meaningful ways for the heavily armored Fighter to serve as a bulwark, attract attacks, sacrifice their own large health pool to protect the ones with less health pool, i.e. functioning like an MMO tank, but as it is it just sucks and gives the GM a headache. Tulip posted:Apocalypse World still stands out to me as the default TTRPG, even if its not my #1 most favorite, and it has a "tough" stat that I think is both very good and has little to do with strength: "Cool." From the rulebook See, personally I feel like that sounds like a completely awful stat. Because in most of the stories I can imagine, many of the really important moments are in some way tense or under fire, adding another "lmao, you hosed up and your thing don't work"-roll to those pivotal moments sounds like a terrible idea, also resultingly as a stat that essentially everyone would need to have an investment in or be forced to check out of tense situations entirely and just sit in the background waiting for the Cool Folks to sort it out. Maybe that's not how it actually rolls out, but that's what I'd imagine it to be just from that description.
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Jan 18, 2023 01:04
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Hostile V posted:Venger Satanis is perennially crowdsourcing kicks in the genitals. I wanna contribute.
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Jan 18, 2023 01:06
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PurpleXVI posted:I mean it's fair for one PC to be better or worse at taking hits than another PC, but... if it's more than a piddling minor difference, it quickly turns into stuff where you need to tune up damage that would completely obliterate one PC to even scartch another. the worst example of this I ever saw was when me and my group tried playing RIFTS back in ~1992. A couple PCs had megadamage armor and a couple only had SDC-scale armor and we fought something that could do like 1 megadamage hits and of course it vaporized my PC, a leyline walker, on the first hit. After I failed a roll against some mental stat I had a 23 in (that's very high) to do some psychic shield thing. Anyway: you can have this sort of disparity if there's other system elements, as you said, like marks, healing surges, etc. Also constitution used to be the base stat for stuff like endurance skill, resisting poison, is that all gone now?
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Jan 18, 2023 01:13
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Lemniscate Blue posted:I wanna contribute.
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Jan 18, 2023 01:26
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Leperflesh posted:Anyway: you can have this sort of disparity if there's other system elements, as you said, like marks, healing surges, etc. Also constitution used to be the base stat for stuff like endurance skill, resisting poison, is that all gone now? Pre-3e, Constitution added a flat bonus/level(with a higher bonus possible if you were a Fighter of some stripe) to all levels up to and including level 9. At SUPER high levels it added a small modifier(I think it was effectively a max of +10% within the 3-18 range) to your Saves vs Poison and it modified your chance to be successfully resurrected if dead or survive other wild biological surprises(like being polymorphed). Even if you were using Non-Weapon Proficiencies, Constitution affected literally two out of dozens, Endurance and Running, which don't really have any purpose outside of the most obsessively book-keepy games. Somewhat perversely, due to the high difference in what Hit Dice you got, and the massive lethality of the early game, the traditionally fragile and bookish classes like Mages and Rogues absolutely had far greater incentive to invest in Constitution than the traditional tanks like Fighters, Paladins, Rangers and Clerics. Also seeing as how they're both Fighter skills, you don't get much use out of the Fighter being able to move twice as fast as everyone else for a while unless he can handle whatever he's running towards by himself. The one class that put a spectacularly huge premium on Constitution was Psionics but ha ha ha gently caress Psionics and their insanely botched hacky implementation. In 3.x D&D Constitution still provided a hit point bonus and affected Fortitude saving throws, but affected exactly zero skills, and 3.x also ended up with higher HP totals in general due to hit dice not being limited to the first 9 levels, so that made the benefit of bonus HP even less meaningful overall. I think there were a few niche situations that made high Constitution relevant, but ultimately it was even less meaningful in 3.x.
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Jan 18, 2023 01:29
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PurpleXVI posted:
Slight correction, it affected one skill in 3.x. Concentration. But no one boosted their Constitution for that, and you could pretty trivially make the DCs just by investing skill ranks and not worrying about what your base modifier was.
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Jan 18, 2023 01:55
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Leperflesh posted:orruks, aelfs, duardin, etc. etc. This is a misunderstanding of what GW are doing with Age of Sigmar. They aren't filing the serial numbers off; they are adding their own spin not to avoid someone else's trademarks but so they can trademark them themselves after the Chapterhouse Lawsuit Fiasco. Orruks aren't not!orcs; orcs are generic and Orruks are GW-brand fantasy orcas.
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Jan 18, 2023 02:06
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PurpleXVI posted:See, personally I feel like that sounds like a completely awful stat. Because in most of the stories I can imagine, many of the really important moments are in some way tense or under fire, adding another "lmao, you hosed up and your thing don't work"-roll to those pivotal moments sounds like a terrible idea, also resultingly as a stat that essentially everyone would need to have an investment in or be forced to check out of tense situations entirely and just sit in the background waiting for the Cool Folks to sort it out. It rolls out differently for a few reasons: 1. Characters are often put into situations where they can't just wait for the Cool characters to do the thing for them. One of the default GM moves is "separate them", and AW is a system that constantly pushes characters to react to a thing that's happening to them right now. 2. The other moves generally have the assumption that something bad will happen (as opposed to just you fail and nothing happens) if you roll a miss so that tension is built into all the other moves too. If the thing you're doing in a tense situation triggers another more specific move, you'll probably be rolling that instead, and the outcome on a miss will be the follow-through. 3. All the playbooks are written in a way that makes them good at doing their thing in tense situations. The Cool characters might be better at doing something more narratively freeform under fire but, for example, the Gunlugger has plenty of ways to still murder people with weapons in a tense situation. They might Seize by Force which rolls their main stat and lets them pick from a bunch of options, one of which is to reduce the harm they take in doing so. If they don't care about taking harm because they've picked a bunch of other mitigation options, they can ignore that option and instead boost the effect that their move has. 4. The Cool characters are, generally, good at starting poo poo and good at escaping it in the moment but without someone Hot to talk the situation down or someone Hard to end it with violence they're going to be acting under fire a lot and everyone rolls badly eventually. AW is not a game that lets you run from your problems forever.
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Jan 18, 2023 02:07
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neonchameleon posted:This is a misunderstanding of what GW are doing with Age of Sigmar. They aren't filing the serial numbers off; they are adding their own spin not to avoid someone else's trademarks but so they can trademark them themselves after the Chapterhouse Lawsuit Fiasco. Orruks aren't not!orcs; orcs are generic and Orruks are GW-brand fantasy orcas. i want to play the killer whale army
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Jan 18, 2023 02:33
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Arivia posted:i want to play the killer whale army A new experiment in asymmetric design, the Orca Fleet of the Si-P'an Da are the uncontested champions of naval combat. But on land they pay for it with massively reduced movement speed. Immobile is technically still a movement speed. And because this is a GW product they promptly stop having any support for the naval combat spin-off game.
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Jan 18, 2023 02:43
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Arivia posted:i want to play the killer whale army In a lot of my homebrew settings(that admittedly mostly just sit in my head instead of getting used) Orcs are alchemically made beast men(along with most of the standard Monstrous Humanoid races), the classic pig headed kind are the most common breed of Orc but I always stick somewhere in the setting that there's a tribe of Whale/Dolphin/Porpoise headed Orcs that have a reputation for being the fiercest and most feared Orcs in the known world
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Jan 18, 2023 02:47
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PurpleXVI posted:I mean it's fair for one PC to be better or worse at taking hits than another PC, but... if it's more than a piddling minor difference, it quickly turns into stuff where you need to tune up damage that would completely obliterate one PC to even scartch another. D&D constitution has always suffered from the issue that it's usually far less meaningful than the stuff you get from your class, it doesn't contribute to any skill rolls, the only save it's for tends to be associated with save-or-dies that only jackass GM's whip out and the class toughness differences often create situations where, say, an AoE attack that would do meaningful damage to the warriors would completely vaporize the mages if they rolled anything but minimum damage(the original Dragonlance modules are a great example of this bullshit...). Yeah this is kind of fascinating because it reads to me like you're parsing the player being rewarded as a punishment. And like I think that's just from coming from such a different RPG context than from me. Like the bolded part you described is a very core element of how AW is GM'd - the player says what they're going to do, if there's a good reason the player wouldn't just succeed they roll for it, and if they don't roll a clean success the GM pushes a consequence on the player and then goes "what do you do?" Act Under Fire covers a wide range of weaseling out of the problem, whether its "ok I move from cover to cover, evading the machine gun fire" or "I slip out the back of the room while people are distracted," and those can fail too. And that's just...the core of gameplay. I will say that default in AW-hacks is to include a protect move that covers a lot of what you're talking about. LotE has it for Solid, it's part of Tough in MOTW. Default AW doesn't have it straightforwardly, it can be done via seize by force (hard), act under fire (cool), or aid another (Hx), but its very much a thing that's simple to do in these symptoms in a way that more simulation-y games tend to make rather difficult.
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Jan 18, 2023 02:50
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neonchameleon posted:This is a misunderstanding of what GW are doing with Age of Sigmar. They aren't filing the serial numbers off; they are adding their own spin not to avoid someone else's trademarks but so they can trademark them themselves after the Chapterhouse Lawsuit Fiasco. Orruks aren't not!orcs; orcs are generic and Orruks are GW-brand fantasy orcas. Yeah, I know. But what good is a trademark, if it doesn't identify a product or service or something that you're doing differently? Great, I can tell when I'm buying an Orruk instead of an Ork. So? They've correctly understood the process, they've made trademarkeable names for some of their factions. I don't believe doing this in any way improved their products' recognizability in the marketplace. GW's most iconic IP is the stuff that actually looks and feels unique... the big pauldron space marines (which they didn't rename, hmm), the specific chaos gods (they didn't rename them), the sisters of battle and the tyranids and... hey, I'm seeing a pattern, the stuff with creative names is also the stuff with creative attributes worth protecting, and the stuff with generic names that they re-named to be more unique shows the least creative input and differentiation from generics from other companies. It's not a perfect comparison, you're right. But the chapterhouse fiasco, and GW's behavior both before and after, all suggests to me that they just completely whiffed on the actual value of IP protection: reserving your creative works for your yourself. The stuff you didn't just borrow from the commons because your fantasy setting obviously gotta have elves and dwarves and your space setting obviously gotta have... orks. Sp... space orks, yes. That's it. And GW didn't actually make it hard to make warhammer-compatible ork models by renaming them, and Wizards won't actually make it hard to make D&D-compatible content by restricting their licensing deals more. Just feels dumb to me.
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Jan 18, 2023 03:10
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Tulip posted:Yeah this is kind of fascinating because it reads to me like you're parsing the player being rewarded as a punishment. And like I think that's just from coming from such a different RPG context than from me. Like the bolded part you described is a very core element of how AW is GM'd - the player says what they're going to do, if there's a good reason the player wouldn't just succeed they roll for it, and if they don't roll a clean success the GM pushes a consequence on the player and then goes "what do you do?" Act Under Fire covers a wide range of weaseling out of the problem, whether its "ok I move from cover to cover, evading the machine gun fire" or "I slip out the back of the room while people are distracted," and those can fail too. And that's just...the core of gameplay. Yeah, gotta say that most GM's I've played with would generally assume that it should be rolled every time it potentially could, i.e. that it would be a save-or-suck you'd need to pass every time you wanted to use another skill in tense situations, so it'd add a double chance of failure. To me it just sounds like a skill tax for being functional at all. But sure, it probably depends on what sort of GM you have.
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Jan 18, 2023 03:11
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PurpleXVI posted:Yeah, gotta say that most GM's I've played with would generally assume that it should be rolled every time it potentially could, i.e. that it would be a save-or-suck you'd need to pass every time you wanted to use another skill in tense situations, so it'd add a double chance of failure. Those GM's would be breaking enough central AW rules that I feel comfortable saying they aren't playing the game anymore. And I don't mean a No True Scotsman O they're not really playing the game thing. I mean in the sense that if you ignore how the pieces move and that the goal is checkmate and also all the pieces are bicycles now, you aren't playing chess. Like, that's ignoring the entire purpose of AW at that point.
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Jan 18, 2023 03:18
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PurpleXVI posted:Yeah, gotta say that most GM's I've played with would generally assume that it should be rolled every time it potentially could, i.e. that it would be a save-or-suck you'd need to pass every time you wanted to use another skill in tense situations, so it'd add a double chance of failure. Yeah this is what I mean by different context. If a GM did that at my table it would be like encountering a space alien. I can't think of any GM I've played with in the last 15 years that would make that assumption.
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Jan 18, 2023 03:28
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Apocalypse world is very blunt about following the gm rules as written, it's not at all loosey goosey do what makes you happy, ironically
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Jan 18, 2023 03:48
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Tarnop posted:It rolls out differently for a few reasons: One more assumption worth mentioning: the PCs in one Apocalypse World game aren't necessarily allies. They're effectively the main characters of a post-apocalyptic action/drama miniseries. They're probably going to work together at points because that's how players work, but they might hate each other, and they might have a tenuous alliance, and they might sell each other out to the raiders in the third act. The point is, players aren't really going "I want to play the party face", they're going "I want to play the scheming bar owner". And sometimes, you want to play a silver-tongued rear end in a top hat who folds like wet paper when you shove a gun in his face, because that's the archetype you want to see in the HBO miniseries you're playing out with your friends.
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Jan 18, 2023 03:57
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sebmojo posted:Apocalypse world is very blunt about following the gm rules as written, it's not at all loosey goosey do what makes you happy, ironically That's one of the reasons I like it so much, really. The GM is basically the one person who needs some constraints on their creativity, because otherwise it's infinity, and AW tells you straight up that your job is to be a big fan of the characters and help your players have a good time.
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Jan 18, 2023 03:57
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