The Gaming Den

RobbyPants wrote:

Prak wrote:Is there a decent, or at least functional, crowd favor and fame system that measures both players winning over a crowd in the moment and their overall growing fame over the course of the campaign, either already written for D&D or generic enough that it could be stolen for D&D with little difficulty?

Fame systems already written with non combat performance in mind is a plus.

Unearthed Arcana has a reputation system that I was never interested in. It has to do with how well recognized a PC is based on level, class, and events.

Yeah, I need to poke at that a bit. The Ravnica book for 5e has renown rules, too, which would work, since I'm looking at this for a 5e game, but they're very focused on renown in one's guild.

Specifically, I'm toying with a D&D Rock Band campaign, where the party runs around playing concerts in D&D Land and getting up to hijinks. I want a crowd favor system, sorta like you might use in a gladiatorial campaign, and there's a few options for that I know of and need to look at, and a system for tracking how famous the band is, and how famous the individual members are. Which I may end up just doing with the UA or GmGtR Renown systems, and letting each player track their renown and tracking it for the band as a whole.

Prak wrote: [*]Demon Core- Two hemispheres of metal around an inner core, with interlocking edges on the outer shell. When the shell halves are twisted to close around the core, an incredibly powerful wave of energy and heat, sufficient to destroy a building, is released. The halves can be separated by anyone in melee range immediately if unhindered, but anyone within that range when they were closed will die withing 1d10 days.[/list]

Sounds like someone was reading about early studies with plutonium.

Well, it's a thing I'm aware of anyway...

So in warhams 40k you've got wounds, and then there's Feel No Pain ++ sv's

So statistically what level of ++ sv (5+, 4+, etc.) would you need to be about as resilient as having w2, w3, w4?

OgreBattle wrote:So in warhams 40k you've got wounds, and then there's Feel No Pain ++ sv's

So statistically what level of ++ sv (5+, 4+, etc.) would you need to be about as resilient as having w2, w3, w4?

Is it as simple as a 4+ save being as good as 2 wounds, a 3+ being as good as 3 (on average)? Assuming you're not dealing with things that ignore one or not the other, there'd be a lot of that.

Thaluikhain wrote:

OgreBattle wrote:So in warhams 40k you've got wounds, and then there's Feel No Pain ++ sv's

So statistically what level of ++ sv (5+, 4+, etc.) would you need to be about as resilient as having w2, w3, w4?

Is it as simple as a 4+ save being as good as 2 wounds, a 3+ being as good as 3 (on average)? Assuming you're not dealing with things that ignore one or not the other, there'd be a lot of that.

They're only 'the same' on average and that leaves a big question...

A character with 2 wounds and no save is going to survive taking 1 wound. Always.

A character with a 4+ save and 1 wound might die in the first hit (half the time); they might die in 2 hits 25% of the time, and die in 3+ hits 25% of the time. There's a small but noticeable chance for a model to have an extended life, making several saves in a row.

If there are attacks that do multiple wounds in a single hit, the 4+ save person might survive while the 2 wound person (no save) never does. If a unit can only take damage from another unit dealing 1 wound per model and you want your full force to make it into round 2, the 2 Wounds would be better.

This is unrelated to any of the recent discussions, but I've been wondering lately why there aren't more "pocket dimension" type dungeons in D&D?

This was prompted by a Black Magic Craft video where he builds a witches cottage. I was thinking that it would be cool to have an entrance to an abandoned dungeon in the cellar or basement there, but then got side-tracked into thinking about the actual excavation and construction involved. And that made me wonder why there weren't more, lower-level, options for opening and creating a small stable pocket dimension. Something larger than portable holes and bags of holding, but not as grandiose as creating an entire demi-plane. Plus, you'd get the ability to easily place dungeons, and assorted "bigger-on-the-inside" spaces without having to interact with the logistics of this being a physical structure that takes up space. You could put a Fae-themed labyrinth or palace inside a tree, for example, without being constrained by the physical dimensions of the tree in question; you can't hack your way into it by chopping parts of the tree off; and it doesn't necessarily lead to a larger realm you can cavort about in.

When portals do come into place, they often seem like they they're all theoretically linked. Instead of the Wardrobe being the only way into or out of Narnia from our world (which is a much larger realm than I'd be imagining here), most dimension hopping in D&D presumes you can enter the Wardrobe in England, travel about for a bit in Narnia, and then exit via an Armoire in Australia.

You can do that right now by MC fiat, but it seems like an oversight in the world building. Like, there should be spells, or creature abilities, or rituals or something that explicitly does this. We imagine creatures like Beholders creating dungeons as a result of their abilities, but they remain a part of the world they do their digging in. Is there something I'm forgetting or overlooking that does do this?

The Stronghold Builder’s Guide has a few discounts you can claim by being able to personally cast certain spells, but otherwise it only pays lip service to the idea that builders use magic to get stuff done as it’s simply the technology of the world.

Being able to put things into an extra-dimensional space is pretty handy, especially if you can carry it around with you. There are several spells that are related, but there's a story issue - if you can use Secret Chest to safely stow goods somewhere, then teleport to the destination, then pull them out of the ethereal, you don't have trade ships or caravans or all that jazz.

I think that if you built a higher level spell off of rope trick where there was one fixed entrance, that'd be a pretty cool thing. But there's definitely people that are going to want to pack up a tent with a city inside of it, and that's hard on a lot of settings.

Not a game question per se but it's for a game and it's pretty fantastical, so this seemed more appropriate than the MPSIMS thread...

If someone were to steal, say, an in-development weapon prototype (from the US government) and then gave it to a third party, but the third party was not involved in the theft and had no advance knowledge of it (and did not use the weapon for any other crimes while they had it) what might the third party be charged with? There's Possession of Stolen Goods but even that seems to require the stolen goods to be moving as part of interstate commerce, I don't know if the third party themselves taking the goods across state lines as part of their personal belongings counts as that? Still, knowingly possessing something like that seems like it would be very, very illegal. Both parties involved are US citiziens and are not connected to any foreign power but would it fall under the Espionage Act anyway?

(In case state law is relevant, the theft and handover both took place in Virginia.)

Lawyers of the Gaming Den, please help!

You are going to jail just as soon as the NSA reads this hypothetical.

Yes, but on what charges?

Guess you'll find out when you're arraigned.

Schleiermacher wrote:Yes, but on what charges?

Probably conspiracy.

some defense lawyer wrote: Federal conspiracy charges are probably the most frequently charged federal crime. Prosecutors bring them across many different kinds of cases - from fraud cases to drug dealing, from white collar crimes to violent crimes.

Many people misunderstand what a federal conspiracy is, or what it requires.

Probably the most charged federal crime is conspiracy. Prosecutors love to charge this crime because it lets them sweep in a broader set of evidence to trial than they otherwise would be able to.

So what I want to do is just give you a quick overview of what conspiracy is and how it works. Basically for most federal crimes a federal conspiracy is an agreement between two and more people to commit a federal crime. Often it also requires an overt act but not always.

So let's see an example for how this works.

Let's suppose that Larry and Bob decide they are going to counterfeit some money. As soon as they agree they get together - Larry says hey Bob let's counterfeit some money - and they take some step to counterfeit the money. They go by a counterfeiting machine, or they start researching counterfeiting on the internet and they buy a bunch of ink.

According to the law of conspiracy even though that’s a little crazy and they haven’t gone very far that completes the conspiracy and they can be charged.

Prosecutors often wouldn’t charge that because it's, they haven’t gone far enough to make it sort of real in a way that we come to a prosecutors attention, but as the law works that’s enough for conspiracy.

It does not require a big meeting with the formal agenda where all the evil people get in the room and they talk about what they are going to do when they agree, it's enough if two people agree, they agree that they are going to commit some federal crime and they take some step to act out that agreement.

I regret everything. Now I've derailed the discussion of my own question.

(The original hypothetical case can't have been conspiracy because the third party didn't know about the crime at all until after it had been committed.)

deaddmwalking wrote:Being able to put things into an extra-dimensional space is pretty handy, especially if you can carry it around with you. There are several spells that are related, but there's a story issue - if you can use Secret Chest to safely stow goods somewhere, then teleport to the destination, then pull them out of the ethereal, you don't have trade ships or caravans or all that jazz.

I think that if you built a higher level spell off of rope trick where there was one fixed entrance, that'd be a pretty cool thing. But there's definitely people that are going to want to pack up a tent with a city inside of it, and that's hard on a lot of settings.

Yeah, the idea is that this would be a fixed location thing, and probably not something you cast outside of downtime. More like you cast it on a point in space and that usually coincides with some thing, but the portal doesn't travel with the thing if you move it. Indeed, it probably destroys the portal and traps everything in the pocket dimension there forever.

Schleiermacher wrote:Yes, but on what charges?

I would expect you'd annoy the people who'd matter to the extent that the legal niceties wouldn't matter. You'd get convicted of things regardless of whether they apply. Terrorism, say. You were obviously doing this to support some unspecified terrorist group. Assuming it got to a trial.

Schleiermacher wrote:I regret everything. Now I've derailed the discussion of my own question.

(The original hypothetical case can't have been conspiracy because the third party didn't know about the crime at all until after it had been committed.)

Just because it didn't happen doesn't mean it couldn't be prosecuted. In any case, the prosecutors could have an 'unindicted co-conspirator' two link two separate crimes (ie theft and illegal arms sales).

Schleiermacher wrote: If someone were to steal, say, an in-development weapon prototype (from the US government) and then gave it to a third party, but the third party was not involved in the theft and had no advance knowledge of it (and did not use the weapon for any other crimes while they had it) what might the third party be charged with?

Profiting from the proceeds of crime (under the RICO act), violating any patents they had on the weapon, and charged as an accomplice for failing to report your act (which they had no knowledge of) to the relevant authorities. Unless the third party was also a corporation in good standing with the local government, in which case they'd be threatened with having to answer to someone, and it would quietly disappear in the next news cycle.

Thank you all. (Yes, even Grek.)

So in Warhams 3-7th ed you had an AP system that was all or nothing, either you get your whole save or nothing.

In Warhams 1-2-8 they got armor modifiers, you have your armor save then minus some numbers.

For a skirmish game what are the pros of each system? There's been discussion about this before but I forget where

'Hard' AP, where AP2 ignores a 2+ save, gives you situations where your weapons are notably different. AP5 vs. 4+ save is useless, meaning that you either want NO AP or HIGH AP.

'Soft' AP, where AP-1 gives -1 to the save is useful against everything, so having AP is basically always a useful thing. Means AP is a less interesting stat.

IIRC Frank wrote a long piece about it in Koumei's 'reviewing warhams send help' thread .

Ah yeah I found it, it makes a 3+ sv space marine badass for shrugging off infantry shredding bolters, and terminators badass for shrugging off tank busting missiles.

And then terminators are worthless garbage because your brother, who is the only person you play against, keeps getting choppas and AP 2 weapons for some reason.

They did give terminators a 5+ invulnerable save fairly early on because of that, though.

Terminators are often too expensive for their output. If someone else ends up spending loads of points on AP 1 & 2 weapons then you've kind of made them actually useful by making an opponent make stupid decisions (buying expensive wargear instead of more dudes or whatever). It's like the distraction carnifex, but in list-building.

There probably is something out there with a 2+ Save back in the old days that was also pretty good offensively, but it's too long ago for me to remember. But it's just like when you blow 250 points on a Land Raider, which has AV 14 on all sides, but offensively only has 2x twin lascannon and 1x twin heavy bolter, and also good luck getting to actually fire all of them (depending on specific edition and what its Machine Spirit rules allow in that edition).

Meanwhile an AP 2 weapon usually equals -3 AP in the Soft system and that means his weapons at that value do the following:
-Turn Terminator 2+ into 5+ (Invulnerable) or 3+? (Storm Shield Invulnerable)
-Turn Honour Guard 2+ into 5+
-Turn LotD 3+ into 3+ (Invulnerable), but nobody takes these
-Turn Space Marine 3+ into 6+
-Tell Scouts 4+ to get fucked
-Also reduces vehicle saves by 3

And their AP 4 weapon usually becomes -1 AP now, so all Terminators and Honour Guard become 3+ (why did you take a Storm Shield instead of being a ranged regular Terminator?), regular Marines are all 4+ now and Scouts are 5+. And vehicles still take -1 as well.

Looking at how to do "this is a machine gun" attacks for a skirmish game. Yeah more attack rolls for more shots is a thing but looking to see what other good methods are out there.

Been rereading Warp Cult and the way guns are done...

Assault: Fire once in one action (you have 2 actions) and that's it
Rapid Fire: Fire once per action, so two shots a round at most
AutoFire suppression: Create a danger zone until next turn that hits people who move through it
AF sustained: Attack everyone in an area with one attack roll

Necromunda has dice that... I think current Necromunda you roll to hit once then see how many damage rolls you make, but the older Necromunda did something else with fire dice

Any other skirmish games come to mind?