Annoying Game Questions You Want Answered

[hyzmarca]

Well, for playability's sake I wouldn't want to introduce more than 5 deities, because honestly, when was the last time you really needed more than that for an adventure?

Also, I'm very hesitant to plug real-world names like Buddha or Nietzsche into a planescape-ish d20 game.

So far I was thinking about Vecna (for all your necromancing needs), Avacyn (pre-corruption, for all your lawful goodness), and some elemental deity from the FR or Eberron or whatever.

If you want your gods to be actively involved in your campaign, then Vecna is a terrible idea. Because Vecna is basically the Doctor Doom of D&D and would utterly dominate the plot, realistically. He'd find some way to steal the Trickster overgod's power and the entire plot would be about stopping him.

And if you don't want them to be actively involved in the campaign, there is no reason not to have a large number.

Having a large number of weaker gods is probably the better choice, overall, because it makes the players' decisions about who to side with more meaningful. When you can choose from worshipping the god of being a dick, and worshipping the god of kittens and puppies, that isn't a meaningful choice. If you're a dick, you'll choose the first one. Otherwise, you'll choose the second.

That being said, here are some of my suggestions.

Media: Goddess of Television.
Mona Doyle: Guardian of Hedgehogs
Black Rabbit: God of Death of Rabbits.
Pree Aesma: Master of Want

[Whipstitch]

I don't really agree about the Vecna thing. He's famous, sure, but like Doctor Doom he's also gotten himself punked plenty of times. Vecna cultists are also handy villains because their whole shtick is hoarding dire lore until they think they seen an opportunity for a power grab. That means if you ever need to research some evil McGuffin you can do a lot worse than taking a side quest to kick over some Vecna fanboy's sandcastle.

[OgreBattle]

So Shadowrun 4e is mostly stat+skill, but it also has stat+stat to resist mana attacks.

Would it break the game if you also had stat+stat for other rolls? Like Reaction+Agility in place of using a dodge skill and then you can just get rid of the dodge skill.

Also seems like most of the Athletic skills could be removed and replaced with some combination of physical skills like...

Gymnastics: Body+Agility
Long Jump: Body+Agility
Climb: Body+Strength
Swim: Body+Strength
Run: Strength+Agility

Perhaps give a special BP/Karma discount to raising body and strength.

[hyzmarca]

So Shadowrun 4e is mostly stat+skill, but it also has stat+stat to resist mana attacks.

Would it break the game if you also had stat+stat for other rolls? Like Reaction+Agility in place of using a dodge skill and then you can just get rid of the dodge skill.

Also seems like most of the Athletic skills could be removed and replaced with some combination of physical skills like...

Gymnastics: Body+Agility
Long Jump: Body+Agility
Climb: Body+Strength
Swim: Body+Strength
Run: Strength+Agility

It would make those rolls substantially harder for trained professionals because stats are much more expensive than skills are, but substantially easier for the untrained, because adding Body dice is a hell of a lot better than defaulting.

[Whipstitch]

How people would react also depends a bit on what you do with Synthacardium and Gymnastic Dodge. People mostly give a shit about the Athletics group in SR4 because Gymnastics can be used to dodge gunfire and is cheaper to boost than the regular Dodge skill on top of potentially having some niche uses in other checks. The whole thing where people also end up being able to acquit themselves well in the Decathlon by virtue of stacking Gymnastics boosting bioware is just a happy side effect. Nobody actually takes that shit because it makes them climb good.

[hyzmarca]

Also, Gymnast trolls.

Suddenly, trolls become the best gymnasts in the world.

[Longes]

Also, Gymnast trolls.

Suddenly, trolls become the best gymnasts in the world.

Hey, there was a troll climber build who moves faster if he lays down on the ground and starts "climbing".

[Prak]

Ok, here's a weird one- what happens if a rogue sneak attacks with a non-damaging weapon, precisely? I mean, obviously the attack suddenly does damage, but what kind? The Facebook D&D group has a question about using SA on spells, and the question of Ray of Enfeeblement came up (which I would say does not have the ability damage increased by SA), but I'm curious as to what happens if a rogue throws a completely normal snowball at someone who doesn't know they're there. I'm guessing non-lethal and the GM's best adjudication for damage type?

[Kaelik]

Ok, here's a weird one- what happens if a rogue sneak attacks with a non-damaging weapon, precisely? I mean, obviously the attack suddenly does damage, but what kind? The Facebook D&D group has a question about using SA on spells, and the question of Ray of Enfeeblement came up (which I would say does not have the ability damage increased by SA), but I'm curious as to what happens if a rogue throws a completely normal snowball at someone who doesn't know they're there. I'm guessing non-lethal and the GM's best adjudication for damage type?

The rules for spells in Complete Arcane basically say "make up a damage type" and give an example of enervation doing negative energy damage instead of negative levels.

If you throw a non damaging weapon I'd just say you don't do damage, Ie, I really don't want rogues now doing piles of subdual damage on all their bola trick attacks. But I'd just say that a snowball does 1 subdual damage or whatever, if you really wanted to SA snowball people into unconsciousness.

[Prak]

Thanks, Kaelik

[Emerald]

The rules for spells in Complete Arcane basically say "make up a damage type" and give an example of enervation doing negative energy damage instead of negative levels.

Actually, the damage is either the same type as the spell deals, or negative energy damage if it doesn't deal HP damage, not "make up a damage type":

Any spell that requires an attack roll and deals damage functions as a weapon in certain respects, whether the spell deals normal hit point damage, nonlethal damage, ability damage, or energy drain.
[...]
A successful sneak attack with a weaponlike spell deals extra damage of the same type as the spell normally deals. For example, a 10th-level rogue/3rd-level wizard who makes a successful sneak attack with Melf's acid arrow deals 2d4 points of acid damage, plus an extra 5d6 points of acid damage for the sneak attack (with the spell continuing to deal acid damage as normal in subsequent rounds). The exception is spells that deal energy drain or ability damage, which deal negative energy damage on a sneak attack, not extra negative levels or ability damage.

As for the snowball case, you definitely can't deal sneak attack damage with it, since it would only deal nonlethal damage and you can't use a weapon that deals nonlethal damage to make a sneak attack unless it's a sap or unarmed strike as per the Sneak Attack description:

With a sap (blackjack) or an unarmed strike, a rogue can make a sneak attack that deals nonlethal damage instead of lethal damage. She cannot use a weapon that deals lethal damage to deal nonlethal damage in a sneak attack, not even with the usual -4 penalty.

And that's not just a case of it listing the only two nonlethal-only weapons that existed at the time, since the whip and bolas also deal nonlethal and were not granted that exception.

[tussock]

Well, for playability's sake I wouldn't want to introduce more than 5 deities, because honestly, when was the last time you really needed more than that for an adventure?

About 2600 years ago people figured out you really only needed the one to have a grand old excuse to go on genocidal rampages, though they kept a bunch of quasi-gods around the place for most of the time since then. Santa is still around, for instance, the god of giving up food and clothing to poor children in winter, which is pretty arbitrary and specific, and mostly threatens to do the opposite to bad children, leaving them to starve and freeze. He's the disciplinarian, carrot and stick.

Also, I'm very hesitant to plug real-world names like Buddha or Nietzsche into a planescape-ish d20 game.

Well, you can give them new names, but they're great inspiration. Jehovah is a gigantic authoritarian asshole with a fetish for barbecue and childhood genital mutilation and so much more: but your own novel gods (or those from modern PG-friendly writings) are not going to be even that interesting.

Cows are sacred, and as a result really annoying but you can't show it. Because that's one of things the deity is due to reincarnate as, which is representative of how being nice to annoying animals for no reason trains us to be even nicer to people for no reason. Is your religion at least that interesting?

So far I was thinking about Vecna (for all your necromancing needs), Avacyn (pre-corruption, for all your lawful goodness), and some elemental deity from the FR or Eberron or whatever.

But that's not a guiding principle or a thing people do or anything. You can't just have an "LG" stamp without it being about food security or inheritance rights or the judicial system and common law or all of the above, just something, and with some kick to it. Similarly with "necro" or "elemental". Those aren't things people choose to die for, where an absolute opposition to temporal authority, or a rejection of self-identity totally is.

If your gods aren't at least a little bit offensive and weird (so your god of representing imperial authority likes to fuck trees and rocks and your wife, symbolic of the emperor being unlimited in his wishes) you're probably not going to have anyone care about your gods at all.

Which might be totally what you're after. In which case: Eternity (water), Nature (faerie), Passion (fire), Community (earth), and Magic (shadow). Those are your gods. Call 'em whatever you like.

[erik]

As for the snowball case, you definitely can't deal sneak attack damage with it, since it would only deal nonlethal damage and you can't use a weapon that deals nonlethal damage to make a sneak attack unless it's a sap or unarmed strike as per the Sneak Attack description:

With a sap (blackjack) or an unarmed strike, a rogue can make a sneak attack that deals nonlethal damage instead of lethal damage. She cannot use a weapon that deals lethal damage to deal nonlethal damage in a sneak attack, not even with the usual -4 penalty.

And that's not just a case of it listing the only two nonlethal-only weapons that existed at the time, since the whip and bolas also deal nonlethal and were not granted that exception.

You're cuckoo for cocoa puffs Emerald. The part about Saps and Unarmed Strikes being able to deal sneak attack are examples, not exclusive exceptions. They are examples used to highlight the second sentence how lethal weapons cannot be used to do subdual sneak attacks.

[edit: In rereading other subdual weapon entries, I'm on shakier ground than I first suspected, the only other subdual weapon I found which explicitly mentions granting subdual sneak attack is the Truncheon in book of furries, which describes it as basically a larger Sap. And its entry is right beside another subdual weapon which makes no such explicit caveat.

Pathfinder explicitly changed the rogue text to what the vast majority of people already assumed it meant (that subdual weapons deal subdual sneak attack). I say the vast majority because I've never heard of anyone excluding SA from whips before now, and I went in the wayback machine finding threads about people discussing sneak attack for whips and the main point of contention was whether it could deal SA in cases where it doesn't deal damage due to armor, or whether flaming whips deal subdual fire, or if normal fire if it can ignore the armor restrictions. I never saw one soul raise the objection that a whip cannot deal Sneak Attack without special Lasher exceptions.

[Emerald]

[edit: In rereading other subdual weapon entries, I'm on shakier ground than I first suspected, the only other subdual weapon I found which explicitly mentions granting subdual sneak attack is the Truncheon in book of furries, which describes it as basically a larger Sap. And its entry is right beside another subdual weapon which makes no such explicit caveat.

Yep. Between the fact that only some nonlethal-only weapons are mentioned as allowing sneak attacks, the fact that Sneak Attack is phrased as it is instead of something like "With a weapon that deals nonlethal damage, such as a sap or unarmed strike, a rogue can....", and scattered examples like the Lasher's Wound ability, I think it's pretty clear that you can only sneak attack with nonlethal-only weapons if the weapon allows you to do so.

Pathfinder explicitly changed the rogue text to what the vast majority of people already assumed it meant (that subdual weapons deal subdual sneak attack). I say the vast majority because I've never heard of anyone excluding SA from whips before now, and I went in the wayback machine finding threads about people discussing sneak attack for whips and the main point of contention was whether it could deal SA in cases where it doesn't deal damage due to armor, or whether flaming whips deal subdual fire, or if normal fire if it can ignore the armor restrictions. I never saw one soul raise the objection that a whip cannot deal Sneak Attack without special Lasher exceptions.

Oh, I ignore the unarmed-strike-and-saps-only restriction in my games, too, 'cause it's dumb, and I'd let someone sneak attack with a snowball just like any other improvised weapon (for the humor value if nothing else). I was just pointing out that the official answer for sneak attacking with snowballs (and with bolas, if you, like Kaelik, don't want people sneak attacking with them) is that you can't.

[OgreBattle]

Was reading through an old thread about target numbers for dicepools:
http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?p=252168



Are there any dicepool games out there where the TN is better than 50%, like if it's a d6 you succeed on a 3+. Most games I've seen set the odds lower, like Exalted requiring a 7+ on a d10 and Shadowrun having a 5+ on d6.

From what I've read on here an easier target number makes the difference between "average result" and "best result" smaller. Smaller dicepools are needed to hit thresholds, and addig/subtracting those dice are a bigger deal.

----

Most hitbox games with proportionate damage I've seen use 10 hitboxes. Are there any that use a different number, like five?

[Mask_De_H]

There are a couple of rules light games that do 3+ dicepools (RISUS and PDQ I wanna say), and I know FATE and it's derivatives use fewer than 10 hitboxes.

[Ghremdal]

Is there a dicepool game that uses 50% chance of scoring a hit per dice? A 4+ on a d6?

[erik]

Ubiquity. Used for Hollow Earth Expedition (HEX)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow_Earth_Expedition

And they have their own dice to make the big piles of d2's a bit less big (white = 1d2, red = 2d2, blue = 3d2)

[hyzmarca]

Those aren't d2s.

This is a d2.

[Prak]

Anyone ever look at X-Crawl? The concept is appealing, but given that it was a very early third party D&D 3.0 supplement that basically just palette-swapped the setting, I'm dubious as to it's quality.

[Mask_De_H]

The setting is dumb fun, the rule stuff is basic OGL shovelware, here's a review/retrospective on it.

[Prak]

Yeah, the "Earth, but we always had fantasy races!" route is not the way I'd have gone. This sort of thing seems like it would work better as "Fantasyland jumped up to modernesque psuedo-tech!"

...and part of that is because I totally want to see necromancers with Instagram...

[TiaC]

Does anyone know where that piece by Frank about grognards and their relationship with the rules was? I think it included a guy who wanted to just go to the mountains and expected to be able to find a terrorist hideout?

I'm arguing with this shitweasel over on MinMax who's trying to say that if a player can't contribute, it just means they're a bad player who isn't using their creativity and that this won't bore anyone and it made me think of that post.

[Starmaker]

http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?p=270873#270873

[Prak]

Ok, so the Ghostbusters RPG is a four stat dicepool system with the mechanical depth of an well-maintained shower (seriously, you have brains, muscle, cool and moves, and a talent for each. That's it).

This is probably fine for a casual beer and pretzels game, but I prefer more mechanically robust games.

What's a good system to hack into a Ghostbusters sort of game where you have normal humans running around with super science fighting ghosts and monsters? Mutants and Masterminds can totally do it, I'm sure HERO probably could, but I just got done with a math class, I don't want to do another one in the guise of an RPG...

I suppose After Sundown could get hacked into something that'd work? Maybe?