The Gaming Den

Darth Rabbitt wrote:IIRC there was a Swanmay prestige class in BoEF.

Don't remember if it was any good though; but judging the book it came from I'd guess not.

Yeah, there is. Gives you "Wildshape, swan only", SR 12+class level, Wild Emp., Favoured Enemy, low light vision, Speak With Animals (@w), Charm Person (3/d), Speak With Plants(@w), and Charm Monster)2/d) as spell likes, some fey traits, and advances spell casting 9/10.

Full BAB, and Good Fort, 4 skill points

Not terrible, actually a pretty good class it seems. It just has dumb requirements, namely two vows.

But basically it's a druid/ranger PrC which allows you to turn into a swan. It has... practically nothing to do with the Swan Ma(y/iden) myths.

FrankTrollman wrote:It lives in the Astral Plane, and it is full of explosive fluid that sometimes just goes off for no reason. I don't even know what to say.

The Astral Plane is in some sense the space of minds, right? I guess it says something about the mind of the writer.

FrankTrollman wrote:It lives in the Astral Plane, and it is full of explosive fluid that sometimes just goes off for no reason. I don't even know what to say.

-Username17

I know what to say. Roll me up a character now.

So, does the Bestiař have stuff like orcs and goblins in it as well? Did they do the old edition thing of breaking down what percentages of various weapons they use, and then stat up women and children as well?

RobbyPants wrote:So, does the Bestiař have stuff like orcs and goblins in it as well? Did they do the old edition thing of breaking down what percentages of various weapons they use, and then stat up women and children as well?

OK, there are several sections, and the monsters are arranged in alphabetical order (by first letter only, so Duch Obraza comes before Dabel) within those sections. And each of those sections has a subsection divided off of it where the monsters that go into it are in their own alphabetical order (kind of). These subsctions have their own introduction and rules section, so it's really exactly like it was a whole new chapter except that the header at the top of the page that tells you what chapter you are in does not change.

It goes like this:

• Real Chapter: Animals
  Quasi Chapter: Dragons
  Real Chapter: Humanoids
  Quasi Chapter: Lycanthropy
  Real Chapter: Magical Beasts
  Quasi Chapter: Undead
  Real Chapter: Fanfic about named character monsters in the world.

There is no particular rhyme or reason why any creature gets put into any particular section, as you might have guessed by the fact that Dragons are a chapter of their own that is inside the animals section. The animals section includes such crowd favorites as lions, halucinogenic frogs, kraken, and giant fucking crabs - but it also has things which very clearly have magical powers like the Sirit who are these parasites that look kind of like the Face Huggers from Alien, except they are all smooth and molluscish instead of having chitin, and they burrow their tentacles into their hosts like roots and then psychically control them instead of laying eggs down the throat. Actual Hapies and "Ents" (not "Treants" because fuck Tolkien's Estate's Copyright) are in there under "humanoids" while a bunch of the "magical beasts" are basically humans with magical powers. Including the "Mask" - who as I understand it is literally just a crazy dude wearing a magical and evil mask.

Why does a Dryad go into Humanoids while an Astral Demon goes into Magical Beasts? I don't know. Many of the Undead are also basically humanoids, but they are all in the Magical Beasts section too (at least, kind of). They aren't all even ugly or evil, as I mentioned before, Angels are in the Undead section.

But as to the question of how it treats creatures who use weapons, (un)fortunately it just lists their damage as "by weapon type". It doesn't even give you an example weapon they might carry based on their cultural predilections and ability to meet strength minimums (and I have yet to see a weapon list that includes a weapon big enough to fully utilize the strength of the Strength 16 Fog Giant). Creatures with natural weapons are given damage values and an explanation of what they are doing that damage with. So the wereboar does his damage with "hooves and tusks" while the giant fucking crab does its damage with "pincers". Remember that in DrD+ you always roll 2d6 and add a number, so damage values are literally just a single number. Most of those damage values are in the 1-3 range, with spikes for monsters that rip your face off. The giant fucking crab does 8 damage, many of the Dragons do 9, and so far the absolute most ridiculous monster I have seen is the Weretiger, whose teeth and claws do 11 damage. For comparison, in Swan form, the mighty wereswan does 2 damage with their beak (yes, it says "zobák", which means "beak").

On a final note looking through these damage values, I actually found something that does ѱ damage. It's a Mirror Demon, and its claws do its Willpower in ѱ damage, whatever that means.

Weirdest monster so far is probably the Paramit. It's shaped roughly like a gorilla, and gets by by pulling itself forward with its front legs and making erratic jumps. It also has a spinneret on its butt that makes webs that it does not seem to use in combat. It has six jointed mandibles coming out of its face that all move independently like sharp, grasping fingers around a lamprey mouth. These things are about the size of a large dog or medium pig, and are more afraid of you than you are of them. When you get too close, they hop around, hissing and whistling. If you don't back away, they may panic and lap on you, blender face first. These things are specifically mammals.

-Username17

Picture please!

FrankTrollman wrote: On a final note looking through these damage values, I actually found something that does ѱ damage. It's a Mirror Demon, and its claws do its Willpower in ѱ damage, whatever that means.

...you know, maybe it's a whole lot simpler (and more annoying) than first thought: maybe ѱ == psi == it does Psi (Psychic) damage? From the sound of it, they are okay with using the common abbreviation of psychic to psi, then going "Oh, there's a Greek letter for that, let's use that!" and just assuming everyone will know.

And they wouldn't be the only people in the world to think "Psychic damage" means anything and to assume people understand what the fuck they're on about: Pokemon, 4E

I go with the whole '700' someone proposed a while ago. Although given the values of this system, I suspect it means 'your mum' in this context.

For anyone who wants to try this at home...

There's a (I think!) legal site here where you can download a quickstart version of the DrD rules.
http://www.altar.cz/drd/
Have been having fun copy-pasting sections into Google Translate to see what I get. The secret of ѱ remains elusive, however.

FrankTrollman wrote:Weirdest monster so far is probably the Paramit. It's shaped roughly like a gorilla, and gets by by pulling itself forward with its front legs and making erratic jumps. It also has a spinneret on its butt that makes webs that it does not seem to use in combat. It has six jointed mandibles coming out of its face that all move independently like sharp, grasping fingers around a lamprey mouth. These things are about the size of a large dog or medium pig, and are more afraid of you than you are of them. When you get too close, they hop around, hissing and whistling. If you don't back away, they may panic and lap on you, blender face first. These things are specifically mammals.

That... that's a direct rip of the Paramites from the Oddworld video games. Right down to how they drop into screen on webs and have a 'don't-corner-me' behavior (unless they outnumber you).



Do they also have the Scrabs?

...I forgot about those things (and indeed, the games). That is FANTASTIC.

What ARE the copyright laws in Czech Republic like, anyway? Are there any? Or does it do some lovely parody of the anti-piracy warnings on DVDs?

"Downloading pirated movies (or ripping of people's designs or whatever) is STEALING. Stealing is... oh shit, Czechia, not a crime, never mind."

Its like Limbo of the Lost, done the right way. Im am so sold on this

Something I just discovered recently: the "psi" Greek letter? Apparently it's "phi", and is one of those stupid irrational numbers like pi. As in it's part of a ratio and continues on for ever as a decimal.

So clearly the game has a form of irrational damage. We now have the worst damage roll ever. In before Pathfailure adopts this and you get things dealing 1d4+pi

No, Psi and Phi are totally different. Phi is the golden Ratio and it looks like this: ϕ. The letter in the book is definitely a Psi. A Psi looks like this: Ψ. It's really quite easy to tell them apart.

-Username17

Ah. The book I have uses some weird font, where phi looks like psi. My bad. So... looks like the best I can think of is still "It's psychic type damage like in Pokemon."

You think that's bad? I had math discussions in college that were super-heavy and involved lowercase xi, zeta, and sigma.

That's ξ, ζ, and ς. They're basically all the same cedilla ç with none, one or two curlies on top. Fuck them. Fuck them collectively.

Lawd, I remember functional analysis.

But your sigma is wrong; lower case sigma is sort of a circle with a horizontal overhang on top (how the heck do you get symbols here?), uppercase is like a strange looking capital E (much like in English, lower case and upper case letters don't necessarily look the same).

Doom wrote:Lawd, I remember functional analysis.

But your sigma is wrong; lower case sigma is sort of a circle with a horizontal overhang on top (how the heck do you get symbols here?), uppercase is like a strange looking capital E (much like in English, lower case and upper case letters don't necessarily look the same).

The sigma he posted is the form used at the end of a word (e.g. Oδυσσεύς = Odysseus).

Neat; in math classes, you don't spell alot of words with Greek letters, so I never knew they could change at the end, as well as beginning, of a word.

I only recognize it from its TeX incarnation, \varsigma.

At least we're not using Arabic.

Koumei wrote:Something I just discovered recently: the "psi" Greek letter? Apparently it's "phi", and is one of those stupid irrational numbers like pi. As in it's part of a ratio and continues on for ever as a decimal.

So clearly the game has a form of irrational damage. We now have the worst damage roll ever. In before Pathfailure adopts this and you get things dealing 1d4+pi

Psi is the wave function. Expecting people to do quantum mechanics to calculate a damage roll does seem to fit the rest of the game.

I think Psi is simply the mind-affecting type.

So if you have damage reduction psi , it means you are immune to mind-affecting abilities.

If you have Psi damage, you deal mind-affecting type of damage. (like empathic transfer).

Keith Baker (the creator of Eberron) now has an bi-monthly article at The Escapist... and the first one talks about good old Draci Doupe. Best part? They are apparently releasing Draci Doupe 2 in Eastern Europe in 2011!