General Thread

A general thread for requests that don need their own thread. You can ask questions, for recommendations, or whatever you need.

To start with, im asking if anyone has the greentext about a wizard gnome called tee hee that ruined an user's DnD because hes the only player that thinks it's dumb.

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mtgsalvation.com/forums/the-game/the-cube-forum/cube-card-and-archetype/603665-budget-cube-cards-that-cost-less-than-2-usd
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Minor Magical Items

I'm running a low level adventure but I still wanna give my party some weaker but still magical stuff.
So far I have

Magic Token that can cast Faerie Fire once per day and give off light in a small radius

Holy Symbol that increases all Healing from Divine Sources by 1d4 for the wearer

+1 Dagger that makes no noise because cliche

The Bard has the Token, they haven't decided yet on who gets the Holy Symbol, and the Bard currently has the +1 Dagger as well in case he wants to throw it at someone. I have a Cleric, spear wielding Paladin and a Thief that really should have the +1 Dagger but whatever. I want each of them to get a magical item that's not too gamebreaking. Thinking of letting the Thief have some boots that increase his movement speed and give a bonus to sneaking.
Not sure on what I could give the Cleric. He's kinda been exploding everything with Guiding Bolt so he doesn't need more offensive power, but because he is a threat he's also taking a lot of focus in these encounters and has been downed twice.
Would giving the party an item that grants its wearer a bonus on Death Saving Throws be a bit too on the nose?

you could always make it have limited uses.

Something that prevents a failed Death Saving throw but has a limited number of charges? Like 3 and then it breaks?

Gauntlet of 1/day bless spell.

Just continuing something from a different thread that seems to have died, but where did this "Cult of the roll" thing come from?

Take the following two examples, which are admittedly a bit absurd.

>Players, who are playing low level characters in a fantasy setting, skip on over to a dragon's lair, wake up said dragon, insult him, and try to walk off with his treasure.
>DM decrees that they all die, no rolls, no saves, no nothing.

>Players are wandering along, traveling down a mountain road to the next adventure
>Suddenly, a rockslide happens! Everyone make (Roll against appropriate attribute), or take 1d6 damage from falling rocks.
>Oh sorry, your character failed his roll, you're dead.

Both are probably considered bad, but most people would have considerably more of a problem with the first example than the second one. I don't entirely get why. Surely, the choices that the PCs make are more important than the luck of the roll, but the sort of upset would imply otherwise.

All my friends play boardgames and won't spend money on Magic cards. Any ideas for building a $40 cube?

I didn't think this had to be explained, but here goes.
In one example, the GM is telling you that you failed because they want to with no input from the players. In the other, the player has failed despite their own attempts.
One has the GM taking away your ability to do something about your situation, which is the only thing the players actually have in the game, the other, the player has failed on their own merits by the accepted parameters of the game in regards to their own ability.

Does anyone have some good ideas for moon-themed spells?

>OP's Pic related
>"1 Platinum is worth 1000 Platinum. Wait I meant go-"
>Economy instantly collapses and entire setting becomes communist

>Any ideas for building a $40 cube?

Yeah. I've got secret tech for you.

Buy two copies of a Deckbuilder's Toolkit. That comes down roughly to $40. You will receive enough cards and lands for an 8-man draft, the cards will be in the same format and thus probably balanced against each other. Buy penny sleeves, sleeve them up, shuffle and play. That's your $40 cube.

...

Teehee Macaroni. Google it.

Put of the two examples, the first one is a-okay because it's the players being stupid and foolhardy, putting their characters in suicidal danger. Death with no roll is apt.

The second is the bad one, because it's just a roll-or-you-die that comes out of nowhere, without the players doing anything wrong.

Better to have 1 charge.

I gave my thief ghost gloves that lets this fingertips pass though stuff.

Hold Stars. Basically Suction cups that can hold the weight of (the party)

Paladin
Sleep Hammer. Can knock out foes rather then kill
Wing Cape: Makes the Paladin weigh the same as someone without armor and can jump as such. Gets a massive boost to his jump check too.

>low magic
Dont run it in DnD. its not ment for it.

Interesting idea. Will there be enough variation? No idea what is in a toolkit. Looking for something that will be fun to draft again and again.

Was thinking about building something with Unstable seeing people will be buying packs for land.

>sleep hammer
>wing cape
>hold stars
>minor magic items

It's the best you can do with $40 I'm pretty sure. That's a very low budget. Building an actual planned and constructed cube will take money. Even if you set yourself a limit such as "no cards that cost more than $2" (common for budget cubes), and make a small cube (360 cards, barely enough for an 8 man draft), that still comes down to an upper limit of $720 via simple math. You should expect to have to pay hundreds of dollars to build any "real" cube. The DBTK plan is the only way I have found to cut the cost drastically.

That of course assumes you own no cards to make a cube with yourself. If you just happen to have tons lying around, that's a different story and you should try to make a cube out of cards you already own first and foremost.

Contents of DBTKs are fairly uniform and you can find them by googling. Each one has a couple hundred commons of various sets plus four packs of whatever sets are new, plus lands.

I think people like the second scenario better because you know the DM accounted for your character's abilities by adding your bonuses to the roll, even if the result would've been almost the same. In the first scenario you don't know if the DM properly accounted for all factors to come to that conclusion or if he's just being a dick.

Would you play a game that only had 3 stats instead of the classic 6?

GRIT
TRIX
WITZ

>I think people like the second scenario better because you know the DM accounted for your character's abilities by adding your bonuses to the roll

Do you? If you don't trust him to do it in the first scenario, why would you trust him in the second? How does rolling change his trustworthiness?

I really don't see how anybody could like #2 better. Look at what the players are doing. It's "rocks fall, you die" except you get to roll a save, without the players having done anything stupid. PCs being in danger should always come from the players putting them in danger, not just because the DM arbitrarily decided that now was the time to see if somebody randomly dies.

In the #1 OTOH the players are clearly idiots and need to be reminded that idiots don't live long. It's irrelevant if there's any roll involved.

A link for you.
mtgsalvation.com/forums/the-game/the-cube-forum/cube-card-and-archetype/603665-budget-cube-cards-that-cost-less-than-2-usd

Also look up CubeTutor's average cubes if you haven't already, you don't have to copy them because designing a custom cube is part of the fun, but you'll get an idea of what people generally use in these.

Because the fact that you're rolling at all implies that there's a chance of success. #2 could easily be rigged to be impossible behind the scenes, but #1 is an unambiguous "fuck you".

I would, and currently do. Part of a Fantasy Trip game right now.
It only uses Str, Dex, and Int

Thanks, I'm going to look at those. It's been so hard to get friends into MtG seeing they have never played a TCG before. The idea of buying boosters and singles is out hard when they are used to spending a set amount of money and getting everything the game has to offer.

>Actions from the players are not their input.
Are you ok?

Because rolling is fun, it's the thrill of chance.
DM decrees are bad because it reminds you that you are sitting around with your friend who is narrating imaginary events to you, instead of doing something fun.

From the books or homebrew?

was wondering how something like this would work? i was thinking it'd be a good item to have as an alchemist. like what stats or ability's. tried backward-searching it but no luck...

The first scenario is just a game over screen.

People enjoy actually being able to vie and contend for their lives, even if it is pretend lives and they cannot possibly win.

If you don't understand the idea that the journey matters, especially in adventures, I don't think I can help you.

But the journey does matter. My point isn't journey vs fiat, my point is one is a random hazard that was just sprung upon the players, wheras the other is a product of their choices. If anything, it's the first one that's a journey (shame about the destination), not the second.

That's not really about the idea of the journey mattering, it's about the idea that people prefer the illusion of control to the reality of control.

Nobody said you needed to remove all consequences, or even any, so making the ending more fun than your example would not have remove the sense of journey you mentioned.

It's a fiat that negates the right self-determination at an unnecessarily high level of analysis.

You seem sincere in your question so I want to explain it to you better. Can you describe your gaming or other background to me a bit?

Just give it the same properties as a sword except make it magic.

I've been playing various systems, almost always fantasy, since 1991. I DM more often than I play, by about 3:1 in session length, enormosuly more if you count how much more prep tends to go into DMing than goes into playing.

I wasn't trying to get too hung up on the examples, they were meant to quickly and crudely illustrate a point: What creates control for players in a game, a response to their actions/inactions, or random chance in terms of rolling? Clearly the former. Yet you often get a great deal of ignoring, or sometimes even outright hostility to the former notion if it isn't tinged with the random factor, and less commonly, but still observably get a notion that whatever the dice come up with is "fair", despite the fact that the GM is the one who is setting all the probabilities and hazards anyway, and can make them as arbitrary as he or she pleases.

>The enormously more powerful guy/monster kills you.
As a flat declaration isn't really all that different from rolling it out when the conclusion is a foregone one, yet it seems to matter an awful lot to a lot of people.

>Dont run it in DnD. its not ment for it.
Not the current editions of this century (3.pf, 4e & 5e) which is geared towards ridiculous bullshit fantasy bordering on a weird anime ttrpg

The dice helps both the players AND the DM.

Imagine if you were playing an RPG where if you wanted to do something, you always succeeded. It would get boring, because you could just declare anything you wanted to have happen, there's be no suspense.

So suppose you drop that game and play another: Whenever you want to try something, you ask the DM if he will let you succeed. If he thinks about it and says yes, then you succeed. If he says no you failed. That might be fun for a while if you are humorous or can charm the DM, but eventually you'd realize that you are just playing the DM's mindgame, you are only recommending things for him to allow.

Now say you are playing a game where your characters have numerical stats for their skills, and you can roll against known challenge ratings when you want to try something. If you roll the dice and it's high enough, you succeed otherwise you fail. Now you can try things and no matter what the DM thinks about it, you can still succeed sometimes. You have some way to control what happens.

>Poison Save DC: 30

I'm not trying to harp on the example, I was trying to home in on what it is about your perspective that is causing you to be unable to identify what I consider a very straightforward and common human experience.

In the end I suppose it is a matter of expectations. If you haven't created the expectation in your players that this is a game about stealth or trickery or alliance building or finding an obscure or otherwise convoluted method rather than a piss and vinegar swashbuckling tale of confronting dragons with steel and bravado, if you haven't communicated the idea that taking actions A, B, and C are suicide, those outcomes will be disappointing. And honestly, if you've communicated the size and fearsomeness of the surroundings and given them a sense of their own abilities, as well as nurtured the right mood and sense of genre for your players, they will naturally do what makes sense.

And just because they have asked for it and need to die with no wiggle room allowed, why not play it out for them? Why must it be "ok fuckers you're dead: no save, no rolls, you can't even try to run"? A last stand is much more satisfying than a game over screen.

Your second example isn't more fiat than the first, though you may think it is. Travelling has risks, and certain kinds of travel are prone to certain kinds of risks. If you provide that sense of place and potential danger, it's not really that different. Part of the job as a Game Master is to craft an experience that both paints a shared game world for each person and grants each a sense of adventure by way of situations that allow them to contribute according to their abilities - their abilities both in the game and out. There should be a sense of risk, of play really, that fiat does not encourage.

Games are not just about outcomes. There must be an unfolding and a struggle. For example, take a setting where all of the playable races have a maximum life span. (reached character limit)

For example, take a setting where all of the playable races have a maximum life span. Should you as the GM use that same logic to say "Well, it is inevitable at this point that you all die - see you next week"?

Outcome forgone, but in the meantime people want to do stuff. We've all had that feeling listening to our players plan something where we go "Well, he's going to convince them to do that stupid thing. And then they'll be fucked." How should they feel if when they propose their plan you say "Well, it fails horribly and anyone who survives is executed"? Foregone conclusion, but handled way shittier than necessary.

I would, and have in-fact been playing around with a 3-stat system idea with my friend, except we went with
>Power
>Finesse
>Spirit
They're left intentionally broad so that players can chose what exactly a high/low stat means for their character. High finesse could be anything from literal manual dexterity and thiefyness, or a knowledge of the arcane laws of the universe and how best to cheat them.

Same stats as a normal sword. Different sizes and shapes of bottle can be crafted to produce different types of swords.

I'm gonna say it's actually an enchanted "sword bottle", and the water is mundane water.
>Cannot be broken, dulled, rusted, etc.
>Does double damage to fire creatures, but the water turns to mist and must be refilled before the sword can be used again.
>Refilling the bottle is a standard action.

You can also fill it with other liquids.
>If you mix poison into the bottle, your opponent gets disadvantage on their poison save. The poison must be replenished after each successful hit (whether or not the opponent failed their save).
>If you pour oil instead of water into the bottle, you can light the sword on fire for 1d6 damage. The oil runs out after 2 rounds.

I'm sure an alchemist could come up with lots of other interesting liquids to fill it with.

Rod of Chains.

A metal rod which can be activated to do 1 of 2 things.

-Become a flail (magical but still a normal flail)
-Become a 10ft length of chain

It's silly but just cool enough to be somewhat useful while still being minor.

Just went through a wip system oneshot at a small con tonight, GM/creator wanted opinions on the dice system.
>Dice pool of d8s
>pool generally between 3 and 8 dice dependent on stats
>base rule that we used is: 7+ counts for a success; 6 is a boon (less than a success but still shifts an encounter in your favor), 1 is a snag (doesn't count against successes, but you somehow lose control of the situation at hand)
>Control essentially flavors NPC attitudes and tactics, if they lose it they begin panicking and may eventually be at your mercy.

These are the rules we played, but he also offered a couple alternate versions after we'd finished. Thought I'd get some other opinions since I've only ever worked with WoD dice pools
>1s are always Snags, regardless of what success is
>6+ is success, with 8 being a boon
>6+ is success, with 5 being a boon
>7+ is success, with 6 and 8 being books

Of the general difficulty of hitting someone is 3 successes, do any of these seem okay? Too lenient? Too difficult?

By that logic, something like Amber Diceless is not an RPG. And ultimately, since the GM can set whatever difficulties he damn well pleases, and can easily set them to be either trivial or impossible as the case may be, you don't escape the "Just playing the DM's mindgame "if you're going that route, by adding dice.

Furthermore, your example of such implicitly assumes that the GM is unresponsive to what the players are doing if he's not including rolls, which I find unsupported.

>I was trying to home in on what it is about your perspective that is causing you to be unable to identify what I consider a very straightforward and common human experience.
If that's the case, it's probably because I'm writing up some edits to a new edition of wargame rules and I'm very actively looking at applied effects of probability, especially when very large numbers of rolls are involved. And while wargames and RPGs are not directly linked, you have some very similar approaches to them.In either case, you have a number of decisions, usually iterated, made on imperfect (or even inaccurate) information, and you try to make the best outcome of what you've got available.

Ultimately, it should be the choices that matter, not the luck of the dice. All the random element that dice adds in is to create a fuzzier link between a good choice and a bad one. You now still will usually have good choices leading to good outcomes, but you can no longer be as certain about it. But those shitty choices leading to trouble, or good ones leading to victory, still happen, and would happen without a roll attached to them.

That in and of itself is completely different to managing player's expectations, setting the tone of a game, keeping things on focus for whatever the goals are, or even their (possibly irrational) senses of satisfaction. And I don't mean to imply that they're unimportant. Ultimately, you are playing a game, and you do need to make sure that people are enjoying it. But I think it's very, very strange that there's often a lot more focus given to the outcome of a roll than their is about the decisionmaking that led up to that roll.

so mixing it with poison and magic based that can mix with other liquids. sounds good. thanks for the ideas. wondering if there can be other elemental bottles as well.

>All the random element that dice adds in is to create a fuzzier link between a good choice and a bad one.
No. At least some strategic and tactical depth comes from weighing risk vs reward. Without risk, ie. when you know the result of every action without fail, that's a different kind of game.

There is a place for certainty in games, but there's more than that.

The thrill of waiting of an outcome of an future event reflects the real world. You have declared your intent, made your plans, mobilized your troops, and briefed your lieutenants. War has begun. And now you need to see what happens.

In M&M, how do I make powers that don't care about perceiving the target or range? Something like a voodoo doll, for example.

>there's often a lot more focus given to the outcome of a roll
Can you clarify what sorts of situations you are referring to by this? Because I don't see it.

Wait, small con? Was it in southern IL?

>No. At least some strategic and tactical depth comes from weighing risk vs reward. Without risk, ie. when you know the result of every action without fail, that's a different kind of game.
Risk vs reward are not linked directly to randomness of outcome. You ever play chess? You most definitely have risky play vs safe play, and there is absolutely no chance whatsoever in that game.

>The thrill of waiting of an outcome of an future event reflects the real world. You have declared your intent, made your plans, mobilized your troops, and briefed your lieutenants. War has begun. And now you need to see what happens.
Which is created by a sense of suspense of not knowing the outcome by the time you commit. And while having uncertainty as to outcome in the form of a die roll is one way of creating that ignorance, it's hardly the only way, all you really need for that is to hide what is necessary to succeed and/or hide the result of an action until well after the decision point was made.

You have an adventuring party, in one of those classic pseudo-medievalish but not really settings. They go up to an important personage in the town, and ask for some kind of favor, using diplomacy or whatever other mechanical skill your game has. They also, either unintentionally, uncaringly, or simply ignorantly, say something patently offensive to the important guy. But they roll really wellon the attempt.

Which should be given more weight? That the party face said something offensive and is likely to upset the guy they're asking a favor from, or the fact that they rolled well? How much focus do you want to give to the outcome of the dice as opposed to the planning or decisionmaking of the players? Often, at least when discussing things on Veeky Forums, you get a sort of sense that if the person involved gets a good roll, he deserves to succeed, no matter how nonsensical the course of action taken would be.

>Risk vs reward are not linked directly to randomness of outcome.
I didn't say that it did. It's linked to unknown outcomes.

>chess
A play in chess is risky because you don't know your opponent's response. Now, in fact, you don't always know the reason your opponent opts for high-percentage play over the risky play. You can guess, but really in a game where both players have similar and decent understanding of the rules the deeper reasons in their psyche will remain a mystery and do not matter. These are the kind of unknowns that randomness is supposed to simulate. If you think about it, I think you will agree that "randomness" is just our way of describing an the portion of an event where the inputs or resolution mechanisms are for all intents and purposes unknown to us.

Hidden information is what it boils down to.

>die roll is one way of creating that ignorance, it's hardly the only way
That is an argument for the existence of games with certainty of strategy, which is fine. It is not a sufficient argument to me for the exclusion of randomness.

>. If you think about it, I think you will agree that "randomness" is just our way of describing an the portion of an event where the inputs or resolution mechanisms are for all intents and purposes unknown to us.
Yes, that seems fair.

>It is not a sufficient argument to me for the exclusion of randomness.
And I haven't been trying to argue for the elimination of randomness. If I've come across that way, I'd like to apologize (It's getting late and I know I'm getting tired and less coherent).

Rather, I'm just confused as to why you have so much focus on the random element and not the player choices, which seems like they should be more in focus. And yes, hidden information is what it boils down to, whether that's the unknown outcome of the next roll, or something in universe that the players don't know about but would affect their decisions if it did. But not all hidden information is treated equally, and maybe I'm being dumb, but I don't see any real logical reason why one set of such hidden information is considered just the breaks of the game (especially if you have bad outcomes), but others aren't.

>Which should be given more weight?
If you ask me, it's not a matter of weight. You have to look at what the favour is, and what the gaffe is, and what kind of persons they are.

These kinds of interactions happen all the time in daily life. You do what you did well, but you didn't do all of the right things or did things in addition to the right things.

In a roleplaying game, this sort of context can be a big part of the fun, and people who aren't able to enjoy that will appreciate a GM who avoids such subtleties entirely.

>when discussing things on Veeky Forums, you get a sort of sense that if the person involved gets a good roll, he deserves to succeed, no matter how nonsensical the course of action taken would be
Well, not all of the dimensions of a game are simulationist in nature. If you break system or game or genre conventions, expect disappointment from people who were expecting them. In an open-ended system like D&D is or was it is fairly predictable that people will develop expectations about how the game is played.

In the same way and for much the same reasons as your dragon example, people get upset if you violate the expected level of abstraction without justifying it with some sort of benefit such as a rewarding or funny death.

Let me explain what I mean by level of abstraction. Imagine a board game where you move your token along a path with branches and such, and part of the rules is if you land on
the same space as the dragon without first finding the sword of dragon-killing, the shield of dragon-thwarting, and the flask of dragonfire resistance, you die. Do you think that any of the players will complain about their token being removed after occupying the same space as the dragon? No, despite being denied recourse to all of the methods of self-determination in your example above, those methods are not expected in this game; it is a game about moving your piece to avoid the dragon and collect items.
(continued)

In a game about roleplaying both in a larger world by describing your actions and in a time-restricted combat mode where you manage your actions every round and roll for success, you expect recourse to these methods of striving towards your goals. Being denied them unexpectedly feels like exactly that.

Wargames are more purely simulationist in nature. Once you know the outcome, there is no need for the roles. Once you don't think you can win, you can forfeit. And that is the expectation.

> I'm just confused as to why you have so much focus on the random element and not the player choices
Because they both matter and ignoring either to the player's detriment is going to piss people off. Unless you were talking about me specifically, in which case I'm focusing on it in this discussion because that was the focus of your question.

>But not all hidden information is treated equally,
It's the scale of abstraction. If I honestly fucked up every choice to get me skewered by the dragon, let me do some sword-swinging and roll my dice a bit. Or, why not give them an out like a good author? Create a plausible reason for the dragon not to kill them immediately, or have something plausible occur that both surprises and intrigues the players about the world and its inhabitants while giving them something other than a game over screen. it goes back to my example of a board game; no one gets mad there about not getting to combat the dragon. Because that's not the point, if you have the 3 items you can beat the dragon - a binary outcome.

Players in RPGs are expected to get invested in their character, not treat it like a roguelike where you just hit "play again" without a thought and throw yourself back into the dungeon.

...

>no one gets mad there about not getting to combat the dragon
Something about this made me think of an indie puzzle platformer (think the old prince of persia, spikes and ledges and pressure pads and the like) I playtested once for a friend and he had set it so that if you ever reached an unwinnable state. the game reset the level (each level was a screen) for you to try again. Unfortunately, this was jarring and disorienting and very unsatisfactory. He couldn't tell because of course he'd been playing the damn thing while building it out of necessity and lacked the distance and perspective to just see why it was terrible. Sometimes you couldn't tell why you had failed, or it didn't give you time to observe what you had set up (some of the puzzles were rather complex) in order to replicate or modify it next time, and overall it was just really bad.

Instead I had him take out the code for checking the game state for a possible win. This let players who were stuck kill themselves, getting more benefit from the funny and exciting ways to die that were in the game. Eventually we put in a method for the player to commit suicide when they were in unwinnable states but had no access to lethality (stuck in a pit, etc). This change was a big hit with everyone and dying because a whole new dimension of game enjoyment, with people finding spectacular and obscure ways to die. Afterwards they started designing levels with that in mind and it became a major part of the game, arguably affording people even more hours of gameplay (albeit for a niche audience) than most of the regular progression of the game.

>Ultimately, it should be the choices that matter, not the luck of the dice.
If that is what you want your game to be, you should take out the dice. Player expectations, like he said.

Of course, if you want some randomness, that randomness actually has to matter at some point, even if its only in aggregate across many decision or is very dramatic but rare. You can pare back or inflate the significance of dice rolls, but if you ask me you depower them until they are just a token action you should take them out of the game entirely. Likewise, if you make chance so powerful that the choices hardly matter, you should take choice out of the game entirely and just make another version of candyland or snakes and ladders to sell to children.

>That in and of itself is completely different to managing player's expectations, setting the tone of a game, keeping things on focus for whatever the goals are, or even their (possibly irrational) senses of satisfaction.
Disagree. Even in a wargame, those things dictate player satisfaction. Hell, they govern satisfaction in general. That's what satisfaction IS.

I can't even imagine playing a wargame that doesn't communicate to you so that you can form workable expectations, doesn't present clear goals at various levels in a hierarchy, or whose mechanics or imagery are at extreme odds with the tone or genre.

>But I think it's very, very strange that there's often a lot more focus given to the outcome of a roll than their is about the decisionmaking that led up to that roll.
If you made a bad decision, it's already made. If you made a good decision, it's already made. Once it's made, you look to the roll for the outcome. Why wouldn't you focus on that? Do you think it rational for players to obsess over bad or good decisions, rather than just accepting it and moving on the the next appropriate action?

>Of course, if you want some randomness, that randomness actually has to matter at some point, even if its only in aggregate across many decision or is very dramatic but rare. You can pare back or inflate the significance of dice rolls, but if you ask me you depower them until they are just a token action you should take them out of the game entirely. Likewise, if you make chance so powerful that the choices hardly matter, you should take choice out of the game entirely and just make another version of candyland or snakes and ladders to sell to children.
This made me think. What if you made a game where the resolution of your units and their units is inevitable. There are lots of choices to make, but both players' units would invariably take each other out across the span of the game. The object then isn't who will be the last one with units remaining, but instead one player will try to prolong the game and one player will try to end it sooner. Rather than a chase-and-flee style game, it would be one where both sides are attacking the other, but the manner of engagement somehow decided the rate at which units were depleted.

Has anyone ever heard of or seen such a game?

IIRC, its been a while since I played M&M, but I think you'd just have to give it a range of "planet" or "universe" or whatever fits your needs.

how to get gf who likes traditional games

False dichotomy. You're comparing two entirely different situations.

The correct comparison would be either:

A.
1:Players piss off dragon, DM kills players by fiat OR
2:Players piss off dragon, players roll initiative, DM rolls breath weapon damage, TPK

OR

B.
1: Players are walking, DM kills them by fiat. OR
2: Players are walking, have to roll saving throws.

When clearly presented with unbiased formulations, we can easily see rolling dice is always better.

Look.

See, the players will always prefer to be given an option. They can run from the dragon, use an ability on the rocks, whatever. They need the option to make choices.

Do these seem reasonable? I'm a little reluctant about the two weapon fighting one as it seems exploitable with rogues and the crossbow one as it could just shutdouwn the big bad's movement in an encounter.

Depends - how broad or narrow if your definition of "girl"friend?

That's how my homebrew works (and most any other tristat sys)
Body - melee combat, Health, athletics, poison saves, Intimidation
Mind - ranged combat, Initiative, disable traps, reflex saves, Bluff and Lying
Soul - magical combat, Mana, magic saves, limit of how many magical items the character can equip at once, Diplomacy

love me some tristats

>the coins are actually fakes
there problem solved

They spent it already.

Nope, VA.

I asked /wsr/ but nobody is on that board
Does anyone have any anti-tech/anti-magic propaganda? The neutral war zones are likely littered with the stuff in my campaign but I want a variety to choose from.
Pic related

Looking for a particular story I saw in a HFY thread about a human in hospital getting a robot arm and the nurse freaking out over how casually he takes it.

Sounds really similar to the dice system that FFG uses for their Starwars role playing system. The basic die is a d8 with symbols on it, success and advantages, so you have a face with 0,1,2 success and 0,1,2 advantage. You roll these against negative die with failure and disadvantage. The failures cancel out successes and disadvantages cancel out advantages.
So for example you are rolling a medium co-ordination check you might roll 3 negative dice and 4 positive dice giving you,
>3 success
>2 advantage
>2 failure
>5 disadvantage
>Net 1 success 3 disadvantage
Results would be you complete the task at hand but in a poor manner and suffer some sort of minor penalty. In this way the disadvantages do the same sort of thing as your snags do.
A downfall of the snags is that on higher amount of dice you have a really high chance of getting a snag however. Boons canceling snags doesn't really work as it wouldn't scale to a tasks difficulty. Anyway I gave a really basic overview of the dice system. It's got some interesting roleplay potential behind it which I think is what you are looking for so you should take a look. It is important to note that the entire system is build around the dice so it might not translate that well.

I really want to make a combat system where you just describe your action, like how you swing a sword or bodyslam a monster, and then that is the basic attack and damage action all in one.

The idea being that you do small weakning attacks until stepping up for a finishing blow (slash throat, crush skull, etc) since small wounding attacks don't kill in this game, at least not all at once. Any ideas on how to make this work?

I'd like to use roll vs AC more or less like D&D.

Bump with more related

Kidnapping sometimes works out.

It does however make the red flag obvious:

>Hey DM may my character succeed at this challenge?
>lol no
>wtf why not
>Because I say your character can't, that's why

>Hey DM can I skill check this challenge?
>Sure the DC is 45
>wtf why
>no reason lol

I'm neutral good

Chromosomes determine it. Past that, I'm not picky.

w-where.

Something like you use your first attacks to lower their resistances or something, then go for a finishing blow.

Stellarmax has something along those lines, but it's a computer wargame, not a tabletop RPG type game.

Is this a joke? I'm asking how to make it work mechanically.

Do you have a name for me? Googling "Stellarmax" and "Stellarmax game" comes up with nothing. You are a saint to give me the tip, any help would be much appreciated too.

Define "work". Because it already works, it's just not good. And how to make it good depends on what you're looking for in that department.

Making it work as in making it have some amount of numerical impacts (that can be usually hidden from the players), and that allow for more interesting playstyles.

For example, you can say that you step into the ogre's swing and slit its throat with your blade. Maybe you make this related to the agility/dexterity stat. If the ogre has max health, this shouldn't work or only have a small chance depending on the power/level of the character. This way the players can't just walk up and target the weak points of every enemy they face. Instead they'd want to weaken it, which maybe lowers the AC and damage the ogre can do as it loses blood and its footing. But the option of going in early for a kill should be there, and the same system should be able to scale so if you get high level you can just narrate chopping off a goblin's head and it just happens, no real need to roll it even.

No, I mean why do you want to do this? One that plays like a rules-light but crunches like D&D? What are you trying to achieve or gain, design-wise?

Alright so Im a sorcerer in my current 5e campaign, dm just said we would reach level twenty. Since a single ability score improvement and the crap ability sorcerers get at level 20 doesnt appeal to much, would it be madness to put two levels into monk?

It's kinda already in there.
Monster has 15AC, your attack roll is 22.
Monster takes 7 damage (difference between attack roll and AC). Any damage that reduces the monster to 0 or bellow is a finishing blow (or leave monsters at 0hp death's door until hit again).

Of course you won't be having regular AC and d20 mechanics because this is a bit better suited to dice pools (or you can, if you're silly enough). You'd need to figure out the probability, HP for characters and if weapon's do different damage.

You're overcomplicating this to shit and back and missing the point of the Ogre's HP.
HP is staying power in a fight, and a resource. There's only ever two values for HP, 0 and anything>0; any inbetween doesn't matter much.
What you could do is "called shots" that do special effects or double damage or critical chance on the higher cost of higher enemy AC.

Say you want to neck your ogre, he has 13 AC regularly, but his neck is a tough target to hit and will give you crit damage + bleed; so you, as the GM, determine a +8 to the Ogre's AC is a fair tradeoff (between player character attack bonuses, levels, etc. should be something that can be done but won't be easy). Now the Ogre has 21AC for the character attempting the necking and 13 to everyone regularly aiming center mass. Now, it's important that here, the Ogre won't get instakilled. That's what the ogre's HP says and the HP is his staying power; the Ogre is designed to last 3 rounds against 3 people in a fight. This lucky called shot lowers that to 2 rounds. The weakening of the ogre can be an ally giving you advantage or the GM determining that the ogre's weakpoint gains less AC.

Sleeve a bunch of lands, then print proxies of the coolest spells you know about.

>HP is staying power in a fight, and a resource.
>There's only ever two values for HP, 0 and anything>0; any inbetween doesn't matter much.

That's what I'm trying to change.

Sounds retarded

I imagine because scenario one has a extremely low chance of ever working out in the favor of the pc, even if it by their own error. By denying that slim chance you are effectively denying their agency and elevating yourself above them.

In the second scenario they still have agency and could possibly even had avoided tragedy all together by flexing their agency earlier.

I'm sorry, I mis-wrote. It's "Solarmax", not "Stellarmax".

Have enemies have HP but they can only ever loose up to 20% of their current HP from any hit.

The the PCs have two types of attacks, ones that do HP damage but cannot kill, and Finishing Moves that do no actual damage, but if you roll more than the monsters current HP, they die.

So the strategy is to chip away at their HP so it's low enough that the Finish Move has a realistic chance.

What do you go to discuss Veeky Forums related lewds now?

Seconding this, I miss /wst/. I understand why people didn't want it, but I enjoyed it.

take a look at Nechronica; 1 hp = 1 body part, most parts affect combat. if you cut off legs and arms, they can't move.

A while ago there was a WWI Regiment rolling thread up, but it got archived before the tables were posted. Does anybody have those?

In Solarmax the goal is to be the last player with units remaining, and units are generated.

Lol you really got my hopes up.