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Liquid Communism posted:I'm sure a lot of those tears are PF Society related. Exactly like the campaigns it was based on. Go figure.
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Mar 7, 2018 13:29
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Lord_Hambrose posted:After playing a Fighter for a few years, I am ready for a change. Back in the days of Living City, any and all fighters got preemptively charmed by someone in the party at the start of every mod. It was even more important once they printed an item (a neogi slave collar) that you could never get off that make you never need food, sleep, or air, but you no longer got saves against charm effects. almost every fighter in the campaign wore one. It was only one per table, but who the hell had more than one non-caster at their table?
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Mar 9, 2018 02:54
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It never stops.
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Liquid Communism posted:We always ran Team Four Specialist Clerics for LC. Mystra, Azuth, and who else? I was Selune.
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Mar 9, 2018 15:05
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dwarf74 posted:In 3e it was one of the signature problems. And 3.0 ignored playtest feedback and left Haste in able to let casters throw 2 spells a turn, making the otherwise garbage boots of speed (10 rounds of haste per day) the most valuable item in the game.
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Mar 10, 2018 04:53
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Zurui posted:No, but I'm saying that it might have been better received. I mean, this is basically how Tome of Battle is written. In what world was tome of battle well received by grogs?
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Mar 10, 2018 13:49
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spectralent posted:also LFQW is just "I have fun when other people have less fun". Yeah, sure, people who like playing wizards probably love it but I imagine the pool of people who really want to have to sit on their hands for four hours and get told all their fun ideas are impossible while Dave conjours his eleventh platinum half-demon orca to trivially save everyone is probably much smaller. It's not a coincidence that something like ninety percent of living city characters were primary casters.
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Mar 10, 2018 23:12
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Isn't the entire selling point of 13th Age is that it's D&D without a grid? That's not "the best D&D" that's "a perfectly nice game that lacks one of the few both defining and positive traits of every version of D&D." I think this is the dumbest, most ahistorical thing I have ever seen anybody say about D&D.
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Mar 11, 2018 04:20
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Why, because people ignored the rules in order to play without a grid? Because D&D and AD&D, especially, only ever mentioned grids in relation to wilderness travel, where they recommended using hex grids. Hell, AD&D used inches as its primary unit for using gridless wargame terrain, with inches being defined differently for indoors and outdoors. 2e didn't get actual gridded combat rules, as far as I know, until the Player's Option: Combat & Tactics book, which a lot of people didn't use, and is precisely why there was a huge loving revolt over 3e's mandate of an actual grid for combat. Wizards at the time were particularly incensed, because it meant they couldn't depend on the DM being nice about targeting anymore.
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Mar 11, 2018 05:02
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:If you're distinguishing between grid-based and numerical distance-based tactical combat, then yeah, sorry, my bad. I'm used to using "gridded" as synonymous with tactical combat since I'm usually distinguishing between D&D and PBTA or something. They are very different. Before 3e, the only reason anybody used battlemats was that it was easier and caused fewer arguments than people carrying around measuring tapes. 3e's mandatory gridded combat was a huge departure, including codifying line of sight and line of effect rules in order to cut down on annoying arguments. 13th Age uses engagement zones, which is basically the same thing fate uses, as I recall, and is a step away from the mother-may-I theater of the mind that was prevalent during 2e. The arc is essentially: Chainmail (full wargame) -> D&D/AD&D (wargame with option of not actually using terrain) -> AD&D 2e (no terrain/minis required with option of using them) -> 3e/4e (minis on a grid) -> 5e (back to AD&D/2e ish) NinjaDebugger fucked around with this message at 05:16 on Mar 11, 2018 |
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Mar 11, 2018 05:13
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slap me and kiss me posted:
Those are used for mapping, not combat, you salmon. In combat, characters weren't actually bound by the grids, nor was it ever implied they were.
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Mar 11, 2018 05:17
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There were a couple of D&D -based board games, as I recall, that did the "Here is an actual gridded board you move around", Hero Quest style, though.
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Mar 11, 2018 05:24
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slap me and kiss me posted:So it's played on a grid in the dungeon, movement is measured in 10' squares, spells are measured in 10' increments, but it's not based on a grid? Seems more likely that's just a pre-made map, rather than being grid-bound tactical combat, given that if it's grid bound, you can fit all of 2 characters and a monster in a bunch of those rooms. (Not that that stopped hero quest sometimes.)
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Mar 11, 2018 05:30
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theironjef posted:I was about to post the screenshot of the "things you'll need" section of the 3e PHB when suddenly I remembered I've changed computers a lot since 2009. There were a lot of people arguing that you didn't necessarily -need- a grid map for 3e combat, but it was definitely the default assumption of the rules.
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Mar 11, 2018 05:54
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RiotGearEpsilon posted:Are you fixated on gorgeous anime bodies of whatever gender? Does liking Jojos count?
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Apr 6, 2018 23:38
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Comrade Gorbash posted:Let's be honest, it should count twice. If liking jojos is wrong, I never want to be right.
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Apr 7, 2018 02:58
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Plutonis posted:*Smiles Kinoko Nasuishily* Look when it gets down to it, Nasu-verse Arthurian myth is only of middling inaccuracy when compared to hollywood depictions.
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May 24, 2018 18:02
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spectralent posted:My girlfriend was incredibly amused to find out that bishonen merlin is an rear end in a top hat fuckup who ends up ruining everything because he wanted to get laid, since that's apparently much closer than "basically gandalf". I mean... that's basically the whole of arthurian literature. It's all dudes following their boners into trouble from start to end. edit: Hell, that's huge chunks of world mythology in general. NinjaDebugger fucked around with this message at 20:36 on May 24, 2018 |
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May 24, 2018 20:30
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Thirteenth age, your one unique thing defines the one nasuverse rule you get to break.
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May 25, 2018 11:42
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Nuns with Guns posted:
It's one of the easiest and biggest sins of urban fantasy, making real atrocities be actually the fault of whatever baddie you want to pump up. It's cheap heat, but all it does in the end is look like you're trying to make humans look less like monsters than they really are.
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Nov 11, 2018 23:55
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gradenko_2000 posted:Nightwatch in the Living City seems like it was very very procedural from its wikipedia description, right down to a flowchart of events, and that might have colored peoples's expectations of gameplay I have some wonderful stories about living city, but what is relevant at the moment is that the primary playtest force for 3e d&d was entirely living city players, because wizards wanted to use living campaigns to sell books. It worked, too, but I have never seen such a monstrous monkey paw.
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Dec 17, 2018 04:39
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Arivia posted:Please explain. This is fascinating but people are talking about 2e players like they’re lepers and I don’t get why. I've explained a lot before, and it's bedtime, so maybe tomorrow. The tldr version is that a lot of the mechanical problems with 3e are the result of living city players reacting to the things that are broken in 2e, and not paying enough attention to things that were bad in 2e, like save or be screwed effects.
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Dec 17, 2018 04:58
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gradenko_2000 posted:so is this is the origin of that thing where 3e playtesting was done by people who played Wizards like artillery/blasters with lots of Evoc spells such that the save-or-dies completely flew over their heads? Okay, early morning pre-work storytime In order to begin to understand Living City, you must first understand two things. 1) Living City was essentially the first MMORPG. The O was offline, sure, but it obeys all the same meta rules that your average MMORPG does, including how to divide loot, players having multiple toons, and bad classes being actively shunned by all but the extremely dedicated because there's no GM freedom to adjust things to hurt the overpowered classes. 2) Living City premiered before AD&D 2e. AD&D 2e was The Game for twelve years, and Living City was part of it for 100% of that time. People had a LOT of time to find all the holes in the system, and to find all the things that were bad, especially in the specific 4 hour (occasionally 8 for 2-part) module based adventure format. On top of that, the campaign administration basically didn't use house rules, aside from deciding what books were legal and what wasn't, so the meta was, aside from the occasional new book inclusion, extremely stable. As a consequence of these things, and the mechanical holes in 2e AD&D. almost every save or die spell in the game was functionally worthless. Clerics would prepare a couple Hold Person spells, just in case, because there wasn't a lot good at cleric 2. If there was a fighter at the table (which was not guaranteed, the average table was 3 wizards and 2 clerics, for reasons I'll get into sometime), one of the wizards would keep a charm person handy, and preemptively charm the fighter. Beyond that, the fact that AD&D saving throws were based in the target's power, not the caster's, meant that you could generally expect your save or die to succeed 20% of the time, absolute max. On top of this, AD&D HP were pretty low, which meant that with three wizards handy, laying down a monstrous artillery barrage to burst down all the enemies and then finish off any survivors with magic missile was by far the best strategy available. Chances were strong one of the wizards would be a multi or dual class thief, which takes care of 100% of your thieving needs, since almost all of a thief's abilities were worthless, and a Knock on each wizard and a Find Traps on each cleric was enough to handle anything else. When you take all of this, combined with the defenses that made it possible, it becomes much easier to see why people were kind of myopic. They had been playing in essentially the same meta for twelve years straight, and all of our efforts were concentrated on making sure that the worst parts of that meta didn't happen again. HP inflated, making direct damage worse by proxy. Fighters and thieves got MUCH better (as much as it might not look like it sometimes). Casters lost the single most broken thing in AD&D 2e. If you ever wondered why 3e has a rule that says you can't refresh a spell slot if it's been used in 8 hours, even if you're 'fully rested'? It's because in the AD&D 2e Tome of Magic, there was a spell called Nap, at cleric -2-, that allowed wizards to refresh their entire loving spell allotment with a 2 hour power nap while the clerics (house ruled to only ever prepare spells once a day) and non-casters (if you had any) kept watch. I think the only reason the spell wasn't banned was because the admins were afraid of a goddamn riot because something like 50% of the campaign was wizards, because of the bad rules and massively warped meta.
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Dec 17, 2018 13:10
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Liquid Communism posted:It's precisely that meta that Ed Greenwood makes fun of so often in his Forgotten Realms novelization stuff, amusingly. Pretty much. Gonna guess... Helm, Mystra, Mask, and... hmm... Selune, maybe? (The two most popular deities in Living City were Mystra (Anyspell) and Azuth (You can just straight up memorize wizard spells as cleric ones, if you have a spellbook.) NinjaDebugger fucked around with this message at 14:03 on Dec 17, 2018 |
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Dec 17, 2018 14:00
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gradenko_2000 posted:To answer your question directly, a level 16 Fighter is going to have +16 BAB, 24/+7 Strength, +1 from Weapon Focus, +1 from Greater Weapon Focus, +2 from Melee Weapon Mastery, and +5 weapon enhancement bonus. That's a total attack bonus of +32. On top of this, the fighter they're balancing against tops out at 13th level at 5/2 attacks (and only with a specialized weapon), alternating 3 and 2 attacks, which means that it looks even loving worse for the 2e fighter. I was not exaggerating in the least when I said that 3e was a significant upgrade for fighters and thieves, people were -actually concerned- about that, because it had long since sunk in that 2e fighters and thieves were absolute garbage. A lot of us wanted to push them even harder, and nerf casters more, but that was never going to happen with Monte "Caster Supremacy" Cook in charge. A number of the things we told them as playtesters about the caster classes ended up being implemented in 3.5, after it turned out that we were entirely loving correct, and one was implemented literally as soon as Living Greyhawk started, which was the fact that Druid + as printed Animal Friendship was -massively loving broken-.
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Dec 21, 2018 23:48
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gradenko_2000 posted:do you mean that 3.5 was an improvement, or the opposite? Falstaff posted:While it looks that way, it also misses the context of the rest of the game, like the way some baseline fighter features were stripped out of the class for 3e (fighter stickiness, what passed for attacks of opportunity, extra attacks against weak enemies), and the way monster hp was drastically inflated between editions by dint of giving the every single monster a CON score. The removal of stickiness was a deliberate change to address the suicidal nature of withdrawal our flight in 2e. It didn't work entirely as intended, but it was a considered change, not a nerf, to shape how combat played out. 4e did it better. The hp math was a problem, but in theory was supposed to be addressed by the increasing damage of fighters, but again, didn't go nearly far enough, and wouldn't even really try until the book of weeaboo fighting magic. NinjaDebugger fucked around with this message at 09:52 on Dec 22, 2018 |
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Dec 22, 2018 09:31
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neonchameleon posted:And yet for literally every boost you gave fighters and nerf you gave casters there was one the other way you gave casters a boost and fighters a nerf. Anything from more spells for casters to casters being able to pick their saves to savage armour check penalties to the complete overhaul of the magic item system that turned casters up to about 15 while shredding fighter power. Welcome to trying to work with Monte Cook. If we knew then what we knew now, it wouldn't have made a bit of difference, because it's been twenty years and he still hasn't learned a loving thing.
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Dec 22, 2018 22:37
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Andrast posted:Even if I had time to play every rpg I read, I still wouldn't want to play them with randos I have been playing living campaigns for twenty years, and there is a goddamn reason I don't play at a table unless I already know and like at least three other people at it.
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Dec 27, 2018 16:07
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Warthur posted:Isn't the entire backstory of the game based on the excessive use of defiler magic destroying the ecosystem? It is, but the mechanics of how defiling works are based entirely in an attempt to limit the ungodly power of 2e casters, which wasn't necessary for 4e. Preservers (all PCs, essentially) had to spend extra rounds casting their spells, taking them down to a level where the non-casters didn't feel quite so lovely. In 4e, that would have just made casters unplayable, so it was changed to an incentive to defile, instead of a penalty to preserve.
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Jan 1, 2019 15:43
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Razorwired posted:It's fun if you're the guy role-playing Great Value Lord Humongous and pressuring a bunch of 20 year old nerds to have sex with you "in character" Hey, I'm told Lord Humongous is a great guy who understands the importance of consent.
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Mar 10, 2019 04:54
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Kibner posted:Call of Cthulu Wrong. 4e D&D is definitely Waffle House. It knows exactly what it is and does it perfectly every time.
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Jul 26, 2020 03:37
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I was a pre-release playtester for Magi-Nation CCG and it was so drat good. The aesthetic was fantastic, too. All the dude wanted to do was make a game that would make it fun for kids to learn how to do math quickly, and honestly, he didn't do that badly, it's just that the CCG wars were a real cardboard grinder. Also, naming an entire series of cards "Xyx" was not the greatest idea. That's not like, letters standing in for anything. That's just the name. https://magination.fandom.com/wiki/Xyx THere were like seven or eight of these drat things, all types of living clouds. Major Xyx, Minor Xyx, Sandstorm Xyx, you fuckin name it. And nobody could agree how to pronounce it. NinjaDebugger fucked around with this message at 23:06 on Oct 17, 2020 |
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Oct 17, 2020 23:02
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:So Samurai ideals were pretty hosed up and toxic, but what era is the L5R rpg based on? The "government stipend aristocrat" era or the Sekigaraha thing? L5r is an anachronistic combination of several different eras that were nowhere near each other made to produce a specific sort of setting. Trying to use it as a Japan simulator is silly,and if you try to lock it to a specific era it loses a lot, same as if you try to make it "more realistic" the comparison to pendragon is not an accident.
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Aug 1, 2021 13:22
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:
Replicator rations are a significant plot point a number of times, it's not like they're unlimited power even where they appear. They don't have magical engines, running out of fuel has been a plot point a number of times, as have resupply stops.
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Aug 26, 2021 14:45
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Nuns with Guns posted:Interest on a mortgage? You're not making that money, it's getting paid to the lender or investor. You can use your mortgage interest payments as a tax deduction though, which is why rich people will get interest only-loans on multi-million dollar homes to help round out their end-of year tax filings. That's what he means, the money you save on interest by paying off the mortgage is less than the money you -earn- by putting money in an index fund because it has a better rate. The fact that the two are opposite directions doesn't change that you make a profit. I'm in the same position, my last student loan has a lower interest rate than I'm earning elsewhere, so I'm just doing minimum payments until such time as that changes.
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Oct 10, 2021 21:17
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Froghammer posted:If I'm understanding the order of operations correctly, Zak tried to shove two witnesses, and presumably their testimony, into opposing council's deposition shortly before it was supposed to begin (this was all being done remotely, so that means that the two witnesses would be on the zoom call). Vivka's lawyers immediately file for an order of protection in order to shoo them out, arguing that the only reason Zak would want them in the deposition is to intimidate Amanda while she's giving testimony. Zak's lawyers argue, I don't know, something. Probably, in legalese speak, "well what we're doing is technically allowed by the court so that's what we're doing, whether or not the defendant feels intimidated is their problem and not ours". That's what I'm reading as well, yeah.
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Jan 17, 2022 20:27
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Splicer posted:Well WoW came out four years after 3rd edition so you can probably disregard that part... You loving wish. The screaming about tabletop Diablo was deafening.
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Mar 23, 2022 18:20
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Mystic Mongol posted:Motherfuckers closed down the Evil Electric Power Plant, and it's 100% because they don't like the name. All that poo poo about it turning the frogs dire is just fossil fuel company propaganda. Meanwhile the coal power plant they opened to replace it is somehow "clean" because the coal comes from Mount Celestia. Who cares what plane the fuel is from? It's still dumping carcinogens into the air, guys! The entire multiverse is actually just the business bits of a good/evil reactor being used by a higher dimension to generate power.
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Apr 14, 2022 21:09
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Apparently Satine just pulled out of gencon?
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Jun 13, 2022 02:43
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Eastmabl posted:You pay to rent the table (usually six seats) and recoup the surplus. As far as I know, there are not, getting the whole room/ballroom for the whole convention, unless you are out to reserve a -specific one- is a matter of having an ongoing relationship with the convention. Heroes of Rokugan always gets its own area, either a single room in the convention center or a single ballroom/section of ballroom in one of the hotels, and has never done more than the base fee per slot. We get this because we're a large group with consistent attendance at both the convention and attendee level. Other orgs for various things get the same courtesy, because it's easier for literally everyone that way. edit: It also probably helps if you're running back to back events for most of the convention. If you're doing like three seminars in a day but they're at 8 AM, 2 PM, and 6 PM, who knows where you'll end up? Especially if they're on different subjects. Miniatures painting classes all tend to end up in the same area, except for the official Games Workshop events, which are off in a hotel in their own ballroom. They do try to cluster things together when they're the same type of event, and are reasonably good at it. NinjaDebugger fucked around with this message at 12:45 on Jun 13, 2022 |
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Jun 13, 2022 12:36
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MadScientistWorking posted:Can I ask a dumb question that is RPG adjacent but not exactly. All this talk about Vecna reminded me that there is a health insurance company and robotics company named Vecna. Supposedly it wasn't deliberate, but I've heard that that they are aware of it. Now what is the rules regarding trademarks that would allow them to use the name in that context that wouldn't get them sued by WoTC? Is it just because the trademark is for entertainment purposes? All trademarks are for specific domains and only conflict when it would cause confusion of the two. Very few things are large and multi domain enough to claim a universal trademark.
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Aug 24, 2022 14:14
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