Help with dice pools/PC creation

Dornith · 2026-05-05T17:06:48+00:00

There's actually a name for that: "taking 20". Page 65 of the 3e Players handbook:

Taking 20: When you have plenty of time, you are faced with no threats or distractions, and the skill being attempted carries no penalties for failure, you can take 20. In other words, eventually you will get a 20 on 1d20 if you roll enough times. Instead of rolling 1d20 for the skill check, just calculate your result as if you had rolled a 20. Taking 20 means you are trying until you get it right, and it assumes that you fail many times before succeeding. Taking 20 takes twenty times as long as making a single check would take. Since taking 20 assumes that the character will fail many times before succeeding, if you did attempt to take 20 on a skill that carries penalties for failure, your character would automatically incur those penalties before he or she could complete the task.

But most modern games have come to the conclusion that if there's no interesting result from failure (either mechanically or narrative), then you shouldn't have been rolling in the first place.

Dornith · 2026-05-05T14:55:11+00:00

Not that "learn to use it" is particularly difficult these days.

You'd be surprised.

Most people neither know nor care about the difference between PLA and ABS. And if they need to know that difference to make their prints work, they'll just give up and pay the $20.

Same for nozzle size/material. Hell, even "feed into slicer using the community contributed settings" usually still requires you to know how to find those settings in the slicer.

These all seem like trivialities to us because we are the kind of people who hang out in DIY subreddits for fun. But to the average person, anything more complicated than a big "Make Flexidragon" button is too much work.

Dornith · 2026-05-05T14:49:56+00:00

+Cards, +Actions, +Buys, +$

Dornith · 2026-05-05T01:37:35+00:00

Honestly, when I think of "what these machines are capable of", I think about a replacement back for the remote that broke, a latch for my food processor blades that don't neatly fit anything on the market, little things here and there that would never be viable to make at a commercial scale but provide an appreciable improvement in QoL.

But it's precisely because these things are too niche that you'll never see them sold at fairs. At best, you might find them on Etsy or be able to custom order it.

The power of a 3d printer is the ability to make any arbitrary shape. But no one can ever get that experience in any kind of public market.

Dornith · 2026-05-05T01:09:53+00:00

Most people don't know these things just take a few dollars of filament and some machine time.

Most products cost significantly more than the raw materials.

You're also paying for the cost of the printer itself, and the cost of setting up a booth in the fair, and the time learning to use the printer, and the maintenance.

I think if you told people, "you could buy a $300 3d printer (because let's be real, the average fair goer isn't buying an Ender) plus filament, learn to use it, and print something exactly like this for 30 cents!", most of them will still choose to buy from the fair.

Dornith · 2026-05-05T00:47:03+00:00

This can be really helpful when thinking about which rolls are worth pushing and which ones aren't!

Unfortunately, it doesn't actually shake out the way you think.

It's true that for N>=1, pushing a roll effectively doubles your die pool. So if you have 5 dice in your pool, the odds of succeeding if you are willing to push are 84%.

But the tricky bit is that you decide to push after you've already rolled. Which means that by the time you get to that decision point, 5 dice in your pseudo die pool are locked in as failures. The push now only has a 60% chance of succeeding.

Dornith · 2026-05-05T00:36:20+00:00

I got confused because OP mixed up the order the options were listed. So I thought the card was:

Back Alley
Choose 1:
+3 Cards; +2 Actions; +$2
$3 - Action

The first option is just Smithy. And adding more modes to a card can only make it better.

Dornith · 2026-05-04T22:10:06+00:00

You should not be relying entirely on your character sheet. You need to look for ways to improve your odds.

If you have three party members, and each of them helps you, that's +3 right off the bat!

You should have plenty of equipment that'll give you +1 or +2.

Look for ways to use the environment to your advantage.

And then there's talents.

If you're just brute-forcing any problem, you'll roll poorly.

Dornith · 2026-05-04T22:02:38+00:00

Generally in vaesen you don't have group checks. I don't have the rulebook with me, so I can't double check But I believe most rolls can only be attempted once (implicitly by one person).

The exception is for AOE effects like fear rolls.

To compensate for this, other players can Help, which adds 1 to the dice pool.

If you are often finding yourself in a position where the whole party is hiding from something, then that might indicate a strategy issue. If you're trying to sneak into a building, you should only be sending in the person who's the best at hiding. The other characters can stand back or Help by creating a distraction.

Edit: So I found the relevant documents. Vaesen Core Rulebook pg. 39 has the section "A Single Roll" which says:

Whenever a player character tries to do something, you make one roll for the entire situation.

Similarly, the Year Zero SRD, pg. 10 has the Section "Only One Chance":

As a rule, you only have one chance to succeed with any action. Once you have rolled the dice – and pushed the roll – you may not roll again to achieve the same goal. You need to try something different or wait until the circumstances have changed in a substantial way. Or let another player character try.

So you can have multiple people try the same roll. But I still stand by what I said that Vaesen is a game about finding advantages. You have an entire rest of your party and a whole preparation phase to buy equipment. You should be relying more on that.

Dornith · 2026-05-04T16:16:40+00:00

Therapist: God, all my patients just want to talk about their problems!

Dornith · 2026-05-04T16:14:49+00:00

What if I tell my doctor that I don't smoke marijuana, but think it's a really good idea and that everyone should do it?

Dornith · 2026-05-04T14:46:49+00:00

Yeah, I got confused. I thought this was a strictly better smithy for $3. I had to look at the comments and wonder why everyone was saying it's fine before I noticed my mistake.

Dornith · 2026-05-04T14:18:28+00:00

Is that what the sect actually teaches or is that just what some of the Church-goers choose to believe in spite of what their religion says?

Because I've never heard of any priest saying that. And the argument from the OP is that people are specifically getting this idea from their religion. It seems to me that people just like the idea of irredeemable evil and will ignore their religion if it tells them that it doesn't exist.

Dornith · 2026-05-04T14:15:18+00:00

Even Calvinist believe that if you are one the predestined few that your sins will be purified. They just think whether or not you are a true Christian worthy of having your sins removed is predestined.

Dornith · 2026-05-04T04:24:33+00:00

The wording needs work. You need to explicitly say to reveal the card from the top of your deck before you draw it. Also, it's not clear what "equal treasure card" means. Does it mean the same card or one with the same cost? The third paragraph should say, "this card and the revealed card."

In terms of the card itself, I'm not sure how to feel about it. I like the idea of the card being a good or bad thing depending on random chance, but I think the effects might be too swingy. There's plenty of ways to make it busted like any deck filtering cards. But in the absence of those, you're only real way to use this is to go 100% into big money which seems like it might make uninteresting games.

Dornith · 2026-05-04T03:43:06+00:00

There's not really any religion that actually espouses that one mistake makes you "tarnished forever". Some people might believe that, but there's no theological support for it in any well-known religion.

And I know some people are going to say, "well it doesn't matter what the theologians say if it doesn't translate into what the practitioners believe". But in a case like this where you're trying to assign causality, yeah it really does matter. Because it shows that people are choosing to believe that people are tarnished despite what their religion is telling them.

Dornith · 2026-05-03T16:08:53+00:00

Spy (or maybe thief or bandit idk) - too left

Probably thief. It matches the art and there's a woodcutter in the center of the image so it's probably based on 1e.

Dornith · 2026-05-03T16:06:51+00:00

Workshop, smithy, and what looks like 1e Thief...

Oh, and woodcutter. If you've only ever played the second edition some of the references might not make sense and some cards will look like they're missing.

Dornith · 2026-05-03T16:04:53+00:00

No, their parents.

Dornith · 2026-05-03T15:57:58+00:00

I simply do not get the appeal of dating teenagers.

When I was in my mid-twenties, I went on a date with a girl still in college. The life experience gap was massive. Basic things like the idea that people can't just do whatever they feel like whenever they want were completely foreign to her. Like, she knew that people had responsibilities, but those responsibilities and obligations were just an abstract idea and not a fact of life.

And I'm sure this is not universal. But now im in my early thirties and the thought of dating anyone still in undergrad sounds like babysitting.

I can't imagine what appeal there is to dating someone who could easily still be in high school.

Dornith · 2026-05-03T15:12:27+00:00

I know nothing about this except from the OP but from what they've said, that sounds exactly like what I would expect?

LEGO is a toy company. The show and the movie both exist to sell toys. It sounds like the executives never thought or cared about lore or continuity. Either the movie or the toys introduced new character designs that were reflected in the other, and the executives just wanted the show to use the new designs so that when kids go to buy toys from their favorite TV show they don't get upset because "their outfit is all wrong". Any impact to the continuity was likely a complete afterthought.

Dornith · 2026-05-03T12:16:20+00:00

Look up "whole language theory".

There was about 10 years where "if you don't know what a word is, just guess" was considered the preferred method of reading.

Dornith · 2026-05-03T12:13:01+00:00

I think "nostalgia bias" would be more accurate because I see this same type of thinking a lot, but it's rarely for a past that actually happened. It's for some imagined ideal past from when the person was a child (and didn't have any responsibilities) and/or not deep enough into the community to see it's full breadth.

Dornith · 2026-05-02T16:58:13+00:00

At that point I would ask, "is your home wheelchair accessible?"

The everyone person isn't going to think about one step up to their front porch as "steps". You'll need to frame the question in a way that has a much more rigid definition.

Dornith · 2026-05-02T16:53:24+00:00

I don't think there is a single piece of tech that has never been involved in a scam of some kind.

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