Annoying Game Questions You Want Answered

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Um... yes, actually? My hope is that higher level trainers can eventually acquire enough clout/money/whatever to open up their own gym or other business.
Obviously we'd want all of the players to start engaging in the ownership game at the same time and in roughly the same place, but I think that saying the Pokemon setting is set up to where it's normal and easy for literally anyone to fuck off on a Pokemon adventure at any time isn't that much of a stretch. You could go from being a wandering Trainer with nothing but the cash your mom gave you to opening up a restaurant with your new friends (human and nonhuman alike) because that was your life's dream... who still goes on adventures because it's easiest to get rare ingredients yourself when you're a modestly leveled adventurer.
Alternately, you could switch over into having adventures close to home and do less travelling once you buy a house. Hell, in modern settings you can probably just email your underlings while you're travelling. I think I'm rambling, so I'll shut up now.

[Trill]

Not really a game question, but I just wanted to announce that Dumpshock is dead.
Does anyone have alternative links for the Shadowrun Supplemental?

[angelfromanotherpin]

The Trove has it.

[Prak]

I had an idea for a one shot in a group that was talking about a GM who had mandated 3d6 roll in place for a normal game.

The idea for the one shot is that the great heroes have failed to defeat the BBEG, and now it's come down to the common people, who aren't important enough to be legendary heroes, or even soldiers in the armies of nameless soldiers, to try to survive as best they can as the dark armies descend upon villages.

In my head, this takes the form of a sort of hollywood-esque last stand, while low-level priests are sequestered trying everything they can for some hail mary tactic that relies heavily on divine intervention.

But... is there a good way to do this in D&D? I'm leery of switching to a system that handles mass combat better, since the core of the idea is rooted in D&D stuff, namely, being characters with primarily npc levels and bad ability scores.

[angelfromanotherpin]

I did something similar for an intro to the 'old-school' experience for new gamers, except the PCs were the Hail Mary. The big bad's army had wiped out the best, but the rest had a lead on his external heart which was in one barrow in a field of a thousand. Using the power of low-grade masses, team good guy set to digging up every tomb as the enemy army bore down on them, and the PCs were the group that dug up the right tomb and had to do the low-level dungeon crawl to save the day. I might still have the write-up.

[Prak]

I definitely want the PCs to have agency in the hail mary. In my initial thinking, I was conceptualising it as some kind of artifact, but it occurred to me that deus ex machinas are bad, so I want the PCs to be in control. I'm currently thinking that the thing the priests are working on is pulling out every trick possible to create, like, a potion of Exalted Fury. So the last scene in the one shot should be one of the PCs charging into the core of the massed evil armies to pull the pin on their exalted hand grenade, probably with other PCs trying to make a hole so the one with the grenade doesn't die before they're in position.

[OgreBattle]

If it comes out of nowhere then it feels like a deus ex machina, but if it's foretold some sessions ahead, or if it turns out something they already know about *twist* is actually the important thing with some new information or a different perspective, then it feels better.

[Prak]

yeah, but this is a one shot. And I like the idea of the Exalted Fury thing. It lets me finally use the spell since I'll probably never get to do it as a player.

[OgreBattle]

Hmm then perhaps...

Have it be something the party already has, starting in media res or with an infodump that frames the one-shot.

Like the first page of Naruto is the demon fox battle, then the demon fox power appears.

[OgreBattle]

Is Planescape actually a setting that handles high level full casters

[Iduno]

Is Planescape actually a setting that handles high level full casters

I think the high-level NPCs were somewhere between 11 and 15, in AD&D, so not really. Then again, you can send pretty much anyone to go fight in the blood war or whatever, and give them a good challenge.

[Username17]

Is Planescape actually a setting that handles high level full casters

Sort of? It accepts that they exist and has a flippant answer for what that isn't a problem.

"Shit's like infinite man, so like whatever. You can use your powers to raise an army of Solars and shatter the temples of Mammon; but like that level of Hell is infinite, man. So there's like, more of it."

-Username17

[Iduno]

Not really a game question, but I just wanted to announce that Dumpshock is dead.
Does anyone have alternative links for the Shadowrun Supplemental?

It's back.

[Thaluikhain]

Way, way back when I got 2nd ed 40k and saw it had rules for bows and crossbows and other weapons taken from WHFB, I'd wondered about using 40k rules to play WHFB. Now, of course, that wouldn't have worked very well, but I'd wondered about using the same set of rules to play different tech levels.

Bow vs bow could be done with the same rules as lasgun vs lasgun, I guess, but allowing bow vs lasgun would muck that up, and 40k, Necromunda, Gorkamorka and Inquisitor all had that sort of thing. The first 3 had bows be much the same as lasguns unless you had armour (which isn't great) and the latter seemed to work under the assumption that since chainswords are better than clubs, if being hit by a chainsword hurts, being hit by a club tickles (that also isn't great).

The Dr Who Miniatures game "borrowed heavily" from 40k, also features a variety of tech levels, and has 21st carbines treated the same as 19th century ones, whilst differentiating between Sterling SMGs and FAL rifles. Also not great.

Is there a good way of mixing up tech levels in the same game, either using the same rules for different tech levels fighting peers, or fighting against radically different tech levels but keeping things balanced?

[angelfromanotherpin]

It depends what you mean by 'radically different.' As long as the difference is merely 'very impressive' and not 'incomprehensibly overwhelming,' then you can usually just mathhammer things and assign the higher-tech stuff an appropriately higher point value.

[Iduno]

Is there a good way of mixing up tech levels in the same game, either using the same rules for different tech levels fighting peers, or fighting against radically different tech levels but keeping things balanced?

Probably not. On one end, you have Civilization battles where some veteran cavemen with clubs defeat the fighter jets, and on the other you have something like Dwarf Fortress where you probably can't be hurt if your equipment is one tier higher-quality than your opponent.

You would have to find a middle ground where there is a large enough of a difference between tiers that it's worthwhile to do, and also having the difference be small enough that it's possible to overcome. And there might be some overlap.

[Foxwarrior]

Well, from the versions of WH40k and WHFB I remember, creatures that represent the same things have the same stats, an ordinary human with a sword, or a chaos demon, has the same properties in Fantasy Battles and in 40k. Using the fantasy characters as-is in 40k would be silly, but would be silly in exactly the same way 40k already is silly, using a Bretonnian army to defeat Space Marines Mouse That Roared-style isn't really out of genre.

I too used the same stat scale for Gempunks and my near-future Cybergems spinoff, but since I don't abstract away distances and speeds, guns and cars can be a serious advantage over swords and wooden carts, even though swords do more damage than guns do. But if you used both systems at once, the knights and wizards could pick up the guns and rocket launchers, so it wouldn't stay pure Fantasy vs Futuristic for very long.

[Neeeek]

Way, way back when I got 2nd ed 40k and saw it had rules for bows and crossbows and other weapons taken from WHFB, I'd wondered about using 40k rules to play WHFB. Now, of course, that wouldn't have worked very well, but I'd wondered about using the same set of rules to play different tech levels.

Bow vs bow could be done with the same rules as lasgun vs lasgun, I guess, but allowing bow vs lasgun would muck that up....


Is there a good way of mixing up tech levels in the same game, either using the same rules for different tech levels fighting peers, or fighting against radically different tech levels but keeping things balanced?

Well, you might want to consider why various weapons became favored over others.

Bows didn't become obsolete because guns did more damage or were more accurate. Until the mid-19th century, getting shot with an arrow was often as bad or worse than being shot with a bullet. And guns (pistols, at least) had an effective range of like 20 ft. All those Old West gunfights had few causalities because they didn't really hit each other much.


Guns overtook bows because guns are much easier to use.

You can learn to shoot even an old musket fairly accurately with a week or so of training, while learning to shoot a bow effectively takes years of practice. You can also shoot a gun without needing to be strong enough to draw a bow.

You can shoot a gun with one hand. Pistols are design that way, but firing a rifle with one hand is also possible. Bows require 2 hands. Pretty important if you are trying to drive a car or wagon or ride a horse while shooting.

You can carry a pistol in your pants with no trouble. A rifle is bigger, but still much less bulky than a bow. And then you get to ammo. Arrows are bulky as fuck, require care to avoid damaging, and are a pain in the ass to make. Shot/powder/wadding make seem like a hassle, but a round metal ball, a bunch of sand, and some cloth are all extremely durable items that take up little space. Once bullets became a thing, it wasn't even worth discussing anymore.


So, arrow vs. lasgun isn't really a mechanical issue in an individual fight. Both can kill an unarmored person pretty well. But in a large scale army/societal progress situation, the unlimited ammo point and shoot easily transportable weapon is probably going to win out eventually.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

What are some of the benefits of using a roll-under system as opposed to roll-over?

[angelfromanotherpin]

Roll-under and roll-over usually aren't different systems, just different ways of approaching the same system. And roll-under usually comes off badly because as soon as you have to apply modifiers or compare margins of success, the math becomes much less intuitive and wieldy.

If roll-under has a benefit, it is as a constraint. You would use it for a system where you wanted to discourage the use of modifiers and margins of success and just have flat probabilities for things.

[OgreBattle]

Is there a good way of mixing up tech levels in the same game, either using the same rules for different tech levels fighting peers, or fighting against radically different tech levels but keeping things balanced?

Magic is often given to the cold weapons.
For 'realism', you can focus more on morale, stealth, than just killiness to offset the advantage modern firearms have against bows and crossbows.

In real life bows still had a place in the steppes against muskets due to their rate of fire and accuracy on horseback vs a horseback musket. The Dzungar genocide by the Qing dynasty is testament to that. The manchu bow was a very powerful bow too, launched heavy chain piercing arrows. Napoleon's forces also had problems dealing with steppe archers. It's around when revolvers and semi automatics come around that you have a weapon that fires faster on horseback than a bow.


Osprey Publishing (lots of military history stuff) might have a skirmish game that mixes it up:
https://ospreypublishing.com/store/ospr ... y-wargames

They're doing more RPG's this year.


---


Roll-under can be a supplement to an existing system. Older editions of warhammer had a "roll a d6 under a stat like initiative or strength" to represent breaking out of webs, resisting toxins, or dodging something. It's a limited system but it worked as a quick way to have weapons target a different defense than the primary one. So a strength 6+ monster largely ignores the "roll a d6 under strength" web gun or whatever it was.

[Foxwarrior]

I've totally forgotten why roll-under makes applying modifiers more difficult... so long as the final target number is known by the player, and all modifiers are applied to the target number rather than to the die(/dice) rolled. If you have to hit a 4 or less to succeed, adding a +2 raises that to a 6 or less, and you can easily see that you'll succeed 50% more often, and I haven't even told you how big the die is.

...I guess there is the weirdness that all high level tasks have a TN of less than 0.

[Bertie Wooster]

Bows didn't become obsolete because guns did more damage or were more accurate. Until the mid-19th century, getting shot with an arrow was often as bad or worse than being shot with a bullet. And guns (pistols, at least) had an effective range of like 20 ft. All those Old West gunfights had few causalities because they didn't really hit each other much.


Guns overtook bows because guns are much easier to use.

You kinda wrong here. Guns overtook bows because they were BOTH more effective and easier to use. A gun have a notable advantage over a bow in terms of stopping power.
A bullet wound was either immediately lethal or incapacitating. An arrow hit rarely kills or even disables a person on the spot. Especially an armored person. Boromir death scene from Lord of the Rings is actually semi-realistic.

To put it simply: guns are much better than bows at killing people. It is the reason why every single culture that acquired access to guns immediately began switching away from all other kinds of ranged weaponry.

[Username17]

I've totally forgotten why roll-under makes applying modifiers more difficult... so long as the final target number is known by the player, and all modifiers are applied to the target number rather than to the die(/dice) rolled. If you have to hit a 4 or less to succeed, adding a +2 raises that to a 6 or less, and you can easily see that you'll succeed 50% more often, and I haven't even told you how big the die is.

...I guess there is the weirdness that all high level tasks have a TN of less than 0.

The biggest is post-hoc modifiers. So imagine that after reporting the roll you remember that you have high ground or that you don't have your belt of strength on at the moment. If you're doing roll-under blackjack you need to have reported both your die roll and your modified target number to figure out what the modifier did or didn't do to add it later. If instead you're rolling high against a target number, you just report your single modified roll and move the fuck on with your life.

Roll under is just awkward in a lot of ways and produces no advantages unless you make a lot of unmodified rolls. A scenario which is basically only applicable for board games.

-Username17

[Thaluikhain]

Roll-under can be a supplement to an existing system. Older editions of warhammer had a "roll a d6 under a stat like initiative or strength" to represent breaking out of webs, resisting toxins, or dodging something. It's a limited system but it worked as a quick way to have weapons target a different defense than the primary one. So a strength 6+ monster largely ignores the "roll a d6 under strength" web gun or whatever it was.

Not to mention, rolling under your Leadership on 2d6, happens all the time. But, instead of rolling under your BS to hit, you roll under 7-BS. Wasn't until quite a few years later that they changed your BS into simple 3+ or 4+ to hit.

Anyway, rolling high just seems to be desirable, and your game probably has at least some instances where you want to do that. Consistency probably isn't a bad thing.