Corathonv2's page

Bjørn Røyrvik wrote:

*Time-travelling clone cyborgs from the distant future are erasing important events in the history of magic and magic creatures throughout the timestream to ensure their own creation and dominance.

The adventure writer watched the Terminator movies too many times.

Where Chaos Reigns was released in 1985, so he might've seen the first Terminator movie, but none of the others - unless he was a time-travelling module writer. ;)

And the amount of critters in the 1E Monster Manual that have save or die poison attacks is quite high.

Almost all monster poison in 1E is save or die - but a cleric or druid with a 2nd level slow poison spell can bring back a character that has been "killed" by poison if applied within a time limit. The restored victim then has a few hours to get the poison neutralized.

Truly, permanently dying to poison after 3rd level is the result of very bad luck or bad play.

That's funny because I think monsters with levels were possible

Yes. And vampires with levels were actually on the encounter tables in the 1E Dungeon Master Guide.

Is that exactly the meaning behind More than Words???

I have no insider knowledge, but it sure seems like it to me.

Physics. I'm a physicist now.

I've never done what you're interested in, but I've gone in the opposite direction - converting 3E or Pathfinder monsters / adventures to AD&D 1E. Monsters aren't hard to do, but adventures contain assumptions (e.g. about the rate of level advancement or how formidable a single tribal humanoid is) that fail in AD&D.

blahpers wrote:

PossibleCabbage wrote:

blahpers wrote:

Question: Why do it matter to you how things go?

Because as a GM it is my job to make sure the people at the table are having a good time, and over like 20+ years of doing this I have learned to read the room. So if I'm picking up something like "nobody really feels like another fight here" then there's not going to be one no matter what I wrote down or what the dice say. If an "exploration scene" or "talking scene" or "puzzling scene" would go over better than a combat scene, then that's what's going to happen.

Do your players know that you've been lying to them and negating their agency based on your perception of what they're thinking but not saying?

Do you seriously think players are going to mad they didn't have to do something they didn't want to do and instead got to do something they wanted to do. That still challenged them and required them to use their characters?

I know I wouldn't be.

But hey having fun, in the game I am playing, for fun, is more important to me than being safe in the knowledge that the game went exactly as was planned by the DM to the detriment of fun. I don't understand your agency objection.

Being faced with a different challenge than was originally planned doesn't hurt my agency. My character still acts as I want my choices, still matter in that new scenario, its just a more fun scenario.

If a DM can't adjust his plans to enhance the fun at the table then I think I'm completely lost in this argument.

DMs aren't meant to make fun anymore, they just meant to lorde over some weird simulated reality that people don't need to enjoy, they simply must trudge through at all costs!

Chromantic Durgon, I agree that fun is the reason to play the game. But if I, as a player, find out that my decisions are meaningless, my fun is ruined. I think that's what blaphers is driving at.

If I decide to roll the dice, I will obey the results. Otherwise why roll?

I feel no obligation to keep a PC alive; that's the player's job. Likewise, I have no desire to kill a PC; that's the job of their enemies. I'm just the referee.

Set wrote:

And the scene where she just shoots Yon-Rogg was great

One of the only scenes that both had some emotional impact for me and that wasn't ruined by the trailers giving it away.

I was cringing in dread of her actually accepting his stupid challenge because Hollywood.

Nope.

I enjoyed that bit.

Yeah, that was great. One of two places where the movie subverted expectations, or maybe I should say "cliches". The other concerned the Skrulls.

It's only a Christian view to identify one's being with one's souls, and to expect the soul to be immortal.

But that's not true. Its not only Christians (and Muslims) that assume immortality of the soul. Look at the ancient Egyptian religion, for example.

"Your soul just decomposes, becoming scenery" seems like a pretty uncommon viewpoint in the real world's religions. Even in religions like Hinduism, where the individual soul's identity is ultimately lost, the soul becomes one with something eternal.

But, ultimately, people are going to dislike different things.

I'm one of "those people". The grim fate of all souls, whether good or evil, is a very repulsive feature of the setting.

I agree, with Set that its inherited from D&D (starting with AD&D 2E) but it stinks in D&D also.

UnArcaneElection wrote:

Keep in mind that what awaits most Good creatures isn't very good either, since most souls lose their memories after death.

And everything else about themselves, barring special occasions, only to be eventually formed into an Outsider or decomposed into planar matter. Pathfinder not only has your body undergo decomposition, this is a universe in which SOULS undergo decomposition. Makes for a good "cycle" but feels pretty bad to be on the receiving end.

They lose their memories, and the majority eventually become so bored that they just stop moving/reacting, and merge with the Plane. Which is in its turn eroded and destroyed by the Maelstrom in the fullness of time.

Recycling: its good for trash, and also for souls it seems. :(

Yeah, game designers since AD&D 2E's Planescape seem to be incapable of imagining a good (i.e. non-horrible) afterlife.

If I had the infinity gauntlet...

First, there is no such thing as free will. If we knew EVERY variable possible, we could always predict with perfect accuracy what a person would do tomorrow. The problem is that it is very difficult to know even most of the variables, let alone ALL of them.

The concept of free will and choice is an illusion created by the arrow of time (time progresses from the state of no entropy, to complete entropy). In a universe without things like infinity gauntlets (or similar), the present moment is like a curtain from behind which things emerge and we can't see them until that moment. This doesn't mean our choices don't matter, or that we should change how we behave, but in a sense all of existence (all of space and time) has already happened. What you will do tomorrow is already decided based on all the things that have happened before, but you can't see/know what they will be until they happen, because that is how we experience time.

When you start looking into things like evolutionary psychology, some neuroscience, and similar areas of study, the evidence of our lack of free will starts to become even more apparent.

Free will is a useful construct for determining rules and imposing consequences for breaking those rules, but it is nothing more than a useful fiction (for an easy example of a useful fiction, ask a firearms safety instructor why you should always behave AS IF a gun is loaded, even if you've checked it 5 times to make sure it isn't).

Unproven assertion.

In GotG1, Ronan is surprised that Star Lord, a mere human, can use (or even touch?) an infinity stone without dying. He can, because he's not just a human, but the son of Ego.

I am a mere human, the son of Conrad. If I tried to use the Infinity Gauntlet, I guess I'd just die.

Yeah, Vir was awesome. I didn't think much of him when he first showed up, but when he said that line to Morden it showed me that there was more to the character.

I miss Babylon 5.

Ranger: I think we should track the bad guys back to their lair.

Fighter: How would we do that?
Ranger: We follow their footprints.
Fighter: What are these footprints of which you speak?
Ranger: Do you see those holes in the snow shaped like boots?
Fighter: Nope. Hey Cleric, do you see these "footprints"?
Cleric: Hell no, I follow Abadar. Footprints are just Erastil propaganda.
Fighter: How about you Rogue; you can count the hairs on a fly at half a league.
Rogue: I see nothing. I think Ranger got into Alchemist's stash again.

Tracking is a trained only activity of the survival skill. So we are back to AD&D where tracks, even those in 2 foot deep snow, are invisible to those without this skill.

Actually, that's not the way it is in AD&D.

From Unearthed Arcana
"In all cases, the DM must use common sense as to whether or not it will be possible
to follow a creature by tracking. For instance, creatures which leave obvious trails can almost always be tracked - worms, slimes, jellies, and the like are obvious examples of this."

This seems like a "common sense" situation to me. But if you want a rule:

From Wilderness Survival Guide
"A character without proficiency in tracking has a base chance of 0% on any attempt to follow a trail, but may still be able to engage in tracking if the total of all applicable modifiers is a positive number."

The modifiers would be positive in this case.

I'm thinking about doing a campaign, I had an idea to start it off with a seeming goblin/orc invasion. The twist is that, while they are technically invading, the reason they left their homeland is because of a greater evil. As an example, the orcs of Belkzen are invading because Kazavon is leading a quiet attack against the orcs to get his kingdom back. Considering that the players would then find out they were essentially slaughtering refugees, I imagine a few would hate that revelation.

Being a victim doesn't make you a bad person - but it doesn't make you a good person, either.

If the "refugees" are killing, torturing, and eating the residents of the land to which they are driven (typical orc behavior) then they are not refugees, they are invaders. The motivation for their invasion doesn't change that. The revelation that the orcs were driven out of their homeland would not cause me to feel bad as a player, it would get me interested in the darker evil that is behind all of this.

If the orcs are behaving differently than normal (for them) that should clue the PCs that something's up. They may want to find out what, and it shouldn't be a surprise when they find out the truth. There are then possibilities of alliance - although allying with chaotic evil or malevolently insane beings is seldom a good idea.

The Left Hand of Darkness was my favorite, but I also loved The Word for the World is Forest and The Lathe of Heaven.

The deck is a great item. The players can choose to engage with it or ignore it, so its not forced upon those who don't want to use it. Its not disruptive IMC, because my campaign is the story of the characters, rather than a set adventure path. If one PC gets imprisoned far away, the game becomes "How do we rescue him" - new adventure. If another character earns the enmity of a devil then that devil make a move against him - another new adventure.

If you are playing a planned-out series of adventures the deck may be a problem. It may also be a problem for low level PCs

@CorvusMask: Being Good is hard. Its easier to fall than to rise. That said, the huge majority of Celestials haven't fallen, so I think that you're drawing the wrong conclusion from the data.

Also, maybe there are malfunctioning (chaotic) Inevitables and obsessive (lawful) Proteans out there waiting to be revealed.

@Coidzor: Yeah the afterlife in Planescape really stunk, and stunk in ways that contradicted what had been previously revealed about it in earlier products. Then much of that became the Golarion afterlife.

*nods*

Yeah, the depression certainly didn't help, and it will forever be heartbreaking, but he decided to go out on his own terms.

That wasn't the impression that I received from the linked story. It didn't seem like a considered decision on Williams' part but rather the consequence of a terrible mental disease which wasn't even diagnosed until after his death.

I'm pretty sure Tolkien never considered the option for half dwarves but it should also be noted he never envisioned half elves as a subspecies also. Aragorn and Arwen's son was Eldarion but he was human not elf or half elf in the D&D sense of the species.

Yeah, in Tolkien, a child of an elf and a human got to be one or the other. Elrond chose to be an elf, his brother Elros chose to be a human.

In my 1E campaign the group was going against evil alchemists that were using their arts to mutate people trying to create a class of powerful flunkies. Sometimes the process went wrong and created mutants that the alchemists regarded as failures. One of these was a man turned into an idiotic giant who went by the name of "Zog". He was intended as a straight combat encounter, but the party's highly charismatic druid / ranger took pity on him, treated him kindly, and ended up getting Zog as a sort of follower.
Zog stayed with the group for years, finally dying when they encountered a giant metallic mantis that was kicking the party's collective @$$. When the creature attacked the druid / ranger, Zog grappled it and fell with it into a pit of molten lava - saving the party.

Ravingdork wrote:

Yeah, pretty much all of the sakhils are thematically amazing.

Awww, thanks! It warms a parent's heart.

So you're their creator? Just out of curiosity do sakhils have a mythological origin?

The fantastic stands out more against a backdrop of the mundane. If everything is fantastic then. in a way, nothing is. If player character monsters don't even raise an eyebrow in cities or even towns, then they aren't really fantastic.

That's why I prefer most player characters to be humans or demi-humans, with the occasional weird/exotic thing for spice.

TriOmegaZero wrote:

Rosgakori wrote:

And vice versa. Clark Kent is who he is.

Nah.

Was literally about to link that thank you Tri

Superman always had power was always amazing most other heros come into their power. but really Bill says it best.

Bill sees Superman (and everything else, I suppose) through the warped and cracked lens of his own psychopathic outlook. In game terms, Bill, being Chaotic Evil, cannot really understand the mind of Superman, who is Lawful Good.

I am always annoyed by Paizo's calling a winged horse a Pegasus. Pegasus was the name of the winged horse ridden by Perseus. Using "Pegasi" as the plural annoys me even more. Even if there were more than one winged horse, Pegasus is a Greek word, and the "-us singular/ -i plural" construction is Latin. Saying that the plural of Pegasus is Pegasi is like saying the plural of Zeus is Zei.

You're right that "Pegasus" was the name of an individual winged horse in the original myth, but D&D/Pathfinder is rife with taking mythical creatures that were single individuals or existed in very limited numbers, and making species out of them.

My knowledge of Latin and Greek is pretty small, so I might very well have this wrong, but I suppose that the original Greek name would've been something like "Pegasos", "Pegasus" is a latinized form, so maybe "pegasi" isn't such a bad plural form of "pegasus".

Medusa and Gorgon. Medusas should be called gorgons, Medusa should be their queen/goddess, and Gorgons should not exist.

You're right that in Greek myth, the snake-haired female monsters that petrified with a look were called gorgons, but Medusa was the only mortal one of the three. She seems an unlikely candidate for their queen.

The metal-scaled bull being called a "gorgon" is from Topsell's "The History of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents", published in 1658. That's pretty recent compared to the Greek myths, but not exactly a johnny-come-lately.

Derro - These are pretty obviously the "Dero" of Richard S. Shaver, who published a number of supposedly-true "ancient astronauts"-style stories in the 50s. Deranged subterranean dwarfs with psychic powers, the Dero were supposedly the degraded offshoot of an ancient race of super-men called the Tero.

Gary Gygax, who created the Derro, confirmed that they were indeed based on Shaver's Dero.

I've killed lots of characters, but no players - so far. ;)

My philosophy as a GM is to let the dice fall where they may, and as a player I hope that my GMs will do the same. But that's easier to do in the game that I play (AD&D) than it is in PF, because character creation is so much faster.

Talking to your players about this out of game is probably a good idea.

Yeah, I thought Civil War the movie did a much better job than Civil War the comic storyline. Though it helps that former was smaller and more self-contained (and also managed to avoid making Tony and Steve act like jerks.)

Total agreement. I stopped reading Marvel comics because of the comic book Civil War, but I liked the movie version.

There is only one circumstance in which I will fudge the dice or change things on the fly. That's when a mistake of mine has gotten the PCs into hot water.

If the players make mistakes and it gets the PCs into hot water, too bad. But if I screwed something up the PCs shouldn't have to pay for it. In practice it rarely comes up.

Last panel made me LOL.

Lady Luck has no memory. If the die is a fair one it has a 5% chance to come up "20", no matter what was rolled before. However, if the die rolls many twenties in a small number of tries then it might not be a fair die (i.e. the odds of rolling a 20 on the die might be greater than 5%).

I recently DM'd for the first time and after what happened, I think it qualifies for this thread.

I don't think that you did anything wrong. Sometimes the dice run hot. Sometimes characters die.

The NPC had done evil things. Not only is she not repentant, she has promised that if she escapes she will do even worse. There is no rightful authority to turn her over to.

If I were a Good character (but not a paladin) in this situation I'd kill the Aspis agent. If I were a paladin I would (given the rest of the group's consent) untie her, give her a weapon, and say "You and me, to the death. If you win, you can go free at a place of my comrades' choosing." Then I'd fight her.

! agree that the DM in this situation is doing a bad job. He may be looking for "entertaining moral dilemma" be he seems to have created "Sophie's choice" instead.

Yeah people are still playing 1e and 1e, that doesn't mean they are still making products for those editions.

The no-longer extant TSR isn't making them, and WotC isn't making them, but products are still being made and sold, largely due to the OGL.

Actually yeah I think Lovecraft would fit right in with those groups, at least judging from the way he wrote his sympathetic protagonists. He was racist, sexist, classist, and generally -ist towards anything that smacked of scientific advancement (in the stories, i'm not claiming to be an expert on the man himself). His stories praised ignorance as a virtue, most of the academics his stories focus on are considered to be inherently evil even if they aren't shown to be doing anything that would earn them that sort of stigma in today's world. He acknowledges that there are academics who are not evil, but they are almost never actually shown in the focus of the story.

Maybe I should have said "He His protagonists would be absolutely horrified and that should be a mark of pride for us all."

Lovecraft's protagonists were frequently academics, so I don't think that he regarded academics as evil. From Wilmarth in "The Whisperer in the Darkness" to the trio of professors that fought "The Dunwich Horror", to the professors in the ill-fated expedition At The Mountains of Madness, the academics are the protagonists.

The theme of "dangerous knowledge" is definitely in Lovecraft's work, but the villains are usually cultists or sorcerers (like the Akeleys). In fact, I can't offhand think of an evil academic in Lovecraft's stories.

Or a "ghost town" where literally everything is a mimic/group of mimics working together to eat unwary travelers.

There was an old adventure in Dungeon magazine like this.

No alignment problems for the gnome IMO. If I were the DM I'd congratulate him, actually.

Sometimes player characters excel at one thing so much so it is nearly impossible for them to fail. Not just in combat, could be the ability to pick looks, notice things, have knowledge of things, or any other skill or ability. This exceptional proficiency can sometimes stymie us as GMs. But why do we as GMs care so much that a character is good at something, why is letting them be successful so difficult for us (myself included) sometimes.

Pathfinder, my current game of choice, can see this problem happen often as skill ranks, feats and class abilities can really explode how much a character can do. But I’ve begun to learn how to let the rogue do what he does best and not feel bad when he overcomes my cunning trap. Or when the cleric in my Shattered Star game can unerringly name every demonic thing under the sun, letting his skill mean something.

What have your players (or you if you are a player) excelled at? How have you dealt with your player’s un erring ability to succeed at certain things? Do you go out of your way to find manners to make you player’s fail if you feel they’ve over optimized in a specific manner?

Games like Pathfinder and D&D are about overcoming challenges. If the intended challenge is no challenge at all, the GM may be disappointed. And if every (fill in a type of challenge here) is a cakewalk the player may be disappointed too. OTOH, if someone has invested considerable resources/effort in being really good at a thing, they should get some results from that.

Its fairly hard to make a never-fail character in the game system that I run, but characters can and do excel in some areas, and I don't try to take their excellence away from them. I do send a variety of challenges their way, so being a one-trick pony will have a price.

We are all grognards except for one. But we don't grumble very much.

I wasn't familiar with the word either, but presumably it's referring to metaphorical smoothness, i.e. manipulative charisma. There's actually a long history of Abrahamic peacock demons.

"Lubricity" here probably means leacherous, salacious.

I would not take the deal. Humanity is not something to just be thrown away, no matter what's on offer. Nor do I have confidence that I could make the world better by (magical) force. Mind controlling people is deeply repugnant to me, but I could also see how it might be a temptation to use such spells on particularly problematic people. I don't think that I would like the person that I would become. And I do believe in an afterlife, so there's that.

I think the reason that people rebel against alignment is that even the idea of an objective morality is infuriating to some people for real world reasons.

This is kind of a logical contradiction which Pathfinder ignores. It could be mitigated if one assumes that reaching level 20 is so dangerous that almost everyone who tries ends up permanently dead. Then 20th level characters of any sort (elf, human, whatever) would be very, very rare.

Corathonv2 wrote:

J-Bone wrote:

Screw Tomb of Horrors! Screw Gary Gygax!

RIP Gerry the Paladin

Not a dungeon for 9-year-olds.

Not a dungeon for anyone.

Tomb of Horrors is, simply, terrible game design. It's written just to take players down a notch or two. There's no rhyme or reason to the deathtraps, no logic to them, and no satisfaction in avoiding them. And if, somehow, you manage to survive to the end (fat chance!), all the treasure is cursed.

The whole dungeon is a giant "F--k you!" from a jaded GM. No one should ever play it.

Our group survived to the end. Chance (fat or otherwise) didn't really enter in (except at one spot). Caution and the resources of a party of 10th-14th level PCs did the trick.

And, regarding tearing up character sheets, Gygax himself was notorious for doing that in bring-your-own-character tournament play... Even going so far as to call a player's home GM to say "Jardov the Fighter died. Don't let your player Joe bring a copy of Jardov to your game any more."

Have you got a source for this? I've never heard it.

IIRC, the original edition of Tomb of Horrors instructed DMs to tear up the character sheets of anyone who died.

I'm not at home, so I can't check my copy. All that I can say is that I don't recall reading this.

Also older editions had a lot of "gotcha!" Creatures. I remember reading an article where they were talkin about some of the rediculous things in DD, like how you can have a whole room try and.kill you with "trap monsters". Between mimics, that which lurks above/below, the ooze that looks like a normal wall, and Gelatinous Cubes you can easily have a literal attempt to kill ypu...

Aren't there still creatures like this in Pathfinder? Mimics, Lurking rays, and gelatinous cubes, etc, etc?

And as I alluded to earlier, RP was there... so long as you followed the tropes established by Gygax. Want to play an Elf druid? WELL SCREW YOU NO! (Well in 2e).

Actually, elf druids were introduced in Unearthed Arcana in 1985. In a book written by Gygax. Its true that some class/race combinations were against the rules, though.

Oh and the old DD is qhere the idea of "you need a fighter to hit things, a rogue for traps, a wizard to answer non combat threats like chasms, and a cleric to ne healer" came from. You NEEDED rogues since they are the only trap guys. You NEEDED a healer cleric. Unless you wanted to die... a lot... (now a days, there are so many options that you do not needed a dedicated healer, amd this was intentional)

This is true. The party had to work together (or die) because each had skills/abilities that the others needed. Not a bad model, IMO. YMMY.