Tabletop Games Thread

[Mattias]

Get with the times, it's all about battlepasses nowadays.

[Dragos Bee]

Let's sing Te Deum Laudamus!

[Deathhappens]

My point is the same as before: lore should be easy to adjust based on the setting and the archetype you want to portray, and lore with mechanical constraints doesn't fit that.

Mechanical constraints serve only to separate archetypes apart from each other, so how is it constraining when you can simply choose a different archetype to suit your needs? If your Eberron Paladins don't get any divine blessings from gods, nothing is stopping you from having Paladins that lack all the divine blessing features, or you can be slightly more reasonable and simply choose to use Fighters instead (same mechanical background without the conflict in lore).

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Agreed. D&D is a system, not a setting. The archetypes, including their names, aren't as important as the mechanics they describe. You can slap a new coat of paint on them for each setting. Never mind that this isn't a new change. 3rd Edition had mechanically different variant Paladins. Paladins in Athas, Eberron, Abeir-Toril, and Krynn are naturally all going to be different. The mechanics are more important than the flavor. The setting dictates the latter and is mutable. D&D has many settings. Ergo, flavor takes a back seat to mechanics.

I feel like we're just arguing over each other here, but for me the definition of Paladin will always be "holy warrior of god", not "guy with party-buffing auras and bonus dmg vs evil". You can reflavor the latter however you want, but you can't make a Paladin out of Batman.

[Five_X]

"holy warrior of god", not "guy with party-buffing auras and bonus dmg vs evil"

D&D paladins have been one of these more than the other since their inception, and it's not the one that you're hoping for.

[Deathhappens]

D&D paladins have been one of these more than the other since their inception, and it's not the one that you're hoping for.

Hope has nothing to do with it. D&D doesn't have the monopoly on Paladins as an archetype, and one of them is attested in a much broader manner than the other.

[Five_X]

That's just trying to make a personal sentiment into a factual statement. Even before that, though, this whole conversation on paladins started when you said "5e kept the name for brand purposes while kicking away the flavor that actually distinguished the class."

[Twelveseal]

Don't worry. He's just trying to enforce a belief system that doesn't fit with reality onto that reality. Happens all the time.

[Formless Creature]

Please excuse me for potentially sounding like a dumbass, but isn't the advantage of tabletop systems that you can simply customize away the stuff you don't like? If you feel strongly about the Paladin class having a very specific identity, then would it not be better to play with people who feel likewise or enforce it as a DM? I don't really understand... it's a social activity. It's more about the people who play it than the system itself. The system only provides a baseline. I dunno, maybe I'm missing something, I've only played like three sessions in my life.

[Twelveseal]

You're not wrong. The system is the crunch. Death wants the crunch and the flavor to unified when it comes to what's playable, so he actually wants less customization in this area and more integration between the character classes' themes and mechanics. He wants the game to reflect what he sees as the traditional view of the literary archetypes it draws on and dislikes the idea of reinterpreting those archetypes as something else. I can understand his reasoning, I just disagree with it. Following his school of thought, it would be better to do away with things like the Paladin entirely and stick to even more generic archetypes, like, say, Warrior, Expert, Adept, Aristocrat, Wright, and then just have almost all of the actual class features be interchangeable... or alternatively, to have a constant stream of new Classes that do essentially the same thing in-game as a bunch of other classes, but have slight variations in flavor that are specific to a given setting or concept. The idea that you can dramatically change the theme of a class by changing its Archetype, including to some very non-traditional variants, feels like a betrayal of the class and literary tradition.

However, it's better game design and more practical by far to do it this way rather than how he wants. Especially for a system with a host of different settings and plenty of people who cook up their own. I see no sense in going to the trouble of building a completely new Class that's going to fill the exact same role as a Paladin is, ending up with the same basic stats and progression, just because I want something that has a psychic flavor for a world where "magic" doesn't exist but psychic powers do, when I can instead just make a Paladin Archetype themed around psychic powers. It's a lot more efficient and less likely to be unbalanced than something intentionally made to be different. I can call it a Paladin or call it something else, but it's the crunch that matters in this kind of situation. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

[Deathhappens]

That's just trying to make a personal sentiment into a factual statement. Even before that, though, this whole conversation on paladins started when you said "5e kept the name for brand purposes while kicking away the flavor that actually distinguished the class."

While the discussion may have drifted to what exactly is the iconic Paladin, that still rings true because indeed 5e has absolutely nothing in terms of Paladin fluff.

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Please excuse me for potentially sounding like a dumbass, but isn't the advantage of tabletop systems that you can simply customize away the stuff you don't like? If you feel strongly about the Paladin class having a very specific identity, then would it not be better to play with people who feel likewise or enforce it as a DM? I don't really understand... it's a social activity. It's more about the people who play it than the system itself. The system only provides a baseline. I dunno, maybe I'm missing something, I've only played like three sessions in my life.

No, and that's been an assertion in this discussion right from thr start, but the basic system is still the baseline you use to build off of and (more pertinently) what new players encounter when they start playing the game. 5e is just old enough now that I've encountered plenty of people who have no idea Paladins were once locked into being Lawful Good and will argue strenuously against it as though it is a novel concept rather than a return to form (though as you can see, how much of a return is somewhat up for debate). And of course, new people thinkiing they're right is just unacceptable.

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You're not wrong. The system is the crunch. Death wants the crunch and the flavor to unified when it comes to what's playable, so he actually wants less customization in this area and more integration between the character classes' themes and mechanics. He wants the game to reflect what he sees as the traditional view of the literary archetypes it draws on and dislikes the idea of reinterpreting those archetypes as something else. I can understand his reasoning, I just disagree with it. Following his school of thought, it would be better to do away with things like the Paladin entirely and stick to even more generic archetypes, like, say, Warrior, Expert, Adept, Aristocrat, Wright, and then just have almost all of the actual class features be interchangeable... or alternatively, to have a constant stream of new Classes that do essentially the same thing in-game as a bunch of other classes, but have slight variations in flavor that are specific to a given setting or concept. The idea that you can dramatically change the theme of a class by changing its Archetype, including to some very non-traditional variants, feels like a betrayal of the class and literary tradition.

However, it's better game design and more practical by far to do it this way rather than how he wants. Especially for a system with a host of different settings and plenty of people who cook up their own. I see no sense in going to the trouble of building a completely new Class that's going to fill the exact same role as a Paladin is, ending up with the same basic stats and progression, just because I want something that has a psychic flavor for a world where "magic" doesn't exist but psychic powers do, when I can instead just make a Paladin Archetype themed around psychic powers. It's a lot more efficient and less likely to be unbalanced than something intentionally made to be different. I can call it a Paladin or call it something else, but it's the crunch that matters in this kind of situation. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

Integration between lore themes and mechanics is game design 101. Reinterpreting an archetype is fine and everything (in the style of Pathfinder's archetypes, for example), but there has to be an immutable core for you to interpret around, otherwise you're just making a new class, and if all you want is the mechanical chassis of a class rather than the theme surrounding it you're better off doing just that.

[Five_X]

You're right, in that the shift from paladins being locked to only Lawful Good to not was a big one, and many people complained. On the other hand, it was a response to shifts in culture that had already taking place: 3/.5e introduced Blackguards and other paladin prestige classes that did not fit the original Cavalier, knight-in-shining-armour model that originated in 1e. These were popular! It used to be that paladins could only be human, and this too was changed. 1e emphasised that paladins were paladins not because of their connection to a god, but because humans had the purity and nobility of spirit that made them alone able to dedicate their lives to the service of a single ideal. It was kind of a mess, yeah.

Go and look for yourself how paladins changed from one edition of D&D to the next, to trace how and where they have evolved over time. You'll find that they never fit your conception of them. They are, more or less, the same: just now the hard roleplaying aspects are no longer built into the class as explicit rules, but are social guides, cues to follow. They're charismatic warriors with an unbreakable ideal: in 5e just as in 1e. Now at least they don't necessarily need an eye-wateringly high CHA to start as, they're not locked to ambiguous concepts like humanity or lawful good alignment. If someone decides to consciously go against that, that's on them (and their DM).

[Zork Knight]

Too much time in my hands a fondness for geography led me to try and think how each Tremere Councillor would divide their continent into 7 regions for their pontiffs. Which led to some funny business, in part because fucking North America. Input from people about my gross mistakes is welcome.

Potential Cultural Insensitivity?

North America
1. Western and Northern Canada
2. Eastern Canada
3. U.S. Pacific Coast
4. U.S. Mountain States
5. Midwest
6. U.S. Northeast
7. U.S. South

Latin America
1. Mexico
2. Central America
3. The Caribbean
4. The Guyanas
5. The Andean States (Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela and Colombia)
6. Brazil
7. The Southern Cone (Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay)

Western Europe and Australia
1. The British Isles
2. Iberia
3. France and Belgium
4. The Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and Austria
5. Scandinavia
6. Italy and Greece
7. Oceania

Eastern Europe
1. Central Europe (Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary)
2. Adriatic States (Former Yugoslavia and Albania)
3. Baltic States
4. Romania, Moldova and Bulgaria
5. Belarus and Ukraine
6. Russia
7. Caucasus (Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia)

Africa (mostly follows UN/African Union scheme)
1. Maghreb
2. Northeast (Horn, Sudan and Egypt)
3. West
4. Nigeria
5. Central
6. Southeast
7. South

Middle East
1. Turkey
2. The Levant (Cyprus, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria)
3. The Arabian Peninsula
4. Iraq
5. Iran
6. Central Asia (including Afghanistan)
7. Pakistan

East Asia
1. India and Nepal
2. Buddhist States (Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos)
3. Muslim States (Bangladesh, Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia)
4. Mongolia, China, Taiwan and Vietnam
5. The Koreas
6. The Philippines
7. Japan

Conforming to contemporary national borders might not be the best idea when you're working with a cabal of 1000-years old vampire wizards, but it's how far I'm willing to go

[Random]

Playing Sword World 2.5. Don't have any high-level thoughts right now beyond "wow Fairy Tamer/Bard/Scout Nightmare is very off-meta". I'm having fun though. Thank you based WotC for completely destroying your own credibility among TTRPGers or else we would never have found this.

[Deathhappens]

Somebody in a group I'm in expressed an interest in running an Exalted campaign, fingers crossed.

[warellis]

Playing Sword World 2.5. Don't have any high-level thoughts right now beyond "wow Fairy Tamer/Bard/Scout Nightmare is very off-meta". I'm having fun though. Thank you based WotC for completely destroying your own credibility among TTRPGers or else we would never have found this.

What do you mean by "very off-meta?"

[Random]

None of these classes nor the race complement each other at all. I'm basically the odd jobs guy for everyone else in the party who actually has a coherent build and my best showings have involved not using any kind of skill checks at all.

Fortunately, my GM has noticed this, so I'm kinda playing a politician first and foremost at this point thanks to her moving to accommodate that.

On a related note, my character is apparently very good at picking extremely rigged fights. Rigged in our favour, of course.

[Twelveseal]

Playing Sword World 2.5. Don't have any high-level thoughts right now beyond "wow Fairy Tamer/Bard/Scout Nightmare is very off-meta". I'm having fun though. Thank you based WotC for completely destroying your own credibility among TTRPGers or else we would never have found this.

In English? Where'd you find that?

[Deathhappens]

In English? Where'd you find that?

0.5 seconds of googling, presumably:https://www.reddit.com/r/SwordWorld/...ok_i_complete/

[mAc Chaos]

None of these classes nor the race complement each other at all. I'm basically the odd jobs guy for everyone else in the party who actually has a coherent build and my best showings have involved not using any kind of skill checks at all.

Fortunately, my GM has noticed this, so I'm kinda playing a politician first and foremost at this point thanks to her moving to accommodate that.

On a related note, my character is apparently very good at picking extremely rigged fights. Rigged in our favour, of course.

Based.

What's Sword World like? D&D but anime?

[Bloble]

Remember the Goblin Slayer game I posted a few months back? That's based on Sword World.