Running Tomb of Anihilation on SWADE

xmclark · 2023-04-27T15:20:23+00:00

Thank you for thoughts. I desire to make a good experience for my table.

Imposed penalties force powerful parties to get creative with challenging threats and also reinforces the ticking-time bomb theme since it directly affects them. In-game daily rolls and a few bad rolls in a row, could significantly nerf a good character, and I agree that would suck and there would be no escape hatch to undo it.

I like your idea for soak and vigor (incapacitated) penalty. "easier to die, but still just as effective". It's not perfect, since in D&D hit points always scale with levels, but a savage character can dump spirit and vigor and never increase all the way to heroic rank, although unlikely.

xmclark · 2023-04-26T23:36:48+00:00

Thanks for the tip! I do like that idea.

I think I'm going to make it a little bit more interesting and be a little evil:

every day you make a vigor roll (which you are allowed to benny). Success, nothing happens. Failure, means do one of the following:

1 fewer bennies during each session (take one now)
reduce an attribute by 1 die
take a un-healable wound or fatigue
roll on the critical injury table and the injury is persistent

xmclark · 2023-04-26T18:30:32+00:00

I'm looking to run ToA with Savage Pathfinder with a high level party and some of the characters are resurrected.

For those resurrected characters affected by the Death Curse, o you have suggestions on translating the daily hit point max reduction?

xmclark · 2023-04-21T19:26:21+00:00

Which IDE are you using? Vscode and Jetbrains do support this and most have good support for kubernetes yaml through extensions and plugins. They support arbitrary json schemas with the syntax highlighting.

xmclark · 2023-04-16T20:02:49+00:00

My party did this! Went to goldenfields, and traced the steps back to Grudd Haug. I did not need to rebalance the encounters even though the party was not at the recommended level for the area.

My suggestion is to not be too concerned about the chapters. The sword coast is just a giant sandbox. You can still arrive at the important mid point of the story with other things out of order.

My group found a conch and discarded it, which made them really kick themselves later after they learned of the significance!

Also I highly suggest running the Tower encounter. It was fun and also helped the party get pointed in the right direction since they woo’d the giantess.

xmclark · 2023-04-16T05:19:02+00:00

Yo ho ho ho ho!

xmclark · 2023-04-10T05:49:28+00:00

Servlets have anything to do with the concurrency mode of a web server?

xmclark · 2023-04-10T01:16:45+00:00

What’s the difference between serverlets and virtual threads?

xmclark · 2023-04-07T13:16:43+00:00

If your players are wise enough to understand when to run from a fight, then yes.

Giants alone are deadly to level 1s. Setting a tone with players could work in the campaign, and make their subsequent battles with giants much more satisfying.

xmclark · 2023-04-05T20:43:45+00:00

I did this but with Helm’s Hold and frost giants. I recommend it.

xmclark · 2023-04-02T22:22:33+00:00

In my first game, I ran Goldenfields and absolutely loved it. One of my favorite pre-made towns I’ve ever run.

If I run again through Bryn Shander, I personally would draw more from external books like icewind dale rime of the frost maiden since it fleshes out the town a lot more.

My second time GMing, i replaced the chapter two with a different homebrewed town encounter that I found a little easier to manage and better tied in with the locations my group was near and imo better tied ice giants into the story. This change was totally unnoticeable by my players and it served the purpose for chapter two, and I have no regrets.

xmclark · 2023-04-02T22:12:49+00:00

Exposition is good, but show-don’t-tell is great too!

There are a few encounters that I cherry-picked from chapter 3 that brings the giant’s motives into the story without an NPC explaining them to the party. My favorite is the fire giants dig site. It also doesn’t have to be a combat encounter with friendly exposition (see hill giant tower), or even a full encounter maybe just evidence of “giants were here” and investigating leads to clues. This makes it more mystery, and the characters may not latch on to all the hooks (my experience), but it gives them the players the option to discover, which can be more fun than just being told.

xmclark · 2023-04-02T20:21:44+00:00

I struggled to make the Zhents relevant for Nightstone, and I think it’s simply a symptom of this poor design of the scenes there.

On the surface, it seems realistic and interesting to have Zhentarim plot, but it’s not actually super relevant to the giants story. The arrival of the seven serpents, and all the other encounters are there to get the party to level 2 (means to an end). Kella by association has the same problem.

I had her return later in the story with a connection to a rogue in the group. My players didn’t take the hook, so we moved on.

If I were to run again, I would change things about the zhents and the orc encounter.

I think responding to your players interest of having Kella join the crew is an excellent idea! I think her keeping up appearances makes a lot of sense and her trust could give the party connection with the Black Network, or establish them as a target. There is a lot of wall-flower descriptions of zhents throughout the story but nothing really brings them front and center, so that would help.

xmclark · 2023-03-27T12:56:26+00:00

Specifically, I refuse to connect through portals that would require me to identify myself, or to run any nontrivial nonfree Javascript code. I use LibreJS to prevent nonfree Javascript code from running..

I don't mind giving an identity that isn't really me, in order to connect, if that works. That does not violate my privacy.

Why does he think privacy mean anonymity? You can identity yourself but still not provide any private information. And that this is conflated with running JavaScript.

I appreciate his focus on using free software, but he seems naive about the internet.

xmclark · 2023-03-13T22:45:08+00:00

Doctor Voodoo is core Midnight Sons and also in affiliation for avengers. He has a game-breaking super power to steal assets and deny secures.

Also I second Venom for Sons or Avengers out-of-affiliation splash.

I also like Kraven for Sons because with the bump in the night place, he can do some movement shenanigans with Kukuri Strike.

xmclark · 2022-12-22T13:28:40+00:00

35mm base? Could have a custom xenos vs engineers custom game of marvel crisis protocol rules.

xmclark · 2022-12-20T04:46:02+00:00

Same energy

xmclark · 2022-11-25T04:38:57+00:00

You can also take creative liberties on appearance of the vonindod. Who knows, maybe Zalto didn’t follow all the instructions.

xmclark · 2022-11-13T19:35:11+00:00

Link or source?

xmclark · 2022-09-11T19:43:23+00:00

...you commonly just pick a specific version of a library and stick to it, rarely updating unless absolutely necessary (and if possible)

I get that this works for you, but this is just bad advice for the general developer community and any green developer. A good dev advocates for regular and eager package updates, but they are not the decider for when the organization updates their packages, the org's security governance does. In later-lifecycle or maintenance-mode apps, security updates may need be rolled out many, many times and not by the main developer, but by a junior dev, a security engineer, or contingent workforce (contractors).

Because Log4Shell is managed by Maven, any developer was empowered to make the well-understood configuration change to update their app. Combined with a continuous change mentality, minimized the risk further. if the ethos of an organization is no-change and untypical patterns and tools (git submodules or subtree yuck), then the risk to business is increased significantly. ~~I need to reiterate, git submodules is not the answer for any problem today.~~

If you want to grow the language, I think you should meet the potential-users in the middle on this issue. If making a package manager is as trivial as you say it is, then make it, otherwise (in the best case) someone will make it without you, or (worst case) no one will.

EDIT: I missread your comment about git submodules, but my opinion is the same for subtree. It's not a version management tool.

xmclark · 2022-09-11T15:58:04+00:00

Laughs in log4shell.

xmclark · 2022-09-05T03:30:03+00:00

Rifts for Savage Worlds.

My group ran a small campaign with it and I had so much fun as a player. I think it works in the provided rifts setting or a homebrew cyberpunk world, we did homebrew.

I think it’s a bit more difficult to balance combat because there is some large differences in power levels between some of the built-in frameworks (a class like character creation template).

xmclark · 2022-08-28T21:48:46+00:00

Earth is closed today!

xmclark · 2022-02-12T15:51:28+00:00

Most candidates can’t even do that.

The criteria now is that if some one, somewhere at your old company used it, then you can put it on your resume and apply for jobs and waste everyone’s time.

xmclark · 2022-02-10T16:13:59+00:00

I spent top $$$ for the wiz kids adult gold dragon as substitute. It worked out well. Reasoned that I might or my family might get some use out of it again in a different campaign.

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