Annoying Game Questions You Want Answered

[OgreBattle]

Opportunity Attacks...

D&D4e: https://dnd4.fandom.com/wiki/Opportunity_attack

"The opportunity attack action is an opportunity action available to all player characters, and is the most common opportunity action.

Triggering opportunity attacks is usually called provoking opportunity attacks. The opportunity attack action is provoked by an enemy leaving an adjacent square without shifting or teleporting, or by an adjacent enemy using a ranged or area power.[PH:290] Like all opportunity actions, opportunity attacks cannot be provoked by forced movement.[PH:285]

The opportunity attack action allows a melee basic attack against the enemy that provoked it, if the character is able to see that enemy and make a melee basic attack against it.[PH:290]

Like all opportunity actions, an opportunity attack interrupts the action that provoked it. The opportunity attack resolves before the interrupted action. If the interrupted action becomes impossible to complete, for example, if the opportunity attack reduces the enemy to 0 hit points, the interrupted action is lost.

A character can take any number of opportunity actions per round, but no more than one opportunity action during each other combatant's turn. A character cannot take opportunity actions, including opportunity attacks, during the character's own turn.[PH:268]"

D&D5e:
In a fight, everyone is constantly watching for a chance to strike an enemy who is fleeing or passing by. Such a strike is called an opportunity Attack.
You can make an opportunity Attack when a Hostile creature that you can see moves out of your reach. To make the opportunity Attack, you use your Reaction to make one melee Attack against the provoking creature. The Attack occurs right before the creature leaves your reach.

You can avoid provoking an opportunity Attack by taking the Disengage action. You also don’t provoke an opportunity Attack when you Teleport or when someone or something moves you without using your Movement, action, or Reaction. For example, you don’t provoke an opportunity Attack if an explosion hurls you out of a foe’s reach or if gravity causes you to fall past an enemy."


D&D3e: https://www.d20srd.org/srd/combat/attac ... tunity.htm

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Forced movement giving opportunity attacks would organically create cool Chrono Trigger tech team attacks, but some designers get spooked by that and make it illegal to hit an ogre that is stumbling past you

In general though OA AoO's are things I lose track of... I'd rather have a movement phase and action phase.

[Nebuchadnezzar]

Thanks for the earlier suggestions, everyone.

I'm weighing options between playing in two different Pathfinder 1e games, for which the goals are in pleasant opposition.

The first game's mission statement is to necessarily go slowly via entertainingly grinding to repeated halts, akin to a game of d20 Mornington Crescent. To that end I'm trying to put together a character that makes decent use of as many different ability pools as are nominally viable. The game will likely start at 15th level, classes with 9th level abilities are generally prohibited so as to encourage usage of more fiddly ones, and third party stuff is more often fine than not. Optimization is a fairly distant second priority to being complicated. A current idea is leaning heavily into Dreamscarred stuff, and making a Metaforge, which allows dipping into psionic powers/aegis customizations/soulknife mods/Akasha stuff through Aegis, Path of War maneuvers available in 3-4 different ways, and other magic through UMD. Alternatively I was debating a Vizier(Seer)/Tactician(Amplifier)/Amplifer, trying to both make repeated modifications to the rest of the party (Teamwork feats/Collective/maybe Zealot or Bard stuff?) and to jam in as many possible uses of the word Amplifier.

The second game intends combat to be as automatic as possible. All the Pathfinder classes appear to me to have something to be manipulated. I'd love to find a way to make an effective character for whom their agency is on the order of Pony Trick Y/N? .

Any suggestions on either are appreciated. (edit:motherfucker, misspellings in a black out drunk can go imagine some awful insult)

[Dean]

I wanna know how many re-rolls equals a straight bonus.

Lets say I'm using a d12 and want to get high rolls. Getting two dice and choosing the highest or adding +1 to one roll looks basically even. How many rolls are roughly equal to +2 or +3 to the roll? Obviously a +1 has the advantage that it allows a 13 and makes one immune from a 1 but if I'm only caring about average result what's the equivalence?

1d12+1 = 2d12 choose highest
1d12+2 = ?
1d12+3 = ?
1d12+4 = ?

[Trill]

1d12+1 = 2d12 choose highest

Eehhhh.
if you look over at anydice, then rerolling a d12 isn't a +1 bonus, but a +2 bonus (avg. 8.5 with the bonus vs. 8.49 with rerolling)

+3 is 3d12 choose highest
+4 is 5d12 choose highest
+5 is 12d12 choose highest
and after that the average grows very weakly. +6 is (13+)d12 choose highest (I can't give you an actual number because anydice takes too long)

[meschlum]

As an approximation that grows slightly less accurate with the number of rerolls, the expected value for a N sided die rolled X times and taking the highest value gives you N * X / (X+1) + 1/2

No rerolls (so 1 roll): N * 1 / 2 + 1/2 (6.5 for a d12) - exact value
One reroll (so 2 rolls): N * 2/3 + 1/2 (8.5 for a d12) - actual value is 8.48611..
...

So with a d12, one reroll is worth a bit less than +2 on average (8.5- vs. 6.5), two rerolls are almost worth +3 (9.5- vs 6.5), and you need four rerolls to get +4 (10.5- vs 6.5), etc.

And a +6 puts you off the chart on average (with d12), of course.

[deaddmwalking]

Just going to point out that a reroll versus roll x dice, take the best result has some funkiness... Sometimes rolling again when you have a 10 makes sense because you might as well try to get an 11 or 12. I assume this is all about rolling x dice (which is virtually always better, anyway).

[OgreBattle]

We often bring up Stealth Rules Are Hard To Write... usually in a 'surprise' situation.

Interestingly this WW1 manual says a surprise attack is really difficult to pull off and entirely depends on the defenders goofing up... BUT the usual method isn't total surprise, it's grinding their nerves down:
https://archive.org/details/instruction ... 2/mode/2up

Constant harassment, keeping them up at night, getting the keen eyed spotters to keep on spotting things over and over and over, until they're fatigued enough for an actual attack to close in.

[shlominus]

i'm not sure if a ww1-manual is the best way of examining surprise combat situations. i assume trench-warfare featured few ambush-situations.

this one might be better suited to the task:
https://books.google.at/books?id=_-sIAQ ... &q&f=false

it might also provide plenty of good advice for adventuring parties, i'm sure.

[deaddmwalking]

Agree that trench warfare isn't the best. Sneak attacks work when an enemy couldn't possibly be in a position to attack, but somehow they are. In ancient times, when an army had the ability to move faster than expected (like the Mongols) or came from a completely unexpected direction that seemed so much more difficult that nobody would ever attempt it (Hannibal crossing the Alps).

Trying to convince your enemy that the attack MUST come from a certain direction or COULDN'T happen at all allows the attack you do launch the element of surprise.

[Stahlseele]

See D-Day.
Germany did not expect you lot to land there, they thought you would cross over much further north where the distance between blightly and mainland europe was much smaller.
Thus most defensive preparation was focused on that part of the shore and not further south.

[Ice9]

I'm weighing options between playing in two different Pathfinder 1e games, for which the goals are in pleasant opposition ...

For the first one, is it Gestalt? It really should be to maximize the complexity.

For both of those, here's some Spheres of Power stuff, since I've been looking at that recently.

Complex:
The Ascendant Aegis lets you combine SoP, SoM, Psionics, PoW, and Akashic stuff all in one class.
Conjuration sphere companions are each an entire separate character to build. To be OP, have a bunch out at once. To not be OP, but still have a ton of them, make them Puppet companions (costs your actions to have act, but no cost to summon them, so it's basically alternate sets of abilities to use).

Simple:
I made a TK-focused Incanter for dungeon-testing that mostly just uses air bullets for massive damage, plus passive buffs. You can throw a lot of feats/talents into just "better tk" if you want to, it's a very talent-hungry sphere.

Incanter 10
Feats: Extra Talent x5, (Improved) Force Shield, Mind Against Body, Touchsense
Telekinesis (take Easy Focus as part of your tradition):
acceleration, affix, dampening field, dancing weapon, deflect,
disperse force, effortless tk, flight, focused might, forceful tk,
gravity ward, greater speed, idle concentration, increased range,
kinetic sense, linear acceleration, quick catch, powerful tk, tk maneuver,
weaponize
Time: -accelerator, -personal time
augment healing, after image, improved after image, retry
Gear: belt dexterity +2, cloak resist +2, mithral shirt +1, gloves telekinesis +4, headband [stat] +4

For like 90% of combat you can just shoot people with 12d6+8 air bullets and use an immediate to negate damage when necessary. This also gives some other capabilities (Linear Accelerator for long range and AoE, TK combat maneuver, affix someone/something in place forever, self-regen w/ concentration, etc)

Edit: Looking at it now, this is pre-USoP, so some adjustments may be needed.

Non-SoP:
Summoner + all the expanded summoning feats + Evolved Summon Monster multiple times. You have a huge list to summon from, and each creature on it can be customized with different evolutions.
This one I actually played, and got pretty fed up with the paperwork, so it might be good for the intentionally complex game.[/spoiler]

[OgreBattle]

Been reading about Roll & Keep and Legend of the 5 Rings (5th edition?). It has a Strife/Unmasking mechanic that looks neat:

When you do that roll and keep thing, certain hits also build up Strife. Once Strife surpasses your Composure, you can no long keep those dice with strife markers, so as long as your strife is full you have a worse success rate per die.

There's a combat stance to remove stress and one to count strife as more success. Strife also goes down per scene, but the main reason it's there is the 'Unmasking' mechanic. You do something un-samurai like such as yelling at a superior, hurts some game mechanic measures of status (glory, honor), but strife goes back to zero.

Most of this is a role play prompt though, so could be anything... which isn't necessarily a terrible thing but having a GM and players that don't see eye to eye can sour it.

But... it seems this kind of things is easier to handle if you just detach strifes from the dice roll and make it an extra slow-charging resource to access yeah? Say you have X amount of bonus dice, using it builds up strife that only slowly goes down, or suddenly bursts with an Unmasking. The 90's RPG Tenra Bansho Zero basically does that. So am I basically correct on this or am I missing some other aspect of strife in L5R 5e?

Now... is there any way to do Roll & Keep that really does something fun that simpler systems don't handle?

[SlyJohnny]

But... it seems this kind of things is easier to handle if you just detach strifes from the dice roll and make it an extra slow-charging resource to access yeah? Say you have X amount of bonus dice, using it builds up strife that only slowly goes down, or suddenly bursts with an Unmasking. The 90's RPG Tenra Bansho Zero basically does that. So am I basically correct on this or am I missing some other aspect of strife in L5R 5e?

You'd lose some fun mechanical peculiarities if you disconnected it from the dice rolls.

You roll 'ring' dice and 'skill' dice on skill checks and attacks and stuff. Your number of ring dice determines the number of dice from the roll that you are allowed to keep, so investing in high ring values is generally more important than having lots and lots of skill dice, even though skill dice are better.

But you can't keep dice with strife symbols on them when you're Compromised, and ring dice only have one side with a success symbol that doesn't also have a strife. The odds of actually being able to accomplish things while Compromised are better when you have lots of skill dice in something.

Also, you can only Unmask and empty once a scene, so it's not always best to do it immediately. A couple of the schools use accumulated strife to fuel their school abilities

[OgreBattle]

But... it seems this kind of things is easier to handle if you just detach strifes from the dice roll and make it an extra slow-charging resource to access yeah? Say you have X amount of bonus dice, using it builds up strife that only slowly goes down, or suddenly bursts with an Unmasking. The 90's RPG Tenra Bansho Zero basically does that. So am I basically correct on this or am I missing some other aspect of strife in L5R 5e?

You'd lose some fun mechanical peculiarities if you disconnected it from the dice rolls.

You roll 'ring' dice and 'skill' dice on skill checks and attacks and stuff. Your number of ring dice determines the number of dice from the roll that you are allowed to keep, so investing in high ring values is generally more important than having lots and lots of skill dice, even though skill dice are better.

But you can't keep dice with strife symbols on them when you're Compromised, and ring dice only have one side with a success symbol that doesn't also have a strife. The odds of actually being able to accomplish things while Compromised are better when you have lots of skill dice in something.

Also, you can only Unmask and empty once a scene, so it's not always best to do it immediately. A couple of the schools use accumulated strife to fuel their school abilities

How's the melee combat and stances in L5R 5e?

[SlyJohnny]

Water lets you perform a second action during a turn, as long as it doesn't share tags (Scheme, Attack, Support, etc) with the first action, and doesn't require a dice roll. Can spend a * to heal 2 strife.

Earth makes it so enemies can't spend * to inflict status effects on you, or to autocrit you. Can spend * to ignore terrain penalties.

Fire lets you count strife symbols as bonus successes, as long as you got enough real successes to succeed at the roll. Can spend a * to inflict 2 strife on someone present.

Air increases the TN of attacks targeting you.

Void lets you ignore strife symbols on dice (though you still can't choose to keep them if you're already Compromised), and can't be selected as a choice on an enemies Predict action, where they guess what stance you're next going to be in, and if they guess right, you take 4 strife and get kicked into another stance (if you have some way of Immobilising an enemy and thus preventing them from changing stance, you can use Water stance to combo that with a Predict action, and stress them out really quickly).

Fire is important for getting high initiative, especially as the Quick Reflexes advantage is Fire ring, and for giving your enemy strife. Earth is also important to block crits. The default assumption for duels seems to lean towards first strike/first blood iajitsu duels, so going first and not getting instracritted are important.

Duelling is important, but starting characters typically only have one or two points in Martial Arts (Melee). A maximum of 3 is possible for starting characters, but you either have to roll a random background element that gives you more, or make a choice to get +1 to a skill at the expense of not getting a second advantage; and there's no way to get new advantages in play, outside of paying 3xp for a new passion "if your GM agrees".

You also get an option where you get +1 to any skill you don't already have points in, so even courtiers can start with +1 to swordery if they want. Only a handful of the bushi characters actually start with techniques or school abilities that are relevant duels, and anyway, the easiest way to win a duel is to make it so your enemy becomes Compromised before you do, giving you a free attack roll to try and land a 2x crit; you can avoid this by going into the fight Compromised, and therefore never BECOMING compromised, but that's not a plan that works well at low levels.

All this to say that there isn't some huge power disparity between bushi and everyone else initially, having 3 in a ring is half the battle, and duels are very swingy and unpredictable even if one person would seem to be the clear favourite. Everyone can have a go. It's a surprisingly robust system, and it's a lot of fun.

Regular fighting can be a bit padded sumo. You don't start taking crits until your endurance is depleted, and it's very hard for heavily armoured combatants/monsters with high soak to inflict high damage on each other. You're more likely to accumulate strife and get compromised. You can spend two ** to inflict a crit before their endurance is gone, but tough opponents will resist the consequences down some, and it takes a while for Lightly Wounded to become Severely Wounded to become Dead, especially if your enemy is switching stances a lot (being wounded is tracked per ring). Everyone takes Heartpiercing Strike at Rank 3.

Apparently the game gets janky at high levels, and the core book doesn't really have opposition that can challenge rank 4 or 5 characters. But we've been having a lot of fun. I am the Topaz Champion, and I am more proud of this than I am of anything I've accomplished in real life.

[Prak]

On Pathfinder- remember that there are multiple traits that just give you extra gold, like Chosen Child or Rich Parents, which each increase your starting gold by 900gp.

[OgreBattle]

For all of D&D, is there an average hit % and damage dealt vs enemy HP that's an ideal for all levels, or an ideal for 'gritty' vs 'heroic'?

In D&D3/PF it's around level 4-5 with 40ish hp that you move out of "greataxe crit one shot by an orc" range yeah

[Foxwarrior]

I think in Early Tome, TWF flask rogue was regarded as a reasonable party member.

[Prak]

For all of D&D, is there an average hit % and damage dealt vs enemy HP that's an ideal for all levels, or an ideal for 'gritty' vs 'heroic'?

In D&D3/PF it's around level 4-5 with 40ish hp that you move out of "greataxe crit one shot by an orc" range yeah

I don't know if there's a numeric ideal for grittiness. I'm reminded of Brilliant Gameologists' episode about Grit, where it's about loss, and constant grinding down at the heroes. It's a theme, not a number. If the heroes get a new magic sword, it should come at a cost, and one they care about. So, they get it because they failed to save the barmaid they were getting on with, and are able to wrest the +5 Flaming Burst Greatsword from the demon that was summoned by the ritual sacrifice. If they get 5000gp from the chest at the end of the dungeon, they don't get to think about the sweet wand they can buy, at least not without thinking about the fact that their sister is being held by kidnappers who are extorting money from them.

If Grit influences hp and damage at all, it should be that healing is never available enough to offset damage. And it's easier to do that after the fact, so something like in your dungeon notes, instead of specifying the kind of healing item they find in a chest, they get something that specifically won't quite fully heal them from the battle before it. Or if it's enough to fully heal one PC, there isn't enough to heal anyone else. You want the PCs to feel the constant wear, and never have an opportunity to feel on top of things. They are never without an enemy they know they will have to face, they are never at full hp, they never get a new toy without sacrifice.

I suppose this could be a place for classic bad GM tricks, like dickish genies and arbitrary DCs, but the difference would be making the players aware that those things are in play explicitly because you're trying to run a gritty game. Maybe it's a good place for "success at a cost" rules.

[Foxwarrior]

And it's easier to do that after the fact, so something like in your dungeon notes, instead of specifying the kind of healing item they find in a chest, they get something that specifically won't quite fully heal them from the battle before it.

If the players ever see a hint of this, they'll know that their actual max health is just a value lower than the number on their sheet, and the jig is up.

While Prak's suggestions are painfully arbitrary, the idea that you should have more regress and less progress to add grit to a game does match up with my experience.

[Dean]

What do you guys think the life expectancy would be like for the people of a generic D&D world? I imagine their incredible access to healing would mean infant mortality and death to disease would be massively lower than in our world, but the D&D world also seems to have a truly extravagant number of deaths by violence.

Basically what percentage of the population is it feasible to imagine get eaten by owlbears? If we assume historically unusual access to healing and only an average of like 4 kids per family (after which point I think it seems "weird" to people in the modern day). I bet it's quite a lot.

[deaddmwalking]

What do you guys think the life expectancy would be like for the people of a generic D&D world? I imagine their incredible access to healing would mean infant mortality and death to disease would be massively lower than in our world, but the D&D world also seems to have a truly extravagant number of deaths by violence.

I don't think that infant death would be expected to be lower. Any injury can reduce a character from fine to 'dying' pretty easily, and you usually only have one minute to resuscitate them. Only in cases where the character would be expected to recover easily on their own would they be less likely to die.

Access to healing also seems to be questionable. We know that PCs are expected to pay for healing; the costs associated with it are out of the reach of most families based on their Profession or Craft checks.

Historically, it appears that 20-30% of children under the age of 7 died (quick search of medieval demographic data). Assuming that the average family had 5 children, they'd have four that survive through childhood. Half of those could die after having some number of children to feed your various monsters and you'd be able to maintain a stable or slightly positive.

It appears that the risk of death during childbirth was approximately 1% (per child). Those types of expected traumatic situations would be significantly reduced by access to magical curatives (assuming they were available).

My supposition is that if you presume that all the deaths that normally are attributed to plague/post-injury disease are cured by magic, you could still have a lot of people killed by violence (including monster predation) and keep similar demographics. Within that, you'd presume that the amount of death the PCs directly witness is highly unusual - villages don't usually get wiped off the map.

[K]

If the default levels of characters in 3.X DnD is to be believed, healing magic is not very common. Most small communities have access to maybe one person who can heal minor wounds, so there would be fewer deaths by infection, but only major cities would have access to anyone who can cast Cure Disease or perform other useful magic (healing or otherwise). Those people probably only work for the nobility or themselves.

Monsters would need to be rare near settlements to keep societies from collapsing. Basically, the death rate is probably at replacement rate because of monster attacks, not growing like any per-modern society. This is why societies are stuck in a medieval era for thousands of years.

[Grek]

What do you guys think the life expectancy would be like for the people of a generic D&D world? I imagine their incredible access to healing would mean infant mortality and death to disease would be massively lower than in our world, but the D&D world also seems to have a truly extravagant number of deaths by violence.

What edition are we assuming? Pathfinder and 5e both have cantrips at-will, which has a big impact on how many people can be serviced by a single low level spellcaster. Having the local cleric cast Purify Food/Drink on the town well twice a day and on the water used by healers would be a pretty big help all by itself, to say nothing of having someone who can cast stabilize/cure minor wounds/spare the dying working as a midwife. But if they're only getting like 5 cantrips and maybe 4 real spells a day total, their impact is going to be a lot less.

[OgreBattle]

Monsters as environmental disaster, storms of the century and so on is a way to have a sudden burst of death without having an owlbear eat one child a day.

FFXIV and Phantasy Star has great magical dooms befall humanity every few millennia, with the current story set upon the coming doom or some generations after great civilization was wiped out.