Search results

Yes, that's the plan. The entire world gets to see my janky code as I hack away at it.

Thanks man! Forge of Foes has been an invaluable reference. Literally could not do this work without it.

I will soon! Doing this in part to re-activate my programming skills, but as I post stuff I definitely hope people review the work and find ways to improve it. A point scheme like this is a useful community resource. Having it locked up in one person or company's hands wouldn't help.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure this breaks as we go up in level. However, hopefully the act of breaking it reveals a pattern of where monsters should be at high levels. Right now we don't have a great benchmark IMO.

That's a huge issue. I'm hoping that by focus on actions, I can create a model that better accounts for the actual effects of debuffs and conditions. Theoretical, this model can figure out what happens when a character - or monster - is no longer able to act in a fight despite having a bunch of...

Sly Flourish does awesome work! Anyone building monsters should check out The Lazy DM's Forge of Foes. It's literally sitting right next to one of my Python books as I work on this stuff.

In theory (assuming this all works) your point budget would be based on the number of characters who show up. So, in building encounters one way to attack would be: Assume a minimum number of players show up, let's say 4. Then, figure out what to add per player beyond that. So for a moderate...

That's pretty amazing. Also incredible stuff for your sixth video. I think a lot of what you have there is spot on. I'm definitely going to use Battle Sim to check predictions the system makes versus the reality. That's an amazing community resource!

My analysis so far uses actions as the basic currency. IME, the challenge with ramping up the number of monsters comes down to: Overwhelming the party with a horde of little guys, because the PCs simply don't have enough actions to deal with them all in a timely manner The PCs using action...

This is the basic sticking point. Each class having its own power floor and power peak makes things messy. It's legacy code that a lot of people run, so we have to address it. For the first pass, I converted all the spells of a caster of a given level into a very rough output per action. That...

Great point! Long-term, I think something like that should be possible. The math will be a bit different on the two sides of the equation, but I think we can bridge. We expect monsters to go to 0, so we need to measure how much damage they do each round and how many rounds it takes for the...

I'm thinking of something along those lines, likely a Patreon with a few different tiers, but we'll see.

This is a vastly underrated strength of 1970s D&D - the d6 standard was useful! One of the appeals of 40k-style points is that we can also adjust specific values up or down over time, based on play experience. In 40k, the points are a constant work in progress. The metagame shifts as new stuff...

Yes, with a caveat. Work I did for WotC is owned by WotC, so I can't take it up and expand on it. However, there's tons of empty space beyond those bounds that I want to explore. Things like psionics, new character class structures, and so on, are high up my list, with DM tools my top priority...

HP loss is a starting point, mainly because it gets us a sense of whether the party wins or loses. I'd like to fold in other resources once I have a good sense of how to model how spending resources shortens up encounters. Not to get ahead of myself, but the class design I'm working on is built...

Hey everyone! Like a lot of DMs, I've struggled to get CR to work reliably in my games. Unlike a lot of DMs, I can honestly claim that it's my fault. 5e drafts heavily off of 3e's core mechanics, so it made sense to recruit its encounter building tool. Rodney Thompson and Peter Lee both pushed...

So, if I have the question right it is this: "Why do some classes have highly impactful subclasses, and others have ones that provide a lower impact?" It mostly comes down to power budget. As you build a class, you have total power N at level X. That power comes from the total of the class...

That mostly tracks with my experience. Once someone has decided they want to spend time with TTRPGs beyond playing them, they almost invariably want to become a DM. The early products were meant to grab the attention of as many TTRPGers as possible. There are some exceptions. There are...

I'm not sure I'd slice it that way. First, most people don't buy anything. I mean anything at all. They borrow books and might not even take their character sheet home. If they are online, they might use free resources. To those people, that's the game. It's like playing pick up basketball...

What a terrible way to start the year. She will be dearly missed.