Annoying Game Questions You Want Answered

[deaddmwalking]

A standard D&D level-up includes potentially updating attributes, skills, feats, attack bonuses, saving throws, new special attacks, special abilities, and spells. That's a lot to handle 'on the fly'. You can give a similar effect with a single 'power up' similar to a Barbarian's Rage ability.

If you want someone to go Super-Saiyan mid-combat, make it a buff that does something like +x hit points, +4 on all rolls, regain a used spell slot/daily ability. Does that exactly duplicate leveling? No. Maybe it is even slightly better in some ways. But it would feel like a power-up, largely bridge the gap until the player can handle the actual leveling up, and would be easy to add/remove on the fly.

[Thaluikhain]

Ok, bit of an odd question, but occasionally there's discussions about Logistics and Dragons, specifically about how a game turns into it at high levels.

Was wondering, at what other points do games tend to change into other games? For example, if everyone in the party starts out not able to fly and later becomes able to, seems like a lot of things you start out with (or at least how you play) become irrelevant.

And, while it's a bit of a general question, but is that a good thing, having to change how things work (in practice)? Could stop things getting same-y, but again, could be a problem if people liked the old way of doing things which no longer really matters.

[Kaelik]

I think important milestones of game chaning can be good or bad depending on how they are implemented. Mostly you want to do things that make some part of the game which has started to seem boring disappear or drastically reduce and be replaced by a new different thing to manage that is at least as interesting as the thing that went away.

I think D&D 3.5 flight mostly doesn't actually happen like that. It's usually quite hard to get all day combat flight without significant cost, though Tome it is much more likely. So often you just end up with some people using it and not others, or even the people who can use it choosing not to a lot of the time. When it does happen (or if you are Tome and you all have flight) it usually replaces a bunch of ground combat interactions with fiddly 45 degree angles that are much less interesting, and kind of sucks a bit.

However, mounted transport flight and teleport are both big changes in how you move around, and I think those are actually mostly bad in D&D. They don't so much change how you deal with parts of the game as obviate them in extremely boring ways. It's not always bad to obviate parts of thre game, For example, it's good when the party stops accounting for rations, that's awesome, but the things obviated by Teleport are at least important enough to the gamem that Teleport should really be adding a different thing for PCs to interact with to replace that section of the game.

There's also the change from "People who wander around going into caves and murdering everything for loot" to "People who make decisions to change how society works and/or create their own goals" which is handled pretty badly in D&D in the sense that it is not signposted and most most content/modules/fluff/setting material is written as if you stay cave murderers forever, but D&D actually does have all the material there to do that better then a lot of games, so if PCs stumble into it or are already aware it can be a useful transition for making the players feel a sense of progress.

[Thaluikhain]

Ok, totally random and minor thing that's been bugging me. Current 5th ed D&D Shocking Grasp, you cast it and make a melee spell attack to touch the target. Would it not be better to cast it and then make a normal attack and if you hit the target gets normal damage and Shocking Grasp damage? Now, that's an action for a spell and and action for an attack, but in the description as it is it says that your action is to cast and then touch, and it'd make sense for the touching to happen forcefully. Maybe just an unarmed attack, or maybe you cast it and then attack next round.

But touching with the intent to harm, but doing so gently seems wrong and annoys me.

[Omegonthesane]

It's easy to invent flavour text that would make it make sense. Maybe you have to be holding your hand in a decidedly not-fist-shaped position to maintain the Shocking Grasp spell, and thus can't strike with real physical force while also delivering the spell effect.

Fundamentally, whoever decided what passes for balance in 5e land decided that you shouldn't be able to spell-attack and attack-attack in the same Action, so the fluff bends to the rules unless it's exceptionally brain hurting or causes the players to achieve a goal before the DM wanted them to.

[Thaluikhain]

It's easy to invent flavour text that would make it make sense. Maybe you have to be holding your hand in a decidedly not-fist-shaped position to maintain the Shocking Grasp spell, and thus can't strike with real physical force while also delivering the spell effect.

Or you could do that, yeah.

[Thaluikhain]

Ok, not exactly on topic for this thread, but I didn't want to create a new post just for this.

I seem to remember a thread discussing Leviathan: The Tempest somewhere on the forum, but haven't been able to find it. I don't suppose anyone knows if there was just a thread or if I'm remembering it wrong, and where it is?

[erik]

Might have been mentioned in here. viewtopic.php?p=343094

But my phone is not ideal for search skimming a thread whose image links are now a thousand pages of hashed junk.

[Thaluikhain]

It is mentioned there in passing, but I seem to remember a thread talking in some length about it.

Reading the rules myself, and it's bad. It doesn't have the pretension of most WOD stuff, but using established words for completely new ideas is there and it's somehow even more embarrassing than usual.

EDIT: Forgot to say, I do appreciate you having a look for it.

[Thaluikhain]

It struck me that it's popular to rip-off, say, Mind Flayers, there was lots of room for improvement with their fluff. Though, it seems that this isn't a thing that people ripping them off seem too interested in, they are in it for the tentacle faces and maybe the psychic stuff.

Are then any examples of people ripping off Mind Flayers and then bothering to make them work better?

(I mean, people have made stuff like Dark Elves better, but "elves, but evil" is a lot more generic than Mind Flayers are)

[Foxwarrior]

By "make them work better" you mean take on the whole backstory/life cycle when ripping them off? I could suggest the Goa'Uld and the Zerg... Don't really understand what you want, is it to rip them off so closely that wizards of the coast could make a copyright law case and just fix a few minor details, because that strategy has legal problems.

[Kaelik]

Yeah the Goa'uld do fit all the flavor elements of Mindflayers except tentacle faces. Never noticed that before.

[Thaluikhain]

Huh, also not noticed that.

Yeah, their backstory and life cycle and demographics seem a mess, and there are lots of fairly blatant rip-offs. For example, Fighting fantasy has the Brain Slayer, which is an obvious rip-off. But it's just doing much the same thing, hiding underground, being octopus headed, psychic attacks, didn't take the opportunity to run with the idea and develop it any. Just riding the same bandwagon in a lazy way.

Wondering if any inspired by/rip off monsters went any further and improved on the original.

[Sashi]

Yeah, their backstory and life cycle and demographics seem a mess.

Honest question: what makes them such a mess?

Lost, contradictory, and secret histories are a great way to give room to incorporate them into multiple settings (and also to preserve mystery even after players read the monster manual), there are plenty of real plants, animals, and fungi with equally or more bizarre life cycles, and their demographics can be easily adjusted to cover anything from "one lone encounter" to "invasion of the mind flayers" just by tweaking their spawning rate and willingness to work in groups.

Seems about perfect to me.

[deaddmwalking]

So Mind Flayers were based on Cthonians (part of the expanded Cthulu Mythos and introduced in Robert Blake's short story 'The Burrowers Beneath'). The original cover of the book depicted only the tentacles of the beasts, and Gygax has claimed that is what inspired him. It is also possible he saw other artwork associated with it.

The image below was included on a book: Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Volume 1 published in 1975



The original publishing of the Ilithid was also in 1975.

Gygax was known to take a creature he saw somewhere else and then semi-randomly assign powers to it. The Rust Monster, for instance, was based on a toy. A good article about the origins of the Mind Flayer (and you can find the article on the rust monster on the same site) is available at Dump Stat Adventures.

You would be free to take the physical description from the image in this post and create an entirely new monster. If you include the psionic powers and the brain-eating, though, you'd probably be in dangerous territory.

There's a good article about Universal's Frankenstein - while the actual creature is Public Domain the version as depicted in the movie can be protected.

So then it becomes a question of what you want to use? A humanoid body with squid-tentacles surrounding it's mouth? Go right ahead! Pirates of the Carribean did it with Davy Jones:



You're just going to get in trouble if you have too much physical similarity combined with too much similarity to existing powers/overlap with the depiction within protected products. That said, pretty much anybody can sue you at any time, and if you're worried about being called to defend yourself or your creation in court, giving a wide berth of potentially protected material is a good idea.

So what is it that you really think is the core of an idea you want in your game? People living in underground cities and/or enslaving others is definitely something you can have. But give them purple skin, 4 tentacles, brain-eating and psychic powers? That's a recipe for trouble.

[Thaluikhain]

Ok, not sure if this is the best thread for this, but while the consensus of the board seems to be that D&D 3.5 was good, and that 4 was, to be polite, not good, 5e doesn't get talked about.

In my cursory and not expert examination it seems to be adequate (though it likes magic a bit too much for my taste), but then it's not hard to make a system that is adequate for a cursory and not expert examination.

[Koumei]

5E is Shedinja: an empty husk that floats along, it appears to exist but there is nothing inside, and the slightest touch by something effective (in this case, not Rocks or Fire but "people who like looking at the mechanics of games") causes it to crumble into dust.

[Omegonthesane]

I think a few years ago there was an analysis of how to abuse Glyph of Warding to have more spell slots, on the basis that everyone who was here in 2015 concluded quickly that being a Necromancer and having an army of crit-fishing skeleton archers was the way to win 5e D&D and so the analyst wanted to squeeze more power out of their Necromancer.

That doesn't entirely explain why the TGDMB eye of Sauron never fell upon the finer details, 'cept insofar as there weren't that many finer details for it to fall upon. There's a few mentions of "optimised" builds elsewhere (most infamously everyone's scared of the "Coffeelock", a sorcerer who does a warlock dip because they can convert warlock spells, which refresh every Short Rest, into Sorcery Points and then turn Sorcery Points into sorcerer spells below a certain level which otherwise refresh once per day). So it's likely that there wasn't anything for any serious reviewer to sink their fangs into.

Conversely, without getting into the particulars of forum drama, I get the impression that the former actual TTRPG professionals who used to post here and do OSSRs and Anatomies of Failed Design just don't consider that an entertaining, let alone productive labour anymore. Times and priorities change.

[merxa]

5e was largely viewed as vaporware here, and in many ways it is (or was), but it's also a great cognitive load reduction in comparison to 3.x, and groups with the context of 3e can port over rules as needed without too much struggle. Since the release, more rules have been added, and generally thats been ok, but there's just so many questions that 5e punts off to the gm that it can still sometimes feel like half an edition.

the reduced cognitive load to run and resolve 5e has several benefits, so it's not all bad, and after a couple decades of the 3x crunch, i admit I am enjoying the mental vacation and so far I have not had a 5e session that was just one long combat, while I've had a few that spanned past a single session in 3.x, especially in the upper levels. Of course in 5e, 'high level play' is a bit of a mirage... a distorted illusion caused by air vapor...

[Kaelik]

I see 5e as the perfect local minimum of least good RPG game. It's extremely complicated and rules heavy, so you absolutely have to read hundreds of pages to know what you are doing or thousands to GM, and you can't play it by just sitting down and bullshitting with your friends. But also, it's just randomly missing key rules sections because it relies on you just backporting from 3.5 rules whenever it would be too complicated to actually write the rules, and also all the rules mostly suck shit and don't let your characters actually do cool things and all the boring number accounting you have to do doesn't matter because the numbers basically don't matter and you are mostly just using the dice results.

It's the worst of all possible worlds. I think anyone playing 5e would be better off playing 3.5 and ALSO better off playing some hacked fate game or the pbta 2d6+vaguely defined move rules light.

[merxa]

by analogy 5e is the fast food of rpgs, a terrible product millions of people seemingly willingly partake in above and beyond my local steakhouse which is absolutely divine and far better than anything else in the multiverse.

5e's returned emphasis on the 6 core stats, a basic resolution tree of d20+stat+misc vs DC, a rescaled and flatter tier rng, generalized adj/dis mechanic, a singular ac (Must i keep asking for the uber PCs flat-flooted touch ac?), 5e is perhaps a slightly higher maximum than the perfect local minimum, but whose to say the true topology of game design? Some facts seem to suggest the d&d zeitgeist is crescendoing during 5e -- perhaps the lesson is, the greatest adventure was the mindcaulk we've brought along to mark our path back hom... wait, where's the mindcaulk?

[Thaluikhain]

Ah, ok, thanks. Been looking at some rules and DND Beyond and seen a lot of "hey, what?" stuff, but nothing jumped out at me as being game killing, and was watching the VLDL D&D games which seem to work, though that seems to be mostly a good group and DM.

[deaddmwalking]

Ah, ok, thanks. Been looking at some rules and DND Beyond and seen a lot of "hey, what?" stuff, but nothing jumped out at me as being game killing, and was watching the VLDL D&D games which seem to work, though that seems to be mostly a good group and DM.

5E is the calcification of 'the rules don't matter, a good GM will fix everything' mindset. How your attack works and how you calculate damage is pretty clear, so the worst abuses of a bad GM don't come up. Basically, everyone is equally mediocre so it doesn't matter if the GM decides that Sneak Attack doesn't work RAW the way it did in 3.x. But things like deciding between feats or stat bonuses are really telling - the game doesn't have a coherent design philosophy. You can either have abilities or higher stats, but not both - we can't trust the game not to break - it's 20 levels of being a 2nd level character.

[Thaluikhain]

Ok, been looking through 5e and while there is a lot that just looks bad. In particular, they way attack spells either do or do not affect things other than creatures, seemingly depending on whether or not the writer remembered to put rules in for that. When it does affect things (eg "A flammable object hit by this spell ignites"), there's always the caveat "if it isn't being worn or carried".

Which, ok, it doesn't make sense, but I can accept that not having adventurers equipment risk being destroyed every fight is a worthwhile thing. And it makes it nice and simple and straightforwards, which is a plus.

Wondering what other people's thoughts were about that.

[Kaelik]

I mean that particular clause is just a general rule of all spells via the attended objects rules of 3.5.

I think everyone recognizes that you don't want to roll a saving throw for the Wizard's spellbook when a fireball happens and you also definitely don't want it to explode without a saving throw. Even before you have to start arguing if LINEN is flammable.