Lurker > Lightning Bolt

Are those games good? I got a few from humble bundles way back and they're just in my steam list.
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One day dude, I'm just gonna get off the bus, and I'm gonna run in the woods and never come back, and when I come back I'm gonna be the knife master!
-The Rev

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Materials are a separate system which, as-written, can be replaced by a focus which is analogous to a holy symbol.

I'm aware. I don't feel much need to keep track of the details. Inventory management is an unfun thing so I just use the bag as a holy symbol mechanically.
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One day dude, I'm just gonna get off the bus, and I'm gonna run in the woods and never come back, and when I come back I'm gonna be the knife master!
-The Rev

Materials are basically the "Arcane Focus". Instead of a symbol of god, it's a bag. So nah, I don't feel much need to keep track of the details. Adds very little fun gameplay, and inventory management in general is very "solo play" which I don't like to encourage.
Reflavoring the bag to an orb is fine, whatever their cute little hearts desire.

I wouldn't remove them, since players won't use them unless there's a reason to, and they feel neat so I want to encourage them. Though making them optional and giving them bonus stats could work. It's so harmless to require it that I usually just do so in case I want to play with the mechanic at some point. Rare materials, getting captured and losing materials, expensive materials, and such work. Not a fan of inventory management and travel preparation usually.

Inventory management being the micromanaging of amounts of supplies and consumables you'll need. Magical item upgrades, allocating your money as a power budget, is fine, though a little stale in execution in some games.
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One day dude, I'm just gonna get off the bus, and I'm gonna run in the woods and never come back, and when I come back I'm gonna be the knife master!
-The Rev

Yeah when is @DeItaBladeX gonna make his announcement?
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One day dude, I'm just gonna get off the bus, and I'm gonna run in the woods and never come back, and when I come back I'm gonna be the knife master!
-The Rev

ParanoidObsessive posted...

I'm not really looking for a name for it, per se. I'm just trying to think of any real-world examples of something similar.

Ohhh gotcha. Okay, if it's not mushin then I give up on everything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushin_(mental_state)#
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One day dude, I'm just gonna get off the bus, and I'm gonna run in the woods and never come back, and when I come back I'm gonna be the knife master!
-The Rev

Yellow posted...

I don't have any nerd friends to play DnD with and I've always wanted to play. Does anyone want to play PotD DnD?

Having never played I can't be the master

I tried to make shadow run a PotD game last Christmas and no one signed up. It does not work.
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One day dude, I'm just gonna get off the bus, and I'm gonna run in the woods and never come back, and when I come back I'm gonna be the knife master!
-The Rev

"Nirvanic Battle Trance"
That's definitely nirvana.

Or nibbana in another translation if you don't wanna sound like the band. But at that point you can pretty much go with anything "Asian sounding" and people will get it.
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One day dude, I'm just gonna get off the bus, and I'm gonna run in the woods and never come back, and when I come back I'm gonna be the knife master!
-The Rev

"Phalanx" sounds pretty nifty, and has a sense of settling into a focused battle form. Historically it's been an extremely cooperative thing, though, so hard to pull off alone.
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One day dude, I'm just gonna get off the bus, and I'm gonna run in the woods and never come back, and when I come back I'm gonna be the knife master!
-The Rev

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Basically, the universe is balanced between Dynamism and Stasis - change versus status quo.

Hmm. I think I'm gonna veer away from that actually. (Also thanks, because even if I don't say "ooh yes I'll use that thing" this is still helping me figure out what I want!)

Because my theme isn't about that... I think. It's less about change and more about being a decisionmaker. For instance, one of the main Actors is God-Emperor Hannah. She has taken control of the world, reshaped it to her will, and rules it. She no longer makes significant changes to the world because it already satisfies her vision, but she does exert her will and enforce the current state of things.

Meanwhile, the Anti-Theists consider the current world to be a travesty. They see the people who have given up, the towns that are abandoned, the way God is the source of food, water, and everything, and they fight to change it. And while they're on the verge of discovering something that could swing the whole fight, they're more of a "boogieman" to the people than a savior because, again, you can't rely on other people to exert your will onto the world.

Change wasn't the problem before, lack of change isn't the problem now, and change isn't the problem of the future. The problem has always been that only one person is making the decisions, and that a single person's solution for any problem will only reliably satisfy themselves. "Be the change you want to see in the world." more than "Change is good."

That's what I want the story to be about, making things better with your own two hands. I think.
The name of the campaign/story is "A Better Place", and I even might do this 3-sentence thing whenever they full rest, lightly chastising them. "Sleep does not fix the things that cause you stress. Sleep does not make the world a better place. But while you sleep, you may dream that everything is alright... and wake refreshed." Maybe.
(I always really liked those Sleeping-At-The-Inn themes in video games. A soothing, reliable little jingle that indicates you're safe and asleep, and that whatever is wrong in the world it doesn't need to be worried about for at least 3 seconds. Just the time for a sigh of relief. Gonna try it at least!)



Now that I phrase it like that, I probably don't need a word for Inactivity. It's sort of just the obvious counterpoint, but doesn't really crop up much except to highlight the Activity.
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One day dude, I'm just gonna get off the bus, and I'm gonna run in the woods and never come back, and when I come back I'm gonna be the knife master!
-The Rev

Definitely using Dynamicism for one character. It sounds exactly like what the "chessmaster" character would call it. Thanks!

But it feels a little formal to use generally. Something more evocative like "Force" maybe... I think the Force is taken though, especially in nerd culture.
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One day dude, I'm just gonna get off the bus, and I'm gonna run in the woods and never come back, and when I come back I'm gonna be the knife master!
-The Rev

I want cool names for the concepts themselves, not for the groups. Like what philosophy do people who are inactive represent?

Basically a new axis, similar to Law-Chaos, and these people are just the extremes on that axis.
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One day dude, I'm just gonna get off the bus, and I'm gonna run in the woods and never come back, and when I come back I'm gonna be the knife master!
-The Rev

Since we're doing names, help me with a pair of names too please!

I basically need a good way to phrase a central theme that is Inaction vs Action. Or Peace vs Conflict. Submission vs Assertion. But a really flowery and loaded term for each, on par with crap like "Hope". Hmm...

The basic gist of the theme is that the world is made of two kinds of people: those who act and those who don't. Or those who... fight and those who don't?

The actors tend to use any means necessary to do what they think is best. "Let us fix this world, or break it trying," is a good summary of the mindset these people tend to have.
But most people do virtually nothing all day long, not needing to provide for themselves and not having any drive. They've been socially suppressed, see no future, and indeed just exist. The worst cases have completely given up trying to sustain themselves, and they tend to starve to death every few weeks (since in this world you're automatically resurrected when you die).

So fun times all around. Got any good terms for this theme?
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One day dude, I'm just gonna get off the bus, and I'm gonna run in the woods and never come back, and when I come back I'm gonna be the knife master!
-The Rev

Well, if a lot of your "awakening" revolves around slavery and making better slaves from inferior species, then the terminology is probably going to be pretty condescending. "Groomed" feels appropriate in that regard, though less fantastic. "Purified", "Refined", "Tamed" and such follow a similar way.

If the term has been written by the former slaves races now freed, they probably want a different picture of it. In that case, something inspired and obnoxiously independent (they're gonna wanna downplay their reliance on the Githyanki) like "Enlightened" or "Successors". "Inheritors" if they still want to respect their pre-awakened history. Moving away from

It's really gonna depend on your themes though. E.g. if you run with emptiness as a game-wide metaphor, maybe call your mindless ones "Hollow". That's what Dark Souls does (though it uses downfall rather than uplift).
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One day dude, I'm just gonna get off the bus, and I'm gonna run in the woods and never come back, and when I come back I'm gonna be the knife master!
-The Rev

Intelligence is Focus.

Wisdom is Calmness (or like serenity or whatever). Technically, Wisdom is "Grab bag of brain things we couldn't fit elsewhere" but that's none of my business.

Charisma is very happy to be described as "force of will". Based on that, I'd go with Dominance or similar. Keeps it from feeling like a dump stat, eh?

Dex I have no clue.
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One day dude, I'm just gonna get off the bus, and I'm gonna run in the woods and never come back, and when I come back I'm gonna be the knife master!
-The Rev

I prefer the blink cats. Or dweomercats rather.
Any time they're targeted by a magic effect--say you shoot a fireball in their direction--they can teleport right next your face mid-pounce and full attack you.
Just any time you cast, boom! There's a tiger already mauling you!

Take that, casties! Play a real class!
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One day dude, I'm just gonna get off the bus, and I'm gonna run in the woods and never come back, and when I come back I'm gonna be the knife master!
-The Rev

Post apocalyptic shapeshifters should totally be ambush predators! You meet a traveler on the road, and have to decide whether to blow him up before getting in range of his deadly (insert attack here), or if maybe you think it's a real human and you should be nice.
Receptive to cool changes too. They can fake being injured, fake being attacked by another changeling, plead that they're actually good unlike the others, etc etc. Players will never feel secure when they see another human, and post-apocalypse that's appropriate.
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One day dude, I'm just gonna get off the bus, and I'm gonna run in the woods and never come back, and when I come back I'm gonna be the knife master!
-The Rev

I know absolutely nothing about either race except what you just told me, and I also have no clue what your setting looks like so far. >.>
So here's my opinion anyways! Subject more to what's on my mind at the moment than anything else but eh.

A robot society feels most interesting to me when they've freshly gained sentience. Learning to go from calculated efficiency to being able to ask what is valuable is a stark change. I think it'd be interesting to see a few of them stumble with this new "values" thing. In fact, creatures unused to having these values would probably be unused to defending them or distancing from them sensibly. I could imagine factions, but I could also imagine they just have this society thing figured out and run smoothly, but are also extremely aggressive towards change and new ideas.
Robots can also be used to show the perils of excessive logic and how omnipresent observation is bad mhmm. Not as much a fan.


Changelings don't even sound like they would have societies. They sound like pretty blatant ambush predators. Admittedly, "infiltrate a society peacefully and just eat people on the regular" is a pretty weird niche for a species, but there's hardly any other use for such a trait to exist and it's magic so whatever. I guess I could see it developing as a sort of camouflage for a sociable, intelligent creature with poor natural fighting ability. In that sense they're flat out superior to humans, no? Just us but they also transform. That seems like less fun. Neat as their gimmick is, it doesn't really seem very useful for an independent species. Either you're in with society or you're not, why put the effort in and fake it?

I guess from a less logical angle and a more narrative level, they're (again) perfect for infiltrations, but this time intelligent enough to get along with people but malevolent enough to not want to just join the society. Every person you meet has a chance to be one, so you'd better keep on your toes. It plays well into paranoia, and can be used to drive home points of isolation. And just a few pieces of fake information from a "trusted source" can really make players feel like nothing is true when the results of the lies start seeping through.
Complex, successful, hostile infiltrations into intelligent societies suggests a secretive, arrogant (or desperate) culture. They'd take on jobs, trying to make cash to stay afloat because their biology requires literal ground up moon rocks to function I bet. Or they'd just believe in their own superiority, and see their infiltrations as attacks on an enemy they hope to one day conquer when they get their numbers up.

Unless you just copy what Prey did and make them eat human consciousness to breed. That'd give them a reason to infiltrate societies, but I think it might be a little beyond the race's flavor. *sagenod*
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One day dude, I'm just gonna get off the bus, and I'm gonna run in the woods and never come back, and when I come back I'm gonna be the knife master!
-The Rev

Okay, so I (re)played the Majora's Mask water temple yesterday. Very educational.

First thing I notice in the entire dungeon is that, in the first room, there's a water wheel that seems to run something very large, and it's hooked up to yellow and red pipes. The yellow pipe has an on/off switch, but the red is just off with no switch in sight. "That's easy, I'll follow the red pipe to its switch, or whatever it has!" I say.

Next room features a forked path between a door and a huge spinning whirlpool (as well as more clarity on what the water wheel does and how it works). I follow the red pipe into the whirlpool. Etc etc zelda etc, I find the red switch, eagerly use the results of my discovery to alter the whole dungeon back at the beginning machine, and dive back in to explore the bits I just unlocked until I have total control of the dungeon, having noticed an inactive green pipe while I was switching the red one on.

Essentially, I knew why I was exploring the whole time, but I was still exploring. All hail the red pipe!

I think that's a super valuable lesson. Immediately upon entering the first room, I not only saw the machine that's central to how the dungeon works, I also saw what I needed to do next. It gave me a starting point, and something to go by when hit with choice paralysis.



That said, Zelda games are totally made to be accessible to kids. These puzzles have good design principles, but are admittedly quite easy. More red herrings, subtler guides, more complicated environments, and more flexible mechanics (a switch can do two things, on or off, which is very straightforward) would probably be more appropriate for my group.

For instance, I very rarely lost sight of the path of a pipe, like behind or through a wall. I never encountered pipes that were hard to distinguish, since they were super clearly colored. All of the pipes simply needed to be turned "on", and there was no nuance where some should be turned off or potentially reverse direction. While charming from a kid's game, I think my players would feel like I was being condescending if I literally just had them following a glowing red pipe.
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One day dude, I'm just gonna get off the bus, and I'm gonna run in the woods and never come back, and when I come back I'm gonna be the knife master!
-The Rev

I_Abibde posted...

Reading a dungeon analysis makes me stop and ask myself how to use a feature like the parallel dimensions in Strange Journey in a D&D setting (i.e. you use a specific ability to "slide" into another version of the same dungeon that has alterations to its basic layout, allowing you to get to restricted areas of the original dungeon by going through the parallel version).

My first thought is to make the alternate dimension one that already exists in the rules. Like the Ethereal Plane or the Plane of Fire or something. That way you can draw on a whole new set of rules that the players are already familiar with and that they can already interact with a little bit. How smart is the mage gonna feel when he realizes that he can just use Ethereal Jaunt instead of one of the preset portals to solve a puzzle? Or that Force magic hits both planes at once?

Plus, creatures on the ethereal plane can see the material plane, but not vice versa. I bet you could start using the "surprise" aspect of ethereal enemies to make the party feel really uncomfortable whenever they're in the physical plane. I can also imagine the PCs leaving a lookout in the ethereal plane whenever they return to the physical in case of an ethereal attack. If you're careful with portal placement, you can break this briefly and make them run blind for short bits.

If you start relying on surprises, you could also give the PCs a chance to get the drop on an ambush predator! That could feel like some sweet justice if you've been a little aggressive with the Ethereal Spiders lately.

So start with an ethereal wall on the entrance, a portal in the room, and a physical wall on the exit. Stick an ethereal treasure chest in there. Introduce the mechanic. And like... continue or something. I may use this but I'd need to build it in tandem with a layout, the way I'm doing things, and not right now. :p

You could probably do a whole (short-ish) campaign with this idea. The Plane of Water mimics the rising/lowering water levels from OoT pretty well. Plane of Positive Energy has that cool rule where you gain health constantly until you hit double your max health and explode. It could be neat if you want to make forays into the other Plane timed without dropping the party to 2 health every time, and it also opens up some funny "breaking the rules" cheese like beating the shit out of yourself with a hammer to extend your time limit. The big limiter is that these Planes actually are other places, unlike the Ethereal Plane which is sort of just an extra layer on top of the normal world.
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One day dude, I'm just gonna get off the bus, and I'm gonna run in the woods and never come back, and when I come back I'm gonna be the knife master!
-The Rev

shadowsword87 posted...

The problem is that players are trained to go, "I see something, time to go poke it".

I can always retrain them. Set enough fire under a player's ass and they'll do whatever looks wettest. >.>

But yeah, I know that height won't be a gate past level 5 or so. That's about when flight comes online for casters in Pathfinder. And some even weaker PCs could find a way up. So I'll need to design a lot of these dungeons around the player's ever-changing abilities. Shouldn't be too hard, GMs design dungeons based on how strong the party is already. And the overworld is harsh enough in my setting that I should have plenty of warning before they go to a specific dungeon. I think.

Really though, I think I have to accept that sometimes the players will outsmart me and solve something a lot sooner than I guessed they would. That usually feels so good for the players that it's beneficial anyways. At least my players love feeling like they beat the system.
It's a lot less of a problem in DnD than Zelda because humans are so adaptable. Computers can do those complex physics puzzles, but as a GM I can allow for creative solutions to work, expand the play area at will, and adaptively design the game so that a particular sequence break doesn't break anything it shouldn't. I don't need invisible walls to keep PCs out of undeveloped areas, I can just develop what happens on the spot when the PCs go over that fence.
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One day dude, I'm just gonna get off the bus, and I'm gonna run in the woods and never come back, and when I come back I'm gonna be the knife master!
-The Rev

ParanoidObsessive posted...

The more I think about it, the more I think an idea like that would work well if the players were dealing with some sort of previously (mostly) undiscovered magitech sort of culture that was able to build fortresses that were powered by some sort of internal magical power source, which allows certain tools or weapons to function within their bounds but which are effectively rendered inert outside of their range for lack of power. That would allow the DM to introduce almost any functionality or ability in an item that can be extremely useful in its "home" dungeon but more or less useless anywhere else.

I've already got a setting that allows for a bit more contrivance than normal. It's a bit of a "what if". What if a child in our world (2017 real-life Earth, the one with the fidget spinners) gained the powers of a god and used them make the world "perfect" as best as she could?

So, since God Emperor Hannah likes games, she gave everyone DnD-level super powers. Death was an unsatisfying experience and so has been removed. Food, shelter, and indeed all needs are provided, so the only remaining economy is for adventuring loot. Monsters have been spawned the world over to give people something to do (adventure!). And more ostensibly good ideas that really weren't thought out because a child enacted them.

(Full disclosure, I ripped the premise from a webcomic called A Better Place. Here's that world's propagandistic genesis story in one comic-page if you like, though I won't be using the "attach giant thrusters to the earth" plotline https://tapas.io/episode/145338)

So uh yeah, I'm kinda married to that. It's neat!
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One day dude, I'm just gonna get off the bus, and I'm gonna run in the woods and never come back, and when I come back I'm gonna be the knife master!
-The Rev

ParanoidObsessive posted...

First things first - each dungeon needs a special mechanic that mainly helps you get through that dungeon, but is mostly useless outside of it (theoretically, you could just revoke it once the adventurer's leave).

Actually, I think I'll be using monsters and traps for puzzles. Items are the Zelda progression system, so it makes sense to hand out new powers there, but DnD has its own and it'd be weird to layer them. I think.

So instead of the "Magic Lens To Look At Things You Need This Lens To See" and associated invisible things, I can use enemy weaknesses. Like a troll in flammable gas. If you attack its weakness without thinking, you'll blow yourself up, but with good planning you can instead blow the troll up with little effort. That's a weak idea alone, you'd need to introduce the gas elsewhere in simpler conditions and let the PCs learn about it first, and possibly add in another confounder, but you get it.

The way I view it is that I'm shoving Zelda-style puzzles into the DnD progression system. Or really, just modern puzzle design, which is puzzle themes that train the player with increasingly complicated puzzles using the same elements. I think.



BUT! But but but! That isn't the part of Zelda dungeons I meant!
The puzzles are all well and good, but I'm more interested in (or I guess what I need more help with) is the dungeon layout being a challenge on its own. Easy example, seeing a chest on a high ledge and a door next to it. You gotta find where the other side of that door is, don't you? So you keep that in mind as you explore, and it gives direction to your choices. You gotta beat the dungeon not just by beating the individual puzzles, but by understanding the whole dungeon's layout and function.

Or maybe it's less about understanding the dungeon as the challenge, and more about that "directed exploration" thing. After all, once you see a chest on a high ledge to your left, you'll be looking for both stairs and paths on your left. I've never been a fan of navigation being an uninformed choice.
Uhhh... I'm not sure really what the essence of this is. Send help.

But I've seen very few DnD dungeons that weren't just a large plopping down of rooms with hallways connecting them and zero gameplay reason to ever pay attention to where you are within them. And I'm really not sure why.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Also, physical mapping would pretty much be a must.

Hmmm... mapping how?
I play online, so we pretty much always use maps. Everyone pulls up the same, gridded map and moves their tokens along it. Something like this if a picture helps:

(though I as the GM have the ability to hide as much or as little of the map as I like)

But now I'm wondering if I ought to make them draw their own maps, or at least parts of them. After all, if I want the layout of my dungeon to be the challenge, maybe I shouldn't just give them the whole layout as soon as they see it. Zelda dungeons don't give you the full map and compass until you're well into them (except when they do).
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One day dude, I'm just gonna get off the bus, and I'm gonna run in the woods and never come back, and when I come back I'm gonna be the knife master!
-The Rev

How would you make a Zelda style dungeon work in a DnD/Pathfinder game?

Maybe comparing anything to Zelda is unfair, but Zelda dungeons feel like they were designed very differently from DnD ones.

That is, DnD dungeons usually feel like "gauntlets". You get the occasional hidden room or transforming space, but for the most part it's just room after room with self-contained puzzles or fights. "Left or right?" ceases to matter because each room has no apparent external context.

Compare that to OoT's water temple, where you go back and forth through the maze, raising and lowering the water level of the whole place. You would have to remember a room, picture what it'd be like if you pulled the lever in the other room, and maybe even need to find a new way back, encouraging a strong understanding of the dungeon as a whole. Maybe the water temple specifically was a little too hard for the target age, but I like the idea of dungeon connectedness, and of mastering the dungeon as a whole rather than room by room.

Or the earth temple from Majora's Mask! With the huge, layered, stone pillar in the middle room, and you had to approach the pillar at various heights in the correct order to knock out damaged layers. Then you'd walk on top of the pillar when it was the right height. That's cool stuff!

But these example puzzles are obviously best run by computers since they rely on precise calculations and physics simulations. So... what do you think a human-run Zelda-style tabletop dungeon would look like?
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One day dude, I'm just gonna get off the bus, and I'm gonna run in the woods and never come back, and when I come back I'm gonna be the knife master!
-The Rev

Babbit55 posted...

Like I said, not disagreeing, just doesn't need to be a blanket is all

Ohh.
Well that is totally not what I got from "only bad roleplayers need their GM to roll for them".
Mkay!
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One day dude, I'm just gonna get off the bus, and I'm gonna run in the woods and never come back, and when I come back I'm gonna be the knife master!
-The Rev

KthulhuX posted...

However, if they are that type of player, their plan B is likely to be just as bland as their plan A.

A fully realized and consistent Plan B is actually pretty rare in my experience. Dedicating too many resources away from your Plan A makes you weaker, in specialization-focused games like Pathfinder at least. A "switch hitter" of dramatically different styles is rarely a good idea.

So Plan B usually becomes something improvised and non-repeatable. Maybe it uses a special consumable they've been saving, maybe it's taking advantage of this one specific fight's qualities (enemy type, terrain, etc). These are the fights where the martials form a protective circle around the wizard and pull out bows because they can't reach the enemy safely. Or the cleric empties his bag on the ground trying to find that one scroll of Stone to Flesh because his meatshield is suddenly less meaty than advertised. Or where the sword and board fighter has to leave the squishies he's protecting to go save a valuable NPC/macguffin being taken away ("You're the only one who can make it!").

When their Plan A is countered, D&D characters aren't usually versatile enough to have a grand Plan B ready (except high level wizards ugh). They usually have to drop their Plan A and adapt a new plan using the exact same ingredients as Plan A's.

That said, don't counter in the same way too often. You can imagine it would be super annoying to have to guard your wizard with a shitty bow more than once or twice.

KthulhuX posted...

Plus there is the fact that, if you are talking about spells, it's not always an option to immediately switch to the "super weird spells". Because they likely do not have those spells prepared or known.

I have an issue with Vancian magic for that reason, and I don't really use it any more in my games.
I allow it, but I introduced the Spheres of Power magic system and all my players just gravitated towards that naturally, so yay.

Babbit55 posted...

Not disagreing with you, just saying public rolling to really good roleplayers won't change things up too much, though it does depend.

It won't change the story, no, but it'll change the game. Often, especially when the challenge they're facing is information-based, giving the players tons of free information is just way less fun for them.

It's the difference between solving a puzzle and pretending you're solving a puzzle. The former is obviously more fun, right?
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One day dude, I'm just gonna get off the bus, and I'm gonna run in the woods and never come back, and when I come back I'm gonna be the knife master!
-The Rev

Babbit55 posted...

In all honesty, only bad roleplayers need DM's to lie to them/ roll for them

If the only goal is to put on a show for like a podcast then sure. I can pretend I'm having fun so it looks realistic enough.
If you actually like mystery, intrigue, suspense, solving puzzles, or thinking at all, then sometimes it's nice to not have the solution given to you.

Bluff is something I very rarely have the players roll themselves any more, after Father Donnagin. One of my favorite NPCs was a Cleric of good/healing who had a knack for always catching the (evil) PCs with their pants down. He led the investigation of the PCs' first murder and managed to counterbluff them, making it seem like he believed the PCs' lies (or at least left enough doubt that they didn't kill him before he could investigate, and trust me they wanted to). If the player had seen his roll on Bluff, he would have known that the Cleric didn't believe him, and then goodbye suspense!

Hell, even your own story would have been more interesting if the party didn't know ahead of time via public rolls that you were fooling them.
That said, I don't let PCs roll Bluff against PCs anyways. Diplomancers tend to override the party's will when allowed to use CHA skills on allies (so... exactly what happened but all the time).
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One day dude, I'm just gonna get off the bus, and I'm gonna run in the woods and never come back, and when I come back I'm gonna be the knife master!
-The Rev

KthulhuX posted...

Honestly, if your players are the type to rarely, if ever, step outside of a few pre-determined attacks / actions, there's very little way to get them to use some of the more interesting options.

It's actually pretty easy as the GM to make the players stray away from their Plan A. Just make Plan A not work!

If their normal strat is to hit it with a stick, then easy ways to block that include swarms, DR, concealment/darkness, high AC, incorporeality, huge size plus mobile (players will provoke AoOs to get to it), STR damage, overstrong full attacks (players won't risk staying close), "burning blood" retaliation upon being cut, flying, burrowing, range enemies that kite, etc etc etc etc. That's all just off the top of my head, there's likely more.
Mix and match and apply all of the cool, weird things this game has against your party's weaknesses on the occasion when you want to force them to come up with an improvised strategy.

Counters are neat, but don't predictively counter an improvised strategy unless you're just trying to get them to retreat. That's a level of difficulty that a lot of players can't handle, or don't want to.
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One day dude, I'm just gonna get off the bus, and I'm gonna run in the woods and never come back, and when I come back I'm gonna be the knife master!
-The Rev

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Just a generic "evildoers" might be a bit too broad a category to apply favored enemy to, though.

Just "humans" works. The anti-evildoers bit comes from the Paladin side. They do have a pile of anti-evil abilities right?
I don't know the 5e mechanics terribly well.
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One day dude, I'm just gonna get off the bus, and I'm gonna run in the woods and never come back, and when I come back I'm gonna be the knife master!
-The Rev

I hate singing bards.
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One day dude, I'm just gonna get off the bus, and I'm gonna run in the woods and never come back, and when I come back I'm gonna be the knife master!
-The Rev

ParanoidObsessive posted...

The DM suggests that they'd LIKE you to choose two classes for story reasons and combine them to make an interesting roleplaying character concept (like, say, making a Fighter/Mage who is a combat battlemage or a Cleric/Paladin who is a militant church-knight for their god), and not just power game and choose two classes that synergize best for optimal combat utility mechanically, but they can't straight up stop you from being a filthy munchkin if that's what you really want to do.

Ugh, so one of those games where I'm not even supposed to try to win? Why even put monsters in if I'm not allowed to try?
Fine! Fine. It's fine! *cough*

In a vacuum my first instinct is a Paladin/Ranger and go all RIGHTEOUS FURY smiter of evil people. (Rangers still get things for tracking and hunting specific targets in 5e right?) I've never gotten to play in a campaign so unsubtle that it would work, but the kid in me just loves the idea.
"Good is that which evil fears, and justice is making those fears a reality!"
>.>

Realistically, I'd assume a more "intelligent" setting and go for something like Druid/Monk and go pretty fierce with it, Rogue/Wizard because nothing is more infuriating than a sly bastard who knows magic, or Cleric/Fighter and just play it as Cleric because Cleric has plenty of versatility for storytelling in its mechanics to make up for the the Fighter's 'none'.
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One day dude, I'm just gonna get off the bus, and I'm gonna run in the woods and never come back, and when I come back I'm gonna be the knife master!
-The Rev

I mean that the bottom of a horse and the bottom of a unicorn are the same thing. How would a centaur with unicorn legs be any different from a centaur with horse legs? >.>
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One day dude, I'm just gonna get off the bus, and I'm gonna run in the woods and never come back, and when I come back I'm gonna be the knife master!
-The Rev

shadowsword87 posted...

Welp, my gf is now super into the idea of playing a centar, but replace the horse bits with unicorn bits.
Great.

What would the difference be?
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One day dude, I'm just gonna get off the bus, and I'm gonna run in the woods and never come back, and when I come back I'm gonna be the knife master!
-The Rev

Limitations are good for the game. I loathe just giving players the win out of pity.

For example, once I ruled they couldn't drop entire stone gates on people, they thought it through and instead set up a few premade massive stone gates which they would release with a single Stone Shape spell.

It ended up more tactical and rewarding for them than if I had just given them the power to do what they wanted for free.

(5x2x2 was the correct limit, they were arguing for like a 10x15x2 volume affected)
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One day dude, I'm just gonna get off the bus, and I'm gonna run in the woods and never come back, and when I come back I'm gonna be the knife master!
-The Rev

I hate adjudicating stone shape. Players are terrible at ballparking 3-D volumes for some reason, and since I can easily do 5x2x2 I always have to be the bad guy and say they can't affect all that.
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One day dude, I'm just gonna get off the bus, and I'm gonna run in the woods and never come back, and when I come back I'm gonna be the knife master!
-The Rev

Probably
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One day dude, I'm just gonna get off the bus, and I'm gonna run in the woods and never come back, and when I come back I'm gonna be the knife master!
-The Rev

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Adventure paths/modules/scenarios/etc are kind of annoying, because they almost rely on players doing exactly ONE thing, and the GM needing to force the players to do that thing in order to keep the plot moving. While some allow for branching paths or discuss alternative options, most of them just boil down to "railroad the fuck out of your players, and slap the shit out of their characters if they complain." Which is terrible roleplaying, in my opinion.

APs work fine without narrative agency, and wouldn't be so popular if they didn't. Neither would video games, for that matter.

In fact, it's usually the kinds of people that enjoy GMing (not necessarily exclusively) that think players need narrative agency, because GMs are the kinds of people who value narrative agency/worldbuilding.

But agency is obtainable in many ways, and expression is only one kind of fun according to the MDA format. As someone who most highly values narrative and challenge aesthetics, I actually prefer playing linear adventures. I can almost be guaranteed curated content and a solid, well-paced story with those.

As for getting the players to do what you want, you usually handle that at the buy-in. "This adventure involves you escaping from prison, joining a cult, and working to destroy the government in evil ways. Bring a character that would do that." That's half done right there.
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One day dude, I'm just gonna get off the bus, and I'm gonna run in the woods and never come back, and when I come back I'm gonna be the knife master!
-The Rev

Players are jerks.
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One day dude, I'm just gonna get off the bus, and I'm gonna run in the woods and never come back, and when I come back I'm gonna be the knife master!
-The Rev

Mario_VS_DK posted...

In one game I play, those fights aren't too frequent, but they normally last around 2 to 3 hours... :/

What on earth? What takes you so long? o.O
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One day dude, I'm just gonna get off the bus, and I'm gonna run in the woods and never come back, and when I come back I'm gonna be the knife master!
-The Rev

krazychao5 posted...

I never understood DnD

Reading this doesn't help

You come up with a character.

The GM describes a scenario.
You tell him what your character does in that scenario.
He tells you the results.
Repeat ad nausea.

People view their character as an avatar of themselves, so they can get really invested. /shrug

(There are also frequent fights, but the way those work are totally unrelated. You basically enter into a FF Tactics game for 15 minutes.)
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One day dude, I'm just gonna get off the bus, and I'm gonna run in the woods and never come back, and when I come back I'm gonna be the knife master!
-The Rev