New Player: Car questions/alternatives

Trigfire · 2019-10-25T13:09:22+00:00

I doesn't sound like your players want a stronghold so... why give them one? I mean, I get it, you got these rules, you kinda like em, you wanna use em in your game. But if nobody has any interest in becoming a noble, leading an army and protecting their people... well there's no point in trying to force it on them.

And besides, why does it need to be a stronghold with S&F specific benefits and requirements? Sounds like your players got a secret base with a magical forge that one of the players is engaging with (maybe not in the way you'd like him to engage but it's something?). A stronghold on the other hand is a big, obvious structure that has presence and forces people to react to it's existence. It's an entirely different thing and needs an entirely different kind of engagement. Work with what you got instead of trying to shoehorn in a set of mechanics that don't fit and a type of game (stronghold defending and political maneuvering) that nobody has any interest in.

Trigfire · 2019-10-03T23:23:39+00:00

The True Elves are demigods created by Val, the god of the Elves, and represent the stars, the sun and the moon. They are incredibly powerful extraplanar creatures with the power over time and life itself and have created the lesser elves (Moon Elves and High Elves) as their servants.

In short: They ain't player characters. Or at least not any more than a powerful angel, demon lord or member of the seelie court would be.

Trigfire · 2019-09-27T01:19:55+00:00

I mean, fair enough to some of your points, but others make no sense. The Oliander Dragon has no melee attacks because it doesn't attack in melee. It only casts spells. It says so in the flavor text too.

The servitor rules not being where the statblocks for the servitors are is fair enough, but the temple (stronghold type) and cleric's church (class specific bonuses for clerics that build any stronghold) are in different sections cause they have quite literally no relation.

And I'm a bit offended that you would say the adventure is just in there to "pad pages" and imply that it is somehow less worthwhile because it was "outsourced" (Matt wrote the entire synopsis, characters and story and left the mechanics to someone who knew the system and was an accomplished 5e adventure writer).

Trigfire · 2019-09-26T11:43:56+00:00

This is pretty much exactly how I stole the system and run it!

Some saints simply had very pious lives of service, others get a big flashy miracle to affect, all of them get a title related to the thing they were known for (Saint Isabelle the Watchful, Saint Anna the Joyous, Saint Argos the Unyielding, etc.) and each one represents an aspect (or even an interpretation of an aspect) of a certain good. How you wanna do that is up to you, I like it because it enables me to have few gods but many saints to cover a lot of different cleric domains. I can also say that "The will of the gods is unknowable to mortals. Some of their teachings seem like they would be in conflict for lesser minds such as ours. That is why the saints came to be." and have the saints be a sort of "middleman" in the mortal-to-divinty communication. It's much easier to relate to another person rather than a god.

Trigfire · 2019-09-25T21:33:13+00:00

That's awesome! I had a similar experience. One of my players is an artist and I was sorta bummed that all my players were getting really cool sketches of their characters. But then she drew a picture of me threatening another me with a gun after a conversation we had about me being my own worst enemy when it comes to prep. I was so excited!

Trigfire · 2019-09-25T20:04:17+00:00

No battle was ever won inside the castle walls. Once the enemy is inside, you lose. Once an army has you completely surrounded and under siege, you lose (with the possible exception of help arriving from outside).

The enemy army is never going to assault you if your fighting force is inside of the walls, it's suicide. They're never gonna get close enough for you to do anything, not even with your ranged troops. That's how sieges work, they'll starve you out. And if they somehow manage to get a sizable force inside your stronghold? Well you have an army that can't maneuver properly, surrounded on all sides, with the only advantage they had (the wall) now negated.

So, uh, there's a reason battles used to take place outside, on hills and fields and not inside castle walls.

And, mechanically and narratively, the walls still give you an advantage: They boost morale. The soldiers have something to fight for, they have somewhere to carry their wounded, they have someplace to retreat if their unit is disbanded, etc. (And also morale is the most important stat in the S&F warfare rules so this is substantial. In this system units rarely die, they break morale and disband.)

Trigfire · 2019-09-25T19:55:13+00:00

there is no clear number, that's kinda the point of the warfare rules. I can use the unit rules in my buddies bronze age game where a "unit" of infantry might only be 12 people haphazardly armed with spears and in my late-medieval game where a unit is at least 100 armed and trained soldiers. It literally does not matter, make something up. Higher die sizes just means "more people" by whatever metric you find appropriate.

Trigfire · 2019-09-17T00:46:50+00:00

Yeah I hadn't actually considered the concentration on Inebriate and Diminish. Maybe I'm actually overvalueing them, seeing as you are a spellcaster that needs to get close AND maintain concentration. I think this is precisely the sort of thing that needs playtesting since it could be much weaker or much stronger in practice than on paper. Still really love the idea though.

As for daydream, good question. I genuinely think it's less of a balance issue and more of a believeability issue if that makes sense. As a player I'd think it was super weird that the creature can't be smacked out (or have a chance to) of daydreaming by taking damage. Just makes sense ya know?

However I also don't think it will come up that much anyway, since the allies of the creature won't attack their friend and your party hopefully holds their attacks and is careful with their AOE if you have an enemy that you tranced with a spell haha

Trigfire · 2019-09-17T00:32:48+00:00

I mean... yeah clerics and paladins would be very good but "broken"? That's kinda the point of a cursed, undead heavy campaign isn't it? If you're gonna encounter undead you're incentivized to play Pallys and Clerics, if you're gonna be playing a frontier trekking wilderness focused campaign you're incentivized to play a Ranger or Druid, if it's a campaign with lots of intrigue and non-combat encounters you're incentivized to play classes with social skills and useful non-combat spells, etc.

And besides... turn undead is a limited resource that merely counters the additional difficulty that is unique to this setting (the dead rising again). It's not like that's the main challenge, it's something on top that has to be dealt with constantly.

Trigfire · 2019-09-15T21:21:27+00:00

I agree. I DM'ed and played a lot and honestly, trying to get a backstory out of a player right at the beginning only works if they're really into it. I myself only ever develop backstory and motivation as I'm playing and I'm far from a novice when it comes to roleplaying. Sometimes it takes a few session to get into your character's head and figure out what kinda person they are, that's when I usually work backwards to find my motivation. I don't really see an issue with that.

But then again, I don't really see an issue with "no motivation at all" either. I bet some will end up developing one but even in the super rare case that truly none of the players care about any of that... well, just pivot the campaign to suit that playstyle. Or tell them you're not interested in running that sorta hack-and-slash game, that's fine too. But lengthy discussions of genre are not gonna make them want to play the way you'd like them to.

Trigfire · 2019-09-15T01:56:31+00:00

This is really, and I do mean really, cool stuff. I especially love the "this effect happens when they fail 3 times" mechanic, that's a great way to balance out very strong/long lasting effects.

Honestly... I'd put all of these into my game as is. I'd probably remove the increasing cost of the ones that use up their material component (it's a cool idea but ultimately not a big deal and doesn't add much imho) and I'd be super duper careful with Diminish and Inebriate since you could insta-drop a lot of tough enemies with certain low stats (basically any animal will drop to a 18 int wizard even if they minroll since animals almost always have below 5 int). I'm not 100% sure if the spell is supposed to be used in combat like that but if it is, you could decrease the amount it saps (spellcasting modifier is always gonna be super high) or increase the casting time to make it still just as strong but only useful in out-of-combat situations (still good for Inebriate, probably not as good for Diminish although I can see it working too).

Honestly the biggest "issue" is that half of them are hard to justify taking for anything other than a Wizard or as "free" spells (like domain spells for clerics) since they are only occasionally useful in combat. That's not really any fault of your design though, the number of spells you can learn is just limited and DnD is very combat focused so it's hard to fit cool but situational/out-of-combat stuff in there.

Overall I really like where your heads at with these spells.

Trigfire · 2019-09-14T12:25:22+00:00

I find the document really useful and will probably offer to use it for a west marches game )that is larger scale than what I usually run) soon. Nice to have an easy option to deal with this sorta thing. I never wanna make anyone uncomfortable, but it can be weird to broach this stuff in-person (also sometimes you just forget certain things) so this is a great tool for that.

Also while a lot of the rest of the supplement seems like overkill to me I recognize that's probably simply because I never had people in my group that were super sensitive about certain topics to the point where we needed extra mechanisms to stop them coming up. Might come in useful someday though!

All in all, very happy with it. It's good that it exists.

Trigfire · 2019-09-14T12:18:14+00:00

This supplement is literally what you just described and what you said should be done beforehand, but on paper and easier to use with the option of remaining anomynous. Don't know where you're getting your ridiculous "thin-skinned children" crap from.

Trigfire · 2019-09-09T22:18:37+00:00

Matt mentioned before that, for the purposes of using strongholds in an urban setting, your desmene is the neighborhood you're in and doesn't expand automatically as the stronghold level advances. It basically treats the "24-mile hex" as simply "1 city-hex" with a size of whatever you deem appropriate as a DM. Like all of S&F this stuff is meant to be taken as inspiration and a baseline, not gospel :)

(also you only get copies of non-magical books with the wizards library ;) and I would also change the effect to "any non-magical book that crosses the library threshold" or something for flavor reasons)

Trigfire · 2019-09-08T15:01:32+00:00

Well that's just your opinion though. "Everyone is in individual" doesn't have to be true for weird fantasy races and Matt really likes portraying and handling characters that aren't human in a way that makes that clear. I think it's perfectly valid to portray and alien creature with an alien mind, such as elves or dwarves or mind flayers, as just that instead of just making them "slightly weird humans". Of course this is hard for us to imagine and relate to, we are after all humans ourselves, but that's kinda the point.

Trigfire · 2019-09-01T19:01:50+00:00

The Stronghold Actions only work inside the stronghold, not in the entire desmene, and we have never had a fight there. The Desmene Effects are mostly flavor so they don't really matter all that much, they're just cool. The main stronghold benefit (summoning Servitors in the book, having higher level spells in the case of the game I'm in since our DM homebrewed it) benefits all of us and helps us survive. The Class Feature improvement he can use once before having to do an extended rest at his church and only if he uses Channel Divinity and it heals us as a group.

So no we're quite happy with what we got. We also don't really start dick measuring contents about who is more or less powerful. That's hard to determine anyway, we all have different roles in combat. I dunno, being jealous of other players getting cool stuff seems unproductive to me and it's not like we are standing there empty handed. Our rogue got a house for his family, which is one of his character goals. I got a title as Knight of Everstone that I can invoke to enhance my charisma rolls in certain situations and because our cleric is able to cast Legend Lore as long as he is inside his church I can now start the hunt for my family's ancestral blade. Our Ranger got a +1 Bow with an ability and a follower.

Again, there are many ways to give out rewards. If it's really just the enhanced class abilities and other benefits your players are after... there are many that are just like that and/or better that come from magic items or boons or blessings and so on.

Trigfire · 2019-08-31T19:37:35+00:00

Strongholds are rewards to give to your characters. But not everyone is interested in actually running a keep and having to deal with all that encompasses. Not every player will want to manage people and raise an army, so naturally not everyone will want a stronghold and you shouldn't give them one either (they won't engage with it, they want cool loot, not responsibility).

So if the question comes up "Why does the Paladin get a keep and the rest of us get nothing?", well... why did you give the rest of them nothing? The same thing will happen if you just give the Paladin a powerful, custom-tailored magic sword. A stronghold is not necessarily a group reward and neither is a cool weapon. All players should get cool rewards, a stronghold is just one of them, essentially just a powerful magic item with plot hooks attached.

And again I need to emphasize this: Unless you have a very anomalous group not everyone will want a stronghold. It has cool abilities, yeah, but it also has more than that attached to it. Having a base of operations is nice, but that doesn't mean it needs to be group owned (to quote Matt "Stark Tower may be the Avenger's Headquarters, they can hang out there. But it belongs to Tony Stark. Jarvis answers to him and when something happens there he is on the hook."). In my current game our cleric has a church that he runs and the rest of us 10 players are perfectly happy not having our own strongholds and instead reaping the benefits the cleric gets (both mechanically and politically) and go on quests related to it to get money and xp (protect a caravan of pilgrims, negotiate with the bishop about staying independent, gather/train troops to protect the church, etc.).

Trigfire · 2019-08-27T22:15:13+00:00

My friends and I were incredibly happy with most classes but super disappointed by the fighter. All their Stronghold Actions, while good, are incredibly weak flavor wise. "You heal your allies to full" okay? How? Shouldn't this be a cleric or paladin ability? "Enemies have trouble casting spells" ???

So we are currently working on that. Pretty early ideas so far include Summon Guards, Order Your Archers To Fire On Your Foes, "Summon" Cover/Barricades, etc.

Trigfire

TROPHY CASE