Recent content by The-Magic-Sword

Focusing on the OP (to avoid catching up on 34 pages of discussion), I tend to run my games less as plots/stories and more as 'narrative-rich spaces' in the sense that they're full of setting, and character, but rather than a plot, these elements interact in ways that don't conform to...

In our west marches, we use a structure where players gather leads, and use them to launch voyages (outings, single or multi-session to go follow up on something) to go somewhere in the sandbox and do something. One cute thing we did is that while finding information out in the world is a valid...

I've successfully been doing player driven stuff, the secret sauce is that players level up by paying with treasure, and gather information on possible locations of more treasure doing anything. So at least when real life isn't interfering, they generally do take the initiative to move on to...

I tend to think of Story Now games (e.g. your PBTA and Apocalypse World and so forth) and games like 4e as the "Modern" era, but I also don't think the "Modern" era is current, I think of it as being in the past, or at least there being something newer than modern which is surely still chugging...

This might be acceptable to me, especially as a reflavor of the tortle statblock, and if you let me be cute about it.

Hmm, the character wouldn't look the way I wanted them to, and they wouldn't be cold blooded which means their people wouldn't have the same underlying relationship with the sun. I wouldn't be able to wear a shell painted with religious iconography since i wouldn't gave a shell.

Before we switched to Pathfinder I had a tortle light cleric i wanted to play, i had this idea about tortles meditating in open sky temples on the backs of massive dragon turtles, contemplating the sun as they bask in it, and what it means to them as cold blood creatures. The tortle would have...

I think what I'm wondering is, how strong do we understand a guard captain to be in the story? What kind of villain is he? How hard is he to deal woth, and for who? As you're presenting it, I'm wondering how the emphasis on story is involved-- how strong a character is, that is who they win...

Are we discussing whether story or mechanics are coming first? Or are we talking about our mutual understanding of what the story is in the first place?

Looking back at this thread, I think that one major thing is that this is, in some ways, an outgrowth over how the concept of an abstraction middle man between the world portrayed by the game rules and the world we imagine has played out. I'm seeing an underlying difference in how different...

I think there's a kind of inertia working against specific licensed games like this unless the property is stratospherically popular, like Star Wars, and even then there's probably some. I think RPG players are more interested in their own settings and DND-Trope-Land. I think that part of what's...

But just think with affirm or a similar payment plan service it could be a few dollars of impulse purchase instead ; ) (this is a joke, I find the advent of payment plans for such simple things horrifying, if probably sometimes useful for a host of reasons)

A lot of the AOE spells do pretty well against single bosses too, strictly speaking single target spells are better but you can't always get them at the perfect level and perfect scaling (since Paizo doesn't grid fill spells that way)-- the line spells are generally pretty close. Chain Lightning...

If anything I think it'll give each AP a more festival atmosphere, in terms of release hype, just because it won't be a continuous bleed, and people will have more time to digest each thing before the next thing comes out-- whether or not they make it through all three volumes in that time.

Hmm Primal isn't a huge debuffing list (as opposed to like damage-with-weaker-control-effects and healing) but 5th and 6th does include Grisly Growths, and Wall spells. if used well, the wall spells can, in general, be much stronger than slow (wasting multiple actions for the creature to bust...