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kingcom posted:Right and I think you've pointed out my big problem for why I'm asking this. The question of 'who are adventurers and how do they fit' is a really big important one for defining tone of a game and even within the same setting what mercenary and not even having a place to talk about what an adventurer is in your game seems like a pretty big missing step? Like even pathfinder goes into detail about the pathfinder society and pathfinders being a part of that or operating independently an how the interface with the world. This is something they include out of the gate. To be fair, Pathfinder only has one setting to describe and frame in its rules. D&D has to be more generic than that, and what adventurers are differs from setting to setting and campaign to campaign. Arivia posted:Idk you tell me why Mearls took paragraphs right out of Rob Heinsoo and Skip Williams’ work on the 3.5 and 4e DMG and so on. Corporate authorship.
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Nov 26, 2019 15:34
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Splicer posted:The persistent belief that this is possible with something as crunch dense as D&D, never mind the completely inexplicable belief that it succeeded, is one of the most baffling things about the whole deal I mean we can certainly argue about how successful it has been in that regard and how different those settings really are, but D&D certainly does support more published settings than PF does. Perhaps that's one of PF's advantages over D&D: it doesn't pretend to be as generic as D&D does.
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Nov 26, 2019 15:59
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Arivia posted:Oh it's legal, it's just creatively bankrupt and lazy like so much else of this slapdash edition. Nah, man. I'm not trying to make a point about legality. My point is that it's not meant to be an original creative work. It's rules and inspiration for a game. Think of it like a textbook or manual. It's like E.B. White adding a bunch of poo poo and his name to William Strunk's Elements of Style. Why rewrite a section if the current version already does the job? I won't argue with the other part because you're right.
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Nov 26, 2019 20:27
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Arivia posted:There's no common framework that's shared between the 3e, 4e, and 5e DMGs though. Of course the 3.5 DMG kept a lot of stuff from the 3.0 one, since it was an update like what you're describing. Each edition's is organized differently with different content. Whoever was working on that part of the 5e DMG went "okay well I should have this part like the 3e DMG and I'm just going to use their example and change the names", which is loving lazy. It wasn't a section that had been passed down for 15 years, they deliberately went back and took it for themselves. It's a new edition of the game. It is an update like I am describing. Again, the books don't exist to be original creative works. They exist to enable playing the game in its newest edition.
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Nov 26, 2019 21:37
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Arivia posted:We'll just have to disagree. Remember that I'm not disagreeing with you about 5E being lazily slapped together. I'm just pointing out that this sort of patch writing is not unique to 5E.
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Nov 26, 2019 22:00
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kingcom posted:I feel like a few people are missing exactly what I'm talking about here. I'm not saying the rule book needs to specifically lock down the exact details of what an adventurer, I'm saying that the discussion amongst a group about defining what an adventurer is in your setting is really important to building group expectations. I did miss that. Apologies. And yeah, you are correct. At the most base level, a group needs to talk about whether or not 'adventurer' is even a concept in a given campaign. But also, isn't this sort of discussion implicit in a lot of the campaign building guidance and discussion that already exists? 5E has sections on playstyles, tiers of play, types of campaign, and creating organizations among its campaign design advice. Wouldn't "what exactly is our characters' job?" be a question that gets raised and answered organically as part of hashing out those considerations? I don't mean to push back. My experience is that this is implicit, but I've been playing with the same folks for nearly 20 years now, so we're really good at talking through everything when beginning a new campaign.
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Nov 26, 2019 23:42
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Yeah, Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber series I believe. I think it comes from Michael Moorcock's Elric novels. xanthan posted:Why did morality get added to it? The law-chaos axis was a thing since OD&D. The moral axis got added with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons to make it more advanced I guess. 
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Dec 10, 2019 03:48
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Hippo. . .griff? No, the hippo guys are called giff. 
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Dec 12, 2019 22:57
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MonsterEnvy posted:We may get a redone Spelljammer which is Sci-Fi D&D. Spelljammer is space D&D, not Sci-Fi D&D. Its setting and mechanics are explicitly magical and rooted in concepts (like the phlogiston) drawn from medieval European cosmology because those concepts are so clearly unscientific. In Spelljammer, you travel space in a sailing ship fashioned to look like some menacing sea creature that is powered by a magical chair that literally jams a wizard or clerics spells. Its whole point is to be gloriously high fantasy space adventure, not just Sci-Fi D&D. They had the Buck Rogers license for that.
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Jan 7, 2020 23:00
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FFT posted:It's sci-fi like Star Wars is sci-fi, in that it isn't but has some of the trappings No, it's really not. Spelljammer very intentionally and specifically avoids the trappings of science fiction and instead uses the trappings of high fantasy. That's why your ship has sails. That's why it's powered by a magic shunting throne. That's why you travel across a flammable medium imagined by people who had trouble with the idea of a void in God's creation. That's why the bad guys are orcs just spelled backwards. I don't mean to be a pedant, but since the last few pages have been arguing about whether D&D can do genres other than D&D high fantasy, I think we should try to be clear about genre. And man, if you think Spelljammer is sci-fi, you're maybe not the best judge of what kinds of genres D&D can actually do.
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Jan 8, 2020 00:20
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Saying Star Wars isn't science fiction is dumb nerd pedantry left over from the days when you had to pick between being a -Trek or -Wars fan and fight over it. Arguing over whether or not it is science fiction is just more dumb nerd pedantry that's entirely besides the point. The point is Spelljammer is doing everything it can to not feel or look like science fiction.No. 1 Apartheid Fan posted:(but it's close enough to fantasy that you could run a good Star Wars game in Dungeons & Dragons without changing anything but class, item, and ability fluff) Y'know, after playing in some very successful D20 SW games using both the revised and Saga editions and then switching to WEG's old D6 rules, I don't think you can run a *good* Star Wars game in Dungeons & Dragons. You can run a fun game with the trappings of Star Wars. You might even tell a really interesting Star Wars story like KoTOR 2 attempted to, but you're not going to capture the pacing and feel of the films and shows.
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Jan 8, 2020 01:02
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:Get your existing friends and ask them to play. You might have to teach some rules but it's 100 percent better than playing with strangers. Yes. Do this. Don't make friends out of gamers; make gamers out of friends. It's what my group has been doing for twenty years now, and it's great.
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Jan 21, 2020 00:17
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No. 1 Apartheid Fan posted:IMO the Ranger sucking is really exclusive to 3E (and its iterations) and 5E. And it's a product of Druids - and 5E gishes in general - being stupidly broken and neatly obviating any clear purpose for a Ranger. Yeah, AD&D rangers were pretty great (especially 1E ones who got an extra hit dice at level 1), and the 4E Ranger was a very effective but not very exciting class.
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Feb 25, 2020 20:55
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Bust Rodd posted:It’s very difficult to find 4e Stans. Cool 4E was and still is very popular around these parts. Nobody would call it a perfect game, but the general (and correct) consensus around here was that it was the best mechanically designed and balanced version of the game yet. SettingSun posted:Yeah 5e is honestly ok. I'm just wondering what could have been if they had iterated on 4e instead of taking a hard left away from it. (I miss you Warlord) I really love 5E. It's not nearly as well put together as 4E, but it does a better job of scratching my "I want this to feel like the AD&D we played in middle school" itch.
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Feb 27, 2020 19:33
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thespaceinvader posted:5e is fine. But it doesn't engage me in anywhere near the same way 4e does; it's simply nowhere near as strong a small-squad tactical minis game Fumbles posted:Yeah it can be (accurately) said that that just turns the game into "loving Wing It" the RPG, This basically sums up why I think 4E is a better game, but I prefer playing 5E. I'm not really interested in tactical combat. I just wanna have a rules framework for loving off and making up adventure stories with my friends. Splicer posted:This is baffling. Do you think 3.x/4e used poker as a resolution system or something? I think he's probably referring to stacking and tracking modifiers, which I don't remember being that much of a deal in 4E, but it was definitely a big pain in the rear end in 3E. Butt Discussin posted:What is pathfinder 2e like, in general? I liked pathfinder(1e) back in the day a decade or so ago, though I didn't play it all that much. I'd also like to hear more about PF2. I quickly flipped through the playtest rulebook at a BAM a year or two ago, and I remember that it looked like they were moving far away from being houseruled 3.5E, but I don't recall specifics.
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Feb 27, 2020 20:38
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Athanatos posted:As a DM on roll20 I still used actual books and paper notes. I still made all my rolls with actual dice. I run two campaigns on Roll20 right now, and I use actual books, a notebook, and real dice to do all the stuff on my end. My players use paper or form fillable pdf character sheets and roll dice with macros. For maps, I just take photos of my hand drawn maps or those from the books and turn on the fog of war option and reveal areas as PCs discover them.
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Mar 17, 2020 19:45
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Aww, now I wanna know what happened to the kitty and potion guy.
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Mar 23, 2020 00:53
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Sodomy Hussein posted:Just reads like "No, because that would be fun and simple and we have a loving complex when it comes to the monk." Like it would totally break the game if monk became as ubiquitous as everyone bolting warlock onto everything for exactly one class feature! See, to me it reads like, "nah we didn't intend for the Rogue's damage boosting gimmick to add onto the Monk's, but we can't just come out and admit our design intentions, so here's some complicated nonsense instead." Which is still idiotic and bad, but it's not quite "strike monks from the game because they weren't in my 2E PHB!"
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Apr 7, 2020 17:21
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Arivia posted:That FR supplement I mentioned earlier is now available! https://www.dmsguild.com/product/244431/The-Border-Kingdoms-A-Forgotten-Realms-Campaign-Supplement this is a completely canon supplement by Ed Greenwood on a part of the Realms that has never been completely detailed before. This is explicitly a place for your PCs to come and found their own kingdoms, build their own castles, so forth and so on, which means it's a great follow up to any adventure you've already done that you want to continue with the same group. (You'd want rules for castle building and ruling and so on, which I believe the best 5e rules for are going to be that stuff Matt Coville's doing? or maybe Courtney Campbell's Downtime and Demesnes, but buying that gives money to gross people) It's basically halfway between Baldur's Gate and Chult on the western coast of Faerun, to give you an idea where we're at. Awesome! Thanks for posting this. I'm very excited.
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Apr 13, 2020 01:12
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Reveilled posted:And yes, the leg isn't mentioned as being magical, so logically it would be an impedance to her combat ability, but there's no reason that leg *couldn't* have been written as magical, or some fantasy steampunk doohickey or whatever. Even if it's not magical, the leg shouldn't impede her combat ability. This is the kind of setting where every other pirate has a hook, eye-patch, or peg leg and fights just fine. The prosthesis is essentially just aesthetics. I am a little surprised that they didn't add any sort of advantageous trick to her leg. That would fit well with the whole Ravenloft monster hunter deal.
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Apr 30, 2020 16:57
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Sodomy Hussein posted:In real life now, advanced prosthetics are getting quite awesome. Yeah, good point. Real world prosthetics are approaching sci-fi cyberware levels of awesome. Cyberware should be the model for RPG prosthesis. Minus the whole "having prosthetics makes you less human" thing, of course.
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Apr 30, 2020 19:09
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Richard Lee Byers' The Year of Rogue Dragons trilogy for Forgotten Realms features a protagonist who lost most of his limbs in a dragon attack as a child and had them replaced with iron golem prosthesis by an evil wizard from Hillsfar who forced him to fight in its gladiator pits in exchange. I always thought that guy was a great way to include a "warforged" PC in an FR campaign. Also, at the end he loses his iron golem limbs to a rust dragon's breath attack, but goes on to be a heroic kick rear end without them.
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Apr 30, 2020 21:02
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Inkspot posted:Definitely stealing this. From The Expanse.
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Jun 6, 2020 22:23
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Azhais posted:That can't possibly be the first icewind dale adventure what with Drizzt being a thing. Or hadn't it made it to 5 yet? There are surprisingly few published Icewind Dale adventures. Aside from the two Infinity Engine games, there's Legacy of the Crystal Shard, which was one of the transition modules released between 4E and 5E, and that's it. To be fair, Drizzt really doesn't do a lot of adventuring in Icewind Dale. The Icewind Dale trilogy only spends its first book there, and across thirty something novels, he only returns maybe half a dozen times. Icewind Dale was so insignificant that Salvatore's contribution to the FR series of sourcebooks wasn't even about it. Instead, he covered the Bloodstone Lands.
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Jun 12, 2020 20:57
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Arivia posted:no, they don't Yeah, even Heroes of Baldur's Gate was just "meet or fight the companions from BG1 depending on their alignment." And that was written by a guy who worked on BG1.
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Jun 15, 2020 20:12
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Panderfringe posted:You can't. Forgotten Realms sucks rear end. This is extra dumb because Princes is mainly a bunch of stuff ported over from Greyhawk.
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Jul 31, 2020 23:31
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Splicer posted:The wardrobe opens, disgorging another clone. They kill it. They turn to leave, behind the door is another opening clone box. They kill it. They run out of the room, a pillar in the hallway dumps out another clone. They kill it. The weakened pillar collapses, the ceiling empties dozens if not hundreds of naked clones stacked like cordwood. A clone struggles to its feet to be pancaked by another pallet of gooey wizard flesh from above. The floor collapses into the great hall below. An ominous, squishy rumbling comes from the chimney... loving Manshoons.
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Aug 11, 2020 18:10
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:D&D has never had a clear idea of what people should be able to do at higher levels or what kind of problems high level characters should be solving This really isn't true. AD&D had PCs becoming rulers and gaining followers. Prior to the release of Planescape, the inner and outer planes existed largely to offer problems for high level parties. The Dark Sun setting had an entire book, Dragon Kings, dedicated to high level play involving conquest and becoming supernatural beings. Plain D&D's Companion, Master, and Immortal boxed sets were specifically about high level play. D&D lost this with 3E's "return to the dungeon" and lack of domain and mass combat rules.
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Aug 12, 2020 16:30
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Maxwell Lord posted:4e definitely favors big setpieces over smaller encounters though I wonder if you could do the latter as the former, in a way. I think a lot of people built encounters in 4E like this. I did. I ran some pretty classic dungeon crawling in 4E where the dungeons were keyed by area and each contained an encounter. Sometimes the party used the layout to short rest before completing an encounter and had an easy time of things. Other times the party would enter a new encounter area before short resting and find themselves in some trouble. It all balanced out overall and led to the sessions that had me comparing 4E to my fond memories of BECMI.
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Aug 18, 2020 23:28
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I'm playing a cleric of Selune right now and wondering if I should switch from Light to Twilight domain. I like being a laser blast cleric, but I'm thinking there's more overall utility to the Twilight stuff.
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Nov 20, 2020 20:26
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E: ^^^ Dragonbait is the best dragon paladin pal a magic clone can have. And he communicates with smells. You can be a cleric of Lliira, the goddess of good times (joy), or a cleric of Sune, the goddess of sexy good times (beauty). You could be a cleric of Akadi and quote Subotai, "my god is the wind; my god is above your god." Shaundakul is a cool minor god of exploration and travel who's perfect for an adventuring cleric. If you want to be a war cleric, but want to have some extra flavor, you can worship Garagos, the former main god of war who's focused on slaughter and bloodshed, or if that's too edgy, the Red Knight, is the lesser goddess of war's tactical and strategic aspects.
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Dec 3, 2020 04:32
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Nehru the Damaja posted:Anyone seen a follower of Hoar done as something other than overpowering edgelordism? That's Hoar's whole thing. That's like asking if anyone's see a cleric of Cyric who isn't an insane troublemaker or a cleric of Nobanion who doesn't like cats.
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Dec 3, 2020 04:57
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Drizzt worships Mielikki 
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Dec 3, 2020 05:10
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FFT posted:woops yeah, unicorn goddess Oh yeah, you're right about Elistraee. I've always felt she should be an aspect or alias of Selune, given that Selune is all about redemption and dancing in the moonlight, so there's all sorts of overlap. But then again, I just gushed a bit about FR's lesser war gods, so I'm being sorta hypocritical here. theironjef posted:Saurials are awesome in general. gently caress yes they are. 
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Dec 3, 2020 19:38
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Seldon posted:This player needs to just play Pathfinder, the default setting is "homebrew planet of all the things". Or just go with Forgotten Realms, the "official planet of all the things."
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Jan 10, 2021 03:55
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Arivia posted:I'd change the words - Dragonlance is epic fantasy to FR's high fantasy (if even that). I'd say that it's a setting crafted for one specific big 1-20 (more like 3-15 really) epic plotted storyline campaign, the DL series, and anything else done on Ansalon is gonna exist in its shadow. Which is why TSR ended up making the Taladas sub-setting, a place where you could have Dragonlance stuff without the War of the Lance looming over it all. Devorum posted:There's also an entire continent ruled by rad minotaurs. It's even better than that. Rad minotaurs only rule one of its major nations. There's also a crazy theocracy, a few different elf cultures, a diverse steppeland area, spooky jungles, competent tinker gnomes, non-kleptomaniacal kender, and wasteland nomads who wouldn't be out of place in Dark Sun. And it all takes place on another continent shattered by the Cataclysm, but this one is basically one giant volcano, like a bigger and crazier Morrowind. It leans harder into the post apocalyptic nature of the setting and doesn't have the starkly black and white morality of the Chronicles. It also doesn't have a lot of the setting specific classes, like Knights of Solamnia or Wizards of the White/Red/Black robes. Instead, it featured a lot of setting specific kits. Taladas is a really interesting setting. It's still mostly generic D&D fantasy, but in places it's just as weird or weirder than Dark Sun, Planescape, or Spelljammer.
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Jan 12, 2021 04:37
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Trivia posted:Is it necessarily plausible to have a log blocking a paved path, one that is traveled frequently, and then needing to use strength of all things to clear it (instead of walking around)? It's totally plausible because traveling down that path is a skill challenge, and skill challenges involve difficulty and obstacles. One way to think about it is that the log was implicitly there the moment the DM decided to make traveling down that path a skill challenge.
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Jan 15, 2021 16:03
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Perry Mason Jar posted:It is objectively true that having players invent stuff that exists in the world at whim reduces immersion but that doesn't mean it's a bad trade. Is it? Can't players inventing stuff be an expression of immersion? They're so engrossed by the experience that they are imagining details in addition to those presented by the DM. Isn't that immersion?
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Jan 15, 2021 18:37
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Perry Mason Jar posted:If you're reading a good book you may imagine the finer features of a character that wasn't deeply described. If you put a whole different character into the book then you're doing something else - you're co-writing, you're writing fan fiction, etc. Totally fine but you're no longer immersed in the book in the sense that you're getting lost in the narrative of the book. There's a whole philosophical position held by many theorists and scholars (like Barthes and Fish) that regards reading as an act of co-writing. But regardless, I'd say this is another example of someone becoming so deeply immersed in the narrative world that they're actively imagining its existence beyond the discourse they're engaged with. hyphz posted:The "immersion" that's meant is the player being able to have the same mindset as their character - or, rather, the mindset that we think they have when we see them. Yeah, I get what is meant by "immersion" when talking about games. It means you're imaginatively experiencing the game world from the perspective of your character instead of the perspective of some nerd sitting around a table or in front of a screen. I'm rejecting the idea that inventing details that weren't explicitly placed by the DM breaks that immersion. I'm arguing that it instead is an expression of immersion because it's showing imaginative engagement with the world from the perspective of the character. Take the log example that spurred this discussion. I don't think the player in question broke out of her character's mindset when she invented the log. I instead think she was actively engaged with the world from the mindset and perspective of her character. She's playing a strong character who solves problems with athletics, and the DM has implied there will be unspecified problems along this journey, so she imagines her character seeing a problem that she can solve with athletics. Trivia posted:We weren't told there'd be difficulties on the path. You were told so implicitly by the DM making the journey down that path into a skill challenge.
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Jan 15, 2021 20:35
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hyphz posted:But she does that imagination from the point of view of an author or arbiter of the story. Which is perfectly reasonable, but does mean that she's stepping out of her character's mindset. That's the idea I'm pushing back against. This gets taken as a given, but I don't think it is. I'm saying the player is not taking the perspective of an author. She is instead taking the perspective of her character, imagining what challenges that character sees before her, and articulating those challenges. She's not authoring; she's doing improv. quote:The implicit question is "Player, what obstacle do you want your character to encounter on their journey?", to be decided based on authorial matters. That can include connection with the world, but necessarily includes other things as well, and gives the player extra responsibilities. That's not necessarily bad, in fact it can make the game more involving, but it does also add some restrictions to the player's mindset. I think you're conflating what's happening in a situation like this with the sort of collaborative world and adventure building that takes place outside of the game when you frame the implicit question as "what obstacle do you want your character to encounter on their journey?" That question is one of preliminary thinking, asking the player to consider what they would like their character to experience as part of the game. The situation we're talking about is much more in the moment, and I would say the implicit question here is, "player, what does your character see on the journey?" This question prompts the player to imagine her character's perspective. I don't think this gives the player any extra or special responsibilities or limits her mindset. I think it invites the player to engage with her character in the world and prompts her to open her mindset to that of her character. E: I may be coming across more combative than I mean to here. My issue is with the idea that this sort of gameplay objectively hinders or reduces immersion. If you wanna tell me that this sort of gameplay reduces your immersion, I wouldn't presume to tell you that you're wrong. But does it reduce every player's immersion? Not in my experience. Did inventing a log hamper that player's immersion? I don't think so. Like I said, I see that as an expression of her immersion in her character's perspective. PeterWeller fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Jan 15, 2021 |
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Jan 15, 2021 22:07
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