The Gaming Den

Iduno wrote:

The Adventurer's Almanac wrote: What an interesting Mind Blast table. At animal intelligence, failing the save just fucking kills you, and being slightly clever stuns you for a few minutes... and being a genius makes you go fucking insane forever. Alright, then.

Yeah, but it's only a 4/20 chance. 20% is almost 0%, so I'm sure it's fine.

Seriously though, jenkem-huffing dipshit designs a table that spits out 2 variables as results? Either simplify to make it give one set of results, or base the effect of MoS.

Isn't it the point of tables to make the stuff complicated?
If it isn't complicated, an sentence would be enough.

Yeah, but this is complicated in a stupid way. I'm guessing the intent is some kind of CoC-style shit where the smarter you are, the more susceptible you are to mind-shattering shit that's impossible to understand. That's just dumb in D&D. Did this ever make it outside of that particular magazine?

It's D&D, so the only reason to have high INT is 'cause you're a Wizard yeah? So wizards being more vulnerable to mind horror attacks seems fine 'cause they're already wizards and can probably counter it with preparation

That's dumb enough for me to believe.

The Adventurer's Almanac wrote:Yeah, but this is complicated in a stupid way. I'm guessing the intent is some kind of CoC-style shit where the smarter you are, the more susceptible you are to mind-shattering shit that's impossible to understand. That's just dumb in D&D. Did this ever make it outside of that particular magazine?

But also the saving throw is lower (easier) if you're more intelligent. I'm sure that table is an amalgamation of 3 different ideas, put together in the worst way possible.

Tome question: the Demon Armour allows the wearer to "see souls." Can living or undead creatures still make a Hide check to avoid the wearer's notice? Can invisible creatures be located with this soul vision? Can nondetection or the like block it?

Can someone tell me where it says in SR4e that you can use active skills for knowledge skills?
Because I was sure it was in the CRB, but can't find it and am not sure if it's even in it or if I just copied it from 5e

rampaging-poet wrote:Tome question: the Demon Armour allows the wearer to "see souls." Can living or undead creatures still make a Hide check to avoid the wearer's notice? Can invisible creatures be located with this soul vision? Can nondetection or the like block it?

I think this is more related to the flavor for the effect. The mechanics of the effect are that you see all creatures within 120' feet.

My understanding of this, and what happened when I used it was to handwave away that flavor and just use it as normal sight that happens to ignore illumination and intervening objects specifically. So hiding and invis work like normal, and nondetection would not apply because the sight is not the result of a divination effect.

Now that gives a giant middle finger to flavor, but I'm not all about flavor and most of my players aren't either.

Trill wrote:Can someone tell me where it says in SR4e that you can use active skills for knowledge skills?
Because I was sure it was in the CRB, but can't find it and am not sure if it's even in it or if I just copied it from 5e

As far as I know, it's just a common house rule.

It makes sense for a lot of mechanical things: it's unlikely that you have zero knowledge about car parts when you're also the greatest living car mechanic. You may not be able to identify which corporation owns which car manufacturer, but can probably tell which manufacturer made any given vehicle. Also, mechanical skills rely on the same stats as knowledge skills, so being good at one also means you're decent at the other.

I've got an idea and I'd like to spitball it here:

What do people think about a class system that relies on multiclassing? The idea is that across 25 levels or so, you'd pick up 3-4 classes that each have 6 or 8 class features in them, but each class has a linear progression reliant upon your skills? I think you would need to have a bunch of classes in different categories, particularly combat and noncombat classes, and limit the amount of either you can choose so everyone can contribute in and outside of a fight. The problems would probably be setting up the structure so that you aren't fucking yourself by picking up things that aren't level appropriate, among some other stuff I'm missing out on.

I've really only seen something like this done in one game, and I think it could be done better. I'm curious as to what you guys think.

The Adventurer's Almanac wrote:I've got an idea and I'd like to spitball it here:

What do people think about a class system that relies on multiclassing? The idea is that across 25 levels or so, you'd pick up 3-4 classes that each have 6 or 8 class features in them, but each class has a linear progression reliant upon your skills? I think you would need to have a bunch of classes in different categories, particularly combat and noncombat classes, and limit the amount of either you can choose so everyone can contribute in and outside of a fight. The problems would probably be setting up the structure so that you aren't fucking yourself by picking up things that aren't level appropriate, among some other stuff I'm missing out on.

I've really only seen something like this done in one game, and I think it could be done better. I'm curious as to what you guys think.

Here's some old threads that discuss multiclassing and power systems:
http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=53893
http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=52860

It sounds like you are NOT doing D&D3e PF open multiclassing yeah?
So you pick one class for 1-5, instead of being a Fighter 3/Mage2/Thief1

Things you have to decide on...
-When you reach Hero tier at lvl 6-10, do your Rat Catcher tier lvl 1-5 abilities still matter?
-When you reach the new tier are you restricted based on the class you were or can a mage and warrior both become Demon Knights at lvl 11?

I actually brought that question up because of similar threads, but I've only made it back to 2013 so far, so I haven't gotten to those two yet.

I think the structure I have in mind works like this: You have 4 class slots and each class is split into 4 tiers of power. Within those classes, you have to fill out the lowest tier before you can access the higher ones. I think the best option would be to have powers from lower tiers get stronger when your whole character goes up a tier, but that can be difficult for more exception-based features. It's easy to pick up Ember at tier 1 and have it turn into Flamethrower at tier 3, but how can you do that with item creation or seeing ghosts? I fear that writing out scaling powers could eat up page count like a motherfucker, and I'm already working with 750 fucking pages of moves and abilities.

I also think you could hypothetically get away with having 3 open class slots and "unlocking" the final one once you hit tier 3 or whatever - that way each character has a sort of prestige class, but has enough backup shit going on so they aren't pigeonholed into doing the same crap they were 20 levels ago.

You're using the slots to guarantee things like having combat and non-combat utility, right? Like you can be a Fighter/Courtesan or a Fire Mage/Fop but not a Fighter/Fire Mage? If so, I think you need some provision for a class to take up multiple slots. Some concepts (shapeshifter, illusionist) naturally cut across different situations in a way that's really awkward to tease apart. But once you accept that bit of weirdness, I think that works pretty well.

You might also want to remove some slots from any sort of tiered progression. If you have a tier/slot thing for domain play, there's no natural place for that to start relative to fighting ability. Someone can start a kingdom after killing the dread necromancer, after ending an invasion from the hells, or inherit one as a teenager before they have any appreciable skills. You can force the domain stuff to happen at a specific level, but you can also just make it a separate progression. You might find that this isn't the only thing that wants a separate progression.

edit: The opening post of this thread was talking about similar stuff, but the discussion mostly went into whether pillars and balance exist instead.

Hey man, this is a Pokemon game. While I absolutely would love to institute the Domain of the Aggron Knights, I think I'm in the minority for actually wanting rules for that sort of thing. Uh, actually... did you think this was the domain thread?

No? It's a fairly common thing to want to split off that way, and you didn't mention making a Pokemon game.

Anyone seen this skirmish game before? "Open Combat"
http://www.secondthunder.com/store/inde ... ducts_id=4

For miniatures skirmish, they have a supplement called Sword Masters, they say it aims for realistic to cinematic like Princess Bride movement oriented combat

Totally different question I'm hoping for an answer to...

People like 'pets' in D&D, and it totally makes sense to have something like a 'normal horse' that you paid money for at low levels. Some people are happy to 'trade up' when a better mount or pet becomes available, but some people get attached to their original imaginary friend.

What's a good way to offer a way to upgrade a horse to a unicorn/pegasus/alicorn while allowing the original horse to have been actually mundane... Bonus points if that works to turn a guard dog into some type of more powerful companion without having to turn your original 'man's best friend' out of your castle....

deaddmwalking wrote:What's a good way to offer a way to upgrade a horse to a unicorn/pegasus/alicorn while allowing the original horse to have been actually mundane... Bonus points if that works to turn a guard dog into some type of more powerful companion without having to turn your original 'man's best friend' out of your castle....

Magic armour or something which is incompatible with whatever form of magic the magic animal has?

Feed your horse a dragon's heart so it grows scales and wings?

She-Ra's horse gets part of her transformation sequence and becomes a flying unicorn.

Thaluikhain wrote:She-Ra's horse gets part of her transformation sequence and becomes a flying unicorn.

Plus:



-Username17

So I've been following the Domain rules thread, which in turn brought me to the old Converting ACKS Domains to 3E thread from 2015, which even though it was never finished as a domain game has still been a useful demographic resource for me, because I'm the kind of GM who gets a bit obsessive about things like that.

And so I had a question - there are table entries there for extracting extra resources for your domain from the Underdark, but what would be a reasonable set of assumptions for a domain that's entirely in the Underdark, like the Drow or Deep Gnomes or something?

This would be a version that's fantastical enough that you can sustain towns and farms and stuff down there at all, but not one that's all mushroom forests and glowing crystals - things are pretty bleak.

So to a first approximation, the Underdark is basically barren desert, and the only places that can be farmed are hexes that have food caverns and similar resources. Plus a lot of your hex is taken up by solid rock.

On the other hand, your hexes are three-dimensional, giving you potentially a lot more space to exploit. (Two-dimensional hex mapping in the underdark doesn't really make a lot of sense to begin with, but it's useful enough for hexcrawling and domain management that I submit you just think of the map as an abstraction of routes through a three-dimensional complex.)

So my initial thought is that this all shakes out to most Underdark hexes having an arable land value of 10%, and a Fertility of 10 (or rather 12,5 when you're working on the metric system and counting from 25 rather than 20 koku per farm. Either way, it's a 50% yield).

Now this allows a tiny amount of surplus, but not a whole lot. Farmers in the Underdark are basically Oppressed Serfs just by virtue of where they live, and the landholders aren't much better off:

8000 hectares per hex times 10% arable land makes 80 farms per hex.
25 Koku per farm times 50% yield times those 80 farms makes 1000 koku per hex.

Farmers needing to eat means a surplus of 600 koku per hex.

So there flat out isn't enough surplus for farmers to be better off than Oppressed Serfs on the surface, and even that yields the landlord only 300 koku per hex of farmland.

Is that right?

Granted most of the Underdark dwellers are more awesome than your average humans, so they'll have things like Clerics casting Create Food to supplement food production, but that's on the level of adding a handful of farms per Cleric. (I suppose they might have Druids for Plant Growth, which scales much better, but a lot of the civilizations down there don't have much nice to say about Druids.) Disregarding such ways to bring more food to the cities for now, are there any other factors (or system elements) I've overlooked for better or worse or is the Underdark really as barren as my calculations suggest?

It doesn't seem unreasonable by any means but I was hoping there might be some factor that would allow a greater surplus - Underdark towns are probably small but they should be highly developed with enchanted castles and spider cavalry and shit.

Schleiermacher wrote:And so I had a question - there are table entries there for extracting extra resources for your domain from the Underdark, but what would be a reasonable set of assumptions for a domain that's entirely in the Underdark, like the Drow or Deep Gnomes or something?

The Underdark doesn't conform to "hexes" particularly well, because much of any 32 square mile area is solid rock but also too there are chambers that are literally right on top of each other. But for purposes of control ranges and travel times and such, hexes are still broadly speaking a good idea. It's just that in the Underdark a hex might be a six mile tunnel that has an effective population capacity of zero, and might also be an abyss with dozens of shelves on which to grow arbitrarily large amounts of fungus.

The next thing is that some caverns do agriculture and some just have things to hunt. That is to say that some areas can support hunter gatherers but can't support farms. And other areas are the opposite.

The core revelation then is that in the Underdark the farming and hunting limits on each hex are completely arbitrary and also independent. And the next revelation is that some of the nations down there only farm or only hunt and some do both. Like, Quaggoths don't give two shits about hexes that you can make a lot of Koku by mushroom farming because they aren't going to farm mushrooms no matter what. But the Quaggoths do care about places you can make a lot of Koku by hunting giant rats - because they are totally going to do that.

So your hex has a fertility that represents how much Koku a family generates, and it also has two different capacity numbers - one for farming and one for hunting. And all of those numbers are pretty much arbitrary.

But a city like Menzoberranzan has like 60,000 people in it. And that would take only 3 or four hexes of dense farming at normal fertility levels. Most of the hexes around therefore don't need to produce much (or any food. They might be valuable due to gold or adamantium mines, or they might be worthless - things you hold onto just because you don't want to be attacked from that direction.

The bottom line is that the Underdark is like fighting in the desert, where individual oases of decent food output are a really big deal that people are willing to do big military campaigns to acquire.

-Username17

Frank Trollman wrote:(...) The bottom line is that the Underdark is like fighting in the desert, where individual oases of decent food output are a really big deal that people are willing to do big military campaigns to acquire.

This all makes sense, thank you! But it's not great for me because "pretty much arbitrary" is my Kryptonite, and if the total population of the region and their food supply are both arbitrary, then I don't have any starting point.

Is there some heuristic I could use to come at it from a different angle, if I really want to know how many people to put in the Underdark equivalent of a County so I can start assigning them arbitrarily to towns, villages and points of interest?

The answer to that question really depends on how your unspecified fantastical food source works.

For example, suppose you have an underground river full of shrimp and blind cave fish. This isn't really a place you farm (no soil), but is a place you can fish. So the territory boils down to one big town at the source cavern, one big town at the exit cavern and then little caverns with docks and single family olm ranches scattered along the length of the river. Modern fish farming can manage something like 25000 koku per full hex (before factoring in feed costs, but let's ignore those for now), but is obviously going to be much smaller for a single river going through a hex without modern practices. So more like 5000 koku per hex tops.

But if your agriculture is instead based on domesticated monstrous leaf-cutter ants who raid the jungles above your caverns, or the harvest of brown mold cultivars around a local magma chamber, or the annual purple worm hunt (one worm per 60 people!)... your numbers will be very different.