D&D thread
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@Applied-Mediocrity Would not surprise me. I actually upgraded my ranger to the best chain mail for the full body (AC7) putting me on par with the warrior's entry-level plate, and even with a slightly better helmet.
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@remi said in D&D thread:
@Atazhaia said in D&D thread:
My ranger gets a hammer to the back of the head and faints.
My ranger [...] took a poisoned sword to the head and fainted
My ranger gets knocked outI sense a pattern there...
Must be a Blue Ranger. They tend to take a disproportionate amount of abuse...
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@Atazhaia said in D&D thread:
@remi The pattern has been ongoing since meeting 1 (hammer to the leg leaving permanent limp). My ranger ends up in melee all the time for some reason, and has to punch his opponents rather than shooting them.
Edit: For my next campaign I should probably just go for a heavily armored warrior or something...
I kobolded the shit out of drakar och demoner, some old ruleset, and made a warrior with like 5 or 6 actions per round. He also had a skill that let him perform a skill check to ignore armor, and if he used two actions it had no penalties.
The DM didn't quite consider the consequences, and his NPCs were usually geared to dealing with the boffersmurfs of the play group that all opted for enormous weapons and ridiculous armour.
I could kill three of those per combat round. Since my character also pretty much always won initiatives.
He eventually managed to kill that character when I fumbled several rolls in a row to save being skewered by a lance. I think the character took something like 4d10 to the head. Quite dead.Really fun character to play though, since the DM decided to take his reason to live away as the start for the campaign, so not only was the character a walking meat grinder, he was also very, very angry at everything and everyone.
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Status: Wanted to play as Monk in Pathfinder Kingmaker, found fem knight portrait on ArtStation I'm temporarily in love with, will probably play bog standard knight now, so that it fits.
(Yeah, I know vidya things don't go here, but Status thread is currently kind of busy with бред puns)
Edit: My monk bought the farm in the last prologue battle and my fighter can't hit the side of a barn
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I've been listening to Critical Role on my commute, slowly working my way through the show's backlog. I just came across possibly their funniest moment of all time. On a show where they had Pat Rothfuss as a guest star, they were scrying on a certain villain, and found her in a study, ransacking a bookshelf, frantically searching for something and not finding it.
Sam: *gasp* She's looking for the third book of Pat Rothfuss's trilogy, but it's nowhere to be found!
At this point everyone completely loses it and busts up laughing.
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@Mason_Wheeler Kerrek is hands down my favourite guest PC, and honestly up there with my favourite PCs full stop.
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Yesterday was the penultimate session for the current campaign: Marriage fun. Two weeks of festivities to celebrate the union between the wood-cutter's son and the fine lady, the public revelation of the restoration of the ring and sword of the rulers of the land (had been lost for 200 years or so).
I proceeded to make an ass of myself in every competition, including the ones where I had to roll against my stats that were 18 and therefore a 90% success. Our mage tried to help us out by cheating and giving the opponents magical slaps across the face. Also, I was greatly insulted by one of the visiting lords who thought I was hired "for entertainment". which irritated the human-hating mage greatly so she spent a week following him around and causing him inconvenience by making his drinks lukewarm and foul-tasting and giving him slaps at strategical moments.
Then came the day of the wedding and of course it was interrupted by a gang of attacking cultist ninjas. I got knocked out, then healed back up by the healer and proceeded to punch a ninja with double swords until he was dead, then finally got to shoot one arrow with my bow and killed the bow-wielding ninja on top of the tower.
Then the next day the wedding could continue and finish and then a herald arrived with dire news. The thing is that two of the local lords never showed up for the wedding. The news were that one of the lords had killed the other, claimed his lands and also found out that he had been the notorious bandit of the lands. Then she had claimed the lands of the arrogant asshole lord who had insulted me "but found nothing of value and quickly left". And now she was marching towards the capital where the wedding is happening with her armies, being 3 days away.
So now the next and final session will be the final battle against the evil Lady de Caer and to restore peace and order to the lands finally. And I will get to meet her general again, who probably hates me greatly after I absolutely ruined her left arm and made it permanently lame.
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@Atazhaia said in D&D thread:
Our mage tried to help us out by cheating and giving the opponents magical slaps across the face.
I've been reading The Divine Dungeon recently, and that sentence made me gasp a little before I readjusted my perspective to D&D-land...
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@Mason_Wheeler Yeah, we're playing DoD, and while it has a similar name it doesn't have the same rules as D&D. DoD has the concept of mini magics, which are small things that requires no effort from the caster. No need to roll for success, they automatically succeed, but can't cause serious damage by itself. Which our mage uses to cause all sorts of minor mischief.
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@Atazhaia said in D&D thread:
Which our mage uses to cause all sorts of minor mischief.
We once had a character in one of our Shadowrun campaigns who used the Fashion spell for that purpose. She gave another PC — without asking his opinion on it — trousers without a backside in them, for example, which the player didn’t exactly appreciate.
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@Atazhaia said in D&D thread:
@Mason_Wheeler Yeah, we're playing DoD, and while it has a similar name it doesn't have the same rules as D&D. DoD has the concept of mini magics, which are small things that requires no effort from the caster. No need to roll for success, they automatically succeed, but can't cause serious damage by itself. Which our mage uses to cause all sorts of minor mischief.
This reminded me about one of my characters I made for an evil player group campaign, that started out with extra creation points to make the game more epic.
Of courseci made a truly fucking evilnecromancer with high enough necromancy that his mini magic was automatic. And he has kill small critters, together with animate insects. He also had mage quirks, suck as glowing red eyes, poisonous fangs and clawlike nails.
After a fair bit of playing him I managed to turn him into a lich, so he was a walking skeleton with glowing red eyesockets, fangs, claws and an ever changing swarm of undead bugs as a "body".
And his wand was a battle scythe that he also was more than decent att wielding.I made the other players cringe pretty often when I in excruciating detail described just how I murdered NPCs. And the odd PC.
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@Carnage At least it's better to make oneself into a lich during an evil campaign, rather than as members of a lawful good order doing a lich-making ritual on one member of the group, desecrating the halflings favorite glade for decades to come in the process. The warrior has got a bit too tired at being outdone by the healer in damage in every fight, so when we found a forbidden scroll with the instructions he was like "yeah, let's look for the ingredients during our quest and then do it at the first opportunity".
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Q: Why do rogues prefer leather armor?
A: It helps with their stealth, because it's made of hide.
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I've been DMing a game for my wife and kids to help them get familiar with D&D, specifically the Lost Mine of Phandelver campaign[1]. In the mine, there is a building which houses a magical brazier for temporarily enchanting weapons and armor, a few enchanted items, and a spectator, which is there to guard the enchanted items. My wife is playing a paladin with the sage background, and her character values knowledge above all else, so of course she struck up a conversation with the spectator. She ended up befriending it, naming it Bob (much to its pleasure), and then did a history check and remembered that spectators can only be bound to a task for 101 years. Since it had been centuries since the mine was lost, the spectator had clearly fulfilled its term. She informed it that it was no longer bound, and it immediately went home.
[1] For those not familiar with it, the campaign centers around a mine that was also a natural source of magic, and was used to create enchanted items. The mine was eventually overrun by orcs, and its location was lost to history. Fast forward a few centuries, and some dwarf brothers discover the mine, and hire the players to escort some provisions from Neverwinter to Phandalin, the small town near the mine.
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The main thing stopping us playing online through lockdown is the DM's lack of a PC. Someone has an old laptop they've offered to give him, but when I say old I really mean it. It came with vista home basic.
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I don't have any keys for better Windows versions and I doubt it would run 10 anyway. Apparently it's dog slow, and I remember how unusable some of these early Vista computers were so a fresh install probably won't help all that much.
Is there a version of Linux I could put on it that would be user friendly enough for a non geek and lightweight enough to run on this pile of rust with a browser and something like Discord for voice chat? (I haven't had good experiences with the Roll20 voice chat)
Help me, fellow nerds. You're my only hope
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@Jaloopa A large chunk of my players are using discord on their phones. You'd have to do everything theater of the mind style though.
I never liked roll20 as a platform. I'm actually using discord's screen sharing feature with a home-rolled solution in GIMP. All the tokens are layers, and I've got templates for common spell effect sizes, plus a custom-defined unit so I can measure straight in "map feet" (5' = 1" = 53 pixels). Works great, actually. We've got a dice-roller bot in discord, so that's all we need.
Slow and clunky compared to actually being there, but it works ok. Heck, I'm doing 2 other campaigns via Zoom (for the students, who I can't really ethically ask to join my discord due to...well...yeah). There they just use dice rollers on their phones and I screen share similarly.
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@Benjamin-Hall screen sharing sounds more intensive than using a website, and I don't fancy trying to coach him through gimp and everything else required for a homebrewed system remotely. Discord on a phone would be fine for voice though. I've done that myself while using a PC without a mic for the main roll20 stuff
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@Jaloopa said in D&D thread:
@Benjamin-Hall screen sharing sounds more intensive than using a website, and I don't fancy trying to coach him through gimp and everything else required for a homebrewed system remotely. Discord on a phone would be fine for voice though. I've done that myself while using a PC without a mic for the main roll20 stuff
Depends. Roll20 is (in my experience) super heavy-weight and janky (especially on mobile), while screen sharing (on the consumers' end) is just watching a video. The annoyance for phone users is going back and forth between the voice/dice channel and the video one. Split screen is...not a thing, really.
But yeah, on the producer/DM's side, that's not really an option from a phone.
My guess is that any reasonable distribution's web browser would let him run roll20 more-or-less ok. I'd be worried about hardware/driver compatibility. IMX Linux has huge gaping holes there, especially with low-end laptops and their custom/insane hardware choices.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
A large chunk of my players are using discord on their phones. You'd have to do everything theater of the mind style though.
Our group, which has always been online-only, so no change due to social distancing, uses discord, voice and chat only; no video. All theatre of the mind. Even dice rolling is on the honor system; you could lie and say you rolled a 20 when you didn't and nobody would know, but AFAIK, nobody is doing that. Considering how many crit fails I've rolled in the campaign, I've certainly thought about faking some rolls, but I haven't. (I rolled two consecutive death saving fails in our last session, before somebody gave me a healing potion. For which I was very grateful; my usually most reliable d20 suddenly decided to start rolling 3s and 4s at the most inopportune time. That was also very nearly a TPK, 3 of the 4 party members were down to 0 HP (simultaneously, I think) before the 4th one took two healing potions from the unconscious body of player 2 and gave them to him and me. There wasn't a third potion for player #3; the battle was still going on, and we kinda forgot about him. After we ended the session, the DM decided we had stabilized him and he had 1 HP.)
Edit: I should say that I use discord on my phone and have my dndbeyond character sheet on my PC, because for some reason, the discord transmit audio on my PC is always distorted; I can hear everybody fine, but they complain that my voice drops out.
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We're mostly theatre of the mind anyway. It's only battles where the minis come out and the threadbare nature of the drawn maps is a bit of a running joke.
I've looked at linux lite, and this model is in the hardware database which is promising.
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@Jaloopa said in D&D thread:
Is there a version of Linux I could put on it that would be user friendly enough for a non geek and lightweight enough to run on this pile of rust with a browser and something like Discord for voice chat? (I haven't had good experiences with the Roll20 voice chat)
Help me, fellow nerds. You're my only hopeYeah, just go for a lightweight desktop environment and most linux distros will probably work sufficiently. XFCE or MATE are probably the most common ones. I'd probably go with a debian base or derivative these days.
Make sure to set everything up properly so everything works, and is easily accessible so no supervision or tech support will be necessary.Hell, I've got linux running a desktop on an old RPi that is sufficiently fast for browser and other lightweight work, so a laptop should be easypeasy.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
All the tokens are layers, and I've got templates for common spell effect sizes, plus a custom-defined unit so I can measure straight in "map feet" (5' = 1" = 53 pixels).
These sound like a good summary of the reasons why I don’t bother with current RPGs … If I draw one map per adventure, it’s probably a lot, and even then it’s more often than not a sketch of the overall layout of a building or compound to help the players plan how to get inside.
IMHO combat especially often works better without a map, largely because it helps in causing fog of war. Just as long as I, as the GM, have a clear mental picture of where everyone is (both PCs and NPCs).
Even back in our last AD&D campaign, I wasn’t the one drawing the dungeon maps — I got into the habit of telling the players things like room sizes and where the doors were, and left it up to them to actually map things. Again, this meant that sometimes their map didn’t match mine, which I was not at all bothered about.
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@Gurth I only draw combat maps, and most are rough sketches. And I'm not too picky about exact distances either. But not having at least some sort of map is way more work for me, because then I have to juggle everything in my head at once.
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@Jaloopa said in D&D thread:
Help me, fellow nerds. You're my only hope
Could use a remote desktop? Sadly would depend on the latency and speed of the Internet...
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@Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
@Gurth I only draw combat maps, and most are rough sketches.
One of the things that turned me off D&D3+ is when they went from D&D3’s “square-based movement and miniatures are optional” to D&D3.5’s “square-based movement with miniatures is the recommended way to play”, which spawned a whole cottage industry of battle mats, bent-wire spell templates and assorted other IMnsHO unnecessary junk. Extreme example:
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@Gurth I like minis, but I do a hybrid battle map/wargame approach. The squares are just guidelines. If I really need to, I use a ruler to measure distances. In person, only PCs and important NPCs get minis, I use plastic bases and glass crafting gems as tokens for other things.
But I play 5e, which is more amenable to that semi grid style.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
@Gurth I like minis, but I do a hybrid battle map/wargame approach. The squares are just guidelines. If I really need to, I use a ruler to measure distances. In person, only PCs and important NPCs get minis, I use plastic bases and glass crafting gems as tokens for other things.
If I were to play an RPG with miniatures, I’d want basically correct ones for every PC and NPC putting in an appearance … This is probably just my background in modelling seeping through, though :)
For distances and so on, I just estimate it based on the situation as I see it in my mind. It’s usually enough to round things off to the nearest metre anyway. Which leads to another Shadowrun anecdote …
One of the PCs was a physical adept with the Distance Strike ability, which let him make melee attacks from (in his case) four metres away — he doesn’t stretch his arms out that far, but the magic essentially delivers his punches to the target. So, the PCs are in a brawl inside some apartment, and the player asks me how far away a potential target is. I figure it’s about five metres and reply, “About four or five metres,” deliberately keeping it vague so he may or may not be able to reach him with Distance Strike, and he might decide to punch when he can’t actually reach the target. The player then points to his eye and says, “How far away is he exactly?” Damn, I had forgotten he also has rangefinder cyberware built into his eye … “Oh, yeah … 4.53 metres.” “I take a step forward and punch him.”
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@Gurth part of my problem is that I'm not very visual at all. Everything's words in my head, but that's not that great for keeping track of a big sprawling battle without tons of overhead. And I don't have the mental capacity for the overhead required. I'm fine with abstract markers.
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@Benjamin-Hall I can see how that would be a problem, yeah. I’ve got a very good visual imagination (if I say so myself), so it’s no problem at all working out where everyone is, what a PC may be able to see, etc.
Plus, of course, any NPC who’s out of sight of the PCs doesn’t need to be kept track of overly accurately anyway :) Things like “the mage was last seen in the kitchen” is all you really need to remember if no PC has LOS.
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Just got a call out of the blue from my sister. She and her husband are big board game players, but with coronavirus and all that they've been looking for something they can play with a group online. Then they remembered that they got a D&D 5e starter kit at some unspecified point in the past, and they want to set up a gaming group with me and some other family members.
I told her about Roll20, which she had never heard of. First session will be this evening. We'll have to see how it goes!
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@Mason_Wheeler if they also want to try board games online, point them in the direction of tabletop simulator
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Just recruited our mom to join the group. Other family members didn't really think of her but I figured, with her background in theater and improv, combined with her love of fantasy and general geekery, (which is where the rest of us got it from!), it would be a great fit for her. She seems to agree.
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My d&d group is talking about getting back together in an outdoors venue one guy has access to a big field so, weather permitting, we might be starting up again next week. I barely remember what was happening in the story
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@Jaloopa said in D&D thread:
I barely remember what was happening in the story
Hopefully the DM will.
I like how, at the start of every Critical Role session, Matt opens with a recap of the plot of the last few sessions, to bring the current events of the story into sharp focus for the players (and the audience).
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My online group is wrapping up its current campaign in the next couple of sessions. The DM hasn't planned another campaign, and he's going to have limited availability to plan and run another campaign for a while, and some of the other members have limited availability, too. So we're looking at running a series of one-shots for a while, and maybe between regular sessions, too. But it's a small group (4 regulars + DM), so we need a few more people to really make a drop-in session work. I'm not the DM, so I can't say yea or nay to anyone, but if you're interested, I can let the DM know. (He's a member here, but he hasn't been around for a while, so he probably wouldn't see it if you tried to contact him directly.) Edit: Sessions are Saturdays — morning – early afternoon, depending on your TZ, or late afternoon UTC. Regular campaign sessions are every other week, with one-shots in between and/or replacing regular sessions for the next month or two or ?
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@HardwareGeek what time zone? What platform/edition? I might be interested.
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@Benjamin-Hall Basically, 5e. The group was originally organized for people who hadn't played before, and the DM is pretty laid-back; he doesn't necessarily enforce the rules strictly as written. For example, there's never been any concern whether my character has the material components for spellcasting.
I think all of us are in either PT or CT, but there may be one in MT, and I think one of the people who's a member but basically never actually available may be in ET.
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@HardwareGeek I'm in MT. So morning into noonish Saturdays? Chalk me up as interested. You can message me details; I can send you my discord username if that's what you use. Or whatever.
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@HardwareGeek said in Lounge Status Thread:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Lounge Status Thread:
The world will react to them if they're really bad and it becomes a reputation. People refusing to work with them, surrender, etc.
I was going to ask how DMs handle that sort of thing. But I was going to ask in the appropriate thread.
Actually, thinking about it a little longer, I remembered that the question I was going to ask is a little more general: How do DMs typically handle someone playing way outside their character's traits. Like a nominally good character behaving evilly, or displaying reasoning beyond the ability of a low INT barbarian, or whatever?
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@HardwareGeek said in D&D thread:
@HardwareGeek said in Lounge Status Thread:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Lounge Status Thread:
The world will react to them if they're really bad and it becomes a reputation. People refusing to work with them, surrender, etc.
I was going to ask how DMs handle that sort of thing. But I was going to ask in the appropriate thread.
Actually, thinking about it a little longer, I remembered that the question I was going to ask is a little more general: How do DMs typically handle someone playing way outside their character's traits. Like a nominally good character behaving evilly, or displaying reasoning beyond the ability of a low INT barbarian, or whatever?
Generally by talking to the player. Now even 8 int is plenty--that's just uneducated, not moronic. I don't control alignment, personally. If they wrote down good and act evil, the world reacts to what they do, not who they say they are.
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@HardwareGeek said in D&D thread:
How do DMs typically handle someone playing way outside their character's traits. Like a nominally good character behaving evilly
Not playing a game with an alignment system would be the best way to achieve that.
or displaying reasoning beyond the ability of a low INT barbarian, or whatever?
I’d probably point out that the character may not be clever enough to think of that, and if the player doesn’t rein it in a bit, require an INT test to see if the character will actually think of it. (Of course, you then typically get to a situation like in The Gamers, where they try to break open the gate.)
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I've been running Curse of Strahd for my wife, her little brother and 3 of my nephews. They started the last session at level 3, and none of them are magic users. It was fun watching them go from casual enjoyment, to panic when it looked like they were all going to die, and finally to relief when they survived it all.
Spoilers for Curse of Strahd
Anyway, they started the session in Vallaki. After talking to the inn keeper, they decided that they were going to try and find out why he hadn't been receiving his wine shipments and head off to the vineyard. Along the way, they met and talked to the Martikov family. Unfortunately, they still approached the winery itself with no caution. As such, once they reached the building, 30 needle blights swarmed out of the vineyard.By round 3, they were doing pretty well. The first sign of trouble was when a druid stepped out of the fermenting room entrance, followed by 24 twig blights. Next round, another druid and 5 more needle blights stepped out. Then round 5 added a third druid and 2 vine blights. At this point there were about 55 enemies in play.
After that, the last
blightdruid in the building came out carrying the Gulthias staff. Some of the characters were pretty low by this point, and one was unconscious and unstable, so I had the conscious ones with line of sight make a perception check to see if the saw the fourth druid had an unusual staff. Only one character made it, so I had him follow up with a history check. He made that well enough to recognize the Gulthias staff and remember that destroying it would kill all the blights within 300 feet - more than enough for the fight. They ended up focus firing the staff and destroying it, leaving the group only the druids to take out, which they managed pretty well.
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Sent to me by my son:
https://www.facebook.com/190351771685071/posts/604516210268623/?d=n
In case this doesn't embed properly for you (nothing Farcebork embeds correctly for me, probably due to ad blocking), https://www.facebook.com/190351771685071/posts/604516210268623/?d=n
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@HardwareGeek said in D&D thread:
Sent to me by my son:
https://www.facebook.com/190351771685071/posts/604516210268623/?d=n
In case this doesn't embed properly for you (nothing Farcebork embeds correctly for me, probably due to ad blocking), https://www.facebook.com/190351771685071/posts/604516210268623/?d=n
Someone has been reading Paranoia.
