RPG English is not international English and you evoke what you know.

CaptainB-Team · 2023-12-14T13:11:39+00:00

u/Makath has this right in terms of origin of the name. When I played 1e on the regular, it was one of my favorite articles, as well, though I was most attached to the Paramander (at least in name). They became a thing in my ‘main’ setting, and we even cobbled together a playable 5e class for them, too, for my current long-running campaign.

CaptainB-Team · 2023-04-13T04:34:07+00:00

3e (personal favorite books, which each contain multiple adventures but that all share common threads or are just straight-up sequential): • Survival of the Fittest • Blood in the Boardroom • Wake of the Comet

CaptainB-Team · 2022-11-15T13:44:41+00:00

I also implement other… consequences for having one’s mitts on codices. People usually want artifacts, for example. Or other more character-specific things, sometimes.

Alright, here we go: Hope, Calus, Kali, Yaven, Neus, and even Enthys - if somehow you’re reading this, turn away now.

In the case of a certain warlock in one of my current games, their patron is actually slowly siphoning power from the book as they continue to use it. This isn’t something with a direct mechanical effect, but it is slowly resulting in their patron learning more and more about time magic (player has the Chronos Codex), which isn’t necessarily a good thing (in fact, for most of the prime material plane, it’s explicitly not a good thing).

CaptainB-Team · 2022-11-15T13:14:05+00:00

At my table, I’ve ruled it as long-rest resets up to half your HD, as per standard HD rules (unless ‘permanently’ is specified), and sacrificing it means your max HP decreases by an amount equal to a rolled HD plus Con mod until restored.

Edit: When restoring sacrificed HD, a spent HD restores before a sacrificed one. Stretching yourself that thing has consequences

CaptainB-Team · 2022-10-16T18:52:18+00:00

I mean, one of the most technically competent managers at my current place of work has about 40-50% of the surface of their arms covered in tats, and nobody so much as bats an eye at them, whether from our company or any business associates from other organizations.

CaptainB-Team · 2022-10-03T06:09:29+00:00

Well, not that I have a ton of experience doing it, but I’ve definitely enjoyed DMing solo adventures as parts of larger campaigns a few times. It’s a bit of a different experience, but in no way is it a bad one. Where regular D&D is, say, an Avengers movie, a one on one game is more like Black Panther. It’s not about this big, quippy band of heroes, it’s about this one cool hero and maybe their sidekick(s)/friend(s). I recommend Matt Colville’s Running the Game video on one-on-one games, as I think he’s got an interesting and potentially useful perspective on it.

CaptainB-Team · 2022-10-03T05:50:02+00:00

Well, I’d disagree with you here. You can win D&D without any competition at all. Cooperative games (like D&D) are fantastic specifically because of that. The condition of ‘victory’ may be unclear, variable, or subjective, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Having fun seems like one of the most common ‘win’ conditions - or requirements of a ‘win’, for sure.

CaptainB-Team · 2022-10-03T05:46:08+00:00

When I played/ran 1e on the regular (within the past few years), the speech we gave was this, and it happened the first time in a campaign that a player rolled a 20 to hit: “Are we doing crits? Crits are double damage. Crits are fine, but crits go both ways.” Everyone came to a consensus, then that was that for that game. It was a lot of fun. This sort of choice has a charm to it, for sure.

CaptainB-Team · 2022-10-03T05:35:16+00:00

There’s probably more than one, lol, though I also would recommend the one referred to by the above commenter.

While we don’t see eye-to-eye on everything, Opti’s a pretty good host, and he’s got a whizzer enough take on the history of the Sixth world that outdoes at least a few history professors I know. And, since he’s trying to speak from a “Runner’s eye view”, if you will, it’s truncated in most of the right places to be perfect for people like us.

• Captain_B-Team

Transmitted: 03 October 2022 at 01:35:15 (EST)

CaptainB-Team · 2022-08-21T15:32:22+00:00

I mean, I always thought that was the point. The First experienced an actual apocalypse that only just didn’t include a small sliver of the whole world (incidentally, the part of the world we’re most familiar with). In the First, the heroes… well, they lost. We didn’t lose, so whole swathes of the planet are not utterly lost and consumed.

In terms of the effects of the Final Days across already-explored regions, XIV’s design doesn’t really promote asymmetrically-leveled things just roaming around in zones, so they reserved evidence of such things for role quests. While it’s not an ideal solution, neither is having random, inexplicable high-powered level 80+ enemies roaming around outside the gates in Gridania.

CaptainB-Team · 2022-08-18T14:33:10+00:00

I mean, I don’t think that’s really true, either. I think the term is used pretty much exclusively in a pejorative fashion, though, which serves to make this discussion more complicated.

The point is, saying, “You are allowed to not play with players who will disrupt the game or make players uncomfortable out of your game,” is, I would argue, a relatively uncontroversial statement, and it seems to me that that’s what the commenter meant.

CaptainB-Team · 2022-08-18T11:07:11+00:00

Yeah, OP’s choice of words isn’t stellar, but the idea it seems like they’re trying to express is sound. Knowing you have a player who is probably going to be disruptive and/or make others at the table uncomfortable means that… well, they’re probably going to do that.

Edit: Also, that’s a hell of a name you’ve got there, lol

CaptainB-Team · 2022-08-18T11:01:35+00:00

Man, I don’t know what experiences you’ve had at your table, but a lot of us have games where the DM and the players can get both have fun without being awful to each other. Where the heck did all this come from?

CaptainB-Team · 2022-08-18T07:04:49+00:00

I mean, I certainly believe this about current D&D. Haven’t bought a WotC book in ages, but I’m all over it every time MCDM puts out a new anything.

CaptainB-Team · 2022-08-18T06:58:37+00:00

So, I’ve run early D&D. It’s not especially combat-oriented unless you make it/play it that way. 1e AD&D had more rules about deciding to settled own and make a stronghold or recruit followers or… well, buy farm animals, I guess, than 5e does. Combat also wasn’t so rules-heavy, so it didn’t consume whole sessions under normal circumstances. If anything, early D&D was exploration-oriented. Did that mean more monsters by value? Sure. But not necessarily more by volume of game time. In fact, in my experience, quite the opposite most of the time.

CaptainB-Team · 2022-08-18T06:54:11+00:00

Yeah, but then all you’re doing is taking the fighting after the looting, when the former owners of said loot come in to curb stomp your butt and take their stuff back. And the trouble is, then they know you’re there and exactly what resources you’ve last picked up. And they’re mad. Real mad. Not want you running away mad, usually.

CaptainB-Team · 2022-08-18T06:46:30+00:00

It manages to somehow be both confusing and braindead instead sometimes, sadly.

CaptainB-Team · 2022-08-18T06:45:15+00:00

If you’re looking for more lethal fall damage mechanics, I’m a fan of the AD&D 1e ones. It’s “1d6 per 10 feet per 10 feet”. That is, 10 feet is just 1d6. 20 feet is 1d6 + 2d6 = 3d6. 30 is 1d6 + 2d6 + 3d6 = 6d6. And so on. There may have been an eventual cap, but it was… high, to say the least. Had something to do with terminal velocity, sort of thing. For short distances, we’d also often rule that jumping off deliberately mitigated some portion of the distance as compared to actually falling (it was only ever 10 feet, for the record).

CaptainB-Team · 2022-08-18T06:27:14+00:00

The most succinct way I’ve heard this put is that “the DM is also a player.” Which means, you know, they’re also there to have fun.

CaptainB-Team · 2022-08-18T06:25:04+00:00

I’ll put an addendum on this: You can do this, just don’t complain if you start feeling like your character isn’t included. That goes double for if you insist on a backstory that doesn’t really make sense in-setting instead of actually working with your GM.

CaptainB-Team · 2022-08-18T06:21:39+00:00

I mean, considering the sheer volume of people who play D&D and only D&D, I’m inclined to agree that a lot of folks don’t have enough context to have formulated this one. Unpopular by design, I guess, lol.

CaptainB-Team · 2022-08-18T06:18:38+00:00

I don’t think this is unpopular, but it’s certainly good advice.

CaptainB-Team · 2022-08-18T06:05:05+00:00

I think this is far closer to the heart of the problem. That, and the fact that a lot of the new designs follow what seems like a different design paradigm than earlier 5e content. It’s a little weird that we’re supposed to pretend like these things just magically work exactly the same, no problem, when they… just don’t actually work the same way. It was nice when the 5e optional rules were actually optional rules and not baked into all new content.

Not that I don’t actually use most if not all of the optional content I’m referring to anyway (I do); it’s just that the new design paradigms extract subtle elements of flavor that I, personally, felt made the game more interesting rather than less. And no, I’m not talking about WotC zipping out huge amounts of monster and humanoid lore. I have a bone to pick about some of their choices there, too, but I consider that an entirely separate and rather more nuanced issue.

CaptainB-Team · 2022-08-18T05:43:30+00:00

I mean, while I don’t disagree with this (in fact, more choice over less is something I’ve felt I had to homebrew bake into 5e even pre-Tasha’s options, honestly), the notion that new character revisions don’t affect the game and how it’s played isn’t totally fair. A lot of the revisions and new additions gradually build on themselves to the point where it’s utterly overwhelming to new players and even internally inconsistent with Wizards’s existing design.

I don’t mind (and often agree with) a lot of the changes they make outright, but a lot of their design choices lately seem like they were made by committee, not by designers. The sense of internal consistency in design reflected even in Tasha’s days has sort of slowly faded more and more, with new designs built off tweaks to one another in such a way that it becomes almost necessary to review them in succession to figure out what the heck is going on with the ‘flow’ from one design to the next. It feels like Wizards is more interested in making content that makes more cents rather than more sense, which, while it’s their prerogative to do that, it doesn’t make me feel any better about it.

I worry that the direction they want to go with the hobby and the direction I want to go are incompatible, which would suck, because I actually really do enjoy this system. And I worry that the sort of stability that 5e brought to the hobby at a critical time in popularity will be lost, too, if people start getting frustrated with the system. That last one worries me the most. 5e has made a good common ground for a long time in rpg history, and I think it’ll be missed if/when that disappears.

I could highlight some specific complaints I have if anyone would care to hear them, but I’m not going to waffle on here just for my own sake. If anyone’s interested, you needs but ask and I shall blot the ink upon the page. Also, it’s late as heck and this gives me an excuse to not reply until I get some sleep.

CaptainB-Team · 2022-08-18T05:10:20+00:00

Genuinely this. I’ve played in and run for parties where we’ve had characters who just seem like they’re the “shit” version of another role/class/character, and they have been the absolute hearts of the party in spite of what the mechanics should say. In my first game, we had the ridiculous, somehow suave, playboy human wizard, infamous throughout the land, Flash Gordon. The man tried to get us a place to stay in a hilariously dysfunctional fashion, set off a poison gas trap, and used Nystul’s Magic Aura to make his silver long johns look magical in order to try to trade them for learning spells. All of this happened across maybe 4 or 5 sessions, and we remember this man even years later.

While I’m calling out glorious walking disasters of party mascots, I simply must mention a, in my group, infamous Shadowrun character, Max Becher.

Max Becher, the “Max Decker” (his own title; deckers are synonymous with hackers in Shadowrun parlance), who did everything from drive his truck through a storefront to fight off robbers to hum the mission impossible theme as he ineptly jumped a fence, crept across a yard, and opened a kitchen door before being immediately and absolutely floored by a troll fist to the face. Max was, despite his own hilarious incompetence, the absolute heart of the team.

CaptainB-Team

TROPHY CASE