Bay 12 Games Forum

I've never been in a dnd campaign where we were high enough level to cast any of that shit regardless. Must be nearly an irl year of meeting regularly and killing tons of monsters to get a cleric to that point by the default rules and I can't imagine that kinda game actually happens.

For 5e at least, following the reccomended number of encounters and exp gains it takes about four sessions to hit level 5 from level 1, at which point Revivify, the weakest rez spell comes online. In practice it's the only rez spell a PC is likey to ever need unless they fight beholders constantly.

Getting to the next rez spell takes a lot longer, because of how 5e is structured. The design intent is for games to mostly occur between levels 5 and 16, with levelling outside of that range being faster than it is within the range.

Thing about rez spells in D&D is that they aren't hard to do in a normal campaign. Money flows like water, so getting the reagents is trivial to the point that it's a cliche for the casters to carry around enough diamond dust to buy a small kingdom. Being disentegrated is something that shouldn't happen often, if ever, most of the time someone dies because something slapped them hard, and revivify can rez you from anything short of being turned into ash provided the caster can get to you within a minute of death, which due to the ranges involved in normal D&D is so trivial it's barely worth mentioning.

Thing is that D&D, especially 5e, intends for death to be nothing more than one of the tools of attrition. It's not a loss state, it's just another way to expend spell slots and gold. It's an actual part of the design philosophy, which is rooted in an outmoded 'dungeon delver' concept that most people don't actually play like.

What format? Lotta people dislike the slowness of play by post but I think that the alternative of trying to find meetup times for a bunch of internet randos is even worse.

My preference is for voice calls. I've tried play by post in the past and found it sufficiently less enjoyable that I prefer the hassle of scheduling calls.

My current rl group mostly meets via voice calls these days. Used to be that the four of us who live in town would meet in person and the GM would call in from Canada, but we started shifting to Discord and Roll20, partly for the pandemic and now also because two of us have moved to another town.

Btw how are the VtM rules? I'm thinking of giving them a try. However, with carefully picked players. I seem to be getting the worst luck with players, whether in vidya or ttrpgs.

Different is the best way I can describe them. Haven't had a chance to properly play it in years, and this is a different version of the WoD rules than I have played with before, so I'm going to be making a bunch of vampire/ghoul/mortal NPCs using the PC creation rules to get back to grips with it.

Lots of mechanics to do with not being entirely in control of the characters, and accompanying mechanics to encourage players to go with the flow of their inner beast from time to time.

It's very much a game about playing psychologically damaged people with super powers and a vulnerability to addiction.


Sorry to hear about your troubles with games by the way. I've been lucky to not have to deal with drama in any of the groups I've been in, just scheduling problems.

Quote from: Loud Whispers on July 28, 2022, 04:39:08 pm

Btw how are the VtM rules? I'm thinking of giving them a try. However, with carefully picked players.

Ooh ooh pick me pick me!

TBH there's probably enough RPers on the forum that we could try to arrange a group and run games using Discord.



If anyone's interested I did three pitches to my group for VtM games and had them vote.

Pitch 1 was a game set in the Great Heathen Army invasion of the British Isles. They would be vampires allied to the Norse, specifically Bjorn Ironside, helping invade Northumbria to avenge the death of Ragnarr Lodbrok, helping to fight the native mortals, vampires and werewolves and plunder the lands for their own purposes.

Pitch 2 was them being Byzantine vampires in the lead up to the Fall of Constantinople, facing the approach of the Ottoman army and the vampires of the Ashirra (Muslim vampire organisation essentially, as opposed to the more Christian Camarilla.) Idea was more of a focus on politics, looking for ways to assure their own survival and the safety of their assets and freedoms in the event the city falls, but without looking like traitors in the event that the city doesn't fall.

Pitch 3, the winning one, was them being underlings to a freshly returned openly vampiric Dracula.* Full kingdom of evil, open war with mortals rather than hiding as was the norm for the time. Initial enemy being the Ottomans, as they were Vlad's enemy at the time he died with the Holy Roman Empire being tentative allies. As things progress though the Inquisition, Camarilla, Ashirra, rogue vampires, other supernatural beings are all going to show up to try and quash this flagrant breach of the normal status quo, and the PCs are going to be tasked with convincing the HRE to maintain prior friendship with Wallachia as a buffer state against the Ottomans.

My brother is the only person who's shared a PC idea with me so far, he's thinking of being an Ottoman assassin who was sent to Wallachia to kill Vlad, who went and died in battle before he got a chance to try, and then jumped ship when Vlad strode back into Wallachia as a freaking vampire and claimed the throne from his cousin. Summed it up as him going 'Well the devil is real, hail Satan I guess,' and swearing loyalty to the returned Dracula.



*Canon WoD Dracula has two versions, the Old WoD and the New WoD versions. The game is in the OWoD, but Dracula's canon for the OWoD isn't of use to me, so I threw it away and decided to go with a version inspired by various pop-culture versions of him. Going to give him the powers and weaknesses of Bram Stoker's Dracula, which among other things means he doesn't die in sunlight, which is a power no other vampire has. In a way it's a power even Caine, the first vampire, does not possess, as while he cannot die the sun still causes him great pain. Dracula in the campaign is going to be something new, something scary.

Why would you need to people to carry a TV, they aren't that heavy. Also why at 7AM that seems a little past time to be stealing stuff and about prime time to get caught.

It's actually a better idea to steal during the day funnily enough, provided you know the house is going to be empty, especially if you need to move something big or break something.

The dog has managed to cry about my mother being out of the house (went to the movies with my father) more or less constantly for about four hours now. How he hasn't given up or decided to go to sleep and wait is beyond me.

EDIT: He finally seems to have quietened down.

All he's wanted to do for the past while is cry to be let out, just so he can sit in the front garden and wait for my mother to return. I'd be fine with letting him do so, but the garden isn't secure so he can't be out in it without some level of supervision or he might jump the wall, which he has done before.

Devil's advocate: I thought the national guard was also part of the corrupt system? Or is this really just limited to specific local police departments?

(This is why I keep repeating - "stop speaking in absolutes")

The national guard aren't subject to the corrupt training practices (as minimal as police training even is in the US) that the police are, so they tend to be less problematic on the whole. Arguably less suited for day to day police duties than a properly trained cop, but the wildly variable and often lax standards for police in the US means a lot of them aren't properly trained anyway.

The issue could probably be solved without needing to rebuild police departments from scratch by overhauling how Internal Affairs oversight works and by making police training take a lot longer, be standardised and subject to external review, and a push for police recruitment drives from historically oppressed demographics.

Is Bertie just not a great dog or are you not really an animal person? Seems like you have some real antipathy toward that dog.

I love animals, the sole exception being dogs.

Cats, snakes, hamsters, rats, guinea pigs, birds, lizards and so on I would gladly take care of with no complaints. Hell, I even used to feel more than a bit of fondness towards the roaches I kept as animal food (for my lizard, who was a bitey and flighty asshole, but I loved him.) I'd cheerfully babysit a crocodile provided it was still small enough to care for single handedly, or spend a week caring for a donkey even if it was an asshole.

Dogs, I just cannot stand, never been able to. Was getting better at tolerating them through spending small amounts of time with some geriatric small dogs, but being forced to be around Bertie has actually undone a lot of that slowly built up tolerance because he engages in almost every behaviour that makes me not like dogs.

Regarding the dog particularly: If you are inclined to feed the dog, provide it water, and not hurt it... you're a better dog owner than some people. Eh, taking care of things is emotionally healthy for a person, even if a chore.
Also: Sounds to me like your mother is cheap. Try asking for money to take care of the dog. She'll either change the subject or you might find it more palatable with some financial reward attached.

I would most likely forget to feed or water Bertie fairly often, and would essentially wind up emotionally neglecting him. My usual response to having to be in the same building as him is to shut the door and ignore his existence.

I'm also pretty much entirely unmotivated by money, if I don't like doing something then money isn't going to make it more palatable, but I'll happily do actual work I enjoy for free. Hell, I used to spend money on bus fare and lunch so I could help out at the local pet store for free just because I liked working with the animals and customers.