Annoying Game Questions You Want Answered

[angelfromanotherpin]

Whether or not plot-affecting powers are a good or bad thing depends upon your goals. I think the Den is broadly in favor of greater player agency and handing out tools to meaningfully shape the actual narrative, but there are other schools of thought. Personally, I am a huge fan of creative Gordian knot-cutting use of abilities that change the whole context of a scenario. But some people (for whatever reason) really want to do the CRPG thing where the game is a walking simulator with light CYOA elements and occasional tactical puzzles, and from that perspective plot-affecting powers are poison.

[Foxwarrior]

When you give narrative tools to play with the narrative itself becomes another challenge to overcome. That's good of course because CRPGs aren't even the best TTRPG-like experiences computer games have to offer. But when you look at narrative tools like that, you should have level-appropriate ones at every level, not just a general principle of getting more as you level up. If the fighter got exclusive access to Contact Other Plane at level 1 (like, nobody else gets question-answering divinations), you wouldn't really need to give them more later if you didn't want to.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Elaboration:

Like... you took a Feature to have a Gym Leader's influence, or to be able to take the Dragonite Bus (but only if you called ahead a few days, so it was useless for actually getting anywhere immediately). Stuff that basically you should unlock by... narratively becoming a Gym Leader, or getting in good with the Rangers or whatever. Not spending a Feature on them (and, by extension, never being able to get it without spending said Feature and prereqs).

I think, like Foxwarrior said, you should be careful about what kind of narrative tools you're passing out, because... what the fuck is this shit? Good lord.

[Orca]

The people who like CRPG on the tabletop, no powers which can affect plot, are pretty well catered for. There's no real point trying to make a game for them because then you're going against well-established games with bigger art budgets than you can afford.

[Prak]

I'm looking at a dice pool and damage box based system where handling radiation will be a notable part of the game (takes place in a post-nuclear armageddon setting).

I took a look at how AS handles radiation, just as a baseline, and that's too fiddly for something that will be a major part of the game, imo.

But also I def don't want to have players actually tracking rads and time and consulting a chart, because, holy shit.

The most basic way I envision it working is that you have a Rad Level. As it goes up, you get certain effects like, basic debuffs and shit, and when it meets or exceeds your unmarked health boxes, Bad Stuff happens.

But beyond that very simple mechanic, I'm not sure how to make it work.

What's a decent way to handle radiation damage in such a game?

[Foxwarrior]

In STALKER, there are a couple of specific radioactive areas, where going in them raises your Rad Level at a precipitous pace, and IIRC (which I may well not) everywhere else is safe (from radiation).

[erik]

In Nexus I have different levels of radiation exposure with increasingly bad debilitating effects based upon 1 hour of exposure (exceptions at top and bottom). Multiples of 6 in extra time in a certain level is treated as being equal to the next higher radiation level for severity. From 0 (background, no impact) to 7 (overwhelming, immediately lethal exposure, and dead in about 1-2 days).

-edit, now that I'm not on phone I can throw in a table and blurb from Nexus for further explanation.

Radiation Level	Primary Onset	Secondary Onset	Primary and Secondary Effects	Mortality (if untreated)
1	N/A	N/A	None	N/A
2	N/A	1d6 weeks	None, then Hampered	Health [1] or death in 4+1d6 weeks
3	1d6 hours	4d6 days	Hampered,then Wounded	Health [2] or death in 2+1d6 weeks
4	1d6x10 minutes	1d6 hours	Hampered, then Wounded	Health [3] or death in 12+2d6 days
5	2d6 minutes	1d6x10 minutes	Hampered and Wounded, then Disabled or Unconscious	Health [4] or death in 2d6 days
6	1d6 minutes	1d6x10 minutes	Hampered and Wounded, then Disabled or Unconscious	Health [5] or death in 1-2 days
7	1d6 minutes	1d6x10 minutes	Hampered and Wounded, then Disabled or Unconscious	Death in 1-2 days

So 1 hour in Level 1 radiation doesn't do anything. But 6 hours and you treat it like level 2. 36 hours and you'd treat it like level 3.

Level 7 is basically gamma ray shit or so much radiation that it is an instant lethal dose (but the body takes a while to fully shut down still).

Primary Effects are the first signs and symptoms of radiation poisoning that are felt, and usually resolve in 1d2 days, Secondary Effects present later and are more severe. Often they are headaches, nausea and vomiting which cause the affected to be treated as though Hampered. Severe fever and cognitive impairment will further cause the affected to be treated as though Wounded. More severe central nervous system damage will reduce the character to being Disabled or Unconscious, with seizures, lethargy and ataxia.

Hampered is probably closest to d20's "Staggered" as conditions go in Nexus. Half movement speed and -2 penalty to dice pools.

[Kaelik]

I'm looking at a dice pool and damage box based system where handling radiation will be a notable part of the game (takes place in a post-nuclear armageddon setting).

I took a look at how AS handles radiation, just as a baseline, and that's too fiddly for something that will be a major part of the game, imo.

But also I def don't want to have players actually tracking rads and time and consulting a chart, because, holy shit.

The most basic way I envision it working is that you have a Rad Level. As it goes up, you get certain effects like, basic debuffs and shit, and when it meets or exceeds your unmarked health boxes, Bad Stuff happens.

But beyond that very simple mechanic, I'm not sure how to make it work.

What's a decent way to handle radiation damage in such a game?

If you go to my friends and fortresses thread and look up the rules for getting tired. A thing like with areas with basically three or four rating areas and then time spent in each one tracks differently. And then it all moves you down a condition track for radiation.

Obviously not sure how sci fits this is if you have ways to undo radiation besides waiting years.

[Grek]

Radiation exposure has both immediate symptoms and latent symptoms, with the severity of both and the latency period being effected by the total radiation exposure. For example, a 1 Gy dose of radiation will cause nausea in 50% of people for about a day, then seem to do nothing further for a whole month, then cause another month or so of weakness and fatigue after that. A 5 Gy dose of radiation will cause headaches, nausea, diarrhea, fever and cognitive impairment for two days and then lie dormant for about a week of regular health, after which point you have like two to three weeks of increasing health problems before you inescapably die. On the flip side, if you get a 0.2 Gy dose of radiation, you'll see no immediate effects but suffer from a moderately increased chance of cancer in the decades to come.

In order to simulate that, you basically want three numbers: Exposure (how much fucking around with radioactive stuff have you done today?), Dosage (how much radiation has actually gotten into your body?) and Radiation Level (how completely fucked you are by radiation sickness)

Exposure is tracked in terms of dice per unit time spent in radioactive areas and dice per radioactive item interacted with. For example, camping on the outskirts of the ruins might add 1 die per day, while drinking the water out of an irradiated pool might give you 3 dice per liter. Every time a scene ends, roll all remaining Exposure dice then reset Exposure to zero. Every hit increases your Dosage by one. Dosage is marked on the Wound Bar like wounds are, but does not count as being wounded and each Wound Bar can hold more than one dot of Dosage. Every time you fill up a Wound Bar with Dosage, you acquire a Radiation Level. Permanently delete one Wound Box and note down the time that you reached this milestone in the notes section of your character sheet. Do not reset Dosage; it recovers like regular Wounds do. Instead, move any Dosage from your deleted Wound Box into a Wound Box which hasn't been deleted yet. Dosage recovers like Wounds do (and as part of the same Healing Test as Wounds do), but reduces your expected lifespan by a week for every Dosage that you recover from, in the form of increased cancer risk. You probably don't need to track this, but you can if you're a morbid fuck.

Each Radiation Level makes you increasingly sick in the short term and makes it increasingly likely that you're going to die in the long term. First, you take a penalty on all tests equal to the number of filled Dosage bars remaining. Second, you develop Radiation Sickness after a period based on your Radiation Level - one month later for Radiation Level one, and half as long as that for every subsequent Radiation Level (2 weeks, 1 week, 3 days, immediately). While you have Radiation Sickness, you take a penalty to all rolls (including healing tests) equal to the square of your Radiation Level and have to make a special healing test every day where Radiations Levels count as Wounds (and can be recovered as such), but net failures inflict Lethal Damage due to the Radiation Sickness ravaging your body. If a character ever gets three or more Radiation Levels, you should probably just assume they die at some point after the Radiation Sickness kicks in rather than rolling out exactly how their inevitable and painful death plays out.

Potassium iodide pills and anti-radiation suits provide reduce the results of an Exposure roll by small amounts, letting you effectively ignore low level radiation for as long as you don't get an unlucky roll. They do basically nothing against acute doses of radiation, like juggling fuel rods, because the per-action exposure of doing something like that is much higher than the suit can protect you against. Chelation therapy can remove Dosage directly, but this can't be done in the field and has no effect on Radiation Levels themselves.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Would a Pokemon Monster Manual (a Pokedex, if you would) benefit from having writeups of each individual species (or species line) that detail their diets, habitats, and behaviors? Or is that too much work for too little payoff and you're better off referring people to the internet?
Basically, is it worth ripping off the Monsterorious Manualle?

[deaddmwalking]

Would a Pokemon Monster Manual (a Pokedex, if you would) benefit from having writeups of each individual species (or species line) that detail their diets, habitats, and behaviors? Or is that too much work for too little payoff and you're better off referring people to the internet?
Basically, is it worth ripping off the Monsterorious Manualle?

The point of an ecology section is to fire the reader's imagination. You don't know what any individual reader is going to latch on to, so having a lot of different things can help. Keep in mind that we're talking about a fantasy ecology. There's no reason why a creature with the ability to turn flesh to stone couldn't eat stone instead of meat, but there's usually an abundance of rocks just sitting around. Talking about why Griffons prefer horses to all other foods implies things about the setting that players can know and feel smart about. So the question is, does knowing that a Snorlax likes strawberries better than any other food imply that you can get one to wake up and move off the road if you have some to tempt it? If so, it can be worth it to include some of these things in entries - they may be throw away lines in your mind, but they can become a 'big deal' at the table.

[virgil]

Does anyone have the link to the thread that discussed new iconic villains for either TNE or Tome in general? I distinctly remember a high level, Strahd analogue that was something like a lich or mummy that wore a beautiful golden mask to hide the fact her face was worms or something.

[Dean]

Would a Pokemon Monster Manual (a Pokedex, if you would) benefit from having writeups of each individual species (or species line) that detail their diets, habitats, and behaviors? Or is that too much work for too little payoff and you're better off referring people to the internet?
Basically, is it worth ripping off the Monsterorious Manualle?

The AD&D Monster manual style is inarguably the best monster manual ever completely because it focused on the ecology of the monsters as if they were real. In a given session it almost certainly won't matter that Pegasi prefer to make nests near mountainous streams but it will definitely fucking matter in the mission about capturing a pegasus. Most of the information will be useless at any given moment but writing a lot of useful information about a monster is required if you want people to think about it as more than just a bunch of combat statistics.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Most of the information will be useless at any given moment but writing a lot of useful information about a monster is required if you want people to think about it as more than just a bunch of combat statistics.

I was going to say that most Pokemon already have lots of useful information about them, but... that is not the case the more recently you look. I guess I'm just gonna have to make shit up (and by that, I mean steal ideas from people with biology degrees who are way too into Pokemon). Should be fun!

[Prak]

Is there any particularly compelling reason druids have to wait til 11th level to turn into a tiny animal?

[Foxwarrior]

Being a tiny animal can do some useful things for sneaking around and hiding in a bag and such. It's worth something, but a level 1 character getting it isn't beyond the pale.

[Prak]

My various D&D questions have started coalescing into my own D&D heartbreaker, and I'm thinking about combining some classes that share sufficient conceptual space, like, say, making Cleric and Druid different archetypes of a single Acolyte class. Wildshape could easily just be a 3rd level druid spell, and I definitely lean towards what 5e has done with iterative spells, saying "ok, here's the base spell. If you cast it at a higher level, you get these effects."

So there could just be a Wildshape spell, which allows a druid to take the form of, say, a tiny to medium sized animal, and when cast with a fourth level spell slot you can take a large form, a sixth level slot a plant, an eighth level slot a huge animal or plant or a small to large elemental, and a huge elemental with a 9th level slot.

I don't think letting a 5th level character take the form of a cat or hawk is even particularly noteworthy.

[OgreBattle]

Is there any particularly compelling reason druids have to wait til 11th level to turn into a tiny animal?

D&D writes modules in a "meant for everyone to take the same route" way, so being able to turn into a squirrel is effectively being able to walk through walls and get away with critical info, stuff and whatnot.

But D&D seems to make it a "It invalidates the info gathering/sneaking thief at level 1, so no!"

[Emerald]

My various D&D questions have started coalescing into my own D&D heartbreaker, and I'm thinking about combining some classes that share sufficient conceptual space, like, say, making Cleric and Druid different archetypes of a single Acolyte class. Wildshape could easily just be a 3rd level druid spell,

Cleric and Druid being the same class could definitely work--Druid was a Cleric subclass in AD&D, after all--but turning Wild Shape into a spell could be an issue in a couple ways.

1) Proliferation. I'm assuming that your heartbreaker is going to have some way of storing spells even if it doesn't have 3e wands/staffs/etc., some sharing of spells between classes even if it doesn't have the 3e full-list divine casting, etc., and in that case turning Wild Shape into a spell makes it easy for more classes to get their hands on it. Especially if you do anything to address caster multiclassing along the lines of 5e's "use the same table for all your classes" or ToB's "add some of your levels in Y to advance your casting in X" or the like.

2) Multiple resources. The nice thing about having Turn Undead and Wild Shape as class features instead of spells is that they come out of separate pools from your spells, so (A) you don't have to choose between the two, not even to the extent that a cleric or druid has to choose whether to sacrifice a spell for cure X wounds or summon nature's ally X and (B) you can key other things off that resource like [Divine] and [Wild] feats. "Flattening" everything into spells loses you that flexibility and can make characters fairly cookie-cutter if everyone loads up on lots of wild shapes all the time.

3) Class identity. The 3e version of the druid is conceptually built around Wild Shape and a lot of people play druids because they want to play a shapeshifter. If Wild Shape is balanced to be on par with every other 3rd level spell as opposed to being a druid's signature class feature, the druid is basically just a cleric with a different spell list...and yes, you're planning on folding them into the same class, but that doesn't mean you can't try to give the different subclasses fairly distinct playstyles and themes.

Which isn't to say you shouldn't do it, but those are the big pitfalls to watch out for. You might want to look at other approaches, like e.g. consolidating all signature divine caster class features onto one resource, 4e or 5e style, so a cleric's Turn Undead, a druid's Wild Shape, a shugenja's Sense Elements, etc. all use the same resource mechanism.

[Iduno]

Most of the information will be useless at any given moment but writing a lot of useful information about a monster is required if you want people to think about it as more than just a bunch of combat statistics.

I was going to say that most Pokemon already have lots of useful information about them, but... that is not the case the more recently you look. I guess I'm just gonna have to make shit up (and by that, I mean steal ideas from people with biology degrees who are way too into Pokemon). Should be fun!

I think you're doing the Pokedex wrong. Koumei will have better examples, but you need some real wild facts.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

I don't understand the point you're making. Those are actual Pokedex entries that would obviously be referenced when writing an ecology section for a Pokemon.

[tussock]

With quibbling at the margins (leadership, for example, or general fightiness), [skills should not scale with level].

In a level-based system, you get whole new tiers of power, and at those higher tiers, skills don't scale, they expire. Efforts to maintain the relevance of lockpicking are the most famously insulting - but low level rangers should be able to find food in the desert, and higher level deserts should not require 10th level rangers to find food. Instead, the game needs to graduate to higher level character concepts and to conceptually higher level challenges, rather than trying to reskin challenges from 3rd level as things appropriate to a party with 6th level spells.

"A portal opens here but once a year under the harvest moon ..."
"Oh, right, so if I move this rock to here and then snap this branch and, oh, that powdered slug ichor ... there, open, quickly everyone, through!"

Like, portals in D&D are things for PCs to interact with at every level, from locked and stuck doors through passwall to dimension hopping and demon binding. Obviously portals open and close and there's a magical key to open them in the form of a spell and Rogues should just be able to pick that fucking lock too. You can do it in Labyrynth by looking at the walls the right way to realise there's a path through there.

The skills in 3e D&D cover a great deal of real world conceptual space at low level, but inherently the high level concepts are based off exaggerations of those concepts and it's not really a problem for classes to get something to join in on the appropriate part of that. Jumping off a hill and just not landing until you get where you want, is not even high level.

Fighters obviously need fantastic mounts at high levels, and artifact swords, and it wouldn't kill the game to have Handle Animal and Craft be a part of doing that for them along with some class features, assuming you give them enough skill points along the way.

But yeah, also those things can just be spell slots and class abiliites that don't use the common skills either. That might even work better. But if you want to use the skills for high level stuff, it's not all that hard. 3e Rogues have "use this skill better" class options already, just radically expand the concept.

[tussock]

2) Multiple resources. The nice thing about having Turn Undead and Wild Shape as class features instead of spells is that they come out of separate pools from your spells, so (A) you don't have to choose between the two, not even to the extent that a cleric or druid has to choose whether to sacrifice a spell for cure X wounds or summon nature's ally X and (B) you can key other things off that resource like [Divine] and [Wild] feats. "Flattening" everything into spells loses you that flexibility and can make characters fairly cookie-cutter if everyone loads up on lots of wild shapes all the time.

Yeah, there's a thing in 3.0 where they said they were gunna do more stuff with divine energy uses later, and then what they did was give out free metamagic to Clerics.

But Paladins using their Turn Undead for more Smite Evil is great, because there isn't always undead about and they need more smite anyway.

However, you can make Wild Shape into a spell, and then have it not on the class list and instead activated with nature points or whatever, like there's spells on the domain lists that aren't on any class lists. Even Smite Evil and Turn Undead could be written as spells in the spell section and only triggered by the appropriate class-only features.

Where forcing clerics to use at least one domain spell at each level might be better if you forced them to use exactly one domain spell at each level, and more of the domain spells weren't on the full class lists (and also, you could just add spells to a domain at any time, as a designer, rather that wedging in whole new domains).

Equally, some of the spells could be dispatched to a rituals section, because they're just long descriptions of things very rarely used and often with extensive prep time anyway. Not that you need rules outside of your spell list and slots to use them, but you could do if it was appropriate.

Like forcing high level Wizards to have a couple of metamagic spells prepared, and a couple of rituals on the go, and some item construction in the gathering stages, that's probably good for the game. It both forces them into acting on thematically appropriate game concerns, and limits the over-use of whichever ones turn out to be powerful. Plus, they still have their spell slots and feats for being an adventurer with.

[Emerald]

However, you can make Wild Shape into a spell, and then have it not on the class list and instead activated with nature points or whatever, like there's spells on the domain lists that aren't on any class lists. Even Smite Evil and Turn Undead could be written as spells in the spell section and only triggered by the appropriate class-only features.

I don't really see a benefit to jumping through that particular hoop. Given a heartbreaker close enough to 3e that "class feature vs. spell" is a meaningful distinction, the only real differences between a Turn Undead class feature powered by its own separate resource and a turn undead spell-that's-not-a-spell powered by its own separate resource is that the latter has spell components, can be counterspelled, can be put in a wand, and so on, which would all seem to be undesirable characteristics, either making it harder for the character to use a signature formerly-a-class-feature or making it easier for other people to access it.

Unless you're just talking about formatting it like a spell, in which case, eh, not much difference either way. Something fairly standard like Eldritch Blast can really benefit from a compressed spell format because it really just boils down to "60 foot ray, 1d6+1d6/2 level untyped damage," but things like Turn Undead and Wild Shape are fiddly enough that formatting changes aren't likely to see a big benefit.

Equally, some of the spells could be dispatched to a rituals section, because they're just long descriptions of things very rarely used and often with extensive prep time anyway. Not that you need rules outside of your spell list and slots to use them, but you could do if it was appropriate.

The combat spell vs. ritual split is also something I'm not fond of. Anything with more of an in-setting presence than a 4e power is going to blur the lines between combat and utility; a fireball can set a forest fire as easily as nuke a bunch of goblins, a phase door can provide an unexpected flanking opportunity as easily as give a wizard a secret entrance to his lair.

Plus, 4e showed that if you shove the noncombat spells off to their own section and added any impediments to using them over your normal set of spells, they're likely to be neglected by most players. Sure, a heartbreaker ritual system is probably not going to do it as badly as 4e did, but given that pretty much everyone's first inclination when they hear "ritual system" is "increase casting time, add skill checks, add expensive components, and otherwise make things pointlessly baroque" and if you don't do that there's little reason to split them off from spells in the first place, I have yet to see a ritual system that seems worthwhile and sensible.

[Prak]

Well, the main reason I was thinking Wild Shape could be turned into a Druid-only spell is to make combining Cleric and Druid into archetypes of a single class easier.

Clerics get Spells, two Domains, and Turn/Rebuke. So, their features are all established at level one.

Druids get Spells, Animal Companion, Wild Empathy and Wild Shape (plus some bullshit small abilities that hardly matter, like pass without trace, resist nature's lure and venom immunity).

So, just thinking about it in my head while driving, I was thinking that Druids get an Animal Companion where Clerics get Domains, Wild Shape can be a spell, and rather than interacting with diplomacy rules, Wild Empathy becomes Rebuke/Command Nature.

Then I have to figure out whether to even care about the bullshit small abilities. Nature Sense is literally just a "+2 to skills" feat, Woodland Stride could just be a cantrip*, ditto trackless step, to be honest. Then we're just left with "+4 to saves against fae," immunity to all poisons despite the ability being called venom immunity, and a non-illusory disguise self.

Honestly, I could realistically see "Immunity to Poison" being a feat, and... it may well be in some book. I swear "+4 to saves against fae" is a feat, or there's something near enough (and I doubt people would be up in arms over druids suddenly not having a bonus against seeing nymph tits), and 1000 Faces should just... be the spell disguise self. Or maybe a druid only transmutation variant thereof.

*I really like the unlimited use cantrips of PF and 5e, so we're not even asking druids to spend a spell per day on this