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

CrunkLord420 said:
Anyone have recommendations for a free/lightweight drag-tokens-around-and-scribble app? Been using Excalidraw, I only wish it had layers.

btw I hope you guys don't actually pay money for text.
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I thought you were a computer programmer. Make it your damn self. But map tools pretty good. Fantasy Grounds and Forage is what I use. Sorry Foundry.
Also, is the only person who played did actual game design. I don't give a fuck about stacking bonuses. Yes, we took out a bunch when we finally finished it. I still think the making everyone around you fail spectacularly. It's still a funny build. As well as the guy who just is so lucky he walks forward with two Shields. And just lets everyone fumble by hitting him.
 
The Ugly One said:
5th level Duelist Fighter: 2d8 + 14, 23 avg damage
5th level Fire Bolt wizard: 2d10, 11 avg damage

It's a huge difference. Then when you add in everything else that gooses martial characters, cantrips are a "nice to have," no substitute for a real damage-dealer.
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Maybe cantrips alone aren't a substitute for a striker, but "half the effectiveness of your primary damage dealer" for an at-will ability that can usually be done at a safe distance and doesn't require resource drain is still way more than your average caster needs considering the rest of their toolkit. I'd be fine just restricting that sort of scaling to the warlock or eldritch knight or something, but 1-9 casters get enough even when theoretically having to manage resources (let's be real, no one's doing four encounters every day at CR.)
 
Halbschwanz said:
Maybe cantrips alone aren't a substitute for a striker, but "half the effectiveness of your primary damage dealer" for an at-will ability that can usually be done at a safe distance and doesn't require resource drain is still way more than your average caster needs considering the rest of their toolkit. I'd be fine just restricting that sort of scaling to the warlock or eldritch knight or something, but 1-9 casters get enough even when theoretically having to manage resources (let's be real, no one's doing four encounters every day at CR.)
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Yup. Duelist Fighter has to get into the shit to do their damage.
 
I see a lot of talk about modifiers and advantage/disadvantage in d20 systems, but what do you think about dice pool systems? I never saw down to try and "understand" the math behind them but I have some appreciation for them.
 
BlazikenLover said:
I see a lot of talk about modifiers and advantage/disadvantage in d20 systems, but what do you think about dice pool systems? I never saw down to try and "understand" the math behind them but I have some appreciation for them.
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That's the primary issue I have with them: I don't understand how to adjust the probability to get it to do what I want.

Closest I get is 2d6 or 3d6 systems with A/D.
 
Ghostse said:
Yup. Duelist Fighter has to get into the shit to do their damage.
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Archery Fighter. Crossbow Rogue. Archery Ranger. Same thing still applies - they do twice as much at-will damage as a cantrip.


Halbschwanz said:
Maybe cantrips alone aren't a substitute for a striker, but "half the effectiveness of your primary damage dealer" for an at-will ability that can usually be done at a safe distance and doesn't require resource drain is still way more than your average caster needs considering the rest of their toolkit. I'd be fine just restricting that sort of scaling to the warlock or eldritch knight or something, but 1-9 casters get enough even when theoretically having to manage resources (let's be real, no one's doing four encounters every day at CR.)
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This is moving the goalposts. You claimed cantrips scale almost as good as primary damage-dealer attacks, and this is factually wrong.

Whether or not the caster "needs" to be able to do something other than fetch snacks for the table during fights for the first 3 months or so of game time is a philosophical argument. As a practical matter, in ten years of running the game, I never saw a 5e campaign fall apart at low level because the wizard did 4 damage to a goblin instead of hiding behind a tree until the fight was over. People insist all kinds of irreparable harm is done to the game experience when one of the players makes a modest attack instead of just sitting out for 15 minutes...but nobody's ever given me a specific example.
 
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CrunkLord420 said:
BORG aesthetic is peak. The rules are fine. I assume people hate it because it's style over substance, but that's also the point. It's a perfect dark comedy setting where you don't have to overthink over the top violence. Life's a meat grinder, and that's cool.

There's nothing less appealing to me than standard tolkien high fantasy.
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I've run Mork Borg before and I love it for two reasons.

1) It's a mouse trap. If you try and make it any simpler? It breaks and so it plays quickly. I leaned into the lethality and I showed up with a stack of pre-gens. When someone's character died, I had them flip over the top sheet and got them back into it as soon as possible.

2) It does only one thing but it does that one thing really, really well: Insanely, abusively over the top dungeon crawls in a dying world.
 
On the subject of doing "just Trauma Team," I gravitate towards this style of play because I think it solves a lot of classic problems fairly elegantly.

In college, I was in a very large RPG club and got tired of the kitchen-sink style games where everyone was a different exotic race/class combo from different splats and I had to figure out how to make it all work. (This was back during 3/3.5 when this was especially a problem).

I made a campaign where everyone had to play a human fighter out of the PHB. No multiclassing, no weirdo features, no weeaboo fightan magic, your name is Ronard, you're the cobbler's son, you hit people with sticks. The party are a group of rural young men setting off on a treacherous journey to another continent following tales of fortune and glory in the midst of a metaphorical gold rush. Think a low fantasy medieval version of group of friends in backwater Poland deciding to move to California in 1850 except there are monsters in addition to bandits and savages.

My players then had to focus on roleplaying to make their characters unique, rather than their snowflake race/class mix. It also caused a few players to really engage with the mechanics to differentiate their characters, creating some really unique builds that you otherwise would never see.

Having had this experience, there's a lot of games that give options that I think hint at this kind of play, whether it's all Trauma Team, all cops, all bards (some friends and I did this to fuck with our GM, playing a Gwar-inspired band on our first tour of Faerûn), or something else. It solves the problem of why the party came together, why they stay together, and gives a structure to their activities ("what do we do now?" when the plot hook doesn't catch, or downtime between story beats,etc).
 
Manly_Brony said:
That maybe a bit much IMHO. I'd go with a couple of Tsar Bombas. The game rarely brings up the fact that Mythos cults probably fight each other all the time behind humanity's back because even insane people and inhuman monsters don't want a scenario like this.
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While the "Call Azathoth" thing was insane and an act of despair, it was because the world was already going to end for other reasons, and the lunatic who cast the spell after losing his mind preferred Azathoth (the other choice was a complex plot by Nyarlathotep).
 
Sayer of the N-Word said:
That sounds fantastic. How did it go?
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Oh, it was a disaster. This was in that same college RPG club and this GM had the idea to have one "good" and one "evil" party active in the same world at the same time, with sessions on different days. He was the kinda guy to meticulously plot out a grand story that wasn't very good, if you know the type. But his fatal mistake was naming the parties ahead of time. I forget what the good party was called, but he told us our evil party was to be called "The Archlords." That was all I needed.

I pitched the idea to the other players privately and so in the first session when we introduced our characters they're all these hulking, demonic, Chaos-Warrior looking villains, but it's all costume armor and he's actually a gnome bard that plays the fife or whatever. It's been twenty plus years so I unfortunately don't remember anymore, but one of the other players came up with the lyrics to our hit single, "Drider Rider," off our debut concept album The Minstrel Cycle.

The good party went around doing epic heroic fantasy shit while the Archlords descended on unsuspecting villages to violate noise ordinances, run up tavern tabs, and trash rooms at the inn. The GM had a metaplot in mind that would have each party working to indirectly thwart the other, but the Archlords were aggressively disinterested in any plot hook that didn't look like a buxom groupie or cheap ale. The GM eventually got huffy that we were ruining "his" story and let us go, introducing his own npc antagonists to the good party.

Ever since, whenever I run D&D (which is rare), the party inevitably runs across the Archlords, still in their costume armor, still on their neverending multi-planar tour. That GM never appreciated them, but my players since regard the Archlords as Bombadil-esque figures of legend. Their music (and their hangovers) bend time and space, always getting them to their next gig be it in Chult, Athas, Ravenloft, the Hollow Earth, Sigil, or everywhere in-between. They never know how they got there, but they're always on their way somewhere new.
 
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Blarmed&Dangerous said:
ver since, whenever I run D&D (which is rare), the party inevitably runs across the Archlords
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p1138 said:
Meanwhile as the DM, you're expected to keep up with the loot treadmill for the party with the big 6, which can just end up super contrived at times, which is a bigger issue with a system that goes to +5 than something like 5e that only goes to +3. Also because the big 6 is basically all "best in slot" it actively discourages players from using any actually creative loot you might hand out just to see someone try and do something interesting because they need those enhancement bonuses that stack with everything else.
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I've played a lot of PF1, mostly because I think it's better than 3.5 & 5e and my main group knows the system well. Magic item scaling/progression is by far the most uncreative and unenjoyable part of the game. You don't even have to be a party of munchkins, the monsters are scaled assuming all PCs have some amount of magic item bonuses to saves, AC, and ability scores. If you don't keep up with your scaling magic item bonuses and invest in specific key utility items (Talisman of Life's Breath, Boots of Haste, Monk's Robe, etc, depending on the build) you will suffer in nearly every mechanical aspect of the game. And all magic items, even ones with hilariously piddly or useless effects, are absurdly expensive. I mean, look at this shit.
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12k gold for an item that takes up the belt slot (which anyone who uses physical stats needs for their enhancement bonus) which lets you ignore a handful of conditions that apply a -2 to your rolls for two turns, under a specific penalty of not moving more than 5 ft. Not even immune to the conditions. 2 fucking turns. 12,000 gold for that shit. The vast majority of magic items in Pathfinder exist just to be sold for half and turned into stat-boosting items.
 
2LtMashengo said:
There are a lot of fun slotless items, but yeah anything that goes in a big 6 slot is just a waste.
12k is more than it cost my rogue to build his noble villa.
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Man, don't even get me started on the absurd disconnect between the magic item economy and the everything-else economy in Pathfinder. By the time you hit level 10 in Pathfinder, you're like fantasy Iron Man, walking around with the wealth of a small country affixed to your body. Very cool that magic swords (which, given how things are written, are fucking everywhere) and real estate somehow have similar price points.

Edit: This just reminded me of a point in the 2nd book of Curse of the Crimson Throne when the magic plague is tearing through Korvosa and a Captain of the Guard with a crazy good sword (like, +2 Defending silver longsword, I think) comes running to the party to ask them to cast a free Cure Disease on his daughter, whom he loves dearly, because he doesn't have money for it. Me and my party laughed over and over at the thought of a guy walking around with an 18k gold sword who somehow couldn't scrape together like ~200 gold for a Cure Disease cast.
 
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Tom Bombodildo said:
Man, don't even get me started on the absurd disconnect between the magic item economy and the everything-else economy in Pathfinder. By the time you hit level 10 in Pathfinder, you're like fantasy Iron Man, walking around with the wealth of a small country affixed to your body. Very cool that magic swords (which, given how things are written, are fucking everywhere) and real estate somehow have similar price points.
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Considering the odds in Golarion of a closet troll, basement ninjas, etc. appearing in your home randomly; it kind of makes sense in a stupid way.

Tom Bombodildo said:
Edit: This just reminded me of a point in the 2nd book of Curse of the Crimson Throne when the magic plague is tearing through Korvosa and a Captain of the Guard with a crazy good sword (like, +2 Defending silver longsword, I think) comes running to the party to ask them to cast a free Cure Disease on his daughter, whom he loves dearly, because he doesn't have money for it. Me and my party laughed over and over at the thought of a guy walking around with an 18k gold sword who somehow couldn't scrape together like ~200 gold for a Cure Disease cast.
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Yes, well now he won't have his +2 defending silver longsword to deal with the random creatures that will spawn in his pantry so his family will just die anyway.
 
I just had the weirdest conversation with someone who wanted me to be in their game. I simply told them I don't talk about politics. With people I played TTR, PGS with me said. I think you're a good fit. What is with those type of people? It's like these people can imagine that someone doesn't care about their politics.
 
The Ugly One said:
This is moving the goalposts. You claimed cantrips scale almost as good as primary damage-dealer attacks, and this is factually wrong.

Whether or not the caster "needs" to be able to do something other than fetch snacks for the table during fights for the first 3 months or so of game time is a philosophical argument. As a practical matter, in ten years of running the game, I never saw a 5e campaign fall apart at low level because the wizard did 4 damage to a goblin instead of hiding behind a tree until the fight was over. People insist all kinds of irreparable harm is done to the game experience when one of the players makes a modest attack instead of just sitting out for 15 minutes...but nobody's ever given me a specific example.
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One could make the argument that by stacking certain class/subclass features or concentration spells, cantrips can end up doing excessive damage; for example, a level 5 warlock concentrating on Hex and having taken Agonizing Blast can deal 2d10 + 2d6 + 6 damage (assuming +3 CHA, could be more), averaging 24 damage which is just slightly higher than your fighter example given earlier and doable from a distance. That said, concentration can be broken, and warlocks don't have a huge amount of spell slots to begin with, so if they get knocked out of their Hex, they might be hesitant to cast it again and thus not pump out as much damage. And other combos are either outside the realm of what most tables get up to level-wise or requires some level of munchkin building that a DM can shut down if they don't want it.

I'm not a grognard so I don't have years of experience in the matter, but casters always having at least one minor backup spell they can use as needed does not seem to break the game to me. Yeah, I know that back in the day you just threw a wand at your caster and let them use that, but there doesn't seem to be much of a meaningful difference between "I cast a fire bolt from my wand of fire bolt" and "I cast a fire bolt from my hands." I guess that eventually you'd run out of charges in the wand, but with dozens of charges at a minimum, you'd be covered for a long time, and hopefully your DM would be nice enough to have you find another one later in the adventure and thus make that difference irrelevant.
 
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