TG August Cat Thread: it was like a sweaty danny devito

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > TG August Cat Thread: it was like a sweaty danny devito

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Captain Foo posted:

D&D 3.5 w/ Book of Vile Darkness

Why would you inflict this upon anyone

# ¿ Aug 5, 2015 16:26

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 22:50

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Helical Nightmares posted:

Iirc the mortal hunter prestige class was hilariously broken.

Most of prestige classes on BoVD are hot garbage, except for soul eater (all your natural attacks do a negative level on hit, and you get a ton of 24 hour boosts after causing a negative level) and disciple of dispater (triples your crit threat range and expressly stacks with the imp crit feat). Ever wanted to crit on a 9? DoD is for you!

eta: BoVD is one of the few D&D books where I actually like the fluff writing better than the mechanics. There's a lot of cool ideas in there, but the mechanics are more often than not just really bad.

Yawgmoth fucked around with this message at 19:06 on Aug 5, 2015

# ¿ Aug 5, 2015 19:02

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

NGDBSS posted:

I recall that, with some work, you could use Disciple of Dispater as part of an attack sequence that would be unbounded with probability greater than 90%.

Yeah, I remember something along that line. A 20 level build that always crit if it hit and had a x7 multiplier.

# ¿ Aug 5, 2015 19:13

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Tulul posted:

Don't forget the Cancer Mage, which A) is a rogue PrC with no spellcasting and B) can quite easily give you arbitrarily high Strength and AC (stacking +x per day to both).

Oh yes! Although that was a pretty simple "no that's stupid I won't allow it" from most DMs. Sadly those are it for the power; after those three, you plummet to a bunch of 1/2 or 1/3 (wtf) CL PrCs, or sad martial PrCs with 3/4 BAB and one good save. I especially like Lifedrinker, a vampire PrC with no spellcasting that gives a big pile of metamagic feats. :allears:

# ¿ Aug 5, 2015 21:13

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

AlphaDog posted:

1 Daemoniac
2 Foetid
3 Cyclopean
4 Amorphous
5 Unutterable
6 Accursed

How do you have an HPL list and not include eldritch?

# ¿ Aug 10, 2015 16:55

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Covok posted:

The Exalted Motion Picture. Coming 2155.

Coinciding with the release of Exalted 3e, I see.

# ¿ Aug 11, 2015 01:36

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

drrockso20 posted:

one could easily do an adventure based on The Colour Out of Space

This is true! I did exactly this in 3.5 D&D a while back. The PCs managed to only be vaguely successful in dealing with it, which dovetailed amazingly into several other Lovecraft stories.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2015 14:09

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

drrockso20 posted:

Well if the Mythos is included as part of the D&D milieu than one has to accept that it's critters need to be killable now(although a lot of them are quite killable even in the source material)

Dagon is straight-up statted out as a demon lord in one of the fiendish compendiums. He is technically killable but it would be one hell of an undertaking.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2015 16:38

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

LightWarden posted:

Not really. Guy is CR 22, so the PCs should be at least level 17 by the time the game expects them to consider challenging him, and thus should have access to 9th level spells. His special abilities can all be neutralized by various spells- Mind Blank and/or Protection From Evil/Magic Circle Against Evil for most of mind-affecting abilities, Freedom of Movement for his grappling abilities and Heroes' Feast for his poison and fear abilities. His spellcasting ability is garbage because he's got mostly utility spells, some crummy blasting spells and almost no crowd control abilities, and all of his spells have DCs that would be sub-mediocre on an opponent ten levels earlier because they're linked to his comically low Charisma of 16. He doesn't have the actions or abilities to fight a party of four or more on his own and a good crowd control spell can sweep the field of any of his minions for a few rounds, buying you time to tag him with a lockdown ability then roll up and enjoy the buffet.

3e does not do big bad solo monsters very well.

While all of this is true, my last line was mostly just to include a few puns. Also lol @ DMs who use any monster straight out of the book past lv7 because guaranteed your PCs are so far afield from when Skip Williams and crew expected the "usual party" to be by that time that it's a very safe bet that any given monster is gonna be either totally useless (from a PC having a silver bullet against their main gimmick) or a total steamroll (because they forgot/didn't feel the need to protect against it yet).

I had a party of lv18 PCs go up against the CR 36 silver wyrm in dragons of eberron and the only reason he survived at all was because the PCs couldn't sneak past his fortress's alerts and defenses and so on, so he had time to buff and prepare. Fight still only lasted 4-5 turns though.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2015 18:39

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Plague of Hats posted:

Well�huh.

Well, here's hoping. I'll probably give it a read to kill the mid-week doldrums if nothing else.

# ¿ Aug 17, 2015 18:08

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Helical Nightmares posted:

And they wonder why anime fans are socially shunned.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UUcGZ2u4Q1c

/click link
:wtc:

/close tab

# ¿ Aug 17, 2015 23:31

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Splicer posted:

It was also weirdly nonfunctional. They had mech classes with no way to build a mech, for one.

I think there's a F&F writeup.

There is, and you're right. Another highlight I recall is that you can get a crit fail and a crit success on the same roll, because what determines a crit fail and a crit success are two totally different things.

# ¿ Aug 18, 2015 02:19

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Splicer posted:

Nah that's pretty cool, as long as a crit success and a crit fail have different, independent effects. "You nuked that guy superhard but also blew out your coolant tank" is a good game thing. I have no idea what the crit successes and fails did in that game though, but based on the rest of the game I assume they involve rape in some manner.

Nope. It was presented in the nWoD "failed and also broke everything", "failed", "succeeded", "succeeded so hard it made something else easier" sort of style. I mean, you could probably figure out some sort of complicated success style thing but as written it just reeked of "we didn't playtest this at all."

# ¿ Aug 18, 2015 02:45

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

paradoxGentleman posted:

Why do a lot of people in this forum hate ability scores?

I assume it's because derived stats are kind of a pain in the rear end to deal with. It's so much more intuitive to go "I have X which means I add X to rolls for thing" rather than "I have X stat which after some math gets me +Y to thing."

# ¿ Aug 22, 2015 15:06

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Gravy Train Robber posted:

Thank you for reminding me that exists. Is there an F&F of it?

I am almost positive there was.

# ¿ Aug 24, 2015 20:37

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Covok posted:

To be serious, why do you not like the Daily aspect?

I know that I personally dislike the 1/day thing in any system because it makes monster design a pain in the rear end. Either you assume the players will use their orbital bombardment on the thing and make it leagues harder without it, or you assume they don't have that power and it becomes a cakewalk if they do. Much easier to just balance everything on a per-fight basis and not have to worry about planning for X number of daily powers to be used to win.

# ¿ Aug 26, 2015 19:53

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Evil Mastermind posted:

Today is Jack Kirby's birthday, so I'm required by nerd law to post the most game-able map ever written.

One day I am going to run a game using this map. I don't know what it will be, but I feel like it should be RIFTS for maximum kitchen-sink-ness.

# ¿ Aug 28, 2015 17:09

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Helical Nightmares posted:

Take "Snow Wizards" as code for Wizards of Cocaine and roll with it

Snowflame, the best villain.

# ¿ Aug 28, 2015 21:47

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Ryoshi posted:

Hey guys - I'm moving to Minnesota soon and am wondering what the tabletop scene is there. I'm used to the Chicago suburbs where it seems like there's a local (ish) meta for just about everything. Is there a cool store around the twin cities area? I know of Games by James but that seems to be only board games with no playing space at either location.

Where in the twin cities? There's a game store in about every other neighborhood in Minneapolis, depending how competitive you want your FNM to be and how far you are willing to travel.

# ¿ Aug 29, 2015 21:49

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

paradoxGentleman posted:

What exactly do you mean by "bad"? Because I think the way GRRM portrays different characters with different, conflicting viewpoints is incredible and I will never not love Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics series, which pose some wonderful questions to the nature of artificial intelligence, all wrapped up in the shiny package of robot stories . If that makes me the scum of the literary world I can probably live with that.

Some people need to define themselves not by what they like or like to do, but how much better they are for hating something other people like. "You like a thing I have deemed 'bad' so I am better than you! :smug:

" seems like a stupid way to live, but I guess if you don't have anything to like then you have to fall back on hate.

# ¿ Aug 30, 2015 18:45

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 22:50

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Elfgames posted:

Honestly if you have any more than a paragraph of backstory in any game it seriously kills my desire to play with you or run a game for you.

I'm not going to say that writing a pile of backstory is always a bad thing, but I have never played with someone who both wrote >2 paragraphs and was enjoyable to play with. And I've just flat-out never played with a GM who wanted >1 paragraph of backstory because hahahaha gently caress you I wanna play my character not write about him.

I had an ST for a nWoD Changeling game who wanted a paragraph for each dot on the character sheet. You want Athletics 3? Better write 3 paragraphs about how your character jogs every morning! I did not stick around after that demand and neither did anyone else.

# ¿ Sep 1, 2015 14:57

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > TG August Cat Thread: it was like a sweaty danny devito