If everyone are heroes, there would never be anyone on the side of the road to clap.
Good time for my welcome back thread I suppose.
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Would you all be opposed to having an outsider watch the game if its off the boards? Been lurking about and would like to watch a game for a while before jumping right in.
I was in the shower recognizing my greatness when a wonderful idea for a villian came to mind ,and I'm just lacking that little umpnh to make it game legal. as I've posted before I play in a mythic earth type setting, where kinghts are prevalent. The idea is thus. A nighmare that has the intelligence to lure fighters into jousting duels out in the barrens. The knights are beholden to not strike the steed while jousting. then the nightmare shows its true colors and does its best to destroy the fighter before the party can save him. My queetion is this? what/how can the nightmare use to marionette a rider? If nesscessary I'll use a handwavium magic item, but I'd like to steer clear of that. I'm sure theres an answer eluding me, and thanks in advance to the paizoites that help me with this.
This would more likely be a better forum for this. www.canonfire.com
This may not be what you want to hear, but listen to the before mentioned "run it as a tactical wargame." The way I run my game is I come up with 4 to 8 ish adversaries of varying levels and figure what they would do to promote their agendas. That puts it on your players to come up with a scheme to thwart the evil baddies. If the adventurers have a motive for adventuring other then to get gold, then they'll have some interpersonal conflicts as to what baddie to take out first, and it'll enforce a party heirarchy.
Fristly let me say Za frumi! http://www.waerloga.com/zafrumi/ So on that theme, maybe an evil drift, say a vampire wants to attract villagers to the area, and sees the orcs as an impediment to humans moving into an area, or a forgotten evil temple, inhabited by demons is discovered, and the orcs have to defeat or join them. or perhaps and orderly army of hobgoblins wants to bring the bloodwar to the orc tribes.
Barghests, Eye killers, Thunder birds,Air spirits, crypt things,Hecatoncheire,Fossergrims all come to mind.
Aren't you reading too much into this?Probably ;) Heh we just remember "the burning times" of D&D which gave us gems like these. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCRBAE8qeME http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogrwfW1rsA4 had he been a hardcore drug user it probably wouldn't have been mentioned once.
I'm playing 3.5 this Saturday. Our group is going through a heavily modified version of the Temple of Elemental Evil set in Mythic earth.
Mythic Earth/ Greyhawk hybrid here.
I guess part of the problem is that I perceive part of the issue to be that the mechanics of D&D lend themselves to a hack-and-slash. When most of your classes have combat based abilties, it tends to force an issue. Telling the PCs is fine, but I suppose mine are a little short on attention span and occasionally hard to lead. The perception is part of the problem, way back when 2nd edition came out I DM'ed a thieves guild campaign with a group that never fielded a rouge. The occuring enlightenment haunts us to this day when 1/2 of any party is a rouge class and 3/4 a rouge split class. If you approach a campiagn as an economy/war game instead of a series of adventures everyones perception will change, and you won't need to lead them anywhere.
The Middle ages were filled with intruige too, and while I think D20 needs optional crippling tables, or a greater death rate (which is not everyones taste) Theres nothing wrong with the system, just the way its played. Now if we could get some beefier divination spells....
I'm loving this thread and all of the contributions. Making me want to go far far afey. Glad I could stir the conversation.
firstly does anyone use the seelie / unseelie courts in their games with any regularity? secondly are elves considered fey? thirdly what is corellan larethin's position when stacked up against Oberon and Titania? related, allied, acqainted? Thanks in advance for the imput, and please ignore any spelling errors its late.
The conundrum with not making your 1st level characters any more heroic than a typical town guard or aristocrat is that if they're no more heroic than those non-player characters, why would anyone come to them with a job? Why would it fall to them to defend their village or whatever from attack? Thats where fate and destiny step into play. Napoleon,Vassily Zietciev (sp) Robert E Lee, hell look up the early history on any historical figure and theres a good deal of "Ratcatching" fate or destiny steps in and "heroes rise to the occasion. I treat my games as wargames with roleplaying. It the tasks at hand could've fallen to any of 1000 people, but the task at hand has fallen to the PCs.
Look to the D20 Modern ruleset, instead of the old generic classes, Mage, Fighter, Rouge, Priest, A character would be known for a trait, Strong Hero, Dexterous hero, Dedicated hero etc. It would make the fantasy setting even less sterotypical (spell casting strong heroes for example) It would remove D&D from its origins (Gary who?) It would open the market for even more useless character concepts PrC classes due to its column a, column b environment. and lastly it would open the doors to other genres Supers = Eberron, fantasy = Realms /Greyhawk, Horror = Ravenloft, Sci Fi Dragonstar / Spelljammer, and lastly Crossovers Spelljammer/ Planescape.
Anyone who wants that pie bad enough would seduce the orc. 1/2 orcs gotta come from somewhere.
Lil you're a queen! keep on keeping on.
Given that the multiverse is infinite it stand to reason that multiple dimensions cohabitate on the same planes. Of course at times singularities happen where crossing from one dimension to the next is possible, sometimes to people who are unwilling. Faerie abductions, the bermuda triangle,ufo abductions, and disappearences on the Dungeons and dragons rollercoaster are all examples of this. My new campaign centers around some normal joes that reside on earth, and through circumstances beyond their control they fall into a fantasyesque world (not quite dungeonpunk) where things fall through to our reality. (Black choppers, strangely garbed units of human slavers, "Daytripping" are all examples of what can happen.) Wizards and priests hold positions of relative power on both planes, but discourage affiliation with political figures and shun inhabitants of the other dimensions as they fear that the knowledge of planar shifting could weaken their hold on the people that follow them. That is the form, and now the function.... The function of this is that I've got a small group of relatively inexperienced gamers. A complete imerssion into Greyhawk, Ravenloft, or the like would very well cause a culture shock. The first planned adventure is pretty much a blatent ripoff of the movie "Evil dead" followed by a modifed Temple of elemental evil, and a brush with a dimension hopping carnival ( a faerie ride gone horribly arwy" Any imput, questions etc would be muchly appreicited. I think I've gotten most basic questions fielded, but I post this to my peers to see if I've overlooked an obvious question. so be brutal, but gentle please.
Why not just make them human with an unusual culture?Because it's been done before. This is the slippery slope that causes character concepts , to be reinvented as (usually) overpowered PrCs. please don't we have enough of them rolling around as is? think of the newbies.
I've run a similar campaign for about a yearish, and have found some of these to be indispensible firstly
very freeform and quick to run, nearly as high tech as you want them to be. Secondly remember that modern is the communication age. On a transport job, a member of law enforcement, and local news got wind of what was going on, and contacted the runners to try to buy the cargo (I can't even remember what it was) they killed and looted them both, took the law officers stuff , and the equipment out of the news van. little did they know that the van, and the officers badge had GPS's in them, when they fenced the gear, they lost thier fence, which upset the local crime community, so they had the syndicates, the law, and a team of mercs actively hunting them till they left town, and even after.
Utility, utility, utility. My best experiences in rpging, is from what I call F&%* off games. the anatomy of such a game is as follows. Myself and the lads are sitting around bored reminiscing about the good ol days, when we get "the bug." We decide F@#$ it, we're gonna play even if there's only 2 or 3 of us. Character creation is standard, but one character has access to a method of travel. (and oxen team, a tireme,a stagecoach, a scout ship, depending on the setting. Last go about we were horse theives) another character has something he needs moved, money, cargo, or himself. the first adventure is getting from point A to B. By the end of the week.we've consitantly had to turn people away or be in the double digits of party members. and IMO nothing beats dungeon crawls like adventures involving travel, and commerce. Everybody in the party has a stake in the success of the venture, and ADventure gets in the way of the venture ( but usually pretty profitible) Anyway to answer the question, I like lossely defined, but unique "events" such as the old school books of lairs, or the random encounters/PC spotlight on the WTOC main page.
Having played a few d20 past, and modern games, the pervalence of firearms does reduce the power of the wizard somewhat, but it causes the magic users to focus on utility rather then damage output. WFRP also has little problem with firearms in their fantasy setting. However firearms must at least be an advanced feat due to the maintenence required of the weapon. IMO
I hate that due to scheduling constraints the best AD&D group I've EVER been in is evaporating without so much as a accompanying sound of a wet fart. Realisticly its probably already kaputski, and I'm in denial, but when you're faced with a group restructuring that causes 2 or 3 people to be disincluded, its probably better to just let it die, or they'll be feelings hurt.
Not a book per se`, but I take historical happenings and insert a "what if magic entered the world right then." I had a 1066 britain campaign, where autherian characters and landmarks just started appearing. a battle of first mannasssas campaign, where all the dead at the battle became zombified, and magic started creeping into the world after that. and before that an atlantean age campaign, where the "adventures" took place in the form of commerce, and the happenings on the way.
My crew uses the standard AD&D collectible figs, Odd figures can usually get traded to the Eberonn playing clan, except for the small warfroged figures, which get thrown at the Eberonn playing clan, Unless its a large based warforged, those get thrown at the eberron players cars
Kobolds, Mongrelmen, and kobolds. Did I mention kobolds?
7 30 ish to midnightish on Sundays, a lot of it depnds on work schedules and how we're all feeling about life that night. We've broken out the decks of cards some nights just out of exhaustion.
OK here is the crux of my argument. I fully understand that due to the generic nature of the game some base classes are required to differentiate between "strong guy", "smart guy", "magic guy" etc, so I recongnize the terms fighter, cleric, ranger. I can also get behind the perstige class idea. A fighter can be thrown into galdorial combat, or study under a kung fu master, or practice archery all his life. I can get behind a level of specialization that causes the term "fighter" or "rouge" to be modified to "Knight" or "Assassin". having a goal is what makes for a good campaign. Even in my group which for the most part sticks to the core rules I encourage the players to specialize to a PC on the off chance that it may be deemed not unbalancing. To have classes such as these availible at level one, cheapens the need for Prestige classes, and the like, IMO and is bad for the game as a whole, unless you're out to sell more books. I for one would rather have a PC come up to me with a "hey I'd like my magician to focus only on fae related spells", or "I'd like to gain some extra abilities for my cleric for worshipping an odd God" then "hey, can I play a halfling werecat that I got the rules for out of this book?!"
I agree whole heartedly, for every 1/2 class thats suggested to me I say ok, as long as I pick the other parent >8) Since everyone knows my love for the mongrelman, I haven't had a taker yet
B2 the keep on the borderlands is the first published adventure that I DMed and also the first one I partcipated in. Same
I just let this run in the background. http://www.radiorivendell.com/
My 2 copper Isis, shes had her husband chopped to bits by her brother in law, Her son swear an undying holy war against his uncle, and during all of this lost what was one of the most promising worshipper bases on this planet. If nothing else this world would be a place of succor for her and her healing husband. A place where True magic (her main sphere of infulence) could thrive again. a peaceful place without war or slavery, a utopia. Odin could help provide all of that, he plucked out his own eye to learn magic and see the future, surely he could understand the need for a respite. On the other hand Mithras, a Deity of war and light, still sore over losing his empire due to the death of Justinian, yearns for a place where he can be worshipped again, a place of honor and goodness, ever vigilant against any invasion. A place where the legions will remember his name. and surely Odin can help him with that. his former enemy is as weakened as he, and was himself a God of warrior peoples, surely he also longs for a day where honorable battles were fought, and mead flowed over the tales of battle. this sets up a basic groundwork of Odin = worldbuilding facilitator. and an Isis vs Mithras = Hidden and unobtrusive vs prepared readiness mindset. It also allows for the introduction of good vs good conflict as Freya,and Osiris take an exception to thier spouses "creating another world" with other dieties. The resulting conflict would introduce evil as Loki,and Set are tipped off out of the resulting conflict. Mithras could introduce Hecate to the mix as a "second fiddle" in case the Isis thing falls through.
I couldn't agree more. "Knight" is an honorific title, and theres no reason that its should exist as a seperate class, one should just spec a fighter as a knight. A lot of the fluff articles refer to classes in other supplements. If I wanted to deal with that nonsense I'd buy those other supplements. The new spells while nice, do not warrent the purchase of the book. We're already drowning in new feats, Instead of PHBII It should have been marketed as Unearthed Arcana II, or better yet, just lumped into unearthed arcana.
To be the contrarian theres plenty of folklore about creatures which specificly target sleeping people, Nightmares, Night hags, Vampires (there was even a vampire discipline in VtM called morpheus (sp) A sleeping visitation by a succubus/incubus could even be considered pleasurable. The situation at handshould dictate the die roll IMO
War drums, Bugles, Bag pipes
Yes, there was elf hate pre computer age, but IMO it was broadcast to the masses in the computer age, Of course if D&D elfs weren't munchkin magnets, would the computer age elves be?
Played a couple for about a year, You have to put some thought into the campaign setting as theres not a standard "forgotten realms" or "Greyhawk" coming to the fore yet,but with a little discourse with the party about setting, some imagination, and Google earth, D20 modern is a very satisfing experience.
IMO the "Elf hate" was generated in the MMORPG community, and has diffused into the P&P rp community thru co-existence. In about every MMORPG Elves have a siginifigant racial advantage of one type or another, which draws the munchkins and cowards towards elves, and "handicap" players to humans. Its funny that in many games that hate is becoming directed now towards Gnomes. Maybe in a couple of years we'll be discussing "Gnome hate"
My gamiing group had this discussion a long time ago, which caused a unch of wizzies and srocs to be rolled up and pitted against each other. The wizzies at various levels won hands down, and that was thought to be the end of the discussion. However in game play the sorcs performed much better due to their high cha, and wider variety of skills. Thusly IMO they both have roles. If you want to min-max your damage, and work solely to the goal of achieving lvl 20 wizards are your best bet. however the adventuring parties like the sorc better.
Nah , I'm one Contatigon away from a shallow grave as it is. That coupled with my inability to keep my mouth shut would guaruntee me a TPK in less then 2 weeks.
Yes, there are many diverse cultures in my game worlds, because I usually gun for a mythic earth type setting. While I rarely get that Greyhawk is standard enough that the group submits to playing there. However that being said race isn't nerly as important as the culture one subscribes to, in games or IRL.
Last count was 303, that was about 10 years ago. Granted not all of it is "quality" but its no secret that I currently have more then I could ever possibly use.
http://www.tomwham.com/mertwig.html for those who need a jog in memory
Because any offered would open the door to saying that Paizo would be "stereotyping africans". So unless they change all the avatar to Greyhawk human races (which I'd be perectly content with) lets leave the omnipresent racial issues out of it.
Any old schoolers remember the old board game by TSR called Mertwig's maze"? and its sequel "The great Khan game?" Is there any shot that Paizo could resurrect the game, in any form? or has it been dead to long?
F2K and Ultradan have hit the nails on the head. Always get together, even if its not to play D&D, agree to gather, and not to game, If people can't set aside once a week to play D&D, find a equally fun pastime, they're out there.
Not to be contrarian, but how many people have actually tried a realistic high mortality rate rpg? I've been gaming for a good 20 years, and all the stories of high adventure usually come from non D&D games, Original L5R, original deadlands, traveller, WFRP. Ironically the stories come across a table where D&D is played.
Buy the Book of Vile Darkness. I cannot stress that enough. There is SOOOO much fun to be had in that book, especially considering your main plot idea, that you will be drooling!! For example, a Pain Extraction ring operating in the cities underground, sweeping up street children (they are young, resiliant and expendable) for the creation process. Couple of evil clerics to keep 'em healed up and Whammmo! And Liquid Pain can be used for so many nasty things. Not to mention all the Thrall-type PrCs. Trust me, well worth the price of admission, it's one H-E-DoubleHockeySticks of a ride! AS long as the PCs have access to things in the book of exalted deeds, BoVD = a great way to have a recurring undeffeatable adversary ToED = an equalizer for the players should they need them,
The Drow have had their time, for far to long. time to herald the rise of a new race to strike fear and terror into parties till someone makes a cash cow out of a heroic upstart. Thats right FEAR the Mongrelman! Persoanlly I have nothing specific against the drow, outside of original "vualt of the drow" drow good. Menzoberenzzan drow overdone, to death, ad infinitum. In fact The drow race is like Metallica, great for the first couple of albums, and crap after the long haul. Also the end of the beginning of a race of munchkinesue PCs. Not that iparticularly have anything against munchkins, I just enjoy hunting things harder the seal pups.
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