Search results

Ideally my roleplaying of the bartender doing those things while he talks to the PCs should be enough to get that across, shouldn't it?

I don's eee it as dreck, but if I'm running all experienced players then sure, they can know this stuff. If I'm running a brand new player, however, as far as possible I want that player to experience and enjoy the same learning process we all went through at one point or another. My bad...

I added in two key missing words (bolded) to your quote as IMO they make all the difference: the players are trying to get to a new situation via their action declarations but there's nothing anywhere saying that attempt has to succeed. And when it fails, they're still in the old situation...

It's more like saying that if you miss in combat, in order to slay your foe you're going to have to attack at least once more.

That's where the player's imagination has to step up, taking what the DM describes and fleshing it out into a more complete scene. Most of the time, any conflicts between the DM's imagination and the player's are going to be utterly trivial, e.g. the DM might imagine the bartender as being...

If the pun-loving player plays a pun-loving character then he's playing it true when he spins those puns. If he plays a different personality of character and keeps with the puns anyway then he's breaking IC-authenticity. Disruptive, sure. Harmful to setting authenticity, very much so...

In my view, seeing "that's what my character would do" as a hallmark of bad play is an outright mistake. Playing the character true and having it do what it would do is to me the hallmark of very good play. Not sure what "stance" that puts me in, but not too bothered about it in any case.

Some images I've seen that used "half-elf" in the prompt gave decent-looking Elves without the radio-antenna ears.

In the right situation I could see a use for this. I'm awful at taking notes on the fly. How does it handle - or can it handle - a player running more than one character at a time? Also, is it smart enough to be able to distinguish actual play from table chatter? If it isn't, a lot of my...

I'd be far more interested if this was for desktop use rather than phone. Any chance of seeing that at some point?

I may have mentioned this before, but getting a new character into the game is the one situation when I don't mind some GM-side contrivance (or GM-side metagaming, if you like) in order to make it happen. Even then, though, there's limits: e.g. if the party are off-world where there's already...

Which is why you ask questions to get the GM to clarify the situatiuon, as and when needed. Where I'd rather game design - and, more importantly, GM advice - do what it can to fight against this. You're there to roleplay and-or inhabit a character, right? So isn't it in the better interests...

Interesting, in that I see not giving that information as the by-far best means of keeping it out of the way. Once the players have that meta knowledge, it's in the way no matter what. Numbers concern is more the realm of small-g gamists rather than trad-gamers (these are not necessarily the...

So in my situation with the riddle-door, it would have been fine if the door attacked us every time we didn't answer correctly but not if the door just sits there? Had the riddle-door attacked us every time we blew an answer we'd have all been stone dead long before we got it right. :) Either...

Fair enough. By late-era 3.xe I'd dropped away from it; I was more used to 3e having played quite a bit of it, and played just a bit of 3.5e before dropping out to free up the time to run my own game. Thus, when I first saw 4e it was a pretty big jump from the 3e I was used to.

Some of these spell images are producing better character portraits than the art intended to be character portraits! The wizard in "Demiplane" (who I see more as a Ranger) and the Elf in "Animate Object" are excellent. EDIT: on second glance, that's not an Elf, it's a trick of the way the hair...

It's a true fail, because you don't and can't get to the top - there's no way forward. But the consequence isn't as damaging (well, not right away anyway) as having a fail simply result in a fall; instead, you're stuck, and your options are to let go and fall, try to climb back down (at...

I always saw swarms as just a mechanically-useful way of handling hundreds or even thousands of tiny creatures - biting ants, bee swarms, Pied-Piper-esque numbers of common rats, etc. - that each individually had 0.05 of a hit point and each did 0.1 hit point damage on a hit but en masse could...

Worth noting here that the players eagerly embraced the frustration of being unable to solve the riddle. Good on them! @Faolyn , any thoughts here?

Sorry, but for a bunch of reasons that's a complete non-starter. My issue with that would be if (or when, as it's a very frequent occurrence) the risk is something as yet unknown to the character. Not everything can be or should be telegraphed; and telling the player the risk when it isn't...