Tabletop Games Thread

[Five_X]

just sit out of any battle where they are not 100% convinced the enemy should die.

That was the case here, the sorceress was lawful neutral and wasn't convinced that the guy was up to no good - as opposed to two paladins, one of whom has a cursed sword which makes him very much unmerciful. She didn't even heal us, just sort of stood in the corner waiting for it to end one way or the other. In actual combat she's perfectly happy to destroy enemies.

[Janx]

DM: Low magic setting where magic, and non-exotic races are rare and villified.

Me: Makes goblin revenant arcane trickster rogue.

People are gona love me.

[mAc Chaos]

what could possibly go wrong

[Five_X]

DM: you can make unusual characters but it's going to have you at a disadvantage RP-wise

Me: *makes completely ordinary character*

[Saiga]

That was the case here, the sorceress was lawful neutral and wasn't convinced that the guy was up to no good - as opposed to two paladins, one of whom has a cursed sword which makes him very much unmerciful. She didn't even heal us, just sort of stood in the corner waiting for it to end one way or the other. In actual combat she's perfectly happy to destroy enemies.

Yeah, see, I wouldn't want certain players to have literally no options when a fight breaks out if they want to stick to a certain alignment or roleplay. I guess it depends on the campaign, but I feel those kind of situations would come up often enough that you shouldn't have someone sit out of the fight.

[Kirby]

I think I've talked more so far about the process of cooking a stew than I have relevant game stuff.

[You]

I think I've talked more so far about the process of cooking a stew than I have relevant game stuff.

challenge accepted?

[mAc Chaos]

it was amazing

[Kirby]

I made up that recipe on the spot, by the way. Though it was based on the type of chili stew cowboys would eat in the old days, minus the actual chilis bc I forgot about those.

[mAc Chaos]

That was pretty awesome.

Now I am hungry.

[mAc Chaos]

Also you asked about cooking skills: if you decide to go hunting for SUPER RARE INGREDIENTS that can make the GREATEST DISHES then you can use them to prepare them. Not everyone can cook a wyvern...

[Arashi_Leonhart]

Have everyone read Dragonlance.

Play a Dragonlance campaign.

Make food from Leaves of the Inn of the Last Home.

Profit from immersion.

[mAc Chaos]

I want to do a campaign at some point that involves Monster Hunter/Toriko style adventuring to find rare ingredients and monsters. Then you'd have to prepare ingredients and make armor and weapons out of them. They would have danger ratings and ranks. You'd also have to compete against others, and deal with all the implications related to it.

Or maybe I can just make it a subquest in existing games. I had a 1 on 1 RP I did once that basically had that as the next plot point but that didn't get to that part.

[Five_X]

My character in my current 5e campaign is a culinary aficionado. His holy symbol is a pot, and every new creature he comes across he does his level best to try to cook and eat. This actually ended up causing some frustration for the DM, because there was a (admittedly minor) plot point in which the party was supposed to eat some poisoned food - which, naturally, didn't make a whole lot of sense for a person cooking his own deliciously esoteric meals rather than slurping up gruel.

[mAc Chaos]

Should've had a RIVAL CHEF sneak some poison in to prove your character is a fraud.

And then afterwards the only way to clear your name would be to beat him in a cooking duel.

[Arashi_Leonhart]

okay ramp it back shokugeki

[mAc Chaos]

No, MORE SHOKUGEKI

The competition would have to have a judge, but the only judge around is the man you once beat to a key ingredient...

However, his son hates your rival, so he gives you the keys to your rival's kitchen so you can sabotage him overnight, before the competition. Even a biased judge will have to acknowledge you if the gap is that huge.

But if you do that, you'll always be admitting you can't defeat your rival...

[Seika]

Have everyone read Dragonlance.

Play a Dragonlance campaign.

Make food from Leaves of the Inn of the Last Home.

Profit from immersion.

Sorry, steps one and two really aren't worth three and four.

[Seika]

Because I'm not just memeing there, I'll copy out the relevant parts of a conversation I had with mAc.


S: As a rule, settings preferred to change the classes up a bit instead of blocking them off completely. People like their favourite classes and roles. Clerics from Athas or the Forgotten Realms or Krynn all did quite a few things differently to a 'generic' one, but the idea of the class was still there.

Krynn's setting, Dragonlance, historically had no real Clerics for three hundred years, but the point of literally the first book ever published is to get the gods answering prayers again, and I don't remember any decent rules getting published for playing in the no-gods era, so that's a bit of a wash.

S: Clerics, I guess, tend to have the most apparently radical shifts given the prevailing religions on their various planes: Realms Clerics can't worship forces or philosophies and are required to pray to the gods; Athasian Clerics can't worship gods and have to go for the elements. Still, mechanically, it's not a huge deal as long as you can get access to the spell spheres you want. Otherwise, it's more things like Paladins and Clerics getting their Turn Undead nerfed hard in Ravenloft, or Mages and Clerics in Dragonlance having to deal with that setting's ludicrous alignment obsession, rather than huge mechanical swerves.


m: What alignment obsession in Dragonlance?


S: As to Dragonlance, in short, this:


In long, Dragonlance really really really liked rigidly defined GOOD, NEUTRAL, and EVIL groups. All mages were divided into the Order of the White Robes, the Order of the Red Robes, and the Order of the Black Robes, and got bonuses or penalties based on the phases of their patron moon; Clerics were all similarly divided into Clerics of Good, of Neutrality, and of Evil (albeit you got some variation within those kits depending on your patron god). Shifting between moral alignments got you penalties to hit and to AC while you were doing it, and could completely shaft magic-users, who would lose two levels. (Clerics also lost all their abilities until they changed patron god, at which point they lost two more levels).

It lends a horrific whiff of "APOSTATES AND HEATHENS" to the setting. The didactic moralising gets worse when you move from the mechanics of the world to its flavour: the revelation which brings the people back to the worship of the true, good gods after the sinning mortals turned away is contained in writings on platinum plates. (Tracy Hickman is a devout Mormon: this is both intentional and sincere).
The horrific Cataclysm the gods inflict upon the world in response to a dictator going mad with power gets a torturous explanation which begins "Either the gods were unwilling to intervene before the Cataclysm or were unable to do so" in a truly dire attempt to address the old chestnut that is the problem of evil.
The bit about angels bound to do good and humans who have the free will to sin is revisited in a fashion which comes off as stupidly fantasy-racist, and validates those complaints about sentient creatures being locked into 'always Chaotic Evil'.

However, most wondrous were the spirits called the Maran, meaning "Free-willed."These were men who possessed the ability to choose their destinies. Not placed at any of the three poles of the gods' triangle, humans swing in the middle of the triangle from pole to pole to pole. This choice and free agency gives motion to the universe and propels it forward. Not only does man give motion to the universe, but he also inspires the other races to action. Thus these are the most prized of all the souls that awakened.

Dragonlance is in many ways an awfully generic setting, and most of the stuff that's unique to it centres around these stupid set-in-stone BLACK AND GREY AND WHITE (and BY OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST, you better be WHITE) notions. I have a terrible distaste for it.


m: Who do those Laws of Consequence apply to, Paladins? They do sound kind of neat in that they actually define what some of the good and evil is. Neutral sounds interesting, in that it reminds me of the take of certain stoic philosophies, but I wonder if this is the more normal "just let whatever happens, happen, and it'll work out" kind of philosophy or the retard "you gotta shoot a baby for every orphan saved to EVEN THE SCALES, man."

Interesting, all I ever heard about Dragonlance before was how it was the setting for all those famous novels and characters like Drizzt.


S: Nah, they're a setting-wide thing. All PCs, all NPCs, all civilisations. Hence the little tip about how you should run your DL campaigns to REWARD THE RIGHTEOUS and PUNISH EVIL and all that.

Neutrals, from what I remember, vacillated between being good-lite and hands-off "stuff happens" until one side or another (invariably Evil) got out of control.

Drizzt is FR. The only DL characters which gained any notable recognition outside the setting's own fans, I think, were Raistlin Majere (cynical and bitter mage, hosting an evil wizard's soul because it tried to take over him, cursed to see the effect of time on everything, has hourglass pupils) and Fizban (absurd, crotchety, old man who is really the head god of Good wandering around).

[Five_X]

I knew none of that about Dragonlance, thanks for giving that explanation. Pretty interesting, but personally I've never considered running a Dragonlance campaign. It never really struck me as an interesting setting, and FR is what I know from the games and books so it's easiest to work with.