D&D thread
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(Yesterday's) Status: My first ever 0 hp and no saving throws possible. And almost a TPK for us, partly due to my bungling. Very dramatic. Please
now.
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@Mason_Wheeler What does warforged mean in this context?
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@PleegWat without getting into too much
territory, "fantasy robot."
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@Mason_Wheeler Ah, good to read I guessed right :)
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Announcing the 1.0.0 release of NIH System, a 5e D&D fork by yours truly. In true TDWTF fashion, I'm writing it in LaTeX and doing everything in a public github repository.
PRs welcome. And also in true TDWTF fashion, I realized after I'd created the release that the separate changelog (the first 4 pages of the full pdf) is actually a larger file than the full pdf (382 pages)...which it is a part of. Yeah, Microsoft Print to PDF is not a good way of separating PDF pages...
Release V1.0.0 Ā· bentomhall/nih-system
Contribute to bentomhall/nih-system development by creating an account on GitHub.
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Sorry, your game sucks. Fix that and Iāll offer to draw pictures for you
I donāt play D&D but thereās certainly evidence of consideration throughout; descriptions of stuff seems fine on the surface. Except the retard units, of course.
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@kazitor FREEEEDOM (units)! 'Murica, heck ya!
Honestly, art is my big weak point. I suck at it. And am not even clever enough to poke Stable Diffusion into generating anything but trash.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
FREEEEDOM (units)!
Freedom to make trivial tasks convoluted? Freedom from being able to do anything cost-effectively? I suppose thatās a great example of āno one tells you what
to doā freedom
Honestly, art is my big weak point.
Better fix your stats then
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@Benjamin-Hall I do appreciate that you looked at Bounded Accuracy and said "I mean it". I generally approve of bounded accuracy (after, I'll admit, some initial skepticism), but the creators of 5E were careful to leave quite a number of sacred cows alone: so there's "bounded accuracy" and "we don't require you to have magic items", but there was also "of course there are magic weapons with bonuses to hit, it wouldn't be D&D without them!"
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Status: Had a Shadowrun 2e game yesterday. Started ~1300. GM was learning the system, too, so lots of PDF-and-paper-flipping. Took >7 hours for what was pretty much a "tutorial" run. On top of that I picked a metahuman (dwarf) street mage, which for all practical purposes means "sucks to be you, chummer". Was really wiz, though.
@Gurth, can you perhaps
add two centsspare some nuyen on this?
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@Applied-Mediocrity Dwarf mage = good, you get the +1 Willpower that really helps with drain tests. Well, assuming you did the smart thing during character creation and stuck six points into Willpower, anyway :) Your main problem is probably not being able to keep up with anybody else when theyāre running, but learn a Levitate Person spell as soon as you can and youāll be wizzing along faster than they are. If you only really intend to use it on yourself and other friendly targets, force 1 is enough ā the only thing its force rating is used for, is to see if someone who doesnāt want to be levitated, can resist it. So not an issue if you use it to move yourself around faster.
But yeah, Shadowrun isnāt the fastest system, though if the GM is still learning it too, then any RPG system is slow, in my experience. Itāll help a lot if your group sticks to the SRII main rulebook for now, rather than adding in the various sourcebooks with extra rules for it.
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
six points into Willpower
FIve. I took Resources for priority C :/
learn a Levitate Person
force 1 is enoughI hadn't noticed that. Thanks!
Itāll help a lot if your group sticks to the SRII main rulebook for now
That's the plan. Haven't even touched decking yet, too.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in D&D thread:
six points into Willpower
FIve. I took Resources for priority C :/
That still give you Willpower 6, and you can always raise it to 7 with good karma once youāve earned yourself enough points (that is, 7 :)
learn a Levitate Person
force 1 is enoughI hadn't noticed that. Thanks!
There are a number of spells in SRII where the force rating is totally irrelevant to their effects ā oversight on the designersā part, Iād say.
Haven't even touched decking yet, too.
Donāt. Just donāt. Certainly not with the system from the main rules ā if somebody does want to play a decker, do yourself a huge favour and find a copy of Virtual Realities 2.0 without even reading the rules in the SRII main rulebook. This is the one case where I would advise using an additional rulebook from the very beginning: VR2.0 completely replaced the original decking rules with a totally new set, that while still not great, was far better. Chiefly in being more workable in practice, but also much faster, which is important because most of the group tends to switch off and get bored when the decker does his thing. (But oddly, they rarely do that when a magician goes to do some astral reconnaissance, which gives the rest of the group just as little to do.)
The more usual way to handle decking, though, is by an NPC :) Either somebody has a decker contact they call up any time you need something that needs to be done in the Matrix, or the GM provides a decker NPC for your group to sneak into someplace where the decker has to be on-site to accomplish something.
Aside from that, Iāve long held the point of view that, while people who are into computers IRL are most likely to want to play a decker, theyāre probably the ones youāll want to discourage the most from actually doing so. SR decking has zero to do with RL computer use, and the more you try to apply real-world knowledge, the more it breaks down.
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Yesterday's Status: Alright, another Shadowrun 2e game, continuing the adventures. Key takeaways:
- Concussion grenade in a soup can, with Levitate Item, thrown at Lone Star.
- Magically induced hate against humans, to a human in a building of human supremacists
- Stealing all hard drives under the cover of a riot, making our Johnson go hopping mad (but also astonished), henceforth calling it Incompetence Overflow
In the cafe where we played, all other tables playing more normal games (one supposes) had already packed up and left, but we were still crunching through the combat. Also, I had shit initiative (3+1d6), and basically watched things happening, so at one point GM got all like "okay, goddammit, have a +10, go". Unfortunately unlike the last time, where I executed gangers with my sharp pistol skills, I hit just once and that didn't help much. Top kek.
The clown show will take a pause for now. Maybe a conversion to 3e is in order, though.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in D&D thread:
I had shit initiative (3+1d6), and basically watched things happening, so at one point GM got all like "okay, goddammit, have a +10, go".
A house rule that has served me well for a very long time is to have the Rule of Six apply to one die (but not more than that) in everyoneās initiative rolls ā use one die of a different colour if you get more than 1D6, and of course make clear beforehand which colour allows re-rolls, etc.
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This weekās Shadowrun game went well ā¦ Just a simple, quick, in-between adventure in which the PCs are hired to retrieve a briefcase from the apartment of a contact of one of them, then place the briefcase in a specific locker at a bus station. The reason the contact canāt do this himself is because he got attacked by people wanting the briefcase back and had to flee, injured. All this is happening late at night.
So, they head to the apartment. The rigger decides to take his wheeled drone, mounting a grenade launcher (loaded with high-explosive rounds, not the smokes he also has) and an assault rifle on it, and so the group of three plus drone takes the lift up to the floor where the contact lived. He gave them the code to the door, but as the street samurai and the magician are deciding who will go and open the door, the rigger just decides to roll his drone up to the door and shoot it with the grenade launcher ā¦
BOOOM
ā¦ and the grenade sticks in the door.
Sam and magician: āWTF?!ā
Rigger: āIt doesnāt explode? Does it have a timer or something?ā
Sam: āWhy didnāt it explode? Is it still dangerous?ā
Rigger: āIāll shoot it again!āThe second shot missed ā yes, really, from only a couple of metresā range ā hit the wall next to the door and bounced down the corridor before rolling to a stop a little way away.
You know, launched grenades have a minimum range of five metres, within which they donāt explode. Well, the players didnāt know that. They do now.
The magician goes up to the door, still wary of the grenade, punches in the code, and everybody enters. The place is trashed but they soon recover the briefcase from its secret hiding place, pile back into the van and head to the bus station.
By this time, the riggerās player has kind of zoned out for not entirely clear reasons (but see below) so he doesnāt participate at all when the other two discuss how to deliver the briefcase, and whether there are any bad guys lurking in the bus station. The magician does a quick astral reconnaissance and discovers thereās an elf hiding under an Invisibility spell, leaning against a pillar right by the wall of lockers, so that gives them an answer about possible bad guys.
As the sam and magician plan to sneak up on the elf and taser him into unconsciousness, the riggerās player suddenly takes an interest again. After I quickly explain the situation to him, he immediately seizes the moment as well as the briefcase, loudly proclaiming that itās very simple, and walks into the bus station with it. He goes up to the locker, puts it inside, and shuts the door.
At this point, the elf and his two buddies who are hiding among the ten or so waiting passengers are about to spring their ambush. But because they failed to notice the sam and the magician as shadowrunners too, largely because of the riggerās bold move and the sam successfully blending into the crowd, the elf gets a surprise stun baton to his guts (the sam just managing to hit him despite the Invisibility spell).
The rigger takes his phone and punches the police emergency button. He then asks the magician to point out the invisible elf (because the teamās magician can see him due to his astral perception), his player loudly repeating it several times because the magicianās player didnāt answer him right away. It took me several tries to get it through to him that, because theyāre all in combat, neither he nor the magician can just do all kinds of stuff instantly.
None of the three PCs then notice the elfās two team mates before these draw their guns and open fire on the PCs. The rigger gets hit and decides that running outside is the best option. Meanwhile, the sam keeps attacking the elf with his stun baton while the elf casts Ice Sheet over the floor in order to make his escape ā tripping up the sam when he gets hit by a shotgun blast that he tried to dodge. The magician tries to hit the fleeing elf with a combat spell, but fails.
Because the rigger is now running away, one of the enemy PCs shoots him again on the assumption heās going to get heavier firepower. This brings him to one box below a Deadly wound.
At this point, we stopped because two of the players had to leave to catch the train, but not before the riggerās player started telling the other two about how they had screwed up this very simple run. āAll we had to do was drop the briefcase in the locker! Why did you attack that elf at all?!ā Well ā¦ maybe because they figured he would try to hit them when they brought in the briefcase?
TBF, he had a bit of a point, of course. They didnāt know for sure there was an ambush, nor whether the elf was there to trouble them. I still donāt understand the rigger playerās reasoning for phoning the cops and then getting out of there when his buddies are getting shot up, though. Because it was not as if he decided to go out so he could, say, get his drone for fire support ā he made it very clear that he wanted to be out of the area.
The riggerās behaviour in all of this probably has to do with his playerās RL mental health problems, which is why he didnāt play much for the past year. At least he seems to be getting back to more normal again, but heās clearly not there yet :( Thinking about it after the game, I think Iām in the (for me) unique situation of having a player with the Impulsive flaw while his character doesnāt have that. Usually so far itās been the other way around, so that the player had to be reminded to act impulsively instead of thinking things through.
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
I still donāt understand the rigger playerās reasoning for phoning the cops and then getting out of there when his buddies are getting shot up, though.
It's pretty straightforward why he'd call the cops and book it: once the briefcase is dropped off, it's not his problem, and if someone wants to start a gunfight, they can talk to the cops. The cops might act as a smokescreen or distraction while the rigger books it. And if the Johnson only wanted the briefcase delivered, then the runners' job is done. "Job one is to survive. Job two is to get paid. Customer satisfaction is job three."
Possibly not the best answer, but at least not actively terrible.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in D&D thread:
Which is why it's vitally important to be very specific about the job details. Delivery is so much easier than distribution.
(Sadly, the Sunday comics aren't so easy to insert, because Howard was good about responsive design.)
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@PotatoEngineer said in D&D thread:
It's pretty straightforward why he'd call the cops and book it: once the briefcase is dropped off, it's not his problem, and if someone wants to start a gunfight, they can talk to the cops.
āSomeoneā being the same people heās been involved in criminal activities (= shadowrunning) with for quite some time now? It doesnāt come across like he considers the other two his buddies or even team mates, if he just screws them over like that ā especially for no particular reason. Had he called the cops as a tactic to make life difficult for the opposition, sure. But he did it here as if he was an innocent, but concerned, passerby witnessing a fight between people he doesnāt know.
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
@PotatoEngineer said in D&D thread:
It's pretty straightforward why he'd call the cops and book it: once the briefcase is dropped off, it's not his problem, and if someone wants to start a gunfight, they can talk to the cops.
āSomeoneā being the same people heās been involved in criminal activities (= shadowrunning) with for quite some time now? It doesnāt come across like he considers the other two his buddies or even team mates, if he just screws them over like that ā especially for no particular reason. Had he called the cops as a tactic to make life difficult for the opposition, sure. But he did it here as if he was an innocent, but concerned, passerby witnessing a fight between people he doesnāt know.
Is it the rigger's fault that his teammates can't take a hint?
I'm going with poor communication skills on this one. Again: not the worst idea, but still far from the best.
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@PotatoEngineer said in D&D thread:
Is it the rigger's fault that his teammates can't take a hint?
Canāt take a hint? He (the player, so presumably also his character) literally said, at fairly loud volume, that this was easy, then grabbed the case and walked into the bus station without explaining what he was going to do, or how, or why. While his two team mates were debating about whether or not the elf was an opponent, and what to do about him if he was. All of which the rigger entirely ignored.
Yes, I agree itās poor communication, but caused by the player zoning out and, once told what the situation was, acting impulsively. OOC, that is.
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
literally said, at fairly loud volume, that this was easy
That's a pretty clear "Watch this, I'm going to do something really stupid" hint to me. And not just when playing RPGs.
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@Zerosquare Like I said, mental health problems are probably at the base of this. A few years ago, before COVID enforced a (much-too-)long break in my group playing, he was noticeably more stable and far less impulsive ā and, to be fair, heās less flaky now than about a year ago. But weāre not there yet, and I hope we can temper him a bit more, else Iām afraid we may end up having to ask him not to join in anymore until heās a bit better.
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@Zerosquare said in D&D thread:
@Gurth said in D&D thread:
literally said, at fairly loud volume, that this was easy
That's a pretty clear "Watch this, I'm going to do something really stupid" hint to me. And not just when playing RPGs.
"I'm not smart or informed enough to think this through, so I'm just going to do something big."
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The other day we had a family reunion and there was one cousin with whom I played RPGs regularly for year when we were younger. He had asked to borrow my old Star Wars books for his sons.
So one afternoon I got the books out and gave them to the eldest (10 yo or so). I browse a couple of them with him, trying to tell him which ones to read first (I didn't have all the books/scenarios/add-ons, but I probably had more than I didn't!). And then I get into showing him the basis of the system (this is where the D6 system truly shines).
To make him understand a bit better I give one random character sheet that was in my old stuff and tell him "so, let's imagine you're in this corridor and there's a stormtrooper in front of you, if you fire on him then..." And of course 5 min later I'm running him through this micro-one-shot ("get in the imperial base, hack the terminal, get out") and that kept us busy for an hour or so.
That was pretty fun and a bit nostalgic as well. My cousin was sitting a few chairs down all the time and afterwards commented how I seemed to have as much fun, if not more, than his son. And he was probably right, I loved getting back into it.
We tentatively planned to make a small one-shot one evening but sadly didn't have the opportunity.
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I notice I forgot to post the second part of the bus-station mini-adventure.
The riggerās player couldnāt make it last session ā he had an excuse that seemed legit, but I still suspect him of not feeling like playing due to the criticism he got in an email discussion in the days after the first part. That left the other two players wondering, OOC, how they should deal with his character, so before we actually started to play we had a discussion about what their characters knew of his actions. Probably little or nothing ā they certainly didnāt know he had called the cops, nor that he was trying to flee, so they decided their characters would just treat him normally.
As we had stopped halfway through the firefight, we then continued with that, plus the rigger having a slight change of heart, drawing his gun and opening fire on the opposing shadowrunners as well. Because of his wounds he didnāt hit much, but it was enough that the other two PCs managed to win the firefight, despite both ending up wounded as well. Two of the three opponents withdrew, while the third ended up near death on the floor.
At that point, the street sam figured that these were also just shadowrunners being paid to do a job, so instead of letting the opponent die there (as she surely would have), he carried her into his van and both magician and sam did their best to save her life. Unfortunately for them, and especially her, all the effort was eventually in vain, but once it was clear she was dead, they looked for her phone and called her colleagues. Those were pretty surprised by the call, and even more by the reason for it, but then did agree to a meeting for them to collect their friendās body.
And it made the sam decide it would be a good idea to keep a couple of body bags in his van ā¦
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Last session I saved a baby from kidnappers. Apparently my himbo warrior can be useuful, sometimes, even when he's dumb as a brick. Kidnapper was fleeing on horse, I was pursuing on... deer (as that's apprently what I was given as a mount). Managed to catch up the the kidnapper with baby, then had some thinking about how to incapacitate rider without hurting the baby and failing that just went for the "what if I just snatch the baby" option. And succeeded.
Wisely, he did not try to snatch it back and instead opted for fleeing the scene. May have had something to do with his support all being dead, save for one other (who also fled). And that without the baby he was now open to being lightninged by an angry wizard that had already vaporized two of his henchmen.
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So the annual new yearās campaign is here and, uh, this may be one of the most unlikely combinations of people I have grouped with.
So weāre playing Deadlands this year for some weird wild west action. We did a mini-quest to get acquainted to the rules and I really donāt know how this group ended up together. So we all was tasked with dealing with some horse thieves as a warm-up.
Soā¦ We got an undead woman (player one), who got stabbed by a mexican cannibal (player two) and then became friends(?) as it was just a āsmall misunderstandingā who took the mission for money (and meat). Then we have a mad scientist (player three), who also joined the mission for money. And last we got an elderly hustler/gambler (player four/me) who accidentally got roped into this mission while he was with his hired escort (player five), and yes, sheās that kind of escort.
The mexican shot four thieves dead, the undead shot one dead and I killed one with lightning magic (yes, Iām the āwizardā). But as nobody saw me use magic, nobody knows I can do it yet. The scientist is very suspicious of me, though.
We then got an escort mission as a followup, which will be the main storyline of the mini-adventure. And thatās where we are.
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Sounds like fun!
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@Atazhaia said in D&D thread:
We then got an escort mission as a followup
With player 5's definition of escort?
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@Atazhaia said in D&D thread:
āwizardā
Huckster :)
The scientist is very suspicious of me, though.
Itās probably a good idea to not stand too close to any mad scientist when theyāre using their gadgets in any case.
Though come to think of it, in the last Deadlands campaign I ran, it wasnāt the mad scientistās gadgets that killed half the group but his fondness of dynamite. The player had bought several sticks of it, and used it a few times to try and solve problems.
First time, he wanted to derail a train. We were playing one of the published adventures, and I had printed out its nice, isometric-style map of the town at A4 size to put in the middle of the table. The player points out on it where heās going to place the dynamite (beyond the station at which the approaching train is very likely to stop ā¦) and I ask, āAre you going to take cover anywhere?ā He picks the closest building shown on the map: an outhouse.
When I work out the blast radius, the outhouse is squarely within it, and going by the book, the blast soundly knocks it down. With our mad scientist inside. Oops. BTB, the outhouse actually gives him some armour, but he still takes enough damage to be fatally wounded. As I recall, he had to throw away all of his poker chips to survive reasonably intact.
The last time he used his dynamite was in a different town, which ended up being overrun by undead under the control of some evil mastermind. The mad scientist and another player climbed up onto the flat roof of a building to be out of their way, while still being able to shoot down at them. And throw dynamite at them, of course. To help with that, he cut the fuses of his five remaining sticks so they would only be a few secondsā long, and laid out all of the dynamite on the roof so he can grab them quickly.
First stick he throws, he goes bust on the roll. As he raises the lit dynamite to throw it, it slips from his fingers and falls behind his back ā¦
ā¦ amongst the other four sticks ā¦
ā¦ with neither of the players having any actions left this turn ā¦
ā¦ or the mad scientist any poker chips left to affect the roll ā¦
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
āAre you going to take cover anywhere?ā He picks the closest building shown on the map: an outhouse.
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
in the last Deadlands campaign I ran, it wasnāt the mad scientistās gadgets that killed half the group but his fondness of dynamite.
There's another
way to kill yourself (or your favorite mad scientist) with dynamite.As you may know, dynamite is made of nitroglycerine that has been absorbed by a porous stabilizer. (Originally, as invented by Alfred Nobel, the sorbent/stabilizer was diatomaceous earth. Modern versions may use other sorbents, such as clay, and chemical stabilizers in addition to the sorbent.) Dynamite is made in various grades, based on the nitroglycerine content, and higher grades may weep nitroglycerine through the cardboard tube. (Even lower grades will weep eventually, if stored too long.)
In addition to its use as an explosive, nitroglycerine is also used as a drug for the treatment of angina pectoris caused by inadequate blood flow to the heart. It acts as a vasodilator, lowering blood pressure, reducing the amount of work the heart needs to do and thus the amount of oxygen it needs. Like any drug, using too much or using it without actually having the condition for which it would be appropriate can have seriously bad effects; in the case of nitroglycerine, these include dangerously low blood pressure and methemoglobinemia (oxidizing the Fe2+ in hemoglobin to Fe3+, making it incapable of transporting oxygen in the blood).
Nitroglycerine can be absorbed through the skin.
I have a friend whose family owned a gold mine; thus, he had legitimate, legal access to and use for dynamite. He learned the facts as detailed above, as well as the necessity of wearing gloves while handling (at least weepy) dynamite as a result of nearly killing himself due to nitroglycerine overdose from high-grade dynamite.
As a GM, it might be fun to similarly instruct your next mad scientist on the safe handling of dynamite.
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Our mad scientist also has a fondness for explosives, but hasn't had an opportunity to use it... yet. Today we got into a couple fights vs random monsters. A group of tumblebleeds was first. I overkilled one heavily thanks to some very explodey damage dices, and got the killing blow on two others. The only one who got sucked was the zombie woman in the group, so that tumblebleed would have been very drunk before it got blasted to bits by a rifle.
Then a couple days later we encountered a dust devil. Time to shine for me and the scientist, as we were the ones that could attack it without a penalty. Although the mexican did get a shot in on it first too, thankfully hitting as that monster will spit back any projectile that misses it and it has a large penalty on hitting it with regular weapons.
Sunday 18 May 2008
