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

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Roybertitos said:
My approach to creating NPCs is to usually take a character from another piece of media like games, movies, anime, whatever and sort of adapt them as best as I can for the setting. I take their base characteristics like their accents, personalities, abilities, motivations, etc. and add on a few more things to make it unique. It's a lot quicker than coming up with something completely original and usually I change them so drastically no one notices. If they do, my players have a laugh that they caught me, it's all for fun after all.

For example, in a Cyberpunk inspired D&D 5e campaign I took the visual style of Roman Torchwick from RWBY (this was before I dropped the show like a rock, it's pretty shit now) gave him a different name and kept his roguish personality. Then I made him a Drow, and figured it'd be cool if he was a bard and gave him a jazz bar as a front for his criminal enterprise. Since one of my players watched the show at the time, I changed his weapon to two revolvers so they wouldn't catch it.

Add some lore that I don't wanna get into cause this post is long enough then boom, you have an interesting criminal contact for the rogue in the party and a convenient source for quest lines. Gives you more time to focus on the actual story and worldbuilding.
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My first campaign I DMed ever had my players (their first game ever too) just constantly harassing every NPC I introduced, often before I could finish describing the scene. "There's a fruitcart vendor with..." "I knock his fruitcart over." Ect. Murder in the street wasn't too far behind. That's when Snake Plissken the bounty hunter showed up.
 
Yeah, I needed a potion vendor in my game once so I created "Jones" the mad scientist. He was a veteran of a war over ancient knowledge, sold weight loss pills, and ranted about gay frogs (the Slaad were a recurring enemy). Big hit with the players, and he was fun to play in game.

Another time I wanted a bumbling investigator to shadow the group (they were playing a hardened criminal organization), so I ran Steven Crowder's face through a portrait ai app and set him loose. They killed him immediately.
 
DDBCAE CBAADCBE said:
I’m really happy you didn’t add Steven King into that mix as many people would. It shows that you’re actually a fan of the craft and not just some trend chasing poser.
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There was a time when I liked King, but he has committed two grievous sins: He's gone woke, and he seems to think word count will improve quality. The first is bad enough, but the second is inexcusable in a writer.
 
Someone mentioned accent and vernacular and that reminded me of something that has been bothering me:
My character is a lizardfolk who spent a lot of time with an elf or half elf learning skills, so the elf's way of speaking common stuck to her. That alongside some of the lizardfolk awkwardness, means her sentences tend to be longer, use uncommon/rare words and sometimes overly descriptive.
Now, english isn't my first language and the game is text only. After a few sessions I started to slip up more and more and her speech pattern became more normal and I wanna change that. I believe reading a little on how elves generally talk or seeing examples would help, perhaps one of those AD&D 2e setting books goes in detail about that?
 
So I had a realization. 5e is already pretty much over the hill at this point. I've calculated how long each WotC D&D edition lasted.
  • 3e/3.5e lasted from 2000 to 2008, a total of 8 years
    • 3e lasted from 2000 to 2003, a total of 3 years
    • 3.5e lasted from 2003 to 2008, a total of 5 years
  • 4e lasted from 2008 to 2014, a total of 6 years
  • 5e was published in 2014, a total of 6 years ago
This means that 5e is currently over the hill, and is likely to be killed off soon for another edition. My guess is anywhere between 1-5 years, we can expect a new edition being announced. My guess is that it will be conveniently announced when woke stuff dies off, but since I'm not a marketing or political analyst, take that with a grain of salt.
 
Gingervitis said:
So I had a realization. 5e is already pretty much over the hill at this point. I've calculated how long each WotC D&D edition lasted.
  • 3e/3.5e lasted from 2000 to 2008, a total of 8 years
    • 3e lasted from 2000 to 2003, a total of 3 years
    • 3.5e lasted from 2003 to 2008, a total of 5 years
  • 4e lasted from 2008 to 2014, a total of 6 years
  • 5e was published in 2014, a total of 6 years ago
This means that 5e is currently over the hill, and is likely to be killed off soon for another edition. My guess is anywhere between 1-5 years, we can expect a new edition being announced. My guess is that it will be conveniently announced when woke stuff dies off, but since I'm not a marketing or political analyst, take that with a grain of salt.
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I don't know man, I can't wrap my head around a 6e. How the fuck do you make fireball happen again? You can't. After the Dragonlance shit, I'm ready for D&D and Wizards to just die.
 
Mr. Manchester said:
I don't know man, I can't wrap my head around a 6e. How the fuck do you make fireball happen again? You can't. After the Dragonlance shit, I'm ready for D&D and Wizards to just die.
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I mean, this is just an estimate. For all we know, they could keep 5e on life support forever, or WotC could (hopefully) go out of business, leaving the license in the hands of a better company or in licensing hell. There could also be a 5.5th edition. This is only an estimate.
 
They're still releasing a lot of stuff for 5e, including free shit like Unearthed Arcana. I think 5e will hang around for a while while they probe the crowd for what they can change on the next edition.
 
Gingervitis said:
I mean, this is just an estimate. For all we know, they could keep 5e on life support forever, or WotC could (hopefully) go out of business, leaving the license in the hands of a better company or in licensing hell. There could also be a 5.5th edition. This is only an estimate.
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Its a solid estimate. God... dnd 5.5

I think you're just right about that. New system, reprints of the same fucking books, updates on other ones.
 
Corn Flakes said:
They're still releasing a lot of stuff for 5e, including free shit like Unearthed Arcana. I think 5e will hang around for a while while they probe the crowd for what they can change on the next edition.
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I don't know. It feels like they're running out of steam atm. The UA has been releasing at a glacial pace (basically whenever they feel like it), and there's only about 3 books a year now (one of which is usually an adventure) compared to 3.5e and 4e. Combined with, again, the inevitable collapse of pronoun/racial culture, and its likely we'll get a marginally more competent edition soon. Again, this is the analysis of someone who thought the cancer mage was a cool class concept, so take it with a grain of salt.
 
Speaking of 5e, I find it harder to make NPCs for it (especially ones that aren't monsters or have a character class like aristocrats and such).
 
Gingervitis said:
So I had a realization. 5e is already pretty much over the hill at this point. I've calculated how long each WotC D&D edition lasted.
  • 3e/3.5e lasted from 2000 to 2008, a total of 8 years
    • 3e lasted from 2000 to 2003, a total of 3 years
    • 3.5e lasted from 2003 to 2008, a total of 5 years
  • 4e lasted from 2008 to 2014, a total of 6 years
  • 5e was published in 2014, a total of 6 years ago
This means that 5e is currently over the hill, and is likely to be killed off soon for another edition. My guess is anywhere between 1-5 years, we can expect a new edition being announced. My guess is that it will be conveniently announced when woke stuff dies off, but since I'm not a marketing or political analyst, take that with a grain of salt.
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We played D&D from '74 to '79, the books started dribbling out before then, but everything wasn't published until 1979, so that's 5 years. AD&D lasted 10 years, it was 1989 when we started seeing 2e books, and we happily switched. By then I was out of college and didn't have much spare time, though, so I guess 2e would have lasted from 1989 until 2000, so 11 years.
 
Mr. Manchester said:
Its a solid estimate. God... dnd 5.5
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I think 5.5 is probably the closest we'll see to a new edition for a while, and I imagine it will mostly come in the form of the revisions to previously established 5e material, like removing the negative stat modifiers for races.

To its credit, I think 5e is a pretty solid base system. It's easy to pick up, groups can add on as much complexity to the system as they want, and it's not terribly difficult to convert anything from a previous edition over to 5e. Wizards has a good thing here, so throwing that away in favor of an overhauled rule set would be an immensely boneheaded move.

... Actually now that I say that, they'll probably be announcing 6e tomorrow. GG well played.
 
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Gingervitis said:
So I had a realization. 5e is already pretty much over the hill at this point. I've calculated how long each WotC D&D edition lasted.
  • 3e/3.5e lasted from 2000 to 2008, a total of 8 years
    • 3e lasted from 2000 to 2003, a total of 3 years
    • 3.5e lasted from 2003 to 2008, a total of 5 years
  • 4e lasted from 2008 to 2014, a total of 6 years
  • 5e was published in 2014, a total of 6 years ago
This means that 5e is currently over the hill, and is likely to be killed off soon for another edition. My guess is anywhere between 1-5 years, we can expect a new edition being announced. My guess is that it will be conveniently announced when woke stuff dies off, but since I'm not a marketing or political analyst, take that with a grain of salt.
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If we're lucky. At this point, I am expecting a sarcastaball version of DnD being announed. Something that really takes into account Current Year's spirit, that abolishes all badwrong things and makes a STUNNING and PROUD stand against biggotry.

Also, I wonder if they'll call it 6E or give it some new title. Like "DnD Legends" or something, so they can start at first edition again. Dunno about you guys, but for me, seeing an RPG with sixth edition tapped on looks kinda weird, like it's some worn out handmedown cludge.
 
Dunno you but I recall one of the developers talking 5e continuining for a long time and that we would see optional rules or additions to the core ones and called it a sort of 5.5e, I assume that became the optional class feature options UA and now Tasha's cauldron.

Now don't quote me on this, but there were mentions of the edition being far from over.

Lastly I don't know whats up with people, 3 books a year being little content? How many splats do you need?
So far they have been releasing 3 books a year since 2015, yeah often two of them are adventures but they include setting lore and the like, not to mention that they shit canned an option book meant to be released in 2015 and it became the elemental evil player's companion (a few pages taken from PotA with 4 races) and that same year they released sword coast adventurer's guide which was hyped as a big option book, which ended being lackluster since you had 1 or 2 archetypes for each class (except ranger lol) and the rest was lore you could get elsewhere.
If pumping out more books means more sword coasts adventurer's guides then I am happy with what we are getting, really don't know why people want to to back to the 3.5 splat bloat days when many of the options were terrible.
Lastly I should mention that for the first 2 or so years WotC, after the failure of 4e, were being very careful with 5e and didn't allocate much budget into it, it wasn't until later that they started to put more money into it (maybe after critical role and the like exploded in popularity?).
I am still not happy with some of their decisions, scrap mystic v3 and the virtue signaling bs, the latter which makes me more worried than what I'd like admit. At least if they fuck up future material I can just not use it or find a different system.
 
I have hated D&D since 4E. I played a ton of Pathfinder 1E but I don't wanna bother relearning it for 2E with wheelchairs or whatever the fuck and was starting to feel serious crunch burnout as the DM. I can't seem to bother to read 5E. I have the core book and player guide which I bought used for cheap but I can't even read through them for some reason. IDK I just have no willpower to give it a real chance after seeing the changes from 2E to 3E to 4E I guess.

I have been running Lamentations of the Flame princess for about a year now. It was the most basic ruleset based on D&D I could find at the time. Used the supplement Veins of the Earth which was absolutely amazing and a lot of fun. After using that a long time we decided to take a break from caves and moved to the Carcosa supplement. There are some weird dice rules for HD and damage that allows your HP and damage to fluctuate wildly, but over time the players have come to really enjoy it because it makes the most impossible battles winnable and the most routine combats dangerous depending on how the dice play out. There's been a lot of player deaths but less than expected honestly. They are mostly murderhobo opportunists but the supplement is right for it. I gave them a general quest "Kill the Bone Sorcerer" and they marched into the opposite direction about 50 miles now instead just searching for weird shit.
 
DeagleNationRefugee said:
I have been running Lamentations of the Flame princess for about a year now.
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Isn't that the game that the creator got angry and bitter because he was such a dumbass he made his girlfriend the titular character and went nuts when she dumped his ass? I seem to remember he cries and rages a lot in his books, and acts like a smug fucking cunt.

Like we're talking Derick DeShaw level narcissism and smug here.
 
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