This preference for super-demonic tieflings is something you pulled from the air, Aegeri.
Actually they could (as Ravenmuse already pointed out) have a random table for daemonic traits (or lower planar traits, they could in fact be from anywhere in the lower planes!). The problem was to me that they never had enough emphasis on the lower planar part at all. So I never really liked them because they never conveyed any sense of being something from the lower planes. The way 4E has inserted Tieflings and Aasimar is a lot better. Tieflings actually look like a race descended from daemonic/infernal taint and Aasimar (being tall blue supermodel like creatures) actually look like a race that were angelic.
Before lower planar blood made you an exotic supermodel and for that matter so did upper planar blood. One of those concepts is okay with me and the other isn't.
There is nothing wrong with making people corrupted by daemonic taint look more like monsters! SHOCKING CONCEPT.
Edit: It's for this reason in reverse I dislike Shardminds and Wilden. Strange plant creatures I can deal with, why do they have to have mammalian like features and genitalia (boobs?)? Why on earth do living construct crystal people have genders? There is absolutely nothing wrong with making races look non-human. Absolutely nothing.
HachfaceNot the Minister Farrakhan you're thinking ofDammit, Shepard!Registered Userregular
edited March 2010
I don't really care for the fact that 4e tieflings had their own civilization. I liked them better as solitary outcasts, like half-elves only worse.
In Sigil the outcast thing was (somewhat) played down because hey, it's Sigil -- why freak out over the girl with a tail when there is a pair of abishai strolling around the block? But in most PoL settings, it would be a pretty big deal if the miller's daughter came out of her mother with horns and a tail.
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BrodyThe WatchThe First ShoreRegistered Userregular
edited March 2010
Living constructs displaying human dimorphism is there reaction to the over-whelming percentage of sentient beings that have the same. Its a lot easier to get along with your neighbor if you somewhat resemble them. Plus, most people, when they see something walking up-right on two legs, assume there will be some sort of gender markers. I would assume that the artists are trying anthropomorphize things.
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"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
I don't really care for the fact that 4e tieflings had their own civilization. I liked them better as solitary outcasts, like half-elves only worse.
In Sigil the outcast thing was (somewhat) played down because hey, it's Sigil -- why freak out over the girl with a tail when there is a pair of abishai strolling around the block? But in most PoL settings, it would be a pretty big deal if the miller's daughter came out of her mother with horns and a tail.
This has nothing to do with my argument. You can get away with making outsiders with daemonic blood look like outsiders with daemonic blood in planescape. My problem is they didn't and the result was really nothing that conveyed "I am born of a lower planar creature". Your example above is perfect for why I dislike previous editions tieflings. They might as well be called "Half-Cat person" and you would get pretty much the same feel from a tiefling - not that of a lower planar creature. I don't believe looking at the 4E tiefling you could call them half-cat people (or whatever) and get away with it.
HachfaceNot the Minister Farrakhan you're thinking ofDammit, Shepard!Registered Userregular
edited March 2010
I wasn't addressing your argument. I was stating my reasons for liking the old tieflings better. It doesn't have a whole lot to do with appearances, on the whole.
Edit: But why couldn't a half-cat person look lower planar? I mean in the context of the 2e planar races. The guardinals were celestials who looked half-animal, so a cat-like aasimar was totally conceivable. By the same token, you could have someone descended from a vrock who had vulturish features. So who says there are no cat demons?
But why couldn't a half-cat person look lower planar?
Half-cat people are from the upper planes (The Beastlands). So making your tiefling look half-cat like was actually going in the entire opposite direction.
Edit: Also, I never knew any player of a tiefling to do something as awesome as make their character look like a part Vrock like abomination. That would have been a pleasing change of pace.
I have never encountered a catperson tiefling myself. I have no idea what was going on in your games.
edit: Honestly most of the tieflings I saw when I played on AOL chat rooms way back when were kind of boring and by-the-book. Tails and horns, tails and horns.
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
I have never encountered a catperson tiefling myself. I have no idea what was going on in your games.
I never knew a tiefling that looked anything resembling a daemon or anything from the lower planes either. A tail =/ lower planar flavor. Even the art doesn't look that lower planar either, that was my problem with them. The 4E tiefling at least makes me feel that it's something that did come from a lower planar taint once upon a time - making them much more preferable to me.
HachfaceNot the Minister Farrakhan you're thinking ofDammit, Shepard!Registered Userregular
edited March 2010
I really am not that hung up on their appearance. It is the change in their origin that bugs me. Like I said, I liked them better as disparate accidents of a strange universe and not the descendants of the Witchalok Lords of the Godkings or whatever.
This reminds me of one of my friends that plays. His past favorite characters he has made have all been of the same stock: Half Dragon fighter duel wielding bastard swords.
Well when 4th came out I figured he would be apeshit over Dragonborn. Instead he despises them and thinks the only thing keeping them from the bottom of the pack of races in the PHB1 in 4e is the Tiefling, which he thinks looks even dumber. Turns out all of his half dragons looked remarkably like humans, except for maybe black eyes and pointed teeth. I made the comment that he would probably like the dragonborn better if they had the same stat type adjustments as the half dragon template. Amazingly enough I was not corrected.
You know, there's a decent justification for anthropomorphic features on most creatures in DnD.
Consider that religious texts typically depict humans as being created as a likeness unto their gods. In the Bible, God made Man in his own image. Prometheus shaped the first Men after the form of the Titans according to Roman Myth.
So to the Shardmind: if we presume that the Gods are reasonably human-like in their own form, and if they are in any way responsible for the formation of the Shardminds from the remnants of the Far Realm gate or whatever, then they'd probably do the same thing they did when they made humans.
The Wilden are a bit more difficult, depending on the God/Goddess responsible for Nature in each cosmology. Presumably however, they also maintain humanlike qualities and might shape their favored race similarly.
In other words, stop thinking Darwinian and start thinking Creation Myth.
The main thing I'm wondering about with the wilden flavor-wise is why they are fey creatures. They seem more in-tune with the elder spirits of the natural world (although there is a bit of conceptual overlap with the archfey and the elder spirits).
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
You know, there's a decent justification for anthropomorphic features on most creatures in DnD.
Consider that religious texts typically depict humans as being created as a likeness unto their gods. In the Bible, God made Man in his own image. Prometheus shaped the first Men after the form of the Titans according to Roman Myth.
So to the Shardmind: if we presume that the Gods are reasonably human-like in their own form, and if they are in any way responsible for the formation of the Shardminds from the remnants of the Far Realm gate or whatever, then they'd probably do the same thing they did when they made humans.
The Wilden are a bit more difficult, depending on the God/Goddess responsible for Nature in each cosmology. Presumably however, they also maintain humanlike qualities and might shape their favored race similarly.
In other words, stop thinking Darwinian and start thinking Creation Myth.
Well, according to the book, Shardminds aren't exactly directly made by the gods, except insomuch as an unnamed god shattered the Living Gate (probably Tharizdun, he always gets blamed for these types of things). No one is really sure what causes Shardminds to form, least of all the Shardminds themselves. There's three "philosophies" in a loose sense among Shardminds about why they form and what their purpose is. One believes that if enough Shardminds are formed, a new Living Gate will come into being (more or less), another believes that it's the duty of each Shardmind to amass as much power as possible, so that any given one has a chance of creating a new gate, and a third believes that as many sentient Shardminds as possible should be destroyed, as the existence of individuals weakens the destroyed-but-still-alive Living Gate and keeps it from reforming by itself.
I have to say that the whole "various outlooks" sort of thing they have for the PHB3 races is a welcome change from the "example adventurers" they had in the previous books. It allows you to better understand a race's outlook without making you feel like you're being pigeonholed into aping someone else's character.
SO I got the PHB3 on Saturday, and I have to say this is the most meh book that they have released for 4e so far.
The new races
Minotuar - blegh. They already wrote it up in DDI, plus monstrous races can go to hell (bugbears, gnolls, kobolds, don't like any of them)
Wilden - shit. Stupid plant men
Githwhatever - meh. Never really like or disliked the various gith that much.
Shardmind - awful. Stupid name, stupid concept. Who really thought anyone would want to play a dude made out of crystal.
I think they should just stop with new races now unless they are setting specific. It's like Aegeri said a few pages back, it is annoying trying to fold these weird and wonderful things into existing campaign worlds, but because they are in the core books it is also hard to say no if a player wants to use one.
New character options
Skill utilities are actually pretty cool, and hybrid characters work quite well I think.
Some useful feats for existing classes and races.
New classes.
Monk - cool - my favourite bit of the book.
Runepriest - mechanically sound, I just don't really like the flavour.
Seeker - quite good, although I am really confused as to why most of thier powers are X[W] + random dice + stat.
The 3 "augmentable" psionic classes. Awful.
The whole way they have done these augment powers is terrible -
1) Boring.
Each normal character by mid paragon has (ignoring paragon paths and dailies) 3 encounter powers and 2 at wills. That is 5 attack powers they can use reliably every encounter and the chances are all 5 things will be different in what they do.
Each psionic character gets (ignoring paragon paths) 3 at wills. Yawn. Yes you can boost them with points, but the augmented versions always do the same thing as the base, just slightly differently - a bit more damage, more targets blah blah.
Coupled with point 3 below, many psion classes will have the same powers for all 30 levels.
2) Bookkeeping.
A whole extra set of numbers to keep track of. The basic system that everyone else uses is, once the power is used, you cross it off then move on. You always know it is available if you haven't used it.
The augmentable powers use a variable shared pool of points that can go up and down during a fight - want to use the 6 point version of a power at some point in the fight - too bad you only have 5 points left as 4 rounds earlier you used 1 point in another power.
They were going for flexibility, but ended up with over complicated and bland (see above)
3) Overpowered and underpowered at the same time.
Underpowered - the at wills base power doesn't scale at epic like all other at wills in the game. The base power of higher level at wills is not much over the level 1 powers. Generally augmented powers are no where near comparative to other classes equal level encounter powers.
Overpowered - both the ardent and psion have 2 or 3 level 1 at wills that are objectively better than any of the higher level ones (going all the way up to 27), but because they are lower level the top level augment only costs 2 points.
Each psion ends up with at least 17 power points (as well as ways of getting them back in a fight) so they can spam the low level powers fully augmented at least 7 times per encounter. Boring, which feeds back into point number 1 above.
Bladelings were never even supposed to be a playable race. They live in the most hostile, most dangerous layer of Acheri in the whole of the plane, and are completely xenophobic because they live in a world where flying needle sized pins could kill you in a moment. Anything that can survive outside of their shelled cities is obviously, not something to be trusted.
I agree, but this kind of logic was used for numerous dumb races and such in 2E as well. It's hardly new thinking.
This doesn't change the fact bladeling is a horrible race and nobody is ever going to play it anyway.
Right, but my point is, why make them a stupid race in the first place for 4e? They work better as setting material than they do as player characters. I mean, for all the races they could have tossed into MotP, they go for the xenophobic race stuck in their home plane trying to avoid spikey razor'd death.
I mean hell, that's about as random as making bodaks a playable race (well, I guess they kind of did with the revenants, but still). What's the point?
(I'm trying my hardest to think of a race that they could have used instead, but it is six in the morning here and it is not coming to me)
Your argument here can equally apply to 2E Rogue Modrons just as easily, just so you know this.
Oh yeah? YOUR FACE. Seriously though, we're arguing preference here.
Tieflings weren't just "demonic". They were descended from basically anything in the lower planes. This meant that a good number of them could manifest demonic traits, but they could just as likely manifest traits that look like nupperibos, or night hags, or shadow fiends, or basically anything.
Yeah this is lovely idealism but it never worked like this. You can thank Planescape Torment (Annah) and the art of them - which never ever made them look anywhere near as horrific as they could be. At least Tieflings in 4E are unmistakably daemonic/infernal in origin. This is a vast improvement to red eyed supermodels who might have a tail (at worst).
I can think of a few pieces where you got a strong feeling of lower planes-dom (several ones in the Planeswalker's Handbook, for instance). DiTerlizzi was great at stuff like that. Having never played that - nor surrounded by people that used them as people used Fish Malks - I never encountered this and thus, do not bear this grudge.
Modrons have been screwed since 3e, because everyone always sees them as those "goofy little pseudomechanical guys that act kind of like Data."
This was how they were in 2E, you cannot blame 3E for something that 2E did. The core part of this was their inherent action, where if X happened the Modron would always do Y - the nature of its previous strict adherence to law. That is basically how people then played them. In 2E, which is why I hate and despise them inherently because they were always played in the most twinky and obnoxious way possible. Imagine a rogue modron who, on every time hearing the word "is" attempts to steal something from the nearest creature (And yes, this is what the 2E rules supported) and you begin to understand the depth of my absolute and unyielding hatred for them. It's like a kender (from dragonlance), that's also a box that does something stupid "by the rules" every time a certain thing happens.
Uh, I dunno where you're pulling this from, but apparently you ended up with completely different players than I ever did. Modrons were often played like little children trying to figure out why things work (I now have the best character idea ever: a rogue modron trying to write "The Way Things Work" as a primer to get those stupid non-modrons to understand the world as he does).
Seriously, that is as bad as the aforementioned fish malks who would use insanity in defense of doing something malodorous. I never saw it at my table. I never saw half of this anti-social stuff you're talking about.
Where are you pulling this from? Because I will go upstairs and pull out my books and quote their entire entry, if you'd like.
(Quick aside: so much hate comes from having bad players in a group and having to deal with their stupidity. I don't like psionics of any flavor because I had a player once that used my absolute inability with math [well that and he was my uncle, and I was like, fifteen] to abuse the system to heck. I think it drags down discourse; what do you think?)
And yes, they were a horrible worthless PC race for precisely that reason in 2E. Bauriars were far better and in fact, just about everything else was (I'll exclude Tieflings but they were destroyed by players who never actually made them look anywhere near daemonic - other than the odd token gesture of course. Minding that wasn't the players fault when you had the art for them that basically reinforced such notions).
This sounds a little self-reflective - did you end up with bad players at some point Aegeri? And of course the art prettified them up; you either had the beautiful fey artwork of DiTerlizzi, or the random art intern that would jot out a horrible sketch and they'd use it. I can't think of a non-DiTerlizzi piece that I liked in that setting, off-hand.
Planescape had one of the best racial line-ups in any of the original campaign settings, barring possibly Dark Sun (which, back in the day I had no entry into, considering that I had no stores around me that sold the stupid books). The main book had humans, bauriars, githzerai, and tieflings. Planeswalker's Handbook introduced rogue modrons and genansi. They out and out said that most of the other races that ended up on the planes usually ended up heading straight to their homelands and staying there.
Your hate for modrons is kind of...weird, and sounds like it was flavored by bad players. Which ruins so much and kills so much discourse between people.
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KayWhat we need...Is a little bit of PANIC.Registered Userregular
edited March 2010
Kender and Tinker Gnomes - ruined by bad players, or just outright bad?
I remember a Kender in a Dragonlance game who was actually really well done and fun to RP with. The fact that it was like a slightly less hyper Tasslehoff probably had something to do with that, though.
Completely agree with your opinion on psionics, at least so far as psions go. The penalty to defenses equal to your charisma mod is completely and utterly insane at epic and even paragon.
As to why seekers usually do more damage with their powers, I assume it's because seekers are basically wholly focused on the control side of controller. They had very few AE powers (first encounter AE was level 7, area burst 1), which really hampers their potential dpr. So basically they completely blow at killing minions and doing a whole lot of spread out damage, so wizards gave them a little mini-striker mechanic to help compensate. My (tentative, pending getting the book myself, sitting down and reading it) assessment is the class sucks balls, going to the bottom of the heap along with feylocks as possessors of a wide range of control that I find of questionable value. It is less bothersome since the seeker is a controller and a warlock is not, despite it's leanings, but I still remain unimpressed.
All that said, the class could be fun. Rangers may be the kings of bows, but they are also the kings of boring. Seeker at least had some neat tricks to recommend it over, "I quarry a guy and twin strike him." To someone looking for a more involved bow class, though I guess there's always specific bard and warlord builds.
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
Right, but my point is, why make them a stupid race in the first place for 4e?
We're talking about people who made Wilden and Shardminds here. Their logic in player races simply defies comprehension.
I can think of a few pieces where you got a strong feeling of lower planes-dom (several ones in the Planeswalker's Handbook, for instance). DiTerlizzi was great at stuff like that. Having never played that - nor surrounded by people that used them as people used Fish Malks - I never encountered this and thus, do not bear this grudge.
Unfortunately this was the case though, minding I wouldn't mind them bringing back DiTerlizzi for some more art - he was really good at conveying a good "planar" feel in his work.
Also, Malkavians were a great idea in theory but so horrible at tables. I only ever saw someone roleplay one in a non-game destructive manner once.
Uh, I dunno where you're pulling this from, but apparently you ended up with completely different players than I ever did.
That would be the case, because Modrons being something you describe would be interesting. Invariably, I never saw them played that way solely because one rule in the book would let you do ridiculously dumb things. The other was a Modron that went homicidal any time someone said a secret word.
When the player finds it endlessly funny that secret word is "the" it makes any conversation immensely awkward.
Where are you pulling this from? Because I will go upstairs and pull out my books and quote their entire entry, if you'd like.
The 2E book that describes rogue modrons. It is in fact in the book that they have an action they will perform under a certain condition.
I've beaten you to it though, in this case it was under the DMs discretion but sadly I was not the DM and could not stop this in the game involved (sigh). I was after though (thankfully):
Page 77;
Preset Actions
This option requires a rogue modron to state one preset action per level, based on external stimuli - a condition upon which the modron will always respond the same. For example, every time a foe draws a weapon, a certain modron might immediately attack. On the same condition, another modron might cast the highest-level spell it currently has memorized, weather the spell is appropriate for the situation or not.
Now this doesn't inherently sound unreasonable. That is until someone decides "is" is an hilarious trigger for something. The kaibosh was inevitably put on this, but it was a seriously dumb thing for the groups I played with (and then DMed, minding once I was the DM I disallowed it entirely). The damage had well and truly be done though and I've never felt they were anything other than awful.
(Quick aside: so much hate comes from having bad players in a group and having to deal with their stupidity. I don't like psionics of any flavor because I had a player once that used my absolute inability with math [well that and he was my uncle, and I was like, fifteen] to abuse the system to heck. I think it drags down discourse; what do you think?)
This is certainly true, but to me Rogue Modrons were the annoying Kender equivalent of Planescape, instead of something that could have been unique, quirky and interesting.
This sounds a little self-reflective - did you end up with bad players at some point Aegeri?
Highschool DnD was serious business. Actually mostly they were good guys.
Give them something like a Rogue Modron or a Malkavian and the toilet began flushing though.
Planescape had one of the best racial line-ups in any of the original campaign settings, barring possibly Dark Sun (which, back in the day I had no entry into, considering that I had no stores around me that sold the stupid books). The main book had humans, bauriars, githzerai, and tieflings. Planeswalker's Handbook introduced rogue modrons and genansi. They out and out said that most of the other races that ended up on the planes usually ended up heading straight to their homelands and staying there.
Actually IIRC Bauriar, Githzerai, Genasi, Rogue Modrons, Aasimar and Tieflings were all in the Planar Handbook. Flipping through it, I am indeed correct those races are in here (I haven't read the campaign setting in a while, they may have been in the Campagn Guide as well). The tiefling random stuff chart is particularly amusing, I forgot in 2E they could (with a very very very small chance) be immune to normal weapons and only harmed by silver/magical weapons.
Your hate for modrons is kind of...weird, and sounds like it was flavored by bad players. Which ruins so much and kills so much discourse between people.
Bad players do sometimes make up my perceptions of things, but I've never liked things that were just plain disruptive and ruined an otherwise good game.
Kender and Tinker Gnomes - ruined by bad players, or just outright bad?
I remember a Kender in a Dragonlance game who was actually really well done and fun to RP with. The fact that it was like a slightly less hyper Tasslehoff probably had something to do with that, though.
Quirky races always run the risk of players degenerating into absurdity with them.
There's really nothing inherently wrong with kender that isn't wrong with dwarves, it's just that larcenous hijinks are typically seen as a distraction while hard drinking and getting into fights are baseline traits for most adventurers anyway.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds.2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
edited March 2010
The dumbest thing was even when I said that rule didn't apply they did it anyway. It of course did not have the mechanical benefit (you basically went first with your action instantly on the trigger occurring and it could trigger multiple times, even outside of your turn - which if you think about it could be made *insanely* exploitable if you were clever enough), but the "book says this is what modrons could do" so it persisted.
Mr Lethally Assaults anyone who says the word 'The', was quickly dropped into the abyss and never seen again (mysteriously at that). One really shouldn't walk through the wrong door in Sigil, while they are a modron, that just happens to go to the abyss and doesn't have another way back - oh and it's one of the worst layers. You know the one, the one that is the plane of perpetual rust and horrible metal eating monsters. That one. The Bauriar PC he made after was pretty metal and good times were had by all after-wards (especially me, the then 3rd DM of that game).
Kender and Tinker Gnomes - ruined by bad players, or just outright bad?
I remember a Kender in a Dragonlance game who was actually really well done and fun to RP with. The fact that it was like a slightly less hyper Tasslehoff probably had something to do with that, though.
Quirky races always run the risk of players degenerating into absurdity with them.
There's really nothing inherently wrong with kender that isn't wrong with dwarves, it's just that larcenous hijinks are typically seen as a distraction while hard drinking and getting into fights are baseline traits for most adventurers anyway.
Yeah, the player never really did stuff for the sake of it - he never picked the party pockets (unless it was something Really Interesting that they wouldn't let him look at - if we showed him what it was, let him hold it for a bit, then asked for it back, he usually forgot about it in-character and didn't try to get it to INVESTIGATE), he never disrupted the flow of the game, and just about the worst thing he did was get distracted reading some runes on a door we were trying to make him unlock while we fought off the bad guys - and that was because the DM kept saying that these runes were REALLY INTERESTING, and made him roll a Wisdom check or get distracted by them, as I recall.
I always feel you can have quirky characters, as long as you don't use their quirks as an excuse to disrupt the party and be as annoying as possible, while hiding behind the whole 'but that is what my character would do, heheheheh!' excuse so many love to use.
Damn it Aegeri, I came back specifically to trump you with that!
More when I return from breakfast.
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
edited March 2010
I was almost a tiefling in that game as well actually. First session got nowhere as Mr. "The" was constantly killing everyone and the party running from one another. Trying to think of ways of talking without using "The" was the most hilarious thing ever. I wasn't there so I'm assuming my character never said "The". The second session we played Warhammer instead and never played. Third session, I think the DM quit and someone else took over as the first DM wanted to play. I wasn't able to go to that one.
The fourth session I was made DM (because second DM wanted to play) by defacto vote. We played two sessions before I killed off "Mr. Lethal on The" (because the joke as it happened was wearing thin). The only other Rogue Modron I had was like a Kender in a mechanical box. Only he stole things on the word "Is" being spoken. He did not care that I didn't allow the mechanics to actually work, that the book suggested it was good enough for him to "roleplay it" like that.
What I learned was that I can never play DnD. That game I got made DM anyway and couldn't attend the two sessions I could have played. In the Dark Sun game that was run my character was killed by a boulder before I even got to play. I've been convinced I've been cursed to forever DM since (minding it's a job I enjoy anyway).
Damn it Aegeri, I came back specifically to trump you with that!
The main problem was even though it was a rule to the DMs discretion, it didn't stop a PC actually doing it anyway out of "roleplaying" because the book suggested it (and some of them thought it was a plain hilarious idea - all they needed was the seeds of such a concept and getting the mechanical benefit was an irrelevant sideshow to being "hilarious").
Edit: However my memory was definitely not on the fritz and that was definitely in there. The other rule, for those curious was that they could roll initiative once and they used that roll for the remainder of their life (though at the DMs discretion it could be once a day and such forth). Personally I would find that an hilarious rule for 4E that once per day you could roll initiative (after an extended rest) and choose to replace any initiative roll later on in the day with that roll.
I'm starting to get a clear image of how I'd like tieflings to be. Noble, proud, a bit pathetic/bathetic because they used to be so powerful. No homeland or powerbase, so a bit like Jewish people before Israel. Strong connections to the other Astral Sea/Elemental Chaos because of their otherwordly heritage. I plan to have a small community of tiefling scholars in the central town of my sandbox campaign.
I think it helps that I never played 3e or any of the Planescape settings. I have almost no idea of what they were before.
How about halflings? They are almost Tolkienesque, if you take the types like the Tooks and Brandybucks, who were often adventurous. I do prefer proper hobbits, though. What are halflings like in your games?
Kender and Tinker Gnomes - ruined by bad players, or just outright bad?
I remember a Kender in a Dragonlance game who was actually really well done and fun to RP with. The fact that it was like a slightly less hyper Tasslehoff probably had something to do with that, though.
Ruined by bad players. I've told stories of the kender player I had in my game once, and he was fun on a bun. Of course, the guy playing him was usually fun on a bun, but it all worked out.
(Quick summation: he once got a hold of a Wish spell and, with a manic grin on his face, shouted, "I WISH FOR BEER! ALL THE BEER YOU CAN GIVE ME!" and opened his mouth to the heavens.
Being the obliging GM that I am, I gave it to him. And drowned him. One quick raise dead later and he was back in trouble again)
My view may also be colored by the fact that I used to hang out on Kencyclopedia all the time, and they were balls-on-awesome.
Tinker gnomes did not belong in Dragonlance. They were better suited to Spelljammer. Way better suited.
Right, but my point is, why make them a stupid race in the first place for 4e?
We're talking about people who made Wilden and Shardminds here. Their logic in player races simply defies comprehension.
As we were discussing in the last thread, the problem truly lies in the fact that they do not have a group of people that are good exclusively at fluff. It looks like - to me - that they have the mechanical guys writing fluff, which it doesn't seem like they've got a good handle on.
I can think of a few pieces where you got a strong feeling of lower planes-dom (several ones in the Planeswalker's Handbook, for instance). DiTerlizzi was great at stuff like that. Having never played that - nor surrounded by people that used them as people used Fish Malks - I never encountered this and thus, do not bear this grudge.
Unfortunately this was the case though, minding I wouldn't mind them bringing back DiTerlizzi for some more art - he was really good at conveying a good "planar" feel in his work.
Also, Malkavians were a great idea in theory but so horrible at tables. I only ever saw someone roleplay one in a non-game destructive manner once.
He won't come back. He's wayyyy too expensive. Hell, he was probably too expensive when he was working on Planescape stuff, but they didn't care about hemorraging money back then.
Malkavians were great in theory, but I'll agree with you on execution. Hoo boy. Thankfully I primarily played Werewolf (where our worst were "wacky" ragabashes; there was a wide hatred of Nuwisha but no one ever seemed to be able to bring one example to bear of a bad player with one) so we only ever heard about it when some of their forum drama spilled over to ours.
Uh, I dunno where you're pulling this from, but apparently you ended up with completely different players than I ever did.
That would be the case, because Modrons being something you describe would be interesting. Invariably, I never saw them played that way solely because one rule in the book would let you do ridiculously dumb things. The other was a Modron that went homicidal any time someone said a secret word.
When the player finds it endlessly funny that secret word is "the" it makes any conversation immensely awkward.
It's how I read them in the book, honestly. I was never "blessed" with someone making a modron (actually, there might have been; we played a lot of one-shots at one point) but that's the impression that I gained just from reading the book.
I would have smacked that player on the top of the head if they'd pulled that kind of stunt around me.
Where are you pulling this from? Because I will go upstairs and pull out my books and quote their entire entry, if you'd like.
The 2E book that describes rogue modrons. It is in fact in the book that they have an action they will perform under a certain condition.
I've beaten you to it though, in this case it was under the DMs discretion but sadly I was not the DM and could not stop this in the game involved (sigh). I was after though (thankfully):
Page 77;
Preset Actions
This option requires a rogue modron to state one preset action per level, based on external stimuli - a condition upon which the modron will always respond the same. For example, every time a foe draws a weapon, a certain modron might immediately attack. On the same condition, another modron might cast the highest-level spell it currently has memorized, weather the spell is appropriate for the situation or not.
Now this doesn't inherently sound unreasonable. That is until someone decides "is" is an hilarious trigger for something. The kaibosh was inevitably put on this, but it was a seriously dumb thing for the groups I played with (and then DMed, minding once I was the DM I disallowed it entirely). The damage had well and truly be done though and I've never felt they were anything other than awful.
This is why I brought my book to work today, to specifically quote it and then shout TAKE THAT at you. Now you have ruined my fun. You may, however, take back your friendship ring. For rejoice! Things are good between us.
(Quick aside: so much hate comes from having bad players in a group and having to deal with their stupidity. I don't like psionics of any flavor because I had a player once that used my absolute inability with math [well that and he was my uncle, and I was like, fifteen] to abuse the system to heck. I think it drags down discourse; what do you think?)
This is certainly true, but to me Rogue Modrons were the annoying Kender equivalent of Planescape, instead of something that could have been unique, quirky and interesting.
The problem being, quirky and interesting often turn into fodder for the kinds of people that should be nowhere near that kind of junk. Hell, "those kind of people" will ruin anything for anyone; my girlfriend likes to make fun of a person in her old group that was obsessed with dragons. It's hard for her to take anything dragon related seriously now because of how serious this kid was about dragons. And he was in his early twenties, IIRC.
This sounds a little self-reflective - did you end up with bad players at some point Aegeri?
Highschool DnD was serious business. Actually mostly they were good guys.
Give them something like a Rogue Modron or a Malkavian and the toilet began flushing though.
As a friend of mine likes to put it, so you put them in the hole and they get the hose until they learn to play well with others.
Can I relate a story? I love relating stories. Anyway, a good friend of mine (who runs this totally awesome art blog that you should totally check out, seriously, it's awesomesauce) once played a thief in our weekly game who sold her fellow players out constantly. All sneaking around, stealing things, and when she'd get caught, she'd tell them where the rest of the group was hiding out and then get herself the hell out of Dodge. And none of us hated her for it, because she always managed to come back and save their butts at some point, but it was one of those situations where it could have been so bad but instead ended up so good.
Planescape had one of the best racial line-ups in any of the original campaign settings, barring possibly Dark Sun (which, back in the day I had no entry into, considering that I had no stores around me that sold the stupid books). The main book had humans, bauriars, githzerai, and tieflings. Planeswalker's Handbook introduced rogue modrons and genansi. They out and out said that most of the other races that ended up on the planes usually ended up heading straight to their homelands and staying there.
Actually IIRC Bauriar, Githzerai, Genasi, Rogue Modrons, Aasimar and Tieflings were all in the Planar Handbook. Flipping through it, I am indeed correct those races are in here (I haven't read the campaign setting in a while, they may have been in the Campagn Guide as well). The tiefling random stuff chart is particularly amusing, I forgot in 2E they could (with a very very very small chance) be immune to normal weapons and only harmed by silver/magical weapons.
I'm recalling this off-hand, so stay with me. The main campaign book had humans, half-elves, bauriar, githzerai, and tieflings, with some provisionals for planewalking demi-humans.
Genansi, aasimar (which I forgot where in the game until I opened the Handbook up), and modrons were given full write-ups in the Handbook, which also gave quick summations of the planeswalking races.
Your hate for modrons is kind of...weird, and sounds like it was flavored by bad players. Which ruins so much and kills so much discourse between people.
Bad players do sometimes make up my perceptions of things, but I've never liked things that were just plain disruptive and ruined an otherwise good game.
[/quote]
I think you and I approach things differently then, because I generally gloss over the "could be bad" and just run with, "I'll beat them senseless with a rolled up book if they abuse this." But I've been told that I'm a pretty lenient guy when it comes to my games.
Mr Lethally Assaults anyone who says the word 'The', was quickly dropped into the abyss and never seen again (mysteriously at that). One really shouldn't walk through the wrong door in Sigil, while they are a modron, that just happens to go to the abyss and doesn't have another way back - oh and it's one of the worst layers. You know the one, the one that is the plane of perpetual rust and horrible metal eating monsters. That one. The Bauriar PC he made after was pretty metal and good times were had by all after-wards (especially me, the then 3rd DM of that game).
This is comic gold though, and sounds about up my alley. Mister I-Want-Beer had to go through a few of these trials when he started getting a little over-anxious with his prankery.
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
edited March 2010
It depends on the setting, in Eberron a player could be a Talenta plains Halfling. Essentially that kind of character is (or was) a Barbarian that rides Dinosaurs - so pretty whacky compared to other settings. Otherwise I portray them a lot like the Lord of the Rings hobbits out of habit (more than anything else).
To be honest, I may dislike a race but if they are an option I rarely ever tell a player what they can/can't play. I've even dropped my previous stance on Warforged in things like FR because quite frankly, what's so absurd about Warforged compared to Shardminds, Wilden and Minotaurs? If I can accommodate those races (and I've been pondering that for a while now) I can certainly accommodate warforged.
As we were discussing in the last thread, the problem truly lies in the fact that they do not have a group of people that are good exclusively at fluff. It looks like - to me - that they have the mechanical guys writing fluff, which it doesn't seem like they've got a good handle on.
Yeah, their fluff articles for campaign settings and even their default PoL (except the Raven Queen stuff, I mean wtf she reminds me of an Orcus with boobs in some ways).
Personally though I can either continue crying about it or live with things like Shardminds. If my PCs enjoy them and want to play them it's fine by me.
He won't come back. He's wayyyy too expensive. Hell, he was probably too expensive when he was working on Planescape stuff, but they didn't care about hemorraging money back then.
Malkavians were great in theory, but I'll agree with you on execution. Hoo boy. Thankfully I primarily played Werewolf (where our worst were "wacky" ragabashes; there was a wide hatred of Nuwisha but no one ever seemed to be able to bring one example to bear of a bad player with one) so we only ever heard about it when some of their forum drama spilled over to ours.
Forum drama in Vampire went with the territory I feel. The worst forum drama was always cross-game stuff, like when you had vampires, mages and stuff in the same party. It invariably was always horrible. In all this, Malkavians were a fantastic concept that was never played well at all. I still like Malkavians actually, but I'd never go so far as to deliberately bring them back into the game in Vampire: the Requiem. Or in anything for that matter.
And yeah, I remember that he was really expensive, tis a shame
It's how I read them in the book, honestly. I was never "blessed" with someone making a modron (actually, there might have been; we played a lot of one-shots at one point) but that's the impression that I gained just from reading the book.
I would have smacked that player on the top of the head if they'd pulled that kind of stunt around me.
In my defense I would have, but he was bigger than me.
This is why I brought my book to work today, to specifically quote it and then shout TAKE THAT at you. Now you have ruined my fun. You may, however, take back your friendship ring. For rejoice! Things are good between us.
I knew I wasn't going crazy though, I can't remember a damn thing in that book EXCEPT for that. It was ingrained upon me from back in the day. If I had got that wrong I would have begun to question my sanity and memory.
The problem being, quirky and interesting often turn into fodder for the kinds of people that should be nowhere near that kind of junk. Hell, "those kind of people" will ruin anything for anyone; my girlfriend likes to make fun of a person in her old group that was obsessed with dragons. It's hard for her to take anything dragon related seriously now because of how serious this kid was about dragons. And he was in his early twenties, IIRC.
Disruptive players in my experience are tools with just about anything, but at the same time there are things they can get into that can either heavily exacerbate their anti-group tendencies or actually manage to curb it.
In all honesty thinking about it now, he was probably thinking he was being genuinely funny for everyone else rather than deliberately antagonistic.
As a friend of mine likes to put it, so you put them in the hole and they get the hose until they learn to play well with others.
You can get arrested for things like that, especially when you start demanding they rub lotion into their skin on an hourly basis as well.
I'm recalling this off-hand, so stay with me. The main campaign book had humans, half-elves, bauriar, githzerai, and tieflings, with some provisionals for planewalking demi-humans.
Genansi, aasimar (which I forgot where in the game until I opened the Handbook up), and modrons were given full write-ups in the Handbook, which also gave quick summations of the planeswalking races.
Yeah it was probably like that so everything was in one book for players actually.
One interesting thing was the sexual dimorphism in Bauriar - their females didn't get physical stat bonuses and the natural weaponry (instead getting an int and something else bonus).
I think you and I approach things differently then, because I generally gloss over the "could be bad" and just run with, "I'll beat them senseless with a rolled up book if they abuse this." But I've been told that I'm a pretty lenient guy when it comes to my games.
There are three factors here with me:
1) When I was in highschool I was like, 14-18 odd. I had not yet learned my "Stern tone" and ability to judge things on how a game should be run. Half the time my adventures were completely nuts, I was quite happy to have players fighting archfiends at level 10 for example (but I made them so ridiculously overpowered they invariably won now I think of it).
2) I didn't have a lot of patience for some things and even though I couldn't write a DnD story for jack shit, I was determined that it should be "Serious business" so things that got in the way really annoyed me.
3) I never got to play DnD except for once. Every other time I was not able to attend, we played Warhammer (which was awesome btw, certainly not ragging on the ole Warhammer here) or I was made the DM anyway - so I never had any concept of what it was to play DnD until computer games (strangely enough).
This is comic gold though, and sounds about up my alley. Mister I-Want-Beer had to go through a few of these trials when he started getting a little over-anxious with his prankery.
Oh it was absolutely hilarious, for the first session or so but it got rather old pretty quickly later on.
I will concede to anyone the first time someone said "The" and he immediately attacked them was priceless.
So I hope I don't derail too much by saying that this comic really annoys me, because it's using an old joke, but doesn't finish it! It's supposed to end with 'mathematics is applied logic, logic is applied philosophy, and philosophy is applied bullshit. Therefore all science is bullshit'.
I do agree wholeheartedly that I think there should be more setting specific playable races and such. The fact that warforged are even in the base monster manual kind of annoys me, because they are so closely tied to eberron. And I tend to forget shifters exist, since I don't have phb2.
I've said numerous times that I'm pretty new to DnD. For the past few days, I've trying to come up with a good setting for my own adventure. Now, I don't want to spend a lot of money, so I'm thinking the best thing to do is to just come up with my own world that is completely separate from the DnD world. I guess this would be referred to as a campaign setting?
So, I know that I'm going to need a monster manual in order to make my own adventures, something I still don't have. Is there anything else I'm going to need in order to make this work?
Also, has anyone ever given their PCs hidden roles in a setting? I'm thinking about each of the players sitting in a tavern as all PCs meet and an NPC goes up to each one of them and discusses with them a contract. Each player will have a notecard that will be what was whispered to them and something they will keep secret from other players. I don't anticipate it being something huge like one of them being a traitor, but something that's large enough to give them a drive. Like I said, all of my players (including myself) are new to this, and I think something like this would give them something to play for rather than just trying to complete a quest mutually.
Been thinking about trying to get involved with some PbP since I haven't been able to get any decent adventures going around here. Are there any PbPs here that are looking for a new-to-4E D&D vet? Or is there somewhere else in particular I should be asking?
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Actually they could (as Ravenmuse already pointed out) have a random table for daemonic traits (or lower planar traits, they could in fact be from anywhere in the lower planes!). The problem was to me that they never had enough emphasis on the lower planar part at all. So I never really liked them because they never conveyed any sense of being something from the lower planes. The way 4E has inserted Tieflings and Aasimar is a lot better. Tieflings actually look like a race descended from daemonic/infernal taint and Aasimar (being tall blue supermodel like creatures) actually look like a race that were angelic.
Before lower planar blood made you an exotic supermodel and for that matter so did upper planar blood. One of those concepts is okay with me and the other isn't.
There is nothing wrong with making people corrupted by daemonic taint look more like monsters! SHOCKING CONCEPT.
Edit: It's for this reason in reverse I dislike Shardminds and Wilden. Strange plant creatures I can deal with, why do they have to have mammalian like features and genitalia (boobs?)? Why on earth do living construct crystal people have genders? There is absolutely nothing wrong with making races look non-human. Absolutely nothing.
In Sigil the outcast thing was (somewhat) played down because hey, it's Sigil -- why freak out over the girl with a tail when there is a pair of abishai strolling around the block? But in most PoL settings, it would be a pretty big deal if the miller's daughter came out of her mother with horns and a tail.
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
This has nothing to do with my argument. You can get away with making outsiders with daemonic blood look like outsiders with daemonic blood in planescape. My problem is they didn't and the result was really nothing that conveyed "I am born of a lower planar creature". Your example above is perfect for why I dislike previous editions tieflings. They might as well be called "Half-Cat person" and you would get pretty much the same feel from a tiefling - not that of a lower planar creature. I don't believe looking at the 4E tiefling you could call them half-cat people (or whatever) and get away with it.
Edit: But why couldn't a half-cat person look lower planar? I mean in the context of the 2e planar races. The guardinals were celestials who looked half-animal, so a cat-like aasimar was totally conceivable. By the same token, you could have someone descended from a vrock who had vulturish features. So who says there are no cat demons?
No, I can't say they were ever on my "favourite races" list either.
:P
Half-cat people are from the upper planes (The Beastlands). So making your tiefling look half-cat like was actually going in the entire opposite direction.
Edit: Also, I never knew any player of a tiefling to do something as awesome as make their character look like a part Vrock like abomination. That would have been a pleasing change of pace.
There were infinite varieties of tanar'ri. It would frankly defy belief if there wasn't a catlike demon prowling around in the Abyss somewhere.
:P
I have never encountered a catperson tiefling myself. I have no idea what was going on in your games.
edit: Honestly most of the tieflings I saw when I played on AOL chat rooms way back when were kind of boring and by-the-book. Tails and horns, tails and horns.
I never knew a tiefling that looked anything resembling a daemon or anything from the lower planes either. A tail =/ lower planar flavor. Even the art doesn't look that lower planar either, that was my problem with them. The 4E tiefling at least makes me feel that it's something that did come from a lower planar taint once upon a time - making them much more preferable to me.
I can get on board with this.
Well when 4th came out I figured he would be apeshit over Dragonborn. Instead he despises them and thinks the only thing keeping them from the bottom of the pack of races in the PHB1 in 4e is the Tiefling, which he thinks looks even dumber. Turns out all of his half dragons looked remarkably like humans, except for maybe black eyes and pointed teeth. I made the comment that he would probably like the dragonborn better if they had the same stat type adjustments as the half dragon template. Amazingly enough I was not corrected.
Consider that religious texts typically depict humans as being created as a likeness unto their gods. In the Bible, God made Man in his own image. Prometheus shaped the first Men after the form of the Titans according to Roman Myth.
So to the Shardmind: if we presume that the Gods are reasonably human-like in their own form, and if they are in any way responsible for the formation of the Shardminds from the remnants of the Far Realm gate or whatever, then they'd probably do the same thing they did when they made humans.
The Wilden are a bit more difficult, depending on the God/Goddess responsible for Nature in each cosmology. Presumably however, they also maintain humanlike qualities and might shape their favored race similarly.
In other words, stop thinking Darwinian and start thinking Creation Myth.
This is also my preference. I much prefer them to be random horrible accidents than to be the descendants of some random lost nation myself as well.
Because they are a 'development' by the feywild created to fight the intrusion of the far realm into it.
Well, according to the book, Shardminds aren't exactly directly made by the gods, except insomuch as an unnamed god shattered the Living Gate (probably Tharizdun, he always gets blamed for these types of things). No one is really sure what causes Shardminds to form, least of all the Shardminds themselves. There's three "philosophies" in a loose sense among Shardminds about why they form and what their purpose is. One believes that if enough Shardminds are formed, a new Living Gate will come into being (more or less), another believes that it's the duty of each Shardmind to amass as much power as possible, so that any given one has a chance of creating a new gate, and a third believes that as many sentient Shardminds as possible should be destroyed, as the existence of individuals weakens the destroyed-but-still-alive Living Gate and keeps it from reforming by itself.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
The new races
Minotuar - blegh. They already wrote it up in DDI, plus monstrous races can go to hell (bugbears, gnolls, kobolds, don't like any of them)
Wilden - shit. Stupid plant men
Githwhatever - meh. Never really like or disliked the various gith that much.
Shardmind - awful. Stupid name, stupid concept. Who really thought anyone would want to play a dude made out of crystal.
I think they should just stop with new races now unless they are setting specific. It's like Aegeri said a few pages back, it is annoying trying to fold these weird and wonderful things into existing campaign worlds, but because they are in the core books it is also hard to say no if a player wants to use one.
New character options
Skill utilities are actually pretty cool, and hybrid characters work quite well I think.
Some useful feats for existing classes and races.
New classes.
Monk - cool - my favourite bit of the book.
Runepriest - mechanically sound, I just don't really like the flavour.
Seeker - quite good, although I am really confused as to why most of thier powers are X[W] + random dice + stat.
The 3 "augmentable" psionic classes. Awful.
The whole way they have done these augment powers is terrible -
1) Boring.
Each normal character by mid paragon has (ignoring paragon paths and dailies) 3 encounter powers and 2 at wills. That is 5 attack powers they can use reliably every encounter and the chances are all 5 things will be different in what they do.
Each psionic character gets (ignoring paragon paths) 3 at wills. Yawn. Yes you can boost them with points, but the augmented versions always do the same thing as the base, just slightly differently - a bit more damage, more targets blah blah.
Coupled with point 3 below, many psion classes will have the same powers for all 30 levels.
2) Bookkeeping.
A whole extra set of numbers to keep track of. The basic system that everyone else uses is, once the power is used, you cross it off then move on. You always know it is available if you haven't used it.
The augmentable powers use a variable shared pool of points that can go up and down during a fight - want to use the 6 point version of a power at some point in the fight - too bad you only have 5 points left as 4 rounds earlier you used 1 point in another power.
They were going for flexibility, but ended up with over complicated and bland (see above)
3) Overpowered and underpowered at the same time.
Underpowered - the at wills base power doesn't scale at epic like all other at wills in the game. The base power of higher level at wills is not much over the level 1 powers. Generally augmented powers are no where near comparative to other classes equal level encounter powers.
Overpowered - both the ardent and psion have 2 or 3 level 1 at wills that are objectively better than any of the higher level ones (going all the way up to 27), but because they are lower level the top level augment only costs 2 points.
Each psion ends up with at least 17 power points (as well as ways of getting them back in a fight) so they can spam the low level powers fully augmented at least 7 times per encounter. Boring, which feeds back into point number 1 above.
I mean hell, that's about as random as making bodaks a playable race (well, I guess they kind of did with the revenants, but still). What's the point?
(I'm trying my hardest to think of a race that they could have used instead, but it is six in the morning here and it is not coming to me)
Oh yeah? YOUR FACE. Seriously though, we're arguing preference here.
I can think of a few pieces where you got a strong feeling of lower planes-dom (several ones in the Planeswalker's Handbook, for instance). DiTerlizzi was great at stuff like that. Having never played that - nor surrounded by people that used them as people used Fish Malks - I never encountered this and thus, do not bear this grudge.
Uh, I dunno where you're pulling this from, but apparently you ended up with completely different players than I ever did. Modrons were often played like little children trying to figure out why things work (I now have the best character idea ever: a rogue modron trying to write "The Way Things Work" as a primer to get those stupid non-modrons to understand the world as he does).
Seriously, that is as bad as the aforementioned fish malks who would use insanity in defense of doing something malodorous. I never saw it at my table. I never saw half of this anti-social stuff you're talking about.
Where are you pulling this from? Because I will go upstairs and pull out my books and quote their entire entry, if you'd like.
(Quick aside: so much hate comes from having bad players in a group and having to deal with their stupidity. I don't like psionics of any flavor because I had a player once that used my absolute inability with math [well that and he was my uncle, and I was like, fifteen] to abuse the system to heck. I think it drags down discourse; what do you think?)
This sounds a little self-reflective - did you end up with bad players at some point Aegeri? And of course the art prettified them up; you either had the beautiful fey artwork of DiTerlizzi, or the random art intern that would jot out a horrible sketch and they'd use it. I can't think of a non-DiTerlizzi piece that I liked in that setting, off-hand.
Planescape had one of the best racial line-ups in any of the original campaign settings, barring possibly Dark Sun (which, back in the day I had no entry into, considering that I had no stores around me that sold the stupid books). The main book had humans, bauriars, githzerai, and tieflings. Planeswalker's Handbook introduced rogue modrons and genansi. They out and out said that most of the other races that ended up on the planes usually ended up heading straight to their homelands and staying there.
Your hate for modrons is kind of...weird, and sounds like it was flavored by bad players. Which ruins so much and kills so much discourse between people.
I remember a Kender in a Dragonlance game who was actually really well done and fun to RP with. The fact that it was like a slightly less hyper Tasslehoff probably had something to do with that, though.
3DS FCode: 1993-7512-8991
As to why seekers usually do more damage with their powers, I assume it's because seekers are basically wholly focused on the control side of controller. They had very few AE powers (first encounter AE was level 7, area burst 1), which really hampers their potential dpr. So basically they completely blow at killing minions and doing a whole lot of spread out damage, so wizards gave them a little mini-striker mechanic to help compensate. My (tentative, pending getting the book myself, sitting down and reading it) assessment is the class sucks balls, going to the bottom of the heap along with feylocks as possessors of a wide range of control that I find of questionable value. It is less bothersome since the seeker is a controller and a warlock is not, despite it's leanings, but I still remain unimpressed.
All that said, the class could be fun. Rangers may be the kings of bows, but they are also the kings of boring. Seeker at least had some neat tricks to recommend it over, "I quarry a guy and twin strike him." To someone looking for a more involved bow class, though I guess there's always specific bard and warlord builds.
LoL: failboattootoot
We're talking about people who made Wilden and Shardminds here. Their logic in player races simply defies comprehension.
Unfortunately this was the case though, minding I wouldn't mind them bringing back DiTerlizzi for some more art - he was really good at conveying a good "planar" feel in his work.
Also, Malkavians were a great idea in theory but so horrible at tables. I only ever saw someone roleplay one in a non-game destructive manner once.
That would be the case, because Modrons being something you describe would be interesting. Invariably, I never saw them played that way solely because one rule in the book would let you do ridiculously dumb things. The other was a Modron that went homicidal any time someone said a secret word.
When the player finds it endlessly funny that secret word is "the" it makes any conversation immensely awkward.
The 2E book that describes rogue modrons. It is in fact in the book that they have an action they will perform under a certain condition.
I've beaten you to it though, in this case it was under the DMs discretion but sadly I was not the DM and could not stop this in the game involved (sigh). I was after though (thankfully):
Page 77;
Preset Actions
This option requires a rogue modron to state one preset action per level, based on external stimuli - a condition upon which the modron will always respond the same. For example, every time a foe draws a weapon, a certain modron might immediately attack. On the same condition, another modron might cast the highest-level spell it currently has memorized, weather the spell is appropriate for the situation or not.
Now this doesn't inherently sound unreasonable. That is until someone decides "is" is an hilarious trigger for something. The kaibosh was inevitably put on this, but it was a seriously dumb thing for the groups I played with (and then DMed, minding once I was the DM I disallowed it entirely). The damage had well and truly be done though and I've never felt they were anything other than awful.
This is certainly true, but to me Rogue Modrons were the annoying Kender equivalent of Planescape, instead of something that could have been unique, quirky and interesting.
Highschool DnD was serious business. Actually mostly they were good guys.
Give them something like a Rogue Modron or a Malkavian and the toilet began flushing though.
Actually IIRC Bauriar, Githzerai, Genasi, Rogue Modrons, Aasimar and Tieflings were all in the Planar Handbook. Flipping through it, I am indeed correct those races are in here (I haven't read the campaign setting in a while, they may have been in the Campagn Guide as well). The tiefling random stuff chart is particularly amusing, I forgot in 2E they could (with a very very very small chance) be immune to normal weapons and only harmed by silver/magical weapons.
Bad players do sometimes make up my perceptions of things, but I've never liked things that were just plain disruptive and ruined an otherwise good game.
There's really nothing inherently wrong with kender that isn't wrong with dwarves, it's just that larcenous hijinks are typically seen as a distraction while hard drinking and getting into fights are baseline traits for most adventurers anyway.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Mr Lethally Assaults anyone who says the word 'The', was quickly dropped into the abyss and never seen again (mysteriously at that). One really shouldn't walk through the wrong door in Sigil, while they are a modron, that just happens to go to the abyss and doesn't have another way back - oh and it's one of the worst layers. You know the one, the one that is the plane of perpetual rust and horrible metal eating monsters. That one. The Bauriar PC he made after was pretty metal and good times were had by all after-wards (especially me, the then 3rd DM of that game).
Yeah, the player never really did stuff for the sake of it - he never picked the party pockets (unless it was something Really Interesting that they wouldn't let him look at - if we showed him what it was, let him hold it for a bit, then asked for it back, he usually forgot about it in-character and didn't try to get it to INVESTIGATE), he never disrupted the flow of the game, and just about the worst thing he did was get distracted reading some runes on a door we were trying to make him unlock while we fought off the bad guys - and that was because the DM kept saying that these runes were REALLY INTERESTING, and made him roll a Wisdom check or get distracted by them, as I recall.
I always feel you can have quirky characters, as long as you don't use their quirks as an excuse to disrupt the party and be as annoying as possible, while hiding behind the whole 'but that is what my character would do, heheheheh!' excuse so many love to use.
3DS FCode: 1993-7512-8991
More when I return from breakfast.
The fourth session I was made DM (because second DM wanted to play) by defacto vote. We played two sessions before I killed off "Mr. Lethal on The" (because the joke as it happened was wearing thin). The only other Rogue Modron I had was like a Kender in a mechanical box. Only he stole things on the word "Is" being spoken. He did not care that I didn't allow the mechanics to actually work, that the book suggested it was good enough for him to "roleplay it" like that.
What I learned was that I can never play DnD. That game I got made DM anyway and couldn't attend the two sessions I could have played. In the Dark Sun game that was run my character was killed by a boulder before I even got to play. I've been convinced I've been cursed to forever DM since (minding it's a job I enjoy anyway).
The main problem was even though it was a rule to the DMs discretion, it didn't stop a PC actually doing it anyway out of "roleplaying" because the book suggested it (and some of them thought it was a plain hilarious idea - all they needed was the seeds of such a concept and getting the mechanical benefit was an irrelevant sideshow to being "hilarious").
Edit: However my memory was definitely not on the fritz and that was definitely in there. The other rule, for those curious was that they could roll initiative once and they used that roll for the remainder of their life (though at the DMs discretion it could be once a day and such forth). Personally I would find that an hilarious rule for 4E that once per day you could roll initiative (after an extended rest) and choose to replace any initiative roll later on in the day with that roll.
They are in Players Handbook 2. Now everyone gets to have them!
I think it helps that I never played 3e or any of the Planescape settings. I have almost no idea of what they were before.
How about halflings? They are almost Tolkienesque, if you take the types like the Tooks and Brandybucks, who were often adventurous. I do prefer proper hobbits, though. What are halflings like in your games?
(Quick summation: he once got a hold of a Wish spell and, with a manic grin on his face, shouted, "I WISH FOR BEER! ALL THE BEER YOU CAN GIVE ME!" and opened his mouth to the heavens.
Being the obliging GM that I am, I gave it to him. And drowned him. One quick raise dead later and he was back in trouble again)
My view may also be colored by the fact that I used to hang out on Kencyclopedia all the time, and they were balls-on-awesome.
Tinker gnomes did not belong in Dragonlance. They were better suited to Spelljammer. Way better suited.
Aegeri:
He won't come back. He's wayyyy too expensive. Hell, he was probably too expensive when he was working on Planescape stuff, but they didn't care about hemorraging money back then.
Malkavians were great in theory, but I'll agree with you on execution. Hoo boy. Thankfully I primarily played Werewolf (where our worst were "wacky" ragabashes; there was a wide hatred of Nuwisha but no one ever seemed to be able to bring one example to bear of a bad player with one) so we only ever heard about it when some of their forum drama spilled over to ours.
It's how I read them in the book, honestly. I was never "blessed" with someone making a modron (actually, there might have been; we played a lot of one-shots at one point) but that's the impression that I gained just from reading the book.
I would have smacked that player on the top of the head if they'd pulled that kind of stunt around me.
This is why I brought my book to work today, to specifically quote it and then shout TAKE THAT at you. Now you have ruined my fun. You may, however, take back your friendship ring. For rejoice! Things are good between us.
The problem being, quirky and interesting often turn into fodder for the kinds of people that should be nowhere near that kind of junk. Hell, "those kind of people" will ruin anything for anyone; my girlfriend likes to make fun of a person in her old group that was obsessed with dragons. It's hard for her to take anything dragon related seriously now because of how serious this kid was about dragons. And he was in his early twenties, IIRC.
As a friend of mine likes to put it, so you put them in the hole and they get the hose until they learn to play well with others.
Can I relate a story? I love relating stories. Anyway, a good friend of mine (who runs this totally awesome art blog that you should totally check out, seriously, it's awesomesauce) once played a thief in our weekly game who sold her fellow players out constantly. All sneaking around, stealing things, and when she'd get caught, she'd tell them where the rest of the group was hiding out and then get herself the hell out of Dodge. And none of us hated her for it, because she always managed to come back and save their butts at some point, but it was one of those situations where it could have been so bad but instead ended up so good.
I'm recalling this off-hand, so stay with me. The main campaign book had humans, half-elves, bauriar, githzerai, and tieflings, with some provisionals for planewalking demi-humans.
Genansi, aasimar (which I forgot where in the game until I opened the Handbook up), and modrons were given full write-ups in the Handbook, which also gave quick summations of the planeswalking races.
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I think you and I approach things differently then, because I generally gloss over the "could be bad" and just run with, "I'll beat them senseless with a rolled up book if they abuse this." But I've been told that I'm a pretty lenient guy when it comes to my games.
This is comic gold though, and sounds about up my alley. Mister I-Want-Beer had to go through a few of these trials when he started getting a little over-anxious with his prankery.
To be honest, I may dislike a race but if they are an option I rarely ever tell a player what they can/can't play. I've even dropped my previous stance on Warforged in things like FR because quite frankly, what's so absurd about Warforged compared to Shardminds, Wilden and Minotaurs? If I can accommodate those races (and I've been pondering that for a while now) I can certainly accommodate warforged.
I think I'm leaning towards either Spelljammer or Ravenloft, neither of which I got to run when I was younger. I know Hach is interested; anyone else?
Yes, I'll do a thread for this, but I'm just gauging interest.
Yeah, their fluff articles for campaign settings and even their default PoL (except the Raven Queen stuff, I mean wtf she reminds me of an Orcus with boobs in some ways).
Personally though I can either continue crying about it or live with things like Shardminds. If my PCs enjoy them and want to play them it's fine by me.
Forum drama in Vampire went with the territory I feel. The worst forum drama was always cross-game stuff, like when you had vampires, mages and stuff in the same party. It invariably was always horrible. In all this, Malkavians were a fantastic concept that was never played well at all. I still like Malkavians actually, but I'd never go so far as to deliberately bring them back into the game in Vampire: the Requiem. Or in anything for that matter.
And yeah, I remember that he was really expensive, tis a shame
In my defense I would have, but he was bigger than me.
I knew I wasn't going crazy though, I can't remember a damn thing in that book EXCEPT for that. It was ingrained upon me from back in the day. If I had got that wrong I would have begun to question my sanity and memory.
Disruptive players in my experience are tools with just about anything, but at the same time there are things they can get into that can either heavily exacerbate their anti-group tendencies or actually manage to curb it.
In all honesty thinking about it now, he was probably thinking he was being genuinely funny for everyone else rather than deliberately antagonistic.
You can get arrested for things like that, especially when you start demanding they rub lotion into their skin on an hourly basis as well.
Yeah it was probably like that so everything was in one book for players actually.
One interesting thing was the sexual dimorphism in Bauriar - their females didn't get physical stat bonuses and the natural weaponry (instead getting an int and something else bonus).
There are three factors here with me:
1) When I was in highschool I was like, 14-18 odd. I had not yet learned my "Stern tone" and ability to judge things on how a game should be run. Half the time my adventures were completely nuts, I was quite happy to have players fighting archfiends at level 10 for example (but I made them so ridiculously overpowered they invariably won now I think of it).
2) I didn't have a lot of patience for some things and even though I couldn't write a DnD story for jack shit, I was determined that it should be "Serious business" so things that got in the way really annoyed me.
3) I never got to play DnD except for once. Every other time I was not able to attend, we played Warhammer (which was awesome btw, certainly not ragging on the ole Warhammer here) or I was made the DM anyway - so I never had any concept of what it was to play DnD until computer games (strangely enough).
Oh it was absolutely hilarious, for the first session or so but it got rather old pretty quickly later on.
I will concede to anyone the first time someone said "The" and he immediately attacked them was priceless.
So I hope I don't derail too much by saying that this comic really annoys me, because it's using an old joke, but doesn't finish it! It's supposed to end with 'mathematics is applied logic, logic is applied philosophy, and philosophy is applied bullshit. Therefore all science is bullshit'.
I do agree wholeheartedly that I think there should be more setting specific playable races and such. The fact that warforged are even in the base monster manual kind of annoys me, because they are so closely tied to eberron. And I tend to forget shifters exist, since I don't have phb2.
So, I know that I'm going to need a monster manual in order to make my own adventures, something I still don't have. Is there anything else I'm going to need in order to make this work?
Also, has anyone ever given their PCs hidden roles in a setting? I'm thinking about each of the players sitting in a tavern as all PCs meet and an NPC goes up to each one of them and discusses with them a contract. Each player will have a notecard that will be what was whispered to them and something they will keep secret from other players. I don't anticipate it being something huge like one of them being a traitor, but something that's large enough to give them a drive. Like I said, all of my players (including myself) are new to this, and I think something like this would give them something to play for rather than just trying to complete a quest mutually.
Any suggestions on these things?