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blastron posted:Playing 5E at PAX this weekend has sold me on the concept of organized play (and thus, 5E) although I probably won't try to get a consistent group together. The modules I ran at PAX got my lovely wizard up to 3rd level and I'm actually invested in getting more XP. How well has organized play worked out so far, with this downtime/renown/whatever stuff? I've always thought organized play would be awful. Who wants to play d&d with a bunch of awful-smelling strangers? Not this guy.
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Sep 1, 2015 17:14
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ActusRhesus posted:An extremely annoying rules lawyer has been added to our group. You've been pretty dogpiled already so I'm going to take a slightly different tone here. First, are you the DM or a player? If you are a player, OOC rules-sniping probably won't be well received by the group. Your best bet is to talk to the DM. If you are the DM, don't engage in back-and-forth hate-lawyering. Nobody wins when you do this. The other players get very tired of the hostility and the DM stops running a game entirely and starts running some kind of tough-love bootcamp for that one player. Consider the ramifications for the other players. Also since your entire world is a creation of fiction the kinds of "gotchas" hostile DMs come up with are never as clever as they think they are. Often times you end up in arms races about who can be more creative within the context of the rules. It gets ugly.There are no sure-fire ways to entrap such a player as a player or a DM and trying just pisses off everybody as much as the rule-lawyer pisses off you. Consider what you mean by 'rules lawyer'. Is the player annoying because they are well versed in the rules, or would they be annoying either way? There is a flexible definition of 'rules lawyering' in the RPG community. Some people consider it annoying when a player shockingly knows that rules at all and tries to invoke them. Since the DM is the highest authority at the table if the actual 'lawyering' part comes up (that is, making a lot of QED arguments based on former rulings and ambiguous language) that DM still has the veto power. That's when you can tell if the guy is just a jerk or not -- does he huff and tremble when the DM says no or does he just shrug and take a sip of beer? If it's the former that guy would be a jerk even if he never cracked a rulebook and should be kicked out of the group. If you absolutely must gently caress with him, do it privately via email so nobody else gets hurt.
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Sep 1, 2015 17:19
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friendlyfire posted:I've always thought organized play would be awful. Who wants to play d&d with a bunch of awful-smelling strangers? Not this guy. D&D has been pushing for one form of organized play or another since the beginning, so clearly it's doing something right.
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Sep 1, 2015 17:22
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gradenko_2000 posted:D&D has been pushing for one form of organized play or another since the beginning, so clearly it's doing something right. There's always going to be a horde of defectives that can't find a game because nobody will have them, or desperates who can't find a game because there are never enough people willing to run stuff. So yeah, it's perfect for goons.
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Sep 1, 2015 17:40
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Speaking of rules lawyers (but not 5E specifically), my tabletop group used to have an anti-rules lawyer in it who would hate to look up the rules if it took more than ten seconds. He even all but said this during a minor confusion when he was running Dogs in the Vinyard and we weren't certain how to set up multiple people as one entity. A few months ago he moved out to some job opportunity in Minnesota, and we've surprisingly missed him less than we thought we might.
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Sep 1, 2015 17:47
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friendlyfire posted:I've always thought organized play would be awful. Who wants to play d&d with a bunch of awful-smelling strangers? Not this guy. Not specifically organized play, but where I'm from, groups tend often to be cobbled to together from Meetup/Kijiji/the local D&D Facebook group. Particularly if you're planning to use 4e, because most established groups are playing Pathfinder (some have moved to 5e but not many.) Like, my experience has basically been with the same 2 DMs over the past decade, with a rotating cast of players from across the city. And then occasionally a player decides they're gonna run something on their own, and even more randoms get thrown into the mix, somehow. The 5e game I'm in right now (monthly, Hoard) is basically a pool of 10-12 people rotating in and out. There's the obligatory "obese unemployed guy who hasn't played since 3.5 and attends every session," and everyone is a geek of some flavour or another (duh) but by and large they're mostly normal people with real lives.
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Sep 1, 2015 18:09
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friendlyfire posted:I've always thought organized play would be awful. Who wants to play d&d with a bunch of awful-smelling strangers? Not this guy.
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Sep 1, 2015 18:18
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NGDBSS posted:Speaking of rules lawyers (but not 5E specifically), my tabletop group used to have an anti-rules lawyer in it who would hate to look up the rules if it took more than ten seconds. He even all but said this during a minor confusion when he was running Dogs in the Vinyard and we weren't certain how to set up multiple people as one entity. A few months ago he moved out to some job opportunity in Minnesota, and we've surprisingly missed him less than we thought we might. My last RL tabletop group had an eminently sensible policy where if we had a bit of rules confusion we'd spend a couple minutes looking it up, but if it threatened to sink the momentum we'd have the GM make a quick ruling, use that for the rest of the encounter/session, and then look up how it was meant to be done afterwards. On the one hand you maybe don't want to kill the game's flow to spend 20 minutes poring over a badly laid-out textbook in search of the grappling rules on page XX. On the other hand it turns out that most people actually like to know how poo poo works if they're devoting six hours of every Saturday to it.
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Sep 1, 2015 19:03
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If it's stopping general flow for something that's not critical to the scene, then fudging it so things can move on while it gets looked up for later works for me. Having one person a bit distracted while book-diving is preferable to a bunch of people doing nothing for 5-10 minutes while lawyers go legal.
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Sep 1, 2015 19:14
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The issue was more that he was rather annoyed at even spending one minute to make such a search, and yet his attempt to fudge things took longer than using the Find command on a PDF reader.
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Sep 1, 2015 20:00
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Mendrian posted:Consider what you mean by 'rules lawyer'. Is the player annoying because they are well versed in the rules, or would they be annoying either way? There is a flexible definition of 'rules lawyering' in the RPG community. Some people consider it annoying when a player shockingly knows that rules at all and tries to invoke them. Since the DM is the highest authority at the table if the actual 'lawyering' part comes up (that is, making a lot of QED arguments based on former rulings and ambiguous language) that DM still has the veto power. That's when you can tell if the guy is just a jerk or not -- does he huff and tremble when the DM says no or does he just shrug and take a sip of beer? If it's the former that guy would be a jerk even if he never cracked a rulebook and should be kicked out of the group. Yeah, I was going to ask for examples of this "rules lawyering". Because what from your perspective might be rules lawyering, from his perspective might be "The DM in this new group doesn't know the rules very well. I'll help by pointing it out when he gets them wrong!" or might be "Wow, this DM is arbitrarily changing the rules to gently caress with me. That's not cool. I should say something." Like, without examples, I'm not sure that the guy is even doing anything wrong.
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Sep 1, 2015 20:25
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I'm always worried about coming across as a rules-lawyer, just because I tend to remember most of the written rules. I don't want to try and correct someone if they choose to rule things differently, but I want to be helpful if they just aren't familiar with something. One person in my group has this strange obsession with asserting that you have to make some sort of skill check whenever you try to jump, even when I was the one DMing, despite the fact that jumping is just a thing you can do with your movement. Is it being a rules-lawyer to say "no, seriously, strong things can just jump pretty far"?
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Sep 1, 2015 20:27
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Vanguard Warden posted:I'm always worried about coming across as a rules-lawyer, just because I tend to remember most of the written rules. I don't want to try and correct someone if they choose to rule things differently, but I want to be helpful if they just aren't familiar with something. Look, for me, it's like this. RPGs are a hobby where we routinely spend $60+ on hardback rulebooks hundreds of pages long. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that you've read that thing. I think it's actually pretty hosed up that there's any stigma at all around using the enormous artbook that is ostensibly supposed to be the framework for the game. If an orc moves away from your character and you say, 'shouldn't I get an opportunity attack here?' that's not being a jerk and if you're with a group that thinks it is then they are terminally afraid of confrontation. The real problem invoked by 'rules lawyers' has nothing to do with rules. It's people who try to bully and browbeat the group and/or DM into making an advantageous call in their favor. Whether or not they use a rulebook to supplement this behavior is irrelevant: they're assholes. A shocking number of 'rules lawyers' actually rely on a very flawed understanding of the rules they profess to know. As in the example you gave here.
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Sep 1, 2015 20:46
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mastershakeman posted:Why doesn't the dm put a stop to it? rules lawyer is a new addition...who is a long time childhood friend of the DM. it's really changed the game dynamic and it's difficult to find a nice way to say "dude...your bromance is loving up the game" Example: Feeling compelled to preemptively make sure "Oh, just so you know...that wondrous item you just got, well you can't use it with this other ability because (my own interpretation of vaguely written bullshit)" I personally don't care if the player in question gets to add a +1 to his AC or not. So I don't see why people feel compelled to tell everyone else how their character works...especially when it tends to always be to that player's detriment. It's never "Oh, hey, you're interpreting that wrong..it's actually a +2 not a +1". It's always "you can't do that" and "that" is usually poo poo we were doing for months. Doesn't seem to be targeted to any one person. Last time it was one of my stats, this time it's someone else's item. Also, there have been times where he's said "your math is wrong you don't have that high a stat" I've gone along with it to not have a game turn into an argument, gone home and checked it...been right. tried to innocuously mention "Oh hey, ha ha, fun story....I guess we've been reading it wrong and it really is (original interpretation)" only to get "I never said that" or "well I don't know your individual stats" as a response. It's a loving buzzkill. ActusRhesus fucked around with this message at 21:46 on Sep 1, 2015 |
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Sep 1, 2015 21:36
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ActusRhesus posted:rules lawyer is a new addition...who is a long time childhood friend of the DM. Well being passive aggressive won't help with that at all. Stop being the gooniest rear end in a top hat and just loving talk to him about it.
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Sep 1, 2015 21:41
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ActusRhesus posted:it's difficult to find a nice way to say "dude...your bromance is loving up the game" I'd say that's an adequately nice way of putting it. Just go with that. 
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Sep 1, 2015 21:48
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I'd say "Okay, the rules of this game are written badly and confusingly and it makes determining which things interact with which a matter of pure guesswork. If the DM is giving out a custom-made item, then the DM should be able to decide when it applies without having to take a course in technical writing. So let's just leave that sort of thing up to the DM."
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Sep 1, 2015 21:58
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Jimbozig posted:I'd say "Okay, the rules of this game are written badly and confusingly and it makes determining which things interact with which a matter of pure guesswork. If the DM is giving out a custom-made item, then the DM should be able to decide when it applies without having to take a course in technical writing. So let's just leave that sort of thing up to the DM." I like this. Also this. P.d0t posted:I'd say that's an adequately nice way of putting it. Just go with that. But the gold fringed rule book is also a possibility.
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Sep 1, 2015 22:44
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Build up animosity between your characters then mind control his and demand he hand over his sheet.
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Sep 1, 2015 23:00
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mastershakeman posted:Build up animosity between your characters then mind control his and demand he hand over his sheet. it's completely in my character to build up animosity with *everyone*
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Sep 1, 2015 23:19
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gradenko_2000 posted:Having the whole group participate in an escalating rules lawyer arms race might also be a fun diversion So... Hackmaster? I'm in.
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Sep 2, 2015 00:27
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djw175 posted:Well being passive aggressive won't help with that at all. Stop being the gooniest rear end in a top hat and just loving talk to him about it.
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Sep 2, 2015 02:10
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https://goo.gl/YJ8yr8 Attempt #4 on making 5e fighters cool. This time a subclass, meant to go along with the conservative fixes from before. Tactical options aplenty to choose from with standardized, 4e style powers, but with a point system that scales with level. Heavily inspired by the hearthstone ccg. And now I ask myself: why?
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Sep 2, 2015 06:08
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Quadratic_Wizard posted:And now I ask myself: why? Because the Psychic Warrior isn't in 5e yet, and people'd still insist that that's totally different from what a Fighter should be doing even if it did.
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Sep 2, 2015 08:47
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So, plate armor in 5E costs 1,500 GP. I'm only playing Expeditions and Encounters right now, but I've hit 5th level and I still don't have enough gold for plate. It looks like GP in Labyrinth Lord is around 450GP. Would it really have taken you that same amount of time to get enough gold for plate armor in LL? Edit: I guess I'm asking because I know there's an adventure coming up in Expeditions with a black pudding. If gold has already been this scarce, it would be lame to suddenly rob me of 1,500 because I took one hit from a black pudding. Power Player fucked around with this message at 14:31 on Sep 2, 2015 |
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Sep 2, 2015 14:28
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Power Player posted:So, plate armor in 5E costs 1,500 GP. I'm only playing Expeditions and Encounters right now, but I've hit 5th level and I still don't have enough gold for plate. It looks like GP in Labyrinth Lord is around 450GP. Would it really have taken you that same amount of time to get enough gold for plate armor in LL? No way. I haven't played LL, but I have played BECMI and B/X and in those systems, if you couldn't afford plate mail by 5th level, your DM would have to be incredibly stingy. I suppose the 5E designers wanted to keep plate as something special for fighters to look forward to; I know there are grogs who grumble about how easy it is to get plate in other systems, and we all know that grog grumbling was one of the prime drivers of 5E's design.
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Sep 2, 2015 15:27
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A level 1 5th Edition Fighter starts with Chain Mail AC 16. Monster CR 1/8 up to CR 2 all have a total attack bonus of +3, which gives them a 40% chance to hit against AC 16. By CR 3 monsters then have a total attack bonus of +4, so it is expected that a level 3 Fighter will have upgraded to Splint Mail AC 17 to maintain the 40% CTH By CR 4 monsters then have a total attack bonus of +5, so it is expected that a level 4 Fighter will have upgraded to Plate Mail AC 18 to maintain the 40% CTH Now, one "excuse" that might be offered is that under 3.x/5e monster creation rules, you're not actually supposed to face CR x monsters as level x players: * Four level 5 players are going to have a Medium encounter budget of 500 XP per player, or 1500 XP total * A single CR 1 monster is worth 200 XP, so four of them will be worth 800 XP, and then doubled to 1600 XP due to the Multiple Monster Multiplier, so four CR 1 monsters would already be a Medium encounter * If you're level 5 with Splint Mail AC 17 and you're facing down CR 1 monsters with a +3 attack bonus, you're technically ahead of the curve with a 35% CTH So yeah, as far as the stat treadmill is concerned you can probably afford to wait a bit longer for Plate Mail unless your DM is throwing "same CR" monsters against you for whatever reason (possibly as a boss) This is supported by the rough wealth-by-level rules in page 38 of the DMG where a level 5-10 character should have about 637 gp plus their normal starting equipment. EDIT: If we take the 3.x-era encounter creation guideline that four level x characters should face down four monsters of 4-less CR, then conceivably you could wait until level 8 before you're facing CR 4 monsters on the regular and would finally need the Plate Mail's AC 18. Trying to apply 5e's encounter creation rules directly to refine this analysis further: Four CR 4 monsters have an XP value of 4400 total, then doubled to 8800 XP due to the Multiple Monster Multiplier. That would be a Medium encounter for four level 11-12 characters. === In the Rules Cyclopedia, which Labyrinth Lord is partly based on*, Plate Mail AC 3 costs 60 gp, while Suit Armor AC 0 costs 250 gp. A character will start with 3d6x10 gp, so depending on how much generic adventuring gear you're going to be obliged to lug around, a Fighter with an average gold roll of 105 gp can buy Plate Mail, a long sword and a shield for 80 gp total. The "start higher than level 1" character creation rules suggest 1000 gp per level to be spent on non-magical items, so even a level 2 character can expect to be in the best non-magical armor available, i.e. Suit Armor AC 0. If you were doing this via normal play, a Fighter needs 2000 XP to get to level 2, and 1 gp = 1 XP, so even if 75% of that 2000 XP was earned via monster kill XP and roleplaying XP and other XP sources, the Fighter would still have 250 gp worth of XP by the time he hit level 2 and so could again afford Suit Armor. *LL is based off of Basic/Expert D&D, and Rules Cyclopedia is a single volume compilation of Basic+Expert+Companion+Master+Immortal D&D, but purists will say I should draw a distinction between B/X-based and RC-based retroclones. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 17:20 on Sep 2, 2015 |
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Sep 2, 2015 16:56
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The solution here is to find a level 7 caster with Fabricate, then get a pile of metal. Alternately, you can craft your own for half the cost. It'll take 1500 / (5 x # of smiths working) days for it to be finished though, so try to find a village full of blacksmiths. Other solutions I can think of involve scamming or stealing from shops, but those probably aren't helpful. So, I'd recommend magic.
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Sep 2, 2015 17:29
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Hey seasoned DMs, I have a question for you! I'm currently in the outlining stage of creating my own full-fledged campaign (an ambitious undertaking for me, but the folks I played with really liked my short one-off quests I made to run three or four sessions while our DM figured some stuff out.) In the context of 5e, what do you guys think of individual quests/combat experiences for each party member that could/would give a permanent +1 increase to a certain stat? A little more context: it would be the only point in the entire campaign where I do anything like this, and all players would get one so no one gets left out. The stat will likely be Wis or maybe Cha, and even if they fail I may give them the +1 anyway but in Con (this works for flavor reasons.) I know stat increases are supposed to be more seldom in 5e and I don't want the party thinking it's lame or becoming overpowered, so curious what more experienced players and DMs would think.
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Sep 2, 2015 19:17
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Bluedeanie posted:Hey seasoned DMs, I have a question for you! You could give everyone a free 20 in a stat and it wouldn't matter, so a +1 isn't a huge deal. Go for it if you/you're players are into it, but it's not gonna make anything lame/overpowered.
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Sep 2, 2015 19:26
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Bluedeanie posted:Hey seasoned DMs, I have a question for you! What is the gist of your story?
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Sep 2, 2015 19:34
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Its gimmicky and lighthearted (my party responds well to that.) The party will be assembled by a mysterious prince of a far-off and seldom visited kingdom, so they may already be at lvl 5 or so to start. This prince, a lackidaisical bard, was wrongfully disposed by his power hungry and evil brother who appears to have gotten into some pretty dark magic. The prince and his no nonsense advisor are hiring the party to help him find a magical source of water that, upon bathing in it, will also make him a powerful sorcerer so he can take back the throne and free his subjects from slavery. The gimmick is the entire campaign is music based and the prince is Prince, so they have to deal with his insane bullshit while helping him purify himself in the waters of lake minnetonka. There's a point where they'll encounter someone to go on a sort of shamanic vision quest (the flighty prince will know this, the party will not) and each person has a bad trip only they can see which I'll determine by a d20 chart. They will think it's real but I'll reveal what happened at the end, replenish any lost hp or used resources and dish out the point rewards based on if they overcame the challenge or survived a secret turn limit.
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Sep 2, 2015 19:55
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Bluedeanie posted:Hey seasoned DMs, I have a question for you!
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Sep 2, 2015 20:01
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Bluedeanie posted:Its gimmicky and lighthearted (my party responds well to that.) So it seems you've already figure out how to give the stat boost. Go with it.
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Sep 2, 2015 20:03
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The dmg explicitly bars handing out star bonuses like that unless you also play the solo from purple rain simultaneously to doing so.
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Sep 2, 2015 20:13
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The chrome cast will will be put to work for theme music on this one, so that can be arranged.
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Sep 2, 2015 20:14
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Selachian posted:No way. I haven't played LL, but I have played BECMI and B/X and in those systems, if you couldn't afford plate mail by 5th level, your DM would have to be incredibly stingy. Now compare it to how many grogs got real saucy about the 4e fighter not starting off with plate.
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Sep 2, 2015 21:59
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ProfessorCirno posted:Now compare it to how many grogs got real saucy about the 4e fighter not starting off with plate. Huh? According to the PHB 1 a 4e character starts with 100g and Plate Armor +8 AC costs 50gp. You'd still have enough left over for a Longsword, a Heavy Shield, and a Sling and some bullets.
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Sep 2, 2015 22:18
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gradenko_2000 posted:Huh? According to the PHB 1 a 4e character starts with 100g and Plate Armor +8 AC costs 50gp. You'd still have enough left over for a Longsword, a Heavy Shield, and a Sling and some bullets. 4e Fighters aren't inherently proficient with plate though.
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Sep 2, 2015 22:19
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4e fighters don't have proficiency with plate armor.
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Sep 2, 2015 22:19
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