Anun's Miffed Ghost's page

I really gave him every chance. I discouraged him from the plan from the beginning, I even rolled to hit. The rest of the encounter was described by what the other player saw: You see him skid to a stop and look up at the weapons pointed at him. A loud rumbling noise fills the arena as the vulcan cannon spat slugs the size of babies at your friend. Dirt and dust are thrown in the air followed by an explosion. When things settle, all that is left of him is a pile of stained, ruined earth.

Eh. Any plan, no matter how spectacular, can turn to poop real quick when you lose initiative and the badguy rolls a nat 20 to hit. That said, it was a good plan. High drama stuff. It really had the potential to be one of those "HA! You can do NOTHING...er...you got her? WHAT? ummm..." moments. When they fail, yeah it can look a lot like that.

That said, the absolute horror from the rest of the group, who had all really come to like Anun was just priceless! I still remember the character and his last goshawful story with fondness. Heck, it got my sand-speckled Chessex die officially re-named my Anun "dead".

One bit of tidy cleanup. I think there were rules mentioned in the development blogs about falling and collisions. The old rule was 1d6 per 10' drop. The old darkmantle has a whopping average 142 hit points (which is just stupid, but I digress). That would mean that if the vehicle was fast enough to kill it, it would be going a mean of 95 squares a turn, or 475 feet a round. That's fast.

So from a simulationist perspective (by the way Takasi, I have to properly thank you for turning me onto that article) ain't never gonna' happen. So maybe there's a new scaling charge rule as things get faster to give them more punch at faster speeds. Maybe darkmantles just have more reasonable hit points--I think personally that 30 would be fine, though in my games they'd have MUCH less.

Point being that they're not necessarily just making this up. Rules exist for ajudicating this sort of thing, and it's possible they looked it up and went "Dang! We killed it".

Personally I think it's fine to cry foul and say the gameplay here is a little immature, but I dunno I think we've turned this thread into another one of those tired hater threads with all the "not fit for a 10 year old" "impossible to die as a character" "Playtesters goofing off on company time stuff."

Was it a thrilling article? Hardly, but I think there's a better than average chance that folks are doing their jobs and the game isn't the stupidest thing ever made.

Yeah, I've always been a heavy house rules guy myself. Our way of dealing with hit points in our games was that you get them based off race (cause the halfling barbarian with 12 hp versus the half-orc wizard with 4 hp was just ridiculous to us) modified by Con as usual. And that's it. You can buy Toughness. You can raise your Con stat. That's it. No swelling hit points per level. That way weapons work the way they should without becoming meaningless dink damage. Armor gives damage reduction (like in UA, but we give it DR equal to the normal AC of the armor which in nicely beefier). We scale down magic and abilities that do multiple dice of damage and turn it into an add. 4d6 turns into 1d6+4 and so on.

What results is an awesomely gritty game where things can take about the amount of damage you'd expect and all is right with the world. It's still heroic. Heck our Pathfinder group took on the Sandpoint attack from Fortress of the Stone Giants and totally schooled--and they were a fourth level group. So it's not especially uberdeadly even. It just feels right.

So yeah, I'm right there with you.

That said, I'm hoping at least for a while, to go a different way with 4e. To try and take it at face value and play around with the system a bit. I really like this new take on hit points because it feels like they're finally taking it seriously and not trying to handwave it away.

But yeah...a game where TPKs don't necessarily end the game, or where reducing a badguy's HP to zero doesn't necessarily mean killing him. Heck it could mean scaring him away. Wow, that's just a cool thing.

Of course now there's one new snag. You'd have to find something else to call effects that reduce hitpoints--cause damage really isn't what it is.

Here's the big fatal flaw with the storyteller system. That guy who pulls airplanes around with his teeth? Yeah that dude who's a sphirical mass of hulking veiny muscle? He has five dots in strength. World famous, maybe even historically for strength. Joe WoW player? The guy who can't do a pushup with a gun to his head? The guy who breaks a sweat walking to the corner gasstation to buy Ho-hos? He's got one dot in strength.

That's a huge range. Huge. And when Joe puts his XP into Strength, he can raise it every couple of sessions. He can go from couch potato to manly man of legend in crazy fast amounts of time.

Where level provides maybe too linear a gauge of character potential, there is at least some sense of what a character can do, the life he's lived. At 10th level a character has lived a life of glory, and has many stories to tell. He is probably the head of an organization and if you cross him he will probably wipe you.

The Prince of Chicago is hot stuff, sure...but how many dots does he have? Well hard to say. If he gets 5 XP per session for the last 600 years you can pretty much fill in every dot on the sheet and then assume he's got XP to burn that he just can't. If you assume he's a static character who's got a bit better than average allotment of dots then he's a paper tiger and give the characters a few more weeks and they'll be right there with him. The vagueness makes it really frustrating.

Add to that tens explode and high dice yields hold no promise of better rolls and you've got yourself a situation where the average PC has a chance of taking the Prince, the Primogen, the whole enchilada. Heck the guy at the corner newstand could do the same with good rolls.

If the D&D powerscale is too linear, then the WoD one is nonexistant.

There's loads of other troubles with the White Wolf system, but that one there is the most awful.

Mapless and vaguely defined is cool. I really dig that. It gives the world both the flexibility to be sculpted by the DM and the freedom to drop in modules or whatever wherever you choose. Heck you can even drop in stuff from the previous editions that formerly had no home (Races of Stone is a wonderful example, by the way--so is Cityscape, both books that are so good you wish there was a world to go with them!)

The Bael'Turath thing is another one of those things I really like. Much like the fallen Roman Empire, everyone hears about it constantly and sees its ruins laying around. They may even live in what was once one of its mighty provinces, but yet there's still this sense of the greater world being dark and full of dread potency. I love that.

Using it as a template for Eberron or Faerun? I'm not sure. There never was a Bael'Turath in either of those places, and trying to port one into each setting will feel mondo cheesy. Having one freeform mapless world is a heckova' lot of fun. Having every setting--even the ones with maps turn all mapless and amorphous is like hitting the whole game with a chaos-beast ray. That gives me the stabby migrane.

I'm pretty turned off by it. Big ol' Plain Dumb from me.

I don't particularly see rock solid math behind guys getting hit with Finger of Death or going screaming off a 40' track in a minecar and coming out okay (or really not just getting reduced to ten different textures of dead meat). In fact that seems really really lame. You could get the same effect in third edition by just dropping all the save or die DCs to a 5! Wow! Look how heroic I am! Yay! It sounds like the kind of game you could sleepwalk through and come out fine.

That's the opposite of awesome action. No longer having to fear rolling a one and actually failing at something doesn't sound like a benefit either. It makes it sound like once your saves or skills get high enough they pretty much just always work no matter what. That sounds like barrels of fun. What's worse, the story he regaled us with didn't even sound exciting or cool. It sounded kinda' immature and nerdy.

Blergh.

Not impressed at all.

It was one of those over dinner kinds of revelations. Since back in the misty days of yore when Gary Gygax or whoever it was said that hit points aren't a measure of physical punishment so much as pluck, resolve, stamina, and morale--I've always hated it, and fought against it tooth and nail. It seemed overly abstract, clunky, hard to narrate, and a drama killer, all just to give PCs a safety net that it'd be more fun to do without. I hated it.

Then some articles came out for 4e, where they were talking about taking the old sad idea and actually flesh it out with some nice mechanics that took it seriously. Now PCs could step back behind the line of defenders, take a round to catch their breath, and get back some hit points. Inspiring leaders could stoke the courage of their fellows, and it would be reflected in hit points regained. There were even fun ideas that maybe divine "healing" was less a matter of mending shattered bones and more about instilling zealous faith to soldier on.

That got me thinking tonight. If that's what hit points are, then why does losing all one's hit points necessarily mean they're dying? I mean what if their resolve just gives out and they're too tired to raise their sword for another attack? What if their morale breaks and they run? What if they just lose all hope? I mean if hit points aren't your meat and bones, then might the loss of them be interpreted more broadly? Certainly it would give a lot more narrative power to the DM, the ability to paint neat scenes where badguys are driven off or surrender rather than always die. Likewise TPK's would have a new possible resolution other than defilement by monsters followed by rolling up new characters.

It got me thinking of all sorts of things. Heavy armor and weapons costing HP to wear or use. Fear effects that drain HP. All sorts of novel takes on the idea.

I dunno. I think I may be warming up to it.

I think what I like about this new setting most is the lack of maps. There seems to be this strong storyline (and yeah, for a "nonsetting" the Worlds & Monsters book is thick with history and storyline) setting up this dark age environment where nobody really knows much about the world beyond their little corner of it. They even go to pains to name it--though wierdly they don't give it a real name, mostly just academic titles. They have major nations that have risen and fallen, with little paragraph snippets of history. Its like they're trying really hard to paint this lavish world but in just the broadest possible brushstrokes so individual DMs can go in and really make the world their own. Wonderful.

But then in a blink it's like nevermind it's not a setting, do whatever you want.

AAAARGH!

What I wouldn't give for a bit of backbone amongst these guys! This is the second edition of the game where they're gonna' do this to me. It was very much the same in third edition. They do all this overtly Greyhawk stuff, even start weaving some really interesting bits of metaplot, but then it's like at the same time they want to distance themselves as far from Greyhawk as possible and make their Core setting something entirely different. It's like Metropolis and Lois Lane and Lex Luthor, with this Superhero in red underwear and cape but it's totally not Superman! It's something TOTALLY different. Can't happen. Sorry, once you've put the Great Wheel in there and all the Greyhawk gods--you're talking Greyhawk. You might be stomping on it, neglecting it, or mutating it, but what you're dealing with is Greyhawk. To think otherwise is ridiculous. It's obviously Greyhawk.

Anyhow it kills me that I'm constantly having to spindoctor and make sense of things that I'm paying $40 a pop on. I don't see where it would have killed them to make their "World" into, y'know, a world. Anyway if they're not gonna' than I will. Just drives me nuts. It's like nobody's seen a Campaign Setting before--like we'll all freak out and think that their Core Setting is the only one we can play in. I just don't get it.

One of the things that has gotten me so excited about the new edition is the idea that we get a brand new Core World to explore. The key problem with the last edition for me was that Greyhawk kind of got lost. It was nominally the core setting so it didn't get the kind of love Faerun or Eberron did, with a dozen books each, because the presumption was that every Core book was supposed to be a Greyhawk book. On the other hand, rather than explore Greyhawk as it is, there was a big pressure to marginalize the things that made it distinctive and turn it into more the "generic vanilla D&D". The Races series of books retooled each race, as if for some new setting, rather than use the original Greyhawk cultural stuff. They spliced in a whole bunch of new gods and wierd origin stories, until it was hard to know where Greyhawk ended and the Pseudo-Greyhawk Core Setting began. It was a mess. Lots of books did this, all of them pushing and pulling at the identity of Greyhawk as a setting and giving me the kind of knife-behind-the-eyeballs headache that only a continuity hound like me can get.

So I was looking through the Worlds & Monsters book and on the whole I was very impressed. A whole fresh world, with historical underpinnings for its races, whole nations and cultures, unfolding histories. They even give some names for this place--Creation (which, okay, was lifted straight outta' Exalted *sigh*) and The Middle Realm (which I really kind of like, halfway between the Elemental Vortex and the Astral Sea, and likewise straddling the Shadowfel on one side and the Feywild on the other).

Great. A new setting at last! Now Greyhawk can be Greyhawk without everyone messing with it. Awesome.

Then I catch the bit about "What the Development Team Means When We Say World"

Uh-oh.

See a world isn't a world in any conventional sense. It's not a plane or a realm or a planet. Nothing like that. It's the D&D game in its essence that makes it different from every other setting out there. It's like a template for a game to make it "feel D&D". It's a brand.

So now I'm right back to not knowing what they're talking about.

So when they describe the history of Io creating the dragons, is that how it works now in EVERY setting? The one country where the Tiefings come from, is that supposed to exist across all settings? In none of them? I don't get it! Are they saying that their ideas of empires falling all the time and the world being stuck in a mapless dark age, is something that applies to every D&D setting out there?

I just don't know.

Here's my take. The Middle Realm IS a world. It's a real physical world. It's made of dirt. It's not a template or a brand name. Those kingdoms and histories and whatnot exist THERE. The modules and whatnot written for 4e exist THERE. It's a big freeform dark age place full of excitement and adventure and I WILL NOT ALLOW it to become some big floaty "not-really-a-world" thing because that will kill me-- and after a whole edition of having to put up with mealymouthed crap I will have my way on this dangit!!

So...yeah okay that's my peace.

I don't think anyone's arguing that with you man. I think there's guys who can do pimp stuff in your mom's Honda, and guys with a Ferarri that will lurch it to a halt and blow up the engine within 15 seconds of getting into it.

Sure.

That said, there's differences between the Honda and the Ferarri, and I don't think its unfair to say so. I get what you're saying about some people being able to do wonders with anything, but that said I really enjoy having the better tools to work my craft with. But yeah, totally, a good storyteller with a passion for drama can make a great epic story out of Stratego.

That said I love your glorious prose in favor of the art. Likewise as settings go I really do love the World of Darkness. It's really close to my heart as one of my first experiences with storytelling. There's really just a ton of great settings out there. I guess my thing is more the awesomeness of D&D as a storytelling medium rather than trying to detract from anything else. It's the argument that D&D can't be more than a dry board game on a gridmap that gets to me. It's the beer and pretzels, orc-stabbing, space hopping--which is, don't get me wrong, all fine and good for folks who want to play it like that.

But it just feels nice to see so many people who love a good deep D&D game too, full of story and character. That's just cool. Granted I think part of it is that this is Paizo, and the posters here tend to be a cut above anyway.

Hey, congratulations on the big win! You're stuff has been consistantly awesome and I'm really looking forward to flipping through your product when it gets published. How cool is that. Anyhow enjoy it. You done good!