|
What's worse is the habit the designers had of placing like 19 traps in an area when only 2 would have done. I'm assuming you don't NEED to disable all of them, but since you have no real way of telling which ones you need to remove to make the room safe, you sort of have to anyways.
|
# ? Aug 25, 2023 14:14 |
|
|
# ? Jun 5, 2024 19:55 |
|
Splicer posted:Passive checks don't have rolls. Your passive score is 10 + the appropriate ability score + proficiency (if applicable) + modifiers. If your passive score makes or exceeds the check then you Just Succeed, no rolls required. It only existed for a few things like perception and insight at release (same ones as 4E) but passive everything was a common houserule and I think became standard in... I want to say tashas? In BG3, there are absolutely passive checks: if you walk near a trap there will be a die roll, a PERCEPTION: SUCCESS popup, the character will say "careful, this place is trapped", then Shadowheart will walk forward and explode
|
# ? Aug 25, 2023 14:50 |
|
In my case I get 4 fails and then have to decide if I'm going to move ahead anyways, go to camp and rotate out party members to see if their one time checks succeed or reload so I can try again. This isn't just a traps thing though, it sucks when no one passes any of the 6 different skills like arcana or religion and I just... don't get whatever tidbit or lore or whatever that game. Actually there was a quest where you had to find an item that was in a pile of hay. We talked to a dead person who hid an item there and she said "My dowry is in the barn". My brother and I stood around the very obvious hay while our characters noted "Weird that the hay didn't burn, unlike everything else". We couldn't search it, attacking it did nothing. We looked up online and a guide said that we could ask the dead person where exactly it was hidden, but we didn't get that option at all. Thankfully after we rotated party members around one of them succeeded, but I'm guessing that if every party member failed the check we just... couldn't finish that quest.
|
# ? Aug 25, 2023 14:55 |
|
Leal posted:In my case I get 4 fails and then have to decide if I'm going to move ahead anyways, go to camp and rotate out party members to see if their one time checks succeed or reload so I can try again. This isn't just a traps thing though, it sucks when no one passes any of the 6 different skills like arcana or religion and I just... don't get whatever tidbit or lore or whatever that game. Sometimes with talk to the dead you have to ask them 2-3 followup questions and you might run out of questions before you finish. Edit: further, I've had a few quest interactables be very hard to find even when using Alt to highlight them, sometimes you have to wander around to the area so you get line of sight on the interaction point Evilreaver has a new favorite as of 15:45 on Aug 25, 2023 |
# ? Aug 25, 2023 14:58 |
|
BG3 is a game where you just have to accept that you're not gonna see everything in a single playthrough. Sometimes you just fail that skill check and them's the breaks, either savescum relentessly or enjoy the ride.
|
# ? Aug 25, 2023 15:01 |
|
Evilreaver posted:Sometimes with talk to the dead you have to ask them 2-3 followup questions and you might run out of questions before you finish. Is this an Honor Along Thieves reference or an actual thing in the game? (Or both since the movie was good about using real D&D stuff)
|
# ? Aug 25, 2023 15:06 |
|
Lobok posted:Is this an Honor Along Thieves reference or an actual thing in the game? (Or both since the movie was good about using real D&D stuff) My understanding is that it is a canon dungeons & dragons thing Edit: I do like how this somewhat punishes people who just go from the top of the list down asking dumb questions like who are you, how did you die, what's your occupation etc (when the answers are typically John Idiot, village idiot, and died when player character exploded them, respectively) Evilreaver has a new favorite as of 15:50 on Aug 25, 2023 |
# ? Aug 25, 2023 15:46 |
|
Tunicate posted:Pathfinder has 'taking 20' which is the one where if you have no penalty for failure, and therefore if you retry eventually someone will roll a 20, you shortcut to saying it takes 20x as long and skip the misery of rolling it all out (useful for searching etc). Ahhh, okay. So Taking 20 would be going around the room to check/gather everything, while Take 10 is for the stuff that could fail if rolled low, so rather than risking failure you just aim for average. I'm guessing if used in the way I was describing, you could theoretically pass a DC 15 check on a Take 10 but if there was something gated behind a DC 20 breakpoint, you'd miss out on it while also not having to worry about penalties if you rolled a 3 or something. Thanks! Splicer posted:Also neither of these are "from" Pathfinder, they're from D&D 3e I knew it was going to end up being something from D&D first, but I really don't have much experience with D&D outside of a very small amount of 3.5e early on and then 5e. So the only time it's ever really come up was Pathfinder. Makes sense though! Isn't Pathfinder 1e built on the framework of 3e or 3.5e? Gerblyn posted:If you're a Rogue, then you can take 10 whenever you roll less than 10 on a proficient skill. This unlocks at level 11 so I guess giving that to other classes by default in some way would screw rogues over quite a bit! they made it Rogue thing? For 11th level? What? I would've never seen it, either, because I'm just getting to Level 6 now but my Rogue is doing a 3 level dip into Ranger like a ton of other people. Surely there must be some extra nuance to it or something Reliable Talent posted:When you make an Ability Check with a Skill you are Proficient with it, the lowest result you can roll on the die is 10. Huh. I guess the idea is you can put this on and never fail a lower level lockpick/disarm trap/pickpocket Sleight of Hand check? bawk has a new favorite as of 16:15 on Aug 25, 2023 |
# ? Aug 25, 2023 15:58 |
|
bawk posted:
Pretty much! It does really cut down on save scumming and such, especially for speech checks which are harder yo retry without burning inspiration. But yeah, I recently respecced to Assassin 7/Gloomstalker 5 and I don’t miss it much.
|
# ? Aug 25, 2023 16:18 |
|
Lobok posted:Is this an Honor Along Thieves reference or an actual thing in the game? (Or both since the movie was good about using real D&D stuff) Evilreaver posted:My understanding is that it is a canon dungeons & dragons thing It's the basis of the spell itself from D&D: "You grant the semblance of life and intelligence to a corpse of your choice within range, allowing it to answer the questions you pose. The corpse must still have a mouth and can’t be undead. The spell fails if the corpse was the target of this spell within the last 10 days. Until the spell ends, you can ask the corpse up to five questions. The corpse knows only what it knew in life, including the languages it knew. Answers are usually brief, cryptic, or repetitive, and the corpse is under no compulsion to offer a truthful answer if you are hostile to it or it recognizes you as an enemy. This spell doesn’t return the creature’s soul to its body, only its animating spirit. Thus, the corpse can’t learn new information, doesn’t comprehend anything that has happened since it died, and can’t speculate about future events." Edit: Honor Among Thieves was clearly written by people who have played a lot of D&D with parties that have done a lot of dumb poo poo that made their DM groan, and it shows.
|
# ? Aug 25, 2023 16:24 |
|
I love the way random stuff in D&D just casually implies e.g. that there's a difference between "soul" and "animating spirit" in the metaphysics of the universe.
|
# ? Aug 25, 2023 16:27 |
|
Morpheus posted:
The scene with the bridge "puzzle" proves that.
|
# ? Aug 25, 2023 16:28 |
|
Halloween Jack posted:I love the way random stuff in D&D just casually implies e.g. that there's a difference between "soul" and "animating spirit" in the metaphysics of the universe.
|
# ? Aug 25, 2023 16:42 |
|
Real talk, as an amateur game designer, world building like that is extremely fun. Finding different edge cases and weaving together systems of magic that work coherently and fluidly is extremely my poo poo
|
# ? Aug 25, 2023 16:52 |
|
bawk posted:It's stuff like this that lets me know if I ever wake up to find out D&D's magic system existed IRL I would be one of those random skeletons you find in a study/library surrounded by the notes/scrawls/maddening scratchings of a man slowly going insane over how the Grease spell works, let alone what happens between when Revivify stops working and Speak With Dead starts. IRL me vs. That one book from one of the cellars in BG3? I'm hosed, fully dead/enthralled/etc. Why, specifically, the Grease spell?
|
# ? Aug 25, 2023 16:54 |
|
Evilreaver posted:systems of magic that work coherently and fluidly
|
# ? Aug 25, 2023 16:54 |
|
Evilreaver posted:Sometimes with talk to the dead you have to ask them 2-3 followup questions and you might run out of questions before you finish. Just click the nameplate that shows up.
|
# ? Aug 25, 2023 16:55 |
|
DrBouvenstein posted:Why, specifically, the Grease spell? It's one of the strongest first level spells and to master it will make you one of the Lards of Fat
|
# ? Aug 25, 2023 16:56 |
|
RandolphCarter posted:Just click the nameplate that shows up. Sometimes you have to wander around the area to get the name plate to show up is what I'm saying
|
# ? Aug 25, 2023 17:00 |
|
Halloween Jack posted:Sorry, what? We're talking about Dungeons and Dragons. I'm talking about my various lovely homebrews Ask me about my "double pendulum theory" of time travel if you have an afternoon to waste
|
# ? Aug 25, 2023 17:01 |
|
Evilreaver posted:Sometimes you have to wander around the area to get the name plate to show up is what I'm saying Oh, yeah that’s pretty annoying. I think stuff only shows up if one of your characters is facing it.
|
# ? Aug 25, 2023 17:04 |
|
I mean I don't, but I can always read it later. Does it look like this?Evilreaver posted:Ask me about my "double pendulum theory" of time travel if you have an afternoon to waste
|
# ? Aug 25, 2023 17:07 |
|
DrBouvenstein posted:Why, specifically, the Grease spell? You get it at first level, it's liable to make you slip and fall, it can be exploded into a sizeable patch of burning flames, it's an intersection of utility and damage that does exactly what it says on the tin, and conjuring this patch of grease takes more mental/physical effort (using a spell slot) than tossing a bolt of fire. It's fascinating. There's something under the hood of this spell that makes it different, and I'd be the stupid bastard trying to reverse engineer why the rules work the way they do instead of going to wizard school
|
# ? Aug 25, 2023 17:11 |
|
Opening a portal to the elemental plane of grease is hard.
|
# ? Aug 25, 2023 17:13 |
|
I was going to make a joke about taking a level dip into Wizard for access to the Grease spell so that a Monk can just post up in close quarters and punch the poo poo out of prone characters who slipped and fell, like that one goons friend who went to prison and would oil up the cell floor before taunting people in to fight them. But! That totally worked out for him, and it would totally work in-game
|
# ? Aug 25, 2023 17:20 |
|
Halloween Jack posted:I mean I don't, but I can always read it later. Does it look like this? Not really, my double-pendulum theory addresses time loops: the short thread-friendly explanation is that if you go back in time and make a loop, for example giving yourself the answers to a test question, then your future self goes back in time to give a second-order-future self the test answers it can seem as though the answers appeared from nowhere. This loop can appear stable for a handful of iterations, but your Nth-order future self is under no obligation to exactly repeat actions, thus time loops have a unstable nature and can spin off, eventually closing the loop. This theory works to make some time travel shenanigans like the Terminator franchise consistent. The John Connor that we know this "time" is (potentially) not the same as the John Connor who sent Kyle Reese back in time; they have different fathers (we don't know who the previous father was since sending Arnold back in time precluded him meeting Sarah Connor-- furthermore since John Connor is under the assumption that Kyle Reese is his original father, we know for certain that the John Connor from Terminator 1 who sent Kyle Reese back is not the first order John Connor). As the two parties sending agents back in time continue to mess with the timeline this could spin off a quote "finalized" timeline at some point wherein no Johns Connor exist at all Evilreaver has a new favorite as of 17:42 on Aug 25, 2023 |
# ? Aug 25, 2023 17:30 |
|
bawk posted:I knew it was going to end up being something from D&D first, but I really don't have much experience with D&D outside of a very small amount of 3.5e early on and then 5e. So the only time it's ever really come up was Pathfinder. Makes sense though! Isn't Pathfinder 1e built on the framework of 3e or 3.5e? e: also to fully complete this analogy assume that the only sonic game released was sonic 06
|
# ? Aug 25, 2023 20:17 |
|
TL;DR, when WotC made third edition thry had a permissive license to allow third party people to make content for it legally. When they rolled out 4th edition they put together a different very restrictive license, and told publishers that they could either sell 4e content or 3e content but not both. These publishers would have to stop selling their entire catalogs of 3e stuff, which was basically financial suicide. Instead, 3e was forked with some updates into 'pathfinder' (lead by the publisher WotC previously had handling the official Dungeon and Dragon magazines). Pathfinder was compatible with all the old backcatalog, so the third party people could keep selling their stuff. Virtually all of them jumped ship. And, not-incidentally, since 4e's success was now an existential threat to all the major third party publishers, there was a huge edition war.
|
# ? Aug 25, 2023 21:26 |
|
DrBouvenstein posted:Why, specifically, the Grease spell? This just made me think of the Junji Ito short story with the zits.
|
# ? Aug 25, 2023 21:30 |
|
grittyreboot posted:I believe your pet in Torchlight would collect loot for you. Those games also had a nice feature where you could load up your pet with sellable junk and it'd run back to town and sell it for you so you didn't have to stop exploring the dungeon. You had to actively tell it to pick stuff up/manually dump items into its inventory, though either way it only sounds good on paper. In practice, it couldn't keep up with the pace of loot (with a return timer that lengthened the farther from town you were), you were potentially removing a useful combat aid since you could load your pet up with spells, and town portal scrolls were common anyway. Or you could spend a spell slot on a town portal spell and completely skip the fuss.
|
# ? Aug 25, 2023 22:32 |
|
Story notes: Some fast food outlet in Neverwinter hires a bunch of apprentice wizards to keep casting Grease on the deep fryer over and over. Then corporate throws a tizzy when Volo's dictionary includes an entry on "McSpellcasting", claims it is demeaning to their employees. Huge PR blunder when said employees disagree, refuse to sign petition.
|
# ? Aug 25, 2023 22:42 |
|
I know this is a basic rear end question but Why is it called Neverwinter if it's always goddamn Winter?
|
# ? Aug 25, 2023 23:12 |
|
It's ironic
|
# ? Aug 25, 2023 23:16 |
|
credburn posted:I know this is a basic rear end question but It’s not always winter there though? Anyway, it’s because of the river - the river Never which runs through the city never freezes because of the fire primordial (fuckoff big elemental) under the nearby Mount Hotenow.
|
# ? Aug 25, 2023 23:17 |
|
credburn posted:I know this is a basic rear end question but Rebracketing, the same linguistic shift that turned 'an apkin' into 'a napkin'.
|
# ? Aug 25, 2023 23:26 |
|
Tunicate posted:Rebracketing, the same linguistic shift that turned 'an apkin' into 'a napkin'. WHAT
|
# ? Aug 25, 2023 23:48 |
|
Arivia posted:It’s not always winter there though? I read it wasn't certain, unless that's changed. I think there was an elf named Never that nearly perished in a huge battle (Never's Winter) but was saved, also because of the harbor that doesn't freeze
|
# ? Aug 25, 2023 23:49 |
|
Morpheus posted:I read it wasn't certain, unless that's changed. I think there was an elf named Never that nearly perished in a huge battle (Never's Winter) but was saved, also because of the harbor that doesn't freeze The elf Lord Halueth Never is considered the founder. The bit about “Never’s Winter” is considered ambiguously canon - it’s from the Neverwinter Nights 2 video game.
|
# ? Aug 25, 2023 23:54 |
|
credburn posted:WHAT there's a bunch of them. see also "an ewt" and "an ekename". some of them go the other way, like "a nadder", "a norange," and "a napron".
|
# ? Aug 25, 2023 23:54 |
|
|
# ? Jun 5, 2024 19:55 |
|
DontMockMySmock posted:"a norange," this gave me whiplash in the same way that finding out "pineapple" in every other language is "ananas" did "naranja" makes so much more sense now to my English speaking brain, god dammit
|
# ? Aug 26, 2023 00:03 |