Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

Any D&D/D20

Shadowrun

World of Darkness

Palladium

Other (feel free to post about it)

[Kadzar]

Barbarian kinda gets shafted what with rage being a long rest ability with very limited stockpile, and also one of the defining abilities of that class and its impact in combat.

It feels like one of those things that should have been made a short rest ability, but, because it was already put in the game as a 1/day ability back when 1/day abilities were the only kind that existed, they decided they couldn't change it.

As for the general current discussion, I'd say that if you weren't so attached to 5e you might be better served by some kind of OSR system. For instance, while Worlds Without Number doesn't give spells on a weekly basis, it does limit casting a lot, such that first level mages can only cast one spell per day and max level casters can cast six spells a day at most (or seven if they're a high mage and take the art for it). Also there's a free version of it.

[Egan_BW]

why would i use someone else's osr rules when i could just make my own, like a real gamer

[Kagus]

why would i use someone else's osr rules when i could just make my own, like a real gamer

Gods, ain't that the truth... "Yeah I play 5e! ...just had to strangle and beat the rules into an entirely different shape and sprinkle in some homebrew because those systems didn't exist or did exist in a state of being fetid ass. It's so streamlined!"

I'm actually quite open/curious towards OSR, and other systems beyond. It's just that most of the people I'm running for either 1) Play 5e exclusively, or 2) Had their first introduction to D&D as a concept through Baldur's Gate 3, so tabletop as a whole is already a bit of a leap.

I would like to try some other things at some point, but gonna play it "safe" with the lil'uns until they're a bit more steady in their pen and paper boots.


Speaking of steady, this dungeon is doing my goddamn head in... Specifically struggling with finding an elegant solution for the residential areas. Like, there need to be some homes obviously, to show that this was a lived-in place... But I don't really know how to do apartment blocks in a way that won't be extremely repetitive/same-y.

Now, granted, it is entirely up to the players to actually spend the time and energy to go sniffing around in each individual apartment looking for scraps of loot, but I know that they're both new to this kind of free-form crawl, and also obsessive loot goblins... But is having some dull/"under-stocked" sections necessarily a bad thing? Again, it's player agency to interact with that in such a way, and attempting to make every area more or less "equally" engaging is insanity.

Thinking of potentially grouping them up into halls that each count as a "searchable" zone that covers all the doors in that hallway, and just throw some minor loot/curio tables together. If the mapper wants specific layouts I can just copy a screenshot over instead of repeating "30 by 20 foot" and "20 by 30 foot" over and over.


Yeh, I don't think I'm doing lost/ruined cities as dungeons again... Much easier for some dumb "a crazy wizard did it, I ain't gotta explain shit" shenanigans than trying to account for "realism"

[Cthulhu]

1.  If the dungeon is very old it's a safe bet large areas have collapsed or caved in.  That's an easy way to give the impression of a scale while restricting playable space.  Of course in D&D there are ways to get through obstacles like that, but players usually understand the design language here unless it's obviously an obstacle to overcome.  Especially if they're video gamers first they're trained to read rubble as a wall.

2. Dull and understocked areas are fine.  That's a classic OSR design element as a part of the focus on factional gameplay.  Monsters need living space, security, etc. so you expect "factions" (an orc warband, a pack of wolves, a solitary owlbear, etc.) to stake out territory and for there to be a lot of marginal no-goblin's-land between them, otherwise they'd fight too much.  Monsters still pass through the margins so you can have random encounters or hints at things they players haven't encountered yet to reward planning ahead and paying attention.

3. Could do a point-crawl type of setup here, where you identify a few interesting places within a mostly samey area like an apartment block, then connect them into a node map which only abstractly corresponds to the real physical space.  The players tell you roughly which way they're going and you abstract away the rooms and twists and turns between the nodes.

[Kagus]

Ye it's been abandoned a couple centuries or so, gonna be trying to make use of rubble/cave-ins a fair deal and just try to make it apparent which ones are full stops and which ones aren't... There's also some "corruptive magic bullshittery" going on which I've previously established can warp shit in weird ways, which is another fine "out"/explanation, I've just gotta let myself actually use it as such.

Working on filling out some more factions to get the place a bit more populated, not entirely sure what to plonk down in the common residential area as it's relatively close to the side entrance to the dungeon, which is the one Old Man Plotgiver has been sending plucky adventurers into... So potentially keep it fairly clear and just scatter in a few "dungeon ecosystem" mobs like mimics and such since this is the area that's seen most outside activity.

While a point-crawl abstraction would certainly make things a bit easier, I'm unfortunately a bit set on doing a more defined old school crawl with calling out room dimensions for the party's mapper, and letting them build up a picture of what the place is like and make decisions based off of that understanding. As such, there's a lot of fiddly business I gotta lay down... And also why I'm shying away from more "complicated" room/area shapes that are harder to call out and interpret onto a grid.

[Chaosegg]

Maybe a bit of a necro but I didn't really see other recent TTRPG threads to post in

How do you guys feel about all the 2024 changes (minus the drama at Wizards with the employment changes)?
I personally like most of D&D 2024 aside from a couple of the "Loony-Toons" weapons properites like knockback; which i would need to homebrew before anyone in my game used it and maybe a couple other properties as well could be tweaked, but that one for sure.

Anyone else think Daggerheart seems like a nice combo of 5e and Cypher System?

Spoiler: reply to Kagus / agree with Cthulu's advice-abstract it till your players get there in-game-play (click to show/hide)

Ye it's been abandoned a couple centuries or so, gonna be trying to make use of rubble/cave-ins a fair deal and just try to make it apparent which ones are full stops and which ones aren't... There's also some "corruptive magic bullshittery" going on which I've previously established can warp shit in weird ways, which is another fine "out"/explanation, I've just gotta let myself actually use it as such.

Working on filling out some more factions to get the place a bit more populated, not entirely sure what to plonk down in the common residential area as it's relatively close to the side entrance to the dungeon, which is the one Old Man Plotgiver has been sending plucky adventurers into... So potentially keep it fairly clear and just scatter in a few "dungeon ecosystem" mobs like mimics and such since this is the area that's seen most outside activity.

While a point-crawl abstraction would certainly make things a bit easier, I'm unfortunately a bit set on doing a more defined old school crawl with calling out room dimensions for the party's mapper, and letting them build up a picture of what the place is like and make decisions based off of that understanding. As such, there's a lot of fiddly business I gotta lay down... And also why I'm shying away from more "complicated" room/area shapes that are harder to call out and interpret onto a grid.

I would say keep creating and preparing like you are, but don't put the stuff in any specific place yet; save them as sort of modules you can drop in during live actual game play where/as they are needed/make-sense. This will save you from wasting any time, allow you to make use of everything you spend time on, and keep things moving along in a more fun way...
as long as you are not making it obvious to your players that you're doing this (they just find that they go looking around and you have something for them to find after the appropriate search has been "fast travel" mode/rolled).

If you want to read more detailed arguement/advice from me about how/why i have this advice, I did write up a pretty lengthy set of instruction/reasonings i can send you. i just decided it's too long and can be summarized for the most part as I attempt to do here.
TL;DR =
"Don't become the reason your players want to escape from your own world; allow your NPCs & things to work towards creating a space in which the Players want to return... our goal is to escape from the mundane/predictable, but our control must be absolute & consistant.l You control your creations -use them as tools. You are not constrained by what you have said before; you can alter & adjust as needed as long as you can explain it/justify it after-the-fact." -Guy
Generally, i would say that Cthulhu's suggestion about making "you walk around finding empty structure"-type-things a bit more abstract is a good idea. 'Montage it', like a show/movie.
This might be a good time for me to insert one of my most recommended videos related to TTRPGs and to say:
"Remember we play a TTRPG for 4 main reasons (See my sig).
Entertainment/fun, escapism/immersion, success/better-than-irL-but-feels-challenge/meaningful, socialization/whatever that means for your group as long as you all socialize well together."
Link to the Guy video i ref. in my sig (longer version that i tihnk is better explain/organized but says basically the same thing as the other one):  (from 2020 and one of the best GM, teacher & creative i've encountered in that sphere over the last 20 years).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAQRygjLrHY = What is an RPG, and Why You're Probably Doing it Wrong

[Kagus]

--snip--

Again, while I respect and enjoy a more abstracted form of crawl, this particular arc was specifically supposed to be about experimenting with an older school style of doing things. In this instance, player-mapping and large tilewise dungeon exploration with time management.

I have a player who is very much into maps. Her character is also a cartographer, and that's something that effectively hasn't come up during the campaign at large. Giving her the opportunity to actually map out a functional map of the dungeon seemed like a cool way to tie that in, and is something she's interested in trying out.

And if I'm plonking in elements when I feel like it, then I can't really account for how it ties in to the rest of the construct. Does this irrigation ditch actually connect to the outlet in the chasm? Will the hole in the floor of level 2 actually line up with the ceiling of the room it accesses on level 3? Can the players use the vertical magma channels to orient themselves and gain an idea of where they are in the overall scheme of things, and am I making sure I don't loop back on myself and superimpose a room on an existing area (which would be a cool quirk for a more wizardy bullshit dungeon, but doesn't really fit the theme here I feel)?

I'm perfectly fine with them not hitting up everything I've placed down; the intent is just to provide freedom of exploration and problem solving in an understandable space. I don't see how Jaquaysing would really work with a more off-the-cuff room assignment, without risking tying the geometry into knots.


As for 2024, I haven't gotten to look over a full copy of the rules as of yet (swearing off the purchase of more WoTC products does put a slight damper on that), but I'm actually quite positive towards a couple of the changes that I'm aware of. Overhauling the Exhaustion system was definitely needed in my opinion, even if it is a dreaded "flat modifier" that goes against their design philosophy (aside from all the other times they use those)... To my recollection though it doesn't affect save DCs, so it's still more of a slap to martials than spellcasters. But that's an easy and obvious adjustment to make.

I'm... Not entirely on-board with some of the spell changes though. I don't even know what the heck Counterspell is at this point. Sure it's always been a little problematic, but... I'unno man. Also the summon spells no longer actually summoning anything. Like, I get that it could be a pain for combat tracking, but was this really the right fix for that?

I suppose that kinda ties into Wild Shape as well. It just feels like a dulling fix to something that wasn't that big of a problem to start with.


Haven't gotten to try Daggerheart yet, but I'm curious! Had a one-off with a friend running Candela Obscura, and it... Uhh... I don't know how much can be placed on the system and how much on that particular game, but it definitely could've been a better experience. Though to be honest I'm kinda leaning towards the latter...

[Cthulhu]

I haven't looked at the rules yet, though I did look at that goblin dungeon they made as a quickstart for 2024 and hoo boy it's really bad.  Like irreparably bad.  Like either the people writing adventures for WOTC have completely lost the recipe on how to make an adventure, or Hasbro execs have come in at the editing phase and completely destroyed the adventure in rewrites.

Instead of a key the location descriptions are in the form of a narrative that walks through each room, and said narrative doesn't actually correspond at all with the shape of the dungeon map, to the point you have no idea where anything is.

[Kagus]

Woof... I'd heard that module design has been going downhill for a while, but that sounds pretty rough. What's the name of it?

[Kadzar]

I'm... Not entirely on-board with some of the spell changes though. I don't even know what the heck Counterspell is at this point. Sure it's always been a little problematic, but... I'unno man. Also the summon spells no longer actually summoning anything. Like, I get that it could be a pain for combat tracking, but was this really the right fix for that?

I hadn't actually looked at Counterspell until now. I guess it's less complicated now, but there isn't any interaction with spell levels anymore, and no reason to upcast it. Being a Con save, it's sort of like you're forcing a Concentration check against spells that aren't Concentration. Weird.

As for summoning, the summon spells still make creatures, although they're referred to as spirits, but they have normal creature types, so I'm not sure exactly what's going on there. Conjure spells now are creature-themed spell effects that provide buffs or repeatable sources of damage. But, for the most part, spells like the summon spells will create a creature with a statblock derived from the spell that can scale with level. I think the only ones that use regular monster statblocks are things like Find Familiar, which lets you use any CR0 beast since they're weak and unable to attack, or things like Planar Ally or Gate, which give you creatures you don't automatically control.

I kind of prefer how summoning works now, where you don't have to find a creature statblock that fits what you want to summon, and players can't just grab whatever creature appeared in a recent splatbook or adventure that happens to be busted for its CR or has some weird ability. And the conjure spells are an interesting way to have effects like a creature without having to track another creature in the combat, sort of like Spiritual Weapon but with more variety now and other effects besides damage. If they didn't include the summon spells as well, I probably wouldn't be into them, but I think they're okay, but maybe confusingly named, especially if you're coming in from the previous version.

As for adventures, I think they've always been bad. Even the ones that are basically good adventures are plagued by bad layout and poor information design and baffling editing choices. Like, I'm running an adventure from Candlekeep Mysteries that I think is very good, but it feels like it doesn't give a good idea on how to present information to the players sometimes, and there is a point where they just say "this is a good place to put some encounters", and then doesn't include even any sample encounters (I assume because they ran out of space).

[Cthulhu]

Yeah.  The new goblin intro adventure is insanely bad but I haven't really seen any 5e adventures I liked.  Strahd seemed okay?  But like Dragon Heist is really bad, the Tiamat one is really bad.

There was an interview I think with someone from Paizo who said that the majority of their revenue was from adventure module sales, and that the majority of adventure buyers didn't actually run the adventures, they read them like some kind of weird novel.  You can definitely see a design shift towards that market, with content organized more like a story and less like a playable adventure, things like adventure summaries that leave out key info so it can be a surprise in the adventure itself.

That's not to say things were necessarily better before.  There are some really good adventures out there but there's some really bad ones too.  The original dragonlance campaign is maybe worse than anything Wizards has put out.

[Kagus]

I haven't read all of Strahd directly, but I've interacted with it in parts both via the usual internet-o-sphere and via helping a friend with running her game of it (she wasn't super clear on combat balance/mechanics and needed some help putting together an a challenging fight).

...5e's Strahd has some glaring issues when it comes to interacting with the system's mechanics. There are some obstacles that really really need some finesse in order to be an appropriate challenge, but the text provides little to no help in understanding or realizing that finesse.

Spoiler: Strahd Encounter spoilers (click to show/hide)

Fairly early on, the party bumps into a group of Night Hags who are on a hair trigger to start a fight.

If you play this matchup straight and don't dig into alternate/fluffy strategies with them, they will annihilate most any unprepared party at that level. But if you spend some time looking at their lore and tactics, you'll see that you can just have them haunt the party from an ethereal state and give them a slow, creeping doom as they mess with the sleep cycles of the party and give them time to do something about it. That isn't pointed out in the book.

Then you have Strahd himself, confronting the party with his 5e statblock.

If you play this matchup straight and don't dig into alternate/fluffy strategies with him... He'll get bonked like a chump. You need to be a sneaky, underhanded, unfair little bastard who abuses home turf advantages and allies in order to make him threatening (and/or just give him a bunch of spells and items and shit he's not natively printed with). This also isn't made particularly obvious, so if you're like my friend and are a DM who is much more in tune with the storytelling/roleplaying aspect but has never really "clicked" with combat, you won't know that his stats are trash in a brawl.