Bay 12 Games Forum

The Long Dark just released Episode 3 of their storyline quest mode, Wintermute.

So I've been trying not to freeze to death in the Canadian wilderness while wolves take bites out of my frozen ass.

I often do NPCs on the fly too. As an example, my last city guard game had the players tracking down some criminals that had escaped prison. One was a half-elf local to the city, so one of my players decided they'd track down the criminal's family and see whether they knew where he was hiding.

Cue me being caught without any prepared material. So, time to improvise!

First step in any improvisation is to delay so you have time to plan. I do this by playing up the local geography. I've already researched a bit of the background of the city, and I know a few facts from the setting. So I describe the layout of this residential district by framing it with the local tax law that states that residents must pay road access taxes for any building that exits onto a street. Thus, the building they're seeking is buried in a maze of impromptu back alleys and pathways that the locals have created to avoid this paying this tax.

Since their mission is on a time limit, they don't want to spend hours searching for this address. I've already decided the weather is pouring rain this particular day, so when one of the players says they want to find a local child to lead them to the address, I immediately grab the opportunity for a pop culture reference. Cue a small boy running down the flooded street, yellow raincoat flapping behind him, as he follows his paper boat along the gutter, racing towards a drain that empties into the city sewers. Great way to pad a few more minutes of planning time while my players start referencing balloons, clowns, and various other movie quotes.

Eventually they get back on track, and by now I have a game plan. The child happily leads them to the address they seek, and the door is answered by an elven man. He leads them inside his tiny flat, a single common room with a bedroom screened by a hanging cloth. They chat with him, he warily answers their questions, and cue coughing coming from the adjacent bedroom. Their suspicions are aroused, thinking this might be their escaped convict. Instead, I have the man say his wife is sick with illness. He claims it's some form of curse that the local healers cannot cure, so he spends most of his day caring for his sick wife. He says he hasn't seen his son in many years, and my players confirm his words seem genuine with some decent Sense Motive checks.

At this point, they leave and go on with their investigation. I'm actually rather upset by this too, since I had a great story hook I'd developed. See, in my few minutes planning, I'd decided that the wife of this man, should the players insist on speaking with her, turn out to be his second wife after the mother of the escaped prisoner died. If they'd searched her room, they'd have had a chance to find a secret shrine to a god of assassins and poisoners, and potentially discovered this elven man was a serial killer that had married and poisoned numerous wives over his many hundreds of years of life.

Alas, it wasn't meant to be.

Depends which version you're using. 3.5e and PF both have saving throws when interacting with the target. The 5e text specifically says that you bump into invisible parts of the target's body if you interact with them, and has an option to perform an Investigation check against the spell DC.

Yeah, substitute the words "Uighur Muslims" with "German Jews" and you get a great comparison.

Boy cruising every bar you've ever been sounds exasperating

I'm more a fan of girl cruising, myself. Though these days, my wife tends to get upset when I do so.

As a tip, mixing gin and wine might seem a cost-effective method of curing sobriety, but my personal experiences have repeatedly shown it to be a profoundly poor long-term life choice.

Violence is a rational escalation of the rhetoric between the protesters and the state, when peaceful protest is prohibited.

The ancestry feats are all remarkably 'meh' in my book. Used to be you got that stuff just for being that race. You're human? Oh, you get to pick either a bonus feat or bonus skills. You're half-orc? It'll cost you a feat to get darkvision. Seems like they took a bunch of stuff away just so they could sell it back you you piecemeal.

Skill feats are better but still underwhelming. If I was a Barbarian in 1st edition, I'd be getting either a general feat or a rage power every level. I could double down on combat or skills depending on my preference. There's no such flexibility in 2nd edition, where combat and class powers are gated to every second level, and the other levels must be spent on skills.

That's not even getting into the bottleneck that occurs if you want to take an archetype.

Also, don't even get me started on the silliness around crafting items. You want to have a wizard that can write scrolls? He'll need to lug around a 1 bulk formula book (that's probably 20% of his carrying capacity), and gaining the crafting feat only lets him scribe four different types of scrolls. He then needs to pay for learning the formula for any other spells he has in his spellbook that he wants to write before he can scribe them.