ALL OF MY HOUSE RULES
These ones are from the first post.
Tome combat rules, except that if you have the edge, it means you don't provoke AOEs.
No monks, and no barbarians, they just annoy me. You don't have to roleplay an idiot for an intelligence score or 8.
You can use your Charisma or Wisdom modifier for your will saves.
If you write a backstory that is more than 1 paragraph, you get +3 story bonus to a skill that makes sense.
My alignment rules are this. Law = write down six rules that your character always follows, no matter what. Chaos = no. You are not allowed to be chaotic. Good = You don't kill unless you have to, no killing prisoners... etc. Evil = that you don't mind killing, but does not mean psycho killer murder hobo stabmcface everything for no reason at all.
You add your CON to your HP instead of the modifier. Don't roll lvl 1 HP.
only thing that is new here. When you level up, roll 1d4 for your hp, and add the difference. So, 1d6 becomes 1d4+2, 1d8 is 1d4+4... etc.[/b]
Kaelik: Your actual counterargument is pretty lacking there pal. You call people "fucking idiots" a lot but maybe some logically supported discourse might serve you better to make your point.
Wild stuff. A rule my group has been using is to reroll all your HD at each level, and then take the higher if the total is higher, otherwise you just get 1hp. It's a pretty cool rule, because it clears away old bad rolls over time without eliminating rolls entirely.
Lokathor wrote:Kaelik: Your actual counterargument is pretty lacking there pal. You call people "fucking idiots" a lot but maybe some logically supported discourse might serve you better to make your point.
I give reasons for everything else. That was just so dumb I hoped that seconds of thinking about it might help you realize why.
I mean, the idea that you literally cannot have defenses against something one level higher than you is the dumbest possible change I could imagine making. If you don't see how taking away any possible defense from the combatant that is already at a disadvantage from being lower level is going to result in a shit game where you always lose to higher level enemies and always beat lower level enemies then I don't know what the fuck you are thinking.
I mean seriously, what is different from a Demondad's FoM, and a Clerics Deathward and a Dragon's Paralysis or Fire immunity? Once you have established that racial immunities go away for a one level higher character, why the fuck does anyone even care about undead or constructs when you can just level drain undead and dex damage constructs?
Alright fine, not 1, use 5 instead, or use 4 because then it matches up with how Sneak Attack and Uncanny Dodge already work, or make it ease off in a scaling way where it breaks the immunity but provides a huge save bonus, and then even the save bonus goes away as you get more levels on them. I don't care about a literal and specific implementation. And not necessarily every single immunity would have to go away. A zombie or skeleton that doesn't breathe will never be affected by suffocation of any form, because it just doesn't breathe ever.
But, yes, wyrmlings and small fire elementals that could be burned by "hot enough" fire, without every single high level person in the world always having to multiclass into being 3rd level Fire Mages or whatever. Because as soon as some asshole has "Fire Immunity", some other asshole gets "Pierces Fire Immunity" and then the next guy goes out and finds a "Fire Immunity II" so the next guy has to have "Immunity Pierce 2". And it's simpler to just skip past all that and stick some numbers on stuff that interact more properly with the rest of the existing system.
I mean, look, they apparently even already had this whole argument back in 2005. It's not too crazy.
Okay, look, I get why people think immunity is a shitty game mechanic, and I'm even inclined to agree with them in most instances. But your idea is still pretty damn half-baked at this point and I'm inclined to look poorly upon it given that we've already started a game and have a dude in the group who already blew resources on attaining immunity. Expecting people to react well in such circumstances is kinda asking a lot.
And for the record, if you're bound and determined to create houserules for this kind of thing for your own use, don't just flip the "You lose" sign on and off based on level when you can instead give people scaling numbers that are super hard to beat without being higher level. Giving Large Fire Elementals 8 points of fire resistance per CR is still a nerf, but it's a nerf that makes them virtually immune to equal level wizards throwing around fireballs but still gives them a degree of protection from adult red dragon breath without rendering theme completely immune to all fire attacks forever. Likewise, if you were to nerf Freedom of Movement at least give people scaling grapple and escape artist bonuses or something.
TLDR version: If you're gonna fuck someone, at least buy them dinner first, jesus.
hey i never said we should do it for this game, OR that we should literally use the "just woke up spitballed" first version of an idea. damn. Iterative Development.
Only thing I said we should do for this game is the HP Rerolling thing, which is a good idea.
So, I've reviewed part of the recording so far. I think my recording got cut off at the end because when I listened to the ending bit the conversation just stopped without you guys saying you were done and stuff. Still, I vaguely paid attention to at least 2 hours of what I did get.
Uhm, so I guess you guys maybe sold back the Healing Belt? or not? I wasn't clear on that.
And then I guess we're going to be in the city nearly forever, and even if not it seems like the "small details" stuff isn't really being bothered with, so I'll probably move my +3 Survival to something else, because my only reason to get that was so that I could do overland travel without running out of food.
And fuck guys, get it together, Fire Blast has a 30% chance to burn in Gen 1 and then 10% in Gen 2 and later. Then it went from 120 to 110 power in Gen 6 because they powered down some of the major attacks.
I've got mp3 recordings of the first two sessions so far. However, the energy to convert a recording into a coherent explanation of what went on is not always easy to find. And simply releasing the mp3 without any additional info is pretty useless because you quickly get lost as to who's doing what when it didn't directly happen to you.
But I might do some summaries some time soon. They'd be much more terse than my other summaries, but I suppose they'd at least be something.
Last edited by Lokathor on Sat Apr 26, 2014 5:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Uh, so we were in a dungeon, or a warehouse, or a mansion, or something, some sort of structure. I wasn't clear because I missed the last session. Some sort of building.
There were some shadows that made spooky noises and wandered past us, ignoring us in the process.
Then we found the racist Raptoran from before after a room or two, and he was talking to a goblin, and another goblin was behind us on a wolf. So we slammed the door with the goblin and raptoran, then talked to the goblin on the wolf. We told him to go away and he did but he gave us some sort of message before he left. we didn't read the message though, we burned up the paper it was written on without reading it.
then we opened up the door to the goblin and raptoran, but the goblin was gone and the raptoran was a dead bloated corpse. We poked the corpse and it exploded into just a skeleton left over, and then the shadows from before came back and merged into an oversized solid shadow monster. We had a fight with that, and every time it got hit with fire a mini-shadow would fall off, which was no problem because I just kept using burning hands over and over while the soldier used a sword and the curator shot light bolts. We basically took no damage, even though the fight was like like 4-6 rounds long.
So then we explored more and found the trap door that the goblin escaped through, along with a lot of money. We decided to stop fucking around in the weird building thing, since the raptoran that we'd showed up to kill had been killed after all. Also we took a giant solid silver wheel out with us, and it turned out to be worth like 2455gp of silver (400-something pounds). So we sold that, and had even more money.
Then we went to some orc rangers, and they were going to attack the elves, but they wanted more rangers to join them. We went to the rest of the ranger guild guys and they needed their sacred icon back (a skeleton that you can wiggle your fingers in the eye sockets of to get a permanent Con bonus and a temporary disease save bonus). So we went to the druid's guild, and there was just 1 guy there guarding it, so I (the sorc) tried to bluff him into letting us buy it, but I failed the bluff. Then the Soldier used Intimidate, and both sides rolled a 3, but the Solder's bonus was higher, so he intimidated the druid into just handing us the skeleton thing. And we gave it to the rangers, so they joined the orc rangers to prepare an attack against the elves.
Also the rest of us got to use the skeleton for a Con bonus.
Oh, right, also we have 3,255gp worth of "group" money, plus 900gp each individually. We were supposed to figure out what to buy with all that in between sessions so that we don't have to use valuable game time sifting through books and stuff.
So, I need 1,100gp to get a Mithril Chainshirt at level 3. Other than that I don't need any particular equipment until level 4.
Now, does anyone else have any other pressing equipment needs, and what should we spend the big pile of money on? Or other thoughts of what to buy?
It was thought that picking up sweet armors would be better than grabbing magic weapons at first, so we looked into that a little during the game. We agreed to basically use the "simplified" armor abilities (one ability per armor type) instead of the full scaling ability system in the Awesome Tome and other places. Though, not all of Red Rob's stuff even matches up with just the price lists in other places. Much less the abilities (for example, Red Rob's Darkleaf doesn't have Fast Healing, which we've already been going with). So, uh, I guess we should kinda just pick armor stat lines that look good enough, and then pick abilities to go with armors that are reasonable, and kinda figure it as we go along.
I'd rather have the list the MC mentioned and definite word on what armor rules to work with. Right now I'm seriously using chainmail armor from the tome 0.7 pdf even though it's only mentioned in a table and thus lacks scaling bonuses that I'm aware of. I seriously took it just because the ACP was low enough that you can use it and a shield without stumbling around at level 1 even under the most draconian versions of tome armor rules. I say this not to complain, but to point out that I give so few shits about this kind of thing that I would rather select the sketchiest gear from an incomplete but accepted list than bother writing my own stats and try to get that approved. In a related story, I've also been sword 'n' boarding it and it'd be nice to know shit like whether Tower Shields are an actual option or if they're still pieces of shit that inflict an attack penalty.
Under the tome armor rules a Tower Shield is just like any other shield (no special attack penalty), except that it's under the Great Shield proficiency, not the Shield Proficiency. Soldiers are proficient in both, so you're good. Pick up a Tower Shield first chance you get if you want. However, for just a little more gold and 1 less Shield Bonus, you can get a Dragonscale Shield instead, which has 9 less Armor Check Penalty. Unless you want to get that Human stance that ignores Armor Check Penalty then that's probably your best bet.
Simplified tome armor seems to think the -2 attack penalty stays while Races of War scaling armors bit is mum on the topic. I already have a human stance, although I assigned the int bonus to str/dex skills instead of AC (that way it stays relevant as a stealth trick as I level), so if there's no attack penalty the plan would be to pair a kite shield or ice aegis with full plate while only using the human stance during the rounds I actually give a crap about full movement speed.
Other than that, I'm interested in some masterwork thieves' tools and a masterwork or better bastard sword, assuming I can be counted as having earned the proficiency through standard tome means--I've got martial proficiency, good Int and a Cold Dude who can make practice swords if asked nicely.
-2 to attacks is totally stupid and negates the entire point of giving out a special extra set of shields that only some classes can use.
Also ASP being different from ACP is a good thing. Also, not all magic items should have the same price regardless of the specific function of the magic item. Also the saves from weapon abilities should be based on whatever stat you're using to attack with to avoid throwing extra MAD at weapon users. There's a number of things Red Rob's complete item system rewrite gets wrong in my book.
But yeah, we can totally pick you up some Full Plate and a Masterwork Katana, seems like a solid plan.
Last edited by Lokathor on Thu May 01, 2014 6:50 am, edited 1 time in total.
Some unique weapons (that are named, but can be bought. As in, only one of it in world, but nobody seems to like it, probably cursed. WHO KNOWS? oh, yeah, i do)
and shields soon.
Well, the last session ended at about a perfect break point, but with nothing obvious left to do, we flounded for a bit. After asking around, folks told us about some ruins to the south that had been left when settlements were destroyed in the Elf/Hob war. So we went south looking for stuff we could salvage.
We had a fight with some Camels, and they got burned and slashed until they went down.
Then we found a ruined city, and looked around. Some drow were gonna ambush some hobgoblins, when they came out of the ruins, so we attacked the drow (only killing 1, the rest just ran off) and went to look down into the ruins to see if the hobgoblins had noticed. After a moment a hobgoblin came up to the mouth of the tunnel and told us to bring a special helmet they'd found to the hobgoblin leaders. Then he died.
So we took the special helmet to the leaders, and they paid us some money and we leveled up. Then we used the money to buy some totally sweet armor (Mithril Chainshirt for the Sorcerer, and Full Plate for the Soldier).
That was it.
Last edited by Lokathor on Wed May 07, 2014 12:22 am, edited 1 time in total.
I just don't see what was so wrong that you had to nerf all the armor into being a waste of fucking time.
I mean, there is the PHB version, where there are only two actual armors that are ever used, and they don't bring anything but an AC. Then there is the Tome Version where there are tons of options and they all have cool riders. But you picked option three, tons of armors that are all basically indistinguishably uninteresting.
