The first half of the seasons was definitely the better of the two. The second half, while it had a few bright sports like the Bollywood number, was more like the older seasons of LoT - a lot of stupidity and pointlessness (pointless annoying character, thy name is Gary).
It remains to be seen if John sticks around for the next season. Much though I like the character in general, I think I would prefer him to leave. He's better as a loner than a team player.
As was stated by others please drop the stat roll vs. point buy discussion.
I have gone through every post on the first page of the thread, and not a single person has made such a request (and only one considered it off-topic -- and that is a consideration I do not agree with; see below). The advice to avoid die-roll-generated characters was proposed by Derklord, and the immediately-following post was from the OP (almost four hours later, so I doubt he missed Derklord's comment), and it read in its entirely: "This info is all super helpful, thank you all for the advice/resources so far!"
Then I guess I'll have to throw in with the die-rollers: D&D needs rolled characters for my sake. I've had far more fun with rolled stats than point buy or (shudder) array. Most of my players agree, or don't much care either way. Sure, sometimes you get s~!* characters in good groups, sometimes you get god characters. Never has this significantly impacted gameplay or enjoyment.
And this whole discussion falls into the trap I tried to warn of in of my first point in my last post: Fun is the Number 1 priority. What works for a group works for a group and you shouldn't worry if other people don't like it. If your group likes point buy, fine. If your group wants to roll, fine.
By all means be aware of what others have found problematic in order to fix easily issues that may pop up, but don't assume that because some people find something problematic that it is inherently so for everyone.
I don't know why Ray didn't just tell the police officer the immediate truth (apart from humor's sake) -- someone dropped a jar and it rolled under the brake. That is totally a believable thing to happen on an old RV.
This bit is actually the most believable bit of the episode for me.
Some people just naturally try to come up with what seems to them to be a believable story but which sounds nuts to everyone else. I have one of these in my gaming group. He loves to play social characters but his attempts at bluffs and persuasions are just plain whack to everyone else.
The game is supposed to be fun
If everyone is having fun, you are Doing It Right. If people are not having fun, you are Doing It Wrong. Finding out what people like can take some trial and error, so don't be afraid to ask for opinions and change things that are unpopular. All other advice is for the purpose of achieving this overriding goal.
Rule Zero
The rules, including dice rolls, are meant to enhance fun, not reduce it. If a rule (either from the rulebook or informal table behavior) is making the game less fun over all, alter or eliminate it. If adding new rules would make the game more fun. do so. Of course, determining what is 'fun' is a doctorate in itself, and determining how things work together, and personal preference vs table preference, etc. is a pain in the arse.
Trust
A good GM is trusted by their players. While they may make unpopular decisions in a specific instances or put PCs in unpleasant situations, on the whole the players should feel the GM prioritizes their players' enjoyment of the game and will act honorably for the fun of everyone, not just themself.
Likewise, players should be trusted by their fellow players and GM. Sometimes people make honest mistakes, sometimes they try to cheat. How to handle cheaters is a whole other mess of advice, but the short answer is tackle it head on out of game and see if things can be resolved amicably.
No. 'Checks' are rolls to see if you hit a specific number, while caster level is a static component of spell power. It's the Dispel Magic that is making the caster level check, not the WoF.
If WoF had asked you to make a caster level check and add the result to the damage, you could add Otherworldy Kimono's bonus to that and its difficulty to dispel.
A cross between Ledger and Nicholson, methinks. Good actor, but what we've seen of the character looks pretty tame and uninteresting. I dislike giving the Joker an origin story. Part of what makes him good is that whatever he was before is mysterious and possibly irrelevant to what he is now.
I know Leto wasn't terribly popular but it was a take on the character we 8or at least I) hadn't seen before and I would like to see where they could have taken him.
*insert joke about incorrect use of player vs. character *
Short answer, yes. Take any undead in the game, allow player to play it. Done.
If you want an undead race balanced against core races, you're out of luck in PF core. The best thing to do would be to introduce the necropolitan. Just remove the bit about giving them d12 HD and you're good to go.
Good to see the show again. A rather weak episode compared to the rest of the season but that's only because the other episodes have been very good.
Were this Flash or Arrow it would have been the high point of the season.
Generally I'm in the camp of number 3. If s*$* happens, it happens. The notable exception is if a TPK occurs because I as the GM have messed up somewhere, like given faulty information that causes bad choices, if I've misread an ability the enemies have, if I've made bad calls during the fight, etc. TPKs that are on the players or the dice are fine, those that are on the GM are not.
Never 2 do unless this is plainly stated to be how things work when you start the game. Then find out why it only works for the PCs and no one else.
There is also option 6:
6. Fudging.
Sometimes a quiet fudge here and there can be the difference between a hard fight and a TPK. The boss has fewer hp than the notes say, he rolled a bit worse on a ST, he made a poor tactical choice for whatever reason, etc.
One thing I did when faced with a TPK was bring in backstory. One of the PCs was a princess and her great-uncle was a powerful sorcerer who was grooming her to be a potential heir (mostly just a convenient guinea pig), and though the PC had run away, the great-uncle kept a magical eye on her adventures and exploits and when he discovered she was dead and her friends weren't in any condition to bring her back, he intervened and killed the baddies, left the other PCs to live or die as their stabilization rolls dictated and spirited his great-niece away (the less said about his experiments on her the better).
Then the remaining PCs had to get themselves back to full strength and quest to save their friend from the unpleasant great-uncle. Technically an arse-pull solution to a TPK, but one which had background character justification and, most importantly, lead to more story down the road.
I'd rather no movies were Citizen Kane, but that's just me.
The first JW movie (haven't seen the second) had good action but I don't think I can call it a good action movie. Everything that wasn't action was a total drag to sit through. Not 'uninspired but serviceable' like so many movies but actually so bad I did stuff other than pay attention to the movie when there wasn't any action on screen.
My gf thought the movie was ok, for much of the same reasons I did. The most poignant feminist point, according to her, was all the sexist s#&* she had to go through on Earth and how she figuratively told everyone to go f++~ themselves and showed she was better than anyone, woman or no.
Unlike Diana, who grew up with only love and support, kick-ass female rolemodels and mild androgyny, Carol was continually told she wasn't good enough (usually because she was a girl), and she proved everybody who told her that wrong.
The flashbacks to all the times Carol fell when younger and the finale showing her getting back on her feet was actually the only bit of the movie that made me like the character as anything more than a generic cocky OP MC.
Putting it in the 90s might not have been necessary for the story itself, but does work well for the MCU as a whole because Carol has to be an established badass who can be a credible threat to Thanos, and who doesn't setting-wise get thrown in last minute. Now she's got the power, some time to master her control and personality, and reasons why she wasn't around for anything else that has happened on Earth recently.
Oh, and I am really, really sick of this (usually American?) thing of telling people to not think but go with their feelings. I truly hate this cliché and every time it gets trotted out my enjoyment of a work takes a serious hit.
cqc fight scenes (the unfortunate tendency in some MArvel movies of being filmed too close to the action and wanting to move the camera around all the time to prevent you from getting a good look at things).
This isn't just the MCU. American fight choreography has always been kinda bad. Prior to the 90's, it just lacked all sorts of technical proficiency. A few good starts in the late 80's and 90's elevated it briefly, but then the Bourne Identity was made. Parts of it are actually decent, but it also presented people with a fast-paced frenetic style, and that style makes it easy to cover up poor fight scenes.
There's also a lazy technique of filming with 2 cameras, it's something that's used to help catch errors, or ensure that it's being framed well, but directors have started to just use it for cutaways (before this second cameras film was actually rarely used). If you watch the Black Widow interrogation scene in the first Avengers it's pretty obvious.
I know. And it's not like all the cqc action in the Marvel movies is bad. just enough of it and (seemingly) it's getting worse as time goes on.
The DCU has managed to have good fight/action scenes in pretty much everything they've dpme. Say what you will about the movies otherwise, the action has always been very good. Snyder, whatever faults he may have, knows how to do superhero action, and the others they have hired for the other movies have done a good job as well.
Irontruth wrote:
But you find all these sins in most movies. The only movies off the top of my head that give you consistent wide shots of action (recently) are Mad Max: Fury Road and the John Wick movies.
MMFR is one of my favorite action movies in forever. John Wick has good action but suffers in everything else.
Also Atomic Blonde, by the action choreographer of John Wick and starring Charlize Theron, has some great fights. Very good, underrated movie.
Just got back from the movie, and it was OK+. Pretty standard Marvel fare, not their best, not their worst.
The good: some decent spaceship and pew-pew stuff, Goose
The Meh: Carol, the 90s, Coulson, obvious secret baddies are obvious, the skrull
The Bad: Fury (nothing but a joke), cqc fight scenes (the unfortunate tendency in some MArvel movies of being filmed too close to the action and wanting to move the camera around all the time to prevent you from getting a good look at things).
The problem with this sort of thing is these people are all one-trick ponies. At will, in some cases quite powerful, but still rarely more than can be modeled with a single spell or Su ability.
Ben's ability was basically Evard's Black Tentacles, and the only other ability we've seen Klaus have is an inconstant Speak With Dead, so either a cleric with a special spell, or a wizard with a special spell (or Limited Wish).
Do you count TSR/WotC as 3rd party?
Plenty of spirit-based spells to choose from there. If we could use 2e spells it would be easier, since you could use Summon Spirit instead of Speak with Dead, and variants on spirit summoning/communication, binding, etc..
I read Simak's "Shakespeare's Planet" a couple days ago. A fun little story, but it suffers from a common occurrence in SF/F, that the build-up is better than the resolution. Still a good read, as is everything else I've read by him.
Reverse Gravity used to have an area with unlimited ceiling, so maybe your GM was just remembering the old version. Goodness knows my older players and I have made similar mistakes.
Weirdest thing I've played in any game: a sentient photocopier called zzzzzzzDONK! - in TOON.
I don't really have any strong desires of weird stuff to play these days. Mostly I am fine just playing, since I mostly GM.
I don't really have a limit to how silly or weird it can get, I just want it to fit the game being run.
The physics of the medium are one thing, but the main point of the skill in both Fly and Swim are how to move your body effectively in that medium, which has zero applicability to knowing which controls to use on a craft. The fact that piloting small boats isn't hard has nothing to do with swimming. That just means the DC to do it isn't high.
Any sort of flying has a much higher base DC than floating around on water.
Let's put it another way: do you really feel that someone should be able to swim because they can pilot a ship?
Or that a drag racer can do well in a 100 m sprint because both are about going very fast in a straight line over flat ground?
Has any RPG publisher ever kept publishing an 'obsolete' edition at the same time as a new one?
The closest I can think of is TSR when they had B/X-BECMI and AD&D, but that was more like branching lines of development, and it didn't work out for them economically.
Anyway, converting adventures from one system to another is pretty easy* so publishing ones for multiple systems shouldn't be necessary. Even if you stick to P1, if you want more APs, I can't imagine that adapting P2 to P1 can be a problem.
*as long as you know the target system pretty well
My thought would be that for maneuvering in the air the fly skill, with perhaps a modifier would work out. The basics of aerodynamics and stuff like that are the same.
By this logic knowing how to swim should be the same as piloting a boat or submarine.
Um, why can't they use Piloting to fly the ship?
The description of the skill allows you to use it to, you know, pilot it. And navigate.
And shoot the pew-pews.
Or did you mean to say "But without the pilot skill from Starfinder"?
Personally, I'd introduce Piloting but not allow them put ranks into it without some actual practice. They don't have teachers, training sims, training vehicles, and they have no cultural background to indicate how this might work, so anything they do to learn the skill is with the ship itself, and probably going to end horribly.
I'm mostly the GM so my characters are not very many or all that often.
Currently: Viconia, 7th level bard in RHoD set in Norwold.
The only player and therefor character who knows anything about Mystara, and the only one who has played through the adventure before, so I take it upon myself to throw in tidbits of lore at every opportunity. Likes drink and being sarcastic at the enemy.
Aranwaroo
Wookie heavy gunner in a SWTOR FFG SW game. Unlike all other wookies, he bothers to wear armor - the cheapest and easiest. He has a thin, tight armor with all his fur sticking out around the head and hands. Likes: his big gun, shooting Sith and shooting Imperials. Dislikes: Sith and Imperials
Gimme a break, I only played him for three sessions.
and....(thinks long and hard)
Some 3.5 rogue in an abandoned game from a few years back. Can't remember her name, only that she rarely got to SA things*.
Can't remember much about her other than that she didn't like slavery.
*I would have suspected the GM of creating encounters that f$@#ed over my characters if it isn't for the fact that it would be very much against how he comes across in all respects. My supercharged could only charge three times in his career, being constantly stymied by terrain or positioning otherwise, and one of the three times he could he went up against someone who had Sidestep Charge. My rogue met nothing but elementals, constructs and undead after the first combat.
Note that the older a language is, the more guesswork is involved in recreating sounds, and you can find wildly varying attempts at pronunciation and intonation. An actual person from 9th C England would no doubt be sorely puzzled by our atrocious attempts at their language.
Depends on the god. Some probably want a unique, exaggerated titles and constant epithets to stroke their egos (Oh magnificent One, Unparalleled in all the Multivers, please ....) Others are probably fine with a simple "Lord" or "Great One" or something.
On the subject of PCs telling gods to stuff it:
:
In one game the gods came to earth for certain reasons, and rather than stop a pointless civil war started taking sides. My character was fed up with this b***##~$, and strode up to them and said something to the effect of:
"What the hell?!? Why are you doing this? You're supposed to be better than us and You squabble like children, wasting the lives of your followers for petty pride. Now act like gods worthy of worship!"
Nevermind that speaking in this way was grave blasphemy and no one would have batted an eye if my PC and his entire clan was eradicated for such insolence, While the gods never actually admitted their mistake, they did stop the fighting and got one with the business they had come to do. And intense religious debates and exaggerated plays sprung up about the whole incident.
Too much showing off people I don't really care about and too little action.
I'll watch it, just to get it over with.
You know ... man, dude ...
I'm not a big sports fan, I personally am not into basketball at all. I think I'm going to go find a basketball forum somewhere and then post how boring some popular player is, how much a team everyone else is enthusiastically talking about stinks, or maybe how I guess I'll watch some big game even though I hate both teams, you know ... just to get it over with.
Holy crap on a cracker dude ...
To clarify my position:
I have generally enjoyed the Marvel movies - some have been less than good but most have been fun - but I'm feeling a little fatigued by them. They are very safe and by-the-numbers, and while that has worked well, it also gets old after a while and Marvel has been cranking these movies out like there's no tomorrow.
They have in general been quite entertaining, with some exceptions. The problem is the only ones I actually like are Cap and Tony (and Rhodey and Spidey, to a lesser extent) and by now I am OK with them being retired. I don't care about the other characters. Thor borders on likeable but that's all the actor and not the movies or character. The rest are mostly in a "they're OK, I guess" category with a few genuinely annoying ones, like the entire GotG cast and Scott.
What has made the movies fun is decent superhero action and braindead plots.
So a trailer that tries to make me want to see a movie by assuming an emotional connection to the characters I don't really care about doesn't work for me.
The Snap is obviously going to be undone somehow and I don't care about who most of the ones who 'died'. All I'm here for is the end of the story and hopefully some good flashy action that isn't yet another superhero slapfest.
Castle is chaotic. He doesn't give a damn about laws or how his actions affect society as a whole, just his own obsession, and damn anyone who gets in his way.
He may claim to like law and order but he doesn't care enough to actually try to make it work. His own needs and desires trump anything else - classic chaotic thinking.
Being chaotic doesn't mean you can't have a personal code, it just means your code won't be inherited from an outside source or that you won't adjust it to fit the desires of others.
His extreme focus on killing anyone who offends his sensibilities, the refusal to admit that there may be other better ways to handle situations, his extremely self-absorbed worldview, puts him solidly evil in my book, in most interpretations I've seen. Netflix Castle may be more CN than CE, but there is certainly nothing Lawful or Good about the character.
Give all his worshippers the ability to cheaply and easily create kevlar vests? (or any other armor, introducing armor as DR for his followers)
Give everyone the ability to cast Create Water at range specifically targeting gunpowder.
Give everyone Invisibility 1/day.
More important than anything, what are the levels and classes of the gunners and the orcs? Levels and classes are really important in this game. Anything else depends on this answer. If Clangeddin gives his followers guns and Bane just ordains all 3000 as clerics or whatever, it won't take many levels before the gunners are screwed.
What sort of information do the various parties have on the other? How much preparation time does each side have? Where are they facing off? Again, we need to know all this to help.
Have the orcs use their brains. If they mass up and charge they will die. Maybe they invent trench warfare. Maybe they choose terrain where the cannons can't be used effectively.
And depending on the age and color of the dragon, 400 guns are easily handled. Give me a great wyrm red and you'll have a lot of dead gunners.
This might be the easiest solution.
I've had Steeleye Span's "Gulliver Gentle and Rosemary" stuck on my mind for close to a week, and am trying to saturate my brain to the point it can't understand the song anymore.
ANIMAL-VEGETABLE-MINERAL MAN!
I wonder if he'll be back.
Yet another good episode. The slightly surreal Fuchtopia, the dark humor, the brutal violence, the very human and subdued drama of the characters: I have very little to complain about (which is unusual for me) and I like/love pretty much everything.
I'm always impressed at how little damage firearms do in these shows.
I wonder about Jeff cauterizing the wound with his lightning - I thought the point was he simply absorbed it; can he turn off the absorbtion power?
Agent whatsisface continues to be an utter prick. I'm looking forward to him getting his comeuppance.
Seeing Diaz set alight was pleasing. I won't count him as dead quite yet, however. He'll probably comeback slightly singed with even more power, or get the Vader treatment or something.
Depends on the setting.
On Mystara, it's a bit vague what happens to the souls of creatures. Sometimes they are portrayed as being taken by a patron Immortal, sometimes evil souls have been reincarnated in bestial forms, sometimes there is travel of spirits between various outer planes without explaining why they are in any in the first place - nothing definitive.
On Abeir-Toril (Forgotten Realms, Maztica, Al-Qadim, etc.) you go to your patron god no matter what. If you have no patron, it's the Wall of the Faithless, regardless of one's moral leanings or deeds.
Dragonlance is also vague, with things sometimes being portrayed as the Abyss being the only outer plane and afterlife there is, with very little detail about what goes on there.
Dark Sun doesn't have much beyond the Grey and the Black, so there isn't much choice.
Planescape seems to assume that if you don't have a patron Power that claims your soul you head to the Outer plane that matches your alignment. No real mention is made of kharma or some tallysheet of good-evil law-chaos acts that weigh against each other. Greyhawk probably works that way but I know little of that setting other than that the Great Wheel grew from it. Spelljammer probably works that way, and Birthright is also vague on the subject.
Wall of Thorns is a very respectable replacement. If anyone remembers Herogames Hero Fantasy the druid there could cast Wall of Animals which should be a fairly traumatic experience as dozens of woodland critters form an animal pyramid to stop your enemies attacks.
I'm a little surprised that there aren't any Time Travel spells in Pathfinder. I mean it is a horrible idea, introducing time travel into any game is a mistake because it basically leads to people trying to 'fix' everything. And then there is the horror of the BGs doing the same to you.
The reason I'm surprised is because its a very popular trope and well within the scope of 9th level spells (8th even), so I'd figure at some point the editors would make the mistake of letting an author introduce some sort of time travel mechanic in a limited setting and then people would insist on letting anyone in PFS and beyond use it in every setting.
Same here. Outright time travel is understandable because, yeah, players are hard enough to wrangle without giving them free access to the 4th-dimension, but there's a lot of ways to mess with the flow of time to interesting (and relatively manageable - at least as much as any other mid- to high-level spell) effect. I did one time decide to try and make a time wizard and found it difficult to grab more than one or two spells per level that fit the concept at all. I think I've noticed a few more time-related spells come out since then, so maybe I'll give it a second go, now that 1e is coming to a close.
I also feel like Time is a glaringly absent cleric Domain, when you think about it.
Strangely, it hasn't been a problem for me. Possibly because I haven't given unlimited time travel. Yet.
The group has experienced outright time travel and noticeable time dilation.
One of my players' characters is on the path to becoming a Time Immortal, which will require travel to other periods to intervene in events.
Time travel is a problem if you assume that the PCs and no one else have it, or that it is entirely unregulated. Add a few strictures and it's no biggie.
One was a perfectly normal encounter in a dungeon, not a boss encounter or anything. The PCs just waltzed right into a dragon lair, with the dragon having one round to prepare. The dragon snatched, flew off and killed two, over the course of five rounds and reduced the third to negatives before being killed. This was at a level where the PCs (and players) should have handled this easily.
In the appropriately titled "Death's Ride" adventure we had what was technically a TPK, but I fudged a bit and had the granduncle of one of the PCs come in and (sorta) save the day - by which I mean he killed the baddies, abducted his grandniece, and left the others to die.
I still get dirty looks when I mention this adventure and some of the monsters therein.
"Talons of the Night" had everyone left standing by the end (even if there were some deaths during the fight), but the PCs did expend five or six Wishes and two Miracles to break even against a severely nerfed Immortal.
When I wanted a wee break from GMing my gf ran RHoD for us, set contemporarily with our normal campaign. We failed, so I took over, buffed Tiamat a little and let her loose on the 16th level PCs from our normal campaign. There were six deaths divided among four PCs, but they did manage to take her down.
I had an interesting thought I'm going to ask in other threads ...
As a GM who owns 1e Adventure Paths, if Paizo provided free 2e stat blocks for all the creatures used in 1e Adventure Paths, would that:
1. Make it more likely that you'd consider 2e?
2. Make your migrating to 2e a sure thing?
3. Make absolutely no difference to you because you plan to stick with 1e no matter what?
No - don't run APs, don't have problems converting on my own
No - see above
Yes and no. It makes no difference because I don't run APs, and even if I did, I can always convert something myself. I already spend lots of time converting old BECMI modules to P1, so having to do a little work in that regard isn't an issue.
I don't plan on sticking with P1 'no matter what', I plan on sticking with it until something better comes along, and all signs point to P2 being worse. Not as much worse as the PT indicated, perhaps, but it still insists on certain fundamental mechanics that I cannot stomach.
Still not convinced that Cyborg should be here, but other than that the second episode was pretty damn good, quite possibly better than the first.
That cockroach was hilarious. I hope we see more of him.
One thing I like about Titans and DP is how they are perfectly happy to acknowledge that the wider DC universe exists - none of this Marvel tv show pretending that nothing else happens outside what is shown onscreen.
There are several ways you can handle this.
AMF would work, IMO, but needs continual casting.
If you already have the phylactery, the hard part is over with. You could:
- put it in a special holding cell with an automatic crusher that crushes the new-forming body of the lich on a regular basis, preventing it from ever
- temporal stasis on both phylactery and lich
- imprisonment
- Miracle/Wish (possibly with some escape clause like "when the last dragon flies over the last man, you can be freed")
Swinging any sort of weapon around requires strength. Try actual sword/spear/staff/whatever exercises without having the muscles for it - you will feel your inadequacy very soon. The stronger you are, the faster you can swing something, and speed is essential in combat, both for hitting something that is trying to avoid you and injuring something. Though modern sport fencing is tangential to actual combat, just look at the sort of muscles in Olympic fencers' arms to move those knitting needles around.
The stronger you are, the easier you can power through tough armor or hide, knock opposing weapons aside, and the longer you can keep an intense workout like combat.
It was quite good. I'm usually not much into historical dramas and definitely not zombies other than Shawn of the Dead or Zombieland Saga, but Kingdom made both work. Good script, great costumes and general appearance, good drama, decent characters: it all works very well.
I know nothing about Korean history so I don't know if this is set with real historical characters or, as I suspect, fictional ones set in a (mostly) real historical period, nor do I have any idea how accurate the costumes or portrayal of society is. All I know is I liked it.
As for any sort of D&D campaign, it would have to be a very low powered, low magic one. Even considering these would be mindless ghouls instead of zombies in D&D terms, this sort of thing isn't really enough to pose a big threat to most worlds - it's a minor local problem at worst before 4-to-6 murderhobos come along and murder the unquiet dead.
Basically, Gar just lived at Doom Manor after having been rescued by Chief from a plague. The experimental treatment that saved his life also gave him the ability to shapeshift into a tiger. For the rest of Titans shown so far Gar can only shift to a tiger, but in the last episode this has probably been expanded to all animals.
Doing deaths like Fist of the North Star is the way to go, brutal, gory and fast deaths for mooks and other minor challenges, impactful and meaningful and detailed for named characters worth a damn.
Extra points if it's super manly and you shed a manly tear for a valiant opponent. Lots of talking before/during/after the fight is optional.
