MarkB
Member

I like MarkB 's suggestion of the Otyugh handler. So much that I think I'm gonna steal the idea

You beat me to it! Thanks, I also like the ecological impact of MarkB it could be something like a fusion rocket. Depending upon the setting and the society, you could go for an ecological angle. The shuttle is designed with atmospheric flight in mind, and has a propulsion system that works well for that context. But the ship's engines produce waste products including radioactive particles, dangerous carcinogens etc. ...

A social interaction challenge (because combat and exploration are roleplay!) might be the ghost of a miner who died in a cave-in who isn't aware of it. If the PCs can figure out what happened and explain it to the ghost, he or she can move on to the afterlife. If the PCs are successful, the miner shares with them a tunnel that serves as a useful shortcut around a dangerous area (perhaps a cave filled with odorless, explosive gas) and/or leads to a cave that contains a treasure. Edit: Dang! MarkB upstaged me!

...r less entirely subjective. Mmmmm..... I give you all the points for "Paladin issues marinated[.]" It's like the worst steak ever. "Why does our kobold fillet taste so bad? It has to be the Paladin marinade!" Anyway, a quick point- OD&D- Paladin lost status by chaotic act; could not regain status. EVER, MAN! See Greyhawk supplement. 1e- If they perform a chaotic act, must confess and do penance. If evil act, cannot regain status. EVER. 2e- Same as 1e. Although it helpfully creates a rule because 1e had "knowingly commit" evil act, so 2e includes the whole, "You got charmed, yo, and now you have to atone!" So ... part of the problem, as it is with most things, is that weird translation from OD&D to 1e. "Chaotic" in OD&D meant, um, evil. Moorcockian. But by dragging out the whole different penalties in 1e/2e, it confused a lot of people, and (IME), most people just conflated the rules and made it, "If Evil, must atone." But contra what you are writing, and what MarkB is positing, these weren't the parts of the code that got people in trouble. There might have been some bad DMs out there, but as a general rule, the DM wasn't looking to strip you of your powers. Instead, and again IME, it was the rules about who the Paladin could party with ... um, who could be in the Paladin's party, that led to the whole "Jerky McJerkface telling the party what to do" reputation. That, and the fact that we all know Paladins suck and need to be excised from the game.

I came to that conclusion maybe ten pages ago. These peeps need this show to be the best, actual show be damned! Sent from my C6603 using EN World mobile app Who says it needs to be best? I like it. I am not seeing the issues that you are pointing to, or, rather, the issues that are being pointed to are very much not issues for me. IOW, MarkB hits it square on the head. Like I said earlier, I get that people don't like the show. And that's groovy. There's stuff I haven't liked too. Fair enough. The difference is, I'm not jumping through hoop after hoop in order to justify my feelings. I'm not misinterpreting tropes in order to "prove" how bad Disco is. I'm not playing silly buggers cherry picking games to "prove" that they don't care about canon. I'm not trying to prove anything. I like the show. That's the end of that conversation.

...yle mystery scenario, getting the GM to read you bits of his/her notes is the whole point of play: get the clue from here, find the tome there, find the cultists' ritual headquaters, etc. This is all about learning what is in the GM's notes. It's not (or need not be) the GM reading a story: the sequence may not correspond to any particular pre-planned sequence, and there may not be any particular structure of rising action, complication, climax, etc. You also continually use examples of bad GMing to make your point that option 1 is a bad thing.Well, I make do with the examples I have. I don't believe that you've posted any actual play examples. (If you have, and I've missed them, I apologise - can you point me back to them?) The example of the map came (I think) from Lanefan - at least, it has been established in lengthy back-and-forth with him. The example of the plot on the Duke came from Lanefan. The example of the attempt to find bribeable officials came from MarkB. Are you saying that these are all examples of bad GMing? So what does good GMing look like, in this context? What is a good use of secretly-established fictional positioning being used by a GM to establish that a player's action declaration fails, without regard to the action resolution mechanics? A good GM will not send his players on a wild goose chase through the mansion for a map macguffin.So what would the pre-authorship be used for? Even the fiction that I've "pre-authored" can be impacted (or changed entirely if the situation calls for it) at any time by the players' actions - they are the heroes after all.Can you give an example of what you mean? For instance - and I am going to give an example I am familiar with, as I don't have much to go on from your game - I have a PC in my 4e game whose goal is to reconstruct the Rod of Seven Parts. He got the first part at the start of 2nd level. The campaign is now 30th level and he and his friends are in a fight that will de...

...shing a story of an orc. If the person asserts (as I think Emerikol does) that "As a player I only want to add those embellishments that correspond to causal powers exercised by my PC in the gameworld, so I will embellish deaths caused by my PC, but not maps discovered by my PC" that's his/her prerogative. It's a type of aesthetic preference. (As well as Emerikol, Lanefan has advocated it strongly in this thread.) My claims about it are two. (1) It is not more "realistic", or less "Schroedinger-y" than embellishing other parts of the fiction. (2) It means that a reasonable amount of your play experience will involve the GM telling you stuff that s/he made up (either in advance in his/her notes, or stuff that s/he makes up as needed but that is to be treated the same by the game participants as if it were part of his/her pre-authored notes). The reason for (2) I take to be obvious given the extensive discussion of it in this thread, and the example provided by Lanefan, MarkB and others. And the more the game involves "exploration" - that is, the players declaring actions which have, as an outcome, their PCs learning about the gameworld (eg opening doors, finding bribeable officials, searching for maps, etc) rather than their PCs changing the gameworld (eg by killing orcs or befriending strangers) - then the more that (2) will obtain. Furthermore, given that a PC's success in changing the gameworld often depends (in the imaginary causal processes) upon unknown but relevant factors (eg the armour of the orc; the temperament of the stranger) then even changing the gameworld through action declarations can become hostage to a resolution process that does not permit the player to embellish other elements of the shared fiction. For instance, if we go from player action declaration through resolution mechanics through embellishment that reflects outcome, then it is possible to have combat systems like D&D (AC, roll to hit, determine outcome from that) and h...

...GM, that's not counterindicative at all of having trust issues about the GM being unfair.The last sentence is not something I intend to reply to. I'm not interested in analysing my own conjectured self-doubts in this thread. As I've said, a more prosaic explanation for my preferences is available - my pleasure in RPGing does not come from telling my friends stuff that I wrote in response to them making moves for their PCs that oblige me to engage in such tellings. As for the first bit, you are correct that I "seem to couch [my] arguments from a position where the DM is uses secret knowledge and fiat in ways that benefit the DM's ideas over the players". The reason it seems like that is because it is like that. (I didn't clarify that in my first reply because I assumed it was obvious.) And the reason I couch my arguments (I would prefer to say "analysis", but that's orthogonal) from that position is because that position is correct. Which is what I said was evident in the post from MarkB: inherent in the use of secret backstory as a factor in adjudication is that the GM's ideas are given priority in establishing the content of the shared fiction. I'll respond to the following bit too, though, if you like, though I think it's repetition: a GM may be fair or unfair in saying (on the basis not of action resolution, but of secretly established fictional content) that the map is not in the study where the players have declared that the PCs are searching the study for it. If every other bit of information points to the map being in the study, it's probably unfair. If the PCs have a potion of map detecing with a range that will encompass the whole house (kitchen as well as study) but are not using it, then what the GM is doing is probably fair. I don't care whether it's fair or not. The reason I don't like it is because I find it uninteresting. When I RPG, I don't want to engage in an activity in which my friends are spending most of their time trying to establish - by ...

...layer agency in a GM setting-driven game, as it was completely orthogonal from the GM's setting. (Eg we had fragments of a prophecy, and we spent a lot of time debating them, imagining how we could read various PCs into various roles outlined in the prophecy, etc. I assume that the GM had some conception, in his mind, of what the prophecy meant and how the events of play related to it, but they were absolutely irrelevant to what we players were talking about. We could have done our stuff just as easily if the GM had simply handed us three random prophecies downloaded from a Google search.) Clearly, you don't trust that players have any form of agency in any game that has substantive GM backstory and adjudication. You're denying that they do all over the place here and in your response to Lanefan. And you don't really seem to trust us when we say that player do have agency in the games we're running in which we do make use of substantial backstory and adjudication. Your response to MarkB here is fairly dripping with it. "you think it is" makes it very clear that you don't believe him or think it's true. It's like you're calling him out but acknowledge he's not technically lying because he seems to believe it's true.We're doing analysis here. Trying to dig down into the processes of play is not "calling someone out". I don't think MarkB is lying. I do think that the suggestion that I don't trust GMs is (i) false, and (ii) irrelevant - as if the only reason someone would play DungeonWorld rather than 2nd ed AD&D is because they don't trust GMs! But anyway, on to the issue of agency: Here is one of my assertions - if the GM is entitled, at any point in the process of resolution to (i) secretly author backstory, or (ii) secrety rewrite backstory, and (iii) to use that secret backstory as if it was part of the fictional positioning so as to (iv) automatically declare an action declaration unsuccessful ("No, the map's not in the study") - then I assert that every acti...

In many ways, they do the same thing, it’s just the puzzle is a little different, less constrictive, and possibly more complex. Instead of a relatively simple puzzle of doping out the best way to maximize treasure within a single dungeon, they might be working on visiting all of the adventuring sites in the region, foiling the impending invasion of the orcsish legion, stopping the predation of a wicked dragon, or just visiting interesting places.The last of these doesn't sound like a puzzle at all. As for the others, as I posted not far upthread (in response to Sadras and MarkB), I'm curious about how the puzzle-solving works, when there are so many (imaginary) elements in play which can introduce parameters to the puzzle to which the players have no access (in practical terms). I don’t see those as unsolvable, but then I don’t really buy into describing RPG gaming, even limited to dungeon crawls, as puzzles to solve. Unless the puzzle is figuring out how to have fun pretending to be a halfling Paladin or half-orc summoner.Right. As the OP said, I think puzzle-solving play is not so common in contemporary RPGing. Given that it's not, then, what is worldbuilding for?

...e notes on any of it. Having it pre-designed even if just in broad strokes makes the describing so much easier. Particularly at the start of the campaign when the players in theory know much less about the game world than their PCs do (canon lawyers for pre-fab settings notwithstanding) the DM has a lot of describing to do and as a side effect of that description is going to drop the PCs into a particular setting be it a steamy jungle, a city based on ancient Athens, a snowy Viking camp, or a pleasant sunny farm village. You'd probably call this railroading, but how else can it work? Of course, that's just the start; if the PCs in the Viking camp immediately decide to go someplace warmer then the DM has to react to that. (one hopes she has a broad-strokes regional or continental map showing areas beyond a short radius around the camp!) Are you able to say more about how you see the GM's work on the setting in advance of play feeding through to give the players that sense? MarkB might see it differently, but for my part it's much easier to figure out a character's motivations, beliefs, goals, etc. when there's a culture (or cultures) and common history to fit into. If, say, the setting history shows that our starting town was devastated by a war ten years ago and since rebuilt, that's going to influence my character and what she thinks; and probably influence other characters as well. But if the starting history shows no such war it's not our place as players to just add it in. We have no right to, as world design is not in our purview. And if there's no pre-designed history then what's the point? What happened before our PCs became PCs? What major events shaped their lives? (it should be obvious but I'd better mention: the DM sets the event but the player chooses what influence it had on her character, if any). Lanefan

MarkB I thought Force Awakens: Incredible Cross Sections was canon due to being written and published after Disney acquired Star Wars?

MarkB Maybe. But if so, that's a retcon of the Falcon's history. It was originally a freight pusher for orbit; that's why it had the cockpit to the side instead of the YT-standard central cockpit.

Yeah, I gotta go with MarkB on this one. What's the point of trying to draw boxes around whether something is a "game" or not. Like any genre discussion, it's ultimately a deep, deep dive down a dark rabbit hole. And, I would also point out that I don't think anyone has advocated completely taking death off the table either. Just making it a bit more rare.

I usually forget that one even can roll for hit points on leveling up. I doubt it's something the designers give much thought to as well. Agree with MarkB, incentivizing rolling for hp would be counterproductive — average hp should be the preferred option. Easier to keep track of, doesn't lead to pointless power differential between characters, takes nothing away from the RP. If rolling for hp, on average, gave you better results, we'd have players groaning and complaining when I said, "and we'll all just take average hp on level up." With the average being statistically better, nobody even notices that rolling for it is gone after a level or two. (If they ever noticed at all.) Roll dice for PC actions. Live with the consequences. But why randomize the squishiness of a character?

...the questions I'm trying to determine. How high up do you have to climb a building for there to be noticeable change in gravity. I think it would affect how high-rise type buildings were constructed, since the shearing forces (might be using the wrong term) between regular G and lower-G would require stronger building materials. Plus it might suggest activities happening at the upper levels of high-rise buildings would be substantially different...for example moving construction activities to the lower-G zones for increased efficiency. RangerWickett Really helpful on how to visualize entering at the zero-G "fixed" axis and seeing the entire station spin around you. I suspected some kind of shuttle or elevator would be necessary, but hadn't conceived of exactly why... I plugged a 500 m radius in and got a Tangential Velocity (or "rim speed") of 156 mph, which would be "splat your dead" for anyone moving or falling from the zero-G axis to the ground...in scientific terms :) MarkB That's another one of my questions. I mean, nothing we throw on Earth actually travels straight, technically. But in the rotational artificial G environment I'm wondering if it would be more obvious...or would it basically be a case of "throwing a baseball while in a moving car"? In other words, if everything/everyone is rotating at the same rate in relation to each other, there doesn't appear to be any change from Earth-standard gravity (assuming 1 g centripetal acceleration). But what happens if I punt a football down a field or fire a railgun at the elevator/shuttle tube along the central axis when the station is rotating at 1.3 rpms and the rim is spinning at 156 mph?

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MarkB beat me to it. Surprised it took to the second page. If you don't want them encountering/recognizing a troll...just use something else...Hill Giants seem to be the popular choice, but you could just go Ogres, Bugbears, heck make is a gaggle of Kobolds!...and let it regenerate and rend.

R2 and 3PO are both still in it. They haven't been replaced. That's good to know. MarkB - On the Death Star, they're low in the trench, but not as ridiculously low over the lake. Yeah, you can fly real-life jets ridiculously low, but the over-the-topness bothers me.

My wife says Danny shot her to save the Doctor getting his hands dirty. I'll have to rewatch. Like MarkB I assumed it was the Cyberman assumed to be the Brigadier keeping the Doctor's hands clean. But the FX did look more like a teleport. They could have just reused the SFX (those are pricey) or deliberately used that one to allow room to bring back the Master. But, while neat, the Brigadier semi-returning felt deux ex machnica. (Heh. A deus ex machina cyberman. Heh.) It was kinda foreshadowed and it makes total sense but it's so abrupt. Still, any excuse to namedrop Lethbridge-Stewart is fine by me. I liked the mutual lying at the end. Such a different way for companions departing. Despite being extra long it felt like there were some bits missing. I felt there was a scene missing between the graveyard and Clara's room where the Doctor explains that someone could come back. Likely cut for time/pacing but awkward from a story purpose. But I liked Danny sacrificing his life to return the boy he killed. That was such a nice bit of his overall character arc. Perhaps that's a...

Eco-terrorist. Civilization is a blight upon Nature, and it's time to help Nature reclaim its rightful lands, regardless of the cost. I was thinking this. Like for example the druid raids a small village with a pack of wolves. They just come in, terrorize the locals, and leave the land in fear of more, larger, deadlier attacks.

It's not really that the action landing sequence was bad, just that we've seen dozens like it. It's pretty much a rip-off of Kirk and Khan's EVA in Star Trek Into Darkness, and there've been plenty of similar sequences. They did at least subvert the "redshirt dies first" trope, but it felt like that was half the reason they made the sequence. Also, I'm not sure why the pods' tails kept spinning. Was the spinning helpful in some way? I say "gyro-stabilization", but I really think: "CGI bovine excrement". ;)

There are practical difficulties in implementing such a system in a game like D&D. How do you guard against players deliberately seeking out overly-difficult, but not potentially fatal, tasks in order to farm failures? How do you deal with the opposite issue, of a party that does everything right, and stalls in XP progression as a result? This is why I say XP in D&D is a reward. Whatever you give XP for, expect players to seek out ways to do more of that. Giving out XP for failure is going to lead to players seeking to fail as often as possible, without failing so badly that it gets them killed. Personally, that’s not the kind of game I want to run. I want to run a game where players take on quests, complete challenges, and seek out hidden secrets, so that’s what I give XP for.

Accidental double-post

On the other hand, the "up to 60 feet" does give the spell a handy secondary use as a poor man's Levitate if you need to reach a spot on a high ceiling. 4e had what I felt was a much neater solution, one that was much favoured by our group at the time. I don't recall the exact name of the item, but it was a magic dagger that allowed you to carve a doorway into a wall, then open it and step through into an extradimensional space just large enough to accommodate a reasonably-sized party. Once closed from the inside, the door was invisible, and the room would last for eight hours. The dagger was usable once per day. Also, 4e's short rests were much shorter (10 minutes?), so there wasn't much call to make special arrangements for them - even if you were interrupted, it wouldn't take up much of your working day. exodus knife...and I think I might bring it back for 5e one day...maybe in my next newbie game.

A good example, in that such definitions are endlessly debatable as is usually the case with alignment. Buffy may not have appreciated being the Chosen One, but she doesn't otherwise act particularly chaotic. She works well with others, relies on friends and colleagues to help her plan to combat her enemies, and takes responsibility for her actions.Amusing... Buffy neutral good Giles lost lawful good early - he protested a lot but threw a lot of rules out from early on. Xander chaotic good. But really Buffy shows much more character evolution than most alignment systems can tolerate.

Also, the PHB quote is about when something lets you reroll a d20, rather than when it forces you to do so. By your ruling, if I rolled a 16 and an 18 on my attack with advantage, and you used Second Chance to force me to reroll my attack, I could re-roll the 18, get a 1, and yet still keep the 16 because it was now the higher result. I don't think that's the intended result. Probably. But probably it is. I wouldn't challenge your ruling after reading the PHB entries again however.

Yeah, that's about my range too. I have much more varied voices for my PCs when I'm a player. It's just when I'm DMing, I have trouble coming up with unique voices for all of the NPCs, let alone remembering them all. So I just kinda default to one of a small handful of very basic variations.

I really don't see how. You can only ever re-roll one of your dice, so if one is a hit and the other is a miss you'll re-roll the one that would miss. Then you'll take the higher of either the result of the re-roll or the result on the die you didn't re-roll. As i noted in my post above, another ability like from the second chance feat might turn the second roll in a miss too.

And yet, you don't seem to be advocating a game-mechanical change to prevent it from happening. Why would I advocate for that to happen in a thread about magic? If you're happy to leave those rules as they are, either because you know it's never, ever going to come up in-game or because you're happy that you'd be able to make a ruling on it in the highly unlikely event that it did occur, why do you feel uncomfortable applying precisely the same reasoning to cantrips? I will be changing weapon swinging. What I'll probably go back to, since it has worked for me and my groups since 1e, is that after 10 rounds of swinging a weapon in a combat you have to make a con check or receive a penalty of -2 to hit and damage. If you succeed, you have to make another such check every 5 rounds, and the check gets harder to make. I never limited wizards like that, because their spell slots already did that work for me. I'll probably have to institute some sort of similar mental/magical exhaustion ch...

I really don't see how. You can only ever re-roll one of your dice, so if one is a hit and the other is a miss you'll re-roll the one that would miss. Then you'll take the higher of either the result of the re-roll or the result on the die you didn't re-roll. Yeah... yeah, that was last night's alcohol doing math and logic. Don't mind me. I'm heading back to bed now.

Each in their own way, honestly. Liam, playing the wizard, likes to spice the flavour of his spell descriptions with a line or two about how he employs a spell's components, which does a nice job of making his spellcasting feel weighty and visceral. Laura, playing the trickster cleric, doesn't worry about describing material components at all, but often heavily embellishes her spells' visual elements, giving them a unique look and feel in keeping with her character. I guess the point is that these things work well in a performance piece, providing descriptive touchstones to let the audience visualise the action, but in a home game they'd tend to drag and potentially feel like needless spotlight hogging in comparison to other players who just want to say what action they're taking and roll the dice. As a player, I will tend to describe a spell or ability in some detail the first time I use it, but thereafter will take it as read and just say what I'm doing game-mechanically. Other playe...

I guess the point is that these things work well in a performance piece, providing descriptive touchstones to let the audience visualise the action, but in a home game they'd tend to drag and potentially feel like needless spotlight hogging in comparison to other players who just want to say what action they're taking and roll the dice. As a player, I will tend to describe a spell or ability in some detail the first time I use it, but thereafter will take it as read and just say what I'm doing game-mechanically. Other players will find their own balance between flavour and expediency. I kinda disagree, we've been describing spellcasting and weapon attacks with "quick one liners" since the late eighties. I dont feel that it bogs down or causes spotlight issues. We cal it "flourish" and the level of it can vary depending on the scenario, but it has never caused a problem of any kind. The players who aren't as verbose say "nice" and then roll their dice for their attack.

My point is that, presumably, the motivation to remove ability score increases from races is so that you're not always picking races purely for their synergy with the class you're going to play. That being the case, wouldn't you also not want people to choose a specific background purely for class-synergy reasons? Oh, I know. Synergy is always an issue, especially with power-gamers. But, people do tend to drift to their strengths. True some people like to challenge themselves by drifting towards their weakness in order to improve themselves but IME this is much less common. I've had a couple games where I insisted players roll up their ability scores in order and had to roll so it was random. I then let them exchange only one point from each ability score to another (three swaps max, but you could put up to three in one, e.g. take one point from Str, Dex, and Con, for +3 Int). They also rolled randomly for race as well, modifying scores for race. The only choice was in their class. ...

If you're going to de-couple starting ability score increases from race, is there really any point in then coupling them to something else? Why not just say "after you determine your ability scores, you can then add +2 to one ability score and +1 to another."? Really, unless you just want to boost scores, why bother adding anything for any of the above reasons? For many players, IME, seeing a logical increase due to the make-up of a race makes sense. Likewise, if your character has a background in Soldier, for instance, it would make sense to also gain in one ability that you used/trained with more, such as a physical score. And, of course finally, it makes since that whatever experience you went through to acquire your class would likely lead to a related score boost as well by the time you became level 1. After all, you begin level 1 with some class features that you got from someplace or somehow. With 9 races, 13 backgrounds, and 12 classes in the PHB alone, you would have over 1...

Why would you wait until after you'd cast it to begin resting? You can start taking your short rest five minutes before you actually cast the spell if you're really insistent upon counting it down to the second. You can't interrupt a short rest like you can with a long rest.

Up to 60 feet of rope. The rope can be 60 feet or less. You could use a three-foot length of rope, and the most strenuous thing anyone would have to do is kneel down to get into it and then step up. Or, if even a single party member is not currently in need of a short rest, they can go in first and then haul each of the other party members up while they merely hold onto the rope. You can even rig a loop for them to sit in if you think holding a rope is too strenuous for short-rest purposes. Or you could just fly into the hole. :P Yes, I am fully aware there are ways to circumnavigate the climbing requirement. No, that doesn't change the interpretation of the spell, because climbing in was only half the problem with it. The other problem was the duration: It's exactly one hour, what are you going to do when the spell ends? Fall on your tail after the pocket dimension poofs out of existence? Quite the wake-up call that would be. If it was literally just one minute longer I wo...

Drop the "AC 13" part, it's more fiddly than is worth tracking. It's a bit weird having any type of damage strip off a layer - especially psychic damage. Actually, what I find weird is that any attack, no matter how inept, could strip off a layer (like in the original AD&D spell). Hence the AC. Compare to Mirror Image, a spell that asks you to do "fiddly tracking" in precisely the same manner. Except that, for the purposes of items, I simplify AC 10 + Dexterity to 12 (the maximum allowance for medium armor), and then add +1 (it is magic armor after all). So there is some consideration behind the number! :) Thanks for the feedback

It is something that was bandied about when 5e was in late development / initial release (I don't recall the exact timing) - the idea that levels 1-2 were effectively "apprentice levels", and that a character was only a full-fledged hero at 3rd level onwards. Hmm... interesting take on it. I've never thought of it being that way, but I could understand were others might. I would make more sense for character than dip into a class for only a level or two.

This is your personal interpretation of how to use those statblocks. Entertain the possibility that it's not a common one. Right, okay. So we'll ignore the flavour for that *exact* stat block for a bit, and use another logical argument: A 3rd level character has only just finished their basic training. A 5th level character thusly isn't far off. It's entirely reasonable to assume that if a fresh initiate is at level 3, a practised clergy would easily be level 5 or more.