my response to "charismatic players getting bonuses for charisma rolls" will always be "if he gets to use his real life silver tongue to win in the game, i get to beat you up for fights."
fair is fair, and if you're letting steve's lack of social anxiety let me be better, you better believe i am wanting to use my gross ogre like body to win fights.
I sometimes try to push my characters to role play a bit more. For instance in my group I have a player whos someone I've known for years, shes pretty soft spoken unless provoked, but shes playing a tough dwarf rogue. She wanted to intimidate the shop keeper to give them a discount on potions, she rolled very well but I just had to ask "So what do you do or say?" and she couldn't think of anything. After a minute of her trying to think of something I asked if she was OK with my wife tagging in for a second (slightly more experienced player but also very intimidating IRL) she said sure, So my wife reminded her she was currently covered in zombie blood, and had two large daggers at her side, and sometimes you don't need to say anything. She got the idea, and said she just pulled out her daggers, leaned on them, and said a little forcefully "I bet 50 gold would work fine right?". I don't like making people feel uncomfortable, but I also think playing a character thats against your own type can be fun
That gets at the core of it, I think. If you believe characters have it in them to do a thing, that's all you need to let them roll. But at the same time, you need to know how they're doing a thing so you can respond to the roll. Success or failure. If the possibility isn't in doubt, anyone can help them spell out what they're doing.
i am currently trying to play a character who is kind of dim witted and not at all snarky. and as a snarky asshole that has been, something. trying not to argue with people when they make suggestions i think are dumb but my character wouldn't have an opinion on has been a bigger deal that expected.
hopefully it is working.
Hey, we got through the gate and all it cost us was a small trip to the swamp to look for small horrible lizards.
surprisingly, the luchador bird slash manager of an orphanage ended up being the hardest amongst us all
murdering druids is bad luck.
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Mojo_JojoWe are only now beginning to understand the full power and ramifications of sexual intercourseRegistered Userregular
Back when I played D&D a fair bit (3e) it was more common to see people trying to reconcile having players who were a bit on the dim side playing geniuses than the same argument on the charisma side. I imagine it was probably more pronounced in advance&d when charisma was a full dump stat and the internet wasn't used for such things as much. Most seemed to start from a point of limiting characters to max out at their player's mental ability, which was always the saddest thing. Sorry Phil, Ragnar the wizard caps out at 9int and 8wis because you scored a 95 on this internet IQ test and you once lost a tooth opening a beer bottle with your mouth. No spells for you.
I do not miss those discussions.
Homogeneous distribution of your varieties of amuse-gueule
One thing that happens when I play is that my characters slowly slide into the role of exasperated adult who is trying to shepherd his unruly, idiot children through the adventure, and...sometimes that's appropriate for the character, and sometimes it's me getting annoyed at some other people at the table. I've tried to curb this, because I'm always aware that I'm doing it, and it's not always fun for me, or probably anyone else? I think the most success I had at not playing the annoyed dad was when I got assigned the role of Rogue Trader in a Rogue Trader game, and decided my goal was to see if I could get the rest of the party to mutiny against me. It helps that I told everyone else that that was how I was playing the character, so everyone else got to play along, but it's probably a little ironic that the one time I didn't feel like the group dad was when my character was explicitly in charge of the group
Being a drow in the Underdark-adjacent, flying 20 feet in the air on a magic carpet, banishing the death slaad that had enslaved this village of I forget the monster type, then yelling at them to stop fighting us sure worked pretty well.
The 28 intimidate also helped, and that setup did a good job of justifying that roll result.
I like that my bard can be a scary-ass lady when she wants to be.
I'm a bit late to the sewer design discussion, but I just added a Sewer Chase scenario online that might be useful to anyone still exploring that concept for their game. It was an early playtest scenario exploring the chase scenario concept, but this version is up-to-date.
The idea behind this one is the players are chasing a quarry through the sewers for some reason and have to try to quickly deal with the obstacles and other hazards slowing them down. You can easily invert this to have the players trying to escape through the sewers instead (which, let's be honest, is probably more likely in most RPGs).
While it's written for Triptycho, I think it would be fairly easy to adapt the concepts and set pieces to most other systems.
You can find it here if you're interested. It's a low-level design, as mid-level and higher PCs wouldn't be expected to struggle with such mundane obstacles in their path. The use of the mundane means there's probably not much there you haven't seen before, but maybe putting it together as a chase in this way gets the gears cranking for your own campaign ideas.
Fleur de Alys on
Triptycho: A card-and-dice tabletop indie RPG currently in development and playtesting
My role at the table is always "the person who comes up with too complicated of a plan". In my last game we needed to kidnap a guy and I put forward a plan to steal a tow truck, sabotage his car, intercept his call to the tow truck company and then bring him to a secret location to subdue him.
Krahulik suggested we wait by his car until he goes to it, punch him in the head and bundle him into the trunk. We did that instead.
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AuralynxDarkness is a perspectiveWatching the ego workRegistered Userregular
My role at the table is always "the person who comes up with too complicated of a plan". In my last game we needed to kidnap a guy and I put forward a plan to steal a tow truck, sabotage his car, intercept his call to the tow truck company and then bring him to a secret location to subdue him.
Krahulik suggested we wait by his car until he goes to it, punch him in the head and bundle him into the trunk. We did that instead.
"Guy who simplifies the plan," is often my job in any RPG situation, though I'm not sure I've ever managed to shortcut one quite that thoroughly.
My role at the table is always "the person who comes up with too complicated of a plan". In my last game we needed to kidnap a guy and I put forward a plan to steal a tow truck, sabotage his car, intercept his call to the tow truck company and then bring him to a secret location to subdue him.
Krahulik suggested we wait by his car until he goes to it, punch him in the head and bundle him into the trunk. We did that instead.
Complicated plan guy can be a fun guy to play.
I hope you spent at least a little time grumbling about how you always wanted to drive a tow truck.
In my last D&D session the players came up with a plan that was much more complicated than I expected, but with a pretty decent set of skill checks they ended up pulling it off quite well and avoided basically all of the danger that I had planned for the evening. So I guess sometimes the over-complicated plan works out.
Im still waiting to see what complicated bullshit we can do with multiple mage hands
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Zonugal(He/Him) The Holiday ArmadilloI'm Santa's representative for all the southern states. And Mexico!Registered Userregular
My current character's primary personality trait is: I always have a plan for what to do when things go wrong.
My current character's primary flaw is: If there’s a plan, I’ll forget it. If I don’t forget it, I’ll ignore it.
So my character is the guy who constructs a very elaborate plan and then ditches it (and doesn't let the other characters know) for something even crazier.
we had a party of 5 magic users, who when presented with the need to break into a manor, just jumped the fence
This was me in my previous 5E campaign.
DM: You see an intricately carved demon's face in the middle of a door. The door is clearly locked and trapped and inscribed with a half-dozen nefarious riddles, but which one is the true riddle?
Me: I cast disintegrate on the door.
we had a party of 5 magic users, who when presented with the need to break into a manor, just jumped the fence
My team of special operatives with fake ID's in Infinity had to break into a PMC held mining operation.
Upon discovering that it was really dark and noting that half the party had super jump augmentations and one had super strength they literally jumped the fence and then threw every other party member over with no dice rolls in a dark spot of the mining operation.
we had a party of 5 magic users, who when presented with the need to break into a manor, just jumped the fence
Wait why are you counting a Warrior that uses mage hand as a magic user
hans is an eldritch knight that totally counts! he has a cantrip and a shield and was taken out shopping for a back to school component pouch by a college student
There are so many planning sessions I've had to shut down at the table with the word "gloves."
When a newcomer asks what it's about, I relate an old story from thedailywtf (which is mostly about software engineering fails). The short version of the story is that an engineer worked at a place where many of the other programmers liked to over-design every solution, creating complex barely-functional libraries to solve simple issues. This reached its peak when an internal discussion happened about something very different from software.
An employee posted about how cold his hands were after bicycling to work and wondered if there might be some way to rig up heated handlebars from the mechanical workings of the bicycle. Predictably, a long and complex discussion followed where ideas were put forward and built upon until they created new problems. One rig might successfully transfer heat, but you could end up with too much heat, so you needed a mechanism to offload that properly so the rider doesn't have to stop or burn their hands. Another rig solves that but makes the bicycle bulky and imbalanced, so you need to start shifting weight, lightening or removing other parts, and so forth. You get the idea.
The exasperated engineer reading this mess noted that this was being as pointlessly overdesigned as much of the rest of the group's productions, and the proper solution was for the cyclist to wear a pair of gloves to work. Discussion ended immediately.
So the next time your party wizard comes up with a brilliant plan to cast invisibility and silence, sneak into a room, conjure an oil slick on the ground, shapeshift into a mouse, scurry up a wall, and knock over a lantern positioned near the oil slick in order to start a blaze, give them a pair of gloves and tell them to cast fireball through the doorway.
Fleur de Alys on
Triptycho: A card-and-dice tabletop indie RPG currently in development and playtesting
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MaddocI'm Bobbin Threadbare, are you my mother?Registered Userregular
I dunno, I'd rather have heated handlebars personally
we had a party of 5 magic users, who when presented with the need to break into a manor, just jumped the fence
Wait why are you counting a Warrior that uses mage hand as a magic user
hans is an eldritch knight that totally counts! he has a cantrip and a shield and was taken out shopping for a back to school component pouch by a college student
Im still sad my attempt to make recalling my spear work like thors hammer didnt stick
we had a party of 5 magic users, who when presented with the need to break into a manor, just jumped the fence
Wait why are you counting a Warrior that uses mage hand as a magic user
hans is an eldritch knight that totally counts! he has a cantrip and a shield and was taken out shopping for a back to school component pouch by a college student
Im still sad my attempt to make recalling my spear work like thors hammer didnt stick
Yeah but we did complete the Phantom Thieves aesthetic by coming up with codenames to call each other in combat
How do folks track their dnd money?
Are there any useful applications that can add and subtract silver copper and gold pieces, without doing a manual currency conversion each time.
Really don't want to do even that level of math everytime I need to spend.
Right now I got 1000 gp
-25 sp
-6 gp
-3 sp
-100 gp (for camels)
and I just want to be lazy and input those values (-3 sp) and not worry about how many sp is in a gp, and cp in a sp.
.
If it could surface the weight of coinage that would be good too.
Like at a glance I know I have 894 gp - 28 sp, but I'd rather not need to then look up the value of sp and subtract that from gp.
28 sp = 2.8 gp
894-2.8 = 891.2 gp
891 gp + 2 sp
Any thing to help not bothering with that each time.
Character sheet math is the most unfun bit ever.
Thought experiment - suppose you have a D&D-like
game with only arcane casters. Suppose you wanted them to each use a different stat for casting. 'Wizards use Int' is kind of an easy start, but then what? If 'Bards use Cha' then how would you fit both Sorcerers and Warlocks, or do you even try? Is there another type of arcane spellcaster that lends itself better to, say, Dex? Str? Wis?
Thought experiment - suppose you have a D&D-like
game with only arcane casters. Suppose you wanted them to each use a different stat for casting. 'Wizards use Int' is kind of an easy start, but then what? If 'Bards use Cha' then how would you fit both Sorcerers and Warlocks, or do you even try? Is there another type of arcane spellcaster that lends itself better to, say, Dex? Str? Wis?
in this instance i would put put sorcerers as strength. make them like the mastery of self power types. warlock could run on a lot of things but the idea of a con warlock that kind of pits their own health against magical powers could be done as an idea.
no idea about wisdom or dex.
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Der Waffle MousBlame this on the misfortune of your birth.New Yark, New Yark.Registered Userregular
My role at the table is always "the person who comes up with too complicated of a plan". In my last game we needed to kidnap a guy and I put forward a plan to steal a tow truck, sabotage his car, intercept his call to the tow truck company and then bring him to a secret location to subdue him.
Krahulik suggested we wait by his car until he goes to it, punch him in the head and bundle him into the trunk. We did that instead.
You should play Shadowrun sometime.
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WearingglassesOf the friendly neighborhood varietyRegistered Userregular
STR are Monk Street Fighter types, shooting Shinkuu-Hadokens
Posts
That gets at the core of it, I think. If you believe characters have it in them to do a thing, that's all you need to let them roll. But at the same time, you need to know how they're doing a thing so you can respond to the roll. Success or failure. If the possibility isn't in doubt, anyone can help them spell out what they're doing.
murdering druids is bad luck.
I do not miss those discussions.
should I get more favors from the GM because I can sometimes talk good? nah
this is more a personal pride kinda thing - I like to get into my characters' heads, and this is the sorta thing that can help
Twitch (I stream most days of the week)
Twitter (mean leftist discourse)
The 28 intimidate also helped, and that setup did a good job of justifying that roll result.
I like that my bard can be a scary-ass lady when she wants to be.
The idea behind this one is the players are chasing a quarry through the sewers for some reason and have to try to quickly deal with the obstacles and other hazards slowing them down. You can easily invert this to have the players trying to escape through the sewers instead (which, let's be honest, is probably more likely in most RPGs).
While it's written for Triptycho, I think it would be fairly easy to adapt the concepts and set pieces to most other systems.
You can find it here if you're interested. It's a low-level design, as mid-level and higher PCs wouldn't be expected to struggle with such mundane obstacles in their path. The use of the mundane means there's probably not much there you haven't seen before, but maybe putting it together as a chase in this way gets the gears cranking for your own campaign ideas.
Krahulik suggested we wait by his car until he goes to it, punch him in the head and bundle him into the trunk. We did that instead.
"Guy who simplifies the plan," is often my job in any RPG situation, though I'm not sure I've ever managed to shortcut one quite that thoroughly.
Complicated plan guy can be a fun guy to play.
I hope you spent at least a little time grumbling about how you always wanted to drive a tow truck.
My current character's primary flaw is: If there’s a plan, I’ll forget it. If I don’t forget it, I’ll ignore it.
So my character is the guy who constructs a very elaborate plan and then ditches it (and doesn't let the other characters know) for something even crazier.
This was me in my previous 5E campaign.
DM: You see an intricately carved demon's face in the middle of a door. The door is clearly locked and trapped and inscribed with a half-dozen nefarious riddles, but which one is the true riddle?
Me: I cast disintegrate on the door.
DIESEL
Against the Fall of Night Playtest
Nasty, Brutish, and Short
Wait why are you counting a Warrior that uses mage hand as a magic user
the best secret handshakes
My team of special operatives with fake ID's in Infinity had to break into a PMC held mining operation.
Upon discovering that it was really dark and noting that half the party had super jump augmentations and one had super strength they literally jumped the fence and then threw every other party member over with no dice rolls in a dark spot of the mining operation.
hans is an eldritch knight that totally counts! he has a cantrip and a shield and was taken out shopping for a back to school component pouch by a college student
When a newcomer asks what it's about, I relate an old story from thedailywtf (which is mostly about software engineering fails). The short version of the story is that an engineer worked at a place where many of the other programmers liked to over-design every solution, creating complex barely-functional libraries to solve simple issues. This reached its peak when an internal discussion happened about something very different from software.
An employee posted about how cold his hands were after bicycling to work and wondered if there might be some way to rig up heated handlebars from the mechanical workings of the bicycle. Predictably, a long and complex discussion followed where ideas were put forward and built upon until they created new problems. One rig might successfully transfer heat, but you could end up with too much heat, so you needed a mechanism to offload that properly so the rider doesn't have to stop or burn their hands. Another rig solves that but makes the bicycle bulky and imbalanced, so you need to start shifting weight, lightening or removing other parts, and so forth. You get the idea.
The exasperated engineer reading this mess noted that this was being as pointlessly overdesigned as much of the rest of the group's productions, and the proper solution was for the cyclist to wear a pair of gloves to work. Discussion ended immediately.
So the next time your party wizard comes up with a brilliant plan to cast invisibility and silence, sneak into a room, conjure an oil slick on the ground, shapeshift into a mouse, scurry up a wall, and knock over a lantern positioned near the oil slick in order to start a blaze, give them a pair of gloves and tell them to cast fireball through the doorway.
Many great ideas quickly turn into terrible, awful plans with far more problems than the one ostensibly being solved.
Im still sad my attempt to make recalling my spear work like thors hammer didnt stick
Yeah but we did complete the Phantom Thieves aesthetic by coming up with codenames to call each other in combat
now we just need lif as our navigator
Are there any useful applications that can add and subtract silver copper and gold pieces, without doing a manual currency conversion each time.
Really don't want to do even that level of math everytime I need to spend.
Right now I got 1000 gp
-25 sp
-6 gp
-3 sp
-100 gp (for camels)
and I just want to be lazy and input those values (-3 sp) and not worry about how many sp is in a gp, and cp in a sp.
.
If it could surface the weight of coinage that would be good too.
Like at a glance I know I have 894 gp - 28 sp, but I'd rather not need to then look up the value of sp and subtract that from gp.
28 sp = 2.8 gp
894-2.8 = 891.2 gp
891 gp + 2 sp
Any thing to help not bothering with that each time.
Character sheet math is the most unfun bit ever.
the easiest sell ever
also @iguanacus I hope you roll a melee dude because it's gonna be a wizard, bard, and a melee druid
Twitch (I stream most days of the week)
Twitter (mean leftist discourse)
at level 6 i can turn into an allosaurus and eat whatever.
it is my turn to out weird doobh.
Twitch (I stream most days of the week)
Twitter (mean leftist discourse)
so, me.
but with less depression.
game with only arcane casters. Suppose you wanted them to each use a different stat for casting. 'Wizards use Int' is kind of an easy start, but then what? If 'Bards use Cha' then how would you fit both Sorcerers and Warlocks, or do you even try? Is there another type of arcane spellcaster that lends itself better to, say, Dex? Str? Wis?
in this instance i would put put sorcerers as strength. make them like the mastery of self power types. warlock could run on a lot of things but the idea of a con warlock that kind of pits their own health against magical powers could be done as an idea.
no idea about wisdom or dex.
A Bard could be Dex but Cha is too standard to walk away from I feel
You should play Shadowrun sometime.