Jhaelen
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In archeology in Norway, the term hof means a personal shrine in someones own home. But what does it actually mean in Old Norse? The term goði is one of the later titles that the Icelanders invented for their jarl. Generally, it was his duty to inaugurate a new session of the þing parliament, at which time he would invoke various nature spirits for a successful year.I think @Jhaelen already fielded this one, but I'll add that even if what you say is accurate (which it isn't), you are still describing a spiritual leader. Which you just said didn't exist. The Norse term goð means something like ‘helpful nature spirits’, as opposed to ‘unhelpful nature spirits’ (jǫtnar and dvergar). Etymologically, it means something like ‘invoked one’, referring to those spirits that are called on to thank for helpful actions....as opposed to a god, who is invoked and thanked for helpful actions...? Note, when trying to translate the Christian concept of a god into the Norse worldview, a different Norse term, guð, was used instead. Making the distinction is understandable given the cultural context, but they're just variants of the same underlying word with the same "invoked one" PIE etymology. The feminine form of goði, gyðja, is even derived from guð rather than goð. And at the risk of stating the obvious, both are cognates of "god".

...ing stupid, it's even less of a problem. I recall one of my players' PC(s) dying three times in a single adventure: First he tried to charge over a hanging bridge while goblins at the other end were ready to destroy the supports, then he trampled into a grey ooze, and finally he tried to argue with a roper that had him firmly in its grasp (in case you're wondering: we played the D&D 3e 'Forge of Fury' module). He became a lot more careful after that, although he still managed to accumulate the most character deaths at the end of the campaign. I'd call this an example of D&D's mismatch between advertised fantasy adventure and reality as meat grinder crushing the spirit of the player who actually expected to play an action hero. And this is a point, be very careful not to just crush player's legitimate desire to really adventure (or do whatever) simply because conformity to the game's paradigm is uppermost in your mind. This particular player may not be a case of it, but the one that Jhaelen cites seems like EXACTLY that. Let them blossom.

if you game has advanced beyond the need for encounter tables, what does that look like? How do you go about determining what encounters should occur, and where or when?I'm not Jhaelen, but I can answer for my part: when I use systems that don't involve encounter tables (which is every system I run except Classic Traveller), I determine what encounters occur based either on adjudication of player action declarations for their PCs, and/or based on what I thik the demands of pacing, theme, etc require.

History shows us that a system which requires combat skills and non-combat skills to compete for character resources will almost invariably end with players investing in combat skills and ignoring the non-combat skills. Words don't work against zombies or otyughs, but swords are effective against everything. Games that use a unified system for everything tend to have worse balance issues than games which keep those activities segregated. I think that Jhaelen's idea there was to simply reduce combat encounters to be similar to some kind of skill challenge, not (necessarily) change the way skills are allocated. You could still pre-package the skills into Race/Background/Class, rather than let the player pick from each bag arbitrarily. IME with more than a few games that do something akin to that. It produces super-fast gameplay and (can) facilitate much better(IMO) storylines, just because speed. However, it doesn't usually produce the visceral tension that turn-based tactical combat like D&D can produce. (Capes, a quirky little superheroes rpg, is the one stellar exception that I am familiar with.)

Okay, with both Jhaelen and Mallus recommending it, I just picked this up. It's on my pile.

...: shouldn't 'having fun' be its own reward? Rewarding good role-playing makes slightly more sense, but I still dislike the practice because some players _are_ good role-players and don't need (and usually don't care about) the extra xp. They're roleplaying because they consider it fun (i.e. see above). It's the players who struggle with role-playing who'd benefit most from a rule granting them extra xp to encourage them to give their best. But if you want to treat all your players fairly, they'll still always fall behind the players who are already good role-players. In other words: granting xp isn't a good choice if you want to encourage good role-playing. What you really want to achieve is that your 'problem' players realize that role-playing is fun! So, what works better, imho, is to give them more opportunities to be in the spotlight and reward their efforts with mostly immaterial things, like better contacts or allies. I agree with Campbell and (at least in part) with Jhaelen here. The issue I have with DMMike 's position above is that it seems to assume that GM-agnostic systemization of XP gain is either not feasible or undesirable. The GM doesn't need to be in any position to hand out XP. In the Powered By the Apocalypse systems that Campbell is bringing up, XP isn't "awarded" via one person's (likely opaque and cognitive bias-laden) adjudication. Its simply gained via transparent, focused triggers; eg did you fail on a move, did you make Desperate Action Roll, did you overcome a tough obstacle/threat via coercion, did your Vice get you into trouble. The GM's role in these things isn't in the awarding. The GM's role is in following the game's premise and the player cues, in framing the action whereby decision-points related to vice temptation, desperate situations, and dangerous NPCs that can be coerced are the central focus of play (and whatever else might part of the game's PCs' portfolio and xp triggers such as themes of heritage, beliefs, as...

I think that Jhaelen is right. I assume I would need to limit the tapestries down to fewer results and if the generator rolls for one, then it would roll again for determining which of the 500 tapestries is the final result.That is the "intermediate table" that Jhaelen refers to. Deciding the numbers for that intermediate table isn't a maths problem, it's just deciding how often do you want tapestries vs paintings.

I've been reading your posts for a long time Jhaelen, and I never would have guessed that English wasn't your first language. You have a great command of English as well as use of idiom.

Sounds like you need to lead the charge, Jhaelen! Sent from my iPhone using EN World

Jhaelen: the description says "form or appearance," so yes it's illusory, and yes it's real. Depends on the caster. It's not permanent, by the way, since the caster needs to exert will (spend an action) each round to maintain it. You could also do it the way Lamentations of the Flame Princess handles the Summon spell. You're rolling the dice on a disaster happening every time you summon. This sounds like too much fun. At the least, this is a second level spell, in that it's strictly better than Disguise Self - which allows you to make much more limited cosmetic changes. Secondly, the spell you've described is not 'fluff only', because it does effect fictional positioning. 1) Suppose it lets you polymorph into a barstool, a fluffy bunny, or a goblin. Will NPC's now react to you as if you were a barstool, a fluffy bunny, or a goblin? Only if there was a 100% chance that it would not alter the behavior of NPCs would this be 'fluff only'. 2) Suppose I polymorph into a songbird? Do ...

DMMike I always forget about OGRE. Thanks for reminding me! And yes, "dungeon" is often D&D's quirky shorthand for "lair." Jhaelen Maybe that was part of my thinking in the past. I saw plenty of examples I felt were sub-par so I kind of avoided it. Only after years of DMing and writing do I finally feel like I have what it takes to design a big dungeon well. One of the first questions posed in 3e Dungeoncraft is What is the function of your dungeon in your campaign setting? Before you set pencil to paper, you need to decide how the dungeon fits into your campaign setting. Take a moment to consider why the dungeon exists, how it interacts with the rest of the world, and what purpose it (and other dungeons) serve in the grand scheme of things. You could just say that dungeons are the ruins of a forgotten civilization, but many other interesting possibilities exist. Death Trap... Near Frontier... Agent of Evil... Legendary Location... The Bizarre... My hunch is Krak al-Mazhar fits as a Legendary Location... Dungeoncraft also lists 10 possible traits of legendary locations. Here's how I see those applyin...

Thanks for the input everyone. Jhaelen, Reasons for conflict abound... once multiple species are sharing the same world or habitat. What I was looking for was reasons for conflict that could justify the risk of destroying expensive starships, under the assumption that starships cost a significant fraction of a civilization's economic output to rebuild. Naturally, if building starships is cheap, even massive ones like the Enterprise or the Galactica, then species will fight each other for more petty reasons.

My favourite d20 game is 4e D&D, for much the same reasons as Neil Bishop and Jhaelen have posted upthread.

Jhaelen , it's not you. You're not old...or rather, more likely, I am comparably "old" to you. hahaha. But, while I can't speak to app's or i-anything at all, I can tell you as far as the WotC site, it's not "modern web design"...it's a BAD poorly designed site. It IS confusing. It IS (for no discernible reason I can see) difficult to use/find anything. So, at least in that, chin up! It's not you. :cool:

I have encountered people who were shy or short on ideas. In general, I neither kicked them out nor forced them into spotlight. I run the game normally and they usually stay in the background. They don't do much (there is much more talking than fighting in my games typically), but having them in the game hurts nobody. I ask for feedback quite often and when I see that something caught such person's interest, I pursue this theme. I create opportunities for them to gain something by being proactive. I allude to facts in their backgrounds they never mentioned - either confirming or denying these gives me something to work with. Some of them decide that RPGs are not for them. And some gradually open up. There are a few players who, when I started playing with them, only rolled dice for combat or were afraid of any spotlight. After a year or so of playing they became main actors in the campaign. But I definitely agree with Jhaelen that if a player told me something in the general tone of "It's your job to entertain me; don't expect any effort on my part.", I'd show them the door without thinking twice.

@gameprinter - Oh I see. Sorry about that! Jhaelen - Hey! I asked Stardock and they don't mind!! Woot!!!

Jhaelen Ah, well truthfully I've only had a handful of PC deaths between my last 4e campaign and my current...one from a foreshadowed coup de grace, and two from falling / friendly fire. It would appear my players are their own worst enemies ;) Anyhow, back to the topic of Solo Monsters! I think I've got a list of rules for solo design / major topics that should be covered in a design document: Monster damage equivalence (e.g. solo should be worth 3-5 monsters' DPR) Multi-attacks (connected to above, what is impact of choosing one type of multiattack vs. another? For example area attack vs. opportunity attack vs. minor action attack vs. dual basic attacks) Schrodinger's stat block (i.e. needs to adapt to party size) Action recovery (including mitigating attack penalties) Auras (what makes a good solo aura? how to use effectively in encounter?) Replacing "save ends" powers with something more suspenseful & increasing player agency...you don't just make a saving thr...

Well, as mentioned, I don't particularly like traps, but these 'living' traps are even worse. They are too obviously specifically designed by the DM to screw the players, without regard for making any actual sense. I hate that kind of meta-gaming arms-race. Cloakers and lurkers we love. We consider them a natural evolution of magical creatures. Ears seekers and rot grubs, we tend to agree with Jhaelen.

@Morrus I didn't originally put in genre because so many games are multi-genre, and I'm looking for defined options in each category. But after putting some thought into it, I think including genre is probably a good idea to make the list as useful as possible. @Jhaelen I don't suppose you have an .exe or java version of that application available? @amerigoV How would you choose to classify Savage Worlds? @Steenen Good call. "Realism" is a bit messy. I'd be willing to split it up if I could come up with a couple of clear categories (and I'm not too keen on the name actually--I wrote the OP up on the fly without spending time on refinement). The main thing I'm trying to get at is a combination of how gritty the game is for "normal" inhabitants, and how well the physics model reality versus a more forgiving high action movie. Character power falls more into genre. For instance, Exalted is based around playing fantastically powerful beings, but the Storyteller system that it uses is probably the lower end of adventurous. I'd therefore categorize Exalted as adventurous. I could definitely use a better term than "realism," though. I tend to refer to the vulnerability to influences concept you are talking about as character identity, or player cont...

...ideas is just what you're looking for. @delericho : I think that's a fine idea. I guess, dealing with fantasy, I tend to come up with names first and purpose afterwards, but that's not really how it is in the real world. I guess it's just a liberty I take 'because I can'. I'm sure your way would make more sense. @Hand of Evil : Excellent idea. I think it would be a good idea for anyone to add this step when designing a village. It would definitely add a ton of realism to what you're creating and give you even more ideas to go with. I'd also point out that this could be something really crazy or imaginative from fantasy like: "Because all single women over 22 were cursed to live here in the 12th age" etc. Thanks for the link, too. @Morrus : Yes, thanks. I really enjoy creating name generators myself (for various things) but I guess I was always too greedy/lazy to share them. I still have a dozen or so sitting around my hard drives and papers somewhere. Thanks for sharing! @Jhaelen : Yes. What can I say, when I'm wrong, I'm wrong. :) @Dwimmerlied : Thanks. You're most welcome. @haakon1 : Very cool. Thanks. Kind of makes me wish I lived in England. @Derren : Yep. :) *** Regrettably, this will be my last column here on En World. I would like to thank Mr. Morrus for giving me the opportunity to write for his fine website, and I'd like to thank all the great people who are my fellow columnists for being so supportive and writing their own great material. I've had a some chuckles reading a few of your pieces. Thank you to everyone who read one or more of my columns. I really appreciate your time, and thank you for spending it with some of my writing. There are few things in life I enjoy more. Also, special thanks to anyone who commented. Good or bad, the feedback has been great. I've learned a few things and laughed pretty hard as well. While I'd like to continue writing these articles (they're great fun) reasons of time and business have interfered. At...

And what does this tell you about D&D's villains? Most of them _are_ one-dimensional and cartoonish. That is a fair description. A cartoonish game lives and dies on its cartoonish villains and DnD has certainly has some scenery chewing ones over the years. The better ones at least have an interesting background, e.g. Dragonlance's Lord Soth or Strahd von Zarovich (although his tragic back-story was retro-fitted). In Eberron there's the Lord of Blades who is a fairly ambiguous character. In 13th Age there's the Crusader Icon that perfectly personifies what I consider an interesting villain. Here's a quote from the 'Common Knowledge' about him in the 13th Age Core Rules: I love Lord Soth and there is no way you can classify him as misguided. He would probably crush your throat if he heard you make the suggestion. The creators of Strahd have been clear that they view him as a monster with no redeemable qualities. He is no sparkling Twilight Vampire or Emo Vampire the Masquerade...

Is it, though? This is exactly the kind of attitude I've seen in plenty of Paladin PCs. They don't mind committing genocide if they believe a species to be 'inherently evil'. Thanks to D&D's crappy alignment system this works perfectly fine. And what does this tell you about D&D's villains? Most of them _are_ one-dimensional and cartoonish. The better ones at least have an interesting background, e.g. Dragonlance's Lord Soth or Strahd von Zarovich (although his tragic back-story was retro-fitted). In Eberron there's the Lord of Blades who is a fairly ambiguous character. In 13th Age there's the Crusader Icon that perfectly personifies what I consider an interesting villain. Here's a quote from the 'Common Knowledge' about him in the 13th Age Core Rules: Yes, that's the kind of 'misguided' villain that I meant."Bad villains think they are evil or wrong or doing bad things. Good villains think they are good or or right or doing the right things. Great villain **are** good or right or doing righ...

That's not quite true. I actually consider villains that are simply 'Evil' (with a capital 'E', no less) considerably less interesting than villains that are just misguided. Villains should have comprehensible motivations. If you want to be really clever, create villains with goals that aren't actually much different from the PCs. That's guaranteed to generate some interesting roleplaying opportunities. I can not think of any famous iconic DnD villain that is just a misguided good person.

That's not quite true. I actually consider villains that are simply 'Evil' (with a capital 'E', no less) considerably less interesting than villains that are just misguided. Well, there's a question as to what types of villains are interesting to experience in a story (say, a novel), and what kinds of villains are interesting for the player to deal with an in RPG. There's also another question based on what counts as "misguided". There is one form of misguided, where the culprit isn't aware of the repercussions of their actions - and the only "evil" you may put on these is that maybe they should have done more work to alleviate their ignorance of consequences before starting. There's another thing I have heard of as described as "misguided" in which the culprit is fully aware of the consequences of their actions, but they don't feel they are significant. As in, "I am causing pain to 100,000 people, and I don't care - the ends justify the means." The former is merely ignorance. ...

I never cared much for Basic D&D. I'd play it if no AD&D group was available, but didn't really enjoy it. It was too simplified for my taste and I thought having races (elves, dwarves, gnomes, ...) as character classes was really stupid. One of my friends was a fan, though, and always tried to convince me that the game would really pick up in the later sets. But what's the point if you never manage to reach name levels? It makes a lot more sense to put the fun parts where it's actually experienced by the majority of players. But that's a lesson that took a few editions for the D&D developers to learn. It was a great introduction to D&D. It was a game in a box, and less of an investment than buying three or four hard cover books just to play a game that you don't even know if that your going to like. Elves and dwarves were character classes so as to simplify the rules. Elves were all fighter-magic users basically, their main advantage was they could multiclass, if you were a human, y...

But one of my most prized possessions was Sandy Petersen's Field Guide to Cthulhu Monsters' with its utterly amazing illustrations by Tom Sullivan. Yes! I still have my copy - a really inspiration book

The basic ideas of this article had already come up previously in the discussion of the article on the American influence on D&D, so there are not really any big surprises here. I think the more important point is this: This is actually something I've often experienced in MMOs that have a mix of melee and ranged classes: Unless you either grossly exaggerate the effectiveness of melee weapons (e.g. light sabres in Star Wars) or play down the effectiveness of ranged weapons (e.g. in D&D), ranged weapons are always preferable because they allow you to potentially kill your opponents before they even get into melee range, i.e. without any danger to yourself.Most weapons in D&D (e.g., daggers, slings, shields, spears, bows, etc.) fail to represent their actual effectiveness in historical use. Longbows were not exactly something you used when fighting an ogre in a dungeon. There's a reason knights fell out of fashion in Earth's history!That probably has more to do with the rise of profess...

I specifically returned to playing board games regularly because I wanted to get away from playing online games and spend more time 'offline' with a bunch of friends. I don't really care for board games that require an app to play. I tend to keep my hobbies seperate - I don't use online stuff when I roleplay. I play video games on console, single player. My board games are a time to unplug. If a game requires an app or an online connection to play it (board or RPG) I won't play that game.

That's an odd requirement for a boardgame. A lot of games are dabbling in that play space now. I think it's novel, but not something that's going to really become the new normal. I think that the new... is it Descent? Maybe Mansions of Madness? Regardless, they've removed the "DM" player and replaced them with an app. I think one of the Star Wars games maybe does that too. There's a mazey kind of game called Mask of Anubis that involves one player wearing a smart phone/VR headset while everyone else is using a board. From what I've heard, In Detective, part of the game is actively researching information by Googling for it.

Looking at the subject I thought this would be about the IceCube Neutrino Observatory... But still, it's a cool topic...

That's an odd requirement for a boardgame. It's a mystery solving game. There are five cases to solve but you have a limited amount of actions to solve the cases. The cases are all fictional but there is a backdrop of actual real world history and events which you might have to google or check wikipedia pages (or any page you wish really) to find the missing piece of the puzzle. It's very interesting, and the cases are all linked to form a greater story about secrets and corruption which my group and I are slowly unearthing. I am up to case four and think it's a great game, you just need a tablet, computer or smartphone while you play. We play with three players but it is easily done with two.

I used to participate in an RPG group where everyone was drinking beer. It was decidedly more relaxed and the adventures tended to be railroads, so it kind of worked, too. That's intriguing. A more structured game worked better with drink. Any theories on why that might be?

Glorantha is weird. I like most aspects of the setting but don't care for others (ducks as a player race? Really?!). It was a nice fit for Runequest, though. I also recently bought the PDF for using Glorantha with 13th Age but haven't read it, yet. I think that might be a good match, as well, since 13th Age is by default at the higher end of High Fantasy. I was wondering when the first mention of ducks would come out. It sure didn't take long lol. Ducks are a cursed race, and actually do have some interesting background, but they are only a small population within the greater Glorantha. You could play a long campaign and never run into a duck, so I would think not running Glorantha simply because there is a cursed race of ducks somewhere in the world is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

I'm still new to netflix and I have to say I really dislike how everything is based on their dubious rankings. It's really hard to find anything, since all searches appear to come up with the same recommendations. I mean, if I'm searching for 'West World' and it's not available on netflix, I'd like to see a message that 'sorry, it's currently not available' and not a dozen completely different tv shows I don't care for. It's shows shows that are in some manner like the one you're wanting or related to And how do you find out which shows/movies are going to be removed soon? I started watching 'The Expanse' and only after selecting the first episode of the first season do they advertise the fact the show's going to be removed from netflix at the end of this month. This one is harder,but mostly you can find out by looking at sites that show what's coming this month to netflix,they also tend to show what's leaving https://otakukart.com/tvshows/netflix-october-2018-movies-and-shows-everything-c...

TL;DR;: Mearls says "current edition good, older editions bad". Exactly like that, but completely different. pemerton, I think you’re nitpicking wording to force a conclusion at this point. DnD doesn’t allow “killing the orc” to be an action, but als doesn’t let “gain an army” be an action. DnD breaks things into single actions, or close enough to best abstracted like it’s a single action. Each action is resolved using the same system. “Win the fight” is an action in some games, in other games it isn’t. Some fights will be won with one action, most won’t. That doesn’t change that actions are resolved in the same way either way. Some puzzles will be resolved in one action, others won’t. Its the same shstem of resolution regardless.

That's pretty cool. I don't think I've seen that kind of mechanic anywhere.In Marvel Heroic RP/Cortex+ Heroic, there are various abilities which can be rolled as either d8 or 2d6; or d10 or 2d8 or 3d6; etc; but this is in a context where you are keeping the best two dice in a pool, rather than adding them all up (so the choice requires balacing having more dice in the pool - for more chances to roll high - vs having at least some big dice in the pool - which provides other mechanical benefits but also raises the ceiling for high rolls).

Maybe it's not one of the worst things, but I consider it one of the things that distinguishes a good DM from a passable DM. As the article indicates, it's especially bad if there's long texts being read in a monotonous voice. In fact it's almost ensured the players are going to miss important hints hidden in the text, because they're lulled to sleep! I remember when boxed text first appeared. It was clearly done as an aid to noob DMs. However, I think good DMs would learn to transcend it fairly quickly and rephrase it in their own words. (Or read it in a monotonous style for effect!) A passable to mediocre DM uses it as a crutch and never gets past it.

Of the included adventures I only really liked 'White Plume Mountain'. That one is more fun to read than play, IMO, though I was in a long running Greyhawk campaign where Keraptis was the main foil, starting as a villain and, over time, becoming a frenemy. 'The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth' was passable, at best. The thing is: these modules aren't any better than the adventures I've created myself in my early teens: A non-sensical arrangement of rooms that each represented a mostly self-contained puzzle or environment that only started to become real as soon as the party entered it, plus a random encounter table. Now, don't get me wrong: back then we actually enjoyed delving into that kind of dungeon, but (at least in retrospect) it's terrible design. I both ran and played Tsojcanth, the latter in the aformentioned Keraptis campaign. Part of that campaign, which was quite serious in tone much of the time, was that Greyhawk had been studded with dungeons by mad wizards. However, the DM work...

Personally, I never read boxed texts. I either ignore them or paraphrase them in my own words. Imho, very few published modules have good text boxes. How often have you seen long, super-detailed room descriptions that end by mentioning there also happens to be a huge dragon in the center, as if it was an afterthought? This isn't always a bad thing in one respect: if you mentioned the dragon first you'd never get to the rest of the description because the players would be interrupting all over the place. Or even better (i.e. worse) texts telling the characters how they feel or implying they take certain actions? Worse yet are the boxed descriptions that always assume entry through a particular door and thus describe things as seen from that viewpoint, even though there's three other doors the party could come in through. Imho, describing locations is really easy if you remember to think about the characters' different senses and describing the most obvious things first: What are the def...