D&D thread
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@Mason_Wheeler said in D&D thread:
@HardwareGeek Not if you're facing down a dragon, it's not!
(50.5 ± 49.5) Corgis and a dragon? Forget about the quest; it couldn’t possibly be any more worthwhile.
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@kazitor save vs cute. It's a dragon's secret weakness.
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@PotatoEngineer said in D&D thread:
@Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
@GOG said in D&D thread:
@Benjamin-Hall said in D&D thread:
@GOG said in D&D thread:
@Mason_Wheeler said in D&D thread:
Dungeons & Dragons Publisher Faces Lawsuit From Dragonlance Co-Creators
Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast is facing a lawsuit from Dragonlance co-creat...
Anyone have any idea of what that other brouhaha WOTC was involved in was about and why it would impact Dragonlance? Or is that Garage material?
Supposedly they contracted with Weis/Hickman for some new novels, subject to draft approval. They'd been approving drafts for a while, then said "yeah, we're not going to read any more drafts." Which is a contract cancellation without actually going through that project. Except without actually cancelling it--just putting it on indefinite hold. So likely not making the expected payments.
This much I know. However, they mentioned some racism/sexism issues that WOTC was allegedly going through at the time and I wanted to know what those were.
Ah. I'm pretty sure that's about the whole "orcs are evil?" thing. And Dragonlance is full of questionable (from modern woke perspective) decisions regarding race. Gully dwarves. Klepto-hobbits. Etc.
That's D&D in a nutshell, really. Orcs are evil, gnolls are worse, demons are somehow worse than that, and devils are demons with law degrees. As much as WOTC is working on the "every Orc can be Drizzt if they want to," there's just plain fun in having Designated Villains who completely lack moral ambiguity.
Ages back, when RPG Stack Exchange was still young and fresh, Frank Mentzer (lead designer of BECMI D&D) was a member for a while.
He stopped being one soon after getting into a major flame war with a power-user/mod? (do we have a "complaining about Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange" thread?) over the proposition that Always Evil Orcs can be a solid idea.
The thrust of Mentzer's argument was that role-playing games are entertainment and that not all players are necessarily interested in exploring difficult moral dilemmas. Given that a lot of what PCs do is at least somewhat morally questionable, creating a simple, black-and-white (now there's an unfortunate choice of words on my part, eh?) moral framework for it lets them get on with the fun of adventuring without the whole "that orc you just killed had a wife and kids, you know?"
In practice, of course, it doesn't matter if orcs are Always Evil or not. What matters is whether they will kill or enslave you and yours if given half the chance. That's pretty much been the way of the world for thousands of years. It takes two for peace, one for war. If orcs don't want to co-exist peacefully, for whatever reason, debating whether it's because they're capital-E Evil is pointless navel-gazing.
(In the setting I'm currently running/creating for the wife, orcs act the way they do because it suits them. They don't got no time for slave-morality/why-can't-we-all-just-get-along nonsense. If you're a weakling that's gonna let yourself get killed/enslaved, then that's what you deserve.)
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@Mason_Wheeler said in D&D thread:
@HardwareGeek Not if you're facing down a dragon, it's not!
They'll distract him.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in D&D thread:
@HardwareGeek Not if you're facing down a dragon, it's not!
We were stalked by a dragon during one campaign. (Managed to roll the same color dragon for every dragon sighting.) Unfortunately it attacked us a couple times, but we managed to appease it by sacrificing a horse to it for dinner each time. Should have tried summoning corgis instead.
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@Atazhaia said in D&D thread:
@Mason_Wheeler said in D&D thread:
@HardwareGeek Not if you're facing down a dragon, it's not!
We were stalked by a dragon during one campaign. (Managed to roll the same color dragon for every dragon sighting.) Unfortunately it attacked us a couple times, but we managed to appease it by sacrificing a horse to it for dinner each time. Should have tried summoning corgis instead.
Way back in an old campaign we had a dragon to fight, and the DM didn't bother to check what the non-detection ability it had does (it prevents scrying, the DM thought it was a type of invisibility). As a result, we spent a while searching for it, though it was there the whole time.
After we found out what the deal was, the whole thing was recast as the party walking around, steering well clear of the beastie and saying "Nope. No dragon here. No siree."
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@GOG said in D&D thread:
In practice, of course, it doesn't matter if orcs are Always Evil or not. What matters is whether they will kill or enslave you and yours if given half the chance. That's pretty much been the way of the world for thousands of years. It takes two for peace, one for war. If orcs don't want to co-exist peacefully, for whatever reason, debating whether it's because they're capital-E Evil is pointless navel-gazing.
I don't really care what the Alignment entry says in the monstrous manual, I'm a lot more interested in how they act and how they're viewed by the rest of the world. If the orcs in your world are treated as if they're violent, slaving, treacherous enemies, then they're effectively Always Evil anyway.
I'm thinking more about Acceptable Targets: if you cross paths with an orc, is it expected/allowable for you to always kill them? Then they're effectively getting the Always Evil treatment regardless of the stat block. And some games (usually more on the beer-and-pretzel side) work great like that.
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d&d status: I love ending a session on a cliffhanger. Especially since they just uncovered the real masterminds behind the troubles in this town. Or so they think. About 5 sessions before expected, so this might be a rough fight, played straight. But now they have a week to anticipate. Which is evil.
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@PotatoEngineer said in D&D thread:
@GOG said in D&D thread:
In practice, of course, it doesn't matter if orcs are Always Evil or not. What matters is whether they will kill or enslave you and yours if given half the chance. That's pretty much been the way of the world for thousands of years. It takes two for peace, one for war. If orcs don't want to co-exist peacefully, for whatever reason, debating whether it's because they're capital-E Evil is pointless navel-gazing.
I don't really care what the Alignment entry says in the monstrous manual, I'm a lot more interested in how they act and how they're viewed by the rest of the world. If the orcs in your world are treated as if they're violent, slaving, treacherous enemies, then they're effectively Always Evil anyway.
I'm thinking more about Acceptable Targets: if you cross paths with an orc, is it expected/allowable for you to always kill them? Then they're effectively getting the Always Evil treatment regardless of the stat block. And some games (usually more on the beer-and-pretzel side) work great like that.
The simple, practical point of view is that in any game where Fighter is the basic class from which all other classes stem, you're going to need acceptable targets to fight. In practice, it means dehumanizing the enemy and what better way to do so than to make them literally inhuman and fundamentally in opposition to all humanity.
It's the same reason why stormtroopers don't have faces.
Now, D&D has changed a lot since WOTC took over (and not for the better IMO), so what I'm about to say no longer holds, but D&D didn't start out as "kill monsters, get treasure", but rather as "get treasure and avoid fighting if at all possible". This is shown clearly by the combination of xp for gold and the (relatively) low amounts of xp given by defeating (not necessarily killing) enemies. D&D used to be an exploration game, first and foremost, now it is mostly a fighting game (though less so in 5e than 4e).
In old-school D&D editions, like the ones I'm wont to play (my system o' choice is a hybrid of 1st and 2nd edition AD&D), talking to orcs might well be a good idea - if you've got a good line to feed them. That still doesn't change the fact that orcs don't usually just want to be friends and that is indisputably consistent world-building.
Consider: were the Mongols at the time of Genghis Khan and his successors capital-E Evil? Well, they gave you a choice: if you submitted right now you'd probably be okay. If you put up so much as token resistance, they'd raze your cities and slaughter your population wholesale; men, women, children and the elderly.
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@GOG said in D&D thread:
@PotatoEngineer said in D&D thread:
@GOG said in D&D thread:
In practice, of course, it doesn't matter if orcs are Always Evil or not. What matters is whether they will kill or enslave you and yours if given half the chance. That's pretty much been the way of the world for thousands of years. It takes two for peace, one for war. If orcs don't want to co-exist peacefully, for whatever reason, debating whether it's because they're capital-E Evil is pointless navel-gazing.
I don't really care what the Alignment entry says in the monstrous manual, I'm a lot more interested in how they act and how they're viewed by the rest of the world. If the orcs in your world are treated as if they're violent, slaving, treacherous enemies, then they're effectively Always Evil anyway.
I'm thinking more about Acceptable Targets: if you cross paths with an orc, is it expected/allowable for you to always kill them? Then they're effectively getting the Always Evil treatment regardless of the stat block. And some games (usually more on the beer-and-pretzel side) work great like that.
The simple, practical point of view is that in any game where Fighter is the basic class from which all other classes stem, you're going to need acceptable targets to fight. In practice, it means dehumanizing the enemy and what better way to do so than to make them literally inhuman and fundamentally in opposition to all humanity.
It's the same reason why stormtroopers don't have faces.
Now, D&D has changed a lot since WOTC took over (and not for the better IMO), so what I'm about to say no longer holds, but D&D didn't start out as "kill monsters, get treasure", but rather as "get treasure and avoid fighting if at all possible". This is shown clearly by the combination of xp for gold and the (relatively) low amounts of xp given by defeating (not necessarily killing) enemies. D&D used to be an exploration game, first and foremost, now it is mostly a fighting game (though less so in 5e than 4e).
Strangely enough, a lot of the old modules seemed to be written from a "combat first" view. Keep on the Borderlands was a straight clear-and-loot dungeon, and I vaguely recall another one where the only mention of women and children (orcs? goblins?) was their combat stats. I got into RPGs during D&D 2E, and the few modules I bought were pretty similar - the parts written for the GM rarely mentioned non-combat options. So while a creative GM would definitely allow non-combat options, the rules-as-written and modules-as-written seemed to support them only rarely. And there were plenty of save-or-die creatures and traps to encourage GMs to have lethal consequences. I only played D&D with friends, so our only sources were the books, rather than our experiences at other tables - and when a teenager reads the "GM is god" sections, they learn something different than an adult does. It really feels like there are two kinds of old-school D&D: the exploration-first, high-creativity kind, and the clear-and-loot kind, depending on whether the players/GM had learned the exploration-style from the table of an experienced GM.
It sure was possible to get creative, but it was so easy for the GM to shut down creative solutions that they were only going to happen if the GM deliberately permitted them. It's the double-sided blessing of GM-fiat-heavy games. (The easiest way to shut down a stealthy rogue, for instance, is simply to call for checks more often. They'll fail sooner or later.)
I played D&D for at least a half-dozen years before I found a GM who really went with the creative solutions. But even then, a bad roll or an insufficiently-informed decision could get you killed fairly quickly.
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@PotatoEngineer said in D&D thread:
It really feels like there are two kinds of old-school D&D: the exploration-first, high-creativity kind, and the clear-and-loot kind, depending on whether the players/GM had learned the exploration-style from the table of an experienced GM.
I must say it has only ever come across to me as the second type. Though second edition AD&D does clearly mention that defeating NPCs/monsters isn’t the same as killing them, the latter option seems to come across as the preferred one every time. Nearly all of the stats creatures are given, are either combat-related or indicate what loot you get for killing them, for example. Sure, there’s the social organisation bit of the stats block, but that just tells you how many you have to kill, on average :)
As for XP for loot, all I see is an optional rule on page 47 of the DMG that takes up all of six and a half lines to that extent: 1 XP per gold piece value of non-magical treasure. The only other non-combat XP (other than “defeating ≠ killing”) seems to be for using class-related abilities or achievements plus optional XP awards for things like good ideas, role-playing, etc. And both of these quickly get useless because of the high amounts of XP needed to go up a level beyond the first couple. A thief getting 100 XP for successful use of a special ability is really good at level 1, where you need 1250 to get to level 2. At level 15, it doesn’t really help you get the 220,000 XP you need to get to 16 …
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@PotatoEngineer TSR didn't exactly have a reputation for clearly getting across what their ideas were, that's true. Honestly, it took me a long time to figure out what I'd written above, mostly because I started with AD&D 2e, where the xp for gold rule was rendered optional (which goes to show that after Gygax was forced out, institutional knowledge went with him).
We can have a brief look at how the game evolved and see that even at the very earliest phase of development - with the game being little more than moving turn by turn through a dungeon - combat wasn't necessarily the first, last and only option.
From Underworld and Wilderness Adventures (Original D&D):
Avoiding Monsters: Monsters will automatically attack and/or pursue any characters they "see", with the exception of those monsters which are intelligent enough to avoid an obviously superior force.
(Emphasis mine.)
The rest of the section describes various ways of evading pursuit, should the party decide to not engage in combat.
When it comes to intelligent monsters, the book has this to say:
Random Actions by Monsters: Other than in pursuit situations, the more intelligent monsters will act randomly according to the results of the score rolled on two (six-sided) dice:
2-5 negative reaction
6-8 neutral reaction
9-12 positive reaction
The dice score is to be modified by additions and subtractions for such things as bribes offered, fear, alignment of the parties concerned, etc.(Emphasis mine, once again.)
Already we see that, even in their most basic iteration, the rules remind the DM that not all encounters must end in a fight.
This got more emphasis in later editions. Quoth Moldvay (B/X):
If the party chooses to talk (and the monster will listen), the DM plays the part of the monster. The players can ask questions, make bold statements, and otherwise react to the creature. The encounter may then become peaceful (agreement!), hurried (as the monster or the party runs away), or violent (if the talks lead to combat).
There is, of course, a reaction table, going from Immediate Attack to Enthusiastic friendship, with the odds of positive, neutral and negative reactions being the same as in the quoted OD&D table (the two extremes occurring on a roll of 12 or 2, respectively).
Mentzer's (BECMI) version of the reaction table is more involved, with each of the three main branches (negative, neutral, positive) having sub-branches that are tested over time if the party does not immediately attack or leave, making it possible (if somewhat unlikely) to obtain an ultimately friendly reaction even from an initially hostile encounter. The note regarding subsequent tests reads as follows:
Wait 1 or more rounds, and consider character actions, the speaker’s Charisma, and the overall situation before rolling again
AD&D got similar verbiage, which I'll omit. Unfortunately, none of these really emphasised sufficiently that "monster" is a term of art, not a job description.
It didn't help that people were house-ruling the dangers of combat right out of the game from pretty much the get-go. At early levels, old-school D&D is a meat grinder - a 1st level character has a good chance of getting one-shotted by just about anything. Hence the old adage:
That looks like a fair fight and we all know what to do in the face of a fair fight. Run away!
The way to have a decent chance of survival was to only get in unfair fights, unfairly weighted in your favour, that is.
Players got understandably stroppy about losing characters left and right by getting into unwinnable fights, so you got innovations like death at -10 hp or whatever (we have Death Saves in 5e, these days). This took a lot of the sting out of combat, because as long as one person survived, everyone else was likely to as well.
It's funny that you mention Keep on the Borderlands, because I played through the 5e adaptation a while back and we actually managed to convince the goblins, IIRC, to leave peacefully (we had to kill some of them, though). However, 5e makes such ploys harder by requiring Charisma-based checks for that sort of thing (and Advantage/Disadvantage in lieu of modifiers), which may lead to a situation where the only person who can actually communicate with the monsters ('coz they know the language) happens to have Charisma as a dump stat.
In older versions this was less of an issue, because the random checks were either Reaction or Morale and Charisma was just one factor out of many.
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@Gurth AD&D 2e did mess up a bunch of things, by making the xp for gold optional. Gygax was out at this point, and the Williams diktat was to get a new version out so TSR wouldn't have to pay him royalties. While David Cook did a good job overall, it's clear that some changes, as compared to 1e, were ill-considered.
When reaching level 2 requires anything from 1,250 (thief) to 2,500 (mage) xp, it should be abundantly clear that killing orcs (worth 15 apiece) isn't going to get you very far. The optional awards for role-playing and such help even it out, but only if the DM awards them pretty much just for showing up to play.
So how does xp for gold figure into this? Here's some of the random treasure suggestions from the 1e DMG:
- 20k-80k cp (200-800 gp), 20k-50k sp (200-500 gp) - yes, that's a single entry, yielding between 400 and 1,300 xp.
- 5k-30k ep - worth 1,000 to 6,000 xp
- 3k-18k gp - worth equal amounts of xp
- 500-2k pp - worth 2,500 to 10,000 xp
All of these (excluding the silver pieces in the first entry) are bell-curve distributions, so the expected outcome will fall somewhere in the middle. There is only a 10% chance of getting the first (and lowest) amount, and a 5% each chance of getting two entries, three entries or all monetary awards on the table.
Getting all this bounty out of the dungeon would be a challenge (that's why encumbrance used to be counted in coin weight), but a decent haul like the third entry or better (80% chance) might net the party something like 10,000 xp to split - enough to even get a novice magic user to level 2 in a four-man band.
Compare and contrast with how many 1 HD monsters this magic user would have to kill to advance: at 10xp a pop (still talking 1e), our magic-user would have to kill 250 of them single-handedly (actually, a few less if we account for the 1 xp per hit point of monster slain).
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@GOG said in D&D thread:
that "monster" is a term of art, not a job description.
I like the term 'NPC', though that's mostly applied to neutrals rather than hostiles.
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@GOG said in D&D thread:
When reaching level 2 requires anything from 1,250 (thief) to 2,500 (mage) xp, it should be abundantly clear that killing orcs (worth 15 apiece) isn't going to get you very far.
Especially if you play by the book and split the XP between all party members. In the interest of actually getting somewhere, I don’t think any of my groups have used that rule for 20+ years, and just award the whole XP to everyone who made a useful contribution (read: was present and doing something).
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
@GOG said in D&D thread:
When reaching level 2 requires anything from 1,250 (thief) to 2,500 (mage) xp, it should be abundantly clear that killing orcs (worth 15 apiece) isn't going to get you very far.
That's okay: the thief getting a level doesn't do much for them, anyway. (Only half-kidding.)
Especially if you play by the book and split the XP between all party members. In the interest of actually getting somewhere, I don’t think any of my groups have used that rule for 20+ years, and just award the whole XP to everyone who made a useful contribution (read: was present and doing something).
I played in a group that actually allocated XP on a per-kill basis (alongside goal-XP and general roleplaying XP). The fighter who rolled up 18/76 STR ended up with the lion's share of XP, due to how much damage he could dish out. (Thankfully, nobody quite figured out kill-stealing; I think the monster XP might have been split per person that contributed to the kill.) Eventually, the support casters started getting XP for their general support (casting Haste was a favorite), and then we finally switched to splitting XP evenly across the party.
That game is part of why I support milestone leveling now: it was a pain to keep track of XP.
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@PotatoEngineer I don’t like level-based systems much anyway (which makes it kind of odd that I play World of Warcraft a fair amount, I suppose) and much prefer systems in which you get to spend the equivalent of XP directly on improving your abilities, skills etc.
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@PotatoEngineer said in D&D thread:
That's okay: the thief getting a level doesn't do much for them, anyway. (Only half-kidding.)
Going from level 1 to level 2 increases your chance of finding and/or removing traps by 25% and your chance of successfully hiding in shadows by a whopping 50% (in AD&D 1e).
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@GOG said in D&D thread:
@PotatoEngineer said in D&D thread:
That's okay: the thief getting a level doesn't do much for them, anyway. (Only half-kidding.)
Going from level 1 to level 2 increases your chance of finding and/or removing traps by 25% and your chance of successfully hiding in shadows by a whopping 50% (in AD&D 1e).So your chances go from "you'll usually fail" to "you'll still usually fail"! Excellent!
I haven't read 1E, but 2E did thief skills much better: you got 30 percentage points per level to add to your thief skills (limit 15% in any single skill). And at first level, you got 60 percentage points to add to your (absolutely miserable) base skills, limit 30% in a single skill. So you can focus on the Move Silently + Hide In Shadows combo and get to nearly-competent within just a few levels. You'll still be terrible at everything else, but at least you're not terrible across-the-board.
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@PotatoEngineer said in D&D thread:
@GOG said in D&D thread:
@PotatoEngineer said in D&D thread:
That's okay: the thief getting a level doesn't do much for them, anyway. (Only half-kidding.)
Going from level 1 to level 2 increases your chance of finding and/or removing traps by 25% and your chance of successfully hiding in shadows by a whopping 50% (in AD&D 1e).So your chances go from "you'll usually fail" to "you'll still usually fail"! Excellent!
I didn't say you'd actually be good, but better than you were.
I haven't read 1E, but 2E did thief skills much better: you got 30 percentage points per level to add to your thief skills (limit 15% in any single skill). And at first level, you got 60 percentage points to add to your (absolutely miserable) base skills, limit 30% in a single skill. So you can focus on the Move Silently + Hide In Shadows combo and get to nearly-competent within just a few levels. You'll still be terrible at everything else, but at least you're not terrible across-the-board.
Agreed that the improvement mechanic in 2e was a lot better for someone who wanted to develop their skills in a controlled fashion and create a specialized thief.
To be fair to thieves in all editions of AD&D, there was one thing they were real solid at from Day One: climbing. An unimproved 85% chance (compared to an unskilled 40%, IIRC, for everyone else), plus the ability to climb surfaces unscalable by anyone else, without tools to boot, is not to be sneezed at.
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@GOG My main complaint about the whole thing is that thief skills work unlike any other similar abilities in the game. But this being AD&D, of course, would you expect anything else?
My other main complaint is why all of these are special thief skills in the first place. Yes, OK, it’s to make thieves a clearly separate class, but things like druids and rangers get clearly magical class abilities (shapeshifting, etc.) while thieves get skills that in theory, anyone should be able to learn.
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@Gurth said in D&D thread:
@GOG My main complaint about the whole thing is that thief skills work unlike any other similar abilities in the game. But this being AD&D, of course, would you expect anything else?
I hear this general complaint a lot, but - having given it some thought - I think it is a misplaced one.
Let's consider what "rules" typically mean in an RPG setting. For the most part, they boil down to a probability distribution in situations of uncertainty.
This being the case, it doesn't necessarily make sense to use a uniform set of distributions for everything in the game (as all d20-based systems do). Sometimes, a linear distribution makes more sense. Sometimes, a bell-shaped one is more appropriate. What about weighting?
Old D&D didn't care much for having all rules work the same way, because - coming from a wargame enthusiast background - the designers cared more about getting the right distribution for the job than making rules easy to remember (there's a rather longish discussion of probability distributions at the very beginning of the 1e DMG; Gygax was a bit of a nerd when it came to that).
My other main complaint is why all of these are special thief skills in the first place. Yes, OK, it’s to make thieves a clearly separate class, but things like druids and rangers get clearly magical class abilities (shapeshifting, etc.) while thieves get skills that in theory, anyone should be able to learn.
This comes down to the very concept of "class", which is very much a game device, as opposed to part of the world-building. Classes aren't professions, but rather archetypes that exist solely to facilitate a certain type of play. Old D&D was very much about strengths and weaknesses. Thieves had skills nobody else did, because otherwise there would be no point of having such a type of character. They were a (comparatively) late addition to the game, too - the original Men & Magic only had Fighting-Men, Magic-Users and Clerics (a class that combined some of the strengths of the previous two). Thus you had one type of character that was good at fighting, but had no magical ability, one that could use magic, but was really poor in combat, and one that had some magic and was decent in combat.
Thieves originated in a Dragon article, IIRC, and were later re-published in Supplement I: Greyhawk. Since it was a rule supplement, it was stuck with the previously established class framework, despite not really fitting on the combat-magic continuum. Their place in the game was to provide some additional, non-magical abilities that none of the other classes had. If those were available to the other character types, there would be no point to the thief class.
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@GOG said in D&D thread:
I hear this general complaint a lot, but - having given it some thought - I think it is a misplaced one.
I don’t think it’s misplaced — though it does reflect a different mindset than that of the original designers. If, as you say, their intention was to get probabilities “right” (for a given definition of “right”), it makes sense on certain levels to have thief skills work differently from proficiencies or saving throws or whatever. At the same time, it doesn’t on others: the only real difference between a d20 roll and a d100 roll against a difficulty is the granularity.
Let's consider what "rules" typically mean in an RPG setting. For the most part, they boil down to a probability distribution in situations of uncertainty.
I would have said “The physics of the game world”. Though we could then argue how that’s different :)
(there's a rather longish discussion of probability distributions at the very beginning of the 1e DMG; Gygax was a bit of a nerd when it came to that).
Try the GM guide for Das Schwarze Auge … about five pages of a section titled “Higher Mathematics”, including 3-axis graphs, about dice probabilities in the game.
This comes down to the very concept of "class", which is very much a game device, as opposed to part of the world-building.
Well, yes. Which is why I don’t like them overly much unless there’s a good reason in the game world for why there would be classes and levels — and the only game I know that attempts to do that, is Earthdawn.
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@Gurth D20 v. d100 is simply a matter of granularity, true (though in the case of the thief skill progression, it's a key difference, given that some skills advance in less than 5% increments). However, the complaint itself is of a more general nature (to wit: in old D&D every rule worked differently, as opposed to the more "elegant" solution offered by D20, the system), and that's what I was addressing.
Wrt the concept of classes, I don't mind them any more than any other approach. The Fantasy Trip had a cool one, where you could choose between a Heroic or Wizard character, with the difference being whether skills or spells would be easier to learn. Again, classes are archetypes, rather than features of the game world and - frankly - I don't see any indisputable reason why aspects of the game should in some way be reflections of the setting. It's like the classic rookie OOP mistake: objects don't have to have a one-to-one correspondence to your domain entities and it may well be a bad idea to write your model like that.
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@GOG said in D&D thread:
@Gurth D20 v. d100 is simply a matter of granularity, true (though in the case of the thief skill progression, it's a key difference, given that some skills advance in less than 5% increments).
Still a matter of granularity :) They could also advance them in 5% steps at certain levels only and achieve the same overall result, for example.
classes are archetypes, rather than features of the game world and - frankly - I don't see any indisputable reason why aspects of the game should in some way be reflections of the setting.
They feel artificial to me when the game world doesn’t somehow cater to them as well as the rules. And yes, of course it’s all artificial because it’s a fictional game setting with rules that people came up with. I don’t think that’s a good reason to not try and mesh the two when it comes to basic concepts like these. Like I said, I tend to see a game’s rules as the physics of its world, and if you then get major things that exist in the rules but not the world, it feels like a kludge or a badly executed idea.
It's like the classic rookie OOP mistake: objects don't have to have a one-to-one correspondence to your domain entities and it may well be a bad idea to write your model like that.
Would it help if I mention here that I have a hard time wrapping my head around OOP in any case? Your comparison is almost entirely
to me.
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@Gurth Whereas I see game rules as being the UI layer. They're how the players talk to the game world and the game world talks back. Effectively a translation layer. There needs to be some consonance here (try playing a FPS using, say, the UI and control scheme for an RTS), but it's nowhere near a 1:1 or even a direct connection at all.
And the whole thing about probability distributions and granularity is, to me, a red herring. The game-world isn't specified closely enough to have any hope of properly modeling those distributions. And then you have the threshold question of what do you roll for in the first place--every distribution has a flat region. The beauty of a d20 for everything is that it lets you focus on that flat region and leave the rest to auto-success or auto-failure. As long as you don't have a mindset that the dice rolls are in-universe resolution mechanics. They're not (at least in D&D)--they're tools to help move the action along and resolve uncertainty in a fair, fun way. UI conventions, not fiction conventions.
Basically, you decide what you want to do, resolve what will happen, then narrate the resolution. Dice are forward looking. They tell you what will happen when you take an action, not what did happen once you took an action.
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@Benjamin-Hall Thinking about that, I suppose there are three generations of RPG game rules:
- 1970s and 80s, where the rules for different things are essentially unrelated but designed for each separately to give outcomes desired by the game’s designers.
- Ca. mid-80s to 2000, where the rules are intended to be a coherent framework to model reality to some degree or other.
- Ca. 2000 to present, where the rules are kept deliberately simple and wide-ranging, to support the storytelling.
There is a degree of overlap, of course, and games that don’t fit the approximate eras I used above, but this seems fairly accurate to me anyway.
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Tomorrow I have to start running Rise of Tiamat for a party that's been used to a pretty experienced DM.
I picked the module by default, as the only longer-running adventure in the correct universe covering approximately the right levels that I could find. I really don't have the right party for it.
The book stresses how important it is not to water anything down, that the danger should be real and failure possible throughout, and that at the final battle, losing (with quasi-apocalyptic results) and/or a TPK should be real possibilities. I really want to be able to hand this world back to the previous DM and bring my previous character back to the party afterwards.
I've never run anything that didn't come out of a starter set before. I am underprepared and quite anxious. Pinning all my hopes on the other DM who will be my only player with significant experience apart from this campaign, to be able to lead the party somewhat into taking sane actions, using actual strategy, and maybe even making an insight check once in a while. (As the previous most experienced player, I frequently wanted to make insight checks, but my character takes everything anyone says at face value, and no matter how obviously I hint, nobody else ever, ever asks if somebody seems trustworthy etc.)
Thoughts and prayers, please.
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@CarrieVS said in D&D thread:
Thoughts and prayers, please.
I’ve recommended this before, I think, but my philosophy when GMing is: give the players breaks when they need them, without even hinting that you’re doing it, but let the chips fall where they may when the players are being stupid and should know better. That does indeed mean watering things down when necessary. If you don’t want the PCs to die, and the players are not doing stupid or silly stuff, then by all means, lower difficulties for checks, fudge the bad guys’ rolls, reduce the size of opposing groups they have to fight, say the PCs hit when they actually missed, omit minor opposition they haven’t met yet, and so on. The vital thing is that the players shouldn’t know any of this.
Pre-written adventures are always recommendations to the GM, they are never set in stone. That said, you would do well to try and stick to it unless you have a good reason for changing it, because when you do change the story, you will have to keep in mind the effects of this in the later parts of the adventure. In some cases, this makes no difference — having the PCs find a clue they need on the dead body of a bad guy works just as well as them taking it from his desk drawer, if you think the adventure needs an extra fight. But if the adventure’s plot later on depends on that bad guy being alive, you will have to think of a way to have it work anyway now he’s no longer around.
Therefore: read the adventure and revise until you’re familiar with the overall plot and the individual encounters/scenes/etc. in it. You don’t need to know them all by heart, but you should know the basics of what’s supposed to happen, who is important and how the PCs get from each part to the next. You can look up the details during the session, when they become relevant, but if you don’t know the basics you’ll often be one step behind the players, and that not only slows things down but makes them dull.
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And additionally: RoT (and HotDQ, the precursor adventure in that cycle) is notorious for its...selective understanding...of the core 5e ruleset. Expect to have to buffer quite a bit of things and don't be afraid to say
and do whatever is best for your table instead of what it says.In its defense, it was written by third-parties (under contract) who only had access to the playtest documents, not the finalized rules. And there was a bit (a lot) of drift.
From what I've heard--
- Fights are generally tuned higher (in the "more
were they thinking" mode than the finely-tuned machine mode) than normal for 5e adventure paths. - Expectations around DCs and monster abilities are off from normal.
- Lots of the wording isn't quite the same as the rest of the game.
- Fights are generally tuned higher (in the "more
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@Benjamin-Hall There's a combo of those out now (Tyranny of Dragons) that is supposed to smooth out some of the issues that are present in the separate releases. I don't have it yet, so I can't speak to it personally, but that is one of the common reasons people give for getting the combined book instead of the separate campaigns.
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I have a reprieve!
We've taken on a last minute new player, so we're doing a session 0 tomorrow to help him make a character and talk about the campaign. I hope to do a little "random" encounter with them to get the new guy's feet wet, but no actual stuff from the module.
I have another week, therefore, to prepare myself to run the adventure proper. I don't think it's gonna help much - I'd be bricking it if I had another year to get ready.
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I've got to do some more prep. My nephews have ben coming every-other weekend for D&D. They just called and asked if they could come this weekend, too. They are currently traveling in the underdark, which is a lot of travel time, but I need to prepare some encounters for them.
Last weekend they had a pretty fun encounter. They came across a gas-filled cave with a dozen fire beetles. Only one of them was perceptive enough to get any hint that there was something besides the fire beetles in the cave, but he warned everyone. This wasn't the first time they've come across a gas-filled cave, so I was surprised when (s)he asumed that he was smelling a poisonous gas. Regardless, he stopped everyone from going in.
That's when things got interesting. They are travelling with a small group of NPCs who know their way around the underdark. One of them loves to gamble; he'll take almost any bet. The PC who smelled the gas bet a gold that NPC couldn't successfully run into the room, take three deep breaths, and then kick a fire beetle. The NPC did it, killing the fire beetle, and proudly collected his gold. In frustration, the PC threw a torch into the cave, igniting the gas and killing the remaining 11 fire beetles. Unfortunately, the entrance they were next to was the only opening in the cave (aside from the gas vent), so PC was standing right in the blast area. Fortunately, my nephew rolled well on the dex save and made it out with 1 HP. For flare, I had his character's eyebrows singed off. Now he's got this high elf, who is obsessed with her beauty, looking for some way to restore her eyebrows because she doesn't want to wait for them to grow back.
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@boomzilla
Guess that's the last time I ask the DM to let me use cheese strats
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@boomzilla I'm not sure the illustration is quite accurate though.
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@remi How do you think one of those elementals is conjured in the first place?
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@boomzilla And here I was, just reviewing the stats. That thing's a monster in melee: two attacks, each of which applies the grappled condition, with advantage if they're already grappled. Though I suspect that the 5E editor board would reject it: I can't think of any other monster that has the special ability "this specific attack has advantage against grappled creatures" – simply applying the Restrained condition is pretty darn similar (though weaker), so this is a half-Restrained condition and would probably be deemed needlessly complicated. I was about to call out +7 to hit on a CR5 monster as being high, but to-hit bonuses are all over the map: a CR2 polar bear has a +7 to hit, so who am I to complain about this beastie?
The Fondue Pot is spot-on, though. The other elemental-summoning items are also rated as Uncommon, and they summon CR5 elementals.
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I survived my first proper session DMing Rise of Tiamat last night.
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We completed our Werewolf the Apocalypse adventure today. So we have completed our rite of passage, meaning we can now form our own pack. Which consists of a group of teenagers at this point. My character, being the youngest, was elected leader because of my powess in combat. A big silver sword is a VERY effective weapon against other were-beasts and mythical creatures. I can do up to 17 damage in a single strike of unsoakable damage.
Also, I have leadership skills and good manners (when not a big enraged fluffy). And am a skater boy. Hanging out with three girls which is the rest of my pack.
But yeah, miners had uncovered a bad buried thing. Moving the bad buried thing would not work. So by raiding the mining camp's explosive supply we did the extreme solution to blow up the mine and bury the big bad thing again before anyone would unleash what is sealed inside. Then back at the camp the bad werewolves had arrived, just a bit too late to unleash the bad thing. Unfortuntealy they knew what we were too so hiding amongst the other humans would not work.
This led to an epic final battle, where we figuring a fight was inevitable just walked outside. Me first with a big silver sword in hand then the others. The regular humans told us to go inside again but we just did a "Nope!" and kept walking, lining up in front of the baddies and shifting straight into our battle forms. This made all humans flee in terror (according to plan) leaving just us and the enemy wolves and vampires. They being all strong struck down two of us, but I was the avenger striking them down in retalitation. And as werewolves are very hard to kill we had to kill them a few times before they stayed dead. And the vampires were just pathetic mooks and easily dispatched.
Then the tribe that we were supposed to be doing the rite with reappeared and told us of the grave mistake they had done sending us out in the wilderness, as they had been deceived. And then they told us that we had proven ourselves true wolves.
And in honor of the resolution of out first adventure together we named ourselves the C4K9 pack.
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My party is entering an area best described in two words. Body Horror. And the best part is that they're underwater.
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@Jaloopa Which worked very well in this adventure, where we were dumped in the middle of a snowy wilderness, rendering my skateboard useless. Although the skateboard also doubles as what my sword is transformed to when running around among people, so...
And he's a real sexy skater boy, as he's got enough appearance to be model-quality good looks!
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@Atazhaia said in D&D thread:
he's got enough appearance to be model-quality good looks!
My son is playing an RPG that is, as I understand it, basically Call of Cthulhu, except all the PCs are 80–90 years old. My son is playing a retired private investigator. He finds it very amusing that the luck of the dice gave him Humphrey Bogart good looks, while one of the other characters is a socialite who could be described as, at best, quite homely.
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@HardwareGeek said in D&D thread:
@Atazhaia said in D&D thread:
he's got enough appearance to be model-quality good looks!
My son is playing an RPG that is, as I understand it, basically Call of Cthulhu, except all the PCs are 80–90 years old. My son is playing a retired private investigator. He finds it very amusing that the luck of the dice gave him Humphrey Bogart good looks, while one of the other characters is a socialite who could be described as, at best, quite homely.
If I ended up in a game like this, my character would totally be an expy of Bruce Willis from Red. Let the cosmic horrors just try and come at me!
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