Tabletop Games Thread

[Reiu]

Today I broke my record and spent 13 hours on mechanics alone for a level 4 character.

My previous record was 8 hours, also on a level 4.

[Saiga]

Miscellaneous Income^TM

We were level 4-5 and we just pooled all our funds together to make our Wizard deal with the bookkeeping. Easily had enough after completing an adventure.

It wasn't really backwater, we were on a ferry that traveled through the large city unique to our campaign (Brightstone, similar to Neverwinter in terms of size) which had a shop with magic weapons for sale. Then we went to a secret Lycanthrope village (where I got turned into a Werebear) and they had many magic items for sale, but no plate. And then we went to Brightstone, were we got plate under the new DM but had it retconned to splint when that was called a mistake.

[aldeayeah]

That's Saiga's point, though: the absolute top end of heavy armour, costing fifteen hundred gold, gets you one AC point over a focused Dexterity character in forty-five gold studded leather. Heavy armour's fancy but doesn't exactly crush mechanically.

(The actual benefit of heavy armour is taking Heavy Armour Master which is great at four - or insane at one if you're V-Human - and remains highly effective against hordes for a long time, besides being an attribute bump feat too).

Fun fact: the Paladin who got downed by the wolves in the legendary campaign had Heavy Armor Mastery.

[Saiga]

wolves used dex for their attacks

THIS TYRANNY HAS GONE ON FOR TOO LONG

edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQsJSqn71Fw I liked this video. I can see myself fitting into a few of these types, and I think he gives a fair description of each. Does anyone have any particularly good series on DMing tips and thoughts they could share? I've seen quite a few interesting videos already and I think they'd be good for myself as a DM/player and my group to try and improve our games.

[Seika]

King Arthur

STR: 18/52
DEX: 16
CON: 18
INT: 17
WIS: 18
CHA: 18

What the hell, Saber, how did you roll those stats?

(Also Paladin 16/Bard 5 for some reason?)

[mAc Chaos]

how exactly did she get 18/52

[black1blade]

Percentile strength is an AD&D thing. If you are playing a fighter class and you get an 18, you then roll a percentile. % strength is really where you start getting good bonuses in AD&D. 18 strength only gives characters +2 to hit +1 damage but 18/00 gives you +3 to hit and +6 damage.

- - - Updated - - -

[Bird of Hermes]

King Arthur

(Also Paladin 16/Bard 5 for some reason?)

Dang, Sir Dagonet was clearly a bigger influence than expected on Arthur.

[Seika]

[aldeayeah]

PLAYER: I tap my Paladin to crew the chariot.

DM: ಠ_ಠ

[mAc Chaos]

paladin falls

[Seika]

The gnomish version of the Prometheus myth:
A gnome crept into the halls of the gods, saw fire, thought it was neat, replaced it with an illusion, and then ran off to the mortal world with a spark before anyone noticed.

[aldeayeah]

paladin falls

The royal assassin throws himself to the floor too, your paladin is now dead.

[mAc Chaos]

also i still dont get the deal with percentile strength

why only 18

why are you rolling

why doesnt it just go to 19

WHAT DOES IT MEAN

[black1blade]

If you are a fighter and you get 18 str you also get to roll an extra % roll to see how great your str is. If you are just a thief ect then you just have 18. Fighters also receive more hit points from their con score compared to other classes. If you think % str doesn't work for point buy then you would be right it doesn't. Stat increases also aren't really a thing to worry about in AD&D outside of some magical exceptions.

[Seika]

also i still dont get the deal with percentile strength

why only 18

why are you rolling

why doesnt it just go to 19

WHAT DOES IT MEAN

Let's work this up from the start to give you context of how the game was being done in those days, illustrating some underlying principles which I assume led to the situation:
1) For a completely generic, classless character, most AD&D stats are very strongly keyed to one or two overarching benefits, with a spattering of minor extras. When you add a class, that class's key characteristic will then give you extra benefits. (E.g. Thieves get skill bonuses from high DEX, Clerics get extra spells from high Wisdom, and everyone gets a 10% XP bonus if you've got a good score in your primary attribute).

The major, general benefits were:

STR - mêlée THAC0 and damage, encumbrance
DEX - AC, missile THAC0
CON - HP, system shock rolls
INT - actually nothing, dump it like an abusive boyfriend if you aren't a mage or bard
WIS - saves (sorta)
CHA - followers, NPC reactions

2) Attributes have a small to medium-sized dead zone in the middle of their table (generally 8-14 or so) where very little changes about those big primary benefits. If you're rolling 3d6 for your stats, as you're assumed to, this is also where a lot of your statistics are going to end up. By contrast, as you rise up/drop out of that zone, the benefits/penalties accrue at an accelerating rate. This makes that one PC with a single eighteen stat feel like they're genuinely a one in 6^3, while holding most player characters in the bounds of normal/familiar/realistic human capability. (And has a not inconsiderable side benefit of usually keeping PCs within a small field that can be easily accounted for, not dissimilar to 5e's bounded accuracy precept - at least up to the point where permanent stat increases begin becoming available).

3) We want monsters to be able to hit hard based off their characteristics.

4) The stats system itself is hard-capped at 25; not just for PCs. Humans (who are generally the default) naturally floor at 3 and cap at 18.


Results:
Strength, like the other physical stats, provides benefits that almost everyone wants, but (because warriors have relatively little bolted onto the core combat system, unlike spells for mages and clerics or thief skills for rogues) there's no easy knob to turn to give warriors any specific and exclusive benefit.

Further, we've got a lot of to-hit and damage bonuses up at the top end of the Strength scale. In fact, we've got too many, because it has to rapidly scale from very small benefits at sixteen, just like every other stat does, to trying to account for the strength of a tarrasque or titan or storm giant. And strength is awkward in that it's the most directly measurable stat - it's very easy to give it a real world context - so you want to have a fairly fine set of layers of distinction. Lumping an ogre and a frost giant together just doesn't make intuitive sense to players.


Solution:
If we slide in some 'extra' stations between 18 and 19, and make them only available to warriors and monsters, we can help out the PC fighting classes by giving them some extra punch, parallel the other classes' bonuses from their prime attributes, and spread out the stat benefits so we don't have to have massive leap somewhere in the 'escalating bonuses' portion of the stat table.

Once you've decided on making there be extra steps between 18 and 19, how do you represent that? Naturally, with decimals: 18.25, 18.5, 18.75, &c. And to get decimals out of dice, you roll d100, at which point you just give up and call it a percentage anyway.

(It's worth noting that warriors also get HP bonuses for CON >16, whereas other classes stop there).

[black1blade]

Int isn't a dumb stat because it gives you more languages which can be the differences between a living and dead party.

[mAc Chaos]

I actually have always wanted to implement CHA in a similar way, with followers and morale. SOON

So, it sounds like the jump from 18 to 19 then is like, an entire tier's difference? A way bigger gap than 16 to 17 or 17 to 18.

Also what do you mean monsters hitting well based on their characteristics, how would that be different if there wasn't a big dead zone of bonuses. That did surprise me though, seeing such a broad flat range bonus wise.

[Five_X]

Except for the spells Wizards had that allowed them to speak or understand other languages, and if you don't have a Wizard or Bard in your party then that's usually slightly your fault.

[Seika]

So, it sounds like the jump from 18 to 19 then is like, an entire tier's difference? A way bigger gap than 16 to 17 or 17 to 18.

Full table:


See how the straight 18 to 19 leap is plus five damage where the only other points it even goes up by two are at 1 to 2 and 24 to 25?

Also what do you mean monsters hitting well based on their characteristics, how would that be different if there wasn't a big dead zone of bonuses. That did surprise me though, seeing such a broad flat range bonus wise.

Could have phrased that better. Basically, you want to be able to organically say 'this big brutish monster has significant bonuses to hit and to damage because of its strength', but also not tread on the upper tiers like the ancient wyrms and titans and so forth. The middle dead zone necessarily compresses the space you have available to you, which makes that kind of fine-grained work harder to do.

The available solutions are: 1) keep the original scaling, accepting that you're squashing together creatures that don't intuitively fit together into the same strength measure; 2) change the original scaling, accepting that it'll be a bit rougher, and make each step up larger (like +2 to hit and damage instead of mostly +0.5/+1); 3) change the original scaling, accepting that you're going to have a big step somewhere to try to accommodate all kinds of creatures; 4) cheat and add partial numbers into the scale.

AD&D went for a mix of 3 and 4.

Except for the spells Wizards had that allowed them to speak or understand other languages, and if you don't have a Wizard or Bard in your party then that's usually slightly your fault.

And arcane casters wanted high INT anyway - I would go so far as to say playing a Bard or Mage with INT >15 was an exercise in pure masochism without generous DMing or houseruling - so they all knew half-a-dozen languages naturally into the bargain. (Heck, even your basic 9 INT human PC knows two languages, besides demi-humans getting their native languages free, so a party should be able to get along perfectly well).

To be fair, non-weapon proficiencies made INT more-or-less worthwhile if you chose to use them and use them heavily, but I personally never found that system very well done either in 2e or in the succeeding skills system of 3e.