D&D 5E Would you allow switching shield proficiency for Agonizing Blast as a DM?

[Thomas Rainsborough]

You are the one who bought up blind PCs, please recall.

if you don't want to discuss something, don't expressly bring it into the thread, or continue to talk about it. You are 100% free to go back to talking about how players shouldn't ask for replacement abilities for ones they don't want to use if you want.

Read my post again. I brought it up as an analogy for the silliness of asking for more than the rules allow, and you went off on a tangent with it. And slavery...wow, that is quite the leap. I would suggest that you stay on point as well.

 

[Mannahnin]

eidt: also Pendragon is really cool and I wish I wasn't basically the only person in my group who wants to play a game of romantic knightly fantasy.

We're only about ten years into The Great Pendragon Campaign and it's great fun so far.

Last session we had our first PC death- the famously Reckless Sir Berel, seeking out his missing sister (on his own) wound up finding her in a fairy court, enchanted and compelled to be the Unseelie lord's "songstress". He challenged the lord to a duel to the death to try to save her, and was lost, alas. The player will be taking over his own former squire (recently knighted during the Uther/Gorlois conflict) as his new PC. That same session Sir Florence learned his first spell from Merlin and cast it to bless the crops and production of his estates, though badly draining his own strength in the process. And my PC Sir Gwydion tracked down and exacted revenge on his absconded, corrupt and drunken former steward, whom he holds responsible for the past couple of years' disastrous winter phases, including the deaths of his prized charger and his first son, in infancy. And all that's just the character-centric side plots; not getting into the main plot issues of Uther & Gorlois & Ygraine, or the ongoing threat of the Saxons!

 

[Vaalingrade]

Absolutely, that would be a reasonable way to go. As a player, I'd do things like not making perception checks that rely on sight normally and involve things I couldn't possibly hear or otherwise perceive*, but as a DM I wouldn't force a player to do the same.

*For me, things like that are fun when I am the one deciding when to use them as a spice for the game. They become immediately boring and often obnoxious when they become the DM's tool to "gotcha" the PCs or otherwise try to force players to play a certain way. If I want my traumatized gnomish sailor to murder stab the captive goliath wizard mind-controlling slave overseer when they express disinterest in the fate of dwarven slaves sold to the necromancer cult that murdered my PC's friends because he lost control, that's a satisfying RP moment that added a lot to the session. If the DM had forced a wisdom save against murder-impulse, I'd be completely taken out of the scene and just roll my eyes at the mechanization of that sort of internal emotional reaction.

I worked a long time on creating a limitation system with this and I'm still not sure I'm happy with what I came up with.

Basically, you can take a limitation and if you get limited by it in a meaningful way; miss an opportunity, fail, get injured, etc, you get an Action Point, But Better, which isn't limited by the number per turn you can burn.

So if you're addicted to something and you don't get your fix and start taking penalties. You get a point whenever those penalties accrue.

Or if you've got an arch enemy, you get the point whenever that enemy pops up.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

I worked a long time on creating a limitation system with this and I'm still not sure I'm happy with what I came up with.

Basically, you can take a limitation and if you get limited by it in a meaningful way; miss an opportunity, fail, get injured, etc, you get an Action Point, But Better, which isn't limited by the number per turn you can burn.

So if you're addicted to something and you don't get your fix and start taking penalties. You get a point whenever those penalties accrue.

Or if you've got an arch enemy, you get the point whenever that enemy pops up.

That's how Savage Worlds works with hinderances. A few things like missing limbs impact you mechanically, so if you want to be missing an arm but have no mechanical drawback, don't take the drawback (and get the points for it). Mostly is just the player deciding to opt in though. There are traits like "outsider" which would work for choosing to engage with institutional oppression (like being a POC in a pulp game), so it is at the player's discretion whether they want the ugly history to rear its head.

When we play I just have a stack of chips in the table for players to award themselves whenever they play to a drawback.

 

[lingual]

This discussion reminds me of discussions wherein people insist that things like the Warlock class, or being a cool looking fantastical race, have to have downsides or the game might as well be candyland, or whatever.

It's just strange.

Well. To be fair, not using a shield means you don't

Look at the original post. Does it, in any way, have anything to do with slavery, or real life? If someone wants to leap from Agonizing Blast to blind chars to slavery, maybe they should start a new thread.

These threads always devolve! Freely admit my guilt...everyone's gotta have the last word!

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Well. To be fair, not using a shield means you don't

Seems the forums are part of your post!

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I worked a long time on creating a limitation system with this and I'm still not sure I'm happy with what I came up with.

Basically, you can take a limitation and if you get limited by it in a meaningful way; miss an opportunity, fail, get injured, etc, you get an Action Point, But Better, which isn't limited by the number per turn you can burn.

So if you're addicted to something and you don't get your fix and start taking penalties. You get a point whenever those penalties accrue.

Or if you've got an arch enemy, you get the point whenever that enemy pops up.

I’ve thought about doing a similar thing using “dice forward” that you can add to any roll.