Annoying Game Questions You Want Answered

Mord · Post by **Mord** » Tue Mar 22, 2016 5:46 am

I pulled together a Googledoc spreadsheet using Mechalich's survival estimates... I got somewhat different numbers, but probably this is because I'm using different numbers for human population in each century.

Everything is formula driven and anyone can edit it, so if you want to play around with different milestone years, survival rates, human populations, or human:vampire ratios, you can do that.

link

Mechalich · Post by **Mechalich** » Tue Mar 22, 2016 9:23 am

Mord wrote:I pulled together a Googledoc spreadsheet using Mechalich's survival estimates... I got somewhat different numbers, but probably this is because I'm using different numbers for human population in each century.

Everything is formula driven and anyone can edit it, so if you want to play around with different milestone years, survival rates, human populations, or human:vampire ratios, you can do that.

link

Yeah, that spreadsheet looks very similar to the one I was using. Your formulation is more complex than mine was and probably more accurate as a result. It seems to accumulate more elders this way, I'm not sure precisely what the difference is.

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Tue Mar 22, 2016 6:44 pm

How do I win at life in nWoD Mage: the Awakening? Preferably without Matter/Forces shenanigans, because advanced physics and chemistry tend to annoy GMs.

erik · Post by **erik** » Tue Mar 22, 2016 6:55 pm

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Tue Mar 22, 2016 8:22 pm

Longes wrote:How do I win at life in nWoD Mage: the Awakening? Preferably without Matter/Forces shenanigans, because advanced physics and chemistry tend to annoy GMs.

First or Second edition?

Anyway, casting on the fly is a sucker's game. Prep time is god. Focus on getting obscene numbers of successes on long-term continuous effects .

Anyway, Mind 3, Space 2. If you GM give you some extra XP to spend at chargen, then buy a fourth dot of Mind.

1), Use Extended castings of Augement Mind to pump all of your mental and social attributes by +3 or +4. If you have Mind 4, this lasts for one month. Otherwise, it lasts 2 days.

2) Get the US Census records. Casting a spell when you only know the Target's name gives you a 10 dice penalty, steep, but doable with an extended casting. Casting a spell on multiple targets requires log2(n) successes, where n is the number of targets. For 300 million targets, that's 28.1 successes, we can call it an even 29.

Cast First Impressions on the entire adult population of the United States. Make sure to get plenty of extra successes and add them to Potency.

Now run for President. You are super-humanly charismatic and everyone likes you.

Okay, don't actually do that, because casting sympathetic spells on everyone in the country opens you up to retaliation from other mages who will notice and can use that conduit to cast at you with no penalty. But the principle stands. And it can still be used as a political tool, just a bit more indiscriminately. Being superhumanly charasmatic and having the ability to alter the minds of party gatekeepers and media pundits means that you can totally run for President and probably win.

Get one of your teammates to take Life 4. Now circle jerk each other every other morning to become Captain America for two days, with +4 to all attributes. If you're Veteran Mages, with 75 XP to spend at Chargen, you can raise those to 5 and get +5 in all attributes for two months at a time. Which you should do if possible.

Shady314 · Post by **Shady314** » Wed Mar 23, 2016 2:22 am

In the same vein you want everyone in your cabal to take the 5 dot merit Ritual Synergy (Tome of the Watchtowers) turning your cabal into a fucking super mage that can cast damn near anything with prep time. So long as everyone is focusing on their paths and not spreading themselves thin. Since it's a merit its actually something worth buying with XP in play.
It's also hard for the DM to go against something as flavorful as you all working as a team to cast spells.

Even a low dot artifact is a fantastic source of mana.

EDIT: Spirit Thaumaturgy is amazeballs at level 5 letting you make spirits from scratch.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Wed Mar 23, 2016 3:19 am

What's a good way to disincentive looting the dead in D&D and Shadowrun in a non ham fisted manner. I figure a large part of it is the "we are very poor murderhobos" mentality where getting any scrap of coin means one more dagger you can afford for throwing and so on.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Wed Mar 23, 2016 3:24 am

I know I'm going to be called an idiot for this, but if it's one specific group, you could just try telling your players "that's not the kind of game I'm trying to run," and assure them you'll make sure they get the rewards they're due.

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Wed Mar 23, 2016 3:31 am

Few merchants would realistically be interested in orc weapons/armor except for scrap, which is a poor yield. Also, monsters that don't use tools or pockets tend not to carry fungible goods. The kinds of people who carry sufficient magic items to consider selling them are going to be dealing with sum of money where rounding errors let them live in luxury. This means they would care more about being paid in favours, services, and quests more than they would for enough gold to break a horse's back. If you emphasize those kinds of encounters, you can minimize Gygaxing.

As for whether you consider it hamfist, I don't know.

Shady314 · Post by **Shady314** » Wed Mar 23, 2016 4:22 am

DnD: Don't track money down to the goddamn penny like the game does by default. Don't put coins and loot hidden all over your enemies so they have to rifle through their damn pockets. Use less humanoid opponents with gear suitable for PCs. Humanoid opponents can have super shitty/mundane gear PCs wont waste their time on and still be a threat with templates/extra class levels etc. Also cursed items. Put 99% of loot in vaults/treasuries/hoards and such. Sure there's always working out a social contract but that's how you hold to your end.

Shadowrun is basically the same.
You should be mostly facing security with uniforms and standardized gear. PCs with custom gear shouldn't be lusting after some shitty mundane corporate drek or something is very wrong. And even though it's boring shit it's going to have biometric locks, serial numbers, rfid, annoying corporate protocols programmed in, ballistics on file and corporate logos so why the fuck is anyone going to put that kind of effort into taking it and scrubbing it? Most people (with SINs) carry no cash/credsticks it's going to be like everyone is using Applepay through their commlinks so if you want to steal peoples money you become a hacker/decker not a graverobber.

Non-humanoid enemies like drones and awakened animals won't have any loot on them.

Runs are usually time critical to some extent. You simply don't have time to loot everyone you drop except to grab an important keycard or whatever.

This is DM dependent but I prefer Shadowrun where you aren't killing people left and right. I try to actually get in and out quietly. We're thieves first and we want to be alive to get paid not get off on the thrill of the kill.
If your Johnsons throw in bonus nguyen for a clean operation or at least a non-lethal one the players won't have bodies to loot.

Eikre · Post by **Eikre** » Wed Mar 23, 2016 4:23 am

I mean, if you actually walk down the street and kill a guy for real, he's gonna have three classes of loot on him:

1: Literal garbage. You could give a pair of torn up formerly-white Adidas to the salvation army for free, but the only reason they will take it off your hands is that it requires less of their time to open-palm slam that bullshit directly into the dumpster than it does to tell you to go fuck yourself.

2: Salvage. Perhaps, if you list an iPhone 4 with a shattered screen on eBay, you could get a few bucks out of it. I would say that's a skillcheck on "Profession: Idiot Bitch." If you absolutely want your character's dayjob to be the adventuring equivalent of a bullshit multi-level marketing gig, that's your prerogative, but if you're interested in even quantifying that kind of beer money, the rules do indicate that the list of viable pursuits also includes "Perform: Wicked Fucking Sick Skateboard Tricks" or "Craft: Female Orgasms." The choice is yours.

3: Treasure. Yes, sometimes people own things that aren't total pieces of shit, and a pawn shop will actually give you cash for them. Presumably it's not unacceptable that you take a magic sword when you kill somebody that actually has one.

Maybe you should read the Dungeonomicon. This is the kind of shit that the Wish Economy is about, except moved down a notch, to the interaction between the Gold Economy and the Cabbage Economy. Point being, if your players are actually interested in getting "one more dagger for throwing," then you should probably let them know: they are already entitled to literally all of the ordinary daggers that they can even carry. Thousands of daggers. Infinite, even. You are just going to assume that "pockets full of knives" is a granted ability at level 2. It seriously doesn't matter.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Wed Mar 23, 2016 4:28 am

Prak wrote:Working on a D&D character, I rolled three sets of 4d6.drop.lowest and got-

10, 11, 11, 15, 12, 9 (total +2)
8, 10, 9, 15, 9, 12 (total 0)
11,10, 10, 16, 9, 12 (total +3)

According to this article on AnyDice, the average D&D ability set is 16, 14, 13, 12, 10, 9.

First question- what god of dice rolling did I piss off that this sort of sub-par set is typical for me?
Second question- how would rolling additional sets of six influence the average set that AnyDice calculated?

1: A lot of real dice are quite heavily biased. It's not anything like as unusual as it should be for a particular d6 to have an average under 3 or over 4 after 1000 trials. People who have "favourite dice" are probably just observant. Having said that, a sample size of 3 sets is not significant. 1 in 6 sets are a reroll, and about half of the rest are +6 or less, so your set is well inside the normal range.

2: The AnyDice calculation is for all possible combinations of results. Sampling any number of sets will be less accurate as to that true average, though generating a thousand characters or so should get you there if your dice aren't biased, which they probably are.

OgreBattle wrote:What's a good way to disincentive looting the dead in D&D and Shadowrun in a non ham fisted manner.

Why? I mean, there's property laws, that sort of thing, laws against interfering with the dead, but in D&D law is mostly who has the bigger spell slots. But for serious, you're playing people who kill guys to recover treasures, why would that not include the treasure carried by the people they killed?

Shadowrun, you just say that wetware is non-recoverable, and guns are so cheap that you can't buy wetware even by collecting hundreds of them. D&D more uses a weight system, until you have a portable hole, then it works by very large volumes, which is also how your saddlebags and wagons and fleets of ships work.

Like, maybe stuff you steal off the dead just smells like the grave, and maybe creates poltergeists and shit, because fantasy, or you could just let people get their treasure.

Blicero · Post by **Blicero** » Wed Mar 23, 2016 5:09 am

OgreBattle wrote:What's a good way to disincentive looting the dead in D&D and Shadowrun in a non ham fisted manner. I figure a large part of it is the "we are very poor murderhobos" mentality where getting any scrap of coin means one more dagger you can afford for throwing and so on.

Usable encumbrance rules.

Aryxbez · Post by **Aryxbez** » Wed Mar 23, 2016 9:00 am

OgreBattle wrote:What's a good way to disincentive looting the dead in D&D and Shadowrun in a non ham fisted manner. I figure a large part of it is the "we are very poor murderhobos" mentality where getting any scrap of coin means one more dagger you can afford for throwing and so on.

For Shadowrun, I think would be enforcing the Off-time/Post-Mission junk to a sort of phase of the game, and having selling items take up all the time in that phase. This was actually suggested by Frank awhile back, and has inspired me to sorta work on such a subsystem for my SR-campaign I'll run someday.

I know in [Tome] D&D, gold simply has a ceiling to kind of character power it can give you after awhile. So eventually selling vendor-trash for extra daggers, Ale, or Inn-stays won't mean for much.

radthemad4 · Post by **radthemad4** » Wed Mar 23, 2016 9:13 am

Shady314 wrote:DnD: Don't track money down to the goddamn penny like the game does by default. Don't put coins and loot hidden all over your enemies so they have to rifle through their damn pockets. Use less humanoid opponents with gear suitable for PCs. Humanoid opponents can have super shitty/mundane gear PCs wont waste their time on and still be a threat with templates/extra class levels etc. Also cursed items. Put 99% of loot in vaults/treasuries/hoards and such. Sure there's always working out a social contract but that's how you hold to your end.

I've seen this work. In my current Tome game wealth isn't even being tracked at all. The PCs started with whatever amount of mundane equipment they wanted and a few Red Rob items. No one's even asked to loot anyone so far, unless it was a boss character or something who was more likely to have magic items.

Judging__Eagle · Post by **Judging__Eagle** » Thu Mar 24, 2016 2:50 pm

OgreBattle wrote:What's a good way to disincentive looting the dead in D&D and Shadowrun in a non ham fisted manner. I figure a large part of it is the "we are very poor murderhobos" mentality where getting any scrap of coin means one more dagger you can afford for throwing and so on.

My own solution was to apply much of Dungeonomicon's 'Economicon' chapter; before there was even a basic type of Book of Gears items. Ancient times in [Tome] history.

In any case; in a mission on the grinding mountains of Gehenna; a group of PCs from my "planar mercenaries" campaign got awarded a pile of emeralds by a Nalfeshnee for completing a retrieval of a Retriever. The three of them decided that they were going to Gather Information to find a Cleric (or other Divine caster) who could cast them a Contact Outsider in exchange for some of the emeralds.

With use of the "Finding the right sort of Outsider" rules from Tome of Fiends, the PCs were able to identify a Noble Djinn, and were able to bootstrap themselves into the Post-wish economy. Mostly getting up to +2 in Inherent bonuses, or a pair of magic items at a time.

After that; the players wouldn't loot corpses who had magic items the same power as their own; since they couldn't horde and sell them for "better" items. Likewise, finding any item of greater than 15k gold made even players whose characters couldn't even use the item cheer; while being told that the item was sticking out of a pile of gold that might be worth about 10 million gp was met with disgust over delight.

Finally; that last dragon hoard was scooped up by the PC whose player hadn't been given access to Post-Wish items by the other players. They wrote 10,000,000 in their Gold Pieces count; deducted a bunch to get magic items, and got into the Post-Wish economy by that route.

Also; once PCs are within Post-Wish economy brackets; they're more willing to do quests for free. They now want the combat experience. Players will be more relaxed about taking risks as well; and I've even run solo sessions such as a level 6 Dungeonomicon Monk stalking a Catoblepas in a swamp and defeating it.

[edit]

Other things that I could now do, due to the PCs being in a post-wish economy: taking away minor magic items, without guilt.

At least once I had the PCs get shaken down by a herd of Nightmares in Hades; yes, the PCs "could" have taken on a dozen Nightmares, but I wouldn't haven been pretty, and the survivors would have probably called bigger allies. So, for one adventure, each PC had 1 less +2 Stat bonus item. They felt like it was "costly"; but at the same time it wasn't "crippling" a cost, and they got replacements when they got back home.

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Thu Mar 24, 2016 6:49 pm

OgreBattle wrote:What's a good way to disincentive looting the dead in D&D and Shadowrun in a non ham fisted manner. I figure a large part of it is the "we are very poor murderhobos" mentality where getting any scrap of coin means one more dagger you can afford for throwing and so on.

The main question is: why do you want to do that? People loot corpses because they can sell stuff and improve quality of life. That's why soldiers IRL used to loot corpses. But Brotherhood of the Ring doesn't loot the orcs because members of the brotherhood have no need for money - Frodo has massive inheritance to start with, and everyone gets magic items and lifestyle for free. Elves of Rivendel or Mirkwood, people of Rohand and Gondor don't ask the Brotherhood for money in exchange for healing and rest and supplies. Corwyn of Amber doesn't loot the dead because he can literally will any non-magic item into existence so he only takes the trump decks.

souran · Post by **souran** » Thu Mar 24, 2016 8:49 pm

If you want a simple answer for D&D that most players will by without having to explain the wish economy, have coin encumbrance, or otherwise drag a narrative focused game into the fantasy Vietnam realm the answer is to give the treasure as reward for completing a task. Most players will loosen up on the need to take everything that isn't nailed down once they see that the GM is not going to keep the players starving and without treasure. If you need in game reasons those are petty easy too. Unloading 100 pairs of goblin boots should be very difficult. But most players will match the tone of the game. If you run a game that plays like "its always sunny in philidelphia" players will spend their time asking how much gold they can get for a 1 ton of dragon fertilizer. If you run a game that plays like Conan or Jason Born people will spend less time scheming on silly stuff.

erik · Post by **erik** » Thu Mar 24, 2016 10:38 pm

For encumbrance there's pack mules and carts. That's what we took to doing in the Lamentations of the Flame Princess campaign I play in. We pull up to a dungeon with some carts pulled by beasts of burden, and have some hired peons to manage things while we loot the shit out of places.

If we didn't have to pay for every pointless thing then we probably would not even bother. Instead I've taken it to the ridiculous extreme, founding the Invisible Hand, where we work to make a profit off of the two separate price lists for rural and city goods since prices on some items can double from city to rural or vice versa. The best ratio is on wooden holy symbols which go up 10x in price from rural to city. I need to pay a rural village to just craft genuine rustic wooden holy symbols to sell in London.

Mord · Post by **Mord** » Fri Mar 25, 2016 1:25 am

souran wrote:If you run a game that plays like "its always sunny in philidelphia" players will spend their time asking how much gold they can get for a 1 ton of dragon fertilizer.

Are you recruiting players for this game?

erik wrote:If we didn't have to pay for every pointless thing then we probably would not even bother. Instead I've taken it to the ridiculous extreme, founding the Invisible Hand, where we work to make a profit off of the two separate price lists for rural and city goods since prices on some items can double from city to rural or vice versa. The best ratio is on wooden holy symbols which go up 10x in price from rural to city. I need to pay a rural village to just craft genuine rustic wooden holy symbols to sell in London.

That actually sounds pretty fun to me.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Fri Mar 25, 2016 2:36 am

That really does. I need to encourage my queermate to dive into MCing so they can run that game.

K · Post by K » Fri Mar 25, 2016 4:09 am

The most subtle way to discourage PC Greyhawking is to just spend a lot of time changing from wild setting to wild setting and/or spending extended periods of time in the wilderness. The merchants of the mind flayer city accept no number of goblin ass-pennies as currency and finding an onyx statue of a giant frog is not going to do you much good when the nearest city is on another plane, uphill both ways.

Straight up Logistics and Dragons is poison to 90% of the player base.

Blade · Post by **Blade** » Fri Mar 25, 2016 9:46 am

You could also abstract money and just have a "wealth" attribute which gives an estimate of what the PC can afford. The looting is factored in so no need to care about it.

Another solution is to have the characters spend XP or something similar for all the gear they actually keep. So no matter if they've got a million gold pieces, as long as they don't spend XP to make it "permanent", they'll lose it at the beginning of the next session. On the flip side, if they spent XP they are guaranteed to either be able to keep the item or be able to quickly find a replacement of the same value if they lose it.

This is better suited for some games than others (a Conan-style game where you always end your adventure as king of somewhere and start the next one as a half naked slave, a Dying Earth game, etc.) but when it applies it also have the advantage of keeping character advancement from money in check and in line with character advancement from XP.
This way the gear-oriented character doesn't suddenly become far more powerful than the rest of the group because they got hold of a lot of gold but he doesn't become completely useless when they get everything stolen.

Dogbert · Post by **Dogbert** » Sat Mar 26, 2016 12:27 am

OgreBattle wrote:What's a good way to disincentive looting the dead in D&D and Shadowrun in a non ham fisted manner.

d&d:
Give players honest-to-goodness, level-relevant treasure as you actually should because, you know, that's why murderhobos set out to risk life and limb. Greyhawking was instituted as a practice for a reason.

Shadowrun:
Stop playing 5E where EVERYTHING every NPC has ever (starting with a car) costs more than the PCs will earn in a lifetime of chump runs. Also, if those gangers don't want to be poached, then they shouldn't be walking around with yummy, expensive BFGs (just look at what happens in Texas to those rednecks who like to prance around with assault rifles hanging on their backs).

Dogbert · Post by **Dogbert** » Sat Mar 26, 2016 12:56 am

And yeah, I know I'm a horrible person for victim-blaming those innocent gun freaks.