Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)

[Buckaroo]

Wargames Foundry has ancient civilian sets, and I believe that Eureka has a few items that are meant for dioramas.

I knew I was forgetting a company when I was looking myself, and Eureka is a new one to me so thanks!

 

[Tactical Wizard]

Show me people who think that 5e is slow and I'll show you a DM who lets his players dither and look at their phones. For all of it's faults, the death save rule being chief among them, it's an incredibly intuitive system. If I hear resistance, I know "Half damage, round down." If I hear advantage, I know "2d20, keep highest." And the game is like that outside of spells. There's no way I can remember all of those and edge case rules are rather rare so it's easy to improvise and make up a ruling on the spot and I rarely have to look anything up. As far as rolling for attacks and damage?

It's D&D. It's all the fucking same. You roll to hit against a target number and then roll damage. You just don't double on a nat20 and instead roll an extra die because WotC is terrified of making people do very simple math at the table for some retarded fucking reason. Seriously, roll back the death mechanics to 3.0e or earlier, disallow everything published after 2019 and you've fixed 90% of what is wrong with the edition.

 

[Judge Dredd]

Playing PF or 3.5 with people who don't know the rules is an awful slog like your example, but it doesn't have to be one.

Saying PF can be fast is like saying 5e can be deadly. It can be, but that's not the rules presented. I played for over a year, and the group had been playing longer than that, and I still didn't know what I was doing. This was especially true playing a monk. Spell casters were a mess of complexity, but at least that wound was self inflicted.

Modifiers can be pre-calculated to a degree, but the problem is the amount of floating numbers. Bards, buff and debuff spells and potions, transformations, weaknesses and resistances, magic weapons. On the surface it's not much, but it ends up with a tangled mess.

Anyone have a favorite character death?

I don't have many character deaths, but I have a couple of fun close calls.

5e. Level 1. DM rolls in the open. PCs step of the boat (literally, a ship wreck adventure). PC has 10hp to start. The captain survived, is drunk, and wants to stop the PCs escaping. First round of combat. Captain has the initiative. Fires heavy crossbow. Hits. Deals d10 damage. Rolls max. PC is down and bleeding out. He managed to survive, but it was memorable.

Savage Worlds. Horror setting. The PCs are outside a dilapidated house some cultists are using. One PC is on the porch when a cultist rounds the corner of the house, flanking the PC. Not wanting to be filled will bullets, and with no cover nearby, the PC dives through the window of the house, landing right on a bear trap.

Again though, you're just really picking your poison. OSR stuff does a lot of abstract language "Effects the entire room" - but doesn't define the maximum size of a room so you have your powergamer standing on the roof of the inn trying to argue his aural effects now have unlimited range because the outdoors is one big room.
The more time I spend looking and running B/X and looking at AD&D/2e, the more I understand WHY 3e/4e/5e are the way they are as they tried to solved problems the earlier version created and making new ones.

PF2 is like that too. They go autistic with tags and conditions to avoid that kind of argumentation, but instead it creates the opposite problem where as soon as an edge case comes up, or something isn't covered by the rules, the game derails.

This is also why I don't like necromancers, and flat out ban illusionists and enchanters. They are 100% DM fiat, and they either break the game in half, or I feel like I'm short changing them.

A story I might have told before was a 5e guy who took a spider familiar. Not a giant spider, but one smaller than a penny. This was a great choice for scoping out places, the problem was it was a constant headache to deal with since that guy would use it in all kinds of genius ways. In the end, I had a word with him between games and we agreed to make it tarantula sized. It was still really powerful, but he wasn't fucking my game up at least. I'd like to think I could handle it better these days, but I really don't know.

 

[Dante Alighieri]

https://x.com/Deviija/status/1800171308753264893

This is for retards.

 

[40 Year Old Boomer]

5e turns only take forever when the players are bad (phonefags or "duh how do i roll to attack again?") or if shit seriously hits the fan and tough choices come up. As far as pathfinder goes, I played 2e for the first time tonight and it went fairly fast paced. I really like the action economy in it, very versatile. I also watched one of my best friends roll an absolutely obscene amount of 1's and it was fucking hilarious.

 

[Wallace]

How about imposing a 30 second shot clock? If you haven't made your move by then, lose your turn.

 

[Judge Dredd]

A shot clock doesn't work because choosing a move is not the problem. When there is a delay in choosing a move, it's usually because there's discussion of strategy, which I'm all for.

Going back to my dumb Pathfinder example, the choice to do a simple attack is made quickly, it's all the modifiers, rules, and math that slow it down. In my PF example, that was just 1 regular attack action. It doesn't cover the abundance of action types PF1 has. Even 5e, which is much simpler, has move action, action, bonus action, and reaction.

So, let's say you have a party of 5, and it takes 2 minutes to resolve a turn. That's 4 PCs and the DM to go. That's still 10 minutes between you doing something, and then you doing something else. Maybe if a monster does something that requires a save you get to roll a die, but nothing "important" is happening. Even a third of that is still the length of an ad break in a TV show.

 

[Owlbear]

How about imposing a 30 second shot clock? If you haven't made your move by then, lose your turn.

IMO a combat round should generally take 2 minutes per person including the off-topic discussions and the dice rolls. I also don't think D&D or PF is very good at that, as a game system (too much math, even in 5e), but D&D players actually can learn the rules. It's a pretty big lift to actually learn the core rules of 3.5 or PF1, but you can do it.

I really think a big part of this is that you (the player) should not be out-thinking your PC. The idea of roleplaying falls out the window with players tryharding in every combat. If your PC has 8 int, just walk up and hit them like the dumb box of rocks you are. If your PC has 20 int, you've earned a bit of a think. Cutting off the strategy discussion, IMO, is actually part of this - a round is 6 seconds of real time, and a lot of players want to spend the first 15 minutes of that 6 seconds making a game plan.

I believe the 5e monster manual (and to some degree the 3.5 and PF MMs) was actually balanced around people tryharding, which doesn't help.

In my experience, 3.5/PF1 generally has more things to add or subtract, but 5e has a shit load of temporary modifiers to track - including counting your "advantages" and "disadvantages." PF2 does a better job (except for the part where it was written by woke trannies).

 

[Henri Barbusse]

https://x.com/Deviija/status/1800171308753264893

This is for retards.

This is what elves would look like if they were Chinese or Black.

 

[Gingervitis]

Posting in my favorite thread to offer some comedy:
View attachment 6063292
I couldn't help but cackle at the dude on the right's face.

What's the adventure about, you may ask? Well: African Nigga Hogwarts (Nogwarts to the erudite) produces some of the greatest wielders of magic in Golarion, and your one shot party of five are students! Find your lost teacher and solve a wicked mystery that threatens the existence of Nogwarts!

The best part about this is that the PDF is free and includes some pregenerated characters. Inquire within for some goofy character art and potential new KF forum icons.

The editor must have also found the cover art funny because the PDF uses that guy's face as a page header:

Spoiler

View attachment 6063308

Honorary mention goes to whatever this creature is:

Spoiler: Tolkien could never

View attachment 6063321

Thank you Paizo for this bounty of comedy. I'm sure this adventure about being students at African Hogwarts enticed many more blacks to the hobby, especially since it was released for free on Free RPG Day! I hope the thread finds this as funny as I did because discovering the existence of this adventure and that cover art made my day.

I am the thirstiest motherfucker when it comes to black women. I regularly lurk the brown woman threads on 4chan. How they manage to make one attractive black woman throughout the whole book is beyond my comprehension.

Anyone have a favorite character death?

My favorite death was in RIFTS, I created a crazy with Popeye syndrome ( with soy sauce )

The death was in south America (don't remember how we got there) anyway the team was at a bar with alot of anthropomorphic npcs. Our bar tenders were 3 weasels. So I started to knock on the bar "shave and a haorcut." The dm told me the weasels ignored me. I knocked it again, and was told nothing happened. I told him I used a bit of force for a 3rd time, still the weasels ignored me, said fuck it rolled the attack on one of them, got the roll and choked one pretty well, and then was shot In The head and died. My team looked at me and asked why I went murder hobo. I looked my team in the face and said." They are toons! They have to finish shave and a haircut!".
Stupid death yes. But I did love the stupidity of the game.

I had 2 deaths back in high school. Both in 5e too.

My first death had my Dragonborn Sorcerer casting burning hands into melee. My party immediately pulled a Lassie on him, and I failed my death saves naturally while the rest of the group turned their attention to the bandits they were ostensibly fighting.

Two abridged campaigns later, my newest character, a wood elf cleric/ranger with 8 intelligence (-1 to religion and nature checks!) and the rest of the party end up visiting the not!WWE to find that my character from the in-between campaigns, the half-orc barbarian I named Dave Conan, was running the show. So I decided to cast banishment on him, steal some important banking information (I assumed he had some on his desk), and embezzle everything. Unfortunately, Dave Conan succeeded on his wisdom save and tried to kill me. The rest of the party ran upstairs, saw the half-orc trying to murder me, and proceeded to knock my character out before beating me to make sure I failed my death saves.

Yes, I was a little shit in high school.

 

[LovisXVI]

I am the thirstiest motherfucker when it comes to black women. I regularly lurk the brown woman threads on 4chan.

I can respect knowing thyself and all, especially on this site and in this manner, but did you need to mention this fact?

 

[Quintus]

Anyone have a favorite character death?

In terms of character's I played? I've only ever had one die. He got Finger of Death'd to 0 hit points by Baba Lysaga. It was kind of funny I guess. He was utterly and completely insane. Though because I had out of game knowledge of Curse of Stradh, the dm would occasionally let me mix in actually useful information between the complete nonsense he would normally talk about. The best part of it was our cleric using speak with dead to contact him and ask if "what he was saying about the Great Cheese Wheel and the 3rd Pinecone War was true.".

 

[Janusz z Gliwic]

Anyone have a favorite character death?

Saw quite a bit of them because my GMs are sadistic powergamers but one stands out.
PF1e, we were fighting tiny but annoying fey in the tower, and it escaped up the ladder. Me, my animal companion and one more person followed, and it hid in a chest. Since the other person was an alchemist, I figured we could just set that chest on fire to kill annoying thing. Turned out, GM intended this to be treasure for us, and inside there was bag of holding. And a whole lot of alchemist fire. At least fey died too.

Other memorable death happened when I was GM-ing. Also PF1e, party was in submarine going to the bottom, and they were attacked. Some guys got out to fight, some stayed inside. After fight was done, one of the guys outside figured he'll scare those inside, he had transformation ability they didn't know about. But one of those inside was a rogue with busted sneak attack, and prankster didn't expect to be hit in the face so he counted as flat footed.

Regarding PF turn length, this is just absurd. It doesn't matter if it's me GMing, or my much more experienced friends, it's still taking eternity to resolve even simplest combat encounters. And we play online so we have everything precalculated.

 

[Judge Dredd]

It's a pretty big lift to actually learn the core rules of 3.5 or PF1, but you can do it.

The base rules aren't really the problem though. The game is fairly straight forward on it's surface. It's the multi car pile up of modifiers and intersecting mechanics that do it in.

The other problem is no one plays PF vanilla core. There's a shit load of expansions. eg, You have classes, then unchained classes which are the same but buffed. Then there's thousands of feats to choose from, and as a new player wading through them all is a nightmare. Made worse by these intersecting in unsuspecting ways, or some making others redundant. Our DM sent a PDF called Elephant in the Room Feat Taxes. It basically overhauled the feat system to make less shit, and actually manageable.

PF2 has this worse, but it's mitigated by players only having to choose from 4-6 options at a time. As a DM, I pretty much tell the players to figure out how their character works because I can't memorize all of it.

Cutting off the strategy discussion, IMO, is actually part of this - a round is 6 seconds of real time, and a lot of players want to spend the first 15 minutes of that 6 seconds making a game plan.

That part is fun, and the point of games like DnD is they're co-op skirmish games. Otherwise ditch the complex rules for combat. The strategy talk isn't really a problem because everyone is involved. Again, there are more involved skirmish games that don't have this slow turn problem.

 

[Pig Boss]

Saying PF can be fast is like saying 5e can be deadly. It can be, but that's not the rules presented. I played for over a year, and the group had been playing longer than that, and I still didn't know what I was doing. This was especially true playing a monk.

Modifiers can be pre-calculated to a degree, but the problem is the amount of floating numbers. Bards, buff and debuff spells and potions, transformations, weaknesses and resistances, magic weapons. On the surface it's not much, but it ends up with a tangled mess.

You may want to consider buying a CO1 monitor for the room you're playing in because, god damn, PF is not that complex. You should know your next move, know your available modifiers, know which ones are in play and have all of that ready for your turn.

 

[Gingervitis]

Cutting off the strategy discussion, IMO, is actually part of this - a round is 6 seconds of real time, and a lot of players want to spend the first 15 minutes of that 6 seconds making a game plan.

I mean, I like the strategy discussions. Tbh, I do wonder how much replacing individual initiative with side initiative would fix the problem of players zoning out when it’s not their turn.

I can respect knowing thyself and all, especially on this site and in this manner, but did you need to mention this fact?

 

[Overly Serious]

IMG_3977.png

Learn to thumbnail, you fucking kobold. The site struggles enough without having to deal with your 1,022x1432 barely compressed images.

I've never met any any sane PCs, so why wouldn't they wheel a shopping cart full of whatever garbage they've picked up like the murder hobos they are?

My reason for doing general encumbrance is simple: if you don't, the hoarder party will never toss anything and key/useful items will likely be lost & forgot in their inventory. If tracking a mule, hireling, or other livestock is too much of a headache, they can stop anytime they want. It's easy for them to sell their ass next time they get to town.

Here's my metric for how autistic I get: If the party/player will not bitch, complain, cry, protest, be pissy or otherwise sulk when I say "You lost a mule, that mule contained your most valuable loot and spare magic armor" then they do not have to track where which items are carried on each mule (I'm not going to do that, I'd just take an average, but with maybe two exceptions every player I've played with would immediately bitch when I start scratching items off their loot list "Wait no I wouldn't have risked that magic sword and the bag of emeralds on the last mule in the train!").
If they want to abstract out the mule train that's fine too, but only as long as they are not going to bitch, complain, cry, protest, be pissy or otherwise sulk when they want an item to use in combat and I say "no, you left that on your mules back in the last camp".

This is exactly the way things are. And it's brother the "I wear armour all the time" syndrome. No consideration of weight, comfort or social acceptability - the player insists they're always wearing their armour. Nor are they bright enough to learn. I had one fall in the ocean - I'd specifically asked what he was wearing earlier on. Promptly starts drowning and is forced to (with some lucky rolls) remove it and watch it sink to the bottom (no - you're not going to find it again a mile down in the dark). Two adventures later, they fall in the ocean and lose their armour. Yes - they were adventuring on an ocean world. End up on failing a couple of important social rolls because they decided they'd go into a restaurant in armour? Yes - yet again.

Never fucking learn which is why I ditched the group. It was just too depressing to watch them repeatedly bash their heads against a wall and fail over and over. If there wasn't a wall for them to bash their heads against, they would, metaphorically speaking, specifically seek one out.

So yes, I had to do exactly what @Ghoatse does and treat them like fucking children. If I ever pick up this hobby again, which is doubtful, I'm going to require an IQ test for all players. It wont weed out the annoying ones but it will get rid of some of the idiots.

 

[JJLiautaud]

Learn to thumbnail, you fucking kobold. The site struggles enough without having to deal with your 1,022x1432 barely compressed images.

the joke isn't nearly as funny without the massive chad yes.

 

[EleventySeven]

Anyone have a favorite character death?

Not so much the character's death but the aftermath. I played an exile from the evil empire tm in PF 1e's standard setting and when he died, he was visited by the goddess Iomedae who effectively represents the evil empire before it went bad and is the heir of the dead god he worshipped. He called her a bitch, a liar, and a false inheritor for having abandoned the evil empire's people in their hour of need and was only saved from being destroyed by the Goddess of the Dead's intervention. Good times.

 

[LovisXVI]

Not so much the character's death but the aftermath. I played an exile from the evil empire tm in PF 1e's standard setting and when he died, he was visited by the goddess Iomedae who effectively represents the evil empire before it went bad and is the heir of the dead god he worshipped. He called her a bitch, a liar, and a false inheritor for having abandoned the evil empire's people in their hour of need and was only saved from being destroyed by the Goddess of the Dead's intervention. Good times.

Likely saved by Pharasma because he was spitting facts, and she knew it. Real character.