D&D thread
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@Jaloopa and I thought my party was fscked up, mentally unstable, and obsessed with absurd business schemes.
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One from Shadowrun campaigns way back:
One of our party was a Troll who lugged around a minigun. We had lain a trap for the enemies which basically consisted of him standing opposite of the doors of an elevator with a not unconsiderable number of baddies coming up in it. The door goes DING!, he opens up ... and only rolls 1s. He basically stenciled the outlines of the guys into the elevator walls after which his minigun jammed...
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I just got back from running a game where the party got 200 year old dwarven booze from a sealed vault(1) and parlayed it into working for the (unknown to them, but probably not unsuspected) big bag guys. That'll keep them alive when the fire cult dwarves enslave everybody around and won't get their souls bound to constructs, but the cult really had no intention of letting them free.
- It's a ruined dwarven city, with the BBEGs sitting mostly underground and about to come out and conquer all the other groups around.
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
@Parody said in D&D thread:
It doesn't help that we had close to 20 years of TSR/WotC/Hasbro not doing much of anything digitally while
college students with too much free timededicated gamers made digital versions of the books available via all sorts of file sharing systems.More like close to 30 years.
I was dropping recent years where they've mostly come around.
I still have some text files somewhere, that people had typed over from AD&D rulebooks and posted on BBSs in the early ’90s.
I bet I have similar files to yours somewhere. There was also the outliers that were the Core Rules CDs for AD&D 2nd.
Yet they started out so well. In the back of the first print run of the D&D3 Player’s Handbook (from 2000) was a CD-ROM with a character generator, for example.
Sadly, it was just a demo of what became E-Tools, and that product was pretty bad from what I remember. I never got around to trying it myself; the CD is still sealed in my copy of the 3.0 Player's Handbook.
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@Rhywden said in D&D thread:
One of our party was a Troll who lugged around a minigun. We had lain a trap for the enemies which basically consisted of him standing opposite of the doors of an elevator with a not unconsiderable number of baddies coming up in it. The door goes DING!, he opens up ... and only rolls 1s. He basically stenciled the outlines of the guys into the elevator walls after which his minigun jammed...
I’ve seen that too, more than once. Well, without the all-ones roll, but otherwise: point-blank full-auto attacks that miss entirely. The best one was where a PC with a heavy machine gun on a gyro mount (think steady cam harness) loaded with EX explosive rounds had the main bad guy cornered on the top floor of a tall building. He opens up with his HMG from maybe three metres away, but misses completely. The logical conclusion is that his rounds hit the wall behind the bad guy, and a ten-round burst of explosive ammo is quite good at making holes in a relatively thin interior wall …
On the other side of that wall were the stairs.
@Parody said in D&D thread:
Sadly, it was just a demo of what became E-Tools, and that product was pretty bad from what I remember. I never got around to trying it myself; the CD is still sealed in my copy of the 3.0 Player's Handbook.
I think I tried mine. The pouch is open, but I don’t actually recall anything about the software so it must not have been overly great — or at least not add much to the process of making characters on paper.
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Man this thread took off. Good thing.
I have to say even my GURPS adventure, the one with the little girl you have to save, lasted 4.5 years off a basic situation. No it wasn't a tightly scripted full fledged series of encounters, but even situations can be subverted by the players deciding to just walk away and do something else.For 4.5 years we did this, Girl is captured then saved, she was part of a breeding program specifically designed by the chaos and nature gods to be able to help bring the chaos gods back to our realm. Nature further modified her so she can contain all three gods. Good and evil have no idea of this subplot and are simply trying to shut the gates again, but the players are enlisted to help, bring the girl along who absorbs the gods just when everyone thinks they are shutting the gate. End game you either lock the girl away with all three gods in her, or kill her and let them out into our realm. That's it, and the story went for 4.5 years without any plot holes, because... it's simple.
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Talking about killing characters. Death is always a possibility in my games. Without the risk then characters just run roughshod over everything. But there are times where death is good.
One lizard guy wanting to sacrifice himself to a one on one battle with one of the big baddies.. let him do it and if he dies it's honorable and something that will be talked about.
Save the dancer who claims to have escape on the road after being abducted, only to find out later that she is actually an assassin, well I had to make sure there were little hints for them to figure out before she actually attempted (successfully) to kill off a character.
In both cases, good thing magic and gods exist, because that means resurrections can happen if the body is still intact.
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@KattMan said in D&D thread:
In both cases, good thing magic and gods exist, because that means resurrections can happen if the body is still intact.
My DM usually ends up making us fight something for the dead character's soul.
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@CarrieVS
oh they never get off just free. The guy that fought for the protection of the group and died. Well he had to make a vow to fulfill something for the god, and their needs are not small.
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Todays session in the mini-campaign was mostly uneventful. We travelled to some ruins and climbed into a room, where I fumbled climbing down into it and fell and hurt myself (along with another character who also fumbled her roll) and then got a crit on climbing back out.
Then at the end as we were preparing to leave the town we travelled to after the ruins my danger sense was tingling (special trait: can detect imminent ambushes). So I manage to get out a warning, then the DM has us all roll against luck. Everyone succeeds except for me who fails. And then the DM rolls where I get hit and rolls face, the only place of my body not covered by heavy armor. So I get a crossbow bolt to the face, which does 29 damage. Face is a very bad place to get hit due to the high risk of lethal damages. DM rolls the bonus effects of the hit and gets... the bolt grazing along the side of my face, cutting my cheek (first effect) and ear (second effect), giving me a permanent -2 to hearing and causing A LOT of pain (leads to fainting), but fuck all trauma (would lead towards death) or any effect that would be insta-kill (bolt penetrating skull or similar). Then trying to roll 8d6 to not faint obviously led to a fail (needed to roll 16 or lower), so my character was out for the entire battle.
But that was fine, because my apprentice (played by another in the group) avenged me well by spearing one of the ambushers in the hip so hard it got "amputated" thrice(!) leading to immediate death from one hit. Then he went to the one with the crossbow and hit him in the face with the spear, "amputating" his mouth and causing his death too.
So, yeah, between todays meeting and the next methinks our characters will need a couple days to rest up. Well, mine does anyway to heal the pain and most of the trauma...
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@KattMan said in D&D thread:
@CarrieVS
oh they never get off just free. The guy that fought for the protection of the group and died. Well he had to make a vow to fulfill something for the god, and their needs are not small.We went to the Far Realms and fought an elder god that was also my warlock's patron.
But of course we weren't really fighting it, it was just playing with us, and we played right into its hands. We really were at its mercy but it let us go after exacting a price from me (calculated to make me more unstable and destructive, that being what it fed on) and we found out after we got our rogue back that it only let him go because he'd made his own pact with it (and was now multiclassed) and the entire thing, beginning with it showing me that my friend was in its power and begging me to help him, was a setup.
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@Atazhaia said in D&D thread:
the bolt grazing along the side of my face, cutting my cheek (first effect) and ear (second effect), giving me a permanent -2 to hearing and causing A LOT of pain (leads to fainting)
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spearing one of the ambushers in the hip so hard it got "amputated" thrice(!)
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"amputating" his mouth and causing his death too.Are you playing RoleMaster? It certainly gives every impression with crit effects like those.
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@Gurth We're playing Eon, which is a swedish RPG. Likes unlimited rolls, which can be great when rolling for damage but less great when rolling for anything else. As damage is get the highest number, but rolling for success is rolling below the target value. Unlimited rolls meaning that any 6 rolled means rerolling that dice and adding another.
Amputating being what the DM called it, which is why I had it in quotes. Think it means badly damaging. The added effects to damage depends a bit on where you hit, but can be anything from light wound to severing veins. And causing permanent damages, as happened to my poor elf with his ear. Like the NPC who got his mouth "amputated" where the DM informed of the -2 to personality if he'd ever show his mouth, but he also died from the same wound as the NPC failed the do-not-die roll.
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@Atazhaia Which also reminds me of last summer's campaign, which also was Eon rules. Since the added effect can leave permanent scars giving a penalty to personality if shown. So, last summer one of the characters was playing an orc. Massive, over 2 meters tall. Also managed to roll 12 for the age. So a 12yo giant orcish warrior. He managed to get A LOT of those permanent scars giving personality penalties. So if he'd strip naked he'd go into negative personality due to all the scars all over his body, and also having had his manliness all mutilated from not just one, but two attacks to the groin leaving permanent marks.
Dunno if it was through mercy or not that that character died during the final battle. Poor orc.
During the same campaign I played an orc assassin (different kind of orc, so my character was short). Then he took a fist to the eye making him permanently blind on that eye for a penalty to anything requiring eyesight, including using his crossbow ofc. The worst part being that the fight in question was a bar brawl we started in league with the people we were fighting against, just so'd we'd get thrown into jail. So it wasn't even a serious fight...
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And today we played the final episode of the campaign. So we headed to the volcano, after my elf got some rest. Everyone got strange visions on the way. The volcano erupted. One of the PCs got the disease that been killing NPCs all around us and started slowly dying. Then as we reached the volcano we saw the big bad also coming. Clad in white armor with a black sword, just as the prophecy had said. So we prepare for battle as the ground starts cracking all around us.
As a note, the prophecy had told that one of us (my apprentice) would not be returning from this journey.
So, we enter battle. I get a couple good shots with my bow on the approaching leader before going into swordfight. I take a blow to the face again (only place NOT protected by my armor) and again luckily just gets some scars and is knocked down on the ground. My apprentice is taking care of the minor baddies. So I manage to get back up, then fumbles and hits myself with my sword, then the big bad hits my face AGAIN, cutting my nose and knocking me down again, although this time I faint from the pain. But my apprentice saves the day by cutting down the big bad and everyone is happy, because we all survived!
Of note is that the big bad was carrying a cursed sword, and in this game all elves has a curse that makes them become more introverted with age, eventually giving up on life. I was struck with the sword and felt my curse worsening. Then after the battle my apprentice decides to pick up the cursed sword and takes a massive hit to the curse, sending him straight into irrecoverable depression. I being unconscious so could not warn him.
So while we won the fight and defeated the big bad, the prophecy got fulfilled anyway. As my apprentice ended up as good as dead, "killed" by the cursed blade of the enemy. Not planned by the DM as he wouldn't have enforced prophecy fulfilment, but we players ended up doing it anyway.
Pyrrhic victory ftw!
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@Atazhaia said in D&D thread:
Unlimited rolls meaning that any 6 rolled means rerolling that dice and adding another.
That’s what we used to call open-ended rolls until some marketing type came up with the term “exploding dice” that all the cool kids seem to use nowadays.
Though I find it a bit of an odd system in that, the open-endedness only works for high rolls, and not for low ones on tests where you have to roll low. RoleMaster also did (does?) it downward: roll 01–05 on a D100 and you roll again, but subtract your new roll from the old, just as on 96–100 you rolled again and added to the previous total.
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@Gurth Eon uses three types of dice: d6, d10 and d100. d6 is the most used. Skill tests are roll below target value. Difficulty from number of dice, where 3d6 means normal difficulty which makes sense as most attributes and skills will be in the normal 3-18 range. And yeah, open-ended rolls can screw you up on the skill checks. Harder difficulty: more dice. Easier difficulty: fewer dice.
But it does mean you can make some insane damage. As my character was intentionally highlevel from the start, he had a two-handed sword doing open-ended 5d6+3 damage. And a crit doubles the amount of dice used. So if I would have got to hit the final boss instead of just tanking him I could have got some nice damage in! The d100 is used to see where you hit the enemy, as it has a lot of target areas. Then the d10 is used for extra damage effects, which happens at every 10 damage inflicted. So if I do 27 damage to an enemy I get 2 extra effects. (And the d10 is also used for fumbling.)
The extra effects is what causes the damage. Eon does not use HP, rather it has pain, trauma and bleeding/blood loss, along with something called shock value. Pain wont kill you, but it can knock you unconscious. For every pain level gained you have to make a roll against shock value to not faint. Trauma works the same way, but for every level gained you have to roll against shock value to not die. Maxing out either will automatically knock you out or kill you. Bleeding is the most straightforward. Run out of blood and you die.
Although it does make for a lot of rolling when extra effects happen. Saving throw against getting limbs broken or cut off, saving throw against having the weapon get stuck, saving throw against any pain and/or trauma levels gained...
Also, considering how nasty extra effects to the face can be I'm surprised my character survived 3 blows with a total of 6 extra effects to it (2, 1 and 3).
- Minor scar on cheek from crossbow bolt
- Ear ruined by same crossbow bolt (-2 hearing)
- Nose cut in half (succeeded on saving throw against permanent penalty)
- Major scar across face to go with the nose piercing
And something like -5 personality if I'd show my face.
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
@Atazhaia said in D&D thread:
Unlimited rolls meaning that any 6 rolled means rerolling that dice and adding another.
That’s what we used to call open-ended rolls until some marketing type came up with the term “exploding dice” that all the cool kids seem to use nowadays.
I encountered that for the first time in Star Wars D6 (second edition, I think -- definitely not first edition, but I can't remember if it was 2nd ed or what we called "1.5" ed), it was called "free dice" (at least in French, no idea what the name was in English).
But there were two key differences: one, it only applied to one specific dice amongst your pool (typically one of a different colour), not to any dice. And two...:
Though I find it a bit of an odd system in that, the open-endedness only works for high rolls, and not for low ones on tests where you have to roll low. RoleMaster also did (does?) it downward: roll 01–05 on a D100 and you roll again, but subtract your new roll from the old, just as on 96–100 you rolled again and added to the previous total.
SW did it the same way. A 6 was added to the total and rerolled, a 1 would be deducted from the total and rerolled. I think there was a limitation that if you rolled one of the two (6 or 1) on the first roll, then only that same number on further rerolls would count as special (i.e. rolling a 6 after a 1 would deduct the 6 (and the 1), but you would not reroll again the dice and add instead of substracting).
Although I quickly preferred an alternative rule (which I think was suggested in the rules book?), where the 6 would add and reroll, but the 1 would trigger a critical -- not necessarily a failure since the total of the dice might still be enough for the required threshold, but an unintended bad side effect. For example you kill the guy but he falls onto something that makes a lot of noise and blows your quiet infiltration.
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
@Atazhaia said in D&D thread:
the bolt grazing along the side of my face, cutting my cheek (first effect) and ear (second effect), giving me a permanent -2 to hearing and causing A LOT of pain (leads to fainting)
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spearing one of the ambushers in the hip so hard it got "amputated" thrice(!)
…
"amputating" his mouth and causing his death too.Are you playing RoleMaster? It certainly gives every impression with crit effects like those.
I remember those tables from MERP (the Middle-Earth version of RoleMaster). One is stuck in my memory forever: "you stumble on an tortoise that is as invisible as slippery, and fall down"
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"Amputation" I love the way GURPS handles this.
Limbs have 1/2 the health of the body in general.. Hit points are a bit of a guide here. Let's say you have 10, you won't fully die until you are at -60. at zero you roll to see if you are conscious, roll under your normal health. at -10 you roll to see if you are conscious with a -1 to normal health. So with limbs if they take 5 points of damage in a single blow, they are amputated, literally. hands and feet are 1/3 health.Now you can take many paper cuts an not get amputated but a single blow doing that much damage does take it off. Armour is very important in GURPS and weapon based modifications to damage are also important. Armor doesn't make you harder to hit, just makes you harder to damage, just like real life. Matter of fact, heavy armor can make you easier to hit, but so little damage will get through.
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@remi said in D&D thread:
SW did it the same way. A 6 was added to the total and rerolled, a 1 would be deducted from the total and rerolled.
It did? I’ve only played it a few times, but I thought you only got rerolls on a 6. Where are my rulebooks?
Aha. The original second-edition rulebook says that on a 1, you roll another die, and on a 1–5 you suffer a penalty (lose the wild die and the highest-rolling other die), but on a 6 it’s a complication (something goes badly wrong).
The revised second edition does away with the additional roll and leaves it up to the GM whether to apply either of those effects, or just use the total roll including the 1 from the wild die.
Although I quickly preferred an alternative rule (which I think was suggested in the rules book?), where the 6 would add and reroll, but the 1 would trigger a critical
This seems to be the normal rule. Maybe the one your group used was the optional one, and you’re confusing the two?
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@KattMan said in D&D thread:
Armor doesn't make you harder to hit, just makes you harder to damage, just like real life.
Armour making you harder to hit is very much a D&D(-based) thing. Now, if both to-hit and damage caused are wrapped up into a single roll that also involves the target’s armour, sure, it makes sense. The way (A)D&D handles armour is just silly, really, but a lot of games seem to have copied the idea that armour makes you harder to hit but doesn’t affect how much damage you take.
Matter of fact, heavy armor can make you easier to hit, but so little damage will get through.
CP2020 did this fairly well, but unfortunately has such a big damage spread between weapons and such strong armour that it’s either very deadly or almost impossible to hurt someone, with little in-between.
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
Although I quickly preferred an alternative rule (which I think was suggested in the rules book?), where the 6 would add and reroll, but the 1 would trigger a critical
This seems to be the normal rule. Maybe the one your group used was the optional one, and you’re confusing the two?
It seems that we applied the normal rule as you described it, except that most of the time as the GM I went for the complication (rather than just counting the 1 as such, or deducting the highest dice), for maximum dramatic/comedic effect. I probably simply misremembered by thinking it was optional. I'm fairly sure what I described is the rule we used, but since we very seldom referred to the actual rules book, I'm not really surprised that I would have got the "official" rules wrong. I don't remember at all the "penalty on 1-5, complication on 6" rule and I never used it, but it may be that what was published as the 2nd edition in French was what you call the "revised" 2nd ed.
I know that what we used was a mix between the first and second edition (with some bits from what we called the "1.5" edition which was just a rules supplement -- at least, it was published as such in French). They probably didn't make a whole lot of sense together, in terms of rules mechanisms, but when playing SW rules very quickly became just a weak scaffolding for pure Space Opera heroism, so it didn't matter much, and I've almost entirely forgotten which bits came from which edition. I remember that I fairly often did not roll any dice, or rolled them behind the screen just for noise and make-believe, but blatantly ignored the result, and went instead for whatever dramatic and spectacular action the PCs were going with, in the spirit of swinging across pits on a thin rope with someone grabbing you and in the middle of heavy enemy fire.
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@remi said in D&D thread:
may be that what was published as the 2nd edition in French was what you call the "revised" 2nd ed.
With second edition I meant the one on the left, with revised, the one on the right:
It looks like both versions were also published in French, though, so that still doesn’t really get us anywhere:
The normal second edition one is black and white, with a few pages in colour (mainly very believable adverts), the other one is entirely in colour, at least in English.
I remember that I fairly often did not roll any dice, or rolled them behind the screen just for noise and make-believe, but blatantly ignored the result
Ever GMed Paranoia? :)
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
It looks like both versions were also published in French, though, so that still doesn’t really get us anywhere:
Except what you're showing here are the second edition on the left and the first one on the right, not the "revised 2nd".
I don't think there were more than one version of the 2nd printed in France. Based on the covers, I'd say it probably was the "normal" one, not the "revised", but really, that's a weak argument.
The normal second edition one is black and white, with a few pages in colour (mainly very believable adverts), the other one is entirely in colour, at least in English.
AFAIR (OK, I'll really need to find the box where those books are now!), in French both books mentioned above were in black and white with a few colour inserts. But of course, that choice is most likely entirely a printing choice (linked to cost!) and there is no reason why it would have been the same in all countries, so that probably doesn't tell us a lot.
I remember that I fairly often did not roll any dice, or rolled them behind the screen just for noise and make-believe, but blatantly ignored the result
Ever GMed Paranoia? :)
Actually, yes
Well, played it mostly (same group essentially, but someone else was the regular Paranoia GM), but I know what you mean. And, as unlikely as it may sound, playing it informed a lot our play style in other games, as it showed us how much the GM can ignore or bend rules in order to attain a specific result (of course with Paranoia the results you're aiming for are not quite the same as in SW...), and how to do it without breaking the fun and flow of the game (which might be doing it quietly, but in some cases might mean doing it in the most obvious way such as rolling the dice in plain sight and pointedly not looking at it before announcing the result, sometimes this adds to the thrill of the game to know that the GM "cheated").
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Actually it seems I'm wrong, the revised 2nd ed was published in French, according to this site (I'd forgotten about it, but "le grog" was a solid reference about RPG stuff in France, so their list is probably trust-worthy. Anyway, I never owned, read, nor obviously played with that book.
It also looks like I can find a matching English book for every French one that I had, at least for the main rules book/companion guides, so there probably wasn't too much shifting of content between books as it sometimes happens with translations.
So, back to the original sub-thread, the "free dice" rule that I read was probably only ever the 2nd edition one, and it was our group who decided to almost exclusively use the 1 as meaning complication, deviating slightly from the actual rules that we had access to.
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Not a story, just a remark that a friend of mine is bringing me back a copy of the new Shadowrun Sixth World Core Rulebook (basically, Shadowrun 6th Edition) from GenCon and I'm already starting to get the jonesin' for some cyberpunk...
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While we're doing statuses, I'm starting a Star Wars: Edge of the Empire PBF campaign soon. I quite like the system, as it involves custom dice which contain both successes and advantages (and opposing failures and threats). I.e. you can be successful but suffer a setback i.e. drop your gun, or fail your roll but gain an advantage, like falling into cover after the attack. The system also really tries to put the focus on the narrative.
They've also released it as a generic system, Genesys, if you want to use it outside of the Star Wars universe.
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@remi said in D&D thread:
Except what you're showing here are the second edition on the left and the first one on the right, not the "revised 2nd”.
You’re probably right, I couldn’t find the one with the Millennium Falcon in French and kind of assumed the colour one would be the revised edition. Especially in light of your other reply with the revised cover in French :)
AFAIR (OK, I'll really need to find the box where those books are now!), in French both books mentioned above were in black and white with a few colour inserts. But of course, that choice is most likely entirely a printing choice (linked to cost!) and there is no reason why it would have been the same in all countries, so that probably doesn't tell us a lot.
True, I’ve got Shadowrun second and third edition main rulebooks couple of different languages, and some include the colour plates while others don’t, for example. Hungarian third-edition books are even printed on very cheap, lightweight, non-bleached paper.
rolling the dice in plain sight and pointedly not looking at it before announcing the result, sometimes this adds to the thrill of the game to know that the GM "cheated").
Not sure that’s a good tactics in most other games, though :)
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In AD&D, you normally roll 3D6 for each of your six ability scores. I persuaded the
GMDM™ to instead allow me to distribute 63 points over them, as that would get me the same average as someone who rolled, but more control over the outcome. The reason theGMDM™ allowed me to was that I assigned them as follows (including modifiers for beng a dwarf):- Strength 18
- Dexterity 18
- Constitution 19
- Intelligence 3
- Wisdom 3
- Charisma 2
As AD&D didn’t include a Barbarian class, I made him a fighter wearing nothing but a leather loincloth, some belts, a helmet and a cloak, and played him as (hopefully) stupid as his stats. One of the better ones was that coins are money, so more coins is more money, so he’d happily take two copper pieces over one gold piece (=100 copper).
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
As AD&D didn’t include a Barbarian class, I made him a fighter wearing nothing but a leather loincloth, some belts, a helmet and a cloak, and played him as (hopefully) stupid as his stats. One of the better ones was that coins are money, so more coins is more money, so he’d happily take two copper pieces over one gold piece (=100 copper).
My brother played a Barb with a 2 (I think) in wisdom. He used his axe of inquiry often. Anything he didn't understand, he would throw his axe at it.
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
Strength 18
Dexterity 18
Constitution 19
Intelligence 3
Wisdom 3
Charisma 2Wow. That's...unusual. I've always heard that mental attributes that low would basically make an unplayable character, because you'd essentially have no higher brain function and would work entirely on instinct.
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
rolling the dice in plain sight and pointedly not looking at it before announcing the result, sometimes this adds to the thrill of the game to know that the GM "cheated").
Not sure that’s a good tactics in most other games, though :)
It usually isn't, but it is a useful GM'ing technique to be aware of. Once in a while, everyone wants the story to go in one direction, whether it's likely to happen or not, but because they are e.g. in the middle of a fight, they might feel that not rolling the dice would be a bit weird, would break the flow of the game or something like this. So if the GM can properly feel the mood of his group (and of course playing with the same group for years helps a lot!), sometimes it can work. It's purely psychological in the end, but RPG are social games first and foremost, so it's not really surprising.
My point is, Paranoia uses unconventional GM'ing tools that are very well suited to Paranoia, but that actually can be used, sparingly, in other cases. It's kind of like looking at IOCCC code: it's awful (and often awe-full as well), but at the same time it reveals dark corners of C and ways of thinking outside the box and unusual patterns that, once in a while and very sparingly, can be used in normal code.
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@e4tmyl33t said in D&D thread:
@Gurth said in D&D thread:
Strength 18
Dexterity 18
Constitution 19
Intelligence 3
Wisdom 3
Charisma 2Wow. That's...unusual.
The idea was to make the ultimate dumb barbarian allowed by the rules.
I've always heard that mental attributes that low would basically make an unplayable character, because you'd essentially have no higher brain function and would work entirely on instinct.
INT 2–4 is “semi-intelligent” according to the Monstrous Manual, so yeah, I didn’t try to overthink things with this character but just hit stuff if that seemed like an option. Talking to people was also not his strong point, what with that same INT 3 causing him to be easily confused and CHA 2 making him not exactly a people person in the first place.
That last one caused a Reaction Adjustment of −6, on a 2d10 roll on a table to determine the reaction of NPCs the character meets. In typical AD&D style, the table is laid out with positive reactions for low rolls and negative reactions on high rolls, and the Reaction Adjustment is subtracted from the 2d10 roll, making it 2d10 − −6 … In any case even with an NPC rated as Friendly, this character would at best get an indifferent reaction out of them (7 or less is a friendly reaction, good luck rolling that on 2d10+6). Hostile NPCs would at the very best be cautious, but on average would probably attack on sight. Not that this mattered to me, of course.
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
@remi said in D&D thread:
I remember that I fairly often did not roll any dice, or rolled them behind the screen just for noise and make-believe, but blatantly ignored the result
Ever GMed Paranoia? :)
Paranoia is my favorite RPG! I used to run an event or two at every gaming convention I attended. It was always fun to just sit back and let the players paint themselves into a corner or try to figure out some incomprehensible prop you gave them. It is, after all, their job to entertain you!
I still haven't run one with the new card-based system. Just reading it I'm not that enthused. Thankfully, the system was never the point in Paranoia.
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@Parody said in D&D thread:
let the players paint themselves into a corner
Quite literally in the case of a scenario that I remember where they have to repaint a corridor that was erroneously painted the wrong colour (and of course this isn't officially acknowledged and the Computer still believes the corridor to be of the "right" colour)...
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@Parody said in D&D thread:
Paranoia is my favorite RPG! I used to run an event or two at every gaming convention I attended.
I remember GMing it at GenCon UK once, and two players wanted to do something that resulted in them basically going head-to-head. I tell them to roll a die to resolve the issue. One of them takes a D6 and rolls it, the other then takes a D20 and of course rolls a lot higher. I wish I could remember whether I let the D20 guy get away with it, or said something like, “You needed to roll low for this.”
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This seems like the best topic to drop this:
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@mott555 That’s like the Chaos dice GW apparently sold about 30 years ago. I never saw them, but I remember reading about them in a magazine — apparently these were D6s that had the word CHAOS printed on all six sides.
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@mott555 And if people don't fall for that, you can always try these:
Non transitive Grime dice
In this set of dice, green tends to beat red, red tends to beat yellow, yellow tends to beat blue, and blue tends to beat purple. So you might think green is the best dice and purple is t...
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This is a classic
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@boomzilla TBQH, I've probably touched more lives meaningfully as the leader of the D&D club than as a straight teacher. At least that I know of. One of my most satisfying moments was being told "I only made it through my senior year because I knew that at lunch on Wednesdays was D&D club." The sub-text there was that she didn't have tons of friends outside of that and it gave her a place to belong. Which I would have sacrificed small animals for in high school, myself.
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A comment in another thread made me think of an anecdote that someone I used to know online once told me.
As you may or may not know, White Wolf’s Storyteller games also supported using them for LARPs, so you got Vampire LARPs, Werewolf LARPs, etc. Now, some people in this guy’s area organised a LARP in which you could bring any Storyteller-game character, the idea obviously being to have a game in which vampires mix with werewolves, mages, changelings, and what have you in a big story of intrigue, backstabbing, inter-faction rivalry, etc. etc. etc.
My friend decided to make a character using this book:
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@Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
The gnomish engineer, Moon-man, is the one responsible for maintaining the constructs that make the town work. He's totally sane, except that he's building rockets to get to the smaller moon, where he believes that there are endless waves of beautiful, scantily-clad gnomish women waiting for him. His inventions tend to the...dramatically unstable.
So in other words, a perfectly typical tinker gnome?
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@Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
@Carnage Honestly, I don't plan stories. I plan carefully-balanced situations. Houses of cards, stacks of dominoes. It's all wired so that any outside disruption (as PCs are wont to do) will make it all start snowballing down. Somewhere. Somehow. Where it goes is totally unpredictable, but it will be a fun ride getting there. Once the players start meddling, the world will have to react to them and they will have to react to the world's reaction, and so it goes.
I learned this after my first groups took my plots and ran at right angles to reality at the first opportunity. No point in doing more than about a session's worth of detailed planning at a time--the rest of the planning time can be used to build the whole surrounding world in more clarity so that when they inevitably go somewhere you don't expect, there's stuff waiting for them. That way you get a reputation as being able to predict everything, even though you were actually totally blindsided.
See also: Darths & Droids
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
@Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
Once the players start meddling, the world will have to react to them and they will have to react to the world's reaction, and so it goes.
At the game club, one of the players in the short Shadowrun campaign I ran there some years ago remarked to me that he liked me as GM because I don’t say “no” to things players want to try. Apparently, the other GMs he’s played with do that when they feel a player’s actions will screw too much with the story they have in mind. I just tell them to roll some or another test, and then let the chips fall where they may.
[as Matt Mercer] "I'll allow it. Go ahead and make a [whatever] roll..."
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@CarrieVS said in D&D thread:
You just gotta build in an exception for when Vox Machina or the Mighty Nein did a similar thing, and did it better than you, at least if you're not also a professional actor. And Travis Willingham might even be the best actor of the bunch.
My personal favorite was when Grog scored a natural 20 on some completely random knowledge check and then played the entire thing perfectly in-character.
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
@KattMan said in D&D thread:
Armor doesn't make you harder to hit, just makes you harder to damage, just like real life.
Armour making you harder to hit is very much a D&D(-based) thing. Now, if both to-hit and damage caused are wrapped up into a single roll that also involves the target’s armour, sure, it makes sense. The way (A)D&D handles armour is just silly, really, but a lot of games seem to have copied the idea that armour makes you harder to hit but doesn’t affect how much damage you take.
Shad Brooks had a great video on this.
