D&D thread
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
@Applied-Mediocrity said in D&D thread:
Holy hell, I thought you guys were tabletop old guard, with belt onion+2 and gold pieces with bumblebees on them.
TBH, I get the impression that on here, that describes me …
#MeToo, but it's probably only a +1
Around 20 years ago was when I mostly checked out, having tried D&D 3 and not liking it one bit. Since then, I've dipped a toe in the hobby every now and again, but I can only do it for so long before I am overcome with the urge to travel to Renton, WA and murder everyone with a pointy stick of getting poked in unmentionable orifices and need to have a lie-down.
Can confirm that not only did we never consider character roles in MMORPG terms at the time, but doing so would lead directly to a TPK.
Also, we used to throw rules-lawyers into a Sphere of Annihilation. Those were the days...
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@Applied-Mediocrity oh, I'm an avid player and dm. I just started late. It's my main social hobby.
Which reminds me. I think I'm stable enough here that I can start looking for groups again.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
I think I'm stable enough here that I can start looking for groups again.
My initial read of that was "I think I'm [mentally and/or emotionally] stable enough...", which was met with a degree of skepticism. Then I realized you were talking about your job and relocation.
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@HardwareGeek said in D&D thread:
@Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
I think I'm stable enough here that I can start looking for groups again.
My initial read of that was "I think I'm [mentally and/or emotionally] stable enough...", which was met with a degree of skepticism. Then I realized you were talking about your job and relocation.
I have no illusions about my mental and emotional stability. Or rather the absolute lack thereof.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in D&D thread:
@Gurth It was ultimately the Building an RPG system thread that made me think you all kind of were avid players and mechanics experts
I’m quite good at remembering game rules, but my main talent in this area is finding things again in the books I’ve read them in. This is a very useful skill to have for an RPG gamemaster (but, as usual, depends on practice — I can’t do it as well today with an AD&D book as I could seven or eight years ago when I ran my last campaign of that, for example).
I've just never really taken much to the math aspect of TT, yet being any good at that sort of thing amazes me. I guess I'm more concerned with the amateur theater aspect of it all.
I’ve done enough writing for RPGs that I think I’ve developed a good enough feel for it. But I’m no maths wizard who goes very deep into that part of game mechanics either. However, the actual role-playing part also isn’t my main thing. This is why I have problems with many modern rules sets I’ve seen or are aware of: they all focus very heavily on the theatre side of things, IMHO. That results in them putting the game system too far down on their list of priorities, and going for too generic a set of rules “so they don’t get in the way of the story.” What I look for is rules that cater to letting players try the things they typically want to do in the setting, and make a noticeable difference in that aspect.
@GOG said in D&D thread:
Around 20 years ago was when I mostly checked out, having tried D&D 3 and not liking it one bit.
I didn’t mind D&D3, but as I’ve mentioned before (more than once), I vastly prefer AD&D2 for this type of game — mainly due to it not being so sterile as D&D3.
Can confirm that not only did we never consider character roles in MMORPG terms at the time, but doing so would be lead directly to a TPK.
It wouldn’t even work with a typical D&D game, I think. Fighters in that game are pretty much tank and DPS in one, and anyone with healing spells is not going to have enough to keep everyone alive anyway against typical MMORPG-style encounters.
@Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
It's my main social hobby.
Same, and this is why I
amhave been getting ever more pissed off that attempts to actually get the group together have been frustrated by things outside of my control over the past few years. (We used to play once a week. It became once every two weeks some years ago, and then approximately once a month, but it depended a lot — sometimes two weeks in a row, sometimes nothing for two months. By now we haven’t played at all since late February because of — no points for guessing — corona. That I can sort of understand, but the rest of it seems to be for no reason I can discern, other than one player thinking, “I don’t feel like it this week” and thereby scuttling it for the rest of us as well.)
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
@Applied-Mediocrity said in D&D thread:
@Gurth It was ultimately the Building an RPG system thread that made me think you all kind of were avid players and mechanics experts
I’m quite good at remembering game rules, but my main talent in this area is finding things again in the books I’ve read them in. This is a very useful skill to have for an RPG gamemaster (but, as usual, depends on practice — I can’t do it as well today with an AD&D book as I could seven or eight years ago when I ran my last campaign of that, for example).
Whereas I can't remember where something is, but I'm pretty good about remembering what is there. My memory works on a flag system, but the schema doesn't always store all the information...
I've just never really taken much to the math aspect of TT, yet being any good at that sort of thing amazes me. I guess I'm more concerned with the amateur theater aspect of it all.
I’ve done enough writing for RPGs that I think I’ve developed a good enough feel for it. But I’m no maths wizard who goes very deep into that part of game mechanics either. However, the actual role-playing part also isn’t my main thing. This is why I have problems with many modern rules sets I’ve seen or are aware of: they all focus very heavily on the theatre side of things, IMHO. That results in them putting the game system too far down on their list of priorities, and going for too generic a set of rules “so they don’t get in the way of the story.” What I look for is rules that cater to letting players try the things they typically want to do in the setting, and make a noticeable difference in that aspect.
I strongly prefer systems that are neither purely theatrical (especially those where the players are in author stance instead of character stance) nor purely mechanical/simulationist. I want the game mechanics to be
- simple -- common things shouldn't take much time or thought to resolve
- robust in play -- can handle a wide variety of play styles and shouldn't fall apart if you decide not to apply certain rules (or vice versa). Or if your monsters don't have the "right" numbers. The "happy path" should be pretty wide, numerically.
- easy to modify/modular, especially with regards to content. This generally means having unified core mechanics, which rules out AD&D.
- thematic -- the mechanics and core content should try to do something specific theme wise. Generic systems fail at this.
- not comprehensive -- I want there to be large scope for DM/GM involvement. The GM should be much more than just a rules engine (when it comes to the mechanics). This is largely because I have found ones that try to avoid this to be too constraining and inflexible.
- accepting of different settings -- one thing I really don't like about the White Wolf games is that they're bound to one specific world and lore. Worldbuilding is one of my big draws, don't take it away from me.
For me, 5e D&D hits enough of the needs to be my standard game. And I'm a heavy homebrewer--my world is heavily custom, and I routinely make new monsters, items, classes, races, etc. Much more than I have the chance to actually play-test, sadly.
@GOG said in D&D thread:
Around 20 years ago was when I mostly checked out, having tried D&D 3 and not liking it one bit.
I didn’t mind D&D3, but as I’ve mentioned before (more than once), I vastly prefer AD&D2 for this type of game — mainly due to it not being so sterile as D&D3.
D&D3 is ok, but painful to run and learn. I'd only play it if there wasn't a group for 5e (or even 4e). AD&D2 is too hard to get into--the corpus is massive and the core books/mechanics too scattered for me.
Can confirm that not only did we never consider character roles in MMORPG terms at the time, but doing so would be lead directly to a TPK.
It wouldn’t even work with a typical D&D game, I think. Fighters in that game are pretty much tank and DPS in one, and anyone with healing spells is not going to have enough to keep everyone alive anyway against typical MMORPG-style encounters.
Agreed, although 4e came closest. There's no aggro mechanic, for one thing. For another, the turn-based nature means that pure healbots just don't work. You also can't do the standard MMO-style "progression", because there's no death-reset. Although I've incorporated cinematic-style fights based on some MMO mechanics in my games, just heavily modified to fit the very different media.
@Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
It's my main social hobby.
Same, and this is why I
amhave been getting ever more pissed off that attempts to actually get the group together have been frustrated by things outside of my control over the past few years. (We used to play once a week. It became once every two weeks some years ago, and then approximately once a month, but it depended a lot — sometimes two weeks in a row, sometimes nothing for two months. By now we haven’t played at all since late February because of — no points for guessing — corona. That I can sort of understand, but the rest of it seems to be for no reason I can discern, other than one player thinking, “I don’t feel like it this week” and thereby scuttling it for the rest of us as well.)I've had groups since the pandemic, mostly virtual. But I've also moved across state lines twice this year (Florida -> Idaho -> Oregon) and no longer have my student groups (since I'm not a teacher any more). I can restart the group with my nephews, but we'll have to transition to virtual desktops (since they're in Idaho). But I'll need to find at least one other group, preferably in person. Sadly my current city is one of the super-panic ones with the virus, so they're still mostly in lock-down. Despite having basically no cases. The next city over (in a different county) is much more open, but fewer groups to find and much more of a drive.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
Whereas I can't remember where something is, but I'm pretty good about remembering what is there. My memory works on a flag system, but the schema doesn't always store all the information...
The way I find things again in books is by visual cues and association, I eventually noticed: I recognise illustrations, the shape of the page layout, and similar things and know I’m in the right part of the book.
I strongly prefer systems that are neither purely theatrical (especially those where the players are in author stance instead of character stance) nor purely mechanical/simulationist.
Agreed, though I think in my preference, the balance lies more towards the latter than the former.
- easy to modify/modular, especially with regards to content. This generally means having unified core mechanics, which rules out AD&D.
AD&D is very easy to modify — just make something up without any regard for pre-existing rules. It’s what T$R did, after all!
(That said, this seems to have been the default for games publishers until at least the mid-80s. I mean, look at the mess Warhammer rules are for another high-profile example.)
- thematic -- the mechanics and core content should try to do something specific theme wise. Generic systems fail at this.
This. You can use the game system to help with the flavour of the setting, and using d20 or GURPS or whatever for every genre will totally remove that. This because the rules are the physics of the setting: if you’re trying to do, say, a gritty modern crime setting, but use d20 for it “because that makes it easy for players to get into” you’ll generally end up with a setting that feels like “crime D&D” rather than Breaking Bad.
- accepting of different settings -- one thing I really don't like about the White Wolf games is that they're bound to one specific world and lore. Worldbuilding is one of my big draws, don't take it away from me.
Whereas I prefer games with an in-depth world that gives me plenty of built-in plot lines and hooks I can use to build on. That said, I found I just can’t work with White Wolf’s World of Darkness (the original one, anyway) — every time I’ve tried a campaign in that, it fell very flat.
D&D3 is ok, but painful to run and learn. I'd only play it if there wasn't a group for 5e (or even 4e). AD&D2 is too hard to get into--the corpus is massive and the core books/mechanics too scattered for me.
I have the advantage there, I think, that AD&D2 is the first RPG I ever played.
It wouldn’t even work with a typical D&D game, I think. Fighters in that game are pretty much tank and DPS in one, and anyone with healing spells is not going to have enough to keep everyone alive anyway against typical MMORPG-style encounters.
Agreed, although 4e came closest. There's no aggro mechanic, for one thing.
That’s the main reason I can’t see the possibility of having a tank-type character in a typical fantasy RPG. Sure, you’ve got a lot of hit points and great armour. But those orcs will just attack whoever the DM™ wants them to anyway.
Naturally, it would be possible to write a set of RPG rules that has all this kind of thing. In fact I’ve been toying with doing that as a parody, but nothing has come of it so far. Also, it would probably never get finished anyway :)
I've had groups since the pandemic, mostly virtual.
Really, the only roleplayers I know in my area are the ones I already play with. Though I’m aware there are more, the few I’ve met have all been either simply jackasses or gave me the feeling they had a superiority complex or didn’t appear at all interested in the kinds of games I play, so I have no exactly found any motivation to try and get a group together with them.
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@GOG said in D&D thread:
@Gurth said in D&D thread:
@Applied-Mediocrity said in D&D thread:
Holy hell, I thought you guys were tabletop old guard, with belt onion+2 and gold pieces with bumblebees on them.
TBH, I get the impression that on here, that describes me …
#MeToo, but it's probably only a +1
Around 20 years ago was when I mostly checked out, having tried D&D 3 and not liking it one bit. Since then, I've dipped a toe in the hobby every now and again, but I can only do it for so long before I am overcome with the urge to travel to Renton, WA and murder everyone with a pointy stick of getting poked in unmentionable orifices and need to have a lie-down.
Can confirm that not only did we never consider character roles in MMORPG terms at the time, but doing so would be lead directly to a TPK.
Also, we used to throw rules-lawyers into a Sphere of Annihilation. Those were the days...
Yeah, I used to play a lot of TT 20-25 years ago. Most of the players made tanky characters, with full plate wielding massive twohanders because that helped them survive toe to toe with NPCs.
Some players came up with interesting characters over and over that definitely couldn't fit into the MMORPG formulae, because it requires an intelligent world to be interesting to play.
I personally prefer games without any archetyping or professions. Buy skills and build a character in a way where they come together interesting ways. Also, I like the playing of roles better than long sessions of rolling polygons to decide what happens.
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@Carnage said in D&D thread:
Also, I like the playing of roles better than long sessions of rolling polygons to decide what happens.
I'm currently in the middle of an extended
flamewardiscussion on a different board about how to make social interaction rules that don't suck, to which my answer is: "You don't, because all social interaction rules suck, by definition."
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@GOG that's my general take. Give me a basic uncertainty resolution mechanics and leave me alone to adjudicate based on the fiction.
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@GOG said in D&D thread:
I'm currently in the middle of an extended
flamewardiscussion on a different board about how to make social interaction rulesNobody there is taking the point of view that rules like that are unnecessary because you should just let the players roleplay out the situation?
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
@GOG said in D&D thread:
I'm currently in the middle of an extended
flamewardiscussion on a different board about how to make social interaction rulesNobody there is taking the point of view that rules like that are unnecessary because you should just let the players roleplay out the situation?
I believe someone brought this up, yes.
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The infiltration of the enemy base continues. We never found anyone in the boss's room, but we did find a letter written to the guy we're supposed to be rescuing, as if he were an agent of the bad guys. No one's quite sure where his loyalty lies now. The letter has no signature, but there's a drawing of a spider at the bottom instead.
We made our way to the barracks, and just as my character was inspecting the door for traps, it sprung open and he got sliced by a guard standing on the other side of the door. Zeppo (the rogue) yells at them to stop because we're the new recruits. (Luckily I'm wearing a red cloak scavenged from a guard we killed previously.) She manages to convince two of the three guards in the barracks of this ruse. The third yells at them that we're obviously intruders and not new recruits at all. I curse him out as an idiot (Vicious Mockery) and he fails his save, and the DM decides that he is now Intimidated and thinks I'm someone in a position of authority over him.
They escort us to examine the prisoners. We don't find the guy we're looking for, but a family from the town, that we'd heard had gone missing, is locked up in there. Zeppo bribes the guards to leave, saying we're here to relieve them, and I tell Tweedle-Dummy the intimidated guard that we're actually here on a mission from The Spider. He instantly gets nervous and is all "I hear nothing, I know nothing, I see nothing," so I tell him to see nothing and shoo him out of the room.
Luratio uses his noble bearing to convince everyone that we're actually friends and we're here to get them out of here. Zeppo has a key she found previously, which fits the cells, so we spring them and just walk right out the front door with them, telling the thoroughly cowed guards that we'll be back the next day after we take care of this prisoner transfer for The Spider.
And while we were on our way back to town, the DM had us all roll for initiative. We'll find out why in the next session...
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@Mason_Wheeler assassins. It's always assassins. Or maybe cultists. Cult assassins?
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My Friday game's next session should be the finale of Storm King's Thunder. An I am unbelievably excited because my DM is awesome.
I play a white dragonborn barbarian from a clan that I usually describe as feral. They lived on a mountain in the Spine of the World below the den of an ancient white dragon which they venerated. What caused Sora to leave was a group of adventurers who arrived to slay the dragon. The barbarians intimated that this could be achieved over their dead bodies, which was of course arranged. Sora was absent on a hunting trip and returned to find the carnage. In the personality traits section of her character sheet her bond is simply "vengeance." My DM allowed me to take the Zealot path with the spirit of the ancient dragon as her "patron."
She means to eventually slay her dragon and her clan's killers, but I wasn't expecting to actually find them in the campaign, both because I wasn't expecting the DM to put homebrew stuff into it, and because I didn't expect it to be a level appropriate encounter, but we did manage to meet two of the adventurers responsible, separately, though we failed to kill either. And then we found out who hired them to do it.
That individual clearly wasn't a level appropriate encounter, but eventually we found out they are the (presumably canonical) big bad of the module. So was expecting to just thwart their plans, possibly come to their notice, and maybe set something up for later if we continue to play with this party into higher levels.
Turns out, we get some heavy-duty NPC allies and a chance to attempt to kill the big bad and achieve my VENGEANCE.
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Fickle dice:
My son just read me a tweet. I'm paraphrasing slightly, because I'm repeating it from memory.
I'm playing D&D. Somebody just rolled 10 hit dice [10d8] and recovered a total of 10 HP.
The probability of rolling 10d8 for a total of 10 is 0.00000000093. Literally less than 1 in a billion. That is one very unlucky guy.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
@HardwareGeek said in D&D thread:
@Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
I think I'm stable enough here that I can start looking for groups again.
My initial read of that was "I think I'm [mentally and/or emotionally] stable enough...", which was met with a degree of skepticism. Then I realized you were talking about your job and relocation.
I have no illusions about my mental and emotional stability. Or rather the absolute lack thereof.
I don't suffer from mental instability. I enjoy it immensely.
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@CarrieVS said in D&D thread:
My Friday game's next session should be the finale of Storm King's Thunder. An I am unbelievably excited because my DM is awesome.
I play a white dragonborn barbarian from a clan that I usually describe as feral. They lived on a mountain in the Spine of the World below the den of an ancient white dragon which they venerated. What caused Sora to leave was a group of adventurers who arrived to slay the dragon. The barbarians intimated that this could be achieved over their dead bodies, which was of course arranged. Sora was absent on a hunting trip and returned to find the carnage. In the personality traits section of her character sheet her bond is simply "vengeance." My DM allowed me to take the Zealot path with the spirit of the ancient dragon as her "patron."
...
Turns out, we get some heavy-duty NPC allies and a chance to attempt to kill the big bad and achieve my VENGEANCE.I screwed up all through the fight, fluffed most of my rolls, made a completely absurd mathematical error while trying to calculate a complicated buff and shorted myself 5 to-hit on my first four attacks, and got downed twice without dealing a huge amount of damage. And just as I was psyching myself up to say "My name is Viserion Sora. You killed my clan. Prepare to die." the DM quoted the line and ruined the moment - I attribute my chronic loss of mojo throughout most of the fight to that.
We were all in rough shape except the cleric, and then the enemy turned on the cleric, who'd been keeping out of line of sight in a large pit. She flew down into the pit and gave him a massive area attack all to himself, leaving him conscious but clearly not able to take another round of her attacks.
I was in even worse shape, but I was resigned to dying in this encounter, and fine with it - it would be a perfect place to end Sora's story, as long as we killed this foe, so I made a suicide run. I leaped into the pit, on top of the enemy, using my reckless attack.
Hit both attacks.
I landed square on top of her back, driving my father's greatsword into the base of her neck and severing the spinal cord. The last thing she heard was me bellowing the name of Viserion.
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@CarrieVS Awesome!
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Baldur’s Gate 3 character creator tool lets you test builds right now
A fan-made Baldur's Gate 3 character creator is the perfect way to gear up for release, as it'll fill you in on all your race and subrace details right now.
The most generic fantasy squareface white dude. I can't say I'm surprised. Guess people are mostly RP-ing their fantasy selves. Which is to say, boring. Furthermore, their character will pick the choices they would personally make.
My own character choices are not very creative either. The only game where I actively used nonhuman races was Wizardry 8, but that's because you create a party of up to 6 yourself, and you more or less want those class/race bonuses.
Same thing with alignments - I have not been able to play evil character even though I'm on the warpath with half of the kingdom and all known wildlife to get where I'm going. Although not proper good either even though I help everybody look for their lost kittens and the other shoe.
I'm currently going through Shadowrun vidya (why nobody told me about them before!?) which, most of you probably know, mixes guns, tech, magic and fantasy races in a cyberpunk setting. Me? Again, on the whole same as always. Even scoured DeviantArt for a more suitable portrait.
From developer's perspective it does look like putting in an awful lot of work for, err, minorities. Making sure helmets go with horns, those knife ears don't badly clip with hair, drawing good selection of portraits, and finally designing player-specific mechanics (such as story choices). And then, well... not a lot are playing them.
So we have a dragonborn barbarian from a clan of ferals up there. That's something.
Vidya or tabletop, doesn't matter. What you guys are playing as, generally, where such choice is presented?
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in D&D thread:
What you guys are playing as, generally, where such choice is presented?
I tend to play as high elves, where that is an option. Definitely influenced by Tolkien's concept of elves as being noble. I also tend to play as a wizard, and elves often have some kind of racial affinity or bonus for magic.
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@Applied-Mediocrity depends.
Video games? Female, probably human or close to it. My FFXIV character is a hyur (human) female, max height and...bust. I gravitate towards tank and healing roles in MMOs. Things like skyrim, well, I've played everything. Usually restarting dozens of times to get one that feels right.
Table top, I've been a dm more than a player. But I've played:
- Dwarf knowledge cleric (me, but a dwarf)
- Human bard/warlock. Transgender, but not by choice--her (now) patron had a nasty sense of humor. Longest running character.
- Goliath paladin.
I tend to think less about looks and more about background.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in D&D thread:
What you guys are playing as, generally, where such choice is presented?
Anything that strikes my fancy, really. If I look through my old RPG characters, I see things ranging from an elf fighter (my very first character, in AD&D) to an aging snake-oil salesman (in Deadlands) to an ork sky raider (in Earthdawn) to a hobgoblin cleric (in D&D3) to a dwarf rigger (in Shadowrun), and lots more besides.
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@HardwareGeek I think I might call you @HardwareElf
from now on then 
@Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
I tend to think less about looks and more about background.
I take it as a DM you have a good grasp of the setting before you set out? For example, just to ensure that gender-swapping magic (it is magic, yes?) can be explained in-universe.
Anyway, in vidya there's a good chance to accidentally spoil things while reading up on lore. A "boring" character, however, fits easily, and I then can make shit up as I go.
@Gurth said in D&D thread:
Anything that strikes my fancy
Well then, what describes that fancy? There must be other than random roll in your mind.
dwarf rigger (in Shadowrun)
How true to table rules are Shadowrun vidya? They seem quite... unbalanced. Guns blazing seems to be the go-to solution. Takes a while to get pistol popping, but the endgame just now was crit-crit-pop.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in D&D thread:
And while we were on our way back to town, the DM had us all roll for initiative. We'll find out why in the next session...
Finally got to the next session. The DM retconned the initiative roll. Instead, we struggled a bit with exhausted ex-prisoners stumbling along in the darkness. I used Bardic Inspiration to help them catch their second wind, and we continued onward, but got interrupted by meeting some creepy woman who seemed to know we were coming from the manor. She mentioned that she had a brother who liked to pretend to be human, whatever that means, and spent a few minutes eyeing us all like a predator looking at a bunch of mice... but then let us go without ever rolling initiative.
We made it back to town and got the prisoners into the inn. Everyone was excited to see them, and a bit shocked because they thought they were all dead.
The airhead gossip tavern wench kept making an irritation of herself, talking about how anything and everything is just soooo interesting and she'd just have to talk about it with everyone. Finally she started talking about how the special of the day at the inn was apple streudel. So I asked if they have "doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles," and she pointed out there's a bell on the inn door, then ran off looking for sleigh bells. Finally, out of our hair!
A few more discussions with various townsfolk, who we tried to recruit to help us defend the town against the counterattack that we anticipated would be coming tomorrow, we headed to bed. In the morning, the innkeeper told us that a message had arrived: Glass-staff was calling us out and wanted us to meet him back at the manor, or he would attack the town!
We figured "screw that, if we're gonna fight him anyway, may as well not have it be on his territory." So we set to work preparing, determining three likely routes that bad guys might enter the town. We set out three teams, one at each point, of a commoner NPC and a NPC with class levels. The commoner was to act as a sentry: if they see anyone, run and yell and get adventurers for backup, with the leveled NPC there to help keep them alive. We set ourselves up in the middle of town, ready to respond wherever the bad guys were spotted.
The session ended after that point, but we got just enough EXP to level, so now I'm a L3 Bard, College of Lore. I have a feeling my new Cutting Words ability might come in handy in the upcoming fight...
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in D&D thread:
@HardwareGeek I think I might call you @HardwareElf
from now on then @Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
I tend to think less about looks and more about background.
I take it as a DM you have a good grasp of the setting before you set out? For example, just to ensure that gender-swapping magic (it is magic, yes?) can be explained in-universe.
Absolutely. I'm actually more attached to settings than I am to characters as such. I've spent years working on my own D&D setting--I want characters that could have grown up there. It's one reason I frown on expies (ie "I'm playing Batman, just in D&D!")--they never fit the world well.
In that particular case, it was the Forgotten Realms, and gender-change magic is firmly established there (there's even a cursed Girdle of Gender-Change that showed up in 2e). This was a divine transformation anyway, not mortal magic. The character had struck a deal with a powerful servant of the god of music--he'd go questing against evil and the god would grant him the "world's best voice" (he had been kicked out of court minstrel school after puberty when his voice broke badly. The servant decided that the world's best voice belonged to a particular female opera singer...and since it would go against the natural order for that voice to come out of a male body, he, well, meddled a bit. At first, the character was not enthused and wore baggy androgenous clothes to hide the change; eventually he (now she) said "forget it" and went all in on the change.
Anyway, in vidya there's a good chance to accidentally spoil things while reading up on lore. A "boring" character, however, fits easily, and I then can make shit up as I go.
I play video games for the story and the presentation--I'm not one of those lore weenies. It's one reason I'm fond of JRPGs--I can sit back and play through the story/watch the spectacle unfold without really worrying about whether it makes sense. Oddly, I'm fine with railroading in video games but much less fond of it on the tabletop.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in D&D thread:
I have a feeling my new Cutting Words ability might come in handy in the upcoming fight...
Make sure to check with your DM how they want you to run that. Some DMs let you decide after seeing the roll; others just roll in secret and you have to decide in advance. IMO, the first way is much more fun.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in D&D thread:
I take it as a DM you have a good grasp of the setting before you set out?
If you don’t, I doubt the adventures will be very satisfying for the players — unless you’re really good at improvising with consistency.
@Gurth said in D&D thread:
Anything that strikes my fancy
Well then, what describes that fancy? There must be other than random roll in your mind.
It really depends entirely on what I see in the rulebooks, what I know of the setting and like I said, what strikes my fancy at the time. It could just as easily be to gain some rules advantage as because of the roleplaying challenge or because I simply like the looks of a certain type of character — or something else entirely.
dwarf rigger (in Shadowrun)
How true to table rules are Shadowrun vidya?
No idea. The only Shadowrun video games I’ve ever tried playing have been the 25+-year-old SNES and Megadrive versions in emulators, which 1) didn’t really work well, and 2) I didn’t have the patience for these kinds of game.
They seem quite... unbalanced. Guns blazing seems to be the go-to solution. Takes a while to get pistol popping, but the endgame just now was crit-crit-pop.
Not a clue what you’re talking about :) In real Shadowrun, riggers can be quite powerful in combat, given a bunch of drones for example, at the expense of having to keep switching back and forth and keeping track of all of that in your head — and potentially suffering quite badly if one of those drones get shot to pieces.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
"I'm playing Batman, just in D&D!"
I hazard a guess that in [my current favorite pony] Shadowrun, for example, a Batman-type could actually work. But I get your point, absolutely.
I'm not one of those lore weenies
Guess I am then. If I haven't picked up all the lore dumps in the level, I won't be having a good day :)
If I really dig it, I will be also reading additional materials if I can get them (tie-in comics, [amateurish] novels), and not once I've delved into fanfic territory. Then again, you have your setting and I get all my kicks solely from vidya. I believe that explains it.@Gurth said in D&D thread:
Not a clue what you’re talking about
Oh alright :) Basically, in vidya drones, spirits and mages in general seem to have really bad hit chances (vs guns). When they hit, they may level the field, but <50% gamble is way too unreliable. Closing in, remaining out of cover, however, means you're going to get shot. As vidya often have it, if the player character buys it, it's over, so I have some use of them as party members, but I won't play them myself.
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Goddamit, but Shadowrun Hong Kong took a step backwards from first two.
Imposing a very specific background on "choose your character"? Strike! Then you get to pick responses over "do I remember this or that when we were living in that trash can?". Yeah, I'm not brain-burned so I think I should. Except I have no clue, because all that jazz still exists in the writer's head, not mine or anywhere I can see.
There's more. Arbitrarily locking you out of (long) conversation trees. Introducing shit stealth minigames (you move freely, but detection is tile based, among other stupidities). And as much as I like lore dumps, it's really enjoying itself trying to go into Disco Chinesium levels of pretentious (as some redditor said - windbags).
Oh well, at least the shooting is still the same.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in D&D thread:
If I haven't picked up all the lore dumps in the level, I won't be having a good day :)
I don't get upset if I don't pick up everything (unless I'm reading a walk-through, I wouldn't even know I missed something), but in, say, Skyrim, I do read every book I find unless I recognize it as one I've already read (which, at this point in the game, is pretty much everything). Some of them are actually useful. Of course, some books provide skill bonuses, and others contain subtle hints that in situation X, doing Y may be useful. Most don't have any benefit, but the lore is still interesting.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in D&D thread:
@Gurth said in D&D thread:
Not a clue what you’re talking about
Oh alright :) Basically, in vidya drones, spirits and mages in general seem to have really bad hit chances (vs guns).
In the real game, drones tend to be poor shots by virtue of having to use their Pilot rating as their skill, and your typical drone has Pilot 2 or so, whereas a typical skill rating for a player character is more like 4–6.¹ However, drones don’t artificially shoot any worse than characters with the same skill rating as the drone’s Pilot rating.
Spirits, it depends on the spirit’s Force rating — low-Force spirits are crap, high-Force spirits … well, rather you than me facing one in hand-to-hand. Oh, and they’ll be virtually immune to firearms, at that.
Spellcasters are often far deadlier than people with guns, until the fatigue catches up with them.
¹ The game system being to roll as many D6s as your rating, against a target number that depends on the situation. Each die is compared separately, so against a given target number, more dice means a higher chance of success.
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
they’ll be virtually immune to firearms
I see. That's the difference then. The first in the series (Returns) did make a big deal about beings from the astral plane being immune1, but only in the final boss levels so it felt more like a plot armor. But it actually makes sense.
There are places in the levels where high force spirits can be called (conveniently placed for you to know some serious shit will be going down). They do pack a punch. I'm keeping a shaman in the party for buffs (especially Haste), so hey - free handouts, but again - I can't see myself playing as one, because they still die easily.
Spellcasters are often far deadlier than people with guns
Squishy wizards problem. I'll take someone who can tough it out being in a bad spot. In the third game baddies are throwing some fierce manaballs, but the jury is still out on whether I just run into "you're not really supposed to do that, but if you try, have a blast" sort of encounter.
until the fatigue catches up with them
No such thing in the vidya series.
So it's really far from a proper Shadowrun adaption. Still fun, though.
1 Biomagical McGuffin excepted.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in D&D thread:
Squishy wizards problem.
The RNG was really, really kind to my wizard when leveling-up. He's not quite a tank, but he's got almost as many HP as the party's barbarian. Now, if our DM can just get enough time to plan and run a new campaign for us...
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in D&D thread:
I see. That's the difference then. The first in the series (Returns) did make a big deal about beings from the astral plane being immune1, but only in the final boss levels so it felt more like a plot armor. But it actually makes sense.
In normal SR, spirits get armour based off their Force, and pretty much all their other stats are too. The result is that spirits can suddenly get really tough with just one or two points more Force.
Spellcasters are often far deadlier than people with guns
Squishy wizards problem.
In the video game, you mean? Not in real SR, where the only actual difference between magicians and non-magicians is that the former can do magic. You can quite easily make a physically tough and strong magician who can shoot and punch just as well as a street samurai, but can also cast spells. (The street sam’s advantage will be that you don’t want huge amounts of cyberware in a magician, because it reduces the ability to do magic and can even kill that off entirely if you take it too far.)
until the fatigue catches up with them
No such thing in the vidya series.
It’s the balance for magic in the real RPG. You can cast spells as much as you like, provided you can keep the drain (fatigue) under control. Do poorly on the drain test for a powerful spell and you’ll probably think twice about casting any more soon unless you have to.
So it's really far from a proper Shadowrun adaption. Still fun, though.
I liked Baldur’s Gate partly because it used actual AD&D2 mechanics (with a few modifications, but nothing major), so things actually worked as I expected from playing AD&D.
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So, we finished up the Waterdeep Heist campaign. My tauren paladin kept being cursed by his ill-fitting armor and lost his helmet in a fight (seriously, every meeting for 3 in a row I did a fumble that made me lose part of my armor). Continued trying to find who had the eye to reveal the location of the vault. Ended up visiting a bordello. Learnt the elf in the party was a lesbian. My tauren also used the fine services, for fun. The hobbit was the only useful one getting a meeting with the mindraper demon to learn about the thieves who had the eye (as one of them was a favorite customer of hers). Our illusionist transformed into a sexy girl "looking for job" to be able to scout out the place. Then we found the robbers so we could beat them up. Finally got the eye to find the vault, turned out it was inhabited by a demon. It got released in return for revealing the location of the vault. Our healer was the one who made the decision, as she seems to be the lab rat for poking at magical artifacts now.
We also met the god-slayer after he killed yet another minor god. Luckily, he's content just throwing shitty minions at the party and running away. Then we found out the vault was under a theater, so we bluffed our way inside saying we needed to do a "fire safety inspection". Yes, this party consisting of a hobbit priestess, elven weaponmaster, tauren paladin and human cultist are clearly the city fire inspection team.
We found the vault in the sewers under the theater. Then we had to get the NPC mage who gave us the mission to decode the lock, which required four very specific items that we had to get: A drunk elf (our elf volunteered to get shitfaced), a painting of a miner dwarf (my tauren found a painter to paint it), a beardless dwarf (our healer threw some mind control poison on a beardless dwarf shopkeeper we had met), and a construct (our cultist went back to the bordello and charmed their construct).
After opening the vault we got attacked, of course, by others after the treasure within. We killed them all and then went in, indeed finding ~2M gold coins and a bunch of gems. One of the gems being large and red and sticking out from the others. Our healer was the one to pick it up and went through sheer agony as she looked like she would get burnt to ash, berfore returning to not-quite-normal. Turns out she picked up one of the legendary gems of old and now has her strength set to 20 and a health recovery on 1/round of combat.
Then the archmage of the city came and lectured our NPC mage on how he was a complete idiot and if he knew what dark events he had set in motion this day by getting the stone, that a great evil could be unleashed. Our mage trying to meekly defend his actions saying how that evil was the best bet to get rid of the god-slayer (as killing gods are upsetting the natural order, which is bad). This made my tauren quite pissed, and he pressed up the already meek mage against the wall and asked him to explain himself.
And after this little drama we collected the gold, and as a reward were allowed to buy whatever we wanted as well as getting a share. So now my tauren got the best armor, mastercrafted. Mastercrafted axe. A war horse, fully armored, mastercrafted too of course. So, um, absorbs 10 damage from every attack. Does 2d10+1d4+2 damage with his axe. Very dangerous to meet in combat now.
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
I liked Baldur’s Gate partly because it used actual AD&D2 mechanics (with a few modifications, but nothing major), so things actually worked as I expected from playing AD&D.
I keep hearing people talk about how great Baldur's Gate was. I've got the game in my Steam library, and I've tried to play it a few different times, but I can just never get into it. It's mostly because I played Neverwinter Nights first, and going from the polished masterpiece of the Aurora Engine to "clunky late-90s isometric view" is such a massive step backwards that I just find the game entirely unplayable. I hear good things about the story, but the cool story does me no good if I can't navigate it!
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tl;dr: Never try to trick the DM.
WARNING: Minor spoilers ahead.
I just recently started my group on Out of the Abyss. In the slave pens, while trying to get to know the other slaves and formulate a plan, one of the players – a half-elf rogue, planning to go the assassin route – tried to intimidate the orc. This orc is supposed to be easy to cow, but the player flubbed the intimidation roll. As a result, the orc punched him a couple times. At this point, on the other PCs stepped in – a human barbarian who happens to have high charisma as well. She punched the orc hard enough to get him to cower at her feet. The rogue PC decided that wasn't very fair and started holding a grudge about it.
Later, as the slaves (PC and NPC) are escaping, they find a window in one of the guard towers overlooking a cliff and throw out a rope to climb down. The rogue decided this would be a good time to get his revenge and tried to shove the orc out the window. Even giving the rogue advantage on it, they tied the roll and went tumbling out the window together; they both made their dex saves and caught the rope part way down. Unfortunately, the rogue also happened to have the myconid sprout NPC on his back for the climb, and it tumbled to the lake 20 feet below where the orc and rogue caught the rope. I deliberately had them catch hold of the rope at the same point to try and teach this player a little lesson, and the orc headbutted the rogue, breaking his nose. While the rogue was still dazed from the hit (he managed to keep his grip) the orc finished climbing down.
After getting away for the day, the rogue suddenly says he wants to seduce the orc, and starts role playing the interaction. At one point, he asked if he needed to roll deception; I asked if he was trying to trick the orc or if he was being honest about his intentions. He said he wasn't trying to trick the orc. At that point, just the fact that he asked if he needed to roll decption had tipped me off, so I decided to teach him a lesson. Long story short, the rogue and orc fell for each other and started an intimate relationship – mostly just really intense makeout sessions and some cuddling at night since some of the players are still minors.
Well, as you probably suspect, the player really didn't want the relationship and started trying to sabotage it, but I won't let him. Kick and swear at the orc? He's now a masochist. Try to ignore him for a while? He just follows the rogue around like a lost puppy, and so on.
At one point, the characters were foraging for food, and the orc brought the rogue flowers. The rogue, for some unknown reason, ate them and failed a follow-up constitution save. He ended up high as a kite for the next few hours and gained a level of madness.
Now, the rogue has gone a completely different direction than the player intended and he wants out. I'm not going to make it easy for him to change characters, because everything is a result of his choices, but they're still low level, so I'll let him take the out. But at least he's learned not to try to trick the DM.
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@abarker "Do I need to roll deception against the DM?"
"Don't even bother..."
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@abarker the DM, unless a newbie, is a master of deception. Trying to pull a fast one on them usually bends up being pretty hilarious. For the rest of the players.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in D&D thread:
@Gurth said in D&D thread:
I liked Baldur’s Gate partly because it used actual AD&D2 mechanics (with a few modifications, but nothing major), so things actually worked as I expected from playing AD&D.
I keep hearing people talk about how great Baldur's Gate was.
I think that last one is the operative word here :) For its time, Baldur’s Gate was a great game, especially if you played AD&D for real already. Some years ago, I tried running it under Wine and though it works, I quickly got bored with it and never went back to it as far as I can recall. And this is with me having a far lower expectation of video games than people who play actually modern ones …
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
@Mason_Wheeler said in D&D thread:
@Gurth said in D&D thread:
I liked Baldur’s Gate partly because it used actual AD&D2 mechanics (with a few modifications, but nothing major), so things actually worked as I expected from playing AD&D.
I keep hearing people talk about how great Baldur's Gate was.
I think that last one is the operative word here :) For its time, Baldur’s Gate was a great game, especially if you played AD&D for real already. Some years ago, I tried running it under Wine and though it works, I quickly got bored with it and never went back to it as far as I can recall. And this is with me having a far lower expectation of video games than people who play actually modern ones …
Even at the time I wasn't fond of Baldur's Gate. But then I never played D&D IRL. My feeling has always been that it suffered from too small health/damage amounts and too coarse randomness, making it feel like a game of chance more than the game of tactics it should/could be.
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@PleegWat That's been my complaint with D&D as a whole for a long time: the dice introduce far too much randomness into things, and the d20 system in particular really doesn't help matters. When there's only one die being rolled and the distribution of all 20 possible outputs is equally probable, there's no bell curve of probabilities clustered around the most likely outcome like we see in reality; the d20 itself reigns supreme.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in D&D thread:
@PleegWat That's been my complaint with D&D as a whole for a long time: the dice introduce far too much randomness into things, and the d20 system in particular really doesn't help matters. When there's only one die being rolled and the distribution of all 20 possible outputs is equally probable, there's no bell curve of probabilities clustered around the most likely outcome like we see in reality; the d20 itself reigns supreme.
And it goes double for 5th edition and its bounded accuracy. The game I'm in is chock-full of "my highly-Stealthy ranger can't out-stealth the War Cleric" and the like. 3rd and 4th edition had the opposite problem, of course, with "if you invested heavily in this skill, don't bother rolling, you already succeeded; but if you didn't invest much at all, don't bother rolling, you already failed" once you get past the low levels.
I've just learned to enjoy the randomness. We succeed or fail at the whim of the RNJesus, with only the lightest of influence from our choices.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in D&D thread:
Vidya or tabletop, doesn't matter. What you guys are playing as, generally, where such choice is presented?
I haven't done much playing lately – the campaign I'm in right now is the first one in a decade, I think. This is for 5E. I've made two characters (one for a few-shot, and then one for this campaign), and for both of them, I first picked a class, and then I consulted the Wisdom Of The Optimizers to figure out which races went well with that class. There's always a variety of races that work reasonably well for my chosen class, and I've always picked one that sounded fun rather that one that was Just Like Me. (Variant Human is often a very good race for 5E, and yet I've never found it tempting. Apparently, I like something a bit exotic.)
The first character was a Barbarian, and after looking around at the grappling rules and optimizer guides, I picked Goliath to go with it. (They get a few bonuses that make it easier to Barb, and a basic personality type that I can build on.)
The second character is is a Druid, and I picked Ghostwise Halfling to go with it. I've given him a curious, cheerful, mildly-annoying personality, because it works with Halflings. Also, because I love me a beer-and-pretzels game, and I love peppering a few jokes in there, in-character or no.
As for vidyas, I go for variety. I make "whatever I didn't make last time", usually with the weirdest hairstyle I can find. Usually some flavor of white/tanned, most often men, but occasionally women (because if I'm going to be staring at the same ass for hours on end, it might as well look good).
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@PleegWat said in D&D thread:
My feeling has always been that it suffered from too small health/damage amounts and too coarse randomness, making it feel like a game of chance more than the game of tactics it should/could be.
This is a problem with D&D in general. At low levels, characters have very few hit points and weapons can and do kill in one or two blows. At high levels, everyone has essentially the same weapons, so they cause the same amount of damage (plus a bonus if the weapon is magical) but everyone has FAR more hp, so it gets a matter of tediously wearing the target down. Couple this to the straight d20 roll to hit, and it can get quite random.
In AD&D2, which Baldur’s Gate essentially uses, everyone has a stat called THAC0 (pronounced “thacko”), which stands for To-Hit Armor Class 0. For starting characters, this begins at 20 and goes down from there, depending on class: for warriors it drops by 1 per level, for wizards by 1 per three levels, others are somewhere in between.
Everyone also has an Armor Class (AC) that runs from 10 (worst) on down, to a practical minimum of 0 for non-magical armour. It can go into negative values for magical armour, really tough monsters, etc.
Damage capacity is measured in hit points (hp), which everyone gets from their hit dice. Player characters get one hit die per level until around level 12, and then a fixed number of hp per level, with the die type depending on the class: 1d10 for warriors, 1d4 for mages, and again, everyone else sits between those. Monsters have a certain number of d8 indicated in their stats, possibly with a modifier.
The way hitting stuff works, is that you take your own THAC0 and subtract the opponent’s AC, then need to roll that or higher on a d20. Modifiers may be applied to the die roll to account for the situation. A roll of 1 (before modifiers) is an automatic failure and a 20 an automatic hit, regardless of stats.
So a level 1 fighter with THAC0 20 attacking an orc with AC 7 needs 20 − 7 = 13 or higher to hit. A level 15 fighter with THAC0 6 attacking that same orc needs −1 or higher — that is, 2+, because as said, a 1 is an automatic failure.
Damage is simply a die roll based on your weapon (or claw/bite/whatever for many monsters): a short sword does 1d6 hp, a long sword does 1d8, etc. Armour does not reduce damage whatsoever — it makes you harder to hit, not tougher. Thus, a level 1 wizard does not want to get hit with a long sword — or anything else, really. (I have played at least one character with all of one hit point …) Even a level 1 fighter who had a good roll on the hit die will probably die from two good sword strokes.
But level up a dozen times or so, and even with average rolls, your typical mage will have 30 or so hit points, while a fighter will have over twice that many. Yet that long sword still only does 1d8 damage.
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@Gurth Armor works on to-hit instead of damage? I didn't recall that.
I do now recall what made me finally quit that game: at some point I encountered monsters which inflicted negative levels, in significant numbers. The recommended way (per searching on the internet) to handle that situation is to go out and level back up.
If you were level 10, and got hit by 6 negative levels, this means you are effectively level 4, but to get back to level 10 you need to earn the experience you'd usually need from levels 10 to 16. And that's assuming there's that much level-4-suitable content left.And of course, a PC game doesn't have a human GM who can be lenient when something like that happened to the party. Instead you can savescum, but games which 'require' savescumming are generally not fun to me.
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@PleegWat said in D&D thread:
@Gurth Armor works on to-hit instead of damage? I didn't recall that.
It does in all editions of D&D I’ve played (which is to say AD&D2, D&D3 and D&D3.5). It never reduces damage you take, it always makes you harder to hit.
I do now recall what made me finally quit that game: at some point I encountered monsters which inflicted negative levels
Oh, those suck, badly.
If you were level 10, and got hit by 6 negative levels, this means you are effectively level 4, but to get back to level 10 you need to earn the experience you'd usually need from levels 10 to 16. And that's assuming there's that much level-4-suitable content left.
Assuming Baldur’s Gate has the same level progression as AD&D2, that’s plainly ridiculous. For a fighter, level 10 to 11 is 250,000 XP, whereas 4 to 5 is 4,000 XP. IOW, monsters suitable at level 4 will give you a lot less XP, so you probably need to kill 250 ÷ 4 = 62.5 times as many of them as before, just to get back to effective level 5.
It is, though, not per AD&D2 rules: there, the Player’s Handbook clearly states that if you suffer level drain, your XP drops to halfway between the amounts needed for your new level, and the one above. So getting six levels drained at level 10 puts the fighter at 6,000 XP, halfway between 4 (4,000 XP) and 5 (8,000 XP). This is much more doable than in Baldur’s Gate. However, we generally played with the house rule that level drain is never permanent but returns after a while, so you keep your actual XP but your stats are based on the reduced level until you recover.
And of course, a PC game doesn't have a human GM who can be lenient when something like that happened to the party.
That’s why I doubt we’ll ever have true computerised RPGs rather than MMORPGs.
