D&D General Companion Thread to D&D Survivor: Planar Dragons

[EzekielRaiden]

Most of these end up pretty much even at the end. It's almost as if a bunch of folks here work to make sure it's neck and neck at the end.

I mean, it's literally the safest possible strategy:

1. Pick a set of 2-4 favorites (depending on the total size of the set; if it starts with 10, 2 is probably enough).
2. Always either upvote one of them, or upvote something if you think doing so will draw the lightning to it.
3. Before (roughly) the final five, never upvote something you like if doing so would put it (further) ahead of all other options.
4. Before (roughly) the final five, never downvote the highest option if doing so would put something you like alone in first place.
5. With the above caveats, always downvote the current leader or something that gets surges of upvotes.
6. If there are no leaders/everything is too muddled/balanced, downvote the lowest-point option, as this can also draw the lightning.
7. Once it hits the final five-ish, try to get folks to dogpile the most popular option and to ignore any of your favorites that remain.

Follow those steps and you massively decrease the chances that all the options you like will get eliminated. Because things favor downvotes 2-to-1, it's always better to vote cautiously and to try to draw attention away from the stuff you like until the game is nearly over, then slam the most popular options as hard as you possibly can. If you've done a good enough job eliminating popular options early on, many folks will feel lukewarm about most of what remains, and thus will jump when they smell blood in the water.

Because drawing negative attention is literally twice as bad as any positive attention anything can get, playing it safe and even "baiting" attention to stuff you dislike is actually a better strategy than trying to help the things you like actually win. The one and only time we ever got an unequivocal runaway success on these things was Lore Bard.

This is why I would prefer a "race to the finish" model rather than an "elimination" model. Even if that preserves something equivalent to the 2-to-1 bias, a race to the finish "eliminates" options by having them win, not lose, and thus voters are incentivized to create an insurmountable lead, not dogpile a disliked thing until it's driven from the contest.

E.g. start everyone with 20 points, you vote +2/-1, an option wins when it reaches (say) 70. Race ends when (say) five options have won. This way, there's still some strategy, there's still the possibility of a come-from-behind victory, but aiming to keep everything blandly uniform for as long as humanly possible is counterproductive. Further, not only do you get some sense of the "order" of the options (e.g. you can actually define, to some extent, a meaningful hierarchy of results), but you also actually see what is well-liked, rather than seeing what folks have finagled as being sufficiently inoffensive to slip under the radar. In the limit of infinite votes (not actually possible, but for the sake of argument), the "Survivor" method allows a minimum 1/3 minority to dictate which options definitely lose. There is no equivalent to that in the "Racing" method, because options are only eliminated by winning, so nobody is ever knocked out of the race for good.

Of course, this method would be pretty unwieldy with a very large pool....but it's not like Survivors aren't unwieldy when you have 40+ options either.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

This is why I would prefer a "race to the finish" model rather than an "elimination" model. Even if that preserves something equivalent to the 2-to-1 bias, a race to the finish "eliminates" options by having them win, not lose, and thus voters are incentivized to create an insurmountable lead, not dogpile a disliked thing until it's driven from the contest.

E.g. start everyone with 20 points, you vote +2/-1, an option wins when it reaches (say) 70. Race ends when (say) five options have won. This way, there's still some strategy, there's still the possibility of a come-from-behind victory, but aiming to keep everything blandly uniform for as long as humanly possible is counterproductive. Further, not only do you get some sense of the "order" of the options (e.g. you can actually define, to some extent, a meaningful hierarchy of results), but you also actually see what is well-liked, rather than seeing what folks have finagled as being sufficiently inoffensive to slip under the radar. In the limit of infinite votes (not actually possible, but for the sake of argument), the "Survivor" method allows a minimum 1/3 minority to dictate which options definitely lose. There is no equivalent to that in the "Racing" method, because options are only eliminated by winning, so nobody is ever knocked out of the race for good.

Of course, this method would be pretty unwieldy with a very large pool....but it's not like Survivors aren't unwieldy when you have 40+ options either.

Funny enough, there's nothing stopping you (or anyone else for that matter) from creating a poll/race exactly like this! Just maybe not call it a "Survivor" thread

(Also! It feels like we're starting to drag the barrel for Survivor threads. Fun to mix it up and try something new!)

Probably an easy place to start would be the ~55-60 5e subclasses

DO IT!!

[edited to add:

]

 

[JoeyD473]

We did subclasses already. Maybe time for magic items

 

[Maxperson]

We did subclasses already. Maybe time for magic items

Or adventure tropes.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

We did subclasses already. Maybe time for magic items

If you are discussing followups to Survivor, just about any topic you can think of has been done. Magic Items was broken up into 4 different threads, A-C started here

Or adventure tropes.

This could be interesting, although not sure how you put a boundary around "adventure" when it comes to tropes.

That said, I don't think there's a problem with doing with a race something that's been done with survivor in the past. A "race", with first over the line but no elimination, is a totally different experience and could result in a totally different result compared to elimination "Survivor". In point of fact, if someone (not it!) decides to create a thread like this, ideally it's with something that has already been done, so we can see if in fact the outcome is the same? Or completely different? Or slightly different. Whatever the outcome, it would be an interesting experiment

 

[Maxperson]

If you are discussing followups to Survivor, just about any topic you can think of has been done. Magic Items was broken up into 4 different threads, A-C started here

This could be interesting, although not sure how you put a boundary around "adventure" when it comes to tropes.

That said, I don't think there's a problem with doing with a race something that's been done with survivor in the past. A "race", with first over the line but no elimination, is a totally different experience and could result in a totally different result compared to elimination "Survivor". In point of fact, if someone (not it!) decides to create a thread like this, ideally it's with something that has already been done, so we can see if in fact the outcome is the same? Or completely different? Or slightly different. Whatever the outcome, it would be an interesting experiment

Common stuff like, "Rescue the Princess" or "Slay the Dragon." There are lots of common themes/tropes around adventures.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Since, as of the time of this post, the thread remains in contention:

What, exactly, makes the astral dragon so good? Because wow, what a tidal wave in favor of it! I looked it up and frankly it was boring as hell from everything I read. Mostly because the astral plane doesn't have anything in it, at least back then it didn't, so there's basically nothing for them to do besides float around and prey on gith.

 

[RealAlHazred]

Since, as of the time of this post, the thread remains in contention:

What, exactly, makes the astral dragon so good? Because wow, what a tidal wave in favor of it! I looked it up and frankly it was boring as hell from everything I read. Mostly because the astral plane doesn't have anything in it, at least back then it didn't, so there's basically nothing for them to do besides float around and prey on gith.

Exactly. The Astral Plane as originally depicted in AD&D was extraordinarily bland. There were encounters you could have there, but in the AD&D DMG, all of the really interesting sentient encounters were other travelers; all of the natives depicted were basically animals. Then, the githyanki were put there in the Fiend Folio, and suddenly there were intelligent creatures living there -- it instantly made it more interesting. But the githyanki were irredeemably evil and cruel in their original incarnation, which limits what you can do with such encounters. Then they added a few more creatures residing there, including the Astral Dragon, and suddenly there were a a range of possible encounters you could write as a DM. I liked the Astral Dragon a lot because the game is Dungeons & Dragons, and I always try to include a dragon in all my games; before the Astral Dragon, the only ones you'd find there were basically Reds and the occasional Silver or Gold. Astral added variety, and a neutral dragon to shake things up, to boot.

Besides, how could you not like this guy?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Exactly. The Astral Plane as originally depicted in AD&D was extraordinarily bland. There were encounters you could have there, but in the AD&D DMG, all of the really interesting sentient encounters were other travelers; all of the natives depicted were basically animals. Then, the githyanki were put there in the Fiend Folio, and suddenly there were intelligent creatures living there -- it instantly made it more interesting. But the githyanki were irredeemably evil and cruel in their original incarnation, which limits what you can do with such encounters. Then they added a few more creatures residing there, including the Astral Dragon, and suddenly there were a a range of possible encounters you could write as a DM. I liked the Astral Dragon a lot because the game is Dungeons & Dragons, and I always try to include a dragon in all my games; before the Astral Dragon, the only ones you'd find there were basically Reds and the occasional Silver or Gold. Astral added variety, and a neutral dragon to shake things up, to boot.

Besides, how could you not like this guy?

That....didn't answer my question. If I'm already finding the astral dragon boring, telling me "well the astral plane was boring, but adding this really spiced it up!" is kinda completely missing the point.

 

[Tonguez]

Exactly. The Astral Plane as originally depicted in AD&D was extraordinarily bland. There were encounters you could have there, but in the AD&D DMG, all of the really interesting sentient encounters were other travelers; all of the natives depicted were basically animals. Then, the githyanki were put there in the Fiend Folio, and suddenly there were intelligent creatures living there -- it instantly made it more interesting. But the githyanki were irredeemably evil and cruel in their original incarnation, which limits what you can do with such encounters. Then they added a few more creatures residing there, including the Astral Dragon, and suddenly there were a a range of possible encounters you could write as a DM. I liked the Astral Dragon a lot because the game is Dungeons & Dragons, and I always try to include a dragon in all my games; before the Astral Dragon, the only ones you'd find there were basically Reds and the occasional Silver or Gold. Astral added variety, and a neutral dragon to shake things up, to boot.

Besides, how could you not like this guy?

Why couldnt you do the same thing by just putting another dragon in the Astral plane? Afterall it just looks like a Tien Long - so you could just craft a story about a Tien Lung traversing the boring Astral Plane and get the same effect?