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Prak
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Post by Prak »

Ah, alright, I admit, that makes more sense.

I'm still disappointed that "you dance until your heart explodes" is basically a post game effect
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You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
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Post by Omegonthesane »

The "your heart explodes" bit really isn't spelled out in Irresistible Dance either.

How much would it have to be nerfed for a no-save, just-dance spell to come online at a lower level? Preferably even after getting a more representative range than "Touch" (the 1d4+1 rounds is about good enough for combat at that level but seems short for a fluff effect).
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Post by Prak »

Right, no, I had originally planned to make a slightly higher level version of OID to replicate the musical demon's ability, but when it's already a 15th level effect... Hinton's Combusting Dance would have to come online at 17th level.

Thinking about it, the Musical Demon's ability is more rebuff than stun lock, as Buffy is still able to fight while under his spell, and in general it didn't stop people from doing what they were doing before, just turns it into a choreographed song and dance. So it could be done by refluffing some fear effects, especially ones that cause panic on a failed save and frightened or shakened on a successful save. Then we just need an effect that makes a target panicked and deals, say, con damage over time
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.

You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
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Post by Omegonthesane »

Your followers swell in number to that of an army
Searching the board with Google doesn't actually find me a definitive answer to what this phrase means. It's been suggested that a not-bad way of handling this Tome ability when it comes online in Tome games is "for each follower you would get you now get an army of people of that CR" but that isn't spelled out (and that suggestion was years, and a president, ago)
Kaelik wrote:Because powerful men get away with terrible shit, and even the public domain ones get ignored, and then, when the floodgates open, it turns out there was a goddam flood behind it.

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Post by Chamomile »

How can you calculate (using anydice.com if necessary) the odds of meeting certain AD&D style class ability score requirements when using 3d6 roll in order? I mean, I know the odds for any given result on 3d6 so I can multiply them together, but I need to do a lot of these, so a bit of automation would be appreciated. It won't make things a whole lot faster than just punching odds into a calculator, but it'll require less focus and be less prone to human error when I need to try a hundred of them in one go.
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Post by Orca »

Prak wrote:Right, no, I had originally planned to make a slightly higher level version of OID to replicate the musical demon's ability, but when it's already a 15th level effect... Hinton's Combusting Dance would have to come online at 17th level.

Thinking about it, the Musical Demon's ability is more rebuff than stun lock, as Buffy is still able to fight while under his spell, and in general it didn't stop people from doing what they were doing before, just turns it into a choreographed song and dance. So it could be done by refluffing some fear effects, especially ones that cause panic on a failed save and frightened or shakened on a successful save. Then we just need an effect that makes a target panicked and deals, say, con damage over time
Pathfinder's bardic masterpieces are usually pointless, but Banshee's Requiem gives you the nasty damage over time that you're after here. It doesn't cause magical fear, but you could use the Spellsong feat to combine it with a Fear spell or something.
Last edited by Orca on Tue Feb 07, 2017 11:46 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by momothefiddler »

Chamomile wrote:How can you calculate (using anydice.com if necessary) the odds of meeting certain AD&D style class ability score requirements when using 3d6 roll in order? I mean, I know the odds for any given result on 3d6 so I can multiply them together, but I need to do a lot of these, so a bit of automation would be appreciated. It won't make things a whole lot faster than just punching odds into a calculator, but it'll require less focus and be less prone to human error when I need to try a hundred of them in one go.
Here you go.

The chance of the final statement being True - that is, the probability given for a 1 result - is what you're looking for.

All separate conditions (in this case, Wis at least 15, Cha at least 7, and Str no more than 17) must be encased in individual parens, and pay close attention to the difference between > and >= (I have spent way longer on this than necessary because I was bughunting when I just didn't realize my check was using >= and my test was using >).

Anyway use should be pretty straightforward but lemme know if you have any questions.
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Post by Prak »

Orca wrote:
Prak wrote:Right, no, I had originally planned to make a slightly higher level version of OID to replicate the musical demon's ability, but when it's already a 15th level effect... Hinton's Combusting Dance would have to come online at 17th level.

Thinking about it, the Musical Demon's ability is more rebuff than stun lock, as Buffy is still able to fight while under his spell, and in general it didn't stop people from doing what they were doing before, just turns it into a choreographed song and dance. So it could be done by refluffing some fear effects, especially ones that cause panic on a failed save and frightened or shakened on a successful save. Then we just need an effect that makes a target panicked and deals, say, con damage over time
Pathfinder's bardic masterpieces are usually pointless, but Banshee's Requiem gives you the nasty damage over time that you're after here. It doesn't cause magical fear, but you could use the Spellsong feat to combine it with a Fear spell or something.
Melody of Frightful Death also works for an early level Musical Demon. Awesome, thank you. I also just learned that PF doesn't require the bard to stand around in combat doing nothing but singing or dancing, and there's an archetype that lets them basically have physically damaging guitar shredding. PF Bard is basically everything I ever wanted the bard to do.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.

You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
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Post by Chamomile »

Follow-up question: Is there any fast way to determine how likely someone is to have which options when rolling from any given set of potential classes with attribute requirements? For example, here's the set I'm working with right now:

-Death Knight. Requires 16 CON, 14 STR, 12 CHA (0.3%).
-Necromancer Acolyte. Requires 16 INT (4.6%).
-Vampire Duelist. Requires 14 DEX, 12 CHA (6.1%).
-Vampire Blood Mage. Requires 14 INT, 12 CHA (6.1%).
-Ghoul Bruiser. Requires 14 CON, 12 STR (6.1%).
-Ghoul Assassin. Requires 14 DEX, 12 CON (6.1%).
-Skeleton Infantry. Requires 11 STR, 11 CON (25%).
-Skeleton Archer. Requires 11 DEX, 11 CON (25%).
-Skeleton Fodder. No stat requirements.

So the percentages are the odds of you having access to that specific class are listed, but right now I have to figure out the total odds by hand. For example, 12.5% of players can be skeleton infantry or skeleton archer, and 12.5% each can only be one or the other. 6.1% of players qualify as ghoul assassins, but 100% of those who qualify as ghoul assassins are also part of the 25% who qualify as skeleton archers (and half of them also qualify as skeleton infantry). Skeleton infantry have a similar relationship with ghouls bruisers, vampire blood mages and necromancer acolytes have some overlap, and someone who qualifies as a death knight also qualifies as a ghoul bruiser.

The goal of this being to figure out how many players will actually select every class, making the assumption that nobody ever picks a more common (and weaker) class when they could pick a less common (and more powerful) class. That assumption might not always hold true because there's bonuses for getting fodder to max level (5-ish), plus there are reasons someone might go for the vampire blood mage instead of the necromancer acolyte, but it's somewhere to start.

Now, I can sit down and crunch the numbers myself and figure out how many skeleton infantry will actually be ghoul bruisers or necromancer acolytes or death knights, and thus figure out how many people have skeleton infantry as their best option and thus how many skeleton infantry the average party will actually contain, and most importantly, how many people qualify as nothing and will be skeleton fodder. Then I also need to figure out how those stats change if everyone gets a +1 or a +2 or a +4 to CON or CHA or INT, and how they shift around if I change the requirements for classes in order to get a good balance between elites, troops, and fodder. Then I need to do this for five other sets of classes. So automation would definitely be good.
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Post by momothefiddler »

Chamomile wrote:Follow-up question: Is there any fast way to determine how likely someone is to have which options when rolling from any given set of potential classes with attribute requirements?
Can't do that one on anydice. (To be clear, some people probably could. I can't.)

Haven't added the arbitrary stat bonuses in yet, but that shouldn't be too hard (EDIT: done). You should only (be able to) edit the grey cells. As before, lemme know if you have questions.
Last edited by momothefiddler on Wed Feb 08, 2017 3:56 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Chamomile »

Not quite what I'm looking for, although it is nice to be able to make a copy of that, fill in some new classes, and immediately have the odds for an entire set of classes in front of me instead of punching the requirements into anydice one by one and recording them manually, so thank you for that.

However, what I need is the odds the average distribution of classes in a party assuming that someone always picks the rarest class they qualify for. Here's the results of my manual mathhammering of the spooky skeleton class set as an example:
00.3% are Death Knights
04.6% are Necromancer Acolytes (a trivial number also qualify as Death Knights)
05.6% are Vampire Duelists
05.6% are Vampire Blood Mages
01.0% can be Vampire Duelists or Blood Mages
05.6% are Ghoul Bruisers
05.6% are Ghoul Assassins
01.0% can be Ghoul Bruisers or Ghoul Assassins
29.3% can be elites
05.6% are Skeleton Infantry
04.9% are Skeleton Archers
10.5% can be Skeleton Infantry or Skeleton Archers
21.0% can't be elites but can be troops
49.7% must be Skeleton Fodder

25.0% can be Skeleton Infantry. Of those, 1.5% each can be a Necromancer Acolyte, 0.3% qualify as Death Knights, 6.1% can be Ghoul Bruisers (i.e. everyone who qualifies as a Ghoul Bruiser qualifies as Skeleton Infantry), 3.0% can be Ghoul Assassins, 1.5% each can be Vampire Duelists or Vampire Blood Mages. 5.6% can be Skeleton Archers as well, and the remaining 5.6% must be Skeleton Infantry.

25.0% can be Skeleton Archers. Of those, 1.5% can be a Necromancer Acolyte, 0.1% can be a Death Knight, 6.1% can be Ghoul Assassins (all Ghoul Assassins could be Skeleton Archers), 3.0% can be Ghoul Bruisers or Vampire Duelists, 1.5% can be Vampire Blood Mages, 4.9% can be Skeleton Infantry as well, and the remaining 4.9% must be Skeleton Archers.
If I've done my math right and the numbers are all accurate, then elites (i.e. vampires, ghouls, and necromancers) are more common than troops (i.e. skeleton infantry and archers). This is an issue, and I'd like to solve it by adding an extra 10 requisite to each elite. This will drive their frequency down which should drive troop frequency up. Fodder frequency will also rise, though, because vampires and necromancers are all things that you can qualify for without qualifying for any troop type, so as an example, someone with 16 INT and then straight 9s used to qualify as a necromancer acolyte but now only qualifies for fodder, not any kind of troop.

How much are the odds of being fodder going to increase from this? Right now, I can only find out by sinking an hour into running the odds one class at a time all over again. I can guard against dramatic expansion of fodder spawn rates by adding new troop types like a vampire neonate (12 CHA, 10 INT) and/or a necromancer cultist (12 INT, 10 WIS), but that might drive fodder rates too far down. I want fodder to be common before the party starts purchasing upgrades that allow them to add bonuses to attributes when spawning (for the spooky scary party we have here, CON is very likely a priority). Would it help if, instead of a 10, the new prerequisite on the elites was an 11? I'd like to be able to see the results on this immediately, so I can play around with the numbers quickly and easily until I find a balance I like.

Now, if there isn't some anydice or spreadsheet solution to automating the hard part, I'm probably just going to bite the bullet and get a good balance for this party, then copy the numbers while changing the exact attributes used for every other party. This rules out things like certain domains being especially heavy on one minion tier or another, but I'm not totally certain that'd be a good idea anyway, since it'd be hard to balance between factions (domains don't ever directly interact with one another, but they do indirectly interact with one another, so it'd be bad if the Troll King's orcs were noticeably weaker than the Necromancer Lord's undead because the former favors troops much more heavily than the latter). It also means that once I finalize things it'd be a lot of work to make tweaks for other factions. I know I want each domain to have a dragon, and if I decide that I want that to work by having it be an extremely rare grog roll (like 18/16/12 or something crazy) that only approaches the possibility of being rolled when a domain is heavily upgraded. You can also get into things where the party has to decide between focusing upgrades on common stats to make troops and elites more likely or on the dragon's stats to make the dragon a thing that can happen at all. It'd be nice if, after deciding to try that, I wasn't looking at two hours of rejiggering probability curves to make it work.

Of course, the obvious solution here is to abandon the AD&D character generation and just have people roll on a d100 table that's way easier to modify. Drawing out chargen to six rolls instead of just one makes it more exciting, though, plus it gives me immediate buy-in from the OSR crowd. Their recommendations travel about as far, and their money sure as Hell spends just as well, as anyone else's, so that's not nothing.

EDIT: Oh, and I can't edit any cells at all. So there might be some functionality that I'm missing because I can't edit anything. Maybe this thing already does what I need to and I just can't tell.
Last edited by Chamomile on Wed Feb 08, 2017 5:53 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Username17 »

I would start by setting final outputs to add zero or 1, then zero or 2, then zero or 4, then zero or 8, and so on. Then every final number corresponds to a unique set of classes when read in binary.

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Post by Prak »

What would be a good system for a game based on the John Wick movies? Feng Shui?
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
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Post by OgreBattle »

Feng Shui sounds ideal, especially if it's a one shot without character advancement
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Post by Prak »

Another question, about D&D combat: is there a way to make it feel less like "OK, now we stand stock still and take turns punching each other as hard as we can like we're in a fist debate" and more like there's actually a back and forth with parries and repositioning and actual interaction?
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.

You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
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Post by OgreBattle »

If you have everyone do movement done in reverse initiative order followed by actions done in initiative order you get a feeling of actively intercepting foes. OAs will need reworking though
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Post by violence in the media »

Prak wrote:Another question, about D&D combat: is there a way to make it feel less like "OK, now we stand stock still and take turns punching each other as hard as we can like we're in a fist debate" and more like there's actually a back and forth with parries and repositioning and actual interaction?
This may be a dumb suggestion, but you could give people a "fight pool" that gets built up each round as they move, and that can be spent to give bonuses to attack, damage, AC, and saves. You'd get +1 per 5' you move, though you may want to play with that, as your dwarf fighters are going to get less fight pool bonuses than your elf wizards. Also, you only get the bonuses after you move. So, if you want to hit the guy you're standing next to, you can't claim all the bonuses you're totally going to get when you move on your next action.

All bonuses have to be used by the end of your turn, and persist until the start of your next turn. Unspent bonuses are lost. So, if you move 4 squares up to a dude, you could add +2 to attack and +2 to damage for that strike and retain those bonuses for any AoO you might make until your next turn. Your next turn comes around and you have to start over. Maybe you hit the guy and then move 4 squares away from him and decide to spend all +4 onto AC this round.
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Post by Pixels »

I would definitely consider reworking and limiting zones of control. The more penalties you put on players moving around, the more they're just going to stand there and slug it out.
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Post by deaddmwalking »

The system encourages standing around trading blows. Some suggestions for 3.x

1) Allow movement at half speed within a threatened area without provoking an AoO (but provoking as normal when leaving). This encourages people to adjust as necessary.

2) Allow people to full-attack if they move (ie, effectively make full attack a standard action).

3) Better yet, allow people to break up their movement as much as they want between attacks. That is, if I have 3 attacks, I can move 10', make my first attack, move 10' and make my second and third attack and then move another 10'.
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Post by Chamomile »

When someone swings a sharp and pointy object at you, your immediate reaction is to back away. This is the basic tempo of a fight: Someone on the attack is advancing, someone on the defense is retreating, and if you can't retreat you become much easier to hit, which is why "backed into a corner" is an idiom. Increase HP damage, then allow someone to mitigate the increase by taking a five foot step (without provoking AoOs) away from the attacker. If you can't back away in one of the three directions that is directly away from the attacker, you have to take the extra damage. The attacker can take a five foot step to keep up with you for free.

Of course, this has a couple of problems, since it's a quick fix to existing D&D combat and not the total engine redesign this problem really needs. Firstly, it assumes that you care about HP damage at all, which you often don't, so you'd need to rewrite the engine so that the melee is actually important at all levels.

Secondly, people will ping pong back and forth according to how many attacks they have, regardless of BAB, so you'd have to redesign the melee entirely to include some kind of opposed check. Just using the Edge would still make the melee deterministic, with the side with the Edge always advancing and the other side always retreating, instead of momentum going back and forth and only generally favoring the superior fighter.

Thirdly, you'd really want class features, equipment, and/or feats to incorporate this to make it work right. Acrobatic sorts should be able to retreat to the side or even towards the attacker, shields should make it possible to absorb an attack without retreating, power attacks should be easier to retreat from and harder to absorb but should also inflict some kind of "off-balance" status effect that makes it easy for the other side to counter-attack and seize the momentum, giving a penalty to whatever check is made for control of the melee, size and anatomy (i.e. quadruped vs. biped vs. slime, thin vs. stocky, etc.) should make a difference to how easy it is to retreat (perhaps determining how many times you can retreat in one round before you must parry or take the hit) and to parry, parrying with a shield is probably something anyone can do but parrying with weapons probably requires a feat that certain classes get for free and other don't, and on and on and on.
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Post by Koumei »

So, watching the animu of Akiba's Trip (so sue me), I once again have the drive to go over/fix up/completely re-write one of my earlier works, namely Bakuhatsu Gakuen. Especially to include the possibility of rival idol groups battling it out to draw energy from their legions of fans, using that as a way to ascend to godhood.

Now, I accept that as a person of one-day-obsessions (much like in Akiba Strip) the drive to do this will probably last until some time tomorrow, but nonetheless, I've been looking over it, and there are indeed a few things I'd want to change. This includes setting the advancement schedules out better with more in the way of "Do a New Thing" and less in the way of "Have More Dice for an Existing Thing". But the big one is the core dice rolling system.

I am in fact married to the idea of stats being your subjects and the ratings being school grades. I accept that this has certain limitations. But keeping that as a restriction, I'd like to have something that works in a fairly simple manner (this suggests one die with a flat number added to it, or a simple dice pool system despite my reservations), but where moving up a grade level (ie from a C+ to a B-) is a bigger thing than moving up from a C- to a C or a B to a B+. So a progression that has some noteworthy breakpoints built into it even though that can be implemented very badly.

Any suggestions on the best way I can handle this?

The best I can think of is some kind of Upper and Lower Limit system, like "C+: you roll four dice, maximum 4 hits, but a minimum of 1 even if you roll shit. B-: you roll five dice, still maximum 4 hits, minimum 2 though."
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Post by Blicero »

Chamomile wrote:When someone swings a sharp and pointy object at you, your immediate reaction is to back away. This is the basic tempo of a fight: Someone on the attack is advancing, someone on the defense is retreating, and if you can't retreat you become much easier to hit, which is why "backed into a corner" is an idiom. Increase HP damage, then allow someone to mitigate the increase by taking a five foot step (without provoking AoOs) away from the attacker. If you can't back away in one of the three directions that is directly away from the attacker, you have to take the extra damage. The attacker can take a five foot step to keep up with you for free.

Of course, this has a couple of problems, since it's a quick fix to existing D&D combat and not the total engine redesign this problem really needs. Firstly, it assumes that you care about HP damage at all, which you often don't, so you'd need to rewrite the engine so that the melee is actually important at all levels.

Secondly, people will ping pong back and forth according to how many attacks they have, regardless of BAB, so you'd have to redesign the melee entirely to include some kind of opposed check. Just using the Edge would still make the melee deterministic, with the side with the Edge always advancing and the other side always retreating, instead of momentum going back and forth and only generally favoring the superior fighter.

Thirdly, you'd really want class features, equipment, and/or feats to incorporate this to make it work right. Acrobatic sorts should be able to retreat to the side or even towards the attacker, shields should make it possible to absorb an attack without retreating, power attacks should be easier to retreat from and harder to absorb but should also inflict some kind of "off-balance" status effect that makes it easy for the other side to counter-attack and seize the momentum, giving a penalty to whatever check is made for control of the melee, size and anatomy (i.e. quadruped vs. biped vs. slime, thin vs. stocky, etc.) should make a difference to how easy it is to retreat (perhaps determining how many times you can retreat in one round before you must parry or take the hit) and to parry, parrying with a shield is probably something anyone can do but parrying with weapons probably requires a feat that certain classes get for free and other don't, and on and on and on.
I like this. Have you tried attaching any numbers to this framework?
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Post by Chamomile »

Not yet, but I've made a note to do so for Dark Lord and may revise it backwards into Dinosaur Riding Barbarians. Attaching it to 3.X is probably a deeper system change than is wise without going into a full-on edition shift. For a quick fix, just have all melee attacks result in a confirmed critical unless the other guy shifts one square away, and if the other guy does that, the attacker can shift to match him.

This has all three of the problems I mentioned before, but for the third one in particular you are not solving those problems unless you redesign your entire class corpus to work with the new system as well as rewriting melee into an opposed check between both combatants where either one may end up damaging the other with each roll instead of just an attack roll compared to a static number, and that's a design change that may or may not balance well at all with the rest of 3.X combat mechanics. The first one is the only one that can really be solved with backwards compatible house ruling, since you can use things like +5 bonus to all saves until you're under half health to make HP damage and saves relevant to one another.
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Post by Prak »

Why is Vincent Baker such a pretentious dickbag?
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FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.

You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
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Post by OgreBattle »

In a D&D style low leven dungeon crawler, what would you expect to be the game difference between wielding a 2 meter halberd/poleaxe vs a 2 meter greatsword?


I'm thinking that making them mechanically the same opens up more 'rule of cool' character variety, but there's a lot of people who just NEED a mechanical difference for style differences
Last edited by OgreBattle on Wed Mar 01, 2017 11:26 am, edited 2 times in total.
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