[DnD] D&D Discussion & Enlistment (Save Ends)

Alright, so here's the statblock for the black mage; I don't care which of you controls him so whoever's around when his turn comes up just take the reins. Also keeping in mind that he's already expended LIT and SLEP so it's just shitty fireballs from here to Cleveland.



What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Glenn killed the howler in the event that this effects your turn, wvlf.

FELIPE NO

Originally Posted by Zergrinch

I liked Freddy better when he was trying to incinerate us.

Problem, Zerg?

Additional Spam:
Anyways I rolled the death saves for Garr/Skex so it's Hawkeye's turn.

Oh, and the rampager's dead so

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

Soooo Hawkeye's in hospital so I need someone to cover for him for a while. Hopefully he won't be gone for more than a couple weeks...

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Zephyrin

Don't be a dick when playing his character. The Mage is fine, but don't wreck us for no reason.

You got off easy, I half-expected him to try to knock the orb loose again and go for the high score. 100 damage with a single ball gets you a free play, after all.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

To wield it he'd have to get rid of his shield, though. And his Defensive Challenge feat basically doesn't work if he has no shield.

Treasure that looks really good but actually has huge usability problems: that's what Pang likes

How ya doing, buddy?

Essentials and 4E are "different animals" in the same way that dogs and puppies are different animals.

By which I mean that they're the same animal, but one version is slightly less intimidating.

Essentials are just books with class builds and monsters in them. You know, like all the other 4E books. These builds and monsters may be skewed toward slightly less complex play. This does not make them in any way incompatible with the "core". They all share a common label because they have "Friendly To New Players" as a shared conceit, much like the Dark Sun books share a common label because they have "Ha ha, you will choke on silt and die" as a shared conceit. People pretending that Essentials is somehow a separate product line or a separate ruleset are either stupid, misinformed, or deliberately disseminating misinformation.

(Races, Classes and Monsters are not part of the game's rules, in much the same way individual Magic cards are not part of the rules. They're content. Essentials does not have different rules, because it's 4E. There is no such game as Essentials.)

If I have a Dungeon Master's Guide from 2008, and you have a Dungeon Master's Kit from 2010, and we both start up a game... we're both playing the same game. Can you stat up a Dwarven Slayer Fighter and play it in my game? Yes. Can I stat up a Githyanki Psion and play it in your game? Yes.

As for this campaign if people want to play a Slayer or a Warpriest or a Thief that's just fine with me since it will introduce no incompatibility issues whatsoever. And as you point out the changes to item powers change nothing and it's not like I follow standard treasure distribution procedure in the first place so there aren't really any "modifications" for me to adopt. It's just more Stuff. I like Stuff. Some of it isn't very interesting Stuff, but it's all harmless Stuff.

tl;dr tedious grognard lies make me wanna smash a bro

Additional Spam:

Originally Posted by Zergrinch

while those with encounters (like the Bloodclaw sword) and at-wills are rare

Bloodclaw is considered by a lot of players to be one of the most powerful and broken item properties in the game, but I don't think either you or Garr have ever actually activated that power because you're all so utterly petrified of taking damage. It's kind of adorable.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Oops, guess I skimmed over that somehow. Scroll, sword and crown are in Glenn's inventory now.

Additional Spam:
Also I don't think there will be an incoming character right now since 6 PCs seemed to add significantly more than 20% additional unwieldiness. It was a fun idea at the time but it's just a little bit too much to monitor on a permanent basis.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Armor Training lets you wear that type of armor without a penalty. Like, for example, Garr has no training in plate armor which is why he's got all the combat efficacy of a comatose trout. If he was trained, he would get all the upsides of plate armor and none of the downsides. But he lacks the CON score requisite to actually get the training, alas.

You can administer a potion to an ally as a Standard Action, so run over and just cram it in their faces at your leisure.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Well, like it was said, it was either the group or the dungeon but the whole idea of just "wander around randomly" wasn't working for this bunch. So I figured I'd set up a big bright glowing EXIT sign and have 800-lb gorillas push them toward it.

(That, and I didn't really expect them to stick around at length in the cheap one-note FF1 joke dimension so I effectively had no choice but to hit the emergency eject on that one. I'm not playing in that world long-term, so I'm not.)

How ya doing, buddy?

Let's say, theoretically, that you have to camp outside, and it might rain.

Would you rather have a bedroll, or a tent?

What does a tent do. IT SHELTERS YOU AGAINST THE ELEMENTS, THAT'S WHAT

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

Sometimes it rains indoors, too.

LIKE WHEN YOU TRY TO BURN THINGS

Most amazing jew boots

All In The Same Boat depicted Scary Bob as a pirate captain, having mutinied and seized the Rosy Dawn for himself and his loyal crew of dwarven "cabin boys".

Delicious and Moist was just a satisfied orc with a full belly.

Secret Cow Level was a window onto a brutal future where Doorman's proletarian uprising was much more successful. Doorman easily subjugates the Seven-Pillared Hall and in time establishes a "Dictatorship of the People" over the entire Sea of Fallen Stars region.

Magnum Innominandum depicted events precisely as they actually happened, except that literally everyone in the diorama is wearing big floppy clown shoes — even the roc.

Small favor to ask of you all (both the current players and the peanut gallery): as Zerg noticed a while back I've been working on retooling the wiki sheets a little bit, making them a little bit more efficient. I've started with Gra-fa-zut since his had the least material to convert, and I've managed to crunch what was 13 vertical pages down to 5. Now, you'll notice the portrait, backgrounds, achievements, all that stuff is gone; that'll all be on a separate biography page for each character. Everything is in text now; not a single .png file on the page. Just heavy use of templates and tables.

Gra-fa-zut (Sheet)

Now, before I get to work converting everyone else's sheets over, I'm just looking for a little constructive criticism. What can I do to make these sheets more useful? Even if it's a small thing, throw it out there; it's easier to make the fixes now and use them going forward than to retroactively apply them to everything later.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

About checkmarks; as Zerg says, they kind of break up the flow. Instead of the checkmarks what I was planning on was just using the cell text color as a usage indicator; if a power's unavailable its cell will be flooded with bright red. For example, this:



when used, will look like



Which seems, if anything, more eyecatching than the difference between an empty box and a checked box. I didn't clarify at all how I intended to replace the checks when I put up the original request for critique, so that's on me.

Temporary HP doesn't come up very often anymore, and it seems to me like putting it in a separate field from normal HP will just lead to it being overlooked much of the time. I just assumed we'd continue using the parentheses for that, but if there's a strong demand for a separate field I won't say no.

Ability Mods and Trained Skill Highlights have been added to the example sheet. Most of these other suggestions are good but will take a little more time to implement — especially the width issue, which I really should have seen coming by fitting the sheets to my 1600w screen.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Originally Posted by Denicalis

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.

Originally Posted by Zergrinch

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 am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Originally Posted by Zephyrin

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.

How ya doing, buddy?

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


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"

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

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...

How ya doing, buddy?

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.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

...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:

Basically I intended to construct a guild of sorts to allow people to slot in and out of the active party while still being part of "G-Unit". Thus, anybody who wanted to make a character could put it in the G-Unit "roster" and then at the beginning of a new mission it could be debated which 5 employees would be best for this particular job (with the caveat that nobody takes more than say 5 jobs in a row). Zombies? Let's take the cleric. Problem in the woods? Druid might be a good idea.

You could even have multiple characters at a time per player. Sick of playing your wizard? Well, then, don't play him. He just stays at base for a while and you can play your bard instead, whatever. I mean we could still do over-the-top death scenes if the situation calls for it but no longer would we have to up and murder someone because their player went on vacation for a month. People could take a little break from the game without expecting to wait 18 months or more for another turn.

Actually the embassy in Veltalar might be a fun way to springboard into this, we'll see.

Most amazing jew boots

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:



There's nowhere I can't reach.

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

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

If you wanted maps all you had to do was ask. Most of my stuff I just find preconstructed by people far more competent than I, and then I dump a bunch of props on top. UnderLamid was more or less from scratch, but it wasn't exactly compelling artwork.

(Sea battles are basically easy mode, of course. Get boat model, put boat model on water backdrop. Enjoy beverage.)

Originally Posted by Hawkeye

Glenn hasn't had a decent initiative roll once since he joined the group.

On the upside, the whole "caught napping" motif of the battle means that the primary downside of losing initiative (getting wounded before you can act) doesn't really apply here.

On that note, everyone that isn't Cal will be entering the fight by coming from belowdecks. Therefore when your turns come around, indicate which square you're "spawning" in: I1, I3, I4, I5, R2, R3, R4, R5 or R6 (the warder in R3 will have moved by then, natch). Getting to the battle doesn't count against your movement for the turn.

When the sailors enter combat they'll be under Zephyrin's control.



In addition to that we have another volunteer-from-the-audience situation.*



*Yeah probably Skills again but you never know. Bitches whine about the wait times, but they aren't interested unless they can be big-ass heroes. Pft.

Additional Spam:


I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

The captain or someone else who would know what the fuck "starboard" and "port" are. The sailors, and... Gra-fa-zut's got the Mariner background, that'll do.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Originally Posted by Zephyrin

The first thing he was was fish.

I guess this is true in an evolutionary sense.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?