Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)

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Ghostse said:
IIRC the boiled & waxed leather was mostly used for chest protection and gauntlets. Because while its true that leather is pretty labor intensive its got nothing on refining & smithing metal.
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Chest and back pieces with attached shoulder pads, and gloves, boots, and a helmet. IIRC the Roman-era Germanic tribes made leather helmets that visually resembled spangenhelms by taking hardened leather and reinforcing it with a few metal bands. Not bad protection in the Classical era considering the primary weapons were iron shortswords and spears. Hardened leather was cheap compared to iron or cloth, and its ability to protect against light and incidental blows is why I find the notion of Romans wearing leather bracers to be quite plausible despite the lack of reliable sources on it considering it had good chances of stopping a thrust from the military weapons in use at the time from completely fucking up your forearm. And in cities considering how rampant crime and the risk of politically-motivated assassinations were, some fancy-looking arm bands that doubled as armor could literally be a life saver in case some guys came at you with daggers.
 
Snekposter said:
And in cities considering how rampant crime and the risk of politically-motivated assassinations were, some fancy-looking arm bands that doubled as armor could literally be a life saver in case some guys came at you with daggers.
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That's why, while I don't think the concept of "leather armor" is strictly historically accurate, there were certainly types of military gear employing leather. You wouldn't have gone to buy a suit of "leather armor," but you very well may have put together a collection of leather items to protect vital regions, and unless you wanted to go full Dwarf Fortress levels of detail, it seems like a reasonable simplification just to go that way rather than requiring every player to choose some kind of collection of items.

Without a system of assigning hits to specific body parts, it would have been pointless to go into that level of detail anyway.
 
AnOminous said:
That's why, while I don't think the concept of "leather armor" is strictly historically accurate, there were certainly types of military gear employing leather. You wouldn't have gone to buy a suit of "leather armor," but you very well may have put together a collection of leather items to protect vital regions, and unless you wanted to go full Dwarf Fortress levels of detail, it seems like a reasonable simplification just to go that way rather than requiring every player to choose some kind of collection of items.

Without a system of assigning hits to specific body parts, it would have been pointless to go into that level of detail anyway.
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Yeah, I think the way D&D does armor certainly works well enough as a general abstraction. If you were using a ruleset that had hit locations then you would need more detail, but for a hit/nohit system my only real fault with how D&D does it is is that Dex is far too powerful as a means of protection and taken to the logical extreme you'd be seeing entire armies of shortsword dudes in studded leather swinging and missing and dodging arrows like Agent Smith dancing around bullets.
 
Snekposter said:
Yeah, I think the way D&D does armor certainly works well enough as a general abstraction. If you were using a ruleset that had hit locations then you would need more detail, but for a hit/nohit system my only real fault with how D&D does it is is that Dex is far too powerful as a means of protection and taken to the logical extreme you'd be seeing entire armies of shortsword dudes in studded leather swinging and missing and dodging arrows like Agent Smith dancing around bullets.
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And really its an abstraction on top of an abstraction. When players lose HP above 0, I always treat it as they have reduced their ability to remain upright. That might mean they are bleeding, or maybe just countering a frenzied orc attack has exhausted them to the point they might collapse if they take a hit.
 
Wife picked up the shadowrun starter box from 2019 at a con because she was curious about it, and let me tell you how fucking queer it is. For $24 I was hoping for more than there was in this box. There’s not much more info than just enough to play as 3 premade characters and GM. The campaign is set in Seattle of all places because it’s sixth city. The only thing I liked was the pink and black D6 they give you that’d I’d use with my sororitas to keep track of faith.

I really hate those starter boxes, they’re overpriced and don’t give you more than the very bare minimum for one light campaign that doesn’t do good enough of a job demonstrating the game or convincing you to buy the full game book. The only one I’ve ever seen not completely suck ass was the battletech essentials because it MSRPs for $25 and you get a $20 voucher for CGL’s online store.
 
tiefling said:
The campaign is set in Seattle of all places because it’s sixth city.
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To be fair Seattle is the main focus of Shadowrun. After the great ghost dance UCAS was formed and the one point on the Pacific was Seattle which turned into a megacity. So it borders a bunch of interesting shit like the native territories and Tir Tairngire (California but elves took it over and somehow made it less gay? I don't know.) Thinking more about Shadowrun lore I'm pretty sure the south rose again and there's just a confederacy now. Also a dragon was president and then got assassinated by some portal. There's a bunch of cool shit in that setting, I'm surprised some youtube guy doesn't make lore videos about it.
 
Mr. Manchester said:
To be fair Seattle is the main focus of Shadowrun. After the great ghost dance UCAS was formed and the one point on the Pacific was Seattle which turned into a megacity. So it borders a bunch of interesting shit like the native territories and Tir Tairngire (California but elves took it over and somehow made it less gay? I don't know.) Thinking more about Shadowrun lore I'm pretty sure the south rose again and there's just a confederacy now. Also a dragon was president and then got assassinated by some portal. There's a bunch of cool shit in that setting, I'm surprised some youtube guy doesn't make lore videos about it.
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They will probably in the future, some soy faced guy that’s super excited about his shortform video about how to make a nonbinary PC.
 
The autistic fuck artificer in my game has pushed me about to my limit.

He plays the armorer, which means he's tanky as fuck and has great saving throws. It also means that he plays as if his character is immortal. They're level 10, so anytime they see a generic group of humanoids, he knows that he can just get away with anything. Recently he went into a combat solo against one of the lead bad guys and six of his goons. The fucker managed to escape using Hypnotic Pattern on the boss, and wanted to turn around to fight his thugs on 1hp. With healing and my refusal to cheese rolls he managed to not die and decided to run back to the boss to try to steal his weapon. I wasn't about to allow that and he ended up just escaping. This was all in the middle of a city full of soldiers searching for them by the way. I'll blame my inexperience as a DM for this as there are lots of way that I should've killed his character in that instance. Everyone was perfectly polite during the whole thing too, but when the other players played out what they did during all this? He constantly piped up and had things to say. He even backseated them in character thanks to telepathy.

You can use minions/summons for the "Help" action according to the 5e rules, but he seems to think that means he gets advantage on any ability check as long as his homunculus is nearby. He's tried to use it to help him with climbing something and got pissy when I explained that a tiny creature with 4 strength can't help someone in plate climb anything. Even without the homunculus, he always tries to tack his character onto anything anyone else is doing in an attempt to "Help". He'll say he's going to help and then spend 30 seconds fumbling to figure out what that means when I ask.

I've tried to explain to him that turns are six seconds ingame time and they wouldn't be able to stop and have lengthy strategy meetings but he never shuts the fuck up. During battle he constantly tries to backseat the other players. I asked them about this and they don't seem as annoyed as I am, which is ridiculous to me. It completely takes me out of the scene and turns the game into a turnbased strategy. But then when I want to have the bad guy talk to them in the midst of combat that's when he starts questioning the length of turns.

In our latest session I had given them a magic container that heals them when touched for a full minute, but causes a random magic effect when opened. It was also cursed to charm whoever uses it and force them to open it. Our warlock went down and suggested using it. They'd only just acquired it and didn't know about the curse, I didn't remember exactly how it worked either so I said yes. I realized it says one minute after they'd healed, but figured it might spice up an otherwise boring fight. Well the item healed him and the random effect it caused was casting harm on everyone nearby. The artificer was downed and started telling me it was a shitty thing to do as dm, that I bent the rules to force a loss, etc. We had to pause the combat there due to time, but I'm extremely tempted to kill the motherfucker next time even if it means the group is done as a result.

Early on in our games we had another player in the party. To be honest this guy was kind of retarded and had anger issues, but I appreciated that he actually played his character and would suggest doing unorthodox things to solve problems. He clashed with our artificer though and ended up quitting. If there's one thing I regret, it's trying to appease them both and not just telling our artificer he sucks.

I guess I'm just fuming over being called a poor DM, which I don't even deny. I'm awkward and can't always come up with quick reactions for NPCs. However I'm also the only one of this group that was willing to take the time to do it.
 
Mr. Manchester said:
(California but elves took it over and somehow made it less gay? I don't know.)
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Na, its Oregon that the elves took over and made more gay. TL;DR a bunch of elven faggots took over Oregon, shoved all of the non-elves into Portland, and then proceeded to LARP as feudal lords over the rest of the state. Oh, and like all good authoritarians they made all the plebians serve a term in the military so they knew who was boss... which would later backfire on them, of course.
 
Snekposter said:
Yeah, I think the way D&D does armor certainly works well enough as a general abstraction. If you were using a ruleset that had hit locations then you would need more detail, but for a hit/nohit system my only real fault with how D&D does it is is that Dex is far too powerful as a means of protection and taken to the logical extreme you'd be seeing entire armies of shortsword dudes in studded leather swinging and missing and dodging arrows like Agent Smith dancing around bullets.
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D&D's always had a bit of a problem mixing up dexterity and agility. You can't be agile without also being strong.

tiefling said:
I really hate those starter boxes, they’re overpriced and don’t give you more than the very bare minimum for one light campaign that doesn’t do good enough of a job demonstrating the game or convincing you to buy the full game book.
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Starter boxes from Warlord Games do. You get enough minis to play the game:

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And the rules you get are enough to play the full game using the included minis. Not an RPG, though...do we have a wargames thread?
 
tiefling said:
The campaign is set in Seattle of all places because it’s sixth city.
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Seattle has been the "default" setting of Shadowrun since day one, mostly because as the UCAS only possession on the Pacific coast, a massive port city exclave surrounded by Injuns, it offers all sorts of shadowrunning opportunities since everyone wants to control it.

Mr. Manchester said:
California but elves took it over and somehow made it less gay? I don't know
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As Snekposter pointed out, the Elves took over Oregon. California instead decided to secede and become the Cal Free State, at which point they got gangbanged. Tir Tairngire invaded from the north and took everything down to Mt Shasta. Aztlan invaded from the south and took San Diego, and the Japs invaded and took San Francisco. Add in some super earthquakes, a nuclear meltdown and LA becoming a Free City (before being snatched by injuns), and the place is generally the kind of shithole you'd expect California to turn into tbh.

Mr. Manchester said:
Thinking more about Shadowrun lore I'm pretty sure the south rose again and there's just a confederacy now.
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There's the United Canadian American States, which is most of the old eastern and mid western USA and eastern Canada, minus Quebec which went it's own way. Then there's the Confederated American States which is basically the american south, minus Miami/Southern Florida (which belongs to the Carib League), and Western/South Western Texas which belongs to Aztlan and the PCC.

Mr. Manchester said:
Also a dragon was president and then got assassinated by some portal.
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That was Dunkelzahn aka Big D, and he wasn't assassinated by a portal, he was killed by a car bomb, and his death tore open the Watergate Rift. Spoilers ahead (for decades old lore admittedly, but still):

Except he may not have been assassinated and instead it's theorised he sacrificed himself as part of an enormous Blood Magic ritual to empower an artifact known as the Dragonheart, which is used to stop the Horrors from invading the Sixth World too early.
 
Big Green said:
I've tried to explain to him
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This is the problem, you have done the cerebral thing and explained, you must follow it up with the visceral thing and strike him with your shoe.
This will put the fear of Allah into the sodomite, and inshallah he will correct his behavior.
 
tiefling said:
I really hate those starter boxes, they’re overpriced and don’t give you more than the very bare minimum for one light campaign that doesn’t do good enough of a job demonstrating the game or convincing you to buy the full game book. The only one I’ve ever seen not completely suck ass was the battletech essentials because it MSRPs for $25 and you get a $20 voucher for CGL’s online store.
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They've definitely gotten worse. I had the 3.5e basic game as a kid and it was pretty great. Came with modular dungeon map tiles for the adventure, as well as miniatures for the pre-gen characters and the monsters in the dungeon.
 
tiefling said:
Wife picked up the shadowrun starter box from 2019 at a con because she was curious about it, and let me tell you how fucking queer it is. For $24 I was hoping for more than there was in this box. There’s not much more info than just enough to play as 3 premade characters and GM. The campaign is set in Seattle of all places because it’s sixth city. The only thing I liked was the pink and black D6 they give you that’d I’d use with my sororitas to keep track of faith.

I really hate those starter boxes, they’re overpriced and don’t give you more than the very bare minimum for one light campaign that doesn’t do good enough of a job demonstrating the game or convincing you to buy the full game book. The only one I’ve ever seen not completely suck ass was the battletech essentials because it MSRPs for $25 and you get a $20 voucher for CGL’s online store.
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And here I thought only the D&D 5e starter sets sucked and that the standard was something like the PF2e begginers's box which is honestly pretty good: two booklets with an abridged version of the rules and two adventures (one solo and another for 4 players), a bunch of monster standees, dice and my favourite: cardboard handouts with the action rules.
 
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