Tabletop Games Thread

[Mcjon01]

There’s still gonna be randomly generated loot everywhere though right

[mAc Chaos]

im gonna roll a d6 after every monster kill and drop a health potion on a 5-6

its only the beginning

also different item qualities

[Twelveseal]

Aha. That makes sense. If you think it might help in the long run, iirc, there's a 3e Diablo Supplement that might give you some ideas to try for 5e, assuming you don't have it already. I can scrounge it up if you're interested.

Actually, seems like there were three of these things. Huh.

[Ratman]

Askari literally get Faerie Fire in D2 from first level, in Inner Sight, even though no player has ever put more than one point into it, so at least that bit plays well with lore.

The thing with javelins not being finesse ties into a larger issue of 5e, in which there is no reason to use a spear unless it's magical and you don't have an alternative.

[Deathhappens]

Askari literally get Faerie Fire in D2 from first level, in Inner Sight, even though no player has ever put more than one point into it, so at least that bit plays well with lore.

The thing with javelins not being finesse ties into a larger issue of 5e, in which there is no reason to use a spear unless it's magical and you don't have an alternative.

Spears are the only Simple weapon to also be Versatile, so there is that. But agreed that 5e has a serious problem of weapon sameface; which is understandable really since without critical ranges and with the damage dice flattened due to design, how many different ways can you make a 1d6 weapon?

[Ratman]

2e, which is similarly flat to 5e, didn't have a problem with this, and added 10 actually different polearms for good measure, jokes about it notwithstanding.

Then again 2e weapons really rely on Charge being a thing everyone knows about, much like the rest of the system revolves around everyone being on the same page, and you get infinity engine games where melee sucks because devs didn't know charge action is pretty closely tied to the system math. 5e goes weirdly halfway through where it adds special combat actions like bull rush that you have to have read about, so you can't complain about it trying to simplify this part of the system. You could add stuff like parrying by attacking someone's attack roll with a ready action and whatnot from former editions, it would hardly hurt. Then you just tie different weapons to different special combat actions and you're good.

I mean it's still not pathfinder where katanas are for some reason strictly the best one-handed weapon that exists for almost anything you could want to do, so at least there's that.

[Deathhappens]

...I played Pathfinder and I don't remember that, but then my DM at the time banned all weaboo stuff so I might just have glossed over it. Sounds like something there would be more memes about though, if it were true.

[Ratman]

It's actually not completely true as I now find, and not a serious issue in the system that gets to the second decimal of flat damage bonus on level 1, but you can tell that when they came with Eastern Weapons statlines they were like 'yeah but katana has to be the best sword in the game though'.

Katana is 1d8, 18-20x2, deadly. You need exotic weapon proficiency feat to use it one-handed, but there's a bunch of stuff that can give it to you for free. It's furthermore pretty funny that it's a two-handed regular weapon (as good as the Falchion!) until you get the proficiency, when a katana is literally not a one-handed sword and the only guy who ever used it as such did so because he had frog fingers, and none of his students could ever replicate it.

For comparsion:
Longsword is 1d8, 19-20x2, that's it, longswords are strictly worse than katanas, you've heard it here first. They're also strictly worse than Estocs.
Cutlass, Rapier and Scimitar, martial one-handed weapons, are 1d6, 18-20x2, that's it
The Waveblade is 1d6 18-20x2 too, but is also a monk weapon, but is also exotic
The Rhoka, another exotic weapon, is 1d8 18-20x, that's it.
The Urumi, another eastern weapon, is 1d8 18-20x, that's it

One one-handed exotic weapon that somewhat matches or perhaps beats the katana outright is Estoc, which is 2d4, 18-20x2, versatile, and finesse.
The Tongi is also 1d6, 19-20x3, which lets you do crazy stuff.
Pathfinder weapon table is clearly unbalanced despite having a million mechanics it could use to balance its weapons or give them gimmicks. Pathfinder is deliberately stupid, more news at 11.

[Twelveseal]

I haz a sad. I tend to mess around with PF. Any suggestions on what to fix in it and how?

[Ratman]

PF does not exactly need fixing. It needs a GM with a holistic comphrehension of the system and ecletic memory having read every single publication there is. Or at least having enough sense to ban combinations that break past a certain math treshold. To do so you also need to declare what interactions are not intended and about how high should numbers feasibly go per level in a class. I want to say CR should be a hint, but it's all over the place too.

- - - Updated - - -

Basically PF either works if no one cheats, or everybody cheats including the GM. But you probably want the former, because the latter makes for boring games in which you can't present a party with a problem that isn't a combat encounter.

[Twelveseal]

Sounds reasonable, though I suspect an RP where anyone but the GM cheats would have problems by default.

Good to know about the need for caps and math watching.

[mAc Chaos]

I decided it's just easier to let the Amazon use spears and the like as finesse weapons. Doc -> Changed

I made a changelog to the doc that I update since I've added to it here and there like this, so you don't have to dig through the thread to know.

Coming up on one week left for submissions!

[SpoonyViking]

Somewhat apropos of the recent discussion, I found several 5E abilities to scale poorly.

[Ratman]

Sounds reasonable, though I suspect an RP where anyone but the GM cheats would have problems by default.

Good to know about the need for caps and math watching.

Well, that said, there are a lot of things in PF that are just stupid in the sense of not being conductive to a good tabletop game.

Rumormonger
School divination; Level bard 2, inquisitor 2, medium 1, mesmerist 2, psychic 3
CASTING
Casting Time 1 standard action
Components V

EFFECT
Range long (400 ft. + 40 ft./level)
Effect 1 rumor
Duration 1 day/level (D)
Saving Throw Will negates (see text); Spell Resistance yes

DESCRIPTION
You utter a brief anecdote or bit of news as the verbal component of this spell and track its progress through a social gathering or other crowd. When someone who heard the rumor directly from you and repeated the rumor is within your range, they glow silver to your sight, though this glow doesn’t occur if the creature is in disguise (unless it was in the same disguise at the time of casting). You can choose to follow the rumor by selecting any such creature in range, at which point the creatures who heard the rumor from you no longer glow silver, and now the creatures who heard the rumor from your chosen creature glow silver instead. You can follow the rumor’s path until you reach a creature that heard the rumor but didn’t repeat it (or repeated it incorrectly). The glow identifies only creatures who heard the same information you conveyed. Minor cosmetic changes in the rumor don’t interrupt the chain, but when the rumor no longer resembles the information you imparted, the trail stops and the spell ends.

You can instead use this spell to trace a rumor back to its source once you hear it. In this case, you repeat the rumor as you heard it for the spell’s verbal component. The person who told you the rumor can attempt a Will save to end the effect. Failure indicates the silver glow leads to the individual that told her. This process continues each time you locate the next individual spreading the same information. Each individual attempts the save until one of them succeeds (in which case the spell ends and you can’t attempt to trace this particular rumor again) or you trace the rumor to its original source. As with the other application of the spell, tracing a rumor back fails to cause a creature to glow if it is in disguise, unless it was in the same disguise at the time of speaking the rumor.

Case in point. Why does this spell exist? So that the guy playing a Bard can dodge twenty sentences of actually communicating with the GM and the other characters that's going to come up exactly once in a campaign, if at all? So that you can get to combat faster?

As a GM, you really want to be able to present the players with a lot of stick and rope sorts of situations. Figuring those out lets the players feel challenged, and smart once they figure them out, and you get to pad your content after a week of double time at work and everyone is happy. PF tends to hand out teleportation/flight/mindcontrol/conditionalinstantkills like candy, so you want to really carefully read your player's sheets, including asking about what they're going to want to be able to do in the future, in order to know how you'll even be able to challenge them.

[castor212]

if i put a placeholder image in place of damegami's on the doc

would that be used in the game?

[Zurvan]

The way it was in previous games, you had an in-game token with the face (or what have you) and one image in your background

but I don't see why you couldn't swap out art later (before the game starts) if its within reason
(but I'm not the GM)

[mAc Chaos]

if i put a placeholder image in place of damegami's on the doc

would that be used in the game?

It's meant to represent your character, so yes. You could find another picture later of the same character later, perhaps, but it's meant to show who you're playing.

For example, here's one profile (added into roll20) from another game:



Then here's the tokens associated with it, that represent your character on the battle map:



So the picture can serve both as your in-game profile and your token.

[Zurvan]

if i put a placeholder image in place of damegami's on the doc

would that be used in the game?

but the real strat is to leave the damegami in as your own face claim

(well, unless people have done that already)

[castor212]

thats wicked

[Deathhappens]

Is that Zoi in the middle