zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on May 26, 2016 9:09:25 GMT -6
Cthulhu Dark is a lot of fun - certainly more manageable than CoC, I think - but over the last year I've had a lot of fun playing Lovecraftian horror in Dread, the game that uses Jenga blocks. What's nice about Dread is that very little explanation is required to get players (newbies especially) into the game.
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Feb 17, 2015 12:56:45 GMT -6
I rule that M-U's can't cast magic if they're wearing, wielding, or holding _anything_ made of metal - not just armor but rings, coins, daggers, etc. However, furs (AC 7 as far as I'm concerned) or maybe even certain types of leather armor are acceptable, and I want to leave open the possibility of very expensive and rare crystal armors.
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Sept 10, 2014 13:33:46 GMT -6
Can and Neu! are two leading krautrock groups whose seminal records came out in the early to mid-70s - they'll convey a much different vibe than Sabbath, perhaps more closely aligned with science fantasy or the oneiric.
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Sept 3, 2014 14:23:45 GMT -6
Here's another voice urging you to go for it. You'll be doing the hobby a favor.
Maybe some things in our lives require ideological purity, but D&D can't possibly be among them.
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Aug 20, 2014 8:05:50 GMT -6
www.imdb.com/title/tt2375574/A Field in England is a really remarkable (but very small-scale) film set during the English Civil War. Without giving too much away, it's about alchemists and buried treasure; it's just fascinating, visually and in its narrative. Highly recommended and perhaps not wholly irrelevant to D&D. (I'd be surprised if the LotFP guy hasn't happily devoured it already.)
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Aug 11, 2014 15:33:09 GMT -6
If you want you 3E style fighter who is tricked out with feats you can play that, but the guy who wants to play an old school straight forward fighter still can--you just take the bonuses instead of the feats. I’m sorry, but I must challenge that. I have seen a pregen fighter from the Starter Set, and it doesn’t at all resemble an “old school straight forward fighter,” and I assume (wrongly?) that that pregen is as simple as they come in 5e. Second wind? Action surge? Sounds like a video game! That fighter pregen is indeed about as simple as a fighter gets in 5e, to the best of my knowledge. More complicated than an old-style fighter? Certainly. On the other hand, it's vastly simpler than a 4e fighter and quite possibly a fair bit simpler than a 3.5e fighter. May I ask - is there any chance you'll be asked to buy or play 5e? In other words: what are the stakes, for you, of how closely 5e can approximate old-style D&D?
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Aug 9, 2014 12:20:22 GMT -6
That's pretty neat. It may see some use in our campaign - thanks!
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Aug 8, 2014 15:21:45 GMT -6
Is that your experience, though? My experience is more like Finarvyn’s, that the players will gladly show up for a game and immerse themselves in the wonder of the fantastic world, but outside the game there is no way they would care to “study up” on, say, the combat numbers, or the properties of magical items, or any of that stuff they are not supposed to know, let alone the stuff they are supposed to know like the campaign backstory. You may be right - I guess this depends on the players in question. Those that harbor DMing aspirations might be drawn to the guide, but maybe those who haven't bought in as fully just can't be bothered. That's a good question. I bet the game is more fun if everything is being newly discovered by the players. On the other hand, there's a deep well of system-independent D&D lore that most adult players probably share - umber hulks can confuse you with their weird eyes or whatever, etc.; if this knowledge is a problem, the only solution is to make all monsters, treasure, etc. unique in one's campaign... ...which is pretty cool! But also very time-consuming.
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Aug 8, 2014 13:11:16 GMT -6
I think this ship has long ago sailed, Falconer. In today's world, there's no secret DM books that the player doesn't see, beyond the module being run, anyway. Most players will own all three core books That’s not my experience, but maybe by “In today's world” you mean “in d20,” because both editions of AD&D (which are still played today and are even in print) sternly discourage players from accessing the DM books. I really don’t understand how it could be otherwise, but there are many things about d20 that I don’t understand. Accepting that the books "sternly discourage players from accessing the DM books" (and swallowing, for the moment, my distaste at being "sternly discouraged" by a book about playing a game from doing anything) - is it so hard to imagine that AD&D players in the early days who were eager to get their hands on any and all gaming materials would have violated this "rule"? People who are into D&D quite naturally want to avail themselves of as much knowledge as possible about it, and this desire springs as much from the kind of wide-eyed curiosity that draws us into the hobby in the first place as from a base urge to get a leg up in-dungeon.
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Aug 6, 2014 14:56:06 GMT -6
Unless it’s assumed that the players will be allowed to own and read the DMG, which IMO would be terrible. I think players are allowed to own whatever they want, within all applicable municipal, state, federal laws...
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Aug 3, 2014 20:32:14 GMT -6
I thought Forgotten Realms is the default setting in 5e?
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Aug 3, 2014 15:49:04 GMT -6
So I've been playing in this 5e campaign for about a month or so and having a blast. However, an early, impulsive character decision has led to some interesting and at times frustrating situations.
When the campaign began, I wanted to play a human fighter - like I usually do - in this new system. However, unable to leave well enough alone, I decided that my character would begin the game with a chemical dependency to a particular alchemically produced behavioral medication. "That'll be a fun angle," I thought. "I'll be like a nihilistic, detached Brett Easton Ellis character, but with a sword." How wrong can you go?
Pretty wrong, as it turns out. My DM has been insisting on "addiction checks", "relapse checks", and "withdrawal checks" to remind me - usually several times a session - of this crippling disease. It irritates me most, I think, because it invites the DM to violate what I've always considered a sovereign rule of DMing, one I'd never break: the player has sole control over her character's thoughts and desires. It also concretely impedes my ability to kill monsters and collect treasure, which I consider a cardinal goal of the game.
The weird thing is that the rest of the players really love my character's drug problem because it creates interesting role-playing situations. They're not wrong: it does! However, those situations emerge at the expense of my control over my character and my ability to play the game the way I want to. It's also quite frustrating to defeat an owlbear and taste the sweet victory turn to ash as my DM insists that I roll to avoid a moment of weakness. (Also, I've never suffered from a chemical addiction, but I imagine that this phenomenon - the monkey on one's back tainting every triumph - is probably a tiny, trivial taste of what those poor souls have to deal with on the daily. That's a much sadder thought than I care to entertain while rolling the bones and collecting my pieces of imaginary gold.)
I'm going to hang tight through the campaign, but this experience has taught me that (depending on whether the DM and players have TSR-era bloodthirst or post-White Wolf narrative inclinations) a snap "flavor" decision at character creation can have major and inconvenient ramifications in the long term. Next time, it'll be a teetotaling dwarf paladin.
tl;dr: Some people want to tell a story. Others want to win a prize. This dialectical tension is not easily resolved at the gaming table.
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Aug 3, 2014 5:49:49 GMT -6
Mainly not happy with double-bitted chunks-of-iron axes. All due respect: isn't this getting a bit petty?
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Aug 2, 2014 8:28:23 GMT -6
DiTerlizzi's 2e art was a revelation to me back in the day. I too wish that Wizards would assign one individual artist to each setting - it would convey a kind of authorial voice - but I doubt that the unfortunate economics of publishing (in which it's cheaper to pay 10 artists by the piece than to hire one artist full-time) would allow it.
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Aug 2, 2014 7:24:48 GMT -6
Some of the 5e monster art is taken directly from 4e - like, the actual images themselves. I'm looking at the githyanki, lich, and umber hulk in particular. It seems to me that Wizards' art direction is obliged to walk a rather fine line: on the one hand, they have to establish a brand identity; on the other, they have to stay sufficiently generic to accommodate the players' imaginations (which after all is the substance of the game) - new players' especially. You may prefer Otis or Elmore or whomever, but as with all expressions of taste, this is really a statement about you rather than a statement about Otis or Elmore. If the 5e art appeals to new players and gets more into the hobby, I'm all for it. We all know what we imagine a rust monster to look like, and further what the mise-en-scene of an encounter with one looks like. I don't think it's incumbent on Wizards of the Coast to capture those widely disparate visions.
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Jul 22, 2014 18:53:17 GMT -6
Do any of you have any doubt, though, that the overall 5e “culture” will skew heavily towards using all the bells and whistles, and that the “optional” stuff is optional in name only? That future modules and supplements will naturally assume the use of feats, not to mention non-Basic races/classes/paths? I’ll be honest, I’m a rock solid old-schooler with zero interest in d20 of any stripe, but if I were playing 5e, I would definitely want to customize my PC as much as the game allowed. Just knowing that all those options were available would make me want to play with them. I can’t fathom not wanting to do so, as if solely to prove my grognardiness! I'm playing in a 5e campaign right now, and nobody's made a peep about feats. Frankly, that's one of my favorite things about the system: after I get my starting gear, I can go a whole campaign without ever having to choose something from a list of things in a book. Choosing something from a list of things in a book is how 4e players spent like 70% of their time playing 4e.
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Jul 13, 2014 19:51:09 GMT -6
I think this is one of the biggest changes between editions. Characters in my experience are more likely to survive, because when they go down the monsters are likely to ignore them in favour of those still standing. If the characters end up winning the encounter, there's still a chance they can revive their comrades (and vice versa, of course). On the other hand, it does tend to make players more likely to keep their characters fighting when discretion might be the better part of valour ... Depends upon how the DM runs the game, I suppose. In one 5E playtest we encountered a bunch of ghouls and when one of us went down most of the pack went after the corpse. Yeah, the death save system causes kind of a weird situation where the DM's decisions about the enemies' behavior basically determines whether the character lives or dies. If an intelligent monster attacks a downed character, the jig is more or less up for that character - and it feels very much like the DM is going out of her way to screw the player. If, on the other hand, a hungry wild animal goes after a character who's still vertical, it might feel like the DM is pulling her punches. It's not a major problem as far as I'm concerned, but it does create a strange sociopsychological dilemma.
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Jul 12, 2014 21:29:46 GMT -6
I had the chance to play a little 5e this past week using the starter set and basic rules; I liked it. One of our fighters went down and rolled a rather sobering 1 on his first death save during the goblin ambush!
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Sept 20, 2013 16:44:51 GMT -6
I prefer the Eucharistic theology of Richard Hooker: "The sanctification of elements occurs somewhere between "The Lord be with you" and "Amen." IN other words, don't slice the d**n words too finely. Just make up some sh*t you think will be fun and play the f*cking game. I noticed on the forum's home page that gronanofsimmerya was the last person to post in this thread. "Huh," I said to myself. "I wonder if he's going to talk about making up some sh*t one thinks will be fun?" Lo and behold. That's great advice. It's probably the only advice one really needs in order to play the game and have a terrific time. The best thing about it is that it's always true and never needs to be said.
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Sept 18, 2013 6:27:24 GMT -6
Speaking as a member of Generation Y (but one without the upward mobility required to be a "yuppie"!), I have some pretty big problems with that article, which I first read some days ago. Most of them boil down to the author's choice to locate this generational crisis in the family - an institution which has, by and large, served Generation Y pretty well - rather than global capitalism, an institution that has served Generation Y very poorly in several ways. (We're getting pretty far afield of the original topic - which I promise to weigh in on as soon as I get a moment to post something that isn't a Marxist screed - but I want to recommend this book, which deals with some of the root causes of the issues described in the link Falconer posted.)
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Sept 8, 2013 18:43:17 GMT -6
It's these optional rules, though, that defined much of the flavor of the edition for me (and, I suspect, others who joined the hobby in the 2e era). The question I'm trying to answer - one which I'll post a provisional stab at in due course - is whether the crazy crap that those rules ignited in our imaginations can survive without the mechanical framework of the rules themselves.
In other words, what I want to get at about 2e is precisely those things that Gygax wouldn't have done.
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Sept 7, 2013 14:12:02 GMT -6
I guess what I'm asking for is a way to have all the fictive in-game things about 2E without being reliant on 2E's specific rules implementations of those things. Like maybe multiclassing is dealt with by collapsing all classes down into a single ur-class?
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Sept 7, 2013 7:11:04 GMT -6
The very idea of a second-edition grognard - reminiscing fondly about zipping around the skies on an amethyst dragon while bladesinging - is kind of funny, isn't it, but there's no need for it to be; that game's about 20 years old now. I'm aware that there's a handful of retroclones designed to mimic the 2e rules, but from what I've seen, they don't work too hard to capture the particular campaign aesthetic I remember, one in which players aspired to be your Richard Cyphers, your Rand al'Thors, and your Belgarions instead of your Conans and Fafhrds, and moreover one in which the ouroboros had digested enough of its own tail to excrete such fancies as characters who were dragons polymorphed into human form, spriggan characters who could suddenly be 40 feet tall, and parties in which every character was multiclassed into at least three classes. There's a ridiculousness to this milieu that's no more ridiculous than the ridiculousness of 70s gonzo D&D, but your 2e characters won't meet their end falling into a pit trap (although they might wade into a sea of gith and never wade back out).
With all that in mind, here's my question: How would you open up a very light game like OD&D (or, better yet, Searchers of the Unknown) to these possibilities in as few rules as possible?
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Aug 28, 2013 21:16:56 GMT -6
Fighters have never been boring. I've never found it boring to play as a fighter, and I imagine you haven't either - but plainly bycrom has, and that means that fighters have indeed been boring.
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Aug 27, 2013 13:35:22 GMT -6
While I understand and respect the rules-investigative impulse behind making this list of priorities, let me ask: As a practical matter, do players (i.e., not just us, but players in general) really need to structure their roleplaying so formally? In other words, is it not enough for most players just to be told that a paladin is supposed to behave in an extremely upright and selfless manner?
Because a good-faith effort (pun intended) on the part of the player to behave in a paladin-like way would certainly be enough to satisfy me as a DM, and if the player isn't willing to put forth that effort and instead needs some sort of chivalry flowchart to get her act together, I can see myself gesturing pointedly to the exit.
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Aug 26, 2013 17:56:31 GMT -6
I think the objection is simply one of aesthetics, not wanting to see something on a character sheet that has no mechanical effect. I can see that - and it reminds me of the utility of ability scores in character creation as a spur to imagination. Those six numbers between 3 and 18 can be very suggestive of what sort of character to play if the player doesn't already have a solid idea. (Having said that, if the player does have a solid idea, I wouldn't want to tell her to abandon it on account of rolled ability scores!)
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Aug 25, 2013 15:56:26 GMT -6
This is how AC is handled in 4th edition, as most of you probably know - characters receive a bonus to AC equal to half their level. It certainly makes sense to me; it's a step toward addressing the weird asymmetry between to-hit rolls and HP on the one hand, which get better every level, and AC and damage on the other, which don't.
Whether this asymmetry is a major problem or not depends on your preferences, I guess, but I'd love to hear a deeper conversation about what the practical effects are on the players (as opposed to the characters) of missing a lot at low levels and hitting almost all the time at high levels. Is it demoralizing to new blood? Is it frustrating? Seems like it could be, which I think is why the 4e designers strove for 50/50 average to-hit odds at all levels.
* ...although (as Talysman points out) there may be some value in retaining the original mapping of AC onto particular kinds of armor.
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Aug 16, 2013 14:18:36 GMT -6
I wish I'd had the Matthew J. Finch OSR Primer. It would have made me a much happier DM (and probably a better one too).
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Aug 15, 2013 14:38:40 GMT -6
I think part of it is because people don't see the difference between someone who does something with belief in God as a motivator and someone who is able to do something *because* God gave them a power. I think you're right. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that some players don't care about "the difference between someone who does something with belief in God as a motivator and someone who is able to do something *because* God gave them a power." The intricacies of these kind of theological metaphysics just aren't something I want to spend a lot of time thinking about when playing or preparing to play D&D.
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Aug 14, 2013 11:05:55 GMT -6
I'm not sure that all the hit points are supposed to stack. I would consider that the Beholder himself has the HD of his "body" i-e 40 hp (witch corresponds to a 9 HD monster). I agree - I think of a beholder as a roughly 10 HD creature, and 9 seems much more reasonable than 35. For purposes of saves, etc., I'd rule that they have 9 HD. (Although I might have arrived at that number by picking one that seemed right rather than by consulting sources and doing the math!)
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