Annoying Game Questions You Want Answered

[Korwin]

Random question: does anyone remember details about WotC's Setting Search back in 2002, or knows about a blog or something about it? Since Eberron has been officially announced as a 5E release, I'd love to get some background on that setting, but I haven't found anything beyond the most vague of descriptions.

thetrove dot net ?
Might be too much information...

[Antariuk]

I don't mean Eberron splatbooks, I'm looking for information on how that setting came to be, what the Setting Search was like (rules-wise and such), and if there were any other strong contenders or a top 5 list of participating entries.

@Blicero: Thanks, I'll look for that Pyramid issue!

[K]

I don't mean Eberron splatbooks, I'm looking for information on how that setting came to be, what the Setting Search was like (rules-wise and such), and if there were any other strong contenders or a top 5 list of participating entries.

@Blicero: Thanks, I'll look for that Pyramid issue!

There was not. They picked someone in town who was a close friend almost like they were always going to do that and the whole thing was a marketing stunt.

There was no shortlist or mention of any other setting.

[angelfromanotherpin]

The process ostensibly went like this:
Round 1: ~11,000 one-page submissions. You can find a few of those on the rpg.net wiki.
Round 2: 11 applicants were asked to expand their one-page concepts to ten-page treatments. A few of these wound up being made into 3rd-party D20 settings, like FFG's Dawnforge and Goodman Games' Morningstar.
Round 3: Three applicants were asked to expand their ten-page treatments into 100-page 'setting bibles' before the final decision was made. WOTC supposedly bought the rights to all three, and have just sat on the non-Eberron ones because they've been unable to properly support the settings they have, let alone launch new ones.

[Iduno]

Why.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

I was gonna save my first post for something valuable like an introduction or opening up a discussion about game design, but what the fucking fuck did you just post and why does it just look like 5e with more grease.
That PDF is a merciful 97 pages, but after a cursory look at it, it IS 5e with more fucking grease, except it's also advertising to you constantly like you're reading a goddamn AD&D book. The PDF has so much money clearly poured into its art design that it almost makes me think I might actually see these books at my local gaming store.
At least the "Start Here" page literally tells you to go buy Wendy's before you play. Having your tongue in your cheek won't get rid of the flavor of shit.

[Whiysper]

Rage-to-content ratio checks out. Welcome to the Den .

[OgreBattle]

Colonel sanders has adventurer killed a man, KFC has more legitimacy to do an rpg

[JigokuBosatsu]

I run into Keith Baker every so often at my FLG, if I give enough of a shit to bother him I'll see if there are any juicy tidbits that aren't under an NDA or something.

[Korwin]

Just found out, that someone made an StarWars based on D&D5e...?

[tussock]

If you were designing a 3e classplosion hack with tiered classes, what would be the ideal levels to divide the playspace into? (Throwing out all the old classes) I was thinking probably 1-6, 6-12, and then 13-20. That way it lines up with vancian casting. But would 1-5, 6-10, 11-15, 16-20 be better?

1-3 is the NPCs, and maybe heroes start there. Brave souls.
4-9 is the path of the growing hero. Heroic champions.
10-15 is , fuck reality, woot! Immortal mastery. <- death and taxes stop working.
16-21 is the gods, you are gods. Epic ascendancy. <- everything else stops working.


But I put 6th+ level spells every 3, so 9th at L21. So with normal 3e full caster spell gain.
1-3, 4-9, 10-13, 14-17, and then stop playing because the game is well fucked already.

Note that most fights in the basic 3e monster manuals fall in the range of EL 4-13, and D&D does not function terribly well outside that even conceptually just because there's really not even that much to do (in part because 3e hid most of the classic low level stuff in weird places, and also AD&D never supported high level play in the first place outside pvp drama with castles and shit).

[DenizenKane]

I guess my question is too ambiguous. Do tiers need to be seperated by leadership? My idea was that when the stuff started to get crazy with 4th level spells, you could jump into a better concept. Maybe that doesn't work. What levels do people actually play that I should focus my homebrew "Tome" class efforts on?

Also, I wanted to drop the Wizard and Cleric type classes and make them more narrow and "balanced". So Necromancers, Illusionists, Elementalists, Pyromancers, Shaman, Paladin, Etc.

What kind of effects should I avoid?

I really want to run a fun 3e type game with my friends, and I want to homebrew them some fun classes to play. My GF wants to play an cecaelia "Sea Witch" and my other friend wants to play some kind of illusionist. I'll be using some kind of feat per session scheme.

What kind of campaign can you actually run with the parts of 3e/PF/Tome that work?

What levels are the most fun? If you had to stick to 1 level what would it be? How do you design fun encounters when the CR system sucks?

How do you handle the parts of the game that dont work? Like Stealth, Diplomacy, Illusion, Kingdom Management?

How far can you go before you might aswell write another monster manual?

[Kaelik]

I think you should ditch, if going from scratch, all "Teleport" effects and that everyone should have unique long range transportation abilities that are all different from each other in meaningful ways.

So you have the Windform person, the Tree Stride Person, the Firestride Person, the Mark and Recall Person, and stuff, instead of lots of options but actually teleport is better then all of them so you never use anything but teleport.

I'm not going to answer any other questions because I don't know the answers or they vary too much and I don't think my insight is useful.

[OgreBattle]

Denizenkane, it helps to imagine what challenges, monsters there are and how you want them to be fought.

Like are dragon scales harder than steel so you need to stab them in the eye, or Can a sufficiently brave lance cavalry charge skewer one?

Is scry teleSWAT something you actually want? If so what are the conditions, if not then don’t have it.

I like supernatural being natural, a blacksmith can make a bolt katana not because they can shoot seizure rainbows but because they’re a skilled blacksmith with the right materials

What does a war between two kingdoms with an ‘average’ amount of magic look like? What’s peace time life like?

Is wearing a sippy hat with attached potions actually super dumb or a feature?

[jt]

What kind of effects should I avoid?

What's your core adventure structure? What effects break it? If the main thing your players do is a wilderness adventure followed by a dungeon crawl, then:

Flight beats almost every wilderness challenge and many dungeon challenges.
Short-range LOS-limited teleportation beats some wilderness challenges and many dungeon challenges.
Long LOS-limited teleportation beats almost every wilderness challenge and the same dungeon challenges as short-range does.
Burrowing beats most wilderness challenges and some entire dungeons.
Walking through walls and short-range unlimited teleportation beat huge numbers of dungeon challenges.
Long-range unlimited teleportation beats dungeons entirely.

In terms of combat, all of these apply for avoiding monsters that can't do the same thing. If you actually need to kill the monster, they're only relevant if they allow a you-can't-get-me kiting strategy.

And you don't need to avoid these effects, you just need to postpone them until you've gotten enough mileage out of the things they automatically beat.

How do you handle the parts of the game that dont work? Like Stealth, Diplomacy, Illusion, Kingdom Management?

Respectively: handwaving, magical tea party, Silent Image is holograms, and I'd need to write a homebrew system for that when it came up.

Mind caulk is problem for a system - if the rules are unclear or janky enough that each DM comes up with their own ting, then whatever fun you have with those rules is actually the DM's work and not the system's. But as an individual DM and not a system writer, whatever works for you is fine.

How far can you go before you might aswell write another monster manual?

You don't need to write a monster manual as an individual DM. 3E's CR system is inaccurate enough that you'll have to be fudging things and checking for gotchas no matter what you do with it; this is just part of DMing a 3E campaign.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

I thought about making a new thread for this question, but I decided against it.

How many game have explicit retreat mechanics? PCs have a hard time knowing when to call it quits, especially in non-ancient D&D games and their spinoffs. I figure that if there's an express mechanic for fleeing combat in the rules, then players might feel more comfortable running away since they know the GM won't be pulling everything out of their asses.

The problems that I can think of with such a mechanic mostly involve the things that surround it: out of combat movement and chasing are the big ones. Nobody wants JRPG-style "hit retreat to go back to the dungeon/overworld" crap, which means that there should be ways of eluding/distracting pursuing enemies so it actually feels like you're running away and you have control over what's going on. The other issue is that most games I know of don't really elaborate on how quickly you move out of combat, just in it. It can be assumed that you move at the same rate, but is that really a safe assumption to make? Obviously it's not something you need to know all of the time, but having an idea of how quickly a group of adventurers traverse the wilderness, the dungeon, and the battlefield are important to make those transitions less clunky.

I'm really just kind of spitballing here, but it's an interesting puzzle to me.

[Tannhäuser]

OD&D and some other early iterations had mechanics for fleeing in dungeons. You could drop amounts of food and/or gold for monsters or intelligent enemies, and enemies had a chance to stop chasing if you turned corners or they ran past secret rooms and so on.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

I had those in mind, but they still seem incomplete to me.

[Username17]

I had those in mind, but they still seem incomplete to me.

That's because they are incomplete and unsatisfying. D&D runs a combat system with distinct character turns, and map inches and all that. The overland movement system is simultaneous and freeform. As such, the transitions in both directions are inelegant and require massive amounts of mindcaulk.

Even in editions where running away was considered normal and expected (AD&D and OD&D), the primary "mechanic" is to convince the DM that your character should get away. Distractions, holding actions, obstacles, and such forth are all encouraged, but they are also magical teaparty.

Now lots of games have rules for chase scenes, and some of them are even pretty OK. But it is always that transition point between the combat scene and the chase scene that is most difficult of all. Which is not to say that people didn't make it work. Remember that 3rd edition does not have parseable rules about how far apart monsters and characters are when the combat music starts, and people seem to make that work alright through mindcaulk and magical teaparty and DM Fiat. Doing the same for when the combat music stops and you go into a pursuit phase or whatever is inelegant but obviously workable.

-Username17

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Remember that 3rd edition does not have parseable rules about how far apart monsters and characters are when the combat music starts, and people seem to make that work alright through mindcaulk and magical teaparty and DM Fiat.

Woah, I hadn't thought about that at all, but you're right. I've never even seen anybody ask about that sort of thing before, it was always "Oh shit, the DM is writing on the map, we'd better tell him our marching order." Or they just outright tell you to put your minis on the map. It never occurred to me that the start of combat would also need clarification. We joke about the combat music starting, but it might help players in fringe cases to really know when the combat music is about to start and what they should do about it.

I guess to throw something out there and not just talk in theory, what if there was an entry next to combat maneuvers or something that was just straight up called Retreat and you can't use it until you are X meters/zones/whatever away from any enemies, and you explicitly leave combat with the intention of running and/or hiding? The problem with this is that it might seem a bit gamey unless you've got enough surrounding it to make the transition not need too much mindcaulk.

[Chamomile]

Just having good chase rules is not enough to get most players to consider seriously consider using them. A major obstacle is that the vast majority of GMs out there right now run games with the assumption that players will win every single encounter without exception, and will even rig the game (clumsily and in the open, if necessary) to make sure that happens. Even directly advising the players that running away might be a good idea in this situation isn't always enough to break through, and even when it is, you usually end up instilling the idea that some encounters are intentionally unwinnable, and players end up trying to guess at the GM's story structure and pacing to figure out when to run away, rather than what the monster is capable of. The implications of a world that exists as it is and players interact with it are not immediately obvious and take a while to sink into player intuitions.

[Kaelik]

Pretty sure that everyone raised on 3e knows to never run away because monsters have three times your move speed and you can't possibly escape. So a lot of characters refusing to run away and DMs not trying to make their characters run away comes from learned heuristics who's creation was justified.

[jt]

One of the challenges with retreat is that it needs to transition between boardgame mode and narrative mode. Adding retreat rules just postpones the point where your rules need to stop doing anything mechanical and instead output an improv prompt. The best way I know to do that is just a random table; it's still not great.

If you actually wanted to dump people from combat into another thing in boardgame mode, you'd need to have real, concrete rules for chases, stealth, and exploration. A game with boardgamey rules for each of those would be really cool, but also pretty far from what we're all used to.

[Omegonthesane]

I think like literally once I decided encounter distances by pretending the enemy had rolled 0 on their Hide check and determining at what proximity the penalty to the players' Spot check ceased to be so high that they didn't notice them anyway.

Which had no real basis in the rules and also too complicated to repeatedly use when you're not an actual computer.

[Username17]

I think like literally once I decided encounter distances by pretending the enemy had rolled 0 on their Hide check and determining at what proximity the penalty to the players' Spot check ceased to be so high that they didn't notice them anyway.

Which had no real basis in the rules and also too complicated to repeatedly use when you're not an actual computer.

That actually does have basis in the rules, but the distances involved are calculated radically differently in the PHB and the DMG. On a featureless plain, the difference is like three hundred feet.

-Username17