D&D NEXT: Infinite Posts of the Abyss

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Jimbozig: Sep 30, 2003; I like sharing and ice cream and animals.

Jack the Lad posted:

I really, really wish we had cool PC races like Intellect Devourers and Skeletons instead of just Human, Halfling, Dwarf and Elf again.

It's great that Dragonborn and Tiefling made it in, even if they are in a separate ~only with DM permission~ section to appease grogs, but seriously. It's 2014.

So go play Strike! I've got a Bodyswapper in the preview that basically works like an Intellect Devourer. That's a core Origin* in Strike! The Bodyswap power they get could be tweaked just slightly to make it fit the ID's fluff. Skeletons, too - I've got an Undead Origin as one of the goofier examples. You could pick the complication of "Flesh deficiency" to make it a skeleton in particular. Or go with my favourite complication for the undead: "The world is full of prejudice." That Origin is not in the preview, but I'm happy to show it (or anything else that is finished but got left out) to anyone who asks nicely.

Complaining about 5e is fun, I'll admit. But eventually you may want to actually play a game that addresses those complaints. There is already a game doing what you want. It's my game. Play my game. It's better than 4e, better than 5e, better than Numenara, and better than 13A for what I want out of gaming. If you want to play my game but want to get all the material instead of just the preview, just PM me and ask. All I ask in return is that you'll play it and post about it.

*calling it that because the term Race doesn't match what I want to get across with that part of the game. Also fixes longstanding issue of problematic language. Having a character with an evil or savage origin is not offensive. Having a character belong to an evil or savage race is... let's say problematic. Fixing longstanding issues with D&D: It's what Strike! is all about

# ¿ Sep 13, 2014 04:13

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 04:57

Jimbozig: Sep 30, 2003; I like sharing and ice cream and animals.

Really Pants posted:

Unfortunately HBO only affected opportunity attacks, not charging or defender punishments. 4e Fighters can already stop enemies cold or grab them with Grappling Strike on OAs so

But that's why you leave the heavy blades for Paladins and Swordmages and use a pair of Spiked Shields instead.

Don't forget "Pinning Challenge"! Take any two-handed weapon and then your MBAs also immobilize if the target is already marked. What this means is:

Step 1 - attack bad guy. Now he is marked.

Step 2 - if bad guy tries to shift away to avoid an OA, you still get to make an MBA and stop his movement.

Step 3 - bad guy can never escape unless you miss your MBA (as a great weapon fighter with a fullblade and all appropriate accuracy feats, that is exceedingly unlikely)

# ¿ Sep 15, 2014 17:24

Jimbozig: Sep 30, 2003; I like sharing and ice cream and animals.

So stealth rules are hard. They have always been at least a bit poo poo. What would good stealth rules look like in a tactical combat system like D&D's?

# ¿ Sep 19, 2014 06:02

Jimbozig: Sep 30, 2003; I like sharing and ice cream and animals.

djw175 posted:

How do they think they work?

The implication is that they think Healing Surges are a mechanic to increase HP recovery available to characters.
Healing Surges are in fact a mechanic to restrict HP recovery available to characters.

# ¿ Sep 21, 2014 03:56

Jimbozig: Sep 30, 2003; I like sharing and ice cream and animals.

Yorkshire Tea posted:

So I mean, obviously I was being facetious, but this is basically the story of why I stopped playing 4e. I played that character, ended up actually making DPR spreadsheets and stopped when I realised it was literally what I did when I played WoW.

I tried to reconcile this with other classes but I always ended up back there. So when I'd look at the Warlock's abilities, it says "Mind Control x and he attacks y" but to me that's just "Stun x, y takes damage." Not using persuade and intimidation checks alongside my own wit as a player to convince a gobbo that his mates are out to get him.

Holy poo poo you were serious. I was about to chastise the others for misunderstanding your obvious satire. I thought your post was so obviously ridiculous that you must be mocking 4e=WoW idiots.

Nope, turns out you are just the biggest idiot we've seen in a long time. gently caress, even Monsterenvy's stupid ~~lies~~misunderstandings are less obviously bullshit than yours. Do you think Jews have horns, too?

And seriously, nobody forced you to make a DPR spreadsheet. You don't want to do that? Don't do it! You think people didn't make DPR spreadsheets for 3.5? For 5e? Jack the Lad is doing it in this very thread. I guess you have to quit 5e because you can analyze the combat. Sorry, better luck with your next game.

# ¿ Sep 23, 2014 18:00

Jimbozig: Sep 30, 2003; I like sharing and ice cream and animals.

Hey dude, I want to apologize. I wasn't trying to call you an antisemite. I was just shocked that your post, which read to me as obvious satire, was meant in earnest. It was like finding out that Sacha Baron Cohen actually believes that Jews have horns.

# ¿ Sep 23, 2014 20:07

Jimbozig: Sep 30, 2003; I like sharing and ice cream and animals.

Infinite Karma posted:

And if you're grogging over Wizard Supremacy, Storm of Vengeance wasn't even a Wizard spell. The time I needed it, I was playing a Ranger, and I went questing for an Orb of Storms (which is a magic item that anyone can use) that lets you control the weather and summon a Storm of Vengeance once a week. We wiped out the army, and still had to fight the big bad general in a setpiece battle.

Hey I skipped some posts but I saw this and I literally cannot even guess if this story happened in 4e or 3e or 5e. I don't know if the post is pro-4e or anti. I don't even know if it is supposed to be part of a story about a time a game was awesome or about a time a game was lame.

So either there really is no difference in the kinds of stories you can tell in 4e or 5e, or else this thread has simply broken me.

Help, I can't tell the trolls from the seriousposts! I can't tell the grogs from the trolls! How will I know what to think??

# ¿ Sep 23, 2014 20:25

Jimbozig: Sep 30, 2003; I like sharing and ice cream and animals.

greatn posted:

You are literally endlessly fellating the old days as the height of gaming, clinging to an old edition.

Yeah, most of my posts in this thread are about how bad 5e seems, and I do like 4e, I guess. But I also kind of hate 4e. At least I got so frustrated with its flaws that I figured I'd be better off making an entire new game than trying to houserule it into submission. I don't think anyone here is fellating 4e at all. We all wish it had better balance for several badly-implemented classes, that it wasn't so drat bloated, that it wasn't so loving fiddly and poorly supported at high levels, etc. If I had to grade 4e, I'd give it like a C+. I'd fail 5e for being a derivative pile of poor decisions with no understanding of how its predecessors worked.

# ¿ Sep 25, 2014 02:34

Jimbozig: Sep 30, 2003; I like sharing and ice cream and animals.

Tactical Bonnet posted:

In what story does a character who gets stabbed twice just get to carry on with his day if he doesn't get magical healing?

Uhhhh... that's exactly how the rules work now. At least, that's how they work if you treat losing HP as "getting stabbed". If you get stabbed twice you can apparently do anything you can normally do for as long as you like as long as you don't get stabbed another time or two more.

So what kind of story has that? Apparently, your campaign stories do.

Now if you're NOT a moron, and if losing HP is about stamina and morale instead of getting tired, then the short rest rules are moronic. A goddamn hour of rest to recover from a couple of minutes of intense exercise? What the gently caress, man. Goddamn obese out-of-shape adventurers.

In 5e you have two options for flavoring HP:
a) you keep fighting and leaping and running with your guts hanging out until the religious dude prays your wounds shut, or until you take an hour to rest them shut.
Or
b) You are a lazy fat gently caress who can't exercise for 2 minutes without needing a goddamn nap. Unless the religious dude prays for you to stop panting and sweating so loving much.

# ¿ Sep 26, 2014 20:05

Jimbozig: Sep 30, 2003; I like sharing and ice cream and animals.

Gee guys, your games sound so tactically interesting! Each and every fight uses the fascinating tactic of "The front line stands between the monsters and the back line." Wow!

# ¿ Sep 26, 2014 21:56

Jimbozig: Sep 30, 2003; I like sharing and ice cream and animals.

I was skimming through and saw the power "assess enemy" and read it as "assless enemy," which I believe would be a great feat or trait for a skeletal horde.

Lacking asses, skeletons cannot get their butts kicked. This gives them a +5 bonus to resisting intimidation.

# ¿ Oct 8, 2014 05:07

Jimbozig: Sep 30, 2003; I like sharing and ice cream and animals.

Peas and Rice posted:

Balance should discourage you from "one best build for a class at the expense of everything else." See: Pathfinder, 3.5, 4th ed. It's fine for an MMO, but not a tabletop RPG.

What's the "one best build" for a fighter in 4e? For a Warlord? For a Cleric? For a Wizard?

Like, the only 4e classes I can think of that have a "one best build" are the ones that came late to the party and didn't get enough support.

I'm happy that you feel that 5e has good options and variety, too. And I'm happy that you're having fun with it. I'm just a bit baffled by your comment about 4e. Doesn't jive with my experience.

# ¿ Oct 10, 2014 22:32

Jimbozig: Sep 30, 2003; I like sharing and ice cream and animals.

What mechanics let you guard the rest of the party? When the monsters all tried to bypass you and you got an OA on one of them, how did you stop the rest?

# ¿ Oct 13, 2014 17:20

Jimbozig: Sep 30, 2003; I like sharing and ice cream and animals.

Mecha Gojira posted:

We're only level 4. We're about to hit level 5. I don't know about our casters, but I know my paladin will both be picking up his second level spell slot AND an additional attack per round. I just don't feel like 5e solved the play speed issue, but instead we've been playing at such low level for so long that we forgot what it was like to have so many options.

Yeah, I've been wondering about that. Sure, 4e combat was a slog by the end. But that was when we were level 30. I don't think it was a slog at level 1, by any means. So all these people coming back from playing 5e praising the speed of the combat at levels 1-3 just seems like so much noise. If the combat STAYS fast, that's an accomplishment. This, I think, is one where we'll have to wait and see. To see how fast combat is at high levels in 5e as played by experienced players, we have to wait for there to be some experienced players playing at high levels.

RPZip posted:

Strike doesn't actually exist, though.

It's coming. Eventually. I've just got more work this term than usual. Anyway, the thing I'm working on for Strike now is the very thing that is getting bitched about in this thread: rules for encounter-building and monster creation and giving DMs the tools to judge monster and encounter difficulty. I want to get it right, but that takes a lot of time and since I'm busy that means it's taking a while. If I don't get it figured out, we'll just have people asking me what the hell I was thinking when I said that the were-pigeons were appropriate for level 2.

Anyway, the game is totally playable in the meantime, and I'd love to see more people playing it. If anyone wants to play with the character creation stuff that's missing from the preview all they gotta do is PM me and ask.

# ¿ Oct 14, 2014 02:58

Jimbozig: Sep 30, 2003; I like sharing and ice cream and animals.

friendlyfire posted:

I sort of like the idea of treating fighters as sort of mobile terrain. Like, give them something like: "Any time an enemy enters an adjacent space, their movement ends." That's super-sticky, not MMO-seeming (I hope), and probably not a huge power bump. It just lets them do their job a bit better.

I love this little rule. This is without a doubt the best thing you've said all thread.

I don't really understand what the rest of your posts have been trying to achieve, but that one idea is legit great - it gives fighters a cool and effective thing and the rule couldn't be simpler.

It doesn't fix fighters, but it is totally a good start. If you combine that with increased defenive abilities and increased damage, scaling up both with level, you've got yourself a class that is effective while remaining simple for newbies.

# ¿ Oct 16, 2014 14:33

Jimbozig: Sep 30, 2003; I like sharing and ice cream and animals.

friendlyfire posted:

Thank you. I really am a decent game designer, though I am reticent to share anything substantial here because of how consistently hostile this thread is, even for goons.

Honestly, my advice is that you should just stop engaging in the back-and-forth sniping since it's obviously going nowhere. Yes, the thread is being hostile to you, and yes there are some posters who are all-negative about 5e all the time. But the regulars like Jackthelad and alphadog are putting in effort to their posts and helping people make characters and analyze mechanics through math and so on. There has been plenty of 5e discussion in this thread and the explosion of flames over the past two days has been fed in part by your posts.

So keep posting, especially about cool ideas. Things to improve the game, things that you like about it, cool combinations, etc. Just don't even bother replying to people you think are being assholes. To be trite, "be the change you want to see in the thread."

# ¿ Oct 16, 2014 19:36

Jimbozig: Sep 30, 2003; I like sharing and ice cream and animals.

Agent Boogeyman posted:

I can only read this to translate as "d20 was made the status quo to deliberately and purposefully undermine the creative design process of tabletop gaming, thus purposefully and deliberately stagnating it for nearly a decade". Because that is totally what it loving DID. Am I so embittered by what the OGL did to gaming that I'm reading this wrong? I seriously cannot interpret this in any other way. This is not a good thing yet he is talking about it in glowing terms.

Just think of it as Leto's plan from God Emperor of Dune. Sure Ryan Dancey is a horrible worm-person and caused a decade of stagnation, but that oppression caused the scattering of the indie games movement and the new flourishing of RPGs.

# ¿ Oct 23, 2014 12:06

Jimbozig: Sep 30, 2003; I like sharing and ice cream and animals.

Cassa posted:

2 hours to kill a dozen hobgoblins, 4 hill giants and some sort of demonic succubus thing.

This sucks. I didn't get my first two-hour combat in 4e until level 9 or 10. Looks like that improved combat speed only worked at low levels after all.

Meanwhile over in Strike I've been play testing higher-level monsters and found that an above-level challenge 3-player combat at level 8 took 35 minutes despite the players having to take a bit of time figuring out their new powers since we just jumped into level 8. So the problem isn't impossible to solve, you just have to actually be willing to cut the things that slow poo poo down. Cut damage rolls, use Opportunity Damage instead of Opportunity Attacks, have simple-to-run monsters, have a cover system that takes zero time to adjudicate, have proper minion rules, actually have a real math wringer to make sure monster HP doesn't get bloated relative to player damage.

5e just took away a bunch of choices from half the classes and figured that would speed things up. Which it does, a bit. But you can't just speed up one aspect and think that that will make all the difference. There are a lot of things that slow the game down and you have to shave time in a lot of different places to keep things fast at high levels. I am legitimately disappointed to hear that poo poo takes two hours because that means I will never play the game beyond the first couple of levels. For me, two hours is basically a whole session these days, and I am so over the idea of spending an entire session just to kill 8 hobgoblins.

# ¿ Oct 26, 2014 05:23

Jimbozig: Sep 30, 2003; I like sharing and ice cream and animals.

Sounds like a 5- or 6-person group. Monsterenvy also had a 6-person group. To be fair, a 6-person combat will generally take twice as long as a 3-person one (unless you gave specific rules for combat-building for large parties like I have in my game, and even then it still takes longer, just not 100% longer).

So a 2-hour combat for 6 players translates into a 1-hour combat for 3 players. Which is too long, but not a deal-breaker like I thought.

# ¿ Oct 26, 2014 15:40

Jimbozig: Sep 30, 2003; I like sharing and ice cream and animals.

MonsterEnvy posted:

Bland because I find it bland lack of fluff and descriptions is probably the reason there.

Wait wait wait. Is this the same reason you didn't like my vampire statblock as much as 5E's? Because you gave it the same response of "ya ok but I like 5e better" with no reasons at all. If I had typed a paragraph to tell you what a goddamn vampire is, would that have helped?

Hey a vampire is a magic pretty dude who drinks people's blood.

# ¿ Oct 30, 2014 12:20

Jimbozig: Sep 30, 2003; I like sharing and ice cream and animals.

Darwinism posted:

So there's another DMG preview about custom races/subraces! Sounds awesome I bet this is gonna be full of detailed... wait what just steal traits from other races and guesstimate it? Why is this book worth money, exactly?

Why not just put a quarter-page sidebar on custom races in the PHB if that's all it is? Is there some reason why this material shouldn't be player-accessible? Like, I'd think that a player is just as likely to want to come up with a cool race to play as a DM is. Why would a DM even bother coming up with rules for a playable race unless there was a player who wanted to play it? And if you've got a player who wants to play it, why don't they get first crack at picking some abilities?

This whole PHB/DMG thing is crazy to me. One big book is obviously better. Monster manual, sure. I can see having a big book of monsters with adventure hooks - there's demand for that. I wouldn't buy it, but I would totally buy it if it came with a few fold-out maps, sets of pre-made encounters and some monster tokens. Save me a few minutes of monster-building - alright, cool. Give me cool play aids and save me map-drawing and encounter-building time on top of all that? I'm in, baby.

# ¿ Nov 11, 2014 23:15

Jimbozig: Sep 30, 2003; I like sharing and ice cream and animals.

goldjas posted:

I have, twice even. It's fun in a way, but it is really silly. You have to go full crazy with it though and only take it about as seriously as an episode of DBZ or something similar. I think 4E epic worked a lot better actually because while it had some of the same insanity, the combat still more or less worked like it did at low levels just...more.

If by "more" you mean "two goddamn hours more" then I agree. 4e epic combat took wayyyyy too long and, combined with the plainly obvious (even back then) fact that 5e wasn't going to be what I was looking for, was the reason I started making Strike in the first place.

# ¿ Nov 12, 2014 15:07

Jimbozig: Sep 30, 2003; I like sharing and ice cream and animals.

Littlefinger posted:

It is also very important that you specifically roll exactly two d10s (and not one d20 or a single d10) to check against the scientifically determined 60-40 chance of lolsorandom.

That actually makes sense as a standardization thing. All the other rolls like that are d100's.

What's not making sense to me is why the DMG seems to be full of stuff for players like magic items and playable races. What gives?

# ¿ Nov 13, 2014 12:51

Jimbozig: Sep 30, 2003; I like sharing and ice cream and animals.

crime fighting hog posted:

I believe I read that in 3.X someone used that infinite jar of water over a permanently heated metal to make a steam engine that needed no fuel.

Would turning the water into steam to spin a turbine be more efficient than just pouring the water on a turbine to spin it? Paging an engineer to the 5e thread!

# ¿ Nov 13, 2014 20:10

Jimbozig: Sep 30, 2003; I like sharing and ice cream and animals.

Darwinism posted:

Why do these things have to be presented as tables you roll on rather than just a list of rooms that you assign in a way that makes sense, goddamn right there on the first page it says rolling randomly is probably a dumb idea

If you're designing a "death trap" dungeon then over a third of your rooms are going to be guardrooms. That means that for three consecutive rooms, there's about a 4% chance that they will all be guardrooms. If your deathtrap has 12 rooms, then there's something like a 20-25% chance that you end up with a guardroom to guard another guardroom that's guarding a third guardroom.

gradenko_2000 posted:

EDIT: 4E's DMG also makes the case that random generation is something you can use to make a "DM-less" game if all you really want to is to run combats.

This is sweet. Then I and my buddies can play against three consecutive guardrooms where a pair of githyanki are guarding 10 orcs who are in turn guarding a guardroom containing a gelatinous cube and 3 stirges. I'm only half-joking here, because that honestly sounds pretty loving fun. We wander around in a moronic non-designed maze of dead ends and circular paths to nowhere cracking jokes about the gelatinous cube overlord with his harem of orcs and his githyanki bodyguards, only to find in the end that literally the only treasure in the dungeon was the chest in the very first room.

# ¿ Nov 15, 2014 05:17

Jimbozig: Sep 30, 2003; I like sharing and ice cream and animals.

Elfgames posted:

What are you smoking? that's almost the -Only- thing that matters in dungeon world.

Sorta? In one way it's the only thing that matters. I get what you're saying. But I also get what OTM was saying. Like, it doesn't matter if I'm fighting a grick or a flumph, because the hack and slash move doesn't care what I'm fighting or if I'm using my axe or the tusk I ripped off a mastodon - I make the same roll either way.

With D&D the creatures have different defenses and the weapons have different stats. So you can see that those particular differences didn't make the cut in Dungeon World (they didn't make the cut in Strike either, so don't think I'm knocking Dungeon World here). The only thing that matters is how you describe it because that affects the future descriptions - but neither of those come from the actual fighting mechanic because the mechanic doesn't care how you described it and doesn't tell you how your previous descriptions should feed into the next. The mechanic tells you very generally how your general hacking/slashing description should feed into the future descriptions in a general way, but the details of weapon and such mostly lie below the level that the mechanics care about.

Looking at the descriptions, my having a giant mastodon tusk directly affects the DM's descriptions of what happens, and the general outline of that description is determined by my hack-and-slash roll, but at no point does the tusk come into the mechanics there. It's still important, though. I make a point of calling out how items work in Strike. A gun doesn't need any special mechanical weight because it has a ton of narrative weight already. If I have a gun, I can shoot you, or I can put the gun to your head and threaten you, or I can fire into the air as a warning shot, or I can simply lift up my shirt to intimidate you. Without the gun I can do none of those things, and there's no rule in the gamebook that tells you that. It doesn't come from any particular rule, but it is just as authoritative. If somebody says "I don't have a gun, but I shoot him," that's not going to fly - it's nonsense.

# ¿ Dec 8, 2014 06:23

Jimbozig: Sep 30, 2003; I like sharing and ice cream and animals.

moths posted:

Jeez, looks like I gave Mearls too much credit.

Yeah, that's not the only time Mearls talked about that on the podcast. Apparently in Mearls' game the players are literally fighting without penalty with their guts hanging out until the cleric prays them back into their bellies, or until a good night's sleep fixes it right up.

It's honestly baffling - this idea that inspiration can't fix what a good night's sleep can.

# ¿ Dec 8, 2014 15:25

Jimbozig: Sep 30, 2003; I like sharing and ice cream and animals.

PeterWeller posted:

Dude, you can't downplay the warlord hate--"shouting hands back on" and all that poo poo. I bet that if they reskinned the PHB1 warlord into a bard, they'd have dodged a great deal of the dumb ire directed at 4E's entire HP and healing system.

Everyone knows that you can grow a new hand with a good night's sleep. And of course you can pray hands back on, or sing the "Ballad of growing a new hand" but shouting? What do you think this is?

# ¿ Dec 26, 2014 17:30

Jimbozig: Sep 30, 2003; I like sharing and ice cream and animals.

dwarf74 posted:

"The way to build monsters in the DMG is perfect, but the way we built monsters in the Monster Manual is even more perfect."

http://thesageadvice.wordpress.com/2014/12/15/monster-manual-cr/

And another thing.

And also

But then

And have you considered

And oh yeah, I forgot to mention

And of course

What's the point of using Twitter if you're going to take six tweets to reply? Rodney should have just replied "They are fine. I have discovered a truly marvellous proof of this, which this tweet is too narrow to contain."

# ¿ Dec 27, 2014 16:53

Jimbozig: Sep 30, 2003; I like sharing and ice cream and animals.

In Glen Cook's books you can be watching your buddies get slaughtered by guys with swords, and when you see the weirdo in the robes waving his hands half a kilometer away, you absolutely poo poo yourself.

The argument is silly, and if a wizard player tried it on me when I was DMing, it would become a running joke of "the Wizard in the land of skeptics."

Wizard: Where's the magic item shop?
Villagers: lololol this guy believes in magic. Who ever heard of that?

A dragon lands in the town square
Villager: Oi, what's that? I never seen nothin like that before! Wonder if it's friendly? HEY! HEY! Polly wanna cracker?

# ¿ Dec 31, 2014 00:59

Jimbozig: Sep 30, 2003; I like sharing and ice cream and animals.

Wizards using spells above level 0 is dumb and lazy. If you are clever, you have the tools to get the enemies to do what you want using only prestidigitation and mage hand.

Jimbozig fucked around with this message at 03:22 on Dec 31, 2014

# ¿ Dec 31, 2014 03:19

Jimbozig: Sep 30, 2003; I like sharing and ice cream and animals.

If you play on a hyperbolic plane, you can split the difference with a pentagonal tiling.

Or you can tile it with apeirogons (figures with infinitely many sides). This tiling has an infinite number of apeirogons meeting at each vertex.

Escher liked hyperbolic tesselations, too.

Jimbozig fucked around with this message at 06:08 on Jan 1, 2015

# ¿ Jan 1, 2015 06:02

Jimbozig: Sep 30, 2003; I like sharing and ice cream and animals.

ThirdEmperor posted:

One of my friends recently suggested/called me a terrible grog for not having upgraded to 5e.

So.. I basically use 3.5 right now because it's convenient, and don't really care much about balance. I'm more interested in whether character building is easier and more fluid, if CR works now, whether combat goes quicker, etcetera?

Is 5e actually more streamlined or just cut down?

It seems we need more data on combat length. Lots of people say it's shorter, but they have mostly (all?) been playing at very low levels. The few reports from high levels that I have seen all report long combat times. But, in fairness, that might be partly due to inexperience with the complexities of high level characters. I haven't seen enough reports to say anything conclusively, nor have I tried starting a high-level 5e game myself. (And really, why the gently caress would I?)

# ¿ Jan 3, 2015 01:53

Jimbozig: Sep 30, 2003; I like sharing and ice cream and animals.

gradenko_2000 posted:

I can't understand if Adventurer's Handbook is supposed to be splat or not.

It's a splat. This is how they're doing them this edition. They're tying things in with the adventures. They talked a bit about it in one of the podcasts.

It's an interesting idea, and I wonder how it'll turn out. I feel like it's muddying the water, and they might be losing sales from people who don't care about published adventures. They might do better just calling it "PHB 2" or whatever. Those are the potential negatives I see, and I'm not sure if I see the upside, here. Who is going to buy this that wouldn't buy a "PHB 2"?

# ¿ Jan 4, 2015 05:16

Jimbozig: Sep 30, 2003; I like sharing and ice cream and animals.

Daetrin posted:

"Anxious dragonborn sorcerer from a cavern without echoes who doesn't believe in magic, ever."

Instead of forgetting the spells after casting them, he forgets the fact that he cast them.

# ¿ Jan 9, 2015 03:22

Jimbozig: Sep 30, 2003; I like sharing and ice cream and animals.

First answer this: can you cast finger of death on a dude while he is hiding in a box?

Second, answer this: does the term innocence require sapience?

Third, answer this: is the fetus the result of orc-rape or any of the other miscegenation that D&D feels it necessary to classify?

If you answered yes, no, no, then the spell works. Also, you should totally check out this great game I found called Carcosa.

# ¿ Jan 20, 2015 03:33

Jimbozig: Sep 30, 2003; I like sharing and ice cream and animals.

moths posted:

The problem is that it's always bullshit to let a player roll and hope he gets low so it's not the DM's fault you have to follow the script, the dice just didn't work out.

100% yes! This is exactly what I set out to prevent in Strike! When a player rolls, either they get what they want or there's a Twist and the situation changes. There is no "nice try, but you're still on the same railroad" result.

If a player wants to negotiate a lower price on a room and I don't want to make that a big deal, I can just "say yes". If I ask for a roll, then there will be some stakes. The player might get the reduced rate, and may or may not end up owing a favor, or there might be a Twist and then I have to think of something more interesting than "nope."

VVVVVVVVVVV And this post below me is why Strike has no target numbers. Setting target numbers has always been bullshit. The only games where I've found it acceptable are Burning Wheel and Mouse Guard, because they provide sample target numbers for every skill. Even then, I find it burdensome. Having to set difficulties as a GM is perhaps my biggest complaint about Fate. (Note: I like Fate alright, generally).

Jimbozig fucked around with this message at 05:46 on Jan 21, 2015

# ¿ Jan 21, 2015 05:40

Jimbozig: Sep 30, 2003; I like sharing and ice cream and animals.

MonsterEnvy posted:

We have no idea how big the book would have been.

The picture earlier says 1.3 lbs. Dunno about the 160 page number people are using. Where did that number come from?

quote:

Still we will probably get all the mechanics and stuff that were going to be in the book.

What makes you think that? You think they are going to keep paying the people who were working on it to finish it up so they can release it for free?

# ¿ Jan 21, 2015 05:50

Jimbozig: Sep 30, 2003; I like sharing and ice cream and animals.

dwarf74 posted:

Every color is my favorite color.

My favourite color is the visible spectrum. gently caress ultraviolet.

# ¿ Jan 23, 2015 19:09

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 04:57

Jimbozig: Sep 30, 2003; I like sharing and ice cream and animals.

Azran posted:

Am I the only one who gets really confused whenever people talk about Metzer Basic or Holmes Basic or whatever. Why are there so many different names.

Different versions. The original Basic (aka "Blue Box")was Holmes, then the Basic part of B/X (Basic/eXpert) was Moldvay (aka "Magenta Box"), then BECMI (Basic/Expert/Companion/Master/Immortal) was Mentzer (aka "Red Box" or later "Black Box").

I might have some of the details wrong, but basically they are all just different versions of the same game with small rules revisions.

Kitchner posted:

If it was me I think I would just give inspiration points to people who RP their character well.

No offense to you personally, but I hate this rule. I know lots of people like it fine, and it's serviceable with a good DM, but "You get a point when the DM notices/judges that you've lived up to their standards" is just lame in comparison to games like Fate or Mouse Guard that give you specific things you can do to get those points without needing to count on the DM noticing or approving.

And as for your specific DM, they are probably just forgetting. DM's have a lot to think about without constantly monitoring for "good roleplaying," which is something that should be going on all the time anyway. Which is one of the reasons I don't like the rule...

# ¿ Jan 24, 2015 21:32

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > D&D NEXT: Infinite Posts of the Abyss

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