D&D thread
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Rosemaryisk and Thymeisk is a fictionalised buddy detective show set in semi-rural England with two aging lizards for detectives.
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Well this was unexpected.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpI7J9vtbnw
I just have to say, remember when Microsoft said that Windows 10 was going to be the end of new editions, that it would be a perpetual cycle of minor bugfixes and there would never be a Windows 11? Yeaaaaaahhh...
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@Mason_Wheeler which bit is unexpected? It's bee known for a while that WOTC were working on a rules update for 2024, and the speculation on D&D subreddits has been pretty firmly on the idea of a 5.5 minor update rather than a fully rewritten 6th edition
From what I've heard, it sounds like 3.5 was a similar "backwards compatible" update. I imagine if 4E had been popular they would have done the same sort of thing with that
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WTDWTF game when?
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@Applied-Mediocrity We'd need someone to DM it and a campaign for them to DM. Preferably for more than a single scene before vanishing.
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@PleegWat Yeah, I was just poking the warthog. I raised this question once before
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@Applied-Mediocrity If anyone is thinking of picking this up: I've heard the recommendation that the first campaign you DM should be a pre-existing one, not one of your own devising.
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@Jaloopa said in D&D thread:
From what I've heard, it sounds like 3.5 was a similar "backwards compatible" update. I imagine if 4E had been popular they would have done the same sort of thing with that
It was, mostly. But even on the very first (and one of the few) times playing 3.5, I already discovered that some of our favourite tricks from D&D3 weren’t allowed anymore. A Small character wielding a Large weapon is the only one I can actually remember, but there was more.
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@Arantor said in D&D thread:
Rosemaryisk and Thymeisk is a fictionalised buddy detective show set in semi-rural England with two aging lizards for detectives.
It is. But you're not supposed to know it exists. There is no such thing as the Reptiloid Broadcasting Syndicate. Damn shame, because that'd be my favorite show.
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
@Jaloopa said in D&D thread:
From what I've heard, it sounds like 3.5 was a similar "backwards compatible" update. I imagine if 4E had been popular they would have done the same sort of thing with that
It was, mostly. But even on the very first (and one of the few) times playing 3.5, I already discovered that some of our favourite tricks from D&D3 weren’t allowed anymore. A Small character wielding a Large weapon is the only one I can actually remember, but there was more.
That just makes it backwards "compatible"!
Everyone's favorite kind of backwards compatibility.
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
@Jaloopa said in D&D thread:
From what I've heard, it sounds like 3.5 was a similar "backwards compatible" update. I imagine if 4E had been popular they would have done the same sort of thing with that
It was, mostly. But even on the very first (and one of the few) times playing 3.5, I already discovered that some of our favourite tricks from D&D3 weren’t allowed anymore. A Small character wielding a Large weapon is the only one I can actually remember, but there was more.
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
A Small character wielding a Large weapon is the only one I can actually remember, but there was more.
Haste was nerfed, arguably. Chronotyrin was removed, if it ever existed. Enchanted weapons got sane. DR got sort of sane. Arguably.
If 3.0 had the hole for momentum conservation with ring gates, that's also nerfed in 3.5.
Pretty sure that neither Wieldy nor Monkey Grip were actually removed, and there are still transforms in 3.5 that make a Large shortsword be able to be treated as a Small greatsword.
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@Jaloopa said in D&D thread:
From what I've heard, it sounds like 3.5 was a similar "backwards compatible" update. I imagine if 4E had been popular they would have done the same sort of thing with that
They did do a "4.5E" with the Essentials line.
ObTopic: I haven't been playing 5th Edition (I play both editions of Pathfinder instead) so I will continue to wait-and-see what they do with "One D&D". I still expect to see a D&D 6th or 7th edition (or whatever) 5-10 years after it comes out.
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My son just started a new campaign. They came this
close to a TPK in their very first session.Under some circumstances (not known to me), the DM will ask one of the players to roll a d100. The player rolled a 1. This meant someone nearby died. After the DM rolled a few dice, it turned out that the person who died was a NPC who was getting her throat ripped out by 3 zombies, who then attacked the party and the crowd. One of them bit a small boy, who then ran away, spreading the curse to many other people in the crowd, turning them into zombies.
At one point, 3 of the 5 party members were unconscious (a 4th member also went to 0 HP a bit later) and at least my son failed 2 death saves (and 2 successes), so his fate was down to one roll.
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@HardwareGeek said in D&D thread:
My son just started a new campaign. They came this
close to a TPK in their very first session.Under some circumstances (not known to me), the DM will ask one of the players to roll a d100. The player rolled a 1. This meant someone nearby died. After the DM rolled a few dice, it turned out that the person who died was a NPC who was getting her throat ripped out by 3 zombies, who then attacked the party and the crowd. One of them bit a small boy, who then ran away, spreading the curse to many other people in the crowd, turning them into zombies.
At one point, 3 of the 5 party members were unconscious (a 4th member also went to 0 HP a bit later) and at least my son failed 2 death saves (and 2 successes), so his fate was down to one roll.
Low-level play is so swingy. It's quite exciting, but you should have a backup character idea rummaging around your head!
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TBH, that's one thing that I dislike about D&D (but especially when video games attempt to faithfully implement this, because you get to replay the same encounters
your pointy ends, and there's no sense of wonder anymore).I have to wonder, though, how did they fail so bad. Were they all dwarves or something? Zombies have 20ft speed. Rule #1: Cardio.
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@PotatoEngineer I forgot to mention, this is intended to be a Grand Campaign, where the players advance their characters all the way from level 1 to level 20 over the course of an extended adventure and many sessions. That doesn't work so well, though, if everybody dies in the first session.
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Poor adventure design/DMing, IMHO: if you notice the PCs can’t handle the threat, you tone it down (without letting on that you’re doing so) to allow them to make it through. Unless it’s their own fault by making terrible decisions, but if it’s a case of bad rolls and you want the characters to see the rest of the adventure, you fudge stuff to help them.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in D&D thread:
I have to wonder, though, how did they fail so bad. Were they all dwarves or something? Zombies have 20ft speed. Rule #1: Cardio.
If it was 4th edition, yes. Named Carlos.
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@HardwareGeek said in D&D thread:
@PotatoEngineer I forgot to mention, this is intended to be a Grand Campaign, where the players advance their characters all the way from level 1 to level 10 over the course of an extended adventure and many sessions. That doesn't work so well, though, if everybody dies in the first session.
Nearly dies, can be fine, but that's horror vs fantasy arc and should be a conscious choice.
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
Poor adventure design/DMing, IMHO: if you notice the PCs can’t handle the threat, you tone it down (without letting on that you’re doing so) to allow them to make it through. Unless it’s their own fault by making terrible decisions, but if it’s a case of bad rolls and you want the characters to see the rest of the adventure, you fudge stuff to help them.
Related: several of the published adventures have a serious problem with TPKs at level 1. Rise of Tiamat and Storm King's Thunder both have early encounters that are ridiculously deadly. This is a real problem when you're buying the published adventure so that you don't have to do any of the design work!
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@PotatoEngineer said in D&D thread:
This is a real problem
Not knowing when to run away, or that running away is an option.
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@Gurth Son of HardwareGeek here chiming in with additional info.
The DM informed us at the end of the session that there would have been a zombie outbreak some time during the adventure; the poor roll simply "advanced the timetable".
The DM did point out several times during the zombie encounter that "running away is always an option". We did eventually heed his advice, but it was a case of "we want to try to stop this from spreading as best as we can"
Nobody in the party is playing a healer. The DM did suggest to us before session 1 (since we'd all started with squishy casters) that we might want to have at least a martial character in the party, which is why I flexed to a fighter that will multiclass into a half-caster next level (I was also the only player willing to change characters). He did also give us another opportunity to change characters if we felt like we'd need to after the end of this session. One of the players has made a paladin as a backup character.
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@HardwareGeek said in D&D thread:
@Gurth Son of HardwareGeek here chiming in with additional info.
The DM informed us at the end of the session that there would have been a zombie outbreak some time during the adventure; the poor roll simply "advanced the timetable".
The DM did point out several times during the zombie encounter that "running away is always an option". We did eventually heed his advice, but it was a case of "we want to try to stop this from spreading as best as we can"
Nobody in the party is playing a healer. The DM did suggest to us before session 1 (since we'd all started with squishy casters) that we might want to have at least a martial character in the party, which is why I flexed to a fighter that will multiclass into a half-caster next level (I was also the only player willing to change characters). He did also give us another opportunity to change characters if we felt like we'd need to after the end of this session. One of the players has made a paladin as a backup character.
Well, I suppose an ill-balanced party that ignores the DM's "you don't want to do that" suggestions is at least an improvement on not being able to fill out the schedule
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@HardwareGeek said in D&D thread:
Nobody in the party is playing a healer.
Though that is a bit of an oversight in a typical D&D group, IMHO it does still eventually boil down that to the
GMDM™ could have toned things down a bit to give the PCs the chance to make it through and seek healing after defeating the zombies.It’s kind contradictory, when I think about it: I’m not a very storytelling GM, but I do do my best to get the players to run through the whole story of an adventure.
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@boomzilla can confirm
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@HardwareGeek said in D&D thread:
In all seriousness, I'm a little nervous because... well... I can't be the only one who notices just how similar the plot looks to the 2000 film, right? And that flopped because it just wasn't a good movie, and it also didn't really feel like a D&D campaign.
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@PotatoEngineer said in D&D thread:
@Gurth said in D&D thread:
Poor adventure design/DMing, IMHO: if you notice the PCs can’t handle the threat, you tone it down (without letting on that you’re doing so) to allow them to make it through. Unless it’s their own fault by making terrible decisions, but if it’s a case of bad rolls and you want the characters to see the rest of the adventure, you fudge stuff to help them.
Related: several of the published adventures have a serious problem with TPKs at level 1. Rise of Tiamat and Storm King's Thunder both have early encounters that are ridiculously deadly. This is a real problem when you're buying the published adventure so that you don't have to do any of the design work!
However, unlike Pathfinder: Kingmaker, whose early sections were literally all but unplayable if your PC is not a frontline fighter type, these published adventures have a GM that can adjust things to be more reasonable.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in D&D thread:
@PotatoEngineer said in D&D thread:
@Gurth said in D&D thread:
Poor adventure design/DMing, IMHO: if you notice the PCs can’t handle the threat, you tone it down (without letting on that you’re doing so) to allow them to make it through. Unless it’s their own fault by making terrible decisions, but if it’s a case of bad rolls and you want the characters to see the rest of the adventure, you fudge stuff to help them.
Related: several of the published adventures have a serious problem with TPKs at level 1. Rise of Tiamat and Storm King's Thunder both have early encounters that are ridiculously deadly. This is a real problem when you're buying the published adventure so that you don't have to do any of the design work!
However, unlike Pathfinder: Kingmaker, whose early sections were literally all but unplayable if your PC is not a frontline fighter type, these published adventures have a GM that can adjust things to be more reasonable.
Really? I found the game pretty easy as a full on caster.
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@Dragoon OK, what's your secret? Because in my experience it's well-nigh impossible to survive approximately half of the quests up to and including taking possession of the the stronghold, (including the freaking intro!) if you're not a warrior build, and general consensus around the Internet seems to agree with that statement.
How in the world did you survive it?
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Looking at steam I was thinking of the wrong game, Wrath of the Righteous is fine as a caster. Honestly, I don't remember much of my kingmaker playthrough now that I think about it.
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I play games to have fun, save scumming is 100% allowed by me. I have a few select games that I choose not to play that way but I have no issue with it.
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@Dragoon said in D&D thread:
Looking at steam I was thinking of the wrong game, Wrath of the Righteous is fine as a caster.
That could be. I never played it, since reviews basically said it inherited most of the problems that plagued Kingmaker plus a bunch of woke crap in the story, but it wouldn't surprise me if they at least fixed the class balance a bit.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in D&D thread:
Fixed the class balance a bit.
That phrase and "pathfinder" are mutually incompatible. Martial classes get dumped on hard at higher levels, casters are rough at low levels.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in D&D thread:
@Benjamin-Hall
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LinearWarriorsQuadraticWizards
really, it's more sub-linear warriors, quartic wizards.Warriors tend to scale power sub-linearly, frequency either not at all or sub-linearly at best, and versatility sub-linearly at best. So...linearly at best.
Wizards scale power as at least quadratically, frequency linearly, and versatility linearly or better. So quartic at worst.
And that's in 5e--PF and 3e are much worse.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in D&D thread:
plus a bunch of woke crap in the story
You're reading the wrong reviews. There is one
(it's not like a certain girdle didn't exist in BG) and there's overabundance of women in power, but nothing that I recall in 447 hours (holy shit!) beats you over the head with it. And all the mixing up of 'he' and 'she' in descriptions is verbatim from Paizo sourcebooks, apparently based on the gender of iconic character of that class (i.e., Barbarian - Amiri - she).The class balance is, however, worse. Partly because of mythic powers, which being almost completely homebrew are off the scale, partly because most enemies are demons with DR/good and such, partly because that's how 1e rolls, partly because of implementation bugs.
But I'd say it's somewhat easier than KM even then (if you find the right class+mythic synergy). Except the final Threshold map where it's pretty much random bullshit go (not unlike House at the end of Time). But then PnP Threshold is the shittiest party-killing adventure I've ever read, so...
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@Applied-Mediocrity Interesting. Might be worth giving it a try when I get some time.
So if you've played it, I have to ask. The worst part of Kingmaker wasn't its punishing difficulty; as bad as it was, once you obtain the barony it gets fairly manageable. No, the truly awful thing was what happens after that point: the poor implementation of the Barony mechanics. There was just so much wrong with that:
- interrupting your questing with arbitrary "must complete or it's Game Over" time-based quests, over and over
- a city-building minigame that as far as I can tell exists purely for its own sake and has no impact whatsoever on the wider game beyond "your city-building minigame must advance past certain arbitrary thresholds in order to unlock this thing"
- The aggressively serial nature of the barony event card minigame. If you choose to respond to an event, it immediately advances time forward by howevermany days, and you are completely unable to do anything at all -- including aborting the time skip! -- to respond to events that pop up during that period. (Including the aforementioned mandatory complete-or-game-over quests.) The game playability increased sooooo much when I downloaded a mod that removed the time skip altogether and just made it so the event would complete in X days!
Does Wrath of the Righteous have any similarly-awful mechanics? I think I would have actually enjoyed the Barony stuff it it had been done competently, but the implementation we actually got was a mess.
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@Mason_Wheeler Ooh. That's a hairy subject. Yeah, most of it is still there. Different, but there.
The "must complete or it's Game Over" in both cases sort of comes from the PnP. There it's, of course, for the GM to adjust, which makes all the difference. Anyway, there's no events like that in WotR (as such), nor those annoying "spend 14 days with your advisor" anymore. There's no time limit either (again, as such). But now there's army morale mechanic, which is time limit by another name. And morale is also one of those downward spiral things, too. It sort of makes sense story-wise, but the rigid videogame constraints make it... iffy.
And now there's mass combat, which is a poorly balanced HoMM-wannabe minigame with somewhat fidgety controls. Not so much difficult (more than the baseline PF experience, anyway), but very tedious. You get or hire troops and attack preset demon armies waiting for you. Later on, defend against moving ones, too. It has its own rules that is neither PnP mass combat nor PF proper. There is one solid, almost-cheaty way to win, though. And autoresolve was added not too long ago, but I don't know how well it works.
There are still event cards and research projects, but they are not governed by dice rolls and will always succeed or at least "meh". You get to pick a choice and then live with it. On more than one occasion it may be the wrong choice and not always for a good enough reason, but it's certainly less annoying than in KM. Advisors are pre-selected for you (you're not the biggest wig in the land now). You can still do one per category at any given time.
Very similar city-building is also still there (or rather, the main citadel and outposts). Developing city and outposts gives miniscule bonuses to mass combat, so it can't be entirely ignored. Demon armies can besiege and raze them. Never had it happen (other than for science), but apparently it happens to people and then it's a massive pain. I don't recall clearly, but I don't think levelling up the "kingdom" unlocks anything particularly worthwhile other than some achievements.
Well, yeah. Short version - complaints got addressed, but new annoyances got added, too.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in D&D thread:
In all seriousness, I'm a little nervous because... well... I can't be the only one who notices just how similar the plot looks to the 2000 film, right? And that flopped because it just wasn't a good movie, and it also didn't really feel like a D&D campaign.
I've wondered if the first movie could have been saved by inserting some interstitial scenes from the guys playing the game. That "SNAAAAAIIILLLSS" line might have been less-terrible if it was visibly spoken at the table in bad drama, rather than poorly-placed in the movie. And maybe have the zero-budget lich be a prop made by the DM rather than a puppet we're supposed to take seriously in-universe.
In short, turn it into at least a half-comedy, with the movie laughing at itself.
(Note to self: watch The Gamers. I still haven't seen either one yet.)
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@boomzilla said in D&D thread:
(The original version is cooler, but I couldn’t find a PDF of it on a quick look, except on Scribd where you can only really see the first page.)
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