D&D and Tabletops RPGs V7: Yes you can talk about tabletops other than D&D
703 replies, posted
Gonna run a game of Vampire the Masquerade 5th Edition. If you're completely unfamiliar, it's a story-focused game about vampires and vampire society as a vehicle for personal horror(as in, "I can't believe I just did that" type stuff). Metaplot has advanced sinced Revised edition, but for the most part everything is the same; main difference is that there's less Elders around, and there's a Second Inquisition hunting down vampires, with members among most major governmental organizations(FBI/CIA/NSA in the US, MI6 in the UK, and the Society of St. Leopold in the Vatican, and other clandestine organizations in other parts of the world).
Plan is to set the game in Phoenix, Arizona("The Valley of the Sun"), a city that's split between the Camarilla and the Anarchs, with PCs being on the side of the Anarchs. A prominent member of the city's Kindred has been murdered, and as a coterie with something the prove, the Baron gives you the task of investigating and figuring out who killed them. Could it be a political assassination, carried out by the Camarilla? Or an incursion into the city by Sabbat forces? Or a childe gone diablerist on their sire? That's what the Baron wants you to find out.
Currently looking at Monday, Tuesday, or Friday, starting at 8-9 PM GMT. Ideally, we'll do most IC shit in roll20, with OOC being on discord voice chat.
DM me on Discord @Rats#7479 if you're interested.
I wanted to do something for Inktober even though I can't draw things with ink, so I thought it would be fun to take the prompts each day and make magic items (for 5e) out of them. Now that October is over, I compiled them all together in this doc for other people to use.
When fleshing out an Empire for a new campaign what things should I make note of.
My players want detailed history
For example one human empire called Shuishen (water gods)
So far:
Name - shuishen
Age - Ancient (still standing)
Size - low population, moderate size
Government - Autocracy Emperor/City Council/Village Elder
Based on - Asia
Inspired by - Kung fu panda/wow/a hat in time
Climate - temperate / humid
Geography - exclusively mountainous and sea
Main religious deity - Bahamut
People - non aggressive, cautious, religious
Trade import - grains, metals (iron), clay, hardwood
Trade export - pearl ware, fish, jade,
What other things should be listed as a base for building a empire that can have history?
@Rats808
That discord name of yours isn't working for me mate, idk what's the deal but yeah, tried to DM you and it just doesn't do, that or I probably just don't know how to DM people on discord. idk.
Oh, my bad, I wrote it down wrong. It's Rats#9479
Not sure what you mean by low pop, moderate size but:
Legal system (based on religious or secular ethics, etc.),
centralization (depending on speed of travel/communications and size, not sure what you mean by moderate size in this case, will determine the need for regional governors),
constituent cultures (an empire is usually not made of only a single culture - how the empire dealt with the people it assimilated in the past as it expanded, differences between the constituent cultures, regional representation - slavery, lower castes, etc.) this also relates to religion - if your people primarily worship Bahamut was that the case before the empire arose or did the Empire impose its religion on assimilated people, or is the state religion more of a symbol of the government's ethics with general religion being more pluralistic and people can worship their own gods,
internal trade (differences between regions within the empire, is there a breadbasket, are soldiers drawn primarily from one region, etc.),
rules of succession? (Emperor's son or chosen heir? What happens if there's no heir? has there been past succession crises?)
Brilliant! cheers, didn't even think about rules of succession.
What I meant by low population, moderate size is that its a low population, spread out over a moderately sized empire. So all in all, this particular empire has a low population for its size, few villages and very few in them.
Where as a high population, small size would be bursting at the seams with people literally not being able to walk down a street without bumping into someone.
It was just some shorthand for population density.
and the quote of tonight's game "So just so I'm clear you're attempting to roofie the magical twelve year old who at the very least has access to teleportation at will.........Proceed"
I've never felt more like a bard than accidentally summoning a unicorn, mounting it, having my instrument burst into flames, then impaling a mindflayer with the unicorn.
How in the hell was a bard able to ride a unicorn
Kobold bard, thank you very much.
"When darkness and evil threaten to overwhelm the mortal world, the gods sometimes see fit to pair a unicorn mount with a champion." Just ignore the next part about paladins in the MM...
Otherwise it was the the "yes" my DM gave me when I asked if I could mount it.
So after our group wiped during Curse of Straid we decided to plan our characters together
Long story short, now half our party is going to be edgy fallen aasimir paladins... this is going to either be cringy or hilarious as hell
I rolled several weeks ago using two d20s, 1,1 then 8,8 then 14,14 then 20,20 all next to each other.
"you were only supposed to roll 3 d20s"
"but the 4th die roll doesn't really matter"
I rolled one or two more doubles on d20s latter that night, the joke was that the dice was quantum locked.
Lost the cleric and monk in a session that had no combat. Cleric dies from the guiding hand of terrible dice rolls and the monk dug a hole to bury him. My guy is there to help dig and pay respects because it was just us three when we set off to do our thing. Hole is dug, body is buried, and the monk chooses to light a torchstalk and leave it on his grave. I should note now that through our shenanigans the monk only had 1 HP at this point.
One max damage explosion and a nat 1 reflex save later, the monk is spread evenly into the forest. Meanwhile my character has now registered on the madness chart for taking a shower in the pink mist of the monk.
Playing with my Pathfinder group is the best time of the week but boy does one of them (incidentally my best friend) whine. Whines about bad rolls, whines about enemies saving from his spells, whines about being attacked. He's not even new, we've been playing tabletop games for some 4 years now and despite starting this adventure path at 1st level and currently being at 15th, he STILL doesn't know how most of his class' mechanics work. We pretty much have to tell him his character's DC every session.
Also I've now died three times in less than 24 hours in-universe. First it was some big fuckoff eldritch worm with wings (affectionately nicknamed the Giant Purple Dragon Penis by the party) who deleted me with attacks of opportunity, then it was the undead husk of a Great Old One beating my face in with its tentacles (it makes sense in context), and then I failed to save against a Phantasmal Killer spell. The last one was a sore point to the previously mentioned whiner cause he has that spell on his witch and he never manages to pull it off. We were in a room with some big electrical pillar traps though which shocked the party when they got close to it, and the DM ended up ruling that once I was shocked, I was brought back to life because Phantasmal Killer is more or less a heart attack and the shock essentially acted like a giant defibrillator.
My character is a massive asshole already and these repeated deaths are definitely gonna do wonders to his already terrible disposition.
I'm thinking about playing a fighter as a grappler in the next game I join. It's perhaps not the most efficient, but efficiency isn't what this game is about for everyone of course. I was figuring i'd mainly do it if the DM was up for a bit of improvising when it came to grappling people and the like, but i'll just have to see what the DM is up to.
Why? What benefit is there to grappling?
If you're a typical fighter, any damage you do by managing to grapple things will be completely overshadowed by just hitting it with your sharp stick.
It's your character, play how you want to I guess but IMHO it seems to me like it'd be a very boring character to play.
(unless you have some special role play reasons as to why you'd be grappling rather than stabbing.)
Depends ENORMOUSLY on the edition. In 5e you really don't need to "build as a grappler" but the mechanically most sound option is to grapple someone, shove them prone, and then have permanent advantage on all melee attacks while they have permanent disadvantage on all melee attacks, because you need to devote your entire action to breaking a grapple AND you'd have 0 movement from having been grappled and prone, so the best you could do is MAYBE stand up before getting knocked back down again. It's the dullest, most mind-numbing shit I've ever seen but it's what the game encourages you to do.
Same thing is GENERALLY true in 3e as well, though the advantages weren't quite as potent you could still do things like stop most casters from casting by making them unable to do somatic or even verbal components while being grappled. It is a pretty silly build, and if your character revolves entirely around what they can do in combat you're kind of a sad case, but it can be quite potent.
Grappling is good when there's a guy you can't let make an action and don't want to risk botching a damage roll.
I'm hardly really building around a grappler I suppose. If I decide that grappling is really lame I can just go straight back to being a normal fighter
I remember back when I played Pathfinder Society, there was an encounter where we were holding up in some tower against an angry mob and suddenly two grapple monks with potions of fly show up. They fly through the second floor windows and nearly TPK us all by grappling and tieing us up with rope that required a DC 30 something escape artist check at level 5. Shit was crazy and it was probably the only time I got away with setting our own party on fire.
If they'd been really trying to kill you they'd have grappled you out the window, flown up 200 feet, then dropped you. In fact, being Pathfinder, I'm surprised that's not what they did.
In the game I'm in online (after a loooooong absence from the hobby) we, six level 1s, defeated a young black dragon by pushing it of its perch and holding it down.
In my group's home game, I think we're really screwed right now. We took on a fire giant and 3 trolls. We were doing okay, but then a second fire giant showed up and wiped the floor with us. We hesitated but decided to try and bail the fight, because we were out of fire power and low on spells.
5 of us are currently in the air (3 are flying, 2 are being carried). Our other 2 members on the ground are getting killed by trolls. One of them is unconscious, and I'm not sure how healthy the second person is. It wouldn't be so bad, but the one fire giant that didn't run off is now throwing large rocks at us. This is only a problem because the two closest fliers are one hit away from going unconscious.
I'm honestly not sure if all of us are going to make it out. Either way, I think we learned our lesson about taking every fight that comes our way. It also doesn't help that I did not prepare myself beforehand and change my spells up in my spell book. I'm not sure if it was just me being forgetful or if I got like a second-hand high from my friend's smoking weed
I swear barbarians are my one and only class. With no other character am I able to pull off silly or downright retarded things.
Yesterday my character was forced to dance for the amusement of Drow nobility. Succeeded once, but failed horribly the next. Being Drow, they weren't very happy that I danced like shit for the nobles. To redeem myself I entered into a rage induced twerk. Suffices to say the nobles were very pleased at that point.
My current favorite though is Garnok the Wizard. Full barbarian, but delusional in thinking that he's a spell caster. Made him for a one-off with the intent to fail, but since the DM liked him so much he's become an NPC in one of his campaigns
Some "spells" in action have been:
Calm emotion - Nat 20 punched a dire wolf and ended up dazing it
Firebolt - Flaming javelins
Zone of Truth - Holding heads under water to get answers
Invisiblity - Gouging out eyes or throwing dirt
Counterspell - Great axe
Healing Word - Only saying "get well soon"
Mike Mearls of dnd has shown interest with a wrestler subclass that would be under fighter, though it hasn't shown up in unearthed arcana yet sadly.
Been designing my new world for DnD we'll be starting in a couple of weeks.
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/199089/a32567f4-02f6-4fbf-912a-1adae0cd1790/IMG_20181115_165614.jpg
What do you guys think
Does it look realistic?
C&c is always appreciated.
Well, realistic, no. You seem to seem to have some rivers flowing from ocean to ocean, which isn't how water works. The shape of the landmasses is much more like a Civ 5 Fractal map than anything that would be created through plate tectonics and geological forces in reality. This looks like it's meant to be a whole-world map, which unless the world is tiny, the scale of things is all wrong, having only a handful of cities and rivers per hemisphere.Cities are also placed like, seemingly randomly rather than along waterways and in strategic and resource-rich locales like they arose in real life
In terms of just like, using it in a campaign, great. It's very clear and readable and I like the coastline detailing a lot, and just having a map I find is immensely useful to solidifying the campaign as taking place in a real world rather than an amorphous vague notion of wherever the characters are.
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