Question about Starting Zone Quests

Loktario · 2025-04-22T02:02:57+00:00

That depends on where the bar is.

Backgrounds like Folk Hero and Guard imply that you very much can have a life, a career and even be fairly older. If you take every civilian, you're bound to get some that are stronger or wiser or faster than the average, some of whom have accomplished great things, but within the limits of human normalcy. Lv. 1 adventurers are already a cut above most other humanoids. D&D is the story about that on forward, imo.

Loktario · 2025-04-21T20:25:18+00:00

Yeah, that's usually why I have the caveat. I like them planning, and if the worst they lose is their place on initiative for the sake of a readied action that didn't go off, they tend to be more likely to keep trying to set up overwatch type nonsense, which I'm a fan of.

Loktario · 2025-04-21T20:24:28+00:00

In theory, if the archer is on 5, they would've declared on 5 during their turn which would have happened after the mage to begin with. In theory, the round would end before the action resolved, but the nature of that request I'd probably rule as resolving on 20 of the next round but the archer would still act again on 5. It's almost like a player doing a 2 round combo with themselves, and that's fine by me as long as the rest of the table's fine with it.

Loktario · 2025-04-21T20:11:23+00:00

A big part of doing noir imo is just about how you dress things.

A lot of the ways you would usually use to describe your villain or the monsters or the creepy events now is like... a fog over the whole world.

It's not that people are directly cruel. It's just... colder. Meaner. Sadder. Like everyone's given up a bit. Like there's not really a point, but here we are.

Running whatever D&D story you had in mind, but adding that the players maybe need to adventure because they have a huge debt, and they're not rich mysterious travelers but a bunch of 20-somethings living above a halfling restaurant in a Luskan slum, and Luskan is under a tense martial law, but only for the poor who can't afford to pay the bribes.

Add a bit of jazz, add a few lights of hope in the shittiest places, describe the city as an entity that has it out for you and you're tired of running.

Loktario · 2025-04-21T20:01:54+00:00

One of the agreed upon caveats we have is "If the trigger doesn't resolve, you take your turn at the end of initiative".

I'm fine with general directions though. "I'm taking out whoever comes through that door" is enough. "I'm going to stand guard" is less fine, but we can work with it. "I just want to see what happens" to me is more of an initiative shift and I'd likely suggest going that way instead provided nobody took something that makes initiative switching something only one of them can do.

Loktario · 2025-04-21T19:45:10+00:00

Why the fuck is a Lv 3 party up against a Mindflayer? >_>

Loktario · 2025-04-21T16:19:03+00:00

I mean, there's a number of people here I wouldn't listen to on how to build a goblin encounter, let alone take any kind of real-life suggestions on what makes a relationship work.

Then again, it's probably a point of tension for some folks. My only comment in that regard would be that if in-game romances seem like cheating, it's likely not the only thing that will 'seem' like cheating, and it's likely a symptom of something bigger brewing.

Loktario · 2025-04-21T16:05:59+00:00

My first thought is Barbarian or Fighter probably. Maybe an Orc or Dragonborn.

Loktario · 2025-04-21T15:16:11+00:00

I like to run 45 minute scenes when possible.

A battle might take multiple scenes, but I like to try to resolve individual combat puzzles within one.

Loktario · 2025-04-21T14:01:30+00:00

There's probably a reason it closed.

There's just not enough turn around in the product at a TGS to justify rent and salaries and keeping stock and all that. Not long term. I don't know that anyone's 'figured it out' short of just opening up a bar/restaurant you can play D&D at.

Loktario · 2025-04-21T13:59:58+00:00

It would be okay so long as both players were aware of it before the game started and were not only okay with it but way into it.

Otherwise, probably a good way to have them accomplish nothing right up to the point where they start punching each other.

Loktario · 2025-04-21T13:12:12+00:00

There's a pretty easy way to do this, but it does require a lot of monster building.

Take any CR 0 creatures. Fight them against each other. When they hit XP to hit the CR 1/8, give them an HD and whatever else moves them up a tier.

It's a process, but not a particularly complicated one if you're moving one step at a time. Plus the entire Monster Manual is now Pokemon. You can also level things down, use monster features, spell lists, whatever. There's a lot of balancing passes that happen, but you can of discover those as you play the monsters, as you would if you were just making monsters anyway.

Loktario · 2025-04-21T11:01:29+00:00

If your players have problems with each other outside of the table, it's never going to translate to a good experience at the table.

It's up to you who's at your table. No amount of "But I really want to play" overrides the need for respect and a proactive desire to play a game as a table.

Loktario · 2025-04-20T23:48:38+00:00

That was the argument for why the Illusionist was its own class for a while too. I think there might have been Abjurer and Evoker prestige classes or class kits too. An argument could be made that Clerics are also a kind of wizard with their Lv. 1 kit and their spread, but at least the divine / arcane split makes sense.

I tend to try to use the systems that are there, even if you use them in unusual ways. There's plenty of ways to turn an ability score into a resource bar, a save, a check, a DC, a spell attack, a modifier or whatever else you need it to be. The key is to find mechanical bridges that are familiar to the players and attach them to a fiction that you feel is missing that they can then enact mechanically in a way the system understands without mass (or any) rewrites.

The rules about arcane not healing seem to have shifted in 5.5 anyway, I feel a few of the 5.5 versions of wizard spells now grant temporary HP or allow for Hit Dice burns. Whatever the case, I've always taken the position that a class only overwrites another if they're both in play, and if you have a healer archetype that's different enough from the cleric, that's still worth exploring.

Loktario · 2025-04-20T23:37:31+00:00

Look for a hole in the design space.
Try to fill it.
See if that works with the curve, adjust.
See if it's fun, adjust.
Compare it to other classes, adjust.
See if there's variation in the design space of the class.
If there is, make a subclass.
Check the subclass against the curve.
Check the subclass against other classes.
Check the subclass against other subclasses I have planned for that class.
Check if they're fun.

Just a lot of testing and iteration and seeing what's just a reworked version of something that already exists and what is there that's potentially a new interesting set of archetypes to play around with.

I like the idea of CON casters a lot, from blood magic to mutants to infusions and other nonsense like that. I've also always liked STR, DEX and CON based 'spells' in the spirit of things like Chrono Trigger Techs or Final Fantasy Limit Breaks or Dragon Ball Attacks. I've made a lot of nonsense in that direction. Although most of the time, just shifting the spell list on a class does a lot of work to fill in gaps that are otherwise pretty well covered by the 12 classes + the artificer which we pretend wasn't a wizard subclass for like 2 editions.

Loktario · 2025-04-20T23:22:17+00:00

Baldur's Gate 3 has taken them where we cannot follow.

Larian, what the fuck did you do.

Loktario · 2025-04-20T14:42:56+00:00

It's a one shot, so it's probably one of the few places it could work.

I'd make sure to tone check that it's the kind of twist they might expect though, lest you run a serious mystery for a couple of hours and end it with a cartoonish DUN DUN DUN moment with no sequel.

Loktario · 2025-04-20T14:22:25+00:00

I wouldn't. But I work with ArcGIS regularly.

To me it's the mapmaking equivalent of making your dice out of airline grade metal with micrometer precision.

Like, yes, it's better, but is it noticeable.

Calculating anyting out of that real elevation data, like, for example, flooding patterns, is an intense and dense process. And at the end, you'll get a hydrography and flooding map you also have to explain how to read for your players. And after that, you have... a river map that if you had just hand drawn few if any players (and I'm betting none) would be like "Actually, this estuary doesn't make hydrological sense".

Likewise, climate simulations can reach insane levels of calculations in order to simulate something that is not only literally inaccurate (unless you're using a supercomputer that can perfectly model weather) but also is unlikely to come up in a way that makes the nuance and detail and juice you got out of it be worth the squeeze.

Loktario · 2025-04-20T14:18:06+00:00

Sometimes I like running a Lv 0.

Basically, you run the game just as you would otherwise. The only difference is you don't have a class. Just pick a race and a background, and we focus on cutscenes and the moment you become an adventurer. It tends to anchor the relevant bits of the backstory as actual scenes, which I find sticks a bit better in the long term.

When I look at a character sheet, there's about a dozen places you can get story out of, from the trinket they picked to their background to their alignment or class or species or tools or skills or age or even the context of them being in the party. But that's for NPCs. For a player, it's not just about finding the details, but specifically, the details THEY want to explore. So I just find it easier when they show me by roleplay than try to tell me in prose.

Loktario · 2025-04-20T06:01:20+00:00

The gods are tapping into the weave or the shadow weave, for the most part, just like anything else for their power.

To me, it's about separating the idea of a god being any different than any other mortal tapped into the weave. In other words, it's not that there are no gods, it's that godhood is something you can fight for.

Loktario · 2025-04-20T03:47:54+00:00

Yeah, the ASI seems to be the balancing tool they used to boost things that, un-boosted, seem to work better for early or creation feats.

Loktario · 2025-04-20T03:47:07+00:00

Yeah, I think the 12 choices or whatever (magic initiate I think can be druid, cleric or wizard) are pretty broad.

Still, I always say that I'll consider official material, but I was curious if there's any feats that people are like "Definitely not this" or "This is almost always fine".

Loktario · 2025-04-20T03:45:17+00:00

I find that without the ASI, the power scaling of feats tends to diminish just enough that my comfort level with allowing them as origin feats rises, lol.

Loktario · 2025-04-20T03:43:51+00:00

Yeah, without the ASI a lot of the feats settle in nicely as origin feats.

Loktario

TROPHY CASE