Posts Tagged "tao-of-dnd" from 2015

I know I've read much or all of this before when you've talked about regular mages in your world. Is there anything Illusionist-specific here?

Nothing to say, but I'm looking at them.

Good thinking, ScrivenerB.

What would be different in your approach with a new version of the cooking blog?

Looks like a typo on the page for Affirmation.

"A character that affirmed against a fireball would not be similarly protected against any other magical attack, such as a lightning bolt or a fireball."

It would be cool if outside users could propose edits to your wiki thru a built in system, even if just to squash minor errors. Obviously you would have to approve changes - Wikipedia has anti-troll moderators, but you don't.

OK, now the meat of it makes sense. Thanks.

I like that you brought up the ways in which normal party-level activities are and aren't parallel to expedition-level operations.

In terms of rule structure: at first blush it seems that surveillance, recon, and intelligence might be able to form a tighter unit inside the overall "lead an expedition" rules. "What do we know about the environment and the enemy, and can we do a little sidling around the edges to expand those knowledges before we pick a course of action?"

So in terms of information flow, reconnaissance could be how the player commits little bundles of resources to expand intelligence and surveillance. With diminishing returns, of course...

I'm thinking on the topic of mass battles, armies, and then possibly expeditions. Nothing to report right now though.

I can't overstate how much I wish I could play in a game where this goes on. Rest assured that your city is on my list of "places to seek employment" when I graduate. Calgary, am I right?

Aha, I see. The skill and hench systems linking together organically - makes perfect sense. It just screams "fun".

Planning an assault: "my fighter has this and this skill, hench Bob has this and this and he's a fighter too so we've got a handful of solid mercs between us. Joe is a level 6 druid and he has a level 2 cleric so let's bringing them both, gonna need all the healing we can get plus the druid has been harvesting mistletoe for two years now and we'll need those too... oh and someone call Adam, did he decide whether he wants to risk his paladin or if he's just sending a hench? no? hey that makes sense. but less xp for his main guy hahaha...."

What's the historic building in today's picture?

The pictures coming out of the New Horizon mission have been incredible to look at. I've heard that on Wednesday, 10x-higher-res pictures will be released by NASA.

Alexis I may have asked you before but I can't remember: what are the methods, other than "a bonus from the background generator", of one class accessing a knowledge field from another class?

It's slipped my mind: are you currently for or against non-class-specific knowledge fields selectable by any player?

Oh, that too! Gonna go up and read the Animal Riding post now.

Yep, got it. Thanks.

Wait, no, hang on: is it about 'transforming' non-Fighters into leveled Fighters?

Is it both this AND my previous comment?

A little confused about the Training field. Let me check my understanding: the Trainer sage field governs the teaching of other Fighter sage fields (e.g. Cavalry) to non-Fighters? With one player-usable purpose being that a Fighter with the Training field could improve his men-at-arms and followers through teaching them?

I am so jealous of your players!

Can't wait to see the fighter material.

Neat. I like the trading scenario the best. It's a focused activity, it shows that gnolls and other stereotypically "bad" races are just a kind of people (which I think is sensible), there's the lure of easy money which may actually turn out to be pretty easy, and the whole thing is a perfect springboard into NPC relations with two distinct groups from distinct areas, cultures etc. Well done.

I liked seeing how Fallow was constructed in the DM's guide, so I'm also liking this return to it. Thank you.

In regard to your 5th point: is your daughter a candidate? I know you've mentioned her DMing before.

Loving the high-res maps.

I'll look this one up.

Quite a few contortions the party will have to go through to use it, but that's a good thing.

High cruising altitude to avoid being spotted for too long. Have to land well outside civilized areas and hike into town. The ship itself will inspire both fear and greed in others.

Does the pilot need to know where he's going and be able to navigate there overland? Can it just take them anywhere they want with no knowledge necessary? Something in between, such as needing to know in which direction the destination lies?

Cool stuff. But I can see why you're worried. Its value, especially as a "home base", surely dwarfs all else. Even the one guy's fief and fortress - pah, can it move? Didn't think so. (But of course, an air ship has no tax-paying residents. There's life in the fief yet.)

Oh, okay, I see what you meant.

Could you talk more about why Conflict Cards fizzled?

"What was needed was some rule that stated, "If the player fails to convince the orc, the player must acquiesce to one demand made by the orc, hand over 50% of their cash on hand, agree to a proposition and then carry it out, etcetera."

Why didn't a solution like the one you wrote here end up working?

This series has value to me for these reasons:

1. As Discord said, it shows how not to DM.

2. Insight, as always, into the many many layers a campaign world can have. Having you say "ah, the usurers should see me as a fantastic loanee if I've spent 20K on beer futures" makes me start and say - hot damn, I don't have any usurers or moneylenders, better get cracking on THAT level of detail. It's good to be kept on the toes!

The problem, I think, is that people want to automate the wrong things.

Computers are fantastic at crunching numbers and serving data from storage. But instead of people making more and more powerful programs to mimic or automate the world-expanding stuff you do manually (i.e. scanning big chunks of data to provide factual motivation for a game system), they are instead automating stuff that needs no automation. (For example, my pet peeve is virtual representations of physical dice and of paper books, both of which are present in the linked video.)

An alternate direction for automation which would expand the game is to provide greater ability for even the non-technical DM to source world data for processing into game rule bases. These types of things do exist but you usually have to be technical to apply them, and usually various tools must be chained to get anything useful.

Having actually gone and read some of those submissions, Salmon would stand proudly among them. At least in Salmon I know what my character is, instead of having to assume some enigmatic minimalist "persona."

For fuck's sake: this isn't fiction, people. You aren't trying to get a reaction through the EMOTIONAL, MYSTERIOUS content of the rules themselves, but rather through the situations the rules enable. The rules ought to be set down concretely, with edits not being made on the fly unless it's to cover something unexpected, and then only with clear indication that something has changed!

If the rules clearly state that Bob Fighter will die if an attacker rolls 4+ on d8, you bet your ass the party will be tense when it happens - they know the stakes!

Jeeeee-sus.

Got it. Thank you.

"Here is the problem with RPGs in the hands of people who are uncomfortable with realities. Too much time is taken in trying to make them work like television."

Yep, yep. Here is how the typical game pitch sounds, every time:

I've never had players talk so long that we didn't run at all, but I'm comfortable with letting the chat draw out until everyone's ready to play.

"The status quo has a very strong motivation to not let things like that happen - and to punish those who follow courses of action that change the status quo. If the players ever get to be big enough to own a .45 of their own, so they can start blasting away with it, everyone in the world will turn around and blast away at the player. Not just the infringed party. Not just the person the players wronged. Everyone. Because everyone is threatened."

Good paragraph.

The shit-game analogue to your sound logic is this kind of arrangement: the DM tolerates all kinds of idiocy in-game with no repercussions for the players - except when they occasionally just drop out the deus ex machina big-guns and blow you up with fiat.

Oh, good one. If there are druid spells which dry a big area (unlikely, I think) or one that stops normal precipitation for a time ... and even those are unnecesssary of course, if the environment is dry and fuel-heavy. Cool.

Of course, somebody's gonna get pissed - other druids, possibly!

Ooh, very cool. And much more in line with the theme of the druid.

God, wouldn't it feel shitty to burn up a bunch of countryside? Not to mention non-party people getting mad at you, maybe even the own party asking you to be careful with "that spell," and so on.

Nicely done.

Thanks for sharing. It was fun to put these side by side with the animal friends tables.

I wasn't doubting that, but point taken.

Well done. I am following this series closely.

I always marvel at how well-put-together your tools look from the outside. Even with the knowledge that there's always something you don't get to, or can't cover, even with the knowledge that you propose system after system and it takes you years to get one that works well, despite all that it is still so impressive. The Facebook effect, I guess - we see many more of your highlights than your failures.

I'm confused about what this part of the Dispel Magic text means.

"Enchanted items, such as scrolls, potions, rings, wands, staffs, rods, armor, weapons and so on are not affected by the spell. However, dispel magic will dispel the lasting effects caused by those items."

So the items themselves won't get broken or anything, OK. But what are the "lasting effects" here? It makes sense to me for, say, a potion - you drink the potion, you get an effect, but then somebody casts Dispel on you and the effect gets canceled.

Amen. User experience trumps all.

Regarding anti-magician sharpshooters: is that a potential candidate for inclusion somewhere in, say, the Fighter's sage abilities?

I don't think it would be much fun on its own, but as a rider along with some other skill related to, I don't know, military expertise for the purpose of raising a large army, or something.

Or maybe it's just the kind of thing the players will learn from all the times the enemies do it!

Good job.

I noticed that you said the queen was casting in the last post, and here you said she had used a wand of fireballs.

I'm not here to quibble - what I want to know is, does using the wand take the same time as using a spell?

My guess would be yes, with the advantage to the wand being you don't have to spend a spell.

Some things I found instructive:

1. Your handling of the player responding to being interrupted by a third party near the end of the video.

2. Brushing off an unnecessary apology firmly but without further flustering the apologizer.

3. A simple "on focus" and hand motion when the party has gotten distracted by the topic of jellies - but not before contributing a fact of your own. I suspect you don't immediately stop them because that would make you look like a hardass. A little mental wandering can be worthwhile to help trigger exciting ideas,but wandering too far can lead to just talking about playing the game instead of playing the game.

(This is a repost because I don't think my original went thru - Blogspot sometimes dislikes that I have 2 Google accounts. Delete if it did.)

What's the difference between the light gray hexes and the dark gray ones? With "light" being ones the color of the hexes under "Great East Erg" and "dark" being the ones under Mountains of Ksour.

It seems like "dark" might mean mountains - is that right?

Oh really? Next you'll tell me you've got some crackpot idea to change equipment prices based on the relative local availability of goods and services. It'll never fly, man!

Tim, a quote from your post:

"but their character failed their wisdom roll and is dancing around with the thing."

I assume you meant this facetiously, but I think one of the reasons people are so often distrusting of ability checks, knowledge systems - or the game as a whole, really - is because childish DMs say "oh you failed your roll? Well now you're doing (some absurd thing)."

I sadly can't think of a single game I've played in where this wasn't considered acceptable practice*. This fucks everything up, because simple player input ("I touch the statue") is translated into bizarre output ("You got a 1 on your Wisdom to know that you shouldn't; you are now dancing with the statue.")

Cool, thanks for posting the divided maps. That clears up Leon and other labels on the divide.

And by looking at the map more closely I can understand why there is a bigger Valencia label, and a smaller one (same goes for Guadalajara, Madrid, etc). One is the administrative region bearing that name (with gray borders) and then one is the city proper. So that's my other question answered.

Too cool.

Another question: I see there are copies of some city names. Unlike the "Co" which looks like an error, these are fully formed.

My question: in such cases, is this a matter of one label representing the region of influence/administration around the city proper, and the second one being the actual location of the trade-table market?

One hex to the left of Cordoba's label, there looks to be an error - another "Co" as if you left an earlier Cordoba label in. The font on it looks a little taller.

Beautiful!

I'll buy my copy a few weeks from now after midterms. Looking forward to it!

I would like to hear what you have to say about the audience and their reactions, when you're back from the signing.

Well said, William.

Clear, easy to run, and nasty. Love it.

B/c it hits ability scores it needs little tweaking: ability minuses are bad while traveling, they're bad while fighting, they're bad while exploring. That's the right way to do this.

Regarding the heating-up rule: also good, and in particular I think that having this component of "exhaustion" handled directly by the weather-penalty rule is very slick.

An edge case to consider: what if the weather's already high and a fight drags on in that weather? Do the negatives pile on past the "end" of the scale? I suppose "no" is the answer - and that furthermore it would be unlikely for any creature other than a heat-adapted monster to get in a fight with someone in such weather. It'd be an exhausting slugfest, slow and with ragged breathing all around ... but not lacking tension.

Following this series. I think it will make a good combo with re-reading the early Civ IV Technology posts which are concerned with early agricultural societies.

Solid work.

Hey, I was tooling around in the archives and found this post.

Alexis, I want to ask for clarification on this statement:

"A leveled fighter, for example, with 2 attacks per round, would only lose one of those attacks if 1/4 damage was done against him. To lose both attacks, 1/3 of total damage would need to be done. 1/2 is necessary to stop 3 attacks, 2/3 to stop 4 attacks, 3/4 to stop 5 attacks and so on."

I thought that dealing 1/4 of current HP in one hit stuns the recipient of the hit so that they can take no action. I interpret these sentences here to mean that combatants with multiple attacks are allowed to take their extra attacks EVEN WHILE STUNNED, unless the additional HP thresholds of 1/3, 1/2, etc. are reached by the stunning hit.

(One more point: is it shallow just to go "wow that's cool, more please Alexis" for many of your posts? Sure. Is your blog the only thing demanding my hard work and thinking? No. Commenting critically on every post that impresses me would be a part-time job with no pay. I'd rather go implement them for my D&D world and that's when I'm actually running.)

I wanted to address your point in the latest post about not getting any comments. Some thinking brings me to these points:

(A) You're working constantly on elements of the game the average DM doesn't care about, has not or cannot conceive of, or actively opposes as "not fun."

(B) Even your unfinished ideas, with calls for us to critique and take apart, are usually more detailed than what any of us has arrived at.

(C) You have wide-ranging knowledge, a long history of blog posts on many D&D topics, and a reputation for shutting down, with various levels of angriness, those who make the same old tired arguments or who fail to do their homework before commenting. (This one doesn't dissuade me personally but for those with less time to look up old posts or sit down and ruminate, it can be a killer.)

The advantage of text is that I can proceed at my own pace. With video, I cannot proceed at my own pace, and must turn on my audio lest I miss something; the presentational advantages are what make up for this.

Audiobooks combine the worst of both worlds. No demand here.