NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="seasong" data-source="post: 734276" data-attributes="member: 5137">First: rolling dice vs story.I normally adjust how much dice rolling vs narrative decision according to the needs of the campaign and the comfort zones of my players. With the superhero soap opera I'm running, that means virtually no dice rolls at all (maybe once a session or less).With Theralis, however, one of the personal challenges I've set has been to make a story out of whatever the dice (or, in really insanely complex situations, averages) give me. Because the PCs are not comfortable with constant dice rolling, I roll a lot of things ahead of time, but the dice still fall (or rather, the spreadsheet random number generator does).That's not to say that the events are not meaningful. If Akeros died, it was because Hethas sought his soul... and I'll work that into the narrative somewhere. The resulting narrative is a kind of confusion of randomness, my interpretation of it, and whatever goggle-eyed wrenches the PCs throw into the mix (the best part <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />).Second: D&D is a difficult, complex system. Handling lots of rolls like that is tedious and boring. So for big battles, or tons of rolls, I tend to do something like this:Spreadsheet:A1: random number 1-20B1: if A1 > 18, random number 1-20C1: if A1 > 13, d8+5 dmgD1: if A1 > 18 and B1 > 13, C1*3E1: DR 10 (stoneskin)F1: D1-E1 (minimum 0)Twenty rows of that (for the 20 out of 50 orcs who decided to throw their spears at long range in a desparate gamble), and a SUM cell off to the right, and I know exactly how much damage Akeros took, and I can look down Column F1 to see if anyone did spectacular damage.Most orcs did zero damage. One incredible, maxed out 13x3 crit did 29 hp (from 39) in a single shot. So while several spears clattered off his back, one did enough to kill Akeros in one shot. For purposes of the story, I went with that one as "the one", and narratively ignored the pinpricks from the others.I love computers.</blockquote>

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