Ratpick's page

I started playing Dungeon World a few months ago, and am really loving the system! It's a great game for players who usually GM, as players get to do a fair amount of world-building.

If you like the "players get to do world-building" aspect of Dungeon World, I suggest you look at Fellowship: A Tabletop Adventure Game by Jacob Randolph. It's based on Dungeon World but developed into very much its own thing, and one of the rules in the game is that the players get to determine all the lore of their chosen people.

So, if you're playing the Elf, you get to tell everyone what elves are like in the setting (and there's support for playing elves as space aliens), if you're a Dwarf you get to determine what dwarves are like, and so on.

Haven't had the chance to run the game yet, just got it fresh off the printer this week and it looks great.

Yeah, I eventually found the passage in question in the rulebook and it all makes sense now.

On another note, I'm probably not going to run Torchbearer at the convention: subjecting a group of people who have probably not played it ever to the game with me having no experience of it yet either in a convention environment doesn't sound like a recipe for success. For this convention I'll stick to what I know and look at subjecting my friends to this game at some point. :)

Personal preferences I guess. I've played with the Mutant Chronicles a little bit, and I find the zone thing makes playing without maps harder, because players want to know exactly which zones they're in, and you have to work out how long it takes them to get from zone to zone. I find you need a much better defined map layout.

Savage Worlds I just say if they're at short, medium or long range, tell them if there's any cover, and for area of effect weapons/powers I roll a die to see how many people they hit depending on if the AoE is small, medium or large. I play fairly free-form so this works far better for my groups.

I think even games with really abstract distance and positioning systems still benefit from some degree of visualization, because it's hard for players to keep track of all the narration given to them by the GM without a single visual cue.

I recommend a simple trick from Fate if you don't want to rely on maps: use index cards. The only thing that really matters is the relative position of the zones to each other as well as relative distance (in zones). Index cards provide a pretty simple way to represent all that information. You can laminate them and write on them with markers to add extra details to the terrain as the combat goes on.

Take this with a big grain of salt, as I know Mouse Guard, not TB, and the systems are clearly very different on this. But my guess is that, if Disposition is remotely like Mouse Guard, Disposition refers less to the number of goblins and more to the abstract "margin of victory". Does the book actually say Disposition = # of monsters?

EDIT: Just saw your edit.

*Shrug*

I'll wait for Evil Abe on this.

Yeah, at least to my understanding it works a bit differently in Torchbearer: by the example conflict in the book, if the creature type doesn't have a disposition set for a specific type of conflict but has an appropriate Nature descriptor then the enemies roll Nature for their disposition, adding successes to their Nature to calculate their disposition for that conflict, and any enemies beyond the first one can help as normal. So, assuming three creatures with Nature 3 and the "Swarming" descriptor they'd roll 5 dice (3 for Nature, +2D for the two beyond the first helping), adding any successes to their Nature to get their final disposition.

Because this much is clear from the rules I found it odd at first that the number of enemies wouldn't affect creatures with set dispositions for certain conflicts, because it would have the odd effect of making those creatures better at conflicts where they didn't have a set disposition provided they could roll their Nature and get helping dice for the roll, but if The Dread Crypt of Skogenby has the right rules then it all makes sense. Still need to check my book once I get home or wait for Evil Abe to help me. :)

Sorry for the double post, but upon reading the book I can see that Torchbearer won't be the right game for a Dungeon Meshi type of game. That's okay though, I can just run the game by my original plan using Strike! (now there's an interesting game: if you want to see a hybrid of 4e style tactical combat with some ideas from Mouse Guard and Torchbearer, check this game out!) but rereading Torchbearer last night has done little to temper my enthusiasm for the game. Along with Fellowship and Strike!, Torchbearer is now on my list of games to run at the big convention.

I had a few questions though: if a monster has a certain Disposition given for a certain type of conflict I never roll for their Disposition, no matter how many creatures there are in the scene, right? This seems to produce some weird things: goblins have a Disposition of 3 in Drive Off conflicts, meaning that in that type of conflict there'll only ever be three goblins ever, right? I can sort of understand it from a narrative point of view (goblins are cowardly and if the adventurers decide to stand their ground or try to drive them off most will just summarily bugger off), but it gets weird when their Disposition for Kill conflicts is given as a 6. Maybe the idea is that if the goblins are pressed against the wall and death is on the line they'll fight to the last, but they'd rather not risk death to begin with?

Secondly, I'm looking for a good adventure that would make a good one-shot in a convention environment. I know there's an adventure in the book but it leaves me a bit cold, and the free adventure available on their website seems solid but I'm unsure as to how representative it is of the game as a whole. If anyone has a good idea of a short old-school dungeon crawl that would adapt easily into Torchbearer (preferably something with standby monsters like goblins and kobolds) that would be much appreciated!

And finally, for the sake of this one-shot, would I be better off just making the players' characters completely or providing them with prefab characters with some choices left for them to make (like the Nature questions). Making the characters completely from scratch is probably not on the menu, because it would simply take too big a slice from the four-hour slot I'm planning.

EDIT: Reading the Dread Crypt of Skogenby, apparently in conflicts where the Disposition of the creatures is set you're supposed to add +1 to disposition for every creature beyond the first. I'm not sure where that's stated in the rules, but I'd completely missed that. So, in a Drive Off conflict against four goblins their Disposition would be, in total, 6 (3 to begin with, +1 for every goblin beyond the first)? That makes a lot more sense to me, although I'll have to read the book again to see if I've got that right.

I just wanted to quote the entirety of Jessica's post but the forums software makes that really difficult, but damn, that was a good post.

Note to self: seriously question purchasing anything from Alderac.

I saw they had a card game called Greedy Greedy Goblins and did a double take.

I'm currently planning games for the big convention this Summer and I started thinking about Torchbearer again. How well could it be twisted into something by way of Dungeon Meshi, where making delicious food out of dungeon monsters is a thing? I recall Cooking being a skill but can't remember if it can actually be applied towards making food out of slain monsters.

Regardless, the game has everything else I'm looking for in the sort of game I want to run: an old-school survival vibe with a really brutal and desperate feel.

Hey, I'm not sure if anyone ever actually reads this subforum, but this should be relevant to all of you good people on the Paizo forums: recently a boardgame called Star Traders was Kickstarted and, you know, just managed to hit funding. I'm not really here to talk about the game, because it's not really my thing. What I'm here to talk about is the art of the game, some of which seems oddly familiar.

So, basically, their artist photoshopped new heads over art he found floating around the internet and applied a bunch of filters on them to make them look more cartoony. That alone is pretty scummy and bad, but when this was brought up with the game's developers they doubled down on it and claimed that any similarity to his reference images was just due to the artist's style (lol) when even a cursory glance at the pictures used in the Kickstarter and the images they're copies of reveals that very little by way of modification has been done to the images.

Furthermore, the developers said that this issue having been brought to their attention they were going to change the images, which really sends a mixed message: on one hand they are saying that their artist just has a unique style and did nothing wrong, but they're still going to change the images? I don't get it.

Anyway, the reason this should be relevant to the interests of Paizonians is that one of the images being traced photoshopped used as a reference image is, quite clearly, by Eric Belisle, specifically a piece he made for the Pathfinder RPG.

EDIT: I hit submit too early but then realized I didn't actually have anything more to add so carry on I guess!

EDIT: Here's a pretty good side-by-side comparison: Star Traders art on the left, original Pathfinder art on the right!

In my opinion, Burning Wheel is kind of a hot mess compared to its little siblings: Mouse Guard and Torchbearer.

I've been meaning to give it another go 'round, and I probably will when the new Codex comes out. But for the time being, everything I like about Burning Wheel is present, and in fact better-executed, in the other two games.

I really enjoyed it as an RPG design manifesto with some really innovative ideas, but when it came to actually running a campaign it turned out to be too mechanically intense; often without any return to justify the efforts.

Just for example, most BW games have a mechanic where skills accrue XP individually every time you roll them. In Burning Wheel, this involved referring to a lookup table for every skill roll, and not one that is easily reduced to an algorithm either. In Torchbearer and Mouse Guard, there is a simple rule about how many tests you need to advance in a skill, no chart necessary. Both methods ensure that the player is deliberately challenging themselves in order to advance, but the latter is just 100% more playable as far as concerns me.

Yeah, even as a huge Burning Wheel fanboy I agree with all of this. I personally think that Burning Wheel is a great game and a great piece of technology, but Torchbearer (I haven't played Mouse Guard, sadly) really refined on its design to make it even better. It's also a lot more consolidated in its design in many ways.

You mentioned the way skills advance already, but Torchbearer further improves (IMO) on Burning Wheel by consolidating all conflicts into one system based on the most simple and elegant of the various conflict systems in Burning Wheel (duel of wits) and by consolidating all Traits to do the same thing mechanically (in Burning Wheel you had a weird grab bag of Traits where some had no mechanical effect beyond being tags for players to get bennies for acting according to those traits to their own detriment while some were pluses to certain types of rolls).

Having said all of that, even with Torchbearer available as a simpler and much more elegant version of the game, I still kind of just love Burning Wheel and still occasionally run games with it. My main problem is that my friends are kind of tired of traditional fantasy so I've only gotten to use it for semi-historical settings when I'd really like to see what magic and the non-human stocks bring to the game.

Oh, and to add to the discussion of cool little-known RPGs that are cool and good, World of Dungeons is pretty great: it's basically a Dungeon World demake, where the point was to write a simplified version of Dungeon World, kind of like an OD&D to Dungeon World's AD&D. I actually prefer it to vanilla Dungeon World these days for some strange reason, part of it being the aesthetic it gets across but partly because it does some interesting things with rules.

For an example, spell-casting in World of Dungeons is pretty neat. There's three talents that unlock different types of spell-casting: Cantrips, which gives you shadow, light, and sound cantrips for a bit of free-form simple spell-casting; Rituals, which unlocks the ability to cast spells from ritual scrolls and books; and Summoning, which unlocks the ability to summon spirits and have them do your bidding. The latter is actually the closest to D&D style spell-casting in the game: when you summon a spirit it comes with a couple of keywords pertaining to its domains (like fire, time, shadow, life) and you can command it to produce a magical effect within any of its domains. So, if you wanted to cast a fireball spell you'd probably summon a spirit with fire as one of its domains and then command it to cast a fireball-like spell.

The best part of the latter type of spell-casting is that summoning requires either an hour of meditation, ingesting mercury, or having a magical item with the spirit in question bound to it. Ingesting mercury is definitely the easiest and quickest path to spell-casting, but there's a soft limit on the number of times you can ingest mercury before it has an adverse effect on you: you can ingest mercury once per character level per day without it carrying any negative effects, beyond that each time you have to roll with Con to see if you suffer an adverse effect (there are no hard rules in place for what happens, but as per the game's normal rules 10+ means you do it without any adverse effects, 7-9 means you do it with some cost, and 6- means something bad happens).

It also acts as a perfect Rosetta stone for adapting old-school adventures to the mechanics of Dungeon World, and I've been wanting to run Scenic Dunnsmouth (by Lamentations of the Flame Princess) using it for the longest time.

It's also available for free for those of you who are wondering what an old-school version of Dungeon World might look like: http://www.onesevendesign.com/dw/world_of_dungeons_1979.pdf

Burning Wheel.

Cool character creation, "strategic combat", character story driven.
Highly recommended for something different fantasy-wise.

Agreed. Burning Wheel is good. I especially love its take on the traditional Tolkienistic races, which are more Tolkien than Tolkien.

Another game I really like is Strike!, a game of tactical combat and heedless adventures. It's basically all my favorite bits from D&D 4e's tactical combat mixed with something heavily inspired by Mouse Guard and Apocalypse World on the non-combat side. It's fun, quick and really supports my preferred style of GMing, being seat-of-the-pants improvisation and crazyness.

Also, Apocalypse World deserves a mention. Even though there's a bunch of hacks of the system out there now, Apocalypse World is the original and it's an amazing game. Really looking forward to 2e.

** spoiler omitted **

I'd go with either the first or the last one.

Dungeon World is a favorite of mine. The book is longish, but it's mostly just explaining concepts and play style of the game. During actual play, I've never referenced the book though as everything required is on the character sheet. To make a character, you grab a character sheet (or playbook as they're called) and start circling options and filling in blanks.

Yeah, Dungeon World is pretty cool. Most of the stuff there should be familiar to anyone who's ever played D&D in any shape or form, but the system itself is really simple.

It also plays a bit differently than regular D&D though, encouraging collaborative world-building and giving players a bit of narrative agency, but it's a cool simple system for playing something in the vein of traditional D&D fantasy with a few interesting twists.

The classes and sheets with the basic mechanics of the game are actually available for free, and you can find the rules for free as well (the website is called the Dungeon World Gazetteer). I also recommend Truncheon World, a truncated version of the rulebook, by Redbox Vancouver, because not only does it present the mechanics of the game very well it's got loads of great stuff at the end (for an example, potential questions for the GM to ask from their players depending on their choice of Race/Class, as well as alternative Bonds for each Class) and it's Pay What You Want on DriveThruRPG: http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/121244/Truncheon-World-pdf

What about?

** spoiler omitted **

To build on this, not only is each tentacle essentially a separate creature that can move and attack on its own, they essentially try to grab the PC in question and then bring them over to the monster's mouth where it'll make a bite attack which actually deals significantly more damage.

This also makes it a bit of a puzzle monster: do the players simply try to destroy each tentacle (and once the creature has no more tentacles left it'll flee into the bottom of the pool again) or will one of them rush straight for the center of the monster (eating up a bunch of opportunity attacks in the process from the flailing tentacles) and destroy the central part of the monster?

To balance it out, I'd make each tentacle only have enough hit points that it can MAYBE survive a single attack from a PC but most of the time will get taken out by a solid hit, but just have there be like eight tentacles flailing around in combat.

I recall reading somewhere that Gary basically made the Tomb of Horrors to spite his players after they complained that he was too easy on them.
E: Just remembered, the supposed followup to this story was that his players knew him too well and basically beat the dungeon on their first try, which to me was always a really funny story.

Another theory I've heard is that the Tomb of Horrors is not really meant for actually inserting into a long-term campaign, but that it's basically a precursor to the "tournament module," where basically groups of players would be playing the adventure at the same time and the group who made it the farthest in the dungeon/found the most treasure/something would win at D&D forever?

But yeah, I actually took part in the Tomb of Horrors on a lark at a convention a couple of years ago. The DM was amazing but what little I saw of the dungeon itself, it wasn't simply deadly, it was just mostly... really dumb. I mean, yeah, given its origins (if either of the two above accounts are true) it was really made to test the players, not their characters, because a lot of it is simply trying to call Gygax the game designer's bluff (and sometimes double bluff) as to which of the three doors in front of you will actually let you proceed and which contain NO SAVE KILLED BY SNAKES

Having said that, I could see it being run as a fun little diversion in the "Let's just play this dumb dungeon" style, maybe using Dungeon Crawl Classics where everyone just makes a huge bunch of useless level 0 peasants as their characters, but I wouldn't actually ever use it in a campaign containing characters my players actually care about.

For me it's all new stuff!

For an example, I got the AD&D 1e DMG reprint. I have no interest in the rest of AD&D because I've pretty much found the D&D for me (BECMI. Oh god why won't they do a reprint of the Rules Cyclopedia, why?), but a friend of mine said that it's a really good resource for inspiration.

He wasn't kidding. It's chock full of really good dressing for games. Like the random NPC personality trait tables, random dungeon room contents, and so on. I really love it for that.

Yeah, I can kind of tell. You know there are TotM systems that use abstracted "bands" and "zones"; you know there are grid-default systems that describe positions/distances in feet; and you see that 5E uses the latter terminology rather than the former and think you know what that means about how it's designed.

Meanwhile, I demonstrate that 5E's functionality is actually nearly identical to what you point to as the "abstracted" camp, differing only in terminology; and you won't even respond to the comparison?

Did you overlook it? Ignore it? Assume that since you already believe you know which camp 5E falls into, any claim to the contrary must be the result of "playing fast and loose with the rules" despite you not actually knowing those rules well enough to know whether I'm being fast and loose with them or not?

Let me lay it out one more time, as plain as can be:

By playing the 5E rules as presented in the PHB, it is functionally much more similar to abstracted/TotM systems than it is to grid-reliant systems.

If you think I'm wrong, then please refute that claim directly, with actual fact-based discussion of what I just said. Thanks.

I'm going to concede this discussion to you, not only because I agree with you on the point that in practice 5e runs perfectly fine when it's abstracted (it's more the minutiae that we seem to disagree on), but also because I've realized I'm doing what I've always hated, critiquing a game without actually having played it, something which I ran into a lot when I still used to play 4e. I'm sorry, I should've reflected on that before I got into this discussion. I hope I didn't seem too much of an ass.

And yeah, I do realize that in practice 5e probably runs a lot like a more abstract combat system, as this is my experience with the systems I mentioned in my post (BECMI, AD&D, Rolemaster). So, it's a fair cop.

I must admit that I really enjoy figures kind of plonked down around the table to indicate relative positions, who's clumped with who and so forth as a play style. So far as I'm concerned, it's not a diametrical opposition. :)

Oh, I agree with this too: even when using a more abstract system, while not necessary, give a nice visual representation of the situation that's prettier than notes on a scratch card.

Also, I like pushing little plastic soldiers around.

@Ratpick—I'm starting to wonder if you've actually played 5E or not. Can you come up with an actual, believable example of a real 5E spell/effect and how it interacts with a legitimate gameplay situation in such a way as to suggest that a map is anywhere close to necessary? Because this whole "how many of the orcs in that group will fit in my fireball" thing is kinda ridiculous unless you're routinely fighting armies or you're always finding yourself surrounded by a ring of irregularly-spaced orcs in a wide-open field who start approaching from 100ft away in all directions.

I haven't played 5e specifically, I'll admit, but this type of design is hardly unique to 5e: among the other games I've played are BECMI D&D, AD&D, and Rolemaster. All of those games use precise distances where abstract measurements would do, but they run just fine even without the grid. That is to say they run fine if you run things a bit fast and loose. At times a visualization would've been nice to resolve ambiguity between the GM's narration and what the player thought was going on.

I'll admit right now that this kind of design isn't the gravest mistake you can make in, it's simply a pet peeve of mine: it produces potential ambiguity in the fiction that could be avoided. It annoys me simply because it's halfway between two good things (precise grid-based combat and abstract combat with clearly written rules) and thus only manages to be only kinda sorta okay?

Again, just a personal peeve of mine, I realize that most people play fast and loose with it so they don't run into these issues.

I just had this great visualization of a wizard encountering 4 orcs, casting a fireball recklessly, rolling a "6" on 2d3, and then the fireball pauses right before it strikes, while two more orcs get called up from the green room and are told to report to the set asap...

This is great! Thanks! :)

Anyway, I started thinking of how to turn D&D 5e into a more abstract system. I mean, it's not exactly hard, and at least to my mind would make the game closer to my ideal. In my dream D&D with an abstract combat system a classic fireball spell might look like this:

Fireball
Level 3 Evocation
Action: Standard
Range: Far
Target: One zone within range.
All creatures in zone take 8d6 fire damage, I guess they can make a Dexterity save for half or something?

Assuming that all of those mechanical units (like how many zones away is Far range?) have been established previously, you already know what that spell is going to do without needing a map to figure out what happens. Furthermore, there's no ambiguity about who gets hit and who doesn't: you throw this beauty into a zone and everyone takes damage, friend or foe. There's no subtlety to it.

Now, a high-level Wizard might have an ability that says this:

Spell Precision: You may exclude a single creature (probably more at high levels) from the area of effect of any spell you cast.

Now, one of those orcs might be hiding behind a crate or something, meaning that he's got cover from the blast. This would be presented by the following rule:

Take Cover! If a zone's description includes terrain or objects that may be used as cover a character can spend a move action in that zone to Take Cover. While they have Cover all attacks against them are at a Disadvantage and they have Advantage on all Dexterity Saving Throws.

So yeah, that's an example: none of the ambiguity of "How many orcs can I fit into my 20-foot diameter fireball? Wait, Steve, you didn't say anything about these orcs being spaced so widely apart, I'm calling b%$*#%$&!", no need for a grid and miniatures (although I like grids and miniatures too) but just as deadly as the real deal!

I'm really struggling to see why inserting numbers into literally the exact same description suddenly means the rules are all designed around using a map. The argument I'm seeing in these posts is this:

Premise: 5E measures things in 5ft increments.
Conclusion: 5E is designed around using a map.

That logic is so invalid I don't even know where to start. Maybe there's a key premise or two that you forgot to mention or something?

Yeah, sorry, I'm having trouble articulating myself.

The difference is that in 13th Age when I cast that fireball into a mess of orcs I know I'll hit some of them because that's a function of the rules: even though they are abstract and don't care for exact positioning, there's a procedure for determining how many of them I can catch with that fireball, namely rolling 1d3 (2d3 if I cast recklessly). This can all be done without me needing to know the exact position of the orcs in relation to each other.

In 5e I can catch any number of orcs in a 20-foot radius. Now it's no longer enough for me to know that they're an abstract lump of orcs, in order to determine how many I can catch in my fireball I need to know they're relative positions and distance to each other and myself. What if I'm imagining the situation differently from the GM in the theater of my mind? That's another ambiguity that might require more words than necessary to resolve, an ambiguity that doesn't exist in purely abstract or purely grid-based games. How many orcs can I fit into a 20-foot radius circle of fire, when the game's rules concern themselves with exact distances and measurements?

I mean, it's as simple as that really. I'm not saying that you absolutely need a map to play 5e, but having a map helps a lot, because unless your brain happens to run like a super-computer keeping track of everyone's exact positions relative to each other in the fiction (because that's what the rules concern themselves with) is going to be hard. The rules of 5e are built in such a way that the exact positions of everyone in the fiction do matter, and area of effect spells are just one example of where not having a clear visualization can cause ambiguity: when the game concerns itself with the positions of characters and exact distances relative to each other (I mean, I know you as a DM might play it fast and loose, but I'm talking about the rules as they are presented as written) how do you make a fast and loose ruling grounded in the fiction about whether someone is in cover relative to someone else ("No way, I totally have cover against him!" "Wait, what? No you don't, he moved like 30 feet to the side so now he has a clear shot!" "There's no way he could have a clear shot just by moving 30 feet to the side...")? Using a grid this information is immediately clear (You can't draw an unobstructed line from your square to theirs, they have cover) and in an abstracted system it can be turned into a factor of the environment (Boxes and Crates: Any character in this zone can spend a move action to take cover against ranged attacks, moving while in the zone removes this benefit.) or a factor of relative position in terms of zones (There's an obstruction between two zones, meaning that all characters have cover against attacks from the other zone.)

The rules for positioning and distance in 13th Age are abstract, and to support this it has procedures to resolve ambiguous situations like "How many orcs I can hit." In a grid-based combat encounter there's no such ambiguity because based on the area of effect of a given spell and the relative positions of creatures you can immediately see who is in the area of effect. The point I'm trying to make is that 5e actually has the rules of the latter while trying to pretend that it's abstract like the former.

I mean, I do think that 5e can be run fast and loose and very abstractly, and based on my reading of your posts this seems to be what you're doing, and if I were to run 5e I'd probably do that as well. But that's just it, ignoring the rules (which concern themselves with very exact, down to the 5-foot increment positioning) in favor of running things fast and loose. The only point I'm making is that even if people are playing fast and loose with positioning and distance in the game, the rules are very much not fast and loose, but painfully and unnecessarily precise for a game that's supposed to be about Theater of the Mind combat.

Terquem wrote:

God I miss playing Traveler, none of this nonsensical "5 foot" grid stuff

Give me 1.5 meter scale squares every time

The Traveller I played had range bands, what are these "squares" of which you speak? :P

I'm not saying you can't see the war-game roots even 5+ editions later, but 5e relies a lot less positioning than PF, and a lot lot less than 4e did. I think this has less to do with 5' increments of measurement than how granular/micro-tactical the combat options are.

Once again, I don't mean to be argumentative, but I don't see a lot of rules that rely on knowing the relative positions of characters.

Fireball? I know the GM can adjudicate how many enemies get caught in its blast on a case-by-base basis, but that's one example where having a clear visual representation OR abstraction can resolve the potential ambiguity.

In fact, add to that any area of effect spell, whatever it's shape. A grid or some kind of visual presentation makes it immediately clear who's in the area of the effect, or alternately you can do away with measuring absolute distances entirely and just accept a degree of abstraction that makes the game run smoother without a grid.

Basically:
Grids are good when you want to measure things in absolute distances.
Abstract systems are good as well as long as they're built that way.
5e's system is somewhere in between, which results in a lot of ambiguity.

God I miss playing Traveler, none of this nonsensical "5 foot" grid stuff

Give me 1.5 meter scale squares every time

The weird thing is that I'm from Finland so I use the metric system every day, but I still get confused when RPG products (rarely but still occasionally) use the metric system. I learned a completely new system of measurements just so I could play RPGs and I intend to use that knowledge to its full extent!

Ratpick wrote:

I think Bluenose is not talking about the grid explicitly but the fact that 5e measures everything in 5-foot increments.

And exactly what increments do you think Pathfinder uses?

HINT: It's 60-inch increments. :P

Yes, Pathfinder uses 5-foot increments as well? My point wasn't "5e uses 5-foot increments UNLIKE EVERY OTHER GAME ON THE MARKET!"

The difference between Pathfinder and 5e in this regard is that the Pathfinder rules explicitly state that "Hey, everything is measured in 5-foot increments and a lot of the rules rely on relative position and distance so you might want to use a grid," whereas 5e is very coy about it with its "Everything is measured in 5-foot increments but you totally don't need a grid, even though many of the rules rely on knowing the position of characters relative to each other!"

The point is that if you want a game where it's actually easy to keep track of relative position and distance without a visual presentation, then you should design the game around that!

Bluenose wrote:

Having seen people who had't played D&D before going through a module and the rules, I very much suspect that the default assumption is that the 5' grid and the movement speeds and ranges and defined areas of effect mean something and are meant to be used. Certainly their response was, "I can't keep track of all this in my head." And if WotC really wanted people to not bother with a grid, there are much better ways to make TotM easy than to provide a lot of rules that work best with a grid and then expect you to ignore them while providing no alternatives to letting the GM handle it.

I'm confused. You say there's an assumption that "the 5' grid" means something and is meant to be used, but there is no 5ft grid in the PHB. So what is it you're saying means something and is meant to be used?

Similarly, you say the same about movement speeds and ranges and AoEs, but none of those things require a grid at all. Speeds and ranges are entirely linear, requiring nothing but knowing how far away the destination/target is, which is easy as pie in TotM. AoE templates are presented with the plain-English meanings of "cone" and "cylinder" and so forth, with visual examples being basic 3-D drawings rather than square-based templates. How do the AoE rules in any way suggest the need for a grid?

You mention "provid[ing] a lot of rules that work best with a grid and then expect you to ignore them while providing no alternatives". Which rules are you talking about? I don't remember any rules in the PHB that work best with a grid. I don't remember anything that I would need to "ignore" in order to go gridless. In the PHB sitting on my desk, using a grid is explicitly a variant alternative, not the baseline assumption. So what rules are you talking about? Can you be specific?

I think Bluenose is not talking about the grid explicitly but the fact that 5e measures everything in 5-foot increments.

Like, the moment you start measuring things in absolute distances, distance and relative position become important. Otherwise you're going to have arguments about how Steve's character could totally fit all those goblins into the area of his fireball and that's not how I imagined it, dude, how about you just, like, draw this situation out so we know where everything is relative to each other?

So, it's not like 5e absolutely requires a grid and it certainly doesn't have as many rules that interact with the grid as 3.PF and 4e, but the big point is that it still deals with absolute distances (instead of abstract distances which I'll get to shortly) which means that a visual representation is the easiest and most unambiguous way of modeling the situation.

Like I said above, 5e could work as an abstract Theater of the Mind game if the rules were actually built like that. A lot of new games do this: Fate has combat divided into zones, some of which might be connected, some of which might not. You can punch a dude in the same zone as you, shoot a dude who's in an adjacent (or with the right abilities and equipment even further) zone, and if the enemy's in an adjacent zone and the edge between the zones is on fire you can run from your zone to their zone to punch them but you need to roll a test to avoid being burned by the fire.

Fantasy Flight's Star Wars RPGs use abstract range bands, which are basically punching range, close enough to throw a rock at, pistol range, and so on. 13th Age by Pelgrane Press (which is very close kin to D&D) has a similar system, with the distances being engaged, nearby and far. It even deals with the fireball situation pretty elegantly: when you throw your fireball at a mess of enemies you'll be able to catch 1d3 of them in the fireball, or you might want to gamble and cast it recklessly, getting 1d3 more enemies in the blast but potentially hurting your allies as well.

Of course visual representation helps keep track of things like range bands and so on in those games, but when you're playing 13th Age the moment you tell your player "The orc shaman is far away, the berserker and the grunts are nearby, between you and the shaman" you immediately know what you can do in that situation and what'll happen if you cast fireball on the berserker and the grunts (you'll probably catch most of them in the blast!) or if you try to run towards the shaman (you'll run into the berserker and the grunts in the middle!).

Bringing this back to 5e, supposedly 5e is supposed to be run the same way, without really caring about absolute distances, but everything about the design and its reliance on measuring everything in 5-foot increments runs counter to this.

AD&D 1e's combat system is so fascinating in many ways, because it basically had tick-based combat of sorts (mostly in relation to spells: when you cast a spell your character would actually start casting it on the initiative you rolled and only finish casting after enough ticks had passed). I can definitely also see one-minute combat rounds working for a more zoomed out and abstract combat system.

However, my old-school D&D of choice is BECMI, and that one has ten-second combat rounds (6 rounds to a minute, ten minutes to an exploration turn). I'm not sure what made the designers of BECMI change the duration of rounds (because I'm pretty sure OD&D also had one-minute combat rounds and the combat was equally if not even more abstract than AD&D's), but given all of this it made sense that as BECMI developed it started to have something approaching tactical elements that could only really work when the combat round was a discrete small unit of time, like the Weapon Mastery rules and Fighter combat options and so on.

I mean, having said that I do think that one-minute combat rounds are perfectly fine and I'm sure they also inform play to an extent: when one round lasts for one minute you're going to have to run things a lot more abstractly than when you assume each combat round to be over in ten seconds.

Wait, did 3e have ten seconds or six seconds per round? I forget.

Wouldn't that make a 5e style "Come up with a good plan that convinces the DM to grant advantage to your attack rolls so long as you maintain X,Y and Z" more true to Bookrat's definition (which I personally have to take care not to call the real world definition) than a game heavily reliant on positioning of miniatures? I don't mean to sound argumentative, I'm just curious of your opinion.

Absolutely! However, the way I'm reading people's objections the problem lies in the "convince the GM" department. Some people might want a game to give them an objective measure by which their tactical choices are rewarded. Having to convince your GM of your plan's brilliance in order to gain a tactical advantage sort of undercuts the brilliance of that plan: some people want there to be an objective measure in the rules where good planning translates to mechanical bonuses in combat.

I mean, this does exist to an extent in 5e. For an example, setting up an ambush is definitely something that the rules support (Albeit the rules on this are pretty unclearly worded, but that's hardly unique to 5e, having mostly to do with the difficulty of writing sensible Stealth rules. I don't think either 3.PF or 4e had completely unambiguous stealth rules either, 4e's requiring at least a few errata passes before they made sense and 3e having the weird "You can't sneak attack someone in the dark" rules interaction.) and it's an easy way to start combat with basically an extra round to act while your enemies are treated as stunned!

However, as I said above, this is not unique to 5e: both 3.PF and 4e have the rules necessary to support this stuff. That's basically my point.

Having said that, as I pointed above the focus on micro-level tactics and tactical combat in a rules system can (and I think does) inform playstyle. If you have a heavily involved tactical combat system you're probably going to want to use it, and this'll lead to a game with a greater focus on micro-level tactics. Since 5e does not have such a big focus on micro-level tactics, I guess it can be said that it gravitates the playstyle towards macro-level tactics, or at least allows one to focus more on the macro and less on the micro, if that makes sen?

Sounds like a lot of fun. I'll have to give it a look. And I agree that using a grid isn't wrong of bad, however it's been one of those negative things used to bash other version of the game or make it less like an "RPG" and more like a "video game" or "minis combat scenario" when in fact it is a Role-PlayingGame. Like in the post I was discussing, it was leveled at 4e that it could be played almost entirely role-play free, but what edition couldn't be? This isn't new for the genre or D&D/PF specifically.

Firstly, Strike! is cool and good: its tactical combat engine is explicitly inspired by 4e (down to having combat roles, the same ones as in 4e plus the Blaster as a role of its own) but it uses d6 for resolution, and it actually handles itself pretty well without having to escalate the numbers too much. On the non-combat side it has a lot more in common with Mouse Guard/Apocalypse World, but it lives up to its purpose of being a game of heedless adventure. If you're coming at it from 4e you'll recognize a lot of things but some things might surprise you (For an example, class and role are decoupled, so you might make a Necromancer/Striker or a Summoner/Defender). I personally find it to be a good replacement for 4e these days, as it has the same fun and deep tactical combat but with simpler math. Also, it's easily reskinnable to almost any genre: while I'm currently using it to run a very Adventure Timeish fantasy campaign, at some point I intend to use it for sci-fi (probably of the pulpy planetary romance/space opera style, but still).

Secondly, yeah, using a game's reliance for a grid as a criticism is dumb. As is using "You can just play it as a combat game with no role-playing," 'cause seriously that's what D&D at its heart is: it's a challenge-based game where role-playing in terms of play-acting your character is only secondary.

I mean, combat and role-playing as a dichotomy is its own stupid can of worms, but I'm very tired and can't articulate very well at this point.

Diffan, I don't think the claim that 4e requires a grid for its combat is particularly controversial. I mean, yeah, you can play it without the grid, but if you're playing it RAW the grid is an immense help. The same goes for 3.PF though: playing the game by the RAW means that everything exists in 5-foot-squares, so having a grid really helps with adjudicating position and such.

And there's nothing wrong with a game using a grid to model combat. Hell, I'm currently running a game called Strike! which 100% uses the grid for its tactical combat, and it's probably the most fun I've had running an RPG for a while (mostly because it's got a quick combat system that is simple yet deep, and also because it's really easy to create encounters and custom encounters for it).

But bringing this back to 5e, 5e is weird in the sense that everything in the rules is measured in 5-foot increments but at the same time it's supposed to be more abstract (I can sort of see this: the standard rules don't account for stuff like flanking) so it's actually kind of weird. The game would much better support the theater of the mind playstyle if you went with abstract distances, zones in the style of Fate and others, and range bands in the style of the FFG Star Wars RPGs.

Quark Blast mentioned GM fiat as the difference between theater of the mind and grid-based play, and I think that's what this entire discussion boils down to: (referring to the original discussion posted by Bookrat) the people who say that 5e has no tactical options are referring to the fact that by the book the game doesn't explicitly reward certain micro-level tactics (including flanking, creating bottlenecks [I mean I know you can sort of do it but it'd be easier to visualize if the game wasn't so coy about the grid] and so on), and this is seen as a lack of options. These people would rather the game show them what they can do reliably.

And I can actually sympathize with that: whether a tactic is actually viable in 5e largely boils down to GM fiat. In 3.PF and 4e (and the aforementioned Strike!) players can expect that if they make the right maneuvers in combat they'll be rewarded with explicitly stated bonuses, and thus on a micro level the game rewards certain tactics.

And the truth is that when we're talking about macro level tactics, none of these games are actually all that different: you can engage your enemies in smaller groups in 3.PF, 4e and 5e by using the non-combat rules to maneuver for position. 3.PF and 4e do codify the rules for out-of-combat activities more so than 5e, but not to the extent that it shuts down the use of tactics the moment the characters are off the grid.

Like, the point is that while the focus in 3.PF and 4e's combat systems is more on pushing mans on a grid, the result of this is that they have a lot more tactical depth on the micro level. 5e is supposedly unique in how it allows for the use of tactics on the macro level, but thinking about it I don't think that's the case: the same types of tactical thinking that's being talked about here can be applied to 3.PF and 4e.

I do think there is a difference though, but it's a difference in playstyle really: 3.PF and 4e have really fun grid-based combat systems with lots of moving parts, so people want to engage with those rules! Throw-away combats (like picking off the enemies one by one) are generally avoided, because they detract from the fun part of the game, i.e. getting to push mans on a grid and kill dudes. That doesn't mean that 3.PF and 4e don't have the necessary rules to model those kinds of tactics as well.

Or I don't know, that's what I think.

Thanks for the extremely informative post, Jiggy!

I've heard mixed things about 5e Stealth: on one hand, just as you stated, it allows for a group to make a Stealth test and not necessarily fail just because the Dwarf in full-plate armor has a terrible Dex, but on the other I've heard that it's very unclear in its wording and thus will require a lot of DM judgments to be made. Having said that, even with the latter caveat I suppose it's serviceable in the "Make a Stealth test versus the opposition's Perception to see if you can ambush them."

So, yeah, I can see a use for this tactic much more clearly now, and it's clear that I've also been thinking of micro level tactics when this is in fact a macro level tactic. :)

Coming to the example of grabbing, you say that there's no penalty to grabbing an enemy (so, unlike in 3.X you don't need to have a specialized feat chain to attempt it without a penalty), but I would argue that there is still an opportunity cost: in grabbing the enemy you're sacrificing your attack to do so. Sure, as you stated the grabber can then wail on the enemy with melee attacks as normal, but the action to grab the enemy is one potentially damaging attack less on the PCs' part. I'd have to see this situation in action before I could judge whether spending an action to grab an enemy in favor of attacking them with a sharp length of metal is worth it.

But yeah, that was a useful post to me, thanks for that. :)

This is an interesting discussion. I'll be honest: my knowledge of 5e is at most cursory, but given that 5e has gone towards a more abstract combat system I understand that a lot of things aren't as clearly hard-coded as they were in 3.X and 4e. While this doesn't immediately mean that players actually have fewer tactical options, in some cases it might potentially translate to those tactical decisions not translating well into the mechanics.

The reason why mechanics will eventually creep into any discussion on tactics and tactical options is that any given tactic is only going to be worth it if it's actually backed mechanically. There is definitely room for using tactics and them being supported in 5e, but since so little of it's hard-coded a lot of it's going to come down to "Ask your GM for Advantage based on your tactical decisions."

Looking at the different tactics you posted, I could potentially see them working in 5e, but said tactics still don't have a whole lot of mechanical support. Concentrating fire is one that is easily supported: if you concentrate fire on a single enemy the better your odds of taking that enemy out, and every enemy taken out means fewer attacks coming from their side of the field, so that's just common sense.

I'm actually at a loss to see a situation when the latter two tactics could be used in a D&D setting to a potential effect. I can sort of see it: divide and conquer is useful when you can use the terrain to your advantage to engage one group of enemies while blocking line of sight and access to another group of enemies, but I'm having a hard time visualizing when such a situation would arise. Similarly, the hammer and anvil tactic I could see as being useful when engaging mobile ranged combatants, because engaging them when there's a literal wall blocking their escape routes is a good way to shut down their ability to move around while firing. So, okay, I guess I can see it.

Someday, someone is going to dig up a Sumerian cuneiform tablet, translate it, and argue about how the opinion of whoever wrote it was wrong.

Look, all I'm saying is that however high level Gilgamesh was he couldn't have built the walls of Uruk in the time given in the Epics all by himself. I maintain that he was either a cheat or that he was allowed to do it by DM fiat. If you'll just refer to the construction tables in the Rules Cyclopedia...

el_skootro wrote:

I didn't see this anywhere else here, so I thought I'd let everyone know that Adamant Entertainment will be producing an RPG set in China Meiville's Bas-Lag world.

El Skootro

Did the rpg ever get published?

Haha, nope! In case you're wondering, Adamant is currently waiting on Gareth M. Skarka to finish his famously late Far West Kickstarter. So, maybe once that one's finished they might actually start working on Tales of New Crobuzon. So, optimistic guess, maybe we'll see it in 2020?

Beyond the Wall is great. I might even go as far as rating it as my favorite old-school D&D clone, but that would be selling it short: it's very much not just a clone, but a game that takes the framework of old-school D&D and does something unique with it.

Sadly I've only had one chance to run it at a convention, but based on that experience I can say that it's an amazing game. Hmmm, maybe once one of my current campaigns finishes I'll give it a shot.

I also recommend checking out the supplement, Further Afield, which opens up the game into the wider world beyond the assumed setting of a single village.

What's the role of the PCs in the setting?

Does everyone use magic of a kind to bypass the setting's defining axiom or is magic (and thus the ability to enact meaningful change on the world) unevenly distributed?

How absolute is the setting-defining statement? Can you literally do nothing if you don't have magic or what?

On a more serious note, I love fate. Maybe I should do a pbp of one of these

You should do this

So, I know this is probably old news at this point, but at one point Evil Hat (the publisher of Fate) has, since their very successful Kickstarter for Fate Core and Fate Accelerated Edition, been putting out a lot (and I mean a lot) of good stuff for Fate.

The Fate Worlds of Adventure series of products are basically stand-alone settings for Fate Core and Fate Accelerated, some simply providing settings to use with those games as written but with most of them actually providing interest hacks to the Fate rules. They're all available as pay-what-you-want in PDF, with some also available in print.

I'm lazy and can't be bothered to list all of them, but here are some of the ones I'm personally crazy about:

Save Game - Classic video game heroes battle against glitches and corrupt code in this World of Adventure heavily reminiscent of Wreck-It Ralph. Tweaks Fate Core to feel a bit more video-gamey: characters have Hearts instead of Stress, instead of Fate Points you have Coins (which are not only used to invoke Aspects but also to activate Hax Stunts and to buy upgrades in the game's store). Enemies drop coins, in addition to which players can gamble for more coins by starting a combo (namely, each enemy taken out during a combo gives out even more coins, but if a single PC gets taken out during the combo the combo ends).

Aether Sea - Basically Spelljammer powered by Fate Accelerated. Introduces really simple rules for races, space ships, and magic. Doesn't strictly emulate Spelljammer's D&D trappings, but is very close.

Psychedemia - Psychic teenagers studying at an academy to better control their powers so that the government may weaponize them while also having adventures in a surreal dream world.

Gods and Monsters - You are a god and you get to have mythic adventures in a world that has yet to form fully. Each adventure further shapes the world and answers questions about the reasons behind why the world is how it is. Also, you might get a bit too powerful and turn into a monster, which is bad. I've given serious thought to running this as a prequel to a fantasy campaign set in a mythic age, so that we can build the mythology of the setting collaboratively.

Masters of Umdaar - Science fantasy by way of He-Man. Allows for a bit of randomness in character creation, which is good, as well as featuring a system for Cliffhangers, tense dramatic conflicts where the clock is ticking and everything is going down to hell and you only have a limited number of actions before it all falls apart.

Nest - Fantasy in the vein of Narnia and the Wizard of Oz. As a child, you visited a world called the Nest, where you became one of its greatest heroes. Then you grew up and didn't visit again. As an adult with a comfortable desk job you've forgotten about the Nest, when you're suddenly drawn back there. A great force of evil threatens the Nest, and it's up to you to save it. Presents a self-contained mini-campaign set in the nest, as well as three different possibilities for the Enemy that threatens the Nest. I won't spoil them.

So, yeah, that's cool. I for one can't wait to give Nest a spin, but the others are tempting as well.

Hey, this seems interesting. Irontruth, since you seem to have a lot of experience with this game, could you tell me a few things:

First of all, apparently a Stealth is the main focus in the game, and somehow it's handled so well it feels Stealthier than all the Stealths. How is Stealth handled in the game, mainly in contrast to other RPGs?

And secondly, how easy would it be to adapt the game's Stealth rules to another system altogether? Is it really tied to the game's specific system, or is it more of an underlying philosophy that is almost system neutral (like, for an example, GUMSHOE's investigative rules)?

Hey, some (I hope) helpful criticism here: the video you just posted might not be the best way to pitch the combat system of an RPG: it's a black screen with you talking over it. The saying goes that you should show, not tell.

I'm sure a lot of people would be interested in a Dark Souls inspired tabletop RPG, but the presentation is bound to turn people off. My personal recommendation would be to make a video where, instead of just talking the audience through the combat system (because with no visual cues it's not easy to get a coherent picture of the combat system as a whole), you actually walk them through a combat, showing all the various statistics in play as well as the entire combat procedure, die rolls included!

Two things...

Firstly, bounded accuracy being replaced by only giving the big bonus to Martians could really hinder the non martial races.

Man, and I thought my D&D group was out of this world

Planescape was good, but oddly enough it's also a perfect illustration of a setting being changed due to metaplot advanced through the official line of modules. I'm no expert on the subject, but wasn't there some huge metaplot event in Planescape that happened as a result of one of the published modules that ended up changing the makeup of the factions of Sigil, like, a lot?

If I recall correctly, the same thing happened with Dark Sun, i.e. the setting where the point was to play games of Mad Max meets D&D in a post-apocalyptic magical desert. One of the published modules' conclusion was "Hey, actually everything is alright now, the desert turns into a verdant jungle and now there are wind-surfing druids everywhere!"

To reiterate: the nineties were WILD

Neat, I like that. I think that you did mention it, but it makes more sense this time around, for some reason.

The first time I used this rule it was actually for a Pathfinder one-shot. Whenever the PCs hit an enemy I had deemed unimportant (like your average one hit-die goblin) I'd roll their hit points. If the damage was over the mook's hit points, it'd simply go down. Otherwise, I'd flip the token and make a mental note that the next attack would be enough to kill them.

The expression HP Threshold comes from Strike! where a certain class of monsters (Goons, I think) have a hit point threshold of 4 (or 5 at higher levels) and a single attack dealing 4 damage is enough to take them out, otherwise they're bloodied and taken out after the next attack. Do note that in Strike! 4 damage at first level is already quite a lot: most attacks deal 2 damage, maybe 4 on a critical hit, but Strikers might be able to deal as much as 4 damage reliably when using an Encounter power.

Anyway, this is a rule I've never used, so take it with a grain of salt, but it's one I do want to use when I next run a d20-based game: Freeform Skills and Skill Penumbras.

What this rule does is make each skill a bit broader in applications while allowing players to have a bit more customization on their character. There are no class skills or skill points here: each player simply chooses and appropriate number of skills they have as learned (no idea on the numbers, with standard numbers of skills this rule will actually make characters more broadly competent, but I'm okay with this). Each skill is freeform, so the players have freedom in naming these skills.

For each skill thus chosen a player can choose one Umbra (this is the main application of the skill) and two Penumbras (closely related applications of the skill). To give a few examples, here's a few:

Religious Diatribe - This skill counts as Knowledge (Religion) (its Umbra) as well as Diplomacy and Intimidate when the character spouts religiously inspired arguments (its Penumbras).
Arcane Mutterings - This skill counts as Knowledge (Arcana) (its Umbra) as well as Bluff and Intimidate when the character either mutters arcane-sounding theory to sound like an expert or uses said mutterings to try to cow people who don't understand magic (its Penumbras).
Brutish Efficiency - This skill counts as Athletics (its Umbra) as well as Intimidate and Craft when you narrate your brute strength being of use in the test (its Penumbras).
Stentorious Voice - This skill counts as a type of extremely loud and boisterous Perform (Sing) (its Umbra) as well as Diplomacy and Intimidate when you simply use your voice to drown out the opposition's arguments (its Penumbras).
Coarse Persuasion - This skill counts as a type of Diplomacy (its Umbra) as well as Bluff and Intimidate when using a lot of back-slapping and reassurances of "C'mon, you'll love it!" as part of your argument.
(Some names of the above skills stolen wholesale from Luke Crane's amazing Burning Wheel.)

When you use a Skill's Umbra it counts as having that skill at your maximum number of skill ranks and a class skill for the sake of determining bonuses. When you use a Skill's Penumbra it counts as having that skill at the maximum number of skill ranks but without the class skill bonus. All other skills are rolled as if you had no ranks in them and as if they were not your class skills. If the Umbras or Penumbras of two of your skills overlap, simply use the better of the two.

As I said, this will make characters more broadly competent, so it might not be appropriate to all games. In the style of game I run, though, it's all good. :)

Ratpick wrote:

Laurefindel wrote:

What I don't care about is the canonization of novels and that is usually discarded in my games, or at the most, vaguely echoed. Regardless of the setting, be it Forgotten Realms, Star Wars or Middle Earth, it's hard to have players follow the footsteps of Luke Skywalker or Frodo Baggins without feeling like playing second violin. A good DM finds its action further away from the main flag characters.

This is actually a really good point, one which I wanted to raise previously, but I couldn't quite articulate it. The problems of the Realms are the same as those in any multimedia franchise, as far as RPGs go.

Personally, I think it's more of an argument for dedicated tabletop RPG settings and not playing RPGs in large multimedia settings with a big established canon: like, the GM having to find action further from the flagship characters sort of undermines the PCs' ability to impact the setting. I mean, I play RPGs because I want my character to be the Luke Skywalker or Frodo of the setting, not to adventure in the corners of the setting while all the really important stuff is going on elsewhere.

This can be a problem in dedicated RPG settings as well - ones where there's a big metaplot being revealed in supplements and modules pretty much regardless of what players in individual campaigns do.

Man, the nineties were WILD

What I don't care about is the canonization of novels and that is usually discarded in my games, or at the most, vaguely echoed. Regardless of the setting, be it Forgotten Realms, Star Wars or Middle Earth, it's hard to have players follow the footsteps of Luke Skywalker or Frodo Baggins without feeling like playing second violin. A good DM finds its action further away from the main flag characters.

This is actually a really good point, one which I wanted to raise previously, but I couldn't quite articulate it. The problems of the Realms are the same as those in any multimedia franchise, as far as RPGs go.

Personally, I think it's more of an argument for dedicated tabletop RPG settings and not playing RPGs in large multimedia settings with a big established canon: like, the GM having to find action further from the flagship characters sort of undermines the PCs' ability to impact the setting. I mean, I play RPGs because I want my character to be the Luke Skywalker or Frodo of the setting, not to adventure in the corners of the setting while all the really important stuff is going on elsewhere.

I feel like I've been using an improvised version of the threshold system for years during random encounters, I'm glad someone actually bothered to put together some fly-by rules, definitely be using those.

What's the advantage/disadvantage system? Anyone have an idea of where I could find out more about it?

Luckily the group that I have right now is pretty good with character backgrounds (though I do offer in game incentives). Although those tricks from Strike! sound like something that I'll look into the next time we start a new campaign.

oh, I didn't realize you'd responded to my post!

The first time I ran a game with HP thresholds I called them quantum mooks, because until they were hit they existed in both states of being a mook (and going down from one attack) and not being a mook (and needing two attacks to be taken out). The term HP threshold is also from Strike!

Strike! style backgrounds are really easy to come up with, but they might require a bit of work adapting to Pathfinder: in Strike! your background is your main source of getting skills, and your class is actually entirely separate from your background. Tricks are one part of backgrounds, but they're also the easiest to plug into other systems without having to worry about the actual skill system.

They're really just narrative permissions: "Your character is a noble so you can always get your name on the list of a royal ball," or "Your character is a wandering minstrel, so you can always tell what the biggest news around town is when you arrive." If you already know who your characters are it should be easy to come up with tricks of your own for them.

When I run something like D&D these days (usually B/X or something) I sprinkle advantage and disadvantage over it liberally. It's actually fundamentally easier in older editions than 3e and 4e, because there aren't all that many circumstance bonuses going around, and when there are they're usually pretty huge (for an example, the Thief gets +4 on attacks that come from behind, which is almost perfectly represented by Advantage).

Similarly, I use Disadvantage to replace miss chance, whether from concealment or incorporealness or whatever. Miss chance in 3e/PF always felt like a bit of a cheat: no matter how well I just rolled, there's a flat chance that I'll fail simply because the GM rolled some dice behind the screen and said "Actually that hit is a miss now." Even knowing that I have to use the lower result of two dice, Disadvantage feels a lot less cheaty simply because I get to add my relevant modifiers on both dice.

Yeah, thus far they've been DMing, but now they want to have me DM again (I suppose they feel I'm a pretty good DM), but REALLY want to play 5e. I suppose part of this is my fault as I've gone along with them playing 5e for the past year...but at this point I think they are a 5e group currently.

I'll reiterate: you shouldn't be under any duress from your friends to run a system you don't enjoy. The fact that you've "gone along" with them playing 5e before isn't any reason not to have a mature conversation about this now: "Hey guys, playing 5e with you guys has made me realize it just isn't my game. I really appreciate the fact that you'd like me to DM, but I'd rather run something I really enjoy rather than running a game I'm not all that enthused about."

I mean, the fact that they seem to think you're a good DM should give a bit more weight to this.

The reason I'm hammering on this point is that by the tone of your posts you seem to have quite an active distaste for 5e, and if I were in your situation (I'm at most lukewarm towards 5e myself but I wouldn't call it an active distaste) I'd much rather not run a game at all than be forced to run a game I don't personally enjoy.

E: Obviously, when you have this conversation with your friends try not to be an edition warrior about it, because you'll turn it into a shouting match in no time.

"Hey guys, I'd rather not run 5e because it's not really my system..."
"Oh, okay, what don't you like about the system?"
"THE FACT THAT IT'S WATERED DOWN DUMB BABBY TABLETOP DOTA OR SOMETHING!!!"

Don't do that.

Wait, so you're the DM in this case?

Look, if you don't like 5e but your players are insistent on it it's okay to talk about it with them and say "Look, I get that you like 5e, but it's just not my game, I'd rather run Pathfinder if it's okay with you." You'll save yourself a lot of trouble that way: you won't be stuck running a game you don't like, and since your friends seemingly want to play 5e they might not be receptive to your ideas of house-ruling it into something more like 3.5.

Like, if they insist on 5e then it's not like you're under duress to run it? I mean, let's be frank, if you end up grudgingly agreeing to run a system you really don't enjoy, it's not going to be a good experience for you and might actually sour the game for your players as well. No gaming is always better than bad gaming, and this sounds like you're headed straight to bad gamingsville simply due to pressure on you to run a game you don't enjoy.

Tell your old group you're not really enthused about the idea of running 5e, they might find someone else to run it for them, and meanwhile keep looking for those people who actually want to play Pathfinder. It'll be a win/win for all parties involved.

Backstory Cards

Not 5E related, but a good, simple, universal tool for building backstory during character creation.

Could you elaborate on this? Are you talking about drawing cards to determine and/or help inspire the character's background? Reminds me of a thing some cool poster on another forum did when they showed how they used simple Tarot readings to use as a guide in determining character concept.

Also, I really like 5e style Backgrounds, but my favorite presentation of them has to be from Strike!, where a background not only gives you the skills and resources that come with that background, but also a single Trick which is essentially a Thing that you can always do owing to your background. For an example, a character with the Thief background can always stake out a place to find a way in, a character with the Necromancer can always speak with the recently dead, and a character with the Arcanist background can always identify the properties of a magic item.

This is why Eberron is superior. It was a specific mandate that anything from the novels remains non-cannon to the campaign setting. Instead of being things that definitely happened (and I think there's a few novels that contradict each other because of this) they're only things that might have happened.

Agreed. As I might have articulated earlier, Eberrowns.