In place of other, clearly inferior game mechanics, every time you want to hide you’ve got to play the shell game with your game host.
When I say card based resolution mechanics, I don't mean poker, I mean three card monte
0
StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
edited August 7
Anyways the new D&D rules for it seem bad.
- As discussed, rolling at the start of hiding is narratively boring and also doesn't really make sense, because you wouldn't know if you did a good job of hiding without third party input on the matter.
- Turning it into an invisible condition reminds me of BG2, where enemy spellcasters could dispel your thief skills by casting See Invisibility - this might not work anymore or be the intent, but it gives me a bad gut reaction.
- The perception stuff seems confusing. My guess is that it's mostly there for players who are insistent on rolling the dice to see if they see anything due to metagaming, but it doesn't feel like a great solution to that.
- I don't like losing invisible when you make an attack, because it prevents the great trope of missing with an arrow which your enemy also doesn't notice happening. Or silently taking down an enemy Hitman style. Feels like it's carried over from invisibility previously being a strictly magical condition, and doesn't work to support the fiction (or at least the stories I'd like to tell).
- The thing about making a noise louder than a whisper feels strange to me, as part of the stealth check is moving silently. I guess it's to prevent people from talking while invisible, but like, what if what I want to do with my stealth is quietly load a cannon?
You can infiltrate for free, getting a lay of the land. A list of options pops up for stealth challenges. Some locals are talking around a fire, there’s a chest, you notice a weird tower you can’t quite identify. Everyone picks one of these options to roll a relevant skill for. Usually stealth, maybe something else situationally. Everyone rolls at once. Successes happen first, failures happen last.
The player who invested in being good at sneaking rolls well and accomplishes the option they picked. Player whose design makes them bad at this fails, but not in a way that gets in the way of other players doing what they want. Still reveals their presence and ends stealth.
Uhh, I got a question, since I've been seeing the back-and-forth of people when discussing the new 5e's Stealth rules (whether the new or old version is clunkier): How do other systems do stealth, and which one do you guys feel are intuitive and simple?
What are the new 5e rules?
I would say most systems I've played handle stealth the same way they handle any other ability/skill checks, so it's just a matter then of which resolution system you like best there.
From what I gather, it's the following:
- You still need to be in heavy cover and such to start hiding
- You now have a flat DC 15 to succeed in Hiding, after which you gain the "Invisible" condition. It's less the traditional invisibility and more like an "Unseen" state. Benefits are the usual. The spell Invisibility now automatically grants you the Invisible condition. Invisible state from hiding ends if someone succeeds in finding you, if you make "a noise louder than a whisper", or if you attack/cast a spell.
- Enemies now need to take an action try finding you and make a Perception check (or rely on Passive Perception automatically), but the DC is your successful roll (which... sounds like a longer version of the old contested check? I dunno)
Ok I don't really play 5e.. (do .. people actually call old 5e 5e2014 and 5e2024 now because wizards couldn't just increment a number for them?) so probably grain of salt and all that maybe I'm missing something big.
I can kind of see where the designers are coming from with a like "It works like this spell, but with specific requirements to turn it on" instead of some bespoke thing but like... reading that reddit post, you simply need 6 separate rules from 3 sections of the book to understand how this works? Oof.
I don't know what average passive perception would be on an enemy, but 10+wisdom doesn't sound like it's going to beat the base 15 DC you'll always need to start hiding? Which kinda means if things aren't actively searching for you, you just win. Kinda feels like a feel bad for everyone, either you sneak around with impunity, or you have metagaming-gm declaring everyone's doing full-searches constantly. It kind of sounds like see-invisibility or alternate senses stuff just bones you, since you have a spell equivalent "Invisible" condition. The whole thing feels very hand wavy for the DM, are they rolling to search for you? Do they randomly have advantage for a +5 passive because it's "quiet". DM handwavyness is fine honestly but not if it's also this big clunky rules heavy thing.
Anyway! I give it a 2/10. Instead maybe the GM should be forced to play a hidden movement game against the rogue where they write down their moves in secret and the enemies have to search each 5 foot square to determine if someone has passed through it recently. Or we could do the cups thing, that seems faster.
I’m not even saying this as a negative, but modern D&D rules read like very particularly worded wishes to malicious genies. I wish this would happen, but not this, not under this condition, only when, if, as well as, in addition, because, when, to a maximum of, unless—
I’m not even saying this as a negative, but modern D&D rules read like very particularly worded wishes to malicious genies. I wish this would happen, but not this, not under this condition, only when, if, as well as, in addition, because, when, to a maximum of, unless—
After decades of rules lawyers at tables afraid to kick their asses out...
Once again, I have underestimated my player's predilection for juvenilia.
The scene: last night's remotely-run Eberron for Savage Worlds session. Foundry VTT has a couple options for differentiating similar tokens. You can leave them as is (Goblin, Goblin, Goblin), add an incrementing number after them (Goblin 1, Goblin 2, Goblin 3), or prefix the token name with a randomly assigned adjective. (Angry Goblin, Sleepy Goblin, Depressed Goblin).
The party had just rescued someone from a group of cockatrices who were coming back to attack the fresh targets, so I, being in my late 40s but perpetually 12 years old, decided to make my own custom adjectival prefixes for them.
All 12 of them.
Throbbing, Meaty, Totally-Average-Sized, etc.
(Mind you, these are all people that I know personally and this falls within the lines and veils we established in Session Zero; no way I'd drop that on a table of randos.)
They fought half a dozen at first, and then another half dozen joined the fray, all of us giggling and making the silliest of silly jokes. Many Bennies were awarded for making myself and the rest of the players double over in laughter.
A fun thing about cockatrices and their petrification ability in Savage Worlds: it's an ability drain on Agility, and they don't have to actually damage their target, just score a hit. Each failure of a Vigor roll in response reduces the target's Agility by a die size; if you drop below a d4 (the lowest possible value for an ability score), you're Incapacitated and need to make another Vigor roll to avoid being petrified.
Two of my players, inveterate min-maxers, had left their character's Agility at a d4.
...guess who was one of the party members that got surrounded by cockatrices?
They have a good Vigor score, but the cockatrice had gotten a raise on their attack, so the Vigor roll was at -2. They failed, spent a Benny to re-roll, and crit failed, halting their ability to spend more Bennies on more rerolls, and was Incapacitated. However, they made their roll to avoid petrification.
After beating off a few of the cockatrices, the druid cast Beast Friend to win over the remaining assailants, and the party got the hell out of Dodge.
Some slightly more mature hijinks ensued when they got back to town (including exploding dice giving the halfling barbarian a high enough Stealth roll (something around a result of 30 on a d6 Stealth skill!) to become functionally invisible in one shop, going over to another shop and then beefing a second Stealth roll badly enough to be observed by one of the guards there. He successfully escaped and rendezvoused with the rest of the party, and we wrapped for the evening.
One of Savage World's selling point is the ability to run combat encounters at a brisk pace; this is usually the case, but I was hoisted on my own petard of dick jokes and it wound up running longer than it otherwise should have. Still faster than a 5e combat w/ a total of 20 individuals generally would.
Tag yourself, I’m meaty cockatrice. Best for use in a stew.
Beast wing yesterday was good! We did the first space combat for this group, which took a hot minute to set up because it was 6 foes flying PC ships vs 5 PCs. Which is like 130 cards in the initiative deck or something.
The combat looked like this:
The ??? Cards in the middle were a giant pile of torpedoes, which I enjoyed the party scrambling to blow up.
Afterwards they jumped after their quarry, discovered the reason no one’s been coming back through this lighthouse is the way-back lighthouse on the other side was thrown into the ocean, and took a quick break at a very-empty space station inn/tavern where they’re cooking attracted a stow away (one of the players wanted a cooking boon, so he’s got one he can mark where the aroma is so good they attract *something good*) who’s going to give them a bunch of details and locations on the planet below.
The space Combat took most of the session, which is something I was hoping to avoid with these rules, but I need to keep reminding myself that A) it’s still faster than d&d combat and B ) this group usually wants to wrap around 9pm and we start at like 7 by the time everyone’s all set, so like, these sessions are pretty short compared to the 8pm-2am games I used to play with my old d&d group.
I’m not even saying this as a negative, but modern D&D rules read like very particularly worded wishes to malicious genies. I wish this would happen, but not this, not under this condition, only when, if, as well as, in addition, because, when, to a maximum of, unless—
I kinda like rulesy rules sometimes but then like, if they also include “also the dm can rule your stealth doesn’t work on a whim” you don’t really need them to be *that* airtight.
I’m not even saying this as a negative, but modern D&D rules read like very particularly worded wishes to malicious genies. I wish this would happen, but not this, not under this condition, only when, if, as well as, in addition, because, when, to a maximum of, unless—
I think D&D is really stuck on the old adversarial logic of things sometimes, rather than acknowledging that the DM is a player as much as everyone else.
There's also a lot of people on the DnD subreddits being rules absolutists, talking about how "dual wielding doesn't specify specifically that each weapon has to be in a separate hand, therefore..."
It's like these people are actively looking for any way to bog down the game and have less fun with it. They're willfully disregarding their own ability to think critically and interpret things in a way that makes sense. As much as yes, the designers should probably ditch the whole "natural language" thing and just give us books with codified game language, I feel like a lot of DnD players have big-time adversarial DnD brain and are just looking for any edge case or super specific reading to fuck with the people they're playing with.
This is why it's so hard to find a table to play at, because even one of those adversarial jerks can ruin the game for everyone else. At least being a forever DM means I can nip that kinda shit in the bud.
I was actually thinking about natural language last night, and how annoyed I was reading 4th edition character builder ability blurbs and their total lack of any non-mechanical description of effects or flair, and I think the reason the idea of getting rid of all natural language descriptions of things bugs me is: TTRPGs are games of imagination. Natural language descriptions are important to help paint a mind picture, to help players imagine how things look and feel.
Also I don't think natural language is the least bit incompatible with comprehensible rules, stuff like "nothing specifies you can't dual wield two swords in one hand!" is nonsense on the face of it, c'mon.
I was actually thinking about natural language last night, and how annoyed I was reading 4th edition character builder ability blurbs and their total lack of any non-mechanical description of effects or flair, and I think the reason the idea of getting rid of all natural language descriptions of things bugs me is: TTRPGs are games of imagination. Natural language descriptions are important to help paint a mind picture, to help players imagine how things look and feel.
Also I don't think natural language is the least bit incompatible with comprehensible rules, stuff like "nothing specifies you can't dual wield two swords in one hand!" is nonsense on the face of it, c'mon.
I feel like there can be a healthy mix of "natural" and "rules" language, sure, but the DnD designers have missed that mark a lot of the time. I really enjoy having imaginative descriptions of effects and all that, but sometimes, especially in spell descriptions, it detracts from telling me what mechanics I actually have to interact with. When the UA process for the new books was asking for feedback, my consistent feedback on each survey was to change the layout of spells in the books to make it more clear, at a glace, what needed to be rolled.
Could this be solved by telling my players to be more familiar with their own spells when they cast them? Sure! But even then, they have to read through a brick of flowery descriptions to find what kind of save I'm supposed to make this pack of feral goblins roll.
I’m not even saying this as a negative, but modern D&D rules read like very particularly worded wishes to malicious genies. I wish this would happen, but not this, not under this condition, only when, if, as well as, in addition, because, when, to a maximum of, unless—
I think D&D is really stuck on the old adversarial logic of things sometimes, rather than acknowledging that the DM is a player as much as everyone else.
I think it’s an artifact from ye early days of DnD, and that old logic carries over to other games. I ran into it when running WFRP for my current group.
otoh sometimes you tell a player “no” once and it’s like
You go in the cage, cage goes in the water, you go in the water. Shark's in the water, our shark.
+2
Kane Red RobeMaster of MagicArcanusRegistered Userregular
I was actually thinking about natural language last night, and how annoyed I was reading 4th edition character builder ability blurbs and their total lack of any non-mechanical description of effects or flair, and I think the reason the idea of getting rid of all natural language descriptions of things bugs me is: TTRPGs are games of imagination. Natural language descriptions are important to help paint a mind picture, to help players imagine how things look and feel.
Also I don't think natural language is the least bit incompatible with comprehensible rules, stuff like "nothing specifies you can't dual wield two swords in one hand!" is nonsense on the face of it, c'mon.
There is descriptive ability fluff text in the actual 4e books. It's part of the srd thing that required it all be stripped out of the character builder.
my impression of 4E is definitely colored by only having interacted with it through the character builder and not the real rulebooks, but the point isn't that 4E didn't have description, just that seeing it stripped of description in the builder helped illuminate for me why I like natural language.
Nah, I loved the 4e stat blocks. Let me know what it does mechanically, my table can describe how it looks as the situation warrants.
I remember when my Avenger would use Loyal Sanction (utility power where you give a damage bonus to an ally against your chosen enemy), and the GM asked me how that looked, and I was like:
"I am literally pulling out a piece of paper and throwing it in his direction and it's a decree from the church that he's sanctioned to murder this man in the name of Kord."
I adore 4E statblocks. They still include a flavor blurb but they don't make those into rules so there's zero friction to me changing the flavor. I don't even have to ask the DM because the system defaults to player creativity.
+6
StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
Even in 4E I've definitely seen the DM who wants players to stick to the listed flavor text for descriptions and uses that flavor text to adjudicate things.
Which yes, is anecdotal bad GMing, you can find that about anything, but I think it's indicative of how weird the lines between rules language and flavor have gotten for veteran D&D folks over the years.
Even in 4E I've definitely seen the DM who wants players to stick to the listed flavor text for descriptions and uses that flavor text to adjudicate things.
Which yes, is anecdotal bad GMing, you can find that about anything, but I think it's indicative of how weird the lines between rules language and flavor have gotten for veteran D&D folks over the years.
Even in 4E I've definitely seen the DM who wants players to stick to the listed flavor text for descriptions and uses that flavor text to adjudicate things.
Which yes, is anecdotal bad GMing, you can find that about anything, but I think it's indicative of how weird the lines between rules language and flavor have gotten for veteran D&D folks over the years.
I’m not even saying this as a negative, but modern D&D rules read like very particularly worded wishes to malicious genies. I wish this would happen, but not this, not under this condition, only when, if, as well as, in addition, because, when, to a maximum of, unless—
D&D 5 is basically the story of a group of devs that seemed to want to make a grognard-appeasing (after the 4E thing) "return to our roots" game with a sort of OSR-but-heroic approach of "just have natural language and evocative wording, GM gets the final word on everything"... and a fanbase that will tell you to your face that "well the spell says you can see through objects and doesn't give a range limit so obviously I can use it to look through the planet and see stuff going anywhere I want in the world" and not blink. It's a bunch of people who do not know how to do precise language and who did not actually write precise language trying to act as if they write precise language because that's what people want and expect, but they're bad at it.
(By the way, if you want to see what a game that actually got its lawyer to word the wishes to the evil genie looks like, that's basically what Pathfinder 2 is. What if D&D focused on being absolutely munchkin-proof above all other considerations)
I’m not even saying this as a negative, but modern D&D rules read like very particularly worded wishes to malicious genies. I wish this would happen, but not this, not under this condition, only when, if, as well as, in addition, because, when, to a maximum of, unless—
D&D 5 is basically the story of a group of devs that seemed to want to make a grognard-appeasing (after the 4E thing) "return to our roots" game with a sort of OSR-but-heroic approach of "just have natural language and evocative wording, GM gets the final word on everything"... and a fanbase that will tell you to your face that "well the spell says you can see through objects and doesn't give a range limit so obviously I can use it to look through the planet and see stuff going anywhere I want in the world" and not blink. It's a bunch of people who do not know how to do precise language and who did not actually write precise language trying to act as if they wrote precise language because that's what people want and expect, but they're bad at it.
(By the way, if you want to see what a game that actually got its lawyer to word the wishes to the evil genie looks like, that's basically what Pathfinder 2 is. What if D&D focused on being absolutely munchkin-proof above all other considerations)
I'd actually argue that MtG is the correct example there. Zero ambiguity... even if it has some very screwy edge cases (layers!)
I’m not even saying this as a negative, but modern D&D rules read like very particularly worded wishes to malicious genies. I wish this would happen, but not this, not under this condition, only when, if, as well as, in addition, because, when, to a maximum of, unless—
D&D 5 is basically the story of a group of devs that seemed to want to make a grognard-appeasing (after the 4E thing) "return to our roots" game with a sort of OSR-but-heroic approach of "just have natural language and evocative wording, GM gets the final word on everything"... and a fanbase that will tell you to your face that "well the spell says you can see through objects and doesn't give a range limit so obviously I can use it to look through the planet and see stuff going anywhere I want in the world" and not blink. It's a bunch of people who do not know how to do precise language and who did not actually write precise language trying to act as if they wrote precise language because that's what people want and expect, but they're bad at it.
(By the way, if you want to see what a game that actually got its lawyer to word the wishes to the evil genie looks like, that's basically what Pathfinder 2 is. What if D&D focused on being absolutely munchkin-proof above all other considerations)
I'd actually argue that MtG is the correct example there. Zero ambiguity... even if it has some very screwy edge cases (layers!)
Every tabletop ruleset aspires to be a bad implementation of MtG, and most fail.
I’m not even saying this as a negative, but modern D&D rules read like very particularly worded wishes to malicious genies. I wish this would happen, but not this, not under this condition, only when, if, as well as, in addition, because, when, to a maximum of, unless—
D&D 5 is basically the story of a group of devs that seemed to want to make a grognard-appeasing (after the 4E thing) "return to our roots" game with a sort of OSR-but-heroic approach of "just have natural language and evocative wording, GM gets the final word on everything"... and a fanbase that will tell you to your face that "well the spell says you can see through objects and doesn't give a range limit so obviously I can use it to look through the planet and see stuff going anywhere I want in the world" and not blink. It's a bunch of people who do not know how to do precise language and who did not actually write precise language trying to act as if they write precise language because that's what people want and expect, but they're bad at it.
(By the way, if you want to see what a game that actually got its lawyer to word the wishes to the evil genie looks like, that's basically what Pathfinder 2 is. What if D&D focused on being absolutely munchkin-proof above all other considerations)
I don't think PF2 is that bad about trying to very specific with rules wordings? What sorts of things in it are you thinking of?
also Magic is a TERRIBLE comparison for TTRPGs, total apples to oranges. One's a competitive game with precise rules, one is collaborative improv.
Yes, but it's a great example of a game where the rules are very carefully and precisely written, which was the point. Also, the juxtaposition is interesting as the difference in precision in the rules is clearly a conscious choice when WotC makes both games.
I’m not even saying this as a negative, but modern D&D rules read like very particularly worded wishes to malicious genies. I wish this would happen, but not this, not under this condition, only when, if, as well as, in addition, because, when, to a maximum of, unless—
D&D 5 is basically the story of a group of devs that seemed to want to make a grognard-appeasing (after the 4E thing) "return to our roots" game with a sort of OSR-but-heroic approach of "just have natural language and evocative wording, GM gets the final word on everything"... and a fanbase that will tell you to your face that "well the spell says you can see through objects and doesn't give a range limit so obviously I can use it to look through the planet and see stuff going anywhere I want in the world" and not blink. It's a bunch of people who do not know how to do precise language and who did not actually write precise language trying to act as if they write precise language because that's what people want and expect, but they're bad at it.
(By the way, if you want to see what a game that actually got its lawyer to word the wishes to the evil genie looks like, that's basically what Pathfinder 2 is. What if D&D focused on being absolutely munchkin-proof above all other considerations)
I don't think PF2 is that bad about trying to very specific with rules wordings? What sorts of things in it are you thinking of?
From a GM's perspective:
It is really taxing to run a game of PF2E. Playing PF2E is one of the most joyous things I've done with TTRPG's in a while. I love playing Pathbuilder, I love using skill feats outside of combat to gather information or scrounge us some allies (or people very afraid to not do what I tell them to do), or craft shit, etc. And combat in PF2E triggers all the dopamine for me. I love weaving together a path toward my goal throughout my turn and either achieve it or get closer toward achieving it.
But running it is a fucking chore. Keeping track of standard DC's by level (because they couldn't just go 15+level or anything like that, no there's a chart), having to keyword dive on every monster statblock to find the full breadth and width of resistances, immunities, and abilities. Did you know undead are immune to bleed? Because if you look at an undead monster's statblock it won't say shit about this, it'll just say, "Usual undead immunities" so you get to go look up another thing, praise be! The stealth rules are complicated enough to justify a fucking video tutorial, frankly there's several things in the game that justify a fucking video tutorial, and you'll find multiples on several topics.
And then last but not least, the remaster has been a bit of a nightmare for me as a GM. I am constantly having to translate different terms I'm finding in my AP to the terms that exist now. Players who ask me for help will ask me about a thing I've never heard of and then I find out they're talking about a thing I know a lot about but under a different name. And then there's the occasional time when a player will catch me using an old term, such as Power Attack, and they'll want to get cute and correct me and say they don't have Power Attack, they have Vicious Swing, and about the 30th time they've done that I want to flip the fucking table.
Like, I'm still enjoying running this campaign, but Paizo has not made shit easy.
EDIT: Oh, and to Drascin's point: I still can't break my players from spending hours leveling because they want to find a spell that pumps up their stats or an item that pumps up their stats or a +4 weapon or something like that and I have to tell them for the millionth time that this game doesn't do that shit, just go for utility and levying conditions and just focus on doing cool shit instead of numbers go up.
In other news I'm going to start an in-person LANCER game in a couple weeks and I'm extremely stoked about it. I haven't decided if I'm setting it in The Long Rim, Castor + Pollux, or Suldan. But I am pumped. Got my hex grid marker board yesterday, printing stuff off of Retrograde Minis and attaching them to hex bases, let's fucking go.
Posts
When I say card based resolution mechanics, I don't mean poker, I mean three card monte
- As discussed, rolling at the start of hiding is narratively boring and also doesn't really make sense, because you wouldn't know if you did a good job of hiding without third party input on the matter.
- Turning it into an invisible condition reminds me of BG2, where enemy spellcasters could dispel your thief skills by casting See Invisibility - this might not work anymore or be the intent, but it gives me a bad gut reaction.
- The perception stuff seems confusing. My guess is that it's mostly there for players who are insistent on rolling the dice to see if they see anything due to metagaming, but it doesn't feel like a great solution to that.
- I don't like losing invisible when you make an attack, because it prevents the great trope of missing with an arrow which your enemy also doesn't notice happening. Or silently taking down an enemy Hitman style. Feels like it's carried over from invisibility previously being a strictly magical condition, and doesn't work to support the fiction (or at least the stories I'd like to tell).
- The thing about making a noise louder than a whisper feels strange to me, as part of the stealth check is moving silently. I guess it's to prevent people from talking while invisible, but like, what if what I want to do with my stealth is quietly load a cannon?
The player who invested in being good at sneaking rolls well and accomplishes the option they picked. Player whose design makes them bad at this fails, but not in a way that gets in the way of other players doing what they want. Still reveals their presence and ends stealth.
Advantage or similar bonuses is another player trying to cover the host’s eyes.
Then they must announce loudly, "Ready or not, here I come!"
And then you must hope the GM doesn't find you. If they do, you can't play rogues anymore.
We tried that technique up until the first Persuasion roll
I'm not allowed to play Bards any more
I feel you. It's why I can't play anything with a strength score or an intelligence score anymore.
Or a dexterity score...
Or a constitution score...
Or a wisdom score...
RIZ IT IZ
Ok I don't really play 5e.. (do .. people actually call old 5e 5e2014 and 5e2024 now because wizards couldn't just increment a number for them?) so probably grain of salt and all that maybe I'm missing something big.
I can kind of see where the designers are coming from with a like "It works like this spell, but with specific requirements to turn it on" instead of some bespoke thing but like... reading that reddit post, you simply need 6 separate rules from 3 sections of the book to understand how this works? Oof.
I don't know what average passive perception would be on an enemy, but 10+wisdom doesn't sound like it's going to beat the base 15 DC you'll always need to start hiding? Which kinda means if things aren't actively searching for you, you just win. Kinda feels like a feel bad for everyone, either you sneak around with impunity, or you have metagaming-gm declaring everyone's doing full-searches constantly. It kind of sounds like see-invisibility or alternate senses stuff just bones you, since you have a spell equivalent "Invisible" condition. The whole thing feels very hand wavy for the DM, are they rolling to search for you? Do they randomly have advantage for a +5 passive because it's "quiet". DM handwavyness is fine honestly but not if it's also this big clunky rules heavy thing.
Anyway! I give it a 2/10. Instead maybe the GM should be forced to play a hidden movement game against the rogue where they write down their moves in secret and the enemies have to search each 5 foot square to determine if someone has passed through it recently. Or we could do the cups thing, that seems faster.
After decades of rules lawyers at tables afraid to kick their asses out...
The scene: last night's remotely-run Eberron for Savage Worlds session. Foundry VTT has a couple options for differentiating similar tokens. You can leave them as is (Goblin, Goblin, Goblin), add an incrementing number after them (Goblin 1, Goblin 2, Goblin 3), or prefix the token name with a randomly assigned adjective. (Angry Goblin, Sleepy Goblin, Depressed Goblin).
The party had just rescued someone from a group of cockatrices who were coming back to attack the fresh targets, so I, being in my late 40s but perpetually 12 years old, decided to make my own custom adjectival prefixes for them.
All 12 of them.
Throbbing, Meaty, Totally-Average-Sized, etc.
(Mind you, these are all people that I know personally and this falls within the lines and veils we established in Session Zero; no way I'd drop that on a table of randos.)
They fought half a dozen at first, and then another half dozen joined the fray, all of us giggling and making the silliest of silly jokes. Many Bennies were awarded for making myself and the rest of the players double over in laughter.
A fun thing about cockatrices and their petrification ability in Savage Worlds: it's an ability drain on Agility, and they don't have to actually damage their target, just score a hit. Each failure of a Vigor roll in response reduces the target's Agility by a die size; if you drop below a d4 (the lowest possible value for an ability score), you're Incapacitated and need to make another Vigor roll to avoid being petrified.
Two of my players, inveterate min-maxers, had left their character's Agility at a d4.
...guess who was one of the party members that got surrounded by cockatrices?
They have a good Vigor score, but the cockatrice had gotten a raise on their attack, so the Vigor roll was at -2. They failed, spent a Benny to re-roll, and crit failed, halting their ability to spend more Bennies on more rerolls, and was Incapacitated. However, they made their roll to avoid petrification.
After beating off a few of the cockatrices, the druid cast Beast Friend to win over the remaining assailants, and the party got the hell out of Dodge.
Some slightly more mature hijinks ensued when they got back to town (including exploding dice giving the halfling barbarian a high enough Stealth roll (something around a result of 30 on a d6 Stealth skill!) to become functionally invisible in one shop, going over to another shop and then beefing a second Stealth roll badly enough to be observed by one of the guards there. He successfully escaped and rendezvoused with the rest of the party, and we wrapped for the evening.
One of Savage World's selling point is the ability to run combat encounters at a brisk pace; this is usually the case, but I was hoisted on my own petard of dick jokes and it wound up running longer than it otherwise should have. Still faster than a 5e combat w/ a total of 20 individuals generally would.
...totally worth it.
Beast wing yesterday was good! We did the first space combat for this group, which took a hot minute to set up because it was 6 foes flying PC ships vs 5 PCs. Which is like 130 cards in the initiative deck or something.
The combat looked like this:
The ??? Cards in the middle were a giant pile of torpedoes, which I enjoyed the party scrambling to blow up.
Afterwards they jumped after their quarry, discovered the reason no one’s been coming back through this lighthouse is the way-back lighthouse on the other side was thrown into the ocean, and took a quick break at a very-empty space station inn/tavern where they’re cooking attracted a stow away (one of the players wanted a cooking boon, so he’s got one he can mark where the aroma is so good they attract *something good*) who’s going to give them a bunch of details and locations on the planet below.
The space Combat took most of the session, which is something I was hoping to avoid with these rules, but I need to keep reminding myself that A) it’s still faster than d&d combat and B ) this group usually wants to wrap around 9pm and we start at like 7 by the time everyone’s all set, so like, these sessions are pretty short compared to the 8pm-2am games I used to play with my old d&d group.
atrice
I kinda like rulesy rules sometimes but then like, if they also include “also the dm can rule your stealth doesn’t work on a whim” you don’t really need them to be *that* airtight.
Your opponents will be rock hard... after you touch them?
I think D&D is really stuck on the old adversarial logic of things sometimes, rather than acknowledging that the DM is a player as much as everyone else.
It's like these people are actively looking for any way to bog down the game and have less fun with it. They're willfully disregarding their own ability to think critically and interpret things in a way that makes sense. As much as yes, the designers should probably ditch the whole "natural language" thing and just give us books with codified game language, I feel like a lot of DnD players have big-time adversarial DnD brain and are just looking for any edge case or super specific reading to fuck with the people they're playing with.
This is why it's so hard to find a table to play at, because even one of those adversarial jerks can ruin the game for everyone else. At least being a forever DM means I can nip that kinda shit in the bud.
Also I don't think natural language is the least bit incompatible with comprehensible rules, stuff like "nothing specifies you can't dual wield two swords in one hand!" is nonsense on the face of it, c'mon.
I feel like there can be a healthy mix of "natural" and "rules" language, sure, but the DnD designers have missed that mark a lot of the time. I really enjoy having imaginative descriptions of effects and all that, but sometimes, especially in spell descriptions, it detracts from telling me what mechanics I actually have to interact with. When the UA process for the new books was asking for feedback, my consistent feedback on each survey was to change the layout of spells in the books to make it more clear, at a glace, what needed to be rolled.
Could this be solved by telling my players to be more familiar with their own spells when they cast them? Sure! But even then, they have to read through a brick of flowery descriptions to find what kind of save I'm supposed to make this pack of feral goblins roll.
I think it’s an artifact from ye early days of DnD, and that old logic carries over to other games. I ran into it when running WFRP for my current group.
otoh sometimes you tell a player “no” once and it’s like
There is descriptive ability fluff text in the actual 4e books. It's part of the srd thing that required it all be stripped out of the character builder.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
I remember when my Avenger would use Loyal Sanction (utility power where you give a damage bonus to an ally against your chosen enemy), and the GM asked me how that looked, and I was like:
"I am literally pulling out a piece of paper and throwing it in his direction and it's a decree from the church that he's sanctioned to murder this man in the name of Kord."
Which yes, is anecdotal bad GMing, you can find that about anything, but I think it's indicative of how weird the lines between rules language and flavor have gotten for veteran D&D folks over the years.
I will fight them. They are a Dungeon Menace.
This made me laugh pretty fuckin hard
D&D 5 is basically the story of a group of devs that seemed to want to make a grognard-appeasing (after the 4E thing) "return to our roots" game with a sort of OSR-but-heroic approach of "just have natural language and evocative wording, GM gets the final word on everything"... and a fanbase that will tell you to your face that "well the spell says you can see through objects and doesn't give a range limit so obviously I can use it to look through the planet and see stuff going anywhere I want in the world" and not blink. It's a bunch of people who do not know how to do precise language and who did not actually write precise language trying to act as if they write precise language because that's what people want and expect, but they're bad at it.
(By the way, if you want to see what a game that actually got its lawyer to word the wishes to the evil genie looks like, that's basically what Pathfinder 2 is. What if D&D focused on being absolutely munchkin-proof above all other considerations)
I'd actually argue that MtG is the correct example there. Zero ambiguity... even if it has some very screwy edge cases (layers!)
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Every tabletop ruleset aspires to be a bad implementation of MtG, and most fail.
Things get real precise when there are million dollar prize pools.
—
Also won’t be running a play by post game on here this weekend, got to do more anti-fascist protests.
I don't think PF2 is that bad about trying to very specific with rules wordings? What sorts of things in it are you thinking of?
Yes, but it's a great example of a game where the rules are very carefully and precisely written, which was the point. Also, the juxtaposition is interesting as the difference in precision in the rules is clearly a conscious choice when WotC makes both games.
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From a GM's perspective:
It is really taxing to run a game of PF2E. Playing PF2E is one of the most joyous things I've done with TTRPG's in a while. I love playing Pathbuilder, I love using skill feats outside of combat to gather information or scrounge us some allies (or people very afraid to not do what I tell them to do), or craft shit, etc. And combat in PF2E triggers all the dopamine for me. I love weaving together a path toward my goal throughout my turn and either achieve it or get closer toward achieving it.
But running it is a fucking chore. Keeping track of standard DC's by level (because they couldn't just go 15+level or anything like that, no there's a chart), having to keyword dive on every monster statblock to find the full breadth and width of resistances, immunities, and abilities. Did you know undead are immune to bleed? Because if you look at an undead monster's statblock it won't say shit about this, it'll just say, "Usual undead immunities" so you get to go look up another thing, praise be! The stealth rules are complicated enough to justify a fucking video tutorial, frankly there's several things in the game that justify a fucking video tutorial, and you'll find multiples on several topics.
And then last but not least, the remaster has been a bit of a nightmare for me as a GM. I am constantly having to translate different terms I'm finding in my AP to the terms that exist now. Players who ask me for help will ask me about a thing I've never heard of and then I find out they're talking about a thing I know a lot about but under a different name. And then there's the occasional time when a player will catch me using an old term, such as Power Attack, and they'll want to get cute and correct me and say they don't have Power Attack, they have Vicious Swing, and about the 30th time they've done that I want to flip the fucking table.
Like, I'm still enjoying running this campaign, but Paizo has not made shit easy.
EDIT: Oh, and to Drascin's point: I still can't break my players from spending hours leveling because they want to find a spell that pumps up their stats or an item that pumps up their stats or a +4 weapon or something like that and I have to tell them for the millionth time that this game doesn't do that shit, just go for utility and levying conditions and just focus on doing cool shit instead of numbers go up.