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

[Kyle Parson]

A 6 is a Con 9.

I remember this one not so good looking pudgy girl that would go to cosplay shows, I found out that she has a boyfriend who lives all the way out in Indiana, dating has become severely unbalanced.

 

[Tactical Wizard]

We review Flying Circus tonight on Dice Scum. It's an interesting setting of a fantasy world of WW1 aerial warfare with magic, unfortunately compromised with Tumblr-inspired art and a PbtA system. Ready to see queer romance with fish people?!

The shape of water… Avowed… why is it always the fish people!

Like… “Come play our game! You’ll get a complete lack of heteronormativity! Genderqueer character design! Uwu softboi aesthetics!.. AND A WHOLE HEAP’A FISH-RAPIN’!”

 

[AnOminous]

Yeah, I play GURPS mainly, and I saw that the Steve Jackson Games profile on Twitter has the fag flag colors year round.

Wow. You actually found a large enough core group of people who play GURPS to play in one? I loved that, but was never able to put together a core group of autists who would actually agree to play GURPS.

My hat is off to you.

Because it's a hobby where you devote yourself to imagining yourself in a fictional world where you can be attractive, accomplished, and admired. It naturally appeals to losers.

That's the opposite of why when I was a PC, instead of a GM, I'd almost always pick insanely annoying socially undesirable characters like Lawful Neutral weirdoes, who were as annoying as paladins, but without the nice qualities paladins have.

I promise you, if you want to play an annoying character, Lawful Neutral is way better than Chaotic Stupid.

 

[40 Year Old Boomer]

I promise you, if you want to play an annoying character, Lawful Neutral is way better than Chaotic Stupid.

Why annoy just your fellow players when you can also annoy the DM by playing a LN Aaracokra?

 

[AnOminous]

Why annoy just your fellow players when you can also annoy the DM by playing a LN Aaracokra?
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When I was brought in to be an annoying PC, it was always because the GM literally imported me to be that.

I was literally the designated asshole. Like I had the location of the MacGuffin, and was such a total dick they knew they couldn't kill me, unless they figured out where the MacGuffin was by other means, a fun part of the campaign where I desperately begged for my life, and got killed.

"But Paladin dude, you can't just murder me, that's evil!" "I'll repent tomorrow!" [swings Vorpy]

 

[Judge Dredd]

Got to do some reading for my final (possibly) session of Pathfinder 2. The final boss is a powerful ghost. RAW, appears to be the same enemy they've fought a bunch, but with 3 health bars and a minion. They have to put all three status effects on her from plot items that have a save and are once a day iirc. Sounds a little boring, But not sure how to liven it up a bit.

My current thinking is to have her respawn indefinitely, but take more rounds each time, and at that point she auto-fails the save, but have it be a more involved process that means they have to set it up with actions.

I'm also going to say I dislike True Sight becasue I think it should be tiered or have some way of bypassing other than GM fiat "this negates true sight" but I digress.

I never had the true sight problem. For me it was the opposite. What is supposed to be fort knox the PCs find a way to completely circumvent. If it has doors, someone will mistform and slide through. Patroling guards? Invisibility and walk past them.

That said, I do like the idea of (I think it was Bloodbourne but I'm not sure) where high insight reveals all the invisible fucked up creatures all around you.

I've never heard anyone treat Mearls and Crawford as anything but retards but they are the only retards to include in your Mouth of God rules lawyering attempts so they get brought up a lot anyway.

It's a sliding scale of authority. The same way wokeies will tell you to shut up and that [popular character] being gay or black is the new canon, now don't have a leg to stand on. If anything, I see the opposite. That Mearls (not seen Crawford mentioned much) is a has been who only did some minor editing work and shouldn't be taken as an authoirty on anything. Usually as an attempt to dismiss his opinions on the current state of DnD.

They also offer insights into the design process. His little rant about the intention of bonus actions vs how they actually panned out is very revealing and interesting.

 

[p1138]

It's a sliding scale of authority. The same way wokeies will tell you to shut up and that [popular character] being gay or black is the new canon, now don't have a leg to stand on. If anything, I see the opposite. That Mearls (not seen Crawford mentioned much) is a has been who only did some minor editing work and shouldn't be taken as an authoirty on anything. Usually as an attempt to dismiss his opinions on the current state of DnD.

They also offer insights into the design process. His little rant about the intention of bonus actions vs how they actually panned out is very revealing and interesting.

Crawford is easily identified by so many people there's just no need to discuss him being a retard. No one likes his takes. Mearls on the other hand was basically in charge of the entire thing and could have provided a lot more input or better input and failed at doing so for many aspects. As an example, Mearls has been doing a bunch of interviews recently with the title 5e lead designer under his name. Here is one of those

Yes Mearls did seem to think that in hindsight the bonus actions screwed things up, but the reality is most of that comes from players looking to do something, wasting time finding nothing to do, and some of them then getting upset by that. Same thing with swift actions in pathfinder 1 except less of the playerbase was willing to sit around wasting time trying to find a way to use a swift action that they just didn't need to use. The problem is that in the same interview Mearls also goes full fucking retard complaining about the higher CR monsters just being boring sacks of HP, which they are. But maybe the lead designer could have taken a look at the MM during writing, identified that they were just boring sacks of HP and directed the team to fucking do something about it?

 

[The Ugly One]

Yes Mearls did seem to think that in hindsight the bonus actions screwed things up, but the reality is most of that comes from players looking to do something, wasting time finding nothing to do, and some of them then getting upset by that.

The problem with bonus actions is that an unspent resource is a wasted resource, and our brains naturally gravitate toward not wasting resources, thus my one player who frequently goes on desperate hunts to find bonus actions when he plays a character who doesn't have many or any. PF2's system is better (at least in the core concept, before exceptions start piling on) because you can always spend all 3 actions.

The problem is that in the same interview Mearls also goes full fucking retard complaining about the higher CR monsters just being boring sacks of HP, which they are. But maybe the lead designer could have taken a look at the MM during writing, identified that they were just boring sacks of HP and directed the team to fucking do something about it?

Because it seemed like a good idea in 2014, and after 10 years of experience, you've got the benefit of hindsight.

 

[Scream Aim Fire]

So, how's the Dragonlance setting in DnD? Worth getting in to, or no?

Saw some fairly negative comments about it a couple hundred pages ago, got me curious.

 

[#1 Hot Sauce of Kiwi Farm]

Every time I had slavery as a major element in a campaign, it was viewed as utterly repulsive, paladins (who were usually the leaders of the party) absolutely detested it and absolutely forbade it.

It's the mere existence in your universe that means you somehow support slavery. Idiots.

Imagine not enslaving and turning all those unproductive bandits, thieves ect into something productive. One campaign had my dark elf have a their own little prison industrial complex that made a tidy profit. Also helped get a foot in the door with nobility as they wanted to sell off their prisoners.

 

[strawberry15]

Because it seemed like a good idea in 2014, and after 10 years of experience, you've got the benefit of hindsight.

Bounded accuracy was a mistake. I can understand where they are coming from, but their assumption is bad. (a peasant army should have a chance to slay a dragon, so we want to limit bonuses to d20 rolls... what a stupid take.)

So, how's the Dragonlance setting in DnD? Worth getting in to, or no?

Saw some fairly negative comments about it a couple hundred pages ago, got me curious.

It is actually fairly interesting. I reccomend you looking at ad&d version. I believe they made many classes and races more fluffy in a beautiful way. Better than any settings that were published in the last 10 years...

 

[The Ugly One]

Bounded accuracy was a mistake. I can understand where they are coming from, but their assumption is bad. (a peasant army should have a chance to slay a dragon, so we want to limit bonuses to d20 rolls... what a stupid take.)

Bounded accuracy had nothing to do with the hypothetical scenario of ten thousand peasants all shooting shortbows in unison at an ancient dragon, something I have never seen at a single table in my life, and everything to do with having your main mechanic being to slide a uniform distribution all over the damn place being unintuitive. The range around which the scale could slide was constrained to make the numbers more comprehensible, not so that the one paste-eating sperg at your table could save up all his gold across a full year of gaming to hire a peasant army to kill Smaug with a single volley of arrows.

Regardless of what sort of RNG you build your game around, you will have weird corner cases, because dice-based rules systems aren't reality or even close to it, so singling out theorycrafted corner cases is kind of silly. They all have them. The ultimate test is whether the players could play the game and have a good time without constant GM intervention to unbreak fundamentally broken math.

 

[strawberry15]

Bounded accuracy had nothing to do with the hypothetical scenario of ten thousand peasants all shooting shortbows in unison at an ancient dragon, something I have never seen at a single table in my life, and everything to do with having your main mechanic being to slide a uniform distribution all over the damn place being unintuitive. The range around which the scale could slide was constrained to make the numbers more comprehensible, not so that the one paste-eating sperg at your table could save up all his gold across a full year of gaming to hire a peasant army to kill Smaug with a single volley of arrows.

this is the exact example they gaved in their now dead blog in 2013 when they said d&d next was going to be a bunded accuracy game.
they specifically ave this example to say we do not want you to require magical items, bonuses from outside forces to be able to hit a high level threat, we want a peasant to be able to kill a dragon, or a kobold to be a threat to you at every level. this is why we came up with bounded accuracy and we want everyone to be able to hit everything in every turn, is their explanation.
in their mind, they devised the possibility of a low level army of peasants with 0 to hit and 3 dmg to be able to kill a dragon even though it would be hard and deadly for them. this philosophy direclty resulted in bloated hp.

 

[The Ugly One]

this is the exact example they gaved in their now dead blog in 2013 when they said d&d next was going to be a bunded accuracy game.

It was an offhand hypothetical in a blog post that the community chimped out about until they were shitting blood, not the centerpiece of design, as it was never featured in a single module. People acted like the whole system was carefully tuned around mass-scale combat involving literally thousands of 1-HD, I mean CR 1/8 minions, which it obviously wasn't. The irony is that BA is not even why the peasant army can hit an ancient red dragon, as all ancient dragons have AC so high that peasants only hit on a critical. The peasant army can hit the ancient red dragon because they removed Damage Reduction, which was one of those odd 3e-isms that nobody really liked (2e dragon were immune to normal missiles once they were Old). The pants-shitters noticed this and sperged about how important DR is to make D&D playable, because otherwise players will raise up armies of twelve-year-olds to go defeat death knights or something. None of these things the pants-shitters feared ever happened.

The fact that the blog post wasn't even right on the details shows just how irrelevant peasant armies are to 5e design, yet 12 years later, people still act like the average 5e table has buckets of peasant minis strewn around.

in their mind, they devised the possibility of a low level army of peasants with 0 to hit and 3 dmg to be able to kill a dragon even though it would be hard and deadly for them. this philosophy direclty resulted in bloated hp.

The reason HP got bloated is the game is tuned around everyone having a roughly 50% chance to hit when an Nth level party faces a CR N monster, and the expectation that combat should last 3-4 rounds. The problem is that by 11th level or so, players do a shit ton of damage. Mass combat involving hundreds or thousands of peasants was never even playtested and had no bearing whatsoever on the HP numbers in the Monster Manual.

 

[Henri Barbusse]

If you raised an army of peasants to go fight a dragon, it'd break and run away the moment it got hit with dragon breath. Does 5e even have morale rules or is it assumed everone fights to the death or until the GM eyeballs it and says they should run or surrender? Though even without morale rules, dragon fear should make it difficult for armies to fight dragons without magical help.

 

[Oddjob OTP]

If you raised an army of peasants to go fight a dragon, it'd break and run away the moment it got hit with dragon breath. Does 5e even have morale rules or is it assumed everone fights to the death or until the GM eyeballs it and says they should run or surrender? Though even without morale rules, dragon fear should make it difficult for armies to fight dragons without magical help.

So Dragons in 5e are baked in with legendary actions, and the result is SOME cast fear as a legendary action instead of having a passive aura of fear. Which is probably more powerful in some ways (they can cast it once around every round with no "you saved for 24 hours you're good" stuff) but is less powerful in others (Fear spell is a 30ft cone).

Each dragon has different spells, only White and Black have fear. It's all a fucking grab bag, most are probably worse then fear on account of being single target but Silver has hold monster 1/turn which sounds like a fun way for a DM to force someone to reroll characters. And silver has paralysis breath if you fail twice so silver sounds like the ancient dragon most likely to score TPKs in general to me.

Anyway, if the GM was interested in defeating themselves with RAW a trained peasant with a short bow is probably going to hit on a 19 and crit on 20 (ancient dragon AC varies, some are lower) but do about 1 per round average. What the dragon can do about this is probably limited if the dragon is cool with standing there and getting pelted to death by thousands of peasants. They can just fly away though instead of trying to DPS race peasants.

 

[AnOminous]

If you raised an army of peasants to go fight a dragon, it'd break and run away the moment it got hit with dragon breath. Does 5e even have morale rules or is it assumed everone fights to the death or until the GM eyeballs it and says they should run or surrender? Though even without morale rules, dragon fear should make it difficult for armies to fight dragons without magical help.

My deal with dragons was if they invaded normie territories, it actually would eventually end with one of those ten thousand peasant situations. So dragons didn't do that, peasants didn't try that, and dragon-adjoining territories were usually at peace with the humans on the other side.

Neither side had any advantage in actually fighting.

My dragons were usually manipulating politics in the human realms to ensure they got lots of gold and gems.

 

[Adamska]

Saw some fairly negative comments about it a couple hundred pages ago, got me curious.

It's even more filled with characters that crowd the setting than Faerun, meaning there's less leeway and more plot to have to handle on the GM and the player's side respectively, and it has one of the most retarded takes on alignment and level caps I've seen personally.

I don't like Krynn, and I never cared for reading the novels, which are apparently the main draw for the setting.

 

[Corn Flakes]

If you raised an army of peasants to go fight a dragon, it'd break and run away the moment it got hit with dragon breath. Does 5e even have morale rules or is it assumed everone fights to the death or until the GM eyeballs it and says they should run or surrender? Though even without morale rules, dragon fear should make it difficult for armies to fight dragons without magical help.

The morale rules are optional but you don't really need them.

The moment the dragon uses its breath weapon while flying overhead, an army of peasants is immediately going to break and run to the hills. Safety in numbers goes away pretty quickly when the other side is 1 - flying much faster than you can run, and 2 - pelting your friends with fire/acid/ice/lightning and leaving only charred/frozen corpses in its wake. A single good breath attack from an adult red dragon would roast around 60 peasants if they were distributed in the standard 5' square formation. Casualties would be much higher if the peasants were packed more tightly. And that's without adding in the wing attack legendary action (another source of area damage) and its standard attacks (which will dismember/swallow peasants whole).

It's fun to argue things from a rules standpoint, but RPGs are still at their core games where the rules exist to facilitate the narrative, not the other way around. Common sense needs to be applied. Any GM taking that sort of scenario as anything other than a massive rout from the peasants deserves to be trampled by his players.

Now, if we're talking about a necromancer amassing a literal army of skeletons with shortbows to try to turn the local competition dragon into a pin-cushion... things get a little more interesting. Sure, the skeletons aren't immune to the dragon's frightful presence for some reason (let's just assume the aura of fear is supernatural) so on average only 5% of them are going to be standing and fighting after the first round, but the ones that are standing their ground will actually keep fighting without breaking so the fight wouldn't necessarily be a foregone conclusion.

 

[The Ugly One]

The pants-shitter argument against all this is that an ancient dragon's fear aura has a range of 120 feet, which is within longbow range of 150 ft. Typically, the breath weapon has a range of 90 ft. Thus all the peasants will coordinate with the Ready action to ensure they all volley when the dragon gets within 120 feet to try anything. One might go with a shortbow, but it has disadvantage on attacks beyond 80 feet. With the dragon's AC of 20+, peasants need to crit to hit, giving them just a 1/400 chance of hittting.

All of these theorycraft exercises take place in infinite planes with empty skies, of course.

If you raised an army of peasants to go fight a dragon, it'd break and run away the moment it got hit with dragon breath. Does 5e even have morale rules or is it assumed everone fights to the death or until the GM eyeballs it and says they should run or surrender? Though even without morale rules, dragon fear should make it difficult for armies to fight dragons without magical help.

Everything there isn't a rule for in 5e is covered by the DM's judgement. So let's say how I would deal with this should an absolute faggot at my table try the "army of peasants" trick to defeat an ancient red dragon, Smokey Steve.

Absolute faggot: I'm going to raise an army of peasants. 2,000 should do the trick.

Me: Okay, we'll use the tool proficiency rules. It takes 250 days and 250 gp per peasant to train them how to use longbows. Do you have 500,000 gp?

AF: Well, I was planning to have them do this without training. They should be proficient in shortbows.

Me: Sorry, "commoners" have no listed proficiencies, and I'm ruling they have no general proficiency in simple weapons. And no peasant will enter your service to fight a dragon without ensuring proper training, let alone if you're going to teach them to use a weapon that can't quite hit the dragon at his range of effect.

AF: But the math clearly shows that...

Me: Math? Peasants can't even read!

AF: Fine. I'll...sell some of my magical gear.

Me: Oooh, yeah, that's gonna take a few months to find a buyer, and you're going to need to travel to the capital to do that. Oh, and don't forget 2000 longbows at 50 gp each is another 100,000 gp. Plus 4,000 gp for arrows and quivers. Training 2,000 men will also require hiring 200 instructors who, at 2 gp per day each, will cost you another 100,000 gp. That's a total of 204,000 gp.

AF: This isn't RAW! You're a dick!

Me: Oh no, we're still entire within RAW still. 2 gp/day is a comfortable lifestyle, and someone skilled enough to instruct new troops and willing to hire himself out will expect a decent living. So currently, the bill is 704,000 gp for your peasant army. The army, of course, will expect to live in something better than their Poor dwellings to make it worth their while, so 1 gp per day for 250 days times 2000 peasants...that's another 500,000 gp. So we're up to 1,204,000 gp to train your peasant army.

AF: BUT I READ IN A BLOG POST FROM 2013 THAT I COULD DO THIS!

Me: And you can! Although I should let you know that the typical treasure hoard at this level has in the neighborhood of 10,000 gp worth of coins and gems and perhaps 2 or 3 magic items.

AF: Ugh. Fine. I just don't want to wait until I'm high level to confront the dragon.

We roleplay out this absolute faggot selling off his most treasured gear to build his peasant army. Some weeks of game time pass.

Me: It is midnight. Your army camp is slumbering, with a few night watchmen on patrol. It's been another hard day of training, and your men need their rest. You and your night watchmen are surprised by a sudden attack. Roll initiative.

AF: What? Who's attacking us?

Me: A 90' x 90' area of your camp is instantly incinerated, a cone of fire licking up into the night sky.

AF: What the fuck...?

Me: Ah, apparently, everything you've been doing rather publicly over the last month or so to try and kill Smokey Steve has gotten the attention of none other than...Smokey Steve. End of the first round. Second round, nothing happens.

AF: Well, let's go out there and attack!

Me: It's midnight, and he's well over 30 feet away, so you can't see him or hear him as he glides around.

Over the next few rounds, Smokey Steve proceeds to kill the absolute faggot's entire peasant army.

Me: Ah, well, at least you hadn't spent all that gold yet, right?