More Threads that make us Laugh, Cry, or Both

[Draco_Argentum]

That shit was such a mess I couldn't even find the stat penalties for girls. It wasn't in the damn ability score section. This is a turd reminiscent of FATAL.

[SunTzuWarmaster]

Alter Self, can we stop talking about it now?

[Username17]

1201450655[/unixtime]]Alter Self, can we stop talking about it now?

Well, at this point no one knows what Alter Self "does." After literally dozens of fixes, some of which layer on top of each other and some of which replace other fixes or whole sections of the text, it is now completely incomprehensible.

I have lost track. I don't know what the best forms are, I don't know what happens if you try to use it while polymorphed into a giant. I don't know what happens if you polymorph straight. I just don't know. No one does.

-Username17

[tzor]

1201423174[/unixtime]]I'm sure there are pedophiles out there that fantasize about halflings as "legal children", but I don't think that's what most people think...

And that, in a nutshell, is why I prefer my halflings the old fashioned Tolkien way, routund with hairy feet. Generally adult humans who have some form of Dwarfism, just to make sure that they are not in fact child like.

Q.V. Image: Velazquez-dwarf-don-sebastian-de-morra

[JonSetanta]

Alter Self, add or subtract up to two limbs, penises, boobs, etc, etc.
Ah, hand out magical Amulets of Alter Self as party favors on the weekend for an orgy and have some fun.

I skimmed the FATAL-like stuff by nonsi for 10 minutes just now and I want my 10 minutes back.
Didn't even see the 'girl stats suck' part, not that I care to see yet another assclenching grognard with keyboard access.

tzor: Friends and I have been using 'Tolkeinesque halflings' since AD&D and the 3.0 change to wingless pixies never deterred us. This 4e change is pretty much WOTC looking out at what players are actually doing and saying "Oh, well, halflings never were any different in the first place. They always were 4 foot tall, hairy foot, chubby little fuckers." and then we go out and get our new editions of Newspeak for Doubleplusgood gaming.

[Voss]

Except the 4e halfling isn't hairy footed or chubby. Its a 4' tall, thieving gypsy boat tramp that wears shoes and steals from people absentmindedly, like fucking kender. With dreadlocks. Visually its indistinguishable from a human, particularly in the Races & Classes pictures, since almost all of them have no other objects to determine the scale. The only thing that says 'hafling' is the caption.

[Captain_Bleach]

1201451833[/unixtime]]

1201450655[/unixtime]]Alter Self, can we stop talking about it now?

Well, at this point no one knows what Alter Self "does." After literally dozens of fixes, some of which layer on top of each other and some of which replace other fixes or whole sections of the text, it is now completely incomprehensible.

I have lost track. I don't know what the best forms are, I don't know what happens if you try to use it while polymorphed into a giant. I don't know what happens if you polymorph straight. I just don't know. No one does.

-Username17

I suggest taking out morphing in 3rd edition altogether, and substitute Illusion to make yourself look different.

Unless 4th Edition changes it, but I don't have very high hopes.

[Voss]

Not at first. It got hit with 'Its hard to fix, so we aren't going to put it in the first set of books.' Just like druids.

[Captain_Bleach]

1201484633[/unixtime]]Not at first. It got hit with 'Its hard to fix, so we aren't going to put it in the first set of books.' Just like druids.

No Druids in the core books? Hurrah!

[Leress]

1201488415[/unixtime]]

1201484633[/unixtime]]Not at first. It got hit with 'Its hard to fix, so we aren't going to put it in the first set of books.' Just like druids.

No Druids in the core books? Hurrah!

No, they are not in the first "core" book, but may show up in a later "core" book.

[Crissa]

Why the heck should kobolds learn faster because they die sooner? Or elves because they die later? That's kinda a flimsy complaint.

I don't care what gender biased junk someone has in their campaign. They're an idiot, I'll say such, and won't play by their rules.

-Crissa

[Koumei]

Regarding halflings: Some people play them for their paedophile fantasies. Sure. And as long as they don't tell me about it, I'm willing to let them do so. Others for their midget fantasies. Again, don't tell me about it and we're all good.

Some like the tolkien halflings for their hairy, ugly midget fantasies. And you know what? As long as they don't tell me about it, that's fine too.

I'm just as happy to give halflings the boot full-stop, and if we have to have a short race, replace them with goblins, skinks or mephits. But no matter what you do to the little fuckers, someone is going to get off on the idea. And that's fine, providing I don't have to hear about it.

The "adult humans who happen to be scaled down in size" is probably my preference there. Because they're just like anyone else, except... small. In a city game, you could even play them as somewhat bitter about being at ass-height, and at the same time have them sharpen their own teeth, with the background of "I was raised in the ghetto. I know how to fight. Yeah, you can knee me in the face. I can bite your bollocks off."

Polymorph: I don't see an issue with 100% character replacement, as in "hide your sheet. Pick up the monster manual. You are this, down to the last detail. You even lose any other spells affecting you."

So you're a smart human wizard, or a dumb, powerful troll, or you're made of fire, but you can't mix and match. Sure, you have the strength of versatility, but casters always had that, and instead of splitting it into a handful of spells, you rape Sorcerers *slightly* less.

Though in a 1-on-1 game I run, I seriously just let the (Sorcerer) PC more or less change into whatever with PAO, using the stat modifiers of the creature instead of his own, and generally abuse it beyond the rules. Because it's already high level, it's solo, this just means any given enconter is arbitrarily high-powered.

[JonSetanta]

As a DM in high school said about the halfling prostitute my young Aasimar Paladin refused, "They're tight, man. And here only 10 gold for one night."

[PhoneLobster]

Why the heck should kobolds learn faster because they die sooner? Or elves because they die later? That's kinda a flimsy complaint.

Because if your training times are long enough and your life span is short enough you essentially have enforced a level cap on that character.

Worse than a level cap. Because with the old 2nd ed racial level caps you stopped advancing but everyone else moved forward.

In this case at some point if ANYONE moves forward beyond your level cap you die of old age.

With up to 26 years easy of training time even humans at the upper end of starting ages may be looking at age modifiers by the time they are high level.

Throw in that there are strong suggestions that there are other time costs of a similar magnitude as training and you are well into your senility by level 20.

Meanwhile the elf laughs and laughs and laughs.

edit: Slow/Fast aging is bullshit fluff, and its a whopping great problem when it suddenly becomes a mechanical advantage like a level cap where you die or take whopping physical penalties.

Its the same reason spells with "aging costs" are bullshit unfair for elfs and kobolds.

[Absentminded_Wizard]

That's why I pretty much stopped reading that post after the declaration that "you *will* age during the campaign; I'll make sure of it."

[Crissa]

Uhh, 'level caps' because some race dies off early?

So what? When does that ever happen in a campaign?

You learn like a child until some age, you earn levels until some other age, and then you die. Who gives a rat's arse if a race doesn't have level thirty wizards 'cause they're not long lived enough? What, you hate elves or something?

If a campaign has aging, I don't mind. That's kinda epic. Some people like that. Why not? Travel times are 'enforced', why not task-times?

-Crissa

[SunTzuWarmaster]

I like aging in a campaign, because it is fun and flavorful. I don't like mechanical penalties due to aging because they aren't. Introduce the solution: in many books the wizards have already figured out how to stop or prolong death. When you get to a level where you deal with wizards regularly you can buy a potion of "extend life expectancy by 50%". They stack, and the wizards make giant pots of it and drink it in their coffee every morning.

There, aging, no penalties.

edit: run-on sentence, comma is a lousy excuse for a period.

[Koumei]

I don't like elf fanboys, and one of the common things they'll always bring up is "Elves are superior because, as they live for A ZILLION KAJILLION YEARS, they know everything."

When it comes to D&D, they whine that they have to start at age 100-200 without knowing the inner workings of the Universe itself.

So I more or less approve of anything that pisses them off, just by default.

[PhoneLobster]

Who gives a rat's arse if a race doesn't have level thirty wizards 'cause they're not long lived enough?

It's not about that sort of macro background stuff Frank likes to go on about. That's nice background but who cares?

Its about YOUR individual character right now dying and the other guy keeping the same character for the remaining climactic high levels of the campaign. Because he wrote elf on his sheet.

Its sitting down in advance and saying some characters only get to play 80% of the game.

Also enforced discrete training times are retarded for any number of other reasons. Do I REALLY need to explain?

[tzor]

1201524549[/unixtime]]I don't like elf fanboys, and one of the common things they'll always bring up is "Elves are superior because, as they live for A ZILLION KAJILLION YEARS, they know everything."

Ah the famous joke I heard often from the old original White Wolf Vampire game. On the one hand, vampires are "immortal." On the other hand there were only one or two vampires in any major metropolitan city who were older than one hundred years and if there really was a vampire who lived in the time of the Roman Empire he kept reall quiet about it and even then it was only his word about it all, you never could be sure.

I'm going to invert the argument for a moment. Kobolds really do learn "faster" than elves. It has nothing to do with the age when they die. It has to do with the necessity of getting children up to speed. The high mortality rate will cause a kobold society to bring a child up to speed faster than a society that has less pressures in population requirements. Max age for a kobold? Few kobolds ever reach anywhere near that age in the first place. DEATH is often for most non player characters the most effective limitation to advancement, not maximim age.

[Koumei]

"Player Character" is a natural cause of death.

I like to point out that elves are mentally impaired, and that orcs are actually really awesome at learning things quickly. Just, they don't learn quite so much as the others.

Or if it's a fanboy war they want...
Elf: I'm 200 and I finally got my 1st Sorcerer level!
Orc: lol, I'm 15 and I got mine.
Prismatic Dragon: I just hatched and I cast like a 7th level Sorcerer! Also, get me a sandwich, bitch.

[K]

I've always been of the opinion that Levels are not about learning from a book or mere practice, but about taking chances, finding new things and experiences, and testing your skills in novel situations.

I mean, I once fenced with an Olympic-level fencer in a three-on-three battle, and he died many more times than me. Thats because he was well practiced in a very limited form of combat, while I had been practicing in bridge battles, SCA, martial arts that emphasized attacks from several directions, etc. Sure, in one-on-one fencing he schooled me, but thats not going to help me if I need someone to cover my back in a street fight.

And honestly, of all of the old people you've met, how many really are experienced? They are just old and they never did anything interesting. Do they have amazing skills, or even proficiency that you can't acquire by being talented in the first place and then practicing for ten years?

Elves may live longer, but that doesn't actually ensure that they've done anything interesting. After meeting a lot of old people, I think it actually makes them cowards. They know that as long as they don't do anything stupid they can live for hundreds of years.

Kobolds actually need to take risks every day just to get fed, so I actually see them gaining levels faster than elves as well as reaching higher.

That being said, extending you life in DnD is actually easily done in a variety of ways. Not only are there PrCs that do it and let you stay mortal, but just taking a simple route like casting Reincarnate or living and adventuring in the Astral Plane will do it. Undeath is also an easy route, so while the elves may have mortal elven fighters and mages in the high twenties, any race can have vampires or liches in the same range (there is even a spell is 3.5 that stops aging for days at a time for the caster).

Playing a kobold doesn't even mean that you get to adventure less than an elf. In my experience, unless people start advancing the campaign by decades, they can go from level 1 to 20 in around three years of game time. Even if you do advance the game by hundreds of years, you can still come up with a plot reason why the kobold isn't aging. Turning him in stone would do it just fine, but there are a dozen other ways of keeping a kobold fresh as long as you don't expect him to gain levels.

[Koumei]

I fully agree with you there. Seeing as the DMG says you get XP for taking risks (and generally stabbing people in the face), your level mostly says something about how many risks you have taken and still survived.

I've often argued against the bonus to mental ability scores for being old. Any old people that really do come across as wise do so not because "Being old makes you wise", but because they've done a lot of things and experienced a lot. In D&D, that means they're a high level, and so they have useful information because of their level, not their age.

For every wise old person I've met, I've met at least one old fool. Also, it's stupid that sight and hearing improve with age.

[Talisman]

Read it before it's deleted

Apparently this guy wanted help breaking his GM's game because said GM wouldn't let him play what he wanted. He's edited his first post (out of frustration/damage control, I would assume), but apparently his original concept was some sort of deviant 11-year-old.

Oh, and he eventually admits to being a freaking cheater!

[Prak]

actually... it could be that elves don't so much learn more slowly, they just learn more stuff. So the first level elf is going to know pretty much the entire history of the race, because his race has time for that shit. The kobold doesn't know a damn thing about his race other than:

• 
  
• We hate gnomes
  
• All glory to Kurtulmak, and beyond him Tiamat
  
• We are dragonspawn
  
• Death to gnomes
  

The elf is probably going to ask his teachers many times "When do I learn ot fight?" and his teachers will likely reply "When you know why, and that is a very long and hard lesson whose execution is the history of our race". The kobold teacher will give his student the four bullet points above and then say "grab a stick, I'm teaching you to fight." Same for goblins, orcs, and pretty much any of the "savage" races, as they all seem to get the shit end of the stick with lifespans.