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Post by Southpaw Hare on Oct 18, 2017 14:20:51 GMT 1
I googled Eberron after you mentioned and had absolutely no idea that D&D wasn't just Faerun (the D&D world that most people, including myself, play in). I also hadn't realised that Ravenloft was its own world and setting - we're currently playing through the Curse of Strahd and I just assumed it was in a quiet corner of Faerun. Can anybody who has played these other world version of D&D persuade me that I need to dig into them further? I can personally say that I enjoyed Eberron as well, although it more compliments other universes than replaces them. It's got a big magitek, sci-fi twist to it, with a PC race of essentially robots (The Warforged, sentient golems), magitek trains and airships, family houses with magical bloodline powers, and big cities that wouldn't work in other settings. I personally found some enjoyment exploring the questions of what it means to be a Warforged, which was not unlike being Data from Star Trek asking the same questions. It was amusing enough for a while, though I also wouldn't discard my Faerun and Faerun accessories. As a fun fact, Eberron was created as part of a Wizards of the Coast official contest, where some 10,000+ people submitted campaign setting ideas, and only 1 guy (Keith Baker) won and got it published. As it turns out, Rich Burlew, author of Order of the Stick, got second place (tied with a third guy), confirming what a great fantasy writer he is. We may never know what setting he was making (probably locked away in a WotC valut forever), but it was probably awesome. He then wrote some articles about campaign setting design that can still be seen along the left side of his web page to this day.
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Post by Zejety on Oct 18, 2017 22:58:55 GMT 1
My Curse of Strahd group's wizard wanted to ask an NPC for an item. She was friendly and would have given it to him in the first place. Instead, he immediately tried to cast Charm Person on her when she opened the door. When she made her save, he tried to play the components off as a Dragonborn greeting. When he failed that roll, he tried to make up a fake reason for his coming and avoid peeking at the rogue who was entering the house to steal the item. When he failed the roll, he pushed his way (and her) inside and cast Alter Self to "reveal" himself to be a vampire in service of Strahd. When she screamed, he tried to grab her throat and failed. While she ran away, he put the curtains on fire (adventurers...), then proceeded to play intimidating vampire. When his familiar alerted him that the rogue had snatched the item, he Gaseous Formed out the window.
The end.
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Jude
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Post by Jude on Oct 19, 2017 3:36:30 GMT 1
Two main things that I really like about Eberron is the general approach that Keith took towards making it; the "if this is how the rules say this works, then what would the world be like" approach. The other being the amount of different factions and groups that all have their own agendas. It gives you tons of interesting options to make all kinds of stories out of. The first podcast is a good one to listen to if you want an overall introduction to what the world is like and what it has to offer players: manifest.zone/01-introductions/One criticism I've seen which I've noticed in our own group is that for the players to get the most out of it they have to know a bit more about the setting compared to others. Which can be difficult if you have players that don't want to read stuff. I can't speak for any of the other older D&D settings as I've never used them. But if you feel like doing something a bit different with your group but don't want to put in the effort of learning a completely new rule set, I think trying one of these new settings is a good choice.
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Post by Plum on Oct 19, 2017 9:30:59 GMT 1
My Curse of Strahd group's wizard wanted to ask an NPC for an item. She was friendly and would have given it to him in the first place. Instead, he immediately tried to cast Charm Person on her when she opened the door. When she made her save, he tried to play the components off as a Dragonborn greeting. When he failed that roll, he tried to make up a fake reason for his coming and avoid peeking at the rogue who was entering the house to steal the item. When he failed the roll, he pushed his way (and her) inside and cast Alter Self to "reveal" himself to be a vampire in service of Strahd. When she screamed, he tried to grab her throat and failed. While she ran away, he put the curtains on fire (adventurers...), then proceeded to play intimidating vampire. When his familiar alerted him that the rogue had snatched the item, he Gaseous Formed out the window. The end. Aside from the initial idiocy, that is actually a really cool way to save reputation Until said NPC notices the item in your group's posession... Ooh thanks, I will give that a listen!
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Post by Southpaw Hare on Oct 20, 2017 18:14:54 GMT 1
So, Tails of Equestria was played! We started playing the (currently only) module, The Curse of the Statuettes, and we probably got about 1/3 of the way through. In general, it's... again, exactly what you'd expect. It's an RPG, with very simple but typical skill-check sort of rules, except everyone is a pony and everything is a horse pun. Naturally, this group (consisting entirely of people who strongly identify as Bronies) absolutely loves it. I think that the best parts generally come from the characters that the players create, and they did not disappoint; all of the PCs are creative and fun to watch interact. We have: - Ferrous Irony - A grey Earth Pony who is a metalworking smith. She is super serious and boring (sort of like Maud from the show), and has a dry sense of humor with which to deliver constant puns with a straight face. Also, she has special Earth Pony healing powers, which she performs by roughly twisting and snapping you about like the world's least considerate chiropractor, and then you suddenly feel a lot better instantly.
- Strawberry Scoops - A White and Pink Unicorn who was born into a family of ice cream and dessert makers, but actually wants to become a freelance journalist (hence the double-meaning of Scoops). She is overly curious and inquisitive, and wants to get interviews from everyone she meets.
- Stacked Deck - A Pegasus with straight-up Yu-gi-oh! hair, who really likes games of all sorts, especially card games. He is incredibly silly and all about having fun all the time, and/or trying to solve problems by using playing cards in ineffectual scenarios.
- Swirling Line - A purple Pegasus who is a professional snowflake-maker at the weather laboratories of Cloudsdale. She is often quiet, but also friendly and looks to make others laugh.
- Evergreen Falls - A blue Pegasus that is a wilderness survival expert and camping scout leader of the local foals. He lives in the Everfree Forest and often keeps to himself, but he is regularly lured back to civilization by his sweet tooth for tasty desserts.
So everyone is a kooky wacko, which is just about right for the intended tone.
So, right off the bat, we decided to change up the adventure a bit. We didn't want to do the Pet Predicament adventure from the core book, nor did we want to heavily involve the Mane Characters from the show substantially. This module normally starts off with Spike showing up and being all like, "Help! Twilight Sparkle and her friends are in trouble, and they need YOUR help!", which was a bit much for our tastes, so I modified it and changed names as needed. The characters instead started out having a Pleasant Pony Potluck Picnic on the outside of town. We begin with quite a bit of time dedicated to just character interaction, which is silly, funny, and high-energy. Then suddenly, a dragon (think Garble or Ember size) crash landed and asked for their help. His name is Flint, and he's a cool Cowboy Dragon (he has a hat, so that's how you know) who happens to have pony friends (all of which are generically nameless at the moment) that are need need of help.
The over-arching issue of the campaign is the titular curse, which seems to be randomly turning ponies to stone (and also shrinking them to be adorably tiny: statuettes!). Flint tells his tale of woe of how his friends were the previous group investigating the matter, but then they got attacked, and he was the only one to make it out un-petrified. Now it is up to this brave new group of Level 1 Noponies instead! After doing some research checks, they figured out what they needed to know about The Badlands, and then took a train to Dodge City. From there, they met other ponies going out to an archeological dig site in the middle of The Badlands and decided to travel with them. They learned a bunch of stuff from the wagon driver, Sunny Saddle, though a lot of the information is mysterious foreshadowing that will become important only later (and possibly only in hindsight, depending on how clever they are). While on the trail, the group encountered their first major obstacle - a huge rock avalanche while trying to navigate down a canyon path! Rocks Fall and everyone tries Not To Die, which proves difficult for some of the characters who dumped their Body stat. Much stamina damage is taken. At one point, one of the wagon wheels starts to come off, so Ferrous (who has the highest Body stat) begins physically carrying that side of the wagon (becoming a Ferrous Wheel). With the pegasi also helping by keeping an aerial lookout for the rocks as they come, the group eventually makes it to the bottom on the canyon in relatively whole pieces. The group then has do deal with a random encounter (I love the fact that this module has a Random Encounter Chart for The Badlands. It's so classic D&D.) They roll a Sandstorm, which threatens to blast them with tons of stamina damage if they don't take cover. They take the alternate option and have their triple team of pegasi try to manipulate the weather, creating a big tornado around the group and diverting the sand away from everypony else in the center, allowing them to safely walk in the eye of the storm. Creative problem solving! Finally, the group comes upon the camp site of the previous group they heard about. They search around, find some clues, and then realize that... they're being watched by some dark and mysterious figure! Dun dun DUN! To be continued next time (we're doing so on Monday, so the wait shalln't be long!) Overall, yeah, really fun! The setting, tone, and themes are all spot on and something this group really digs!
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Post by Plum on Oct 21, 2017 0:20:19 GMT 1
That sounds really good actually!
Also, those puns. My god those puns
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Jude
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Post by Jude on Oct 21, 2017 4:52:41 GMT 1
It's great that you found a system that fits your players so well. Also those names are amazingly good.
Here is a good tangential topic: How much/what kind of stuff do you all play with on the table? As far as miniatures, maps, terrain, etc. I really enjoy making papercraft terrain. I just enjoy the process and think it looks cool. The problem is then I have a lot of terrain and have to find uses for it. I haven't actually used it that much for any campaigns, maybe if I run one in the near future I will get to use it. I will post some pictures of it this weekend because it makes me happy.
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Post by Southpaw Hare on Oct 21, 2017 8:32:39 GMT 1
It's great that you found a system that fits your players so well. Also those names are amazingly good. Here is a good tangential topic: How much/what kind of stuff do you all play with on the table? As far as miniatures, maps, terrain, etc. I really enjoy making papercraft terrain. I just enjoy the process and think it looks cool. The problem is then I have a lot of terrain and have to find uses for it. I haven't actually used it that much for any campaigns, maybe if I run one in the near future I will get to use it. I will post some pictures of it this weekend because it makes me happy. It really depends on the game. When playing D&D, 3rd edition and onward, my groups always use Minis on a map of some sort. Other games might not have any concept of tactical combat, such as the MLP game - but it DOES have huge areas for drawing your pony character, so we bust out the big 120 color crayola pack! I personally own pretty big collections of dice, minis, and various game pieces, so it's nice to get good use out of these things that I've spent waaay too much money on over the years. Doesn't always happen, though.
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Post by Plum on Oct 23, 2017 13:05:19 GMT 1
Curse of Strahd, minor spoilers regarding the amber temple: {Spoiler} So we're still in the Amber Temple (in game terms we've been here for two days. In actual play terms, we've been there for around 15 hours now!). We finally managed to get a handle on things and had no problems smashing through the skulls guarding the left wing of the temple, before heading down to the amber blocks. At some point, our bard has become extremely suggestible and basically is touching everything - but we don't KNOW he's extremely suggestible, so we can't counter-suggest. He's basically now an ultra strong, hideous, slick furred monster hanging from the ceiling and hurling abuse at the party. He's a future boss fight, in other words. He also has a bad habit of fireballing things at point blank range while the rest of the party are nearby. Bigger amber temple spoilers: {Spoiler} So we finally found our way to the Lich living in the temple. He seemed pretty reasonable and was willing to give us the information we needed to defeat Strahd and save Kasimir's sister. Unfortunately our Warlock is a servant of the Raven Queen so you can probably guess what happened next. Our DM severely levelled the Lich down for us and we still had one death (druid), plus one person two death saves down (warlock), and the rest of the party on single digit health. Our warlock would have died too if my Barbarian hadn't missed her attack on the Lich, which was passing half the damage taken along to her. The dead druid then reincarnated (he had also been touching amber blocks...) as a female halfling, with no teeth, which was priceless. I think we'll probably wrap up here next session, but we still have a section left to explore so I can only imagine what our bard will look like after that.
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Post by Zejety on Oct 23, 2017 15:28:19 GMT 1
My group is heading to the Amber Temple next session, after retreating from a first foray into Castle Ravenloft. Can't wait - currently re-reading the chapter, especially the "blocks", as I want to foreshadow them a bit. RE: Plum's second spoiler: The Lich is downgraded in the adventure as written. or did your DM specifically state that they downgraded it even further?
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Post by Plum on Oct 24, 2017 9:08:58 GMT 1
Oh that was probably as intended then {Spoiler} It still had lair actions, legendary actions and legendary resists. It just didn't use any high level spells. Given that it says it's memory is flaky, I suspect that was as written then. I'm curious what would have happened had we restored it, since it wasn't overtly evil and could probably have given us a bunch of info about Strahd. Alas our Raven Queen devotee pushed us straight into battle
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Post by Southpaw Hare on Nov 2, 2017 19:05:46 GMT 1
In our last session of Tails of Equestria, we had some trouble with how the rules for Teleportation were presented. They seemed inconsistent between PCs and NPCs, being very limited for the former, while exceedingly powerful for the latter. I asked about this on Stack Exchange: rpg.stackexchange.com/q/108812/7253And, after an e-mail and some prompting through other mediums, I got an answer from the creator! They pretty much confirmed that this was done deliberately so that the NPCs can have a Deus ex Machina escape if necessary in order to accommodate for newer and younger gamers, but encouraged that we come up with our own customized rules if we wish. I came up with this: www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=22531662&postcount=3Definitely a much more old-school D&D kind of series of charts. I'd love to hear feedback on it.
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Post by Southpaw Hare on Nov 3, 2017 15:55:28 GMT 1
So, my group continued its Tails of Equestria campaign. Everyone is really enjoying it! To start off, we had a new, sixth player and character. Introducing: Goldmyst Alchem - A unicorn stallion who loves brewing assorted exotic potions, and is a bit kooky and unhinged. We technically had two sessions since I last mentioned things. The first of those two, however, did have the issue of having some drawn-out scenes that took a lot of time, and as a result, not very much got done that session. It wasn't a bad session by any means, just slow. The next session last night went at a very reasonable pace, making up the difference. One of the reasons we believe for the slowdown was a custom rule we were using in which the team's Tokens of Friendship were pooled together. We figured this would prompt people to work together more, but it actually ended up having people debate and argue on how to spend them, so we removed this rule and went back to the regular system for Friendship. Quickly after discovering the camp mentioned last time, the group was attacked by a mysterious cloaked mare. She zapped some of the NPCs, turning them into (rather cute) statuettes, confirming her as the (or at least one of the) antagonists spreading this terrible curse. And so, they fought! Unicorn laser beams and shields were used, pegasi dive bombed from the sky. And then, when HP started getting low, the mare ran away. ...but she didn't get far. Yes, see, the book has some really contrived, Deus ex Machina rules about how she's supposed to teleport away, but I was unwilling to do this kind of classically cheap DM trick. This is what led to the whole question, answer from the author, and subsequent house rules I created standardizing teleport. At the time, though, what this meant was that the character tried to teleport away, but the PCs were able to successfully give chase several times. The group continued to wear her down over several more skirmishes over an extended encounter. At one point, she created a bubble shield, but the party used their shovels and/or spades (the equipment portion of the core rules make an oddly specific distinction between the two) to dug under it. At another point, Stacked Deck made a successful bluff that he just wanted to make friends, but instead used his Joke Kit to give her the old Electroshock Joybuzzer Hoofshake trick (which naturally deals actual damage in this system). When she was finally getting really desperate, she even threatened to shatter one of the pony statuettes if the group didn't let her go, which instantly took the game to a much darker twist than anything in the original writing of the character from the module, but it worked really well. In the end, she got away with 2 HP remaining, and she did it the "fair" way (fair by game mechanics, not necessarily morally). With their biggest lead gone for now, the group continued onward to the dig site (the second version of it, as the first one was destroyed by a Tatzlwurm). Here they got to gather all sorts of info, and then got to speak with the current de facto leader: none other than Dr. Caballeron, the villain of the Daring Do episodes from the show. Here, however, he seemed like a pretty nice guy, and also handed out quests, putting him on quite good terms with the group, aside from the fact that Stacked Deck continuously mispronounced his name differently at every opportunity to his annoyance. So, Dr. Cababblebibble asked them to go find Professor Gullytrotter, the actual leader of the archeological expedition, who had been captured and needed rescue. It seems like an honest and virtuous enough quest at face value, but what he didn't mention was that the professor actually has artifacts that he wants, and Dr. Cababylonfive expects the party to lead him right to them! And so the group set off to find the professor, with the optional subquest of stopping off at the original destroyed dig site in order to get some cool Batman grappling hook dealeos that will help them scale the cliffs around the area. Along the way, Strawberry and Swirling Line have an Random Encounter in which they fall into an underground nest of snakes. Swirling Line solves this by performing a swaying dance, pacifying them and allowing them to move on quickly. Once at the destroyed dig site, they attempt to sneak in, but are terrible at stealth, and end up triggering the Tatzlwurm to attack them! Swirling Line attempts the same dancing technique on it, as it's really just a big snake. It doesn't work, but it does allow her to get close enough to see that there is an odd gem lodged in the back of its throat! Now, the module basically says that this gem is supposed to not be relevant yet, and the group is expected to come back here later after they learn that they need it. However, it not only piqued their curiosity, but they had a very good plan for dealing with it. Stacked Deck decides to try and use his Joke Kit's sneezing powder to get the wurm to sneeze up the gem. The later section on how to get the gem makes it states very explicitly that this is something that works, so it did! Stacked got the gem, as well as a big ball of tatzl snot that made him sick with the tatzl flu. Swirling got sick too as she helped him escape, though they both quickly recovered with the help of some of Alchem's Potions. So now the group had performed a Sequence Break and gathered a pretty shiny thing that they didn't even know they needed yet, but hey it looked cool! Eventually, after waiting a few hours, they went back and actually got the equipment they were there for, also. Large post is large. More to come later.
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Post by Southpaw Hare on Nov 10, 2017 10:39:29 GMT 1
Hey guys. So, there's more Pony story to come, but I thought I'd share something else for the moment instead. This is something that came up with my gaming group recently that I feel would be a great conversation starter. Essentially, we were having a discussion about how to get really into the mind of your character, which is something that I think a lot of newer players struggle with. I can completely relate, and I have a story about what is clearly the turning point that helped me with this. I'd love to hear if other people have had similar (or perhaps very different) experiences of their own, or if they find this helpful if they haven't.
When I first started roleplaying back in my mid teens, and continuing through into my early 20s, I pretty much didn't get into character at all. Sometimes I'd try, but I just didn't get it for whatever reason. I just didn't get what it meant to create a personality. Other times, I didn't even care, and I was just there for the mechanical parts like the combat or whatever. Basically, I was doing the classic "roll-playing instead of roleplaying". In either case, my characters largely lacked any real motivation, personality, thought-process, or any such thing.
The turning point came for me when my college group started a campaign in the system Anima: Beyond Fantasy (though the exact system itself is of only minor importance, I think). The first catalyst was the character I created. I started with the base concept of "Like Toph from Avatar", and I chose this essentially "because it was really cool" without any real substance behind it. As a result, the character was blind, but also had a combination of physical fighting skill and psychic powers to limit the blindness.
He didn't end up nearly as tough and self-reliant as Toph though - he was actually fairly frail, and had a history of sickliness from birth. Combined with his multi-classing sort of build, where he wanted to be a fighter-type but was fairly mediocre at it, as well as having a very utility-oriented set of psychic powers, and all wrapped up in being a blind kid who had barely turned 18 and had seen little of the world outside of his house, and you had a very vulnerable character, both physically and mentally. And although I didn't understand it when I was initially writing the character down on the sheet, it was that vulnerability that would come to change my view on roleplaying and make him one of my favorite characters.
The gamemaster of the group, who was GMing for us for the first time (but had plenty of experience GMing in general), pulled no punches on me in taking advantage of my character's weaknesses. Early on, my character decided to use his psychic powers to read books in a library, but he was quickly caught in the act by people who could tell what he was doing. In this setting, such supernatural powers are considered evil and are punishable by death, so my character was essentially thrown in Super Prison and sentenced to die without a trial, on literally his first day in a city on his own.
Now, I could have easily seen this as a dick move by the GM. He made something REALLY BAD happen to me that I didn't agree with. The mechanical game-player version of me felt like he was punishing me, and for no good reason! I could have easily taken the immature brat route and been all like, "Nuh-Uh! That didn't happen! And if it did, I hate you! You're dumb! I don't like the way you GM!", and in response, he could have been all like, "Well that's what happens! I'm the GM, and what I say is law! So there! Deal with it!" and we would have both ended up hating each other and not playing anymore. Fortunately, neither one of us were that immature. On the contrary, it turned out to have been the best thing he could have done. He ended up being my favorite gamemaster, that campaign became my favorite campaign, and that exact moment became one of my favorite moments in any game.
In that moment, I learned how to feel fear in a game.
For whatever reason, I stopped looking at the game as purely a mechanical piece of board gaming, and instead, I felt what my character felt - and that was utter terror and fear for his life. This emotional state then began guiding his actions. In this case of being arrested, his fears told him to "play it cool" with the authorities. He went quietly, being as helpful as possible in the hopes that they'd go easier on him (they didn't really), and he tried to butter up the people in charge in the hopes he could charm his way free (didn't work at all). A little bit of snarky humor worked its way in. And it caused him to think of his parents, whom he had just left not a week ago. Think of how he was disappointing them by dying as literally the first thing he did. All this came about simply because he was afraid.
The character was eventually broken out and teamed up with a group that would become the PC party, most of whom were sticking together for similar reasons of trying to simply survive in a world where everyone (including all civilized society) wants to kill you. Throughout his extended adventures with this group, situations kept occurring that kept causing a similar reaction within me. My character kept getting afraid of what was happening around him (due to being so relatively weak and vulnerable), and as a result, new aspects of his personality kept coming out that even I didn't realize existed beforehand. Contrary to what you might intuit, however, not all of these actions were cowardly or involved running away or hiding. My character actually ended up being a fairly courageous and compassionate individual, despite fear being the base emotion behind these decisions. In one case, his new best friend was in mortal danger which caused him to fear for his friend's life, and it drove him to fight to protect him. As has been said, "Courage is not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear."
His personality really began taking shape around these moments - these vulnerable moments. Sometimes in combat, he'd stay back behind everyone and offer support abilities, because he knew he'd be hurt on the front lines. Perhaps I would have done this anyway from a tactical player POV, but now, I was doing it because that's what my character would do. One time, he blatantly disobeyed the wishes of one of his allies, because he thought the ally's plan was too risky and emotionally-biased. Out-of-character, it didn't really matter, but in-character, my character felt compelled to stand up for what he believed in. Eventually, his overall motivations shifted from simply being out to see the world, to being more about wanting companionship and friends - it made him feel good, and feel safe. And again, all this stemmed from that primal, base emotion of fear. From that, everything else - courage, friendship, defiance, anger - all flowed.
There is a lot more I could speak of about this character, this campaign, the GM and the gaming group as a whole, and how it really changed my life for the better. However, to keep a long story relatively short, that is the big moment that really got me to understand roleplaying in an entirely new light. It got me to appreciate that having bad things happen to your character isn't necessarily a bad thing in itself - rather, it can actually come to define them in interesting ways. From this point, I have always focused on making sure that when I design new characters, they have good healthy amount of vulnerability. (Ironically, the Anima: Beyond Fantasy system was originally really sold to me as a game where your characters are super-powerful anime badasses who can lift mountains and katana air-slash a billion times in a second once they get high enough level. In the end, it was the weaknesses of the characters that impacted me more.) This, I think, is the key. Real people have weaknesses; that is something I had been told many times even before the events of this story, but only after did I start to really understand what it meant.
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Post by Plum on Nov 10, 2017 17:45:17 GMT 1
That was an awesome story! Interestingly, I've never tried to play an adolescent character, probably because I remember just how little impact you had to shape the world at that age. Maybe I should try it and see where those limits and restrictions lead
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Post by Plum on Nov 10, 2017 20:00:39 GMT 1
Toot toot, I've been reading through Xanathar's Guide to Everything! Mostly pretty cool, and one of the two Sorcerous origins I wanted is there so I'm happy
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Post by Zejety on Nov 10, 2017 20:01:41 GMT 1
I should check if German FLSGs got it early, too. Unfortunately, the nearest one is in the next city. :/
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Post by Plum on Nov 13, 2017 21:57:55 GMT 1
Ladies and gentlemen, a moment please. Tyra Northwind, lovable barbarian and famed security chief of the Bloody Roses was found dead on Sunday, sitting in a comfortable looking armchair and buried beneath a pile of vampires.
Sleep well my friend, you will be greatly missed
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Post by Southpaw Hare on Nov 15, 2017 1:50:14 GMT 1
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Post by Plum on Nov 15, 2017 15:03:06 GMT 1
I was really confused reading that post until I hit the bit further down when you said it wasn't that way in D&D 5e You're still right - every martial character I've played under 5e has had perception because it would be massively inconvenient not to. I'll be playing a new Divine Soul Sorcerer in our Strahd campaign which should be useful as we don't have a cleric. She's not as flexible as a regular healer, but she can heal and has access to radiant damage, while also having the power and punch of an arcane caster - fireball, fly, counterspell etc.
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Post by Southpaw Hare on Nov 15, 2017 19:28:39 GMT 1
I was really confused reading that post until I hit the bit further down when you said it wasn't that way in D&D 5e You're still right - every martial character I've played under 5e has had perception because it would be massively inconvenient not to. Sorry, I didn't clarify, but if you look at the top of that forum page, you can see that it's in the 3.0 / 3.5 / Pathfinder forum category, which is what I've played the most of our of all the various D&D editions. Fighters have basically been blind for all of D&D history until 5th Edition.
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Post by mysticjuicer on Nov 15, 2017 19:51:59 GMT 1
I've always wondered why one of the changes to D&D wasn't something along the lines of each character class just getting a different amount of skills that they're proficient in, but the specific skills being entirely up to the player. I mean, assuming we still live in a world where for balance or flavour reasons Rogues get ALL THE SKILLS and then the other classes get some lesser amount, why couldn't those skills be entirely up to the player to pick? The risk of everyone picking the same skill that someone wanted to set themselves apart, or no one picking some critical skill necessary for the game could be handled by doing character creation at the same time, or something.
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Post by Southpaw Hare on Nov 16, 2017 0:32:32 GMT 1
I've always wondered why one of the changes to D&D wasn't something along the lines of each character class just getting a different amount of skills that they're proficient in, but the specific skills being entirely up to the player. I mean, assuming we still live in a world where for balance or flavour reasons Rogues get ALL THE SKILLS and then the other classes get some lesser amount, why couldn't those skills be entirely up to the player to pick? The risk of everyone picking the same skill that someone wanted to set themselves apart, or no one picking some critical skill necessary for the game could be handled by doing character creation at the same time, or something. A not-really-answer to your question is that D&D is a long-running legacy system that is set in its ways, and it does it that way because it's always done it that way, because it's always... etc and so on. It really likes its whole class-based methodology, where characters are heavily defined by their classes. To be clear, there are a lot of other systems that don't do it this way, and instead do it like you're saying, often specifically because they take this issue with D&D and want to do it differently. In fact, I think I've played more systems that have freeform pointbuy systems for character creation than class-based ones at this point. Anima is a hybrid system that works really well. It has classes, but these classes mainly just effect the costs of spending character points on very broad categories of skills - you're then free to free to actually spend those points on the specific individual skills however you wish. The classes don't really define your character at all, but rather just act as a sort of guide of how to distribute your points, percentage wise, around all the many various areas of your character sheet. The details are largely up to you. Yeah, some skills are for some classes could be considered prohibitively expensive to put a lot of points in, but I've never felt locked out of reasonable dabbling in anything. Plus, there's the Freelancer class, who just gets above-average prices for everything, but has low maximum caps on everything, which is neat.
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Post by mysticjuicer on Nov 16, 2017 17:02:30 GMT 1
Yeah, I'm reasonably familiar with D&D. I guess what I meant was, this seems like an extremely low impact house-rule that I'd implement if I still played pen and paper RPGs.
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Post by Zejety on Nov 23, 2017 11:28:01 GMT 1
So, someone tweeted this list/challenge thingy: I think I will try to make (minor) homebrew for every day. Posting here on top of Twitter to add some social pressure. ;-)
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Post by Plum on Nov 23, 2017 11:51:22 GMT 1
That sounds awesome - I look forward to criticising your creative endeavours
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Post by Zejety on Nov 23, 2017 13:06:37 GMT 1
There might be pandas.
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Post by Plum on Nov 23, 2017 13:56:43 GMT 1
A+ creator, would panda again
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Post by Zejety on Nov 25, 2017 19:54:04 GMT 1
Already working on stuff. It's not breaking the rules when there are no rules, right?
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Post by Zejety on Nov 26, 2017 17:46:01 GMT 1
So I've already started with the larger stuff I had in mind for the first couple days. In contrast to later entries, these are pretty long, a player race and a subclass respectively. Here's an early release for you to criticize: Also, a way too specific magic item that arguably removes variety and roleplaying opportunities from the game. This was originally inspired by an interesting interaction in a novel but it didn't really come through.^^
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