The Gaming Den

Ok, so you're a bunch of adventurers in your fantasy setting based on what teenagers in the US believe medieval England was like. You've camped for the night, and you don't want to get murdered in your sleep.

So you set watched, with each watchkeeper spending 1/n of the night awak, with n being the number of people keeping watch (or double that for double watches etc).

How do you tell when it's time to wake up the next person and go to sleep yourself?

You do it whenever you want to, they've got no way of knowing if you wake them up at the right time

More seriously, you've got stuff like water clocks or candle clocks. If you've got a campfire, you can use the time it takes for the logs in the fire to burn.

People can follow internal clocks and wake up on their own:

"**Whether Medieval laymen slept through the entire night is a hot topic. In his book, At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, historian Roger Ekirch references over five hundred documents that suggest laymen went to bed around 9 p.m., slept for 3 to 4 hours, got up for 1 to 2 hours for prayer and possibly sex, and then went back to sleep until Prime. But even Ekirch recognizes that not all people followed the same sleeping pattern as does historian Jean Verdon. Historians refer to this sleep pattern as segmented sleep."

If you have the know-how, you can tell time by the stars.

If you use the wish economy and Tome revision to the planar binding rules, should planar binding payments be in wish economy goods? Can you pay in services at the same rate as the called creature is charging?

Honestly, I think planar binding payments should probably be service in kind. Like, you want an archon to fight the big bad for you? Then the archon wants you to take care of some threat to a community it's invested in.

I have a player that wants one of their questions with commune be "who stole the Maltese Falcon?". They are leaning on the text of the spell that says

...cases where a one-word answer would be misleading or contrary to the deity's interests, a short phrase (five words or less) may be given as an answer instead.

I feel like this is an overly permissive interpretation, and that they shouldn't be able to ask a question like that. Am I wrong at thinking this? If I'm not, how should I better the describe the limits of what can be asked with the spell?

I assume this is 3.5 commune? That version only allows you to ask 'questions that can be answered by a simple yes or no.' Open-ended 'who...?' questions obviously don't qualify.

I think you're overthinking it. You could answer with any single adjective describing the perpetrator that follows the article "a".

A male.
A dwarf.
A thief.

Old beardless male dwarf thief. Or whatever.
The point of these kind of divination Spells is to move the players toward the plot. Unless the thief is mind blanked. And to be honest, who isn't after level 11?

The "cases where a one-word answer would be misleading" bit is there to deal with edge cases like "Have you stopped beating your wife"? (or, more relevant, something like "Moradin, are you still sending dwarf paladins to interfere with our mission?"), where both "yes" and "no" are wrong answers and the god would need to reply with something like "I have never beaten my wife"/"Those paladins aren't my followers" to answer it accurately.

If your player wants a more open-ended answer, contact other plane is the spell they want, where the spell can explicitly return any one-word answer and chains of questions like "What is the first name of the person who stole the Maltese Falcon?", "What is the last name of the person who stole the Maltese Falcon?", and so forth are possible and encouraged.

I was reading about Kurosawa, he would get together his writing team at an inn, present the story scenario, then they all decided how the characters would get past an obstacle like “get across a bridge without a proper pass”

Would y’all say that’s kinda like a free form rpg session

It's akin to a story game. Which some consider a form of RPG, but I consider to be distinct but overlapping.

Are dnd Ray wands derived from sci-fi rayguns Or is there’s a mythological or folktale basis for zapping with wands

Using some variety of pointing-stick to designate the target of a curse is pretty common among traditional magic systems. As far as wands that literally shoot visible rays, the inheritance probably goes:

1. Homer depicts some Greek gods with wands.
2. Folk tales about gods with wands evolve into fairy tales about fairies with wands.
3. Western animation adapts those fairy tales, adding zappy rays for visual flair.
4. D&D is influenced by that western animation.

Some 1e spells and wands are specifically firearms and alien ray guns.

Melf's minute meteors literally has you loading flintlocks
And IIRC expidition to the barrier peaks goes to an alien ship where their space rays are wands.

Ah the Hermetic Order of the Golden Crispy Dawn has a fire wand among other wands and elemental symbols (water cup, earth pentacle):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wand#Status_symbolism

https://www.goldendawnshop.com/product-category/wands/

Maybe that's where fireball wands may be inspired from?

That wiki article says European occult ritual wands appeared in the 1200's
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sworn ... f_Honorius


Homer has wands in the hands of Hermes (sleep), Athena (aging), Circe (polymorph into pig)

"The concept of magic wands was invented by the ancient greek writer Homer, in his books The Iliad and The Odyssey. In all cases, Homer used the word 'rabdos', which means 'rod', and implies something that is thicker than the modern conception of wands. In those books, Homer wrote that magic wands were used by three different gods, namely Hermes, Athena, and Circe. In The Iliad, Homer wrote that Hermes generally used his magic wand to make people sleep and wake up. In The Odyssey, Homer wrote that Athena used her magic wand to make Odysseus old, and then young again, and that Circe used her magic wand to turn Odysseus's men into pigs."

Fireball wands in D&D come from original Chainmail.

Had Cannons and Trebuchets, and the quick way to describe Wizards in the fantasy expansion for the game was something like 'can fire like a Cannon or Trebuchet each turn, as a Lightning Bolt or Fireball'. Fireball explodes over there because that's what the trebuchet did. Ditto for the old style 60' line of death for the cannon or lightning.

But they could do it every turn just for existing in Chainmail and that was bad for early RPG design, so wands of fireball went in as a 'this is how Wizards do that in mass combat' note. The ones you found in modules normally had like 3 charges left and would often be destroyed on attempts to recharge.

Really, whole thing would've been better if they just had a 10 minute cooldown and not worried about charges. Maybe like some damage roll where they break. /random thought.

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Oh, right, why a wand, as such, rather than ... magic rings? Gygax was very into sympathetic magic; if you were aiming an effect, the magic device for it should be a pointy thing (unless you were aiming something fist-like, and then it was a ring), and while they totally included sci-fi elements in all the early D&D games (it was kitchen sink everything), that probably was just slot into the available rules.

https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spel ... e-terrain/

This spell throws down hazards across a huge area, but I can't tell what the incidence rates should be for the hazards. Can you cast Greater and choose only one hazard, like "forest fire", and just have a twelve mile wide conflagration for all time? Cast (un)hallow at the center, and you won't even be able to ever remove the effect either (shy of stuff like disjunction)

Ok, admittedly this is a big broad question, and I don't expect a definitive answer, but still...

A common complaint for many games is that the fluff doesn't match the rules. Is it generally wiser to try to come up with an evocative setting, and try to make rules that work for it, or to come up with rules that make for a fun game and write your fluff to justify it? Or to herd both the rules and the fluff in the same direction as you go along?

The former seems better, the second seems easier, and the third what happens in practice.

I think you just answered your own question (with that last phrase). But generally speaking, I suspect it's easier coming up with an premise (more than a setting) and then creating rules for that. So defining "players will be dungeon crawlers" or "players will be covert operatives" makes for an easier base to build from than thinking "Faerun" or "Seattle 2070". The setting can come later as a way to emphasize or reinforce the premise and/or rules.

So the ideal order would be, IMO: premise > rules > setting.

To me the first is neither the fluff nor the rules. It's the concept of the game: what is this game about? What will we be playing?

Both the fluff and the rules have to be aligned with this. Once you have this concept, you can start with rules or fluff, but most of the time one will feed the other. You'll add some concept in the fluff and you'll need to add rules to have it manifest in the game. You'll want to add a rule for something, and you'll need to add some fluff to justify it.

Fluff first, then rules, or else you get Earthdawn (a weird cludge of not very evocative fluff to explain rules).

Good design is usually a back and forth between your different constraints. It's usually productive to start with whichever side is more constrained. But I could easily see fluff or mechanics be more constrained depending on an individual author's skill level. So I'd at least initially start with the one you're worse at.

Fluff, challenges, character concepts, rules. Then revise them, in that order. Possibly twice.

Lot of emphasis on fluff, which I find kind of odd. You'd think concept would be most important to start with, because without it you can't have coherent rules, fluff, or challenges.