Annoying Game Questions You Want Answered

[Mask_De_H]

Because balance is a type of beverage to some people, and balancing to Rogue/Wizard on the SGT looks overpowered to those used to Fighter/Monk balance.

Also, because the reputation of the Tome stuff is pure power up.

[Judging__Eagle]

Oh god. The internet. It's full of snowflakes.

In this specific case, it was a Discord server were mainstream ttrpgs like Pathfinder, 4e and 5e are considered "acceptable" systems. If not the norm.

The very concept of the Same Game Test is beyond them.

[tussock]

Well, if they want to know if Tome stuff is balanced alongside Pathfinder, it's not, and if they're saying it's much stronger than most Pathfinder classes, it totally is.

If they insist that the acceptable systems are the commercial ones every plays, well, sadly, that is how that works.

It's not snowflakes, they just all agree to sandbag with Wizards and Clerics, and have the DM be nice with the monsters, so that the game works as written. People that want to play Tome are the ... snowflakes.

[Kaelik]

Well, if they want to know if Tome stuff is balanced alongside Pathfinder, it's not, and if they're saying it's much stronger than most Pathfinder classes, it totally is.

If they insist that the acceptable systems are the commercial ones every plays, well, sadly, that is how that works.

It's not snowflakes, they just all agree to sandbag with Wizards and Clerics, and have the DM be nice with the monsters, so that the game works as written. People that want to play Tome are the ... snowflakes.

Snowflake doesn't mean "in the minority" you idiot.

It means fragile can't handle things, usually criticism.

If the Pathfinder people are having to play the monsters like chumps, then that's evidence that they are in fact more snowflake than Tome.

[tussock]

Hmm, apparently I've merged a couple memes that don't go together.

Anyway, I probably had a point.

Something about how people think of rules fixes as things to make it easier to play the way they're already playing, not to change the way they're playing to better fit the rules.

[Koumei]

Anyway, I probably had a point.

I very much doubt that.

[Ice9]

Well, if they want to know if Tome stuff is balanced alongside Pathfinder, it's not, and if they're saying it's much stronger than most Pathfinder classes, it totally is.

This is true though. I like the Tome stuff, but you can't just toss (most of) it in, you really need to go all-Tome. Or have a table of mostly optimizers who can pick the stuff that fits together.

Sure, casters can keep up fine - if they're played to anything near their potential. Most aren't, IME. If you've got a Wizard happily tossing around non-metamagic Fireballs, they're going to look like a pile of garbage compared to the Tome guy just like the non-Tome martials are.

[Judging__Eagle]

I like the Tome stuff, but you can't just toss (most of) it in, you really need to go all-Tome. Or have a table of mostly optimizers who can pick the stuff that fits together.

Yeah, I think the real issue was that the people I was talking with didn't understand that [Tome] content is a replacement for .... about 90% of everything WoTC published for 3.0 & 3.5. Possibly closer to about 95-99%.

They kept seeming to form the impression that it was tacked-on homebrew stuff. Instead of a system replacement/re-write.

[Mord]

Yeah, I think the real issue was that the people I was talking with didn't understand that [Tome] content is a replacement for .... about 90% of everything WoTC published for 3.0 & 3.5. Possibly closer to about 95-99%.

I think that's a vast overestimation of how comprehensive the Tomes really are. Indeed, it's their patchy coverage that has resulted in the profusion of apocrypha from other authors, such as Red Rob's item stuff and Kaelik's errata, that have been recognized as semi-canonical.

[Mask_De_H]

Yeah, I think the real issue was that the people I was talking with didn't understand that [Tome] content is a replacement for .... about 90% of everything WoTC published for 3.0 & 3.5. Possibly closer to about 95-99%.

I think that's a vast overestimation of how comprehensive the Tomes really are. Indeed, it's their patchy coverage that has resulted in the profusion of apocrypha from other authors, such as Red Rob's item stuff and Kaelik's errata, that have been recognized as semi-canonical.

Kaelik's errata mostly involves a sevond pass at RR's item rules and metamagic, which were never finished by Frank and K, but existed. The Tome of Tiamat monster classes never got done, and the usage for planar/post Wish currencies I think are still incomplete, but the Tome stuff acts to replace most everything player-side anyway.

[CapnTthePirateG]

It's not snowflakes, they just all agree to sandbag with Wizards and Clerics.

Sandbagging implies you know what you're doing and are holding back the good stuff until the DM busts out something the party can't normally handle. A fighter is going to outshine a cleric who prepares 100% cure spells, and a wizard is going to feel like a badass burning through spell slots with evocation if there's a Weapon Focus: Longsword fighter for comparison.

Quite frankly, it's very hard to blame the average player for not showing up with system mastery because there are hundreds of pages of rules that interact in unexpected ways and most people don't find character generation fun. Hell, the actual published books give terrible advice (Complete Mage, anyone?), and the D&D community has enough unpublished rules, gentleman's agreements, and mind caulk to give the British Constitution a run for its money. Hell, there is an active culture which will gladly explain to you why following the rules is bad, and an equally active culture which will scorn you for actually learning the rules and making a competent character (because powergaming is bad for...reasons).

We should not be surprised that videogames are killing this hobby.

[Kaelik]

Kaelik's errata mostly involves a sevond pass at RR's item rules and metamagic, which were never finished by Frank and K, but existed. The Tome of Tiamat monster classes never got done, and the usage for planar/post Wish currencies I think are still incomplete, but the Tome stuff acts to replace most everything player-side anyway.

Mine was first .

Rob's is mostly better.

Probably the most meaningful part of my Errata in terms of things people should use all the time are Alpha Nerd's metamagic, which I stole, and my knowledge rules.

Also the duration, which I also stole, are sort of attached to alpha metamagic, but are also incomplete.

For me F&F heartbreaker, where I'm writing all the effects from scratch, I am adhereing to a slightly different standard, but converting that into D&D the problem with my current durations system is solely in the round per level effects.

So buffs that last 1 round per level should last 2 minutes.

Battlefield control should last either 2 or 1 minutes.

But debuffs on enemies, should probably last something like 1dx+Y rounds.

2 minutes is kind of too long for a glitterdust blind, or a whatever effect like that, Obviously, as I write from scratch, I can write a separate duration for each effect as appropriate, but something like 1d6+2 for glitterdust would be okay, but like, something shitty like a sickened effect could just last two minutes and that would be fine.

[OgreBattle]

How does one go about making magic feel dangerous and come at a price? Other than being physically damaging/tiring like Shadowrun.

I've been rereading Assymetric Threat's "stress" system and temporarily losing control of your character to do a predetermined thing seems like the way to go, I think World of Darkness also has you go berserk right?

[deaddmwalking]

How does one go about making magic feel dangerous and come at a price? Other than being physically damaging/tiring like Shadowrun.

Are you sure this is something you even want to do? With narrative fiction, it's easy to make it sound dangerous but only when dramatically necessary does it pop-up. If you intend to give a power to the players, do you really want to take their character away for using it? If it is too dangerous, are they even going to use it?

In general, 'power with consequences' isn't a great limitation when a player has the option of creating a new character to avoid those consequences. This is particularly true with accrual mechanics like 'taint' where you can make a new character with zero taint, even if normally a 'played' character couldn't reach that level without accumulating a fair bit.

[virgil]

How does one go about making magic feel dangerous and come at a price? Other than being physically damaging/tiring like Shadowrun.

I'm with deaddmwalking on this. I think if you really want to push that narrative within the setting itself, make it something that happens to NPCs, and build plots around those consequences. Juicers in Rifts have severe consequences for their power, but it means jack on the timescale of a campaign.

[angelfromanotherpin]

As far as danger goes, you want casting to lead to unpredictable but manageable badness. Unpredictable, so they can't reliably negate the consequences ahead of time; manageable, so they can make decisions about how much risk to take, and also so that the consequences aren't just 'game over: y/n?'

SR is a decent model, although I prefer semirandom 'unintended spell consequences' and/or 'curse effects on the caster' to fairly dull straight damage.

[Harshax]

I've been playing Darkest Dungeon a lot recently. The Occultist has a healing ability that has some unpredictable results, mostly related to its effectiveness:

• No effect.
  Average healing.
  Tremendous healing.

Each result above also comes with the possibly that the target will bleed, taking damage for a few rounds.

Granted, making someone bleed when trying to heal them is in the dangerous and deadly category of magic effects. But, the non-lethal effect is that the spell isn't as spectacular as one could hope. This is on par with rolling a great hit and shitty damage in melee. Spells working like damage rolls isn't too far a departure from consistent Vancian magic when compared to the bullshit chaos magic rules presented in alternative magic systems. You could even grant critical casting rolls two rolls for potency, choosing the better result. The downside is that spell descriptions, which already take up way to much space in every Player's Handbook could get even bigger. Potentially being DCC level of unwieldy.

[Username17]

How does one go about making magic feel dangerous and come at a price?

In RPG terms, things are dangerous when the outcome is uncertain, generally governed by die rolls. Things come at a price tautologically when there is a cost to use them. So magic is dangerous and comes at a price if the cost to use your abilities is randomized and might be more than average.

That's it.

-Username17

[OgreBattle]

I've been playing Darkest Dungeon a lot recently. The Occultist has a healing ability that has some unpredictable results, mostly related to its effectiveness:

• No effect.
  Average healing.
  Tremendous healing.

Each result above also comes with the possibly that the target will bleed, taking damage for a few rounds.

Granted, making someone bleed when trying to heal them is in the dangerous and deadly category of magic effects. But, the non-lethal effect is that the spell isn't as spectacular as one could hope. This is on par with rolling a great hit and shitty damage in melee. Spells working like damage rolls isn't too far a departure from consistent Vancian magic when compared to the bullshit chaos magic rules presented in alternative magic systems. You could even grant critical casting rolls two rolls for potency, choosing the better result. The downside is that spell descriptions, which already take up way to much space in every Player's Handbook could get even bigger. Potentially being DCC level of unwieldy.

Darkest Dungeon also has different preferences for relieving stress, like confession, flagellation, hard drinkin, and so on. Having to roll a sv vs vice in downtime or some smallish amount of gold is spent is what the Conan RPG does.

[Dogbert]

How does one go about making magic feel dangerous and come at a price? Other than being physically damaging/tiring like Shadowrun.

Start by removing half the SQ and spell abilities in about 80% of the Monster Manual, because if you want to make magic punitive and prohibitory so only your NPCs use magic, then you'll also have to downgrade all antagonists so CRs and ELs still hold (also, so your party doesn't get murdered the first time they encounter a shadow).

[Schleiermacher]

I'm going to be running a D&D game soon, with custom classes drawing on a lot of Tome material.

One of those classes is basically a Tome monk, but should also cover ferocious, "feral" fighting styles like that of a Barbarian.

I'm not great at designing new Monk style options, though, and Rage obviously works in an almost diametrically opposite way to Monk styles from a mechanical perspective. So my trouble is, what would be a/some good new Monk abilities (ideally, one or two for each tier) to capture and mechanically support a similarly reckless, aggressive, resilient fighting style?

In magical christmas land, it would be something that at least in some cases incentivized you to keep using that style from turn to turn once you'd started using it, rather than suddenly switching to Deceptive Hummingbird Stance mid-rampage, but that might be asking for too much within the Monk's mechanical idiom. Suggestions?

[Omegonthesane]

If you're only after Monk for theme reasons of "this fighter must be improperly equipped", just give the barbarian Fatal Strike and Armoured in Life in exchange for proficiencies and call it a day. AC still won't keep up with a plate-and-board warrior but AC scales like shit anyway.

If you want the Monk's mechanical chassis of "Trade my Swift Action to be more than a shitty damage dealer per round" that's trickier. Since I'm too unimaginative to think of mechanical things that make a fighting style more "feral" other than "forgets to do fancy things instead of damage" my thought is "While this Style is active the monk's attacks do +Xd6 damage where X is half the monk's Hit Dice rounded down minimum 1" or if you have a hardon for fiddly complicated shit, "While this Style is active the monk's attacks do +1d6 damage; starting at level 3 you can choose this option more than once when designing a style". Although that would be strictly weaker and stop keeping up at all after level 3, but then my instinct is leaning towards "a level appropriate pile of boring damage" being worth half of a level appropriate style, which is going to depend on expected level range of campaign.

[Schleiermacher]

I did want the Monk's mechanical chassis, yes. That was kind of the point.

Quite few bits, like fast movement, save bonuses and the Con damage, work fine for a "feral" fighting style as is, but there's not enough to stick with those only without totally nerfing yourself and there's nothing to play up the "tough but reckless, all-in" approach.

[jadagul]

If you're looking for animalistic fighting styles you might want to raid Frank's take on the Totemist.

[Schleiermacher]

I did look at it, it was interesting. But the Totemist is more of a caster, so not very directly applicable.