Exploding Garrmondo Weiner Interactive Swiss Army Penis - [DnD] D&D Discussion & Enlistment (Save Ends)

Exploding Garrmondo Weiner Interactive Swiss Army Penis (http://www.gamingforce.org/forums/index.php)

- Pang's Violence Basement (http://www.gamingforce.org/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=13)

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If you plan to have a separate biography page, certain info under "Racial & Class Traits" block that aren't really referred to that often (if at all) can be transferred there. These include:

- Ability Scores
- Skills
- Defenses
- Origins
- For Gra-fa-zut's elemental manifestations, I'd put in a separate Traits block since both of them give conditional modifiers
- Action Points are a kind of an expendable resource, so I'd lump it together with Health

I'd also move the Health Block up, since as a player, health is the very first thing I'd check. Since there'd be a missing block, I would propose reducing the number of columns for Skills & Ability Checks. Maybe there's a way to combine this with the Ability Scores block?

As level scales up, I'd expect the number of attacks hitting NADs and inflicting statuses to ramp up. Once, you even had someone with over 6 status effects all at once. Will the "Conditions" field in the health block be adequate? :)

P.S. What's in the room that supposedly shoots at you? You also laid down several story seeds about drows and tarrasques. Were you planning to drop us into drowland if we proceeded north?

Pang, just curious if you've seen Iplay4E.com yet?

Also, dig on the new page layout.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Denicalis (Post 768255)

Pang, just curious if you've seen Iplay4E.com yet?

Yeah, I use it for myself on those rare occasions when I get to play, but it's largely worthless without a DDI subscription. Even if everyone involved in the campaign could use it I'm not sure I wouldn't just stick with the wiki since I hope to expand it to a little more than just character data when I get the time.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zergrinch (Post 768251)

P.S. What's in the room that supposedly shoots at you? You also laid down several story seeds about drows and tarrasques. Were you planning to drop us into drowland if we proceeded north?

It was a floating cube. It had a riddle. It shot arrows at you if you answered wrong. If you answered right, it gave you a priceless artifact.

You would have eventually encountered drow had you taken the tunnel gnome to the gnome encampment. The tarrasque encounter was just one of 60 or so possible destinations available through the Programmable Portal System that you guys had no special interest in.

I hope I am gauging the price of the job correctly.

Also, are the Genasi on the boat already just deckhands that will stay with us during the voyage?

Ways to undermine the mood your DM is trying to set #182:

My weekly game, our DM has created this really dark mood, the entire land we're in has been overrun by the undead. Living settlements are few and far between. The five of us managed to just escape from the clutches of a vampiric cult, and that's how we met.

So we're up to level 6, and prior to our latest session I was sort of needling our bard that I didn't feel very bolstered by his songs. We'd barely limped out of a couple really ugly fights, and if we didn't have a warlord to keep some of us on our feet we'd have been completely boned.

Flash to this current week, and we come across a Tristram stand-in town, utterly ravaged by demons and the undead. Our DM is a great storyteller, and he's weaving all this bleak, raped landscape mojo and has our group beset by the shambling undead the moment we open the doors to the biggest house. My Paladin|Warlock hybrid is doing his usual insane defensive stats and pulling these things towards him, our other Paladin is taking his back, helping block the door. Our Avenger is getting ready for what could be his last stand. The rogue is flitting in and out of the shadows, and our Warlord|bard decides we are in desperate need of some inspiration.

So as his turn approaches, the Paladin|Warlock blasts at the initial wave with radiant smite of both the gods and the skies themselves, the Avenger marks his target and sets his jaw, our DM paints a picture of an indefatigable wall of shambling flesh, and our bard's player reaches down into his bag, pulls out a pair of small speakers and an ipod, declares the inspiring bard song of choice, and proceeds to play the Glee cover of Don't Stop Believing.

Our DM tries to overcome this with more ambiance, but it is to no avail. For every new bard song or inspiring words, there is something else. Cee-Lo Green, Tenacious D, more Glee, Ke$ha...

By the end, we had utterly destroyed the surging horde, and our DM was rubbing his forehead and muttering: "I fucking hate players."

The bard promised not to bring the music next week, but I'm trying to convince him to go one further, bring his guitar and an amp, and shred violently whenever shit gets tense.

I hope he will.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zephyrin (Post 768289)

Also, are the Genasi on the boat already just deckhands that will stay with us during the voyage?

All the genasi on board are just sailors, yes.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Pang

They were red. For reasons he could not quite explain to himself, this comforted him; he felt certain, now, that the ship would go faster.

He's not wrong, red ones always go faster.

Pang, I was wondering if you could repost this particular DDi article. Don't wanna wait a month for the compiled torrent to possibly come out.

Muchas gracias. :)

Quote:

We continually evaluate the tools we’ve put into the game. As we design and develop rules and mechanics, we base some of the work on underlying assumptions regarding how we expect players to advance and improve their characters through their choices of mechanical elements such as feats and items. A short time ago, we evaluated the DCs for the skills subsystem and made some adjustments to the rate at which DCs scale with level. These tables appear on page 126 of the Rules Compendium as well as on the DM Screen available in the DM Kit.

If you compare the new values to the DCs from the Dungeon Master’s Guide and DMG 2, you’ll notice that the DCs are higher across the board. You'll also notice that Hard DC entries scale faster than Easy and Moderate DCs by level. Finally, the new skill DC table has an entry for each level instead of grouping levels into bands of three. These changes are far from arbitrary, as you’ll see.

Early on, we divided checks into Hard, Medium, and Easy, but we didn’t do a good job of telling DMs which one to use in a situation. We needed a system that would not only guide the DM on when to use a particular check but also describe the sorts of characters that would be attempting these checks.

The first step when evaluating the DCs was to determine what those DC categories truly represent. Then we describe our archetypical character who fits that category and determine the typical skill bonus that character might have. Finally, we set DCs based on a curve of expected values that would provide a reasonable challenge at each level—we define reasonable challenge as a d20 roll that is successful around 65% of the time (you need to roll 8+ on the die).

DIFFICULTY CLASS BY LEVEL
http://www.saxypunch.com/missile/skilldcs.png

Easy: The action involved isn’t trivial but is still pretty simple. These are the simplest checks and should represent a reasonable challenge for characters that have no training in the skill (an untrained character). An untrained character is typically adding half his level to the skill and probably doesn’t have an ability score that helps him out. He might get another +1 by Epic tier, since all his ability modifiers have increased by 21st level. Trained characters have little risk of failure, and expert characters are nearly guaranteed success. These are the DCs that we suggest DMs should use when every character in the party is expected to make the check or for group checks (where half the PCs must succeed on the roll to earn a success for the group).

Moderate: A moderate check requires a bit of training or innate ability, or a bit of luck. These checks are aimed at skilled characters who have training in the skill, though there are other options for getting a similar skill modifier, such as having a high ability score (18+) in the skill’s key ability or combining a racial bonus and a moderate (14+) ability score. These DCs scale a little faster than easy DCs, which accounts for ability score increases or adding a feat or path feature if the key ability isn’t your primary or secondary class stat. These DCs are the standard difficulty for a skill check in a skill challenge.

Hard: These checks are designed to test characters who are even more focused on the particular skill, though there might still be some chance of failure even for these expert characters. Without additional assistance (such as a power bonus or another character’s aid), the expert PC will succeed against these DCs around two out of three times. The expert PC typically has training in the skill, and his or her primary ability score is the skill’s key ability (or secondary ability score along with a skill focus feat or racial bonus). As the character increases in level, we expect feat and item selection to provide an extra boost along the way, as well as ability score increases. This DC is a good choice to really challenge a focused PC, though it’s also a good DC to use for repeated successes with a single skill in a skill challenge (once the first, moderate attempt is successful).

All-In: As we identified these character archetypes, we also noted a fourth sort of PC—the “all-in” character. This guy takes every possible advantage toward maximizing a particular skill. He has feats, a racial bonus, starts with a 20 in the primary modifier, is trained in the skill, and searches out magic items that further advance his skill. Even with our now-higher Hard DC scale, this character is nearly guaranteed success. But it’s also difficult to get bonuses that high for more than one or two skills. Rather than push the Hard DCs out of reach of typical characters, we recognize that those characters exist and will be really good at their chosen vocation. If the DM is doing his job (and we’ve given even more tools to help with that), then that character will have his moments to shine but will also face many challenges that can't be tackled with his maxed-out skill.

These new DCs form the backbone for our skill challenges and for other skill-related rolls throughout the game. For example, escape DCs for monsters or traps can be set based on the sorts of characters we expect should have a chance.

We hope this sheds some light on the method behind our madness. Be sure to check out Rules Compendium for an in-depth look at setting up skill checks and challenges in your game!

tl;dr "the DCs are higher across the board"

Ah. That explains why the Arena skill challenge in Round 1-2 seemed too easy. I was using DMG1 values.

That's a really long and silly way of saying "An average skill check should be an 8+, adjust as you think relevant to what your players are trying to do". Have they always led DMs around by the hand like this? It seems really patronising to suggest that people need a special chart to help them gauge the difficulty of skill challenges but then we do have Zerg here who is a living example of someone who plays the game strictly by the letter of the rules so I guess I answered my own question.

Yeah I had no interest in the article myself since my suggested skill check difficulty is "whatever would be funny" but sadly there are a lot of players who insist that their character can't juggle since there aren't any rules for juggling. The sheer number of useless, useless charts is at an historical low but some things never change...

It's been two days. Push wvlf overboard already.

Still got 6 hours left before the 48-hour mark though, boss.

I wouldn't push him overboard, I would just decide for him what he's doing aboard ship.

Now, if Gra-fa-zut suddenly decided to scrape all the barnacles off the keel in the middle of the night that's different.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Pangalin (Post 766300)

Also I have a plan to ease some of the excessively long wait times in my backup queue, but I can't put it into practice until the current adventure finishes.

Almost forgot, had Zeph not talked about delays. Care to share the details of your plan? :)

...shit. Between making a nice-looking job board, writing the transitional fiction, and the gradual work on the new wiki the new system fell by the sidelines.

Spoiler:

That's... actually a really sweet idea.

Seconded, I like that.

But par it down to 2 adventures in a row max (or even just one) per player to keep things fresh and player's senses of humour from being stretched too thin. 5 is still a long wait.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zergrinch (Post 768879)

Still got 6 hours left before the 48-hour mark though, boss.

I'm counting since the DM's last post, not since the post of the most recent player. That's stretching it too far if somebody, say, posts barely within the two day, and then another person we're waiting on has ANOTHER two days to make us drawl about.

And Freeport seems to be the ideal homebase for such a guild, although I haven't really kept up with your geography too much.

Yeah, when it's something where it doesn't matter what order you post in "since the DM's last post" makes more sense as a yardstick.

Geography is basically the standard Forgotten Realms with a bunch of extra little dots scattered all over where I shoehorn in extra cities and towns and such. It's not very instructive, since you have to zoom out so far to get a sense of place, but:

http://www.saxypunch.com/missile/whereyouis.png

That's an awesome idea Pang. It'll give a lot more people a chance to play, give people a chance to play with different people and to try out different sorts of character. Shoe-horn it in asap!

Rather than an existing guild though you shoul make it like a Suikoden castle. Have the G-Unit recruited by a small boy who never says much and when they get there they find 102 other idiots bumbling about the place. If nothing else it gives you the opportunity for an underlying master-plot that doesn't rely on player characters to keep driving it.

Capital idea, my good man.

This feels really awkward but I'm in a position where I basically have to thank Zerg for his endless neuroses. I showed you the progress I'd made on the new sheets a few days ago. Rather than just sitting back and offering suggestions like I asked, Zerg instead made his own account on the new wiki and built my rudimentary sheet into a goddamn technicolor spectacle.

Cal Amah (Sheet)

He's built new templates, rearranged everything, cleaned things up... not only does his sheet look amazing, but the template work he's done makes it much, much easier for me to do the work of converting everyone else over. I'm just blown away, and I don't think he's done yet.

Thanks, Zerg. Thanks for being a crazy person.

Additional Spam:
Not that this will prevent me burying you under a wave of murderous fish