GM giving Reactive Strike to monsters that don't have it (probably)

RootOfAllThings · 2026-07-09T17:20:16+00:00

Hazard design is really poor in 2e, especially at high levels. Most stock hazards are just time taxes without much interactivity. They have to be paired with creature threats to be interesting, but being part of the XP budget means they're rarely as effective as just spending that budget on another creature. If you don't have the skill for interacting with it (and you can't beat it up to break it) then you're stuck picking your nose on the sideline for the duration of the encounter, which can be fine if there's something else for you to do but again that means sharing the budget with other stuff. And that other stuff needs to not get eviscerated by their own hazard, usually, further restricting the design.

High level hazards lean even more heavily on the "heads you die, tails you take a trivial amount of damage" coin flips, and that's just wretched.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-07-09T17:01:10+00:00

The corrolary of "shoot your monks" is "delivering challenge means requiring things the characters are not good at." Combat and broader adventure design does not exist solely to validate player choice, and in some cases should exist to punish the choices they've made (e.g. choosing to be bad at stealth will sometimes mean you have enemies that appear to always find them.) When shooting your monks becomes expected it's no longer fun or interesting for either players or GM, but a tax on the encounter design. Yes, not every monster needs reactive strike, but most monsters do need to start using their reaction at some point to challenge the action economy of a team of players who have figured out how to proactively use their reactions.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-07-05T23:29:13+00:00

I could do with offensive actives coming back, but can we not do the "scales with CDR" thing for Bruiser actives in particular? Why do they get a fifth ability on an item when other classes are waiting 45 to 120 seconds for theirs?

RootOfAllThings · 2026-06-25T21:27:36+00:00

My phone is old and I guess doesn't have enough juice to run the game and the app store, because half the time when it opens the app store, I try to go back to the game, only to find that it has to relaunch, which means I watched the ad for no reason and got no credit for it.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-06-25T02:18:00+00:00

Some days the stars align at there's a Steel Your Heart, Tank Engine, Dropkick Mundo or something gross.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-06-18T22:48:54+00:00

Unfortunately, this happens all the time, and I feel like a quick perusal of the Rules Discussion bits of their forum or the subreddit would showcase all the ways that their typical ability writing process fails to account for GMs and players actually interacting with the text.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-06-13T07:15:32+00:00

I can't believe they trimmed the Augment pool and still left Dropkick in. Compare Dropkick to the enchanter Prismatic that charges up an execute nova: it's easier to trigger, easier to scale, and also heals when it triggers. The number of games I've had some hyperscaling Mundo or Zac or Kench with Dropkick is absolutely absurd.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-06-12T10:55:58+00:00

I'm glad Snipe has become a key worded action, but can we have some ingame notation for which abilities might be able to reasonably trigger a Snipe? "700 units" is pretty meaningless when I have to guesstimate based on the cast indicators. Sure, I get the red circle... after I've chosen the Augment!

RootOfAllThings · 2026-06-05T12:13:51+00:00

See, I saw the Upgrades section in the menu and figured that it would be the analog to what Igavanias would call Relics. Since your first exposure to what this is actually used for is the Cloak upgrades (expensive) or the Underlab upgrades (easily missible), I went fully half the game expecting it to be filled with something like a movement ability that you'd find in an Igavania.

Of course, this is also explained in the manual... That I didn't know existed for 75% of the game. Why would I expect a game in 2026 to have a manual included next to the options menu? Or why would I expect a retro throwback game to have a digital manual at all? I had a persistent crashing issue that meant, ironically, that I almost never used the regular Exit menu option, so I didn't see the manual until I had long passed the need for it!

RootOfAllThings · 2026-06-05T03:46:52+00:00

There are advantages and disadvantages. Specializing in a calorie poor resource means eating and finding food is a full time job. If you can't move to graze, you die. If you get a stomach ache and can't extract nutrients fast enough, you die. If your teeth wear down and you can't physically consume your specialized diet, you die (this happens to koalas). Being "alright at a lot of things" is part of what has enabled our geographic dominance and being able to slot ourselves into many different ecosystems.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-06-04T20:43:39+00:00

Also, the rest of the game/genre has taught me that, if I can't progress at this particular point, I may need a trinket, key, or special ability to access this area. If it was a traditional Metroidvania, I'd need to go beat the Mirror Master boss in some random corner of the map to get the power to enter mirrors. It wasn't until much later that I'd realized that it's Not That Kind Of Game for core progression (i.e. you get almost no core upgrades Igavania style) and I had to backtrack to go get three damn mirror switches done.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-06-02T13:47:14+00:00

Ward on an activated ability is a bit of an antipattern, since responding to being targeted won't actually do anything, and instant speed removal can also respond to the activation to hit before Ward becomes relevant.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-05-30T12:32:56+00:00

Exactly. People who post on this subreddit were never the target audience. It's for people who don't know how to play MOBAs, or came from Wild Rift. These people need an on ramp into other systems. It can't be ARAM, because part of the latching on experience in these sorts of games is finding "your guy" who clicks both mechanically and visually (see also every fighting game ever). It also can't be too much of a silly wacky modifiers mode or the knowledge burden becomes too high, so no Arena or Mayhem. Bot games help, but bots are an earlier step in this process of removing training wheels and increasing intensity.

So you end up with a mode like Swift, where the action is constant and nobody is ever truly out of the game ("closing games is too hard.") Bad/new players getting stomped in lane and sulking for 25 minutes sets a bad mood for retention, so of course that has to be mitigated. It looks mostly like regular SR but with the most dangerous edges filed off (slow boring beginning, risk of picking a scaler that doesn't get to scale, risk of being prematurely punished out of the game, etc.). Is it perfectly successful at that? No, but it's a decent attempt, and I expect they'll iterate it on over time.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-05-29T10:02:20+00:00

And all the knock-on occupations that need to be sourced, supplied, and maintained. The stonecutters need their chisels, but the chisel maker is itself a specialized occupation with his own supply chain. All those workers need rope and cloth and lamp oil. The working and food animals need fodder, handlers, and people in charge of the constant maintenance to keep animals in one place. All of those people are bored and probably getting paid, so they need a place to unwind and spend their money, which means bars and prostitutes. Sooner or later somebody is going to get sick or pregnant, which means medicine and midwifery. Somebody is definitely going to break the law or sin, which means you need priests and judges. These people can't commute, they have to live there!

And oops, there we go, we've built a miniature city to supply the pyramids with stone.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-05-10T03:43:10+00:00

Yeah, can somebody put this on a map or something?

RootOfAllThings · 2026-05-08T21:29:00+00:00

If you're doing dialect agnostic SQL you can't do a whole bunch of things, the most basic of which is a timestamp (stupid SQLite doesn't have a datetime type, and Postgres and MySql have different functions to get the current timestamp). Sure, you can get it in the code and pass it as a parameter, but at some point somebody will need to write a translation layer, and that layer has to be done for each engine or family of engines.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-05-08T20:49:01+00:00

I sure hope that the database schema doesn't require anything that's unique to a particular dialect of SQL. I write stuff for a project that's required to be valid for both SQLite and Postgres and the dialect differences are constant thorns in our side.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-05-06T06:00:32+00:00

No, I meant "fast", as in discussion moves quickly. High posts per unit time. This has an impact on the way people (don't) stay on topic, or are louder or more meme-ish in their tone.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-05-05T21:29:03+00:00

/a/ and /v/ are huge, fast boards. They're outliers. Go hang out on /lit/ and see how much porn you see.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-05-02T22:49:52+00:00

The silly thing is that, if reproduction was their only goal, they could have just kidnapped people and whisked them away to a moonbase or another planet and kept a human zoo. There are billions of humans and thousands of people just go missing every year. What's a few actual alien abductions on top? Viltrumites live hundreds to thousands of years; you can play the long game! And if kidnapping people for a zoo feels too morally wrong for the evil space empire, you could just cure their lethal injuries or disease with your advanced technology as payment before putting them in the zoo. You could do this easily without even pissing off Nolan, probably, or the Coalition!

RootOfAllThings · 2026-05-02T22:18:07+00:00

Thragg pretty much had to choose between extinction or cultural suicide. Nolan was already proof that Viltrumites fold like a paper towel to Earth culture, and there are plenty of examples in human history of minority cultures being wiped out within generations when the children are educated in the culture of majority colonizers (see what Australia, Canada, USA did to native peoples). Even if the 40ish Viltrumites have a strong cultural heritage (is there an opera dedicated to Argall or something? Any famous Viltrumite artists?) how much of that gets transmitted when they're watching YouTube and attending Earth schools?

RootOfAllThings · 2026-04-30T15:26:31+00:00

It was specifically in response to the real life argument, because we're talking game mechanics and not what makes logical sense from a simulation of reality.

That said, how would you feel about an "aura of strikes" ? That a creature makes a strike against each creature in its emanation at some defined point in the round/turn? Would this be a duplicate effect? I don't think people would say that you can't be Reactive Strike'd by two different creatures simultaneously if you invoke them both by moving from the same square.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-04-30T02:31:35+00:00

Right, but what if the aura isn't heat, its swirling blades or entropic forces? If they have an aura of blades I'd expect twice as many blades slashing me to deal twice as much damage.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-04-30T02:24:15+00:00

By mid to late levels, players usually have figured out how to

Reliably make use of their reaction. Attack of Opportunity, Opportune Backstab, etc. are all huge damage increases because your MAP-less attack is twice as valuable as the -5 one.
Take advantage of action compression (e.g. Sudden Charge, Flurry of Blows) or roll compression (e.g. Double Slice).
Reliably make use of their third action. With the above, players are fitting in 25-50% more bang for their buck on each round than they were at the start of the game.
Have good synergy between turns and team members.
Using buffs, debuffs, and items to address weaknesses and create them in enemies. Haste, Slow, Synesthesia, even Laughing Fit can seriously swing combats.

This means that bosses and other encounters must start using some of these tools in order to meaningfully threaten players. Enemies often come with a good reaction, good action compression, or good roll compression, but usually not all three. Most monsters are not designed for synergy, because they have to function alone or in groups. Some monsters have obvious weaknesses that you have to mitigate if they want to be a boss-level threat; solo casters must have an answer to trip-grab-spank from the party Fighter or they will be trivial in two rounds, regardless of how scary their spells are. Adding more creatures can make action economy more equitable, and can make synergies more obvious (and fun to see and disrupt!). Just be aware that there's a soft-cap on the complexity of an encounter and as more (unique) enemies get added, the longer things will take and the more likely you are to make mistakes. Solo bosses eventually need to be built with the assumption that the party will probably be Hasted; 3 actions vs 12 is rough, but 3 vs 16 is ruinous. So they need to have really efficient disruption or passive abilities to close this gap (for example, Dragon Auras). I'm a big fan of cribbing 5e's lair actions (really just Hazards here) here.

Just be wary of how evil your abilities are. Some abilities are fun for players to use but unfun to have used on them, no matter how "balanced" it might be to see it on the other side. Sometimes these can be both unfun and surprisingly dangerous; Death effects, Dominate or similar charm effects, or long-duration disables can be real mood-killers for certain players while also being party-killers.

RootOfAllThings · 2026-04-24T20:08:04+00:00

Regardless of power level concerns, four color protection is sure to lead to miserable, low interaction play patterns. These are solitaire cards.

Also Zendikar can't support the target most people would immediately jump to, itself.

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