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waking up at 5am for burger prime time is sadly on my murtaugh list these days.
Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)
- Thread starter Surtur
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I'm playing in a Connan 2d20 game today and the dm insisted on rolling characters randomly. I'm like the chosen one Kazakhstani. I rolled the moon killed everyone in my village but my family. I got a super education and my observation skills are good.
No clue how to play it, honestly seems a little boring, but if you got cool ideas I'm open to them
No clue how to play it, honestly seems a little boring, but if you got cool ideas I'm open to them
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Good News the Mumble server is up and running if you got any Ideas on how to change the server for better of for worse do let me know and I will see what i can do
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I think it's more long distance observation I'm think my characters.int is tanked.
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- Jul 11, 2024
To me it sounds like a very fun opportunity to be the party's eyes and ears and tell them the idiot version of whatever you see. This telescope works great but all you can see is colored by the lens of pure retardation.
FatR
kiwifarms.net
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Or, maybe, you know, it was DnD trying to provide experience I can get from a dozens of dedicated low-fantasy games, all just for the sake of being more manageable DnD, as opposed to a game which can be used to reflect any sort of fantasy outside of itself. Bounded accuracy is too bounded for Conan the Barbarian's stories, for fuck's sake (specifically, it excludes existence of tasks, at which a random goon has basically a 0% chance of success, while the protagonist has about 95% - which is the thing making him the protagonist and relevant to the plot).
Now, it might be reasonable to have a relatively short RNG with relatively little difference in sheer numbers between a random kobold and an apocalyptic monster, with the latter expanding the gap through special abilities it has. DnD ran with this idea up until the advent of 3E. IF you believe that apocalyptic monsters and high=end heroes should potentially be threatened by mook swarms (the idea with which I personally disagree), it is also possible to go the way of 3.X and keep some of the defensive stats from scaling inherently with the offensive stats, so that high-level entities by default have a big hp cushion to keep them from dying, but those hps can potentially be depleted by a regiment of archers, or something.
So even if you really don't want runaway numbers inflation, there are superior solutions to bounded accuracy.
Also, one the question "but what's stopping heroes from shanking the king and taking over" mentioned a page after. The proper answer is "nothing". You cannot have a heroic narrative where heroes do NOT stand above everyone else on the same side. The whole idea is obviously self-contradictory and stupid. Even in the settings where "standing above everyone else" does not mean "can take on everyone else combined in a straight fight and win". As I mentioned Conan already, he did shank the king and took over, quite literally. Basically as soon as PCs graduate from glorified tomb robbers and bounty hunters to doing any sort of actual fantasy - even most of low fantasy - plots, you have to deal with the fact that the political map of the world is going to be redrawn. In fantasy worlds you can protect cornerstone polities with hidden supernatural reserves which can only be drawn in the most extreme of situations, or build tiered settingss, where superhuman entities engage in their own politics beyond comprehension of people below and patronize mundane kindgoms for one reason or another, and that ensures some stability against random murderhobos who get power-mad after gaining just a bit of real power, but does not change the basic equation. If PCs are needed to save a kingdom, then the fate of that kingdom is under PCs control, and so the king's best bet is to be friendly and polite to them.
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Might it be an idea to keep the specifics private and just send out to people via DM who are confirmed to be in the game? Or are you intending this to be a general use voice server for people?
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- Nov 15, 2021
You can't reenact Robert E. Howard novels using any D&D rule set (for one thing, Conan is a very low-fantasy sort of story), and I don't believe you've ever even tried to, let alone found 3.5 adequate to the task and gave up in frustrated when trying to run your annual Conan simulator in 5e. Have you ever even read a Conan novel, for that matter?
Look through the stats for regents in the World of Greyhawk booklets. King Owen I of the Grand Duchy of Geoff is a 14th level fighter. Hazen of the Archclericy of Veluna is a 19th level cleric. Margus, the ruler of the Free City of Dyvers is a 17th level Thief. There's no scenario where a gang of guys, fresh off their first owlbear kill, is going to overthrow a kingdom.
Clearly, none of your complaints come from actual play experience. As I said, everyone mad about 5e's AC topping out in the mid twenties and the to-hit bonus peaking at around +15 isn't mad from their play experiences; they just like being mad online.
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- Apr 25, 2020
That, and you can assume most of those rulers would have retinues of similar level.
It's not just the PCs gaining levels out in the world, after all. If the PCs can get together and gain experience killing bandits and dungeon-delving, the NPCs can grind out levels in military campaigns and special missions for the crown. Assuming they didn't start out as adventurers themselves, anyway.
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From the AD&D Monster Manual:
"Bandits will always be led by an 8th, 9th, or 10th level fighter, with 6 guards of the 2nd level fighting ability and a lieutenant of 7th level...for every 50 bandits there is a 25% chance that there will be a magic-user of 7th, 8th, 9th, or 10th level...a 15% chance that there will be a cleric of 5th or 6th level."
At owlbear-hunting levels, you aren't even able to clear a hex of its bandit problem.
FatR
kiwifarms.net
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Try to engage with my posts, not with voices in your head, if you want a serious answer.
(1)The exact number of levels over which the supposed progression is stretched changes absolutely nothing for my argument.
(2)I'm well aware of the fact that Gygax tended to place the point of qualifying from a tomb robber to a hero around level 15, which was, IMO, too high, given the scope of character abilities. But still, this was in the game where levels just in PHB went to Level 36 (for humans, at least, demi-human races had their own weird progression where they, IIRC, kept gaining abilities without gaining any more "levels" after level 12 or so), before even exploring any strange add-ons like the Immortal ruleset. So levels 15 to 19 meant a lot less back then, than in iterations of DnD that had no support for going past level 20 (or only in their own strange add-ons). While high-level OD&D was never entirely coherent, the general idea clearly was that of a tiered setting where at 19th level a character may be a hot shit on his insignificant continent, but is not nowhere near the top of even the default totem pole, and there may be whole different realms of incredible cosmic power above him.
Again try not to argue with voices in your head.
All you're saying is "you must be THIS tall instead of THAT tall" to qualify from zero to hero. The fundamental nature of a hero does not change, you just have to grind more before reaching the status. By the way, if you want to add enough grind to make the status realistically unreachable in your typical campaign, because you're not comfortable with PCs redrawing political maps, why not run a game that is geared towards low fantasy to start with?
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- Oct 20, 2019
TBC, this isn't me entering into the discussion on either side, but Monte Cook took a crack at Conan style D20 with his Iron Heroes line:
Had some great ideas mechanically and a real Robert E. Howard vibe. Magic was low-key and associated with evil, armour existed but wasn't typical. So not lines of knights in platemail so much as a "secret of steel" sort of vibe. I never got to play it so I can't speak for how balanced it got as you went on but the character classes were very specialised and barring the sorcerer which was explicitly discouraged for players, heavily focused on martial classes. You had a barbarian class which received tokens when injured, an armiger class focused on defence, the harrier which was an absolutely great hyper-mobile class, the executioner which did very narrow focused, very high damage, an archer class which was quite deadly. I'd be very interested to hear from anyone who got to play it. I'd have loved to but never got the chance. It looked like the best D20 variant to me, though. Much more interesting than regular D&D. Very, very Conan feel.
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You complained that you can't reenact Conan in 5e. I pointed out that you can't reenact it in any edition; the inability to act out Ronald E Howard stories via the game rule set is hardly a unique problem of 5e's to-hit numbers.
You didn't answer my question about whether or not you've read Conan books.
Your argument appeared to be that there's something wrong with 5e because the party isn't the most powerful group of people in the world. I pointed out that they aren't in AD&D, either. You weren't expected to ever get much past 10th-15th level in real games (and it takes years to get that far). The most powerful people in the World of Greyhawk are regents, because, as written, you can't rule a kingdom until 10th level. By the way, a Pit Demon has 13 hit dice in AD&D, so yes, 19th level is very much "hot shit." Anyone who can solo a pit fiend and expect to win is "hot shit."
I bring this up because the scenario that kicked this discussion off, of the party coming back from a simple fetch-quest and overthrowing the king, is not supposed to happen in D&D because kings are supposed to be high level.
The Immortal ruleset is part of the Mentzer series, not AD&D.
You responded to my post about how people who bitch about bounded accuracy are not talking from play experience...with a post bitching about bounded accuracy that clearly has no real play experience behind it. I've noticed a common theme over the years. People who bitch about BA
- Have typically never played any edition except 3.5
- Have zero bad experiences with 5e's hit bonuses & defenses they can point to
- Haven't actually read any classic fantasy
- Theorycraft a lot and play very little
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- Apr 25, 2020
Where did I say players don't get to redraw fantasy maps?
I said that kings and other high leaders are high-level characters, and surround themselves with advisors and bodyguards of similarly high level because it only makes sense in a universe where people can become superhuman with enough adventuring. The players don't just get to shank the king and take over like you implied. If they want to kill a king they'll have an actual fight in their hands (including the equivalent of a dragon's lair's worth of magical countermeasures in the king's castle) and if they win it good on them. They still have to gain control over the rest of the kingdom, because most national entities aren't ruled by "you keep what you kill".
If players want to take over a kingdom, they have to do it either politically by gathering allies within the kingdom before their attempt, or militarily by bringing in allies from outside of it. Once everything is in place, then they get to fight the king. Just pretending a bunch of adventurers can stab a king and claim rightful rulership over anything but a bandit warband is retarded.
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Indeed. Let's look at a 12th level Fighter in AD&D. At 12th level, he should have earned around 1 million gp in treasure. To keep his treasure secure, he needs to have built himself a freehold. He'll have a company of perhaps 50-100 infantry to garrison it, led by another fighter of 5th-7th level.
On top of that, the world of D&D is expected to be primarily inhabited by brigands and monsters, with most of the map untamed, so there's no need to go conquer the Duchy of Geoff and slay Owen. It's much more practical to slay The Red Raider and his bandits, claim the hex as your own, and build there. In all likelihood, King Owen has specifically asked you to do so and will make you an earl over that territory once you do.
In my ACKS game, the players have only just recently established themselves a stronghold, though they're not ready to rule territory yet. They're simply not strong enough to attract the kind of band you would need to do that.
FatR
kiwifarms.net
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I made no implications. I stated directly that they get to do so.
What makes you think so in the world where two hands explicitly can be stronger than four?
Why do you want to play heroic fantasy, of all genres? I'm asking quite seriously. I mean, your scenario belongs in historical fiction or low fantasy that explicitly emulates history, where, of course, a bunch of adventurers still totally can stab (or abduct, or poison, or otherwise eliminate) a king, but they will have to be sneaky and clever about it, and they will need allies and soldiers and supporters and shit to actually benefit from such action.
But fantasy? Let's bring some more examples shall we? From pre-DnD times, and books only, so no really crazy shit here. Oh, all right, there is crazy shit here, just no characters with free nukes on demand.
In The Broken Sword the main character literally cuts a king to pieces after hewing his way through that king's army, and single-handedly turns a hopeless last stand into a crushing victory.
Elric of Melnibone personally kills a whole bunch of rulers, and slaughters the entire ruling counsil and sorcerer-soldier army of a major city once. He wasn't even using sorcery or dragons that time. Other Moorcock's characters usually have more need of armies and mundane weapons, yet under right circumstances still topple empires and slay gods.
Princes of Amber have no real rivals but each other and a handful other entities comparable in stature, all other creatures are tools and pawns. Much of their activities are centered about overthrowing and killing whomever of them sits on the throne at the moment. (Note, that even some of characters from other Zelazny's books would look on abilities like "can recruit a few hundred thousands of normal humanoid soldiers" or "moderate physical enhancement" and ask why these weaklings are supposed to be a big deal. So would people wielding most versions of DnD magic.)
Fafhrd and Gray Mouser are far towards the low end of fantasy, have comparatively limited ambitions, and live in a somewhat-absurdist world, so rulers tend to drop dead around them without their direct action. When dealing with things like a huge pirate fleet, they need to deploy cunning and plot devices. Yet they still have crossed blades with princes and murderhoboed their way through powerful organizations.
I hope you get the idea. Heroes do heroic deeds. Fantasy heroes do fantastic heroic deeds. Cutting down a king by your own hand may be not even be particularly noteworthy. Like, how slaying of Taur Urgas, a king of a big realm, in The Belgariad is a fairly minor episode, because that book series deals with battling an evil god, not a mere king.
Now, please tell me, why heroes in DnD, whose abilities and written and intended can greatly overshadow most of the people mentioned above (at least without the latter's plot devices) should find shanking kings to be so inherently difficult? Please do not restate the already-noted argument of the setting somewhat undererstimating what the game allows the characters to do, and being quite liberal with assigning levels (not that this only became really noticeable, when the level scale was compessed to 20, yet NPCs mostly did not went though appropriate downleveling, in fact, often the opposite - in the earlier editions, level 10 bandit leaders were more understandable, as the maximul level ranged from 29 to 36),
The argument that the world must keep itself stable, because it hadn't fell apart yet, is similarly not an argument in the first place. If the interesting times are upon us, the adventure is happening and the heroes are needed, the world is obviously not stable. Like, by definition. In fact, look at actual DnD worlds, and at how often they suffer humongous catastrophes, up to and incluiding alterations to the very laws of reality. Clearly, mere political change should not be a big deal...
...Yet it often is. In my opinion this is just mostly the matter of convenience that turned into a deeply-ingrained habit. The same core reason why nothing ever really changes in capeshit settings, despite parades of aliens, gods, AIs, and whatever the fuck staging one crisis after another. Redrawing the map and thinking through all the cascading consequences is just an extra hassle. This argument I can accept. But I'd prefer if people defused such problems by methods already mentioned in this thread, like making sure that the local ruler is PCs best buddy, and directing their energies towards conquering Dens of Evil. Instead of suddenly pretending that the king and his retinue were always high enough level to handle the Dark Lord from the Den of Evil, but relegated that work to PCs for some reason.
P.S. And all of this is related only tangentially to the reason why bounded accuracy sucks. It does not suck because a horde of guards can eventually overpower Conan. It sucks because a random guard can succeed at climbing Tower of the Elephant or killing a vulture with one's bare teeth, and probability of success won't even be that miniscule.
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- Sep 7, 2019
since I was the one who made the initial example, I want to inject: if the king is that high level, why does he need the heroes?
my point was rather cramming everything into numbers and then trying to make sense of it like the average /tg/ "stat me" thread, you'll inevitably need some suspension of disbelief (and gm fiat) or divorce from the numbers to some degree.
that's all.
my point was rather cramming everything into numbers and then trying to make sense of it like the average /tg/ "stat me" thread, you'll inevitably need some suspension of disbelief (and gm fiat) or divorce from the numbers to some degree.
that's all.
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The king doesn't go off to kill an owlbear harassing some random village 15 miles away in D&D for the same reason Donald Trump doesn't rake the sand traps at Mar-a-Lago.
But you're right, D&D has never been a world simulation engine, and you shouldn't overthink the implications of what a THAC0 of 2 means.
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FWIW, the random guard shouldn't try to climb the tower because the random guard's life matters to him. A DM might say "one in a hundred times this guy will succeed" but the guard says "There's a 99% chance I am so dead." That's what makes the heroes heroes. They are willing to risk their lives.
This whole conversation takes me back to simpler times.
It's absurd in real terms to imagine character level equating to political station. Even if the king was some barbarian warlord who fought his way to power, he didn't do so by himself and he doesn't stay young forever, either. You can construct some setting in which rulership is determined by right of combat or knowledge of the arcane, but you're retroactively fitting the setting to the rules conceit and it's not going to match up many more normal fantasy worlds. I never really noticed the absurdity of getting to level 9 and now you become a baron but that's how the boxed sets were pretty much laid out. Basic rules had levels 1-3. Killing zombies and panicking when a Carrion Crawler emerges. Expert introduced the big guns and rules for wilderness adventures. Imagine that - it was expected that below level 4 you wouldn't have any adventures in a forest. If that doesn't illustrate the game-y nature of this then nothing does. The Companion box set introduced rules for managing your kingdom, the master set for going on a quest to become immortal. Levels were so tied to stages of game play because that's how things were meant to unfold in a story - the plucky heroes growing to be rulers in castles and archmages in towers. And to make that conceit work, NPCs followed best practice as well. The king was a high level fighter because a PC king would be.
Happy days. Simple. But doesn't work once you start wanting to run more adult campaigns. I've GM'd for younger players (like 19-21) and it's weird how they think they can just kill someone and take their stuff. This is in a sci-fi setting, 'No, their van is not now yours because you killed him. The police will be looking for it'. Or 'if we kill this guy we're now in charge'. No, it doesn't work that way.
Isn't this all really just a question of whether you're okay with following a D&D boxed set style approach or not?