Annoying Game Questions You Want Answered

[hyzmarca]

Are there magical negros and cunning orientals in Call of Cthulhu?

Yes. But the the magical Negros are all evil.

[virgil]

The Tome's Thief Acrobat - their Aggressive Stealth ability. They don't get HiPS or equivalent, so don't they get auto-spotted anyway, making the "ignore -20 penalty" kind of useless?

[Mask_De_H]

What about "I can't believe it's not an Evocation", Incendiary Cloud?

It does lower damage, while having worse range and effect area than Ice Storm and allows a save, but it's a legit DoT with added crowd control that isn't Solid Fog good. Probably 3rd level, like Ice Storm.

[Zaranthan]

The Tome's Thief Acrobat - their Aggressive Stealth ability. They don't get HiPS or equivalent, so don't they get auto-spotted anyway, making the "ignore -20 penalty" kind of useless?

You can hide in shadowy illumination, as it grants concealment. You can also use hide to move from one piece of cover to another in a single action, and being able to run vastly increases the distance you can reach when doing so.

[virgil]

http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spell ... nt-scroll/

I'm trying to wrap my head around this spell for someone using shadow evocation

[OgreBattle]

Did someone run a Shin Megami Tensei Persona themed After Sundown game on here? Thought I read a thread detailing the sessions on here years ago.

[Trill]

http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spell ... nt-scroll/

I'm trying to wrap my head around this spell for someone using shadow evocation

Well,

You transfer the power of a scroll to the target so that it comes into effect under some condition you dictate. Casting this spell destroys the scroll, but allows the spell in it to be triggered in a manner similar to the contingency spell. The spell on the scroll must be a spell on your spell list, it must affect the target of this spell (the target of this spell is considered the caster of the scroll), and its level must be no higher than one-fourth your caster level (maximum 5th level).

Level bard 5, sorcerer/wizard 5[...]You tap energy from the Plane of Shadow to cast a quasi-real, illusory version of a sorcerer or wizard evocation spell of 4th level or lower.

For starters, the wizard casting the Contingent Scroll Spell has to be lvl 20. The person it's cast upon then gets Shadow Evocation with a Conditional to use it. I personally would say you have to determine the spell it casts when using Contingent Scroll. So e.g. the person it's cast upon gets Shadow Evocation (Fireball) with having to say "Bibbity-Bobbity-Boo" to cast it

[Koumei]

Trill: I think the question is "What happens when I use Shadow Evocation to shadow-cast Contingent Scroll? How do I partially turn a Scroll into a contingency?"

[Omegonthesane]

"It's a ~Shadow~ Contingency, it's only 40% effective if that makes sense or has only a 40% success rate if it doesn't" is what I think might be the sensible answer, but I pulled that out my ass and don't even know how shadow evocation normally works beyond vaguely "spells are X% real".

[virgil]

Trill: I think the question is "What happens when I use Shadow Evocation to shadow-cast Contingent Scroll? How do I partially turn a Scroll into a contingency?"

Close. The scroll is a material component, which you get to ignore with shadow evocation. So you can create a contingency of any (level/4)th level spell on your list that can target the caster. How does a shadow enlarge person work? What about a shadow fell animate ray of frost (triggered when at low enough hp for it to kill)?

[DSMatticus]

The affected creature voluntarily fails its saving throw against shadow evocation, and then voluntarily fails its saving throw against contingent scroll, and now a very real scroll has been destroyed in order to create a very real contingency on the affected creature.

Except, of course, there's no indication that shadow evocation requires the same components as the spell it emulates. In fact, shadow evocation's components are explicitly listed whereas its range, effect, and duration are the "see text" references you would expect. But shadow evocation does the use word 'cast,' which suggests it may invoke the ordinary procedure for casting the emulated spell and thereby require its material component. Genuinely unclear.

Also worth noting that as far as I have ever been able to tell metamagicked spells are not necessarily unique spells. You cannot shadow evocation a fell animate ray of frost, because fell animate ray of frost isn't a spell. Ray of frost is a spell, and fell animate is a thing you did to that spell.

[virgil]

Also worth noting that as far as I have ever been able to tell metamagicked spells are not necessarily unique spells. You cannot shadow evocation a fell animate ray of frost, because fell animate ray of frost isn't a spell. Ray of frost is a spell, and fell animate is a thing you did to that spell.

But can you put a metamagic'd spell onto a scroll, which you then attach onto with contingent scroll?

[DSMatticus]

Pathfinder specifically allows you to use metamagic feats during item creation, yes. I completely failed to process anything in your parentheses because ray of cold happens to be an evocation spell and the notion of 'quasi-real, illusory' Schrodinger's zombies was sufficiently interesting to completely derail my attention span.

[Koumei]

Does Fell Animate exist in PF other than the "It's in 3Ed so we get to port it over" ruling that doesn't tend to actually hold?

[virgil]

Not that I can tell.

[Prak]

Ok, so I'm working on "MonsterKin Antifa: the Game." I'm looking at using AS rules, because it's sort of the go-to for improving "White Wolf" games.

If a game like this is self-contained, and so the only supernatural creatures are all one lineage, in this case, people who have become children of figures like Echidna and Lilith, how many types is too few, and how many is too many? Three seems like too few choices for splat, five feels like I'm just aping NWoD for no good reason. Thirteen seems potentially excessive, and there probably isn't enough variety of primordial monsters to actually fill out 13 types.

If I go with "one type per mother of monsters" that has its own issues, because it, so far, leaves vast swathes of the world unrepresented because so far I have a lot of difficulty finding Mother of Monsters figures in American, African and Asian myth. We wind up with two European ...lets call them branches (Angriboda and Echidna), two middle eastern branches (Tiamat and Lilith), a Buddhist branch that feels... over simplifying to say represents all of Asia (Harita), and a South American branch if I shove some game caulk in a mythology (Coatlicue).

[Trill]

I'd say 9
one for each in a party of 6, plus some small overhang
So with 6 people you can have everyone play a different monster, with some still being open.
and with three people you can have that and run three completely different groups of monsters

[hyzmarca]

Ok, so I'm working on "MonsterKin Antifa: the Game." I'm looking at using AS rules, because it's sort of the go-to for improving "White Wolf" games.

If a game like this is self-contained, and so the only supernatural creatures are all one lineage, in this case, people who have become children of figures like Echidna and Lilith, how many types is too few, and how many is too many? Three seems like too few choices for splat, five feels like I'm just aping NWoD for no good reason. Thirteen seems potentially excessive, and there probably isn't enough variety of primordial monsters to actually fill out 13 types.

If I go with "one type per mother of monsters" that has its own issues, because it, so far, leaves vast swathes of the world unrepresented because so far I have a lot of difficulty finding Mother of Monsters figures in American, African and Asian myth. We wind up with two European ...lets call them branches (Angriboda and Echidna), two middle eastern branches (Tiamat and Lilith), a Buddhist branch that feels... over simplifying to say represents all of Asia (Harita), and a South American branch if I shove some game caulk in a mythology (Coatlicue).

Just make everyone a Steve. You're going to have some people who want to be minotaurs, and some people who want to be chimeras, and some people who want to be dragons, and some people who want to be giant apes, and hydras, and gorgons, and dinosaurs, and there are too many Steve type monsters that people will want to be. Son't bothing with lineages or things like that. It doesn't add to the game.

[Prak]

I was leaning towards Steves in loose thematic groupings, but... yeah, plain Steves with the Mothers of Monsters just being fluff is probably better.




So, I just broke up with my femmefriend, who's game I was playing in Thursday nights, and she needs some space. Clearing up my Thursday nights. I'm kind of leaning towards running a casual meat-grinder dungeon for a few people.

What I'd kind of like to do is have each person make six characters to have at the ready, but 3.X characters take a lot of time to make. Does anyone have any suggestions (including "just use 5e, it sucks but it works better for this") for how to handle that, or suggestions of meat grinders that are fun?

Edit: note, I could make a meat grinder dungeon, but the idea is to be able to offer another game for people without adding significantly to my own work load.

[Trill]

Use an OSR hack? AFAIK they are a thin coating of rules on a ball of MMI, so there shouldn't be that many difficulties in making characters

Keep in mind that this is mostly based on hearsay.

[Omegonthesane]

You strange lucky person having a bunch of people to run a meat grinder with

More seriously unless you want "try out lots of different builds" to be part of the experience, my inclination would be to use the system you're familiar with and hack in an excuse for respawning. Assuming of course the players don't have any suggestions - while I ultimately didn't bother with the GiantITP Tomb of Horrors thread I found, I decided I'd justify my endless respawns by playing an entire order of identically statted monks sent in one at a time rather than whatever the official explanation was.

[hyzmarca]

I was leaning towards Steves in loose thematic groupings, but... yeah, plain Steves with the Mothers of Monsters just being fluff is probably better.




So, I just broke up with my femmefriend, who's game I was playing in Thursday nights, and she needs some space. Clearing up my Thursday nights. I'm kind of leaning towards running a casual meat-grinder dungeon for a few people.

What I'd kind of like to do is have each person make six characters to have at the ready, but 3.X characters take a lot of time to make. Does anyone have any suggestions (including "just use 5e, it sucks but it works better for this") for how to handle that, or suggestions of meat grinders that are fun?

Edit: note, I could make a meat grinder dungeon, but the idea is to be able to offer another game for people without adding significantly to my own work load.

Tomb of Horrors. If your players havn'e studied it, then it's a classic meat grinder (if they have then it's pretty easy). It's also been converted to every edition, but I would suggest the original. Not for grognard reasons, but because if you're going to do a meat grinder and want to put in minimal effort then you might as well go with the classic edition of the classic meat grinder.

[Prak]

I was going to go with a "this dungeon is used by a nearby town as a trial by fire for criminals" premise to explain both the lethality and new characters being introduced as needed.

I was definitely leaning towards Tomb of Horrors for module. The fact that it's been converted to every edition helps since I may wind up going 5e just so people can roll up a six pack of characters sometime this month.

[Emerald]

I've run a meatgrinder dungeon crawl like that in 3e before, in our case with one primary PC and 4 backups apiece. It's definitely doable, as long as you buy into the meatgrinder premise and are okay with not having a full set of hand-crafted artisanal PCs for everyone.

For my campaign. we randomly generated 30 PCs (5 for each of the 6 players), with random stats (4d6b3 in order), random race, random class, random skills (N class skills with max ranks in each), and so forth. I wrote some scripts for this, but there are a ton of random NPC generators online that would work too. Each player then claimed four of them and fleshed them out. They picked feats, spells, ACFs, and such and wrote backstories for two of them, a primary PC to be in the starting party and a secondary PC that had some sort of backstory connection to both their primary PC and one other primary PC to facilitate bringing them in later. For the tertiary and quaternary PCs, they just wrote a quick backstory for each with some hooks as to why they were adventuring in that dungeon before and might have been captured/mind-controlled/petrified/etc. The last set of 6 backup PCs were left completely backstory-less and unclaimed by any player.

The secondary PCs were placed at the nearby town (or at least in the general area for nature-y or loner types) while the tertiary and quaternary PCs were placed in the dungeon to be rescued, often in groups of two to four like a TPK'd adventuring party, and when some were encountered I chose which specific PCs they were based on the current situation (so if Bob had just lost his second PC and was currently character-less, surprise, two of the four petrified adventurers were his PCs). If someone ran through all four of their PCs, they started dipping into the communal pool; this only happened to one particularly unlucky player in my group, but he ran through two or three of them.

The key to this setup was that feats, spells, ACFs, and anything else for the tertiary and later PCs were left undefined until they were rescued, saving a lot of generation time up front and also helping out anyone who'd died a lot. Your first two characters both died to undead on this floor? Well, obviously the half-orc ranger you rescued was specialized in undead-fighting, why else would he be in this particular place in this particular dungeon? Placing them in the dungeon also helped with the campaign format, since the party didn't have to leave the dungeon when Sir Dwarfington III died to go pick up Sir Dwarfington IV and also I could drop hints and tips for particularly lethal parts of the dungeon that were giving the party trouble with the justification that one of the rescued PCs had encountered that hazard before they were captured.

[Nebuchadnezzar]

One could put a Paranoia spin on Tomb of Horrors easily enough. Friend Cosmic Abacus hasn't received a status update from the Indigo in Subterranean Facilities Development since they met with Residual Human Resources, and a team of troubleshooters is sent to ensure any new construction is in accordance with IEEE(Institute of Esoteric and Eldritch Engineers) standards. Each clone in a player's six pack could have a different mutation about which they are reluctant to let others learn, expressed as a randomized 3/day spell-like, or an inherent magic item. Characters could also each have a secret agenda, played for laughs (ooze independence) or not (getting a copy of RHR Handbook so as to file a transfer).