Backstage at the Pineapple Express

[Byrd]

Where we may discuss crunchy things that might not go so well on pizza.

(Like game mechanics)

If you were looking for the Pineapple Express:

Thread 'Pineapple Express: Someone Is Wrong on the Internet?'

May 29, 2024

Greetings all former denizens of the "Didn't Comment" thread, and welcome newcomers! This is the Pineapple Express thread, devoted, first and foremost, to the eternal debate over pineapple on pizza- is it the worst thing ever, or the worstest thing ever?

More importantly, there are times when we want to post something- on Enworld or elsewhere on the internet, and we realize ... naw. So we come to this thread instead and talk about pineapples, or cocktails, or play Enworld bingo, or whatever other weird topics might come up.

That said, we have one rule that we ask that all posters...

• Snarf Zagyg
• Replies: 31,229
• Forum: *Geek Talk & Media

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[Scribe]

We are getting to Inception levels of 'do not discuss X here' at this point.

 

[Deset Gled]

We are getting to Inception levels of 'do not discuss X here' at this point.

I think you're not supposed to discuss that.

 

[Byrd]

I think you're not supposed to discuss that.

Fractal pizza, or Infinite Staircase?

 

[Byrd]

Systems to give non-spellcaster PCs access to magic are the best. One of my biggest disappointments with 3E/4E WotC was that they had a great system in place for that in the 3E Unearthed Arcana book, which made powerful magic fiction-first. And instead of basing future iterations of D&D around this, it was more or less memory-holed.

I found it certainly helped with the logic for societies of "magical creatures" like elves.
The hin and the dwarves can access magic indirectly for item creation...
Yes, there's lots of ambient magic, but not everyone has a class with spellcasting abilities.

I will say, in the weekly Pirate Borg game I run at my FLGS, one of the players hunts down every arcane ritual she can, and it's been great fun, combining dangerous magic (learning a spell killed her first body and she now has to jump from rotting corpse to rotting corpse to inhabit) with the discovery of strange, weird spell powers. (She can summon a kraken-sized turtle, who isn't anyone's friend, but tends to act like a nuke during nautical battles, since it shows up mad.)

Sounds like a riot!

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I found it certainly helped with the logic for societies of "magical creatures" like elves.
The hin and the dwarves can access magic indirectly for item creation...
Yes, there's lots of ambient magic, but not everyone has a class with spellcasting abilities.

And in an edition where they were all in on PCs and NPCs being the same, it lets NPCs have big world-ending rituals that the PCs have to stop (with mechanics for doing so!) without then handing the PCs a world-ending nuke when they win, which is how 3E in theory was supposed to. ("Uh, the world ending ritual is in a wand with one charge in it, sorry!")

If I were going to make a fantasy heartbreaker -- arguably the endgame for every homebrewer -- incantations would be a key part of it.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Honestly, I hopped over to games where the line between spellcaster and non-spellcaster was blurry early enough that the hard lines in most class systems still feel strange to me.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Honestly, I hopped over to games where the line between spellcaster and non-spellcaster was blurry early enough that the hard lines in most class systems still feel strange to me.

It was a pleasant surprise to me that Pirate Borg as played, not written, is this way. The book makes you think the classes are a lot more important than they are in play, IME.