zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Mar 6, 2013 16:59:33 GMT -6
Maybe one reason clerics would be inclined to wield blunt weapons rather than edged weapons is that they're easier to learn to use. (Is that true, by the way? Not that it really matters.) Viewed in this way, it reflects a cloistered lifestyle focused on scriptural study and the caretaking of one's flock - the cleric is a scholar/administrator, not a warrior, so she chooses a weapon that doesn't require a great deal of training and practice.
Having said that, my policy is to always allow players to do everything, so this issue doesn't often come up.
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Mar 5, 2013 17:22:05 GMT -6
Thanks for the responses.
I just may.
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Mar 5, 2013 16:46:28 GMT -6
...if you'll excuse the bowdlerized Mae Westism.
I realized today that I've been posting in a sub-forum called "Men and Magic" for some time without having read Men and Magic. What's a person supposed to do about this? My understanding is that hard copies of OD&D are prohibitively expensive (and prohibitively inconvenient) to come by. What do you recommend?
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Mar 5, 2013 10:57:33 GMT -6
My contention: If multiclassing appeals to your players, you might as well jettison the notion of classes altogether. Following Searchers of the Unknown's lead, I like to give all characters the mechanical profile of fighters who can also attempt thiefly maneuvers (Searchers links this process to AC, so that armored characters are less successful at acrobatics and stealth than unarmored ones). Then, if clerical or wizardly powers are desired, those could be acquired through research, communion, etc. - all tasks that you can explore in play and make more or less challenging and demanding to fit your taste. When initial mechanical distinctions between characters are thusly minimized, player skill - and, more importantly, player will - can really shine. If you have a player who's eager to pretend to be a fighter/mage/thief (as I often was, in my salad days), this is a system that allows for precisely that kind of flexibility, and nobody has to go to the trouble of writing "fighter/mage/thief" (or any other class) on his or her character sheet. It's also a great way to emulate swords and sorcery protagonists like the Gray Mouser... if emulating swords and sorcery protagonists is a priority for you, and considering how dead that particular OSR horse now is, I couldn't blame you if it weren't.
Now that I've typed all of that up, it sounds like it might be a lot of work for you, though.
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Mar 3, 2013 18:53:14 GMT -6
Sure is, and if you have a way to make it fun, so be it - who am I to argue otherwise?
On the other hand, if the goal is simply to bring a low-level character up to speed quickly so that the social (i.e., real) problem of one player having to mouse around while her buddies kick posterior can be resolved, then my feeling is that an opportunity for cool plots - like putting one over on the locals and trying to convince them that the newbie is actually a great warrior (as Talysman suggested) - has arisen, and why not seize it by coming up with something original that everybody at the table will get a kick out of?
Maybe the solution is to seek a wizard who can replace the character with a higher-level future version of herself, a few years older and wiser. Maybe the solution is to magically download the spirit of a legendary hero into the character's head. And maybe the solution is to delve into a few dungeons until the new character's found enough gold to level up, if that's the best the DM can come up with and everyone enjoys themselves.
(Prediction: Someone will respond to point out that low-level characters can do all kinds of cool stuff in high-level parties, especially with the help of burning oil, Sleep spells, etc. My rejoinder is that the whole point of being high-level is that one has a license to be awesome in particular ways that low-level characters are not, and those ways do not include Sleeping a bunch of goblins or setting an owlbear on fire with a lantern.)
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Feb 21, 2013 22:27:08 GMT -6
First level. All else is for weaklings. Look, I know you're being a bit facetious here, but the discourse of hardcoreness that suffuses accusations like this one is really off-putting. If the game had been invented in the 90s by me and my friends rather than in the 70s by you and your friends, we might structure the economy of D&D player prestige in a way that rewards our way of playing and denigrates yours - but I'd like to think we wouldn't. Which leads me to: Does this strike anyone else as particularly... gamey? Like, something that characters in an imagined world would never do unless there were invisible abstractions hovering overhead and governing their potentials and aspirations (i.e., rules)? If you're going to allow low-level characters to advance quickly and catch up to their friends, surely there's a more interesting and creative way to do it than through the rote exploitation of what amounts to a loophole.
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Feb 21, 2013 13:33:27 GMT -6
Cope himself (what a fascinating guy) might not be the worst choice: the underrated World Shut Your Mouth conveys a combination of grandeur and wryness that might fit the affect of some games. Could also bring in some Roxy Music to that end.
My knowledge of The Teardrop Explodes is pretty shallow - have to look into that in greater detail.
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Feb 21, 2013 8:13:25 GMT -6
I let the player come up with a new character at the median party level or thereabouts. Inventing a mid- or high-level character from whole cloth is a fun imagination exercise that players seldom get to indulge in, so I like to let them enjoy it.
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Feb 19, 2013 22:15:37 GMT -6
I think mine was a half-elf fighter/mage/thief (isn't that just the most 2e thing you ever heard?) named Darius. This would have been 1991 or so. His main groove was the acquisition and deployment of as many dragonlances as possible.
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Feb 18, 2013 17:01:07 GMT -6
Like geoffrey, I allow characters to regain all HP after an overnight rest; however, rather than fall into negative HP, characters who cross the 0 HP threshold roll a d6 to determine their fate: 1-2 is immediate death; 3-4 is a serious injury that will kill within a short time unless medical attention is provided; 5-6 is unconsciousness from which they can be easily roused by an ally. No magical healing is available. (I've never tested this system with high-level characters, though - it might be a total disaster.)
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Feb 13, 2013 18:35:18 GMT -6
Surely it's time to dispense with the manifestly sexist "fighting man" (which requires those of a more egalitarian bent to inconveniently append "... and fighting women, of course") in favor of the simpler "fighter." If "fighting man" may be symptomatic of Holmes, that's only because it's symptomatic of a time when there were far fewer female gamers and those that were around were less able (Jean Wells aside) to make their voices heard.
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Feb 7, 2013 13:31:47 GMT -6
Just a quick D&D thought-exercise: J. Maliszewski has suggested that the most sustainable model (not sure if those were his exact words) for D&D might look like Monopoly: A single product including everything one needs to play a game whose rules fit on the inside of the box. That sounds pretty good to me, but I wonder if an even better target might be poker, a game whose rules are traditional (and subject to much variation) and whose supplies—i.e., the cards—are readily available.
Obviously nobody's making any money selling "poker" per se, but if you think about the "poker industry"—televised games, for instance—it's still transactional (leaving aside the very concrete betting transactions in poker). Maybe someday that's what we'll have: a free D&D whose economy is located mostly in its popularity as a spectator sport.
(Naturally this would have a require a pretty severe reorientation of WotC's conception of the game!)
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Jan 31, 2013 6:41:43 GMT -6
In the early days of my music PhD work, some friends and I decided we should bite the bullet and watch the entire Met Ring cycle on DVD, so we did. Besides confirming the conventional Wagner wisdom for us - i.e., that the music is incredibly slow-moving and encodes some repugnant social attitudes - it furnished us with some musical moments that I have to say were genuinely remarkable. If you're in the business of counting the Great Musical Achievements of the Common-Practice Era (which fortunately few musicologists are), Wagner has to be responsible for several of them. Parsifal remains my favorite of RW's works, though - and it's the slowest-moving of them all!
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Jan 9, 2013 19:22:22 GMT -6
That actually made a lot of sense - thanks for the breakdown.
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Jan 7, 2013 18:34:37 GMT -6
Geoffrey, I've read your opinions about the movie with interest, so please take me at my word that the following is not a rhetorical question: In what sense are three films "way, way too much" for you if you saw the first and already have plans to see the second and third? They may be "way, way too much for you" as a person who cultivates informed opinions in the garden of your mind, but they must not be "way, way too much for you" as a consumer. Am I wrong to say that fifty years ago (twenty-five, even) this is a distinction we, as cultural participants, wouldn't have made? (Is this also the fertile soil from which hate-watching [q.v. www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2012/12/28/_2012_word_of_the_year_hate_watching_is_the_best_choice.html] sprouts?)
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Dec 16, 2012 9:19:25 GMT -6
I see what you're saying, Inkmeister - and in a way this whole discussion illustrates a weird (but, I think, very relatable) dichotomy in how we think about roleplaying games: Are they social negotiations among people at a table or abstract frameworks that allow us to imagine certain fictional things and events in certain ways? My general feeling is that if a problem emerges in the game (in the rules, or even in the dungeon's layout!) that pertains to that social negotiations, I as the DM am responsible for fixing it. If, however, a problem emerges that pertains to my unwillingness to imagine something in the game's world in the way that I'm inclined to, the solution is that I need to get over myself. Good luck finding players who are of one mind with you to play that "other game;" I'm sure they're out there!
Regarding Bach: yes, that's more or less what I was getting at; one listener's "old-fashioned" is another's Aufklärungskomplexität (if you'll excuse my Frankensteinian German neologism). I applaud your interest in a the historical context of Bach's music! It makes me want to do a Gygaxian analysis of a fugue...
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Dec 15, 2012 20:51:43 GMT -6
I really liked it, although I think it could have shed about half an hour and been a hair better. Not sure if I saw it in 24 or 48 fps, but I had no problem with the way it looked.
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Dec 15, 2012 20:29:28 GMT -6
A few words about J. S. Bach and then a small observation about dungeon design.
In a great essay entitled "Bach gegen seine Liebhaber verteidigt" - "Bach defended against his admirers" - Theodor Adorno argues (convincingly, I think) that despite his music's well-documented reception history, which you quite rightly note makes it very clear that contemporary audiences found his music too "baroque" in the pejorative sense, Bach was a herald of the enlightenment. The complexity of his contrapuntal music, Adorno claims, is a harbinger of nascent early modernity, giving voice not to Lutheran dogma but rather to Cartesian reason. I bring up this article not to contradict your account of Bach's position in the aesthetic world of early 18th-century north Germany, one which he inherited from the likes of Buxtehude and Franz Tunder, but instead to suggest that (like Bach's oeuvre) dungeon design is a matter we might conceive dialectically.
My experience has been that a certain kind of player appreciates large dungeons whose rooms do not furnish an exploratory arc - dungeons that strive to approximate "real" structures, including weird empty rooms or latrines or whatever - and another kind of player appreciates dungeons of fewer than 10 rooms, each of which provides particular set-piece affordances and opportunities for the party to be super cool. I always try to deliver the content my audience (i.e., the players) will enjoy most - not a strategy Adorno would likely endorse, but one that recognizes the consensus-character of the game and one that Bach the organist would surely have hailed.
Not to mention his sons J.C. and C.P.E. Bach, who embraced the crowd-pleasing galant style... I bet they would have bought Vornheim.
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Dec 9, 2012 21:02:18 GMT -6
Good call. We usually do it collaboratively in character creation; I've never prepared goals in advance and handed them down, but with new players especially I can see why you might want to do some of the heavy lifting in advance.
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Nov 21, 2012 14:34:21 GMT -6
I always play Stereolab at the table; it sets a very wide-eyed science-fantasy tone, though - maybe not quite appropriate for Carcosa, which might benefit from the likes of Horatiu Radulescu, Eliane Radigue, or the young Alex Mincek.
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Nov 1, 2012 15:17:35 GMT -6
To your original question: I'd give everyone 100 experience points. Dies ist die Zeit der Könige nicht mehr, to quote Hölderlin; if it becomes a problem that the characters advance more quickly than you or they would like, there are plenty of provisional solutions you can pursue.
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Oct 31, 2012 7:20:00 GMT -6
Given the enormous and very visible resentment of Lucas' stewardship of the franchise (i.e., of the prequels, whose every minute was almost without exception unbearable) and the high quality-ceiling set by genre pictures like The Avengers which marry powerhouse properties to thoughtful directors who are genuine fans, I think there's reason for optimism. I have no doubt that part of Disney's strategy with these upcoming Star Wars pictures is to do right by fans; if the headlines say something like "Star Wars Returns to Form, Woos Disenchanted Adults, Kids Alike," I imagine that'll signal a gigantic return on their $4 billion investment.
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Best AC
Oct 24, 2012 18:46:54 GMT -6
Post by zeraser on Oct 24, 2012 18:46:54 GMT -6
Tougher monsters will have more HP, they probably don't need lower AC's as well to be a challenge. That may be; assuming that PCs typically top out at 8 HD, I guess that gives them more or less a 50/50 shot to hit a 2 AC opponent at the high end - seems fair.
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Best AC
Oct 24, 2012 13:38:33 GMT -6
Post by zeraser on Oct 24, 2012 13:38:33 GMT -6
For me, AC 2 is the best armor class that a person (as in "charm person") can achieve; certain enemies like dragons that have super-tough defenses might get down to 0, but no negative numbers. However, under my house rules, a low AC is not necessarily optimal: It hinders characters' attempts to jump, climb, balance, etc. (as in Searchers of the Unknown) and diminishes the wages of their special attacks (a house rule whereby players who are willing and able to narrate something situational and cool that their characters do in battle can add their AC to a to-hit roll; they deal their HD in bonus damage if successful but are automatically hit by all enemy attacks in the next round if unsuccessful).
Not that you asked about any of that.
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Oct 24, 2012 9:00:16 GMT -6
Would it be too unbalancing to give both abilities to all clerics, on the assumption that most would end up using only one or the other?
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Oct 23, 2012 17:53:44 GMT -6
Seems pretty neat to me. The only thing that seems to be missing (that is to say, the only thing that it's up to the PCs to contribute) is goals: Things to want, things to want to do, things to want to be, etc. Not a big problem, though; given at least one or two players who are willing to do the imagination-legwork of making up their own motivations, you should be set.
Frankly, I really like this kind of campaign - I love the notion of D&D as a game that requires as close to zero prep as possible, with rules that fit on a single page (and setting detail to match) and lots of narrative or dramatic or problem-solving energies unleashed spontaneously in play.
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Oct 19, 2012 18:43:22 GMT -6
I think it's disingenuous to claim that ranges are freer than dice prescriptions; It is all well and good then that I didn't "claim that ranges are freer", for it would sorely aggrieve me if the readership here were to think me in any way "disingenuous" OK, fair enough. That one's on Coach Tracy, but I hope we can all agree that ranges are less clear than prescriptions because prescriptions can be interpreted to construe a distribution in addition to a minimum and maximum. By the way, I'd never hold the use of ranges rather than prescriptions against a product; certainly lots of people found a way to work with ranges in the early days of the hobby. I just think that dice ranges might in some cases be a peculiarity of the early game (like descending AC - which I use!) that we go out of our way to rationalize even though its primary appeal to us lies in its fetish-character, so to speak.
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Oct 18, 2012 18:56:37 GMT -6
Second, ranges are not prescriptive. They don't tell the referee how the range should be achieved, only what the range should be. Thus the referee can make up his own mind on how to roll for 10-1000, for example.
That's true, of course - but it's also true that different means of producing those 10-1000 results may well have quite different distributions (10d100, 1d991+9, etc.). Obviously some of these distributions are feasible with ordinary dice and others would require some other kind of random number generator, but in any case I think it's disingenuous to claim that ranges are freer than dice prescriptions; they just convey a different kind of information.
For my money, dice prescriptions are more useful, but that's beside the point.
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Oct 17, 2012 16:06:35 GMT -6
Glad to hear it's useful info.
I think magic items are an interesting area of design because they're a place where the "world" part of game-making intersects with the "system" part of game-making. I guess that's true of a lot of things, though, like spells, mundane equipment, classes, and (especially) races.
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zeraser
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 184
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Post by zeraser on Oct 17, 2012 10:10:00 GMT -6
wizards.com/dnd/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4ll/20121008I think this is a promising development - it might return some of the old games' specialness (missing in 4E) to magic items. It seems to represent some motion away from the rather campaign-invasive assumption that every character will have access to magical weapons and armor commensurate with her level.
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