The Gaming Den

maglag wrote: Also pretty sure there's a bunch of wars going on right now where one of the sides leaders claims god is on their side and that gets them fresh recruits and money instead of being taken to the closest asylum.

Sure, but even the craziest of the religious crazies are not proposing that any overt miracles are going to occur. "We're going to win this war because our magic is going to stop our enemies' bullets" went out of fashion with the Boxer Rebellion. You can claim that God is on your side and things are going to better for you than the cold hard numbers would suggest, but if you claim the archangel Gabriel is going to descend from Heaven on a chariot of fire and destroy the infidel tanks then you are going to ignored at best.

Similarly, you can believe in ghosts all you want and other people will smile and nod. If you claim to be a ghost whisperer and go to the probate court and tell them the decedent's ghost wants to alter the terms of the will, the judge is not going to listen to you.

There are places in the world where you can still get convicted or murdered by the mob for practicing sorcery, but those places are the exception, not the general rule.

mlangsdorf wrote:

maglag wrote: Also pretty sure there's a bunch of wars going on right now where one of the sides leaders claims god is on their side and that gets them fresh recruits and money instead of being taken to the closest asylum.

Sure, but even the craziest of the religious crazies are not proposing that any overt miracles are going to occur. "We're going to win this war because our magic is going to stop our enemies' bullets" went out of fashion with the Boxer Rebellion.

Not to shit on your point, but they do this exact thing in Ghana. Literally "this magic will make you immune to bullets." There was a news story about one of the witch doctors getting shot a while back.

Yeah, i have heard about that as well . . .
You'd think they'd be on a steep learning curve seeing how that stupidity does not work . .

I'm afraid history shows that demonstrations of a religion's falsity doesn't lead to believers wising up, but rather doubling down on their belief.

You'd think you would have noticed this by now, but...

Working on After the Fall, and I'm trying to figure out what the default goal of demons should be. One thought is to make the game, at least partially, about healing.

I know that one of the common criticisms about VtM is the idea that the default goal is to cure one's vampirism by reaching golconda.

Is it inherently bad to make a game about striving for healing, or is the problem with Golconda that you're a vampire striving to not be one, and a game about healing the bad aspect of your supernatural state while keeping the awesome aspects is perfectly fine?

It seems pretty clear that the problem is that the main goal of Vampire is to stop playing Vampire.

People advance this criticism a lot and it's never made sense to me. When people try to defend it, it always seems to come down to the presumption that power fantasy is the only thing you could ever want out of a game, and therefore playing as someone for whom "regular dude" would be a step up is an automatic failure. But that's baseless. I am totally okay playing a character whose primary goal is to reach more or less the same position as I actually have in real life. That character's goal is only to "stop playing" in the same way that a D&D character who wants to amass a giant pile of wealth and retire in luxury ultimately wants to "stop playing" i.e. stop going on adventures. People who suggest that the character's motivation could be more easily accomplished by the player leaving the table have issues differentiating fantasy from reality that they should see someone about.

Depends on the degree.

For Prak's described system, yeah, fixing the problems means you have reached an end state, but you had to reach that end state.

For Promethean: The Vigil, your IC goal of ceasing to be a Promethean is most ethically achieved by taking your own life, because the prescribed one and only way out other than through death involves subjecting another person to the same horrible fate you're trying to escape.

...I wanna make a coherent point about the implications of V20 introducing Dark Golconda as a thing you can reach to gain the benefits of Golconda while on a "not for suckers" path of morality, but I'm already late for work.

What I'm thinking with After the Fall is to actually use that throwaway jab I made at WW when trying to review Demon the Fallen, and make the torment Demons came out of the pit with, essentially, mental illness, represented by Master Passions.

So one of the default goals for Demons in After the Fall would be healing their pain from their torment in the Pit, effectively overcoming their Master Passion permanently, but still having their assorted powers and abilities. At which point, they could potentially take on a new goal of helping other Demons heal.

I don't think it would be a problem, but because Golconda is so often criticised, I wanted to get some thoughts on the specific problem with Golconda.

I think you need to ask yourself what the game looks like before and after the resolution. If you imagine a play state that exists after they have eliminated their master passion, that's at least good, but having further goals 'unlocked' at that point would also make sense.

Achieving freedom for themselves might be a good initial goal followed by destroying the one who tortured them (ie, freeing others).

Yeah, I'm still trying to figure out what the game is. With no fucking help from DtF, because it never bothered to figure out what the point of the game was. And no particular help from Lucifer, which is what inspired my latest desire to run Demon the Fallen, because it's demon protagonists are... not RPG protagonists.

Lucifer's greatest ambition on Earth seems to be to just engage in every hedonistic desire that comes to mind. The only other demon character in it is Maze, who also pretty much just wants to drink and fuck, but also fight and potentially kill.

I'm thinking the overarching theme for After the Fall is restored glory, rising again. That's broad enough to allow a variety of in game goals, from establishing a new Demonic Kingdom, to conquering Heaven, to gaining God's forgiveness (not my preferred goal, but some people will probably want that), to potentially even just creating a new life for themselves on Earth, leaving the past behind. Healing the torment of the Pit can be a stepping stone to that restored glory, regardless of which ultimate path they want to pursue.

Longes wrote:What games and campaigns are there that have PCs manage domains and stuff? Pathfinder's Kingmaker, Ars Magica, Houses of the Blooded, Game of Thrones. Anything else?

My friend is trying to make elder-level gameplay in Vampire the Masquerade and needs inspiration.

Several RPGs have been mentioned. For these purposes it is also useful to look at play by mail games, board games (especially legacy board games or deck builder board games), and video games. In any case, a lot of the stuff people put into 4X or kingdom builder games is going to be an odd fit if your end goal is to play Vampire Elders. One doesn't normally think of vampires as sponsors of technological advancement or investment in capital to increase production. And what do they care about marching armies around and what does it even mean for them to take territory?

Possibly the best model for Vampire Elder conflict you could have is Monopoly. Very little in the way of resources are "made," the characters mostly spend down resources and parasitize each other. The players move around bartering in influence and attempt to make deals and leverage synergies to exploit each other. Now Monopoly suffers from being a game that is not particularly good, but it probably does the Vampire: the Eternal Struggle shtick better than the card game even without spending any effort to reskin things.

-Username17

Prak wrote: I don't think it would be a problem, but because Golconda is so often criticised, I wanted to get some thoughts on the specific problem with Golconda.

Spiritual enlightenment is nigh impossible to define or come to agreement upon and you sure as hell aren't going to actually be delivering mind-blowing truths via TTRPG. So the path to Golconda is functionally more useful as an interesting bit of characterization rather than an achievable goal or immediate plot device. Vampire David Carradine wandering the earth and attempting to live a moral life sounds like a decent character to have on your monster squad whether or not Golconda is actually a reachable goal but the adventures he takes part in are almost assuredly going to be sparked largely by the actions of characters with more immediate concerns. So trying to legit center the game on Golconda is rough because nobody's answered why the villains should care about stopping Grasshopper from achieving it other than just having a petty personal vendetta.

Well, the idea is that the torment of the Pit that demons suffer manifests similarly to mental illness. It actually just uses the Master Passion system.

I've decided that the overall theme of the game is a return to glory, and for demons, part of that is getting over their torment. I have to figure out how that works mechanically, but that's a minor thing.

The opposition, at least in so far as the forces of Heaven are concerned, have a vested interest in preventing this, because the demons are subverting their punishment for Lucifer's revolt. I mean, I suppose that's sort of a petty personal vendetta, but at least it's fitting.

edit: so, while thinking about how to best create a mechanic for getting rid of your master passion, it occurred to me that I am a dumb, and that by having the mental illness analogue curable, I'm fucking up my own metaphor.

So, in character, demons are mostly seeking some means by which to erase their torment. But mechanically, there's no magic reset button. Mental illness, even metaphysical mental illness is something you cope with, not something you cure. And trying to "fix" it in any kind of permanent sense is likely to make things worse.

So it's less a process of getting rid of your master passion and more a process of gathering resources to help yourself avoid frenzy. One of the best being a support network, which will require a very minor added rule, because I wait one of the major themes, in addition to a return to glory, to be connections between people.

If you are playing a 3e/pathfinder/starfinder game with relatively high amounts of damage, what amount of damage reduction would you consider to be relevant? Also assume that in this game effects that remove you from battle are few and far between.

Is percentage base damage reduction worth the headache? Would it be too fiddly to have both types? (For example, DR 5/-, and you take 25% of the damage that doesn't block).

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:If you are playing a 3e/pathfinder/starfinder game with relatively high amounts of damage, what amount of damage reduction would you consider to be relevant? Also assume that in this game effects that remove you from battle are few and far between.

I can't do much without more specific numbers, but... At low levels, DR 5 is quite relevant, providing the benchmark is ~1d12+6 from a greataxe barbarian, allowing most characters to take an additional hit before dropping. Average damage output gets more complicated once you exceed level 5, and diverges a lot between 3.x and PF.

Is percentage base damage reduction worth the headache? Would it be too fiddly to have both types? (For example, DR 5/-, and you take 25% of the damage that doesn't block).

Depends on the group. A lot of people go blank when asked to do even simple division mid-combat. I have seen it work, though.

Yeah, I'd be able to figure percentage based DR fairly quickly, and one of my usual players likely would as well, but my two other usual players would be completely stymied. It's a good idea, but it really depends on the group.

One approach to proportional damage reduction and energy resistance I've seen used to good effect is a per-die reduction. "DR 1" means ignore effects dealing 1 die of damage or subtract -1 damage from each die for more damaging effects (so 1d6 goes to 0, 2d6 goes to 2d6-2, 3d6 goes to 3d6-3, etc.), "DR 2" means ignore 2-dice effects or subtract -2 damage per die, and so on.

The advantage to this approach is that you're never doing multiplication or division; 20% of 37 might take someone a while to work out, but "I took 37 damage from 10d6, and have DR 2, so I subtract 10 for 27 and then subtract 10 again for 7" is much easier and less intimidating for math-averse players.

The main downside is that many damage effects are in the form 1dX+[huge static modifier] or use larger dice, so for this to work well you have to either treat every +3 or +4 damage as a "die" for DR purposes, or standardize weapon damage on d4/d6/d8 so that e.g. d12+6 turns into Xd6 or Xd8 or Xd6+[very small static modifier]. Easy to do if you're already houseruling weapons and Power Attack and such, less easy if you want a drop-in rule.

A per die system works well if all of your damage comes from one kind of die like a d6, and damage usually increases by adding more dice with modifiers taking a back seat or not existing.

D&D damage is already all over the place so you could do a conversion and just deal with the results

Like a dagger is 1d6, 1h sword is 2d6, greatsword is 3d6

Or design a system with different kinds of dice that use "DR by dice number" as a mechanic to represent something like flesh slicing vs blunt trauma. So your slashy weapons roll a bunch of d6's but the blunt trauma ones roll a few d12's or d20

...Or DR discards rolls of a certain amount, so DR1 ignore's 1's, daggers will plink off but greataxes are usually fine.

I've got a player (Oracle 11) who's interested in learning a better personal buff spell, one that gets most of his desired buffing in one cast. He likes righteous might as a higher level alternative, but wants more offense on the table (at the cost of defense) - and so his initial request was to design a custom 5th level spell that's just divine power & enlarge (4th & 1st level spells) at 1 round/level in duration. On the surface, this seems a reasonable request. What are your guys' thoughts?

It's extremely reasonable.

How is the Tome Knight's code of conduct to be interpreted? There doesn't feel like enough ink has been spilled to circumscribe their ethos. Handing their old sword to the sorcerer to sell for money, letting the wizard put the bear in a headlock while you float above with a bow to challenge them (or puts the bear to sleep), betting buffed with an enlarge, and being a werewolf - all seem 'technically' allowed, but I can't tell if they're edgeline to brake the code or not (especially the first one)

The first one is still ridding yourself of a magic item, and that's unseemly. Other than that pretty sure Knight Archers who can't actually be attacked to turn off the effect of their challenge are a well known phenomenon.

So my pathfinder party found a crystal ball with telepathy at level 7. Teleport is nerfed, so hanging on to it for scry-and-die isn't as effective as it would normally be. Is it still worth trying to hang on to for spying & telecommunications, or should we cash it in for 35k worth of stuff we can use?

If we do sell it, are there any must-have items in the 4-10k range? Party consists of a hunter, a gunslinger, a paladin, and a sorcerer. "Artifact swords" have already been handed out to the hunter and gunslinger, so upgrading to +2 equivalent weapons is off the table for those two. I'm looking a mnemonic vestments to cover some niche spells, but I'm open to suggestions for other things. If nothing else I guess there's always attribute boosters.

I vaguely remember when D&D 3e was launching there was a web page (possibly a little flash game?) that walked you through an encounter and showed how the new action economy worked. Does anyone remember that, or better yet have a link to it?