Before Linxia could become a full Hellknight, however, the Order of the Rack had a test for her loyalty. One of Linxia's brothers had been arrested for attempting to rekindle the spark of rebellion that had been stamped out in Khari with her parents' execution. He had been tried, found guilty, and brought to Citadel Rivad for sentencing. Without hesitation, Linxia drew her sword, and looking straight into her brother's eyes, beheaded him without remorse.
I was half waiting for the Hellknights to tell her she failed for being too merciful :)
"That was too merciful. You should have noticed the stack of wood and spikes in the corner, and the whip and torture implements under this tarp. We have doubts that you can properly enforce the law if you can't even handle a simple scourging and crucifixion. We will be merciful and grade you as a C - do not disappoint us again."
So, if there's anyone out there still playing or if you have waited to play, the Taken King was released about three weeks ago.
There's still too much hoopla that Bungie pushes with this game, but they have done some solid work in making it better. Gone is the "light-system" in lieu of the more traditional leveling with the "light" enhancements changing it up more.
But they have also done a decent job of adding some new story-lines and narration to at least give it some coherence. Also, if you are a pvp fan, I would say the addition of a couple of new game styles and a half-dozen more maps is keeping it interesting.
I think the biggest issue is that in resetting the weapon/ability mechanics, they have essentially demolished all of the previous specialty items and equipment that people worked through for a year to get. It kind of sucks that some of the cool items haven't made the transition and therefore are really diminished in the new format. Bungie claims that they may still be useful, but honestly it doesn't look that way as of now.
My experience is that the old items (light 160/170) are useful while leveling from 34 to around 37/38 - somewhere in there, you are switching out to better gear that you find and get rewarded. The old weapons are still good in the regular Crucible - the armor is less so because the Intelligence/Discipline/Strength stats got reduced to barely contribute. I do wish they had made different rebalanced versions of some of the perks on the old weapons instead of rebalancing the perks on the old weapons. Field Scout is still pretty good, but is nowhere near where it was - which is probably good but really hurts a lot of the weapons that needed it to be useful like the Efrideet's Spear sniper - going from a 6-round magazine to a 3-round is hard.
I was able to use the old items on patrol, though I only pulled them out for special cases (used Invective for kills with Shotguns since it regenerates ammo, and used Patience and Time for kills with a sniper rifle since it had Field Scout for more ammo - but both were only to polish off a specific quest and were a one-off).
64. Because every week, the group votes someone off the island. After this was started, they realized that the campaign was designed for far longer than they had people, so they keep restocking the group.
My main point is that there's really no such thing as "the 3rd edition OGL".
There's an OGL, there's a separate license to indicate compatibility with 3.5 (is that the d20 license? Or was that something more?) and there's an SRD.
As I say, it's pedantic. But I think being clear is necessary when it comes to legalese - if the licensing arrangement is truly going to carry minimal risk.
There is no such thing as "the 3rd edition OGL". You're correct about that. Nor is there a "d20 license".
Not entirely correct on the no "d20 license" - there is a "d20 System Trademark License". It allowed the use of the d20 logo to indicate compatibility and allow the use of certain trademarked terms. The products also had to exclude character creation rules and be labelled as requiring the core rulebooks.
This was separate from the OGL, which was still needed to get the actual mechanics. You might remember the controversy about the Book of Erotic Fantasy - that was over whether it would be approved for the d20 license; it was denied, but was still able to publish under the OGL. See Wizards of the Coast's FAQ.
Edit:
thejeff wrote:
The OGL does two things, it makes the content available for use to anyone and lets them, with some restrictions, claim their material is compatible with D&D.
I believe this is wrong as well - the OGL allowed the content to be designated as OGL compatible but it could not indicate it was compatible with D&D, but I haven't dug up a source for that (though it is what I recall from trying to buy products at the time).
It'd be one guy with an AK, one guy with a compound bow, a guy inexplicably carting around an anti-materiel rifle, and probably a guy in a nice suit and no visible weapon.
Visible being the key word. Also one of them brought a wolf and expects nobody will question it.
And the group will argue about whether anyone who ambushes them should shoot the unarmed guy or someone else :)
An evil dragon has heard of the good black dragon and uses disguise self or similar to appear as a black dragon and terrorize villages, etc, to frame the good dragon (alternately, the evil dragon *is* an evil black dragon). Party has to prove that another dragon was behind it, since who would expect two dragons in the same area?
The dragon gets controlled by a lower-level version of an orb of dragonkind (or a converted spell similar to planar ally but for dragons) and the party has to determine who is behind this, if the dragon is being used for good or ill, and convince the responsible entity to free their ally.
The black dragon discovers something deep in a lake (due to its water breathing) and needs the party to investigate - possibly it was driven off by something).
A ranger who hunts dragons (and possibly has the clichéd backstory of his family/village/lover/etc wiped out by black dragons) starts hunting the dragon down.
Sheep or other similar animals start to disappear in the village the party is at (possibly around the same time the party is tight for funds to buy meat for the growing dragon). The ranchers believe that the dragon is eating their livestock, but perhaps it is caused by wolves/worgs (led by the obligatory winter wolf?) pushing into the lands (perhaps from the dragon foraging in the natural wolf habitat, from other creatures outcompeting them, or from their intelligent evil leaders direction).
A druid tries to convince the dragon that it isn't natural to associate with people and live among them.
One day, the dragon goes out and doesn't return. He has gone hunting and gotten injured by an animal.
Ahh, Another thing to put in a dungeon to mess with players! A Law book full of ridiculous laws and the consequences of disobeying them.
Then have a plane of inevitables devoted to upholding those laws come after the party (bonus points if the penalty is very minor but the party freaks out and tries to kill the enforcers).
in 1996 a group of my friends and I during live action role playing created a team of secondary characters (aside from our normal regular season characters) that were ALL Black elves.
the rules system had NO rules for dark elves AT ALL.
All we did was make elf characters (one was a half elf) with dark magic character class abilities (which canceled out our sense corruption ability) and dress up like Drow.
We were 100% elves in black face.
The game masters banned our characters. (there aren't any DROW in our world!…umm ere not Drow? were just black!)
MINE and the half elf actually WERE evil! (in fact so was my main line season character)
Well, in Golarion anyway, that's pretty legit. I do seem to remember JJ saying (in the questions thread) that any elf that spent long enough in an environment "adapted" to it (So, spend 100 years in the mwangi expanse, gain same traits as local human (dark skin & hair and such), while 100 years in the great north would have the opposite effect (very pale skin & such)). Wont have much impact on a single game but it does allow more diversity than in most settings. Still, cant track down the post though... I would like to track that post down.
In Golarion (and by extension, Pathfinder game product canon), the first drow manifested not long after Earthfall when they went too deep underground and their own negative emotions/personality traits brushed against something down there that transformed them.
One thing to realize about elves is that they do a lesser version of this all the time. An elf that lives in a forest ends up looking and behaving similarly to the elves we see all the time in Golarion, but if that elf moves on to the desert, her nature and appearance will change, over the course of a few centuries, to match. Same with elves up in the snow, or down in the jungle. They essentially change ethnicities as the environment they live in changes. This takes a long time, and isn't likely to be something that ever affects a PC or an elf NPC in the span of a single campaign.
But it IS part of why the elves who went underground turned into drow—they were influenced by the raw chaos and evil of SOMETHING deep down in the Darklands.
And that can happen anywhere if the stars are right. Or it can happen differently. And certainly the drow know about Castrovel and Soveryan, and they may well have built their own versions of elf gates or other things in order to go there to wreak havoc.
My understanding (just from the messageboards): The original drow were all evil, due to the elves who encountered the emanations of Rovagug (spelling?) and the darklands. In addition, evil and depraved elves *can* spontaneously become drow but it might also require an outside catalyst (like the emanations of the darklands in the original transformation). So all "first-generation" drow are evil.
Since being a drow is inherited, later generations of drow may not be evil (and may even be good) - there was a neutral drow in one of the Second Darkness adventures. The transformation is one way - drow who become good do not become elves. Since Second Darkness was the introduction of drow, Paizo wanted to stress that most drow are evil.
Relevant quote on good-aligned drow (somewhat old - from 2012):
The reason we did that "Are there any good drow?" sidebar was because we were deliberately trying to "reset" drow as bad guys and wanted folks to be assured that we weren't going to throw in a dual-scimitar wielding ranger into the mix.
Now that we're about a dozen adventure paths in, if we were to do a drow adventure today, we wouldn't do this sidebar at all.
There CAN be good drow. They're just very very very rare. To the extent that in 5 years of monthly products, we've not yet had one show up in print.
Ah OK. I think my main mistake was in misremembering just HOW mad Hialin was in Second Darkness, upon reading it again he is a LOT of corrupt than I gave him credit for.
I was also wondering, is it possible for a drow to transform back into an elf by being extraordinarily good/pure? If so I guess this would be significantly more rare though since I doubt there are as many good/neutral drow as there are evil/neutral elves...
Nope; the transformation is a one-way trip. A good drow stays a drow.
the guy at the bus stop said the tin foil hat would keep you away!
now I gotta stay with the sweet old couple in the cute lil farmhouse at the end of the road
well i'm sure it'll be safe..... Maybe if we split up.... Great now the power's out!.
(paraphrased from commercial)
Girl: Can't we just get in the running car?
Guy 1: Are you crazy!?!
Guy 2: Let's hide behind those chainsaw!
Group: Yeah!
Serial Killer: ...
Does anyone know which Wayfinder issues have BB adventures and Sandpoint info? The reason I ask specifically is that my wifi is very wiggy, so I have to limit downloads. If I knew which issue to download it'd be helpful.
Just looking at the reviews and product pages at Paizo.com (for issues 1-11), it sounds like you really want issue #9 and possibly 10 and 11 (quotes are from reviews):
Three of the FIVE free adventures within are set near everyone’s favourite starter-town of Sandpoint and playable with naught more than the Beginner’s Box! One of the others is a dwarf-themed quest, complete with six pre-generated dwarven PCs, all of whom have full stat-blocks and biographies, built-in hooks, and their own baggage with the others.
I had to have the whole subscription process explained to me twice. And then I still couldn't work out why I couldn't just subscribe to the PDFs. I ended up subscribing to Iron Gods because I:
A) Love the AP concept
B) Want the PDFs cheaper
C) Want the discount the subscription gives me.
But after Iron Gods I will cancel, and not just because the next to AP's hold no interest for me. Though I might reconsider if there were a AP PDF subscription option - even without the discount or even without being very much cheaper....
An exploding door. I do not need to have that one sprung on me ever again.
Heh - I mentioned this to my group when they had found some threads on the "you don't need Disable Device, just use an adamantine weapon on it" theory of adventuring (also, pockets of alchemical items to explode if someone cuts through the walls).
But I'd never presume that since I dont like them they need to go. Seriously? WHO DOES THAT?
I believe it's so prevalent in TTRPG fandoms because the work staff in the companies that service that fandom tend to be so small, limited in time, and/or busy with projects. The mindset tends to be "If this thing I don't like doesn't exist, that frees up all the people who would otherwise be working on it to come over here instead and work on this thing I DO like".
Also, sometimes players/GMs wanting to use the new rules material can impact existing players/GMs who don't want to (at least leading to a discussion of what people want to include in their game). It can work out great, but it can also lead to tension or conflicts - leading to the mindset of "there's no official rules, so you can't do that" ("no one can ask to play an exotic race before the Advanced Race Guide", for example).
Because it's unfair and it's one of the few things that people actually treat like this. If I'm playing a dumb, uncharismatic brute, I shouldn't get bonuses because I, the player, am good at talking. I'd say that it make it's less a roleplaying experience. You're just playing yourself at that point.
If you, the player, decide to "talk pretty", then you are not playing a dumb, uncharismatic brute, are you? If you decide to play an oaf and then conveniently get eloquent fishing for a bonus in social situations...eh, no. That's just schizophrenic, terrible roleplaying.
But what if it is an Intelligence 7, Wisdom 7, Charisma 7, no skill points invested in any social skills character, who has always been played as a smooth-talking, intelligent, observant character?
Allow me to introduce to you: Deden Elslayer. This guy's first character (brother to one of my best buds) I sat down and tried to make a backstory with this guy. I informed him that its good for the character to not just be a badass but have negative traits too, fears, insecurities etc.
So he's like "yeah alright, my level 4 ranger has a wolf companion and sort of understands animals better than humans (how trite lol but that's not what makes it bad) he has a crippling fear of whales and bees."
"Why?"
"Oh @#$% ummmmm... Because his whole family was on a boat and he watched a whale eat it. And he hunted some stuff for this dude and he payed him with a handyhaversack.... Full of BEES!"
Then he proceeded to be nothing but a hindrance to the group, refused to fight with the group because "I'm chaotic neutral and I think about myself and only myself". Very disruptive, and I won't be asking for him to return.
GM Answer: You hear a horrible sound all around you, and realize you have been surrounded by a pack of... whale-bees.
The key word there is 'invalidate.' There are some/many times when the players actions make the scripted tactics sub-optimal, silly, or even stupid. But that doesn't make them invalid. If a given tactic is still possible, it is valid. Doesn't mean it is a good plan, just a valid plan.
It's possible to hit someone with your scorching ray after they cast communal resist energy on their party. Does that mean that if the tactics don't have a clause for that you have to still hit them with it?
No, you don't. That's the definition of "invalidate".
Depends on if the spellcaster knows they have communal resist energy up or not.
It's a bit more complex than that, they can be used in games just fine, but there are some limitations on other things that can be done with the game as a result. Vic explained it a couple of times, if you can find the posts.
You might also want to look at Ryan Dancey's posts since there has been some discussion of the OGL for Pathfinder Online. Two that seem relevant:
The OGL does not prohibit anyone from making a computer game.
it prohibits you from publishing open game content with any license other than the OGL. All computer software, except that you write 100% yourself, has a license. Ergo, it is functionally impossible to combine the OGL and any software anyone would consider remotely "modern".
But that's not why we're not using the tabletop game rules. We're not using them because they're inappropriate for the kind of MMO we want to produce.
Let me begin by saying that the purpose of the OGL is not to say what is copyright and what is not copyright. That issue cannot be resolved by WIzards of the Coast because the law about how a copyright is transmitted through derivative works is unclear when it comes to things like Dungeons & Dragons.
What the OGL does is clearly establish that some content can be used with the license and some content cannot. When you use the OGL, you don't have to have the debate about copyrights and derivative works. The license itself defines the legal regime for the work in question not the copyright law.
The Pathfinder tabletop game is produced using that license so there's no need for Paizo to attempt to parse what is copyright and not copyright and what is a derivative work and what is not a derivative work on materials it is using from 3rd parties - including Wizards of the Coast - in those works. So it doesn't.
The OGL cannot be used for a software project as complex as Pathfinder Online. The OGL has restrictions on the kinds of licensing terms that can be attached to a project that uses the OGL and those terms are incompatible with software projects that combine multiple tools and middleware, and operate as services that require end-user license agreements and Terms of Service agreements.
So Goblinworks, unlike Paizo, has to think about the copyright and derivative work issues.
The biggest problem is named objects that are legacy D&D - spells, magic items and monsters that Wizards could assert a copyright interest in. There are lots of such things in D&D that are derived from the public domain and that stuff is OK for us to use - but we have to decide what that is. Wizards isn't going to tell us. So we err perhaps on the side of caution - Wizards is a big company and they could afford to ties us in knots with litigation if they wished. We want to avoid the appearance of infringing their copyrights.
The second biggest problem is in the description of game mechanics. Game mechanics by themselves cannot be copyright. However, the game mechanics of a roleplaying game are not like the game mechanics of chess or poker. They embody a large amount of material that is likely copyright. Deciding what parts of the game mechanics are thus "safe" to use, and what part could potentially trigger a lawsuit is again a gray area where we have to decide. And we apply the same rule of thumb as before - we want to avoid the appearance of infringement.
Since Lisa and I worked at Wizards on Dungeons & Dragons and were deeply enmeshed in the decisions about how to create the OGL and what material to license with the OGL, I think we're uniquely qualified to have opinions about where those gray areas lie.
I'm comfortable with using things like the good/evil & law/chaos alignment matrix, and hit points and armor class, and various tests that mechanically work like a saving throw or a skill check, and other such low-level mechanics. That's the stuff I'm pretty confident cannot be copyright. I'm much less comfortable with enumerating the specific list of features a character gets for taking levels in specific classes, for example. So we built a game system that has a completely different mechanic for assigning abilities to characters that works nothing like D&D.
We are also going to use a real-time combat mechanic. Much of the combat system in D&D and Pathfinder is defined by the fact that it is not conducted in real-time. Since we are using real-time, we will therefore have a very different combat engine than D&D or Pathfinder tabletop, and thus we avoid another large area of rules that could entangle us in the question of infringement.
And of course the economic system including harvesting, crafting, and retailing in the MMO will be wildly different than that in the tabletop realm. The D&D and Pathfinder "economics" are a thin veneer of hand waving designed to obfuscate the fact that there's no rational market economy underneath them; they're set dressing for heroic adventuring power management, not a way to determine what the market price for a +2 flaming longsword should be in any given locale. The MMO economics absolutely will be.
Also, Mother Nature miiiiiiiight not like that you're constantly killing the Gifts she gives you.
Ah! No, our dear, dear friend bravely gave its life protecting us from that horrifying one armed kobold with a limp. We will always remember the sacrifice of .....whatever its name was.
Barbarian: "I think I stepped on your animal companion while rage-lance-pouncing that last bad guy."
Hunter: "Not Squirmy-the-multi-legged?"
Barbarian: "Yeah, sorry bout that. Didn't see him since he's short. You want to look at the bottom of my shoe and make sure?"
Hunter: *sob*
Barbarian: "You, uh, got something to scrape this off into and bury or something? Like a shoebox?"
Hunter: *weeps*
Bard: *patting Hunter's shoulder* "He'll always be remembered for having a lot of legs."
We consider individual circumstances. But the bottom line is that you should treat protected materials with much the same caution as you would the password to your paizo.com account.
But I don't think all of my Paizo materials will fit on the post-it note my passwords on, right in the corner of my screen.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned are monsters. In the 3.5 SRD, a number of monsters are defined to have psionics, though those are treated as spell-like abilities (and defined by the spells of the same name). For example, the Aboleth has a number of at will spell-like abilities; in the 3.5 SRD, those are psionics, so you would have to decide how to handle that. It might throw some of the traditional spell counters off (for example, using Protection from Evil versus Psionic Dominate? I'm not sure by the wording if that would be an issue or not - and this was already mentioned by others).
A lot of 3.5 creatures were not designed with the Power Resistance vs Spell Resistance paradigm in mind, so you might want to tweak that by assigning Power Resistance to some monsters that do not have it by default (or changing Spell Resistance to Power Resistance).
The biggest change I think would be that most psionics (outside of 3PP - I'm not sure what material you are using) are fixed in their powers known (outside of certain situations such as Psychic Reformation IIRC), so it might be harder for psionics to focus on spells to defend against both psionics and magic, or to clear both psionic and magic conditions.
Just some thoughts - I haven't looked through spells vs powers for any specific condition-clearing issues or defenses.
Player says: "I think our party has an item for this."
Player means: "Everyone else's inventory is for me to use, so I can blow my gold on this UBER WEAPON."
alternate meaning: I am pretty sure that another player who never remembers contents of own character sheet has something that can save us...
alternate alternate meaning: Remember that thing we argued about not selling and lugging it all this way because it might be useful? It's finally useful.
Ahriman is mythic in that his regen can be stopped by mythic creatures. Though I am surprised he doesn't have any mythic powers in his realm.
According to JJ (forgot the post), demigods are creatures that have four domains and are CR 26-30. Creatures with less domains, or are lower than CR26 are quasi deities.
Gods have five domains and for all intents and purposes are un-CR-able.
So, Ahriman is a demi god. On the lower scale, but he is a demigod.
Apparently there is a private message system?. I have no idea how to use it, so I apologize now if I have rudely snubbed someone by accident.
The link that Orthos mentioned will also indicate if you have new unread messages; "Hello, Gregory Connolly (1)" indicates you have one unread PM.
You can send a PM to someone by clicking on their name to go to their profile; above all of their tabs (for Profile, etc), there should be a link that reads "Send Private Message" that lets you compose a message to them. There is also a way to prevent people from sending your private messages, but I don't remember how that works off the top of my head.
For example, quasits, imps, and lemures stand out as some fiendish creatures that are not only susceptible to mundane diseases but are pretty vulnerable. A lemure has a fortitude no better than a low level martial, and both quasits and imps are nearly as susceptible as human commoners.
A lot of diseases have high save DCs as well...
Ah yes, as was told in the "Book of the Damned, vol XLVII, Revised and Extended Edition", which spoke of the dark days when the plague finally reached the Nine Hells, and devil lords were forced to toil for themselves as their servents fled and died... (no cosmology was harmed in the creation of this post)
I have to admit, I'm somewhat intrigued by the idea - I'd never really considered it ;)
An F2 is a tornado strong enough to rip trees out of the ground, tear the roofs off houses, and even lift cars off the ground. An F3 tears the roofs off most houses. F4 is where you hit the area where neighborhoods are demolished and cars are tossed around. F5 is typically apocalyptic.
Or, as they put it more colorfully, "[a]n F4 will level a framed structure and leave the mess behind, ... while an F5 "cleans up after itself", carrying away the debris."
That's a freeform game and there are plenty of those already out there. Pathfinder is made with a license from WOTC I believe (correct me if I am wrong) and they are class based.
Pathfinder is made based on the Open Gaming License (OGL) that was created by Wizards of the Coast (not to be confused with other licenses for open gaming that apply to other systems). Paize took a great deal of material from the System Resource Document (the material which Wizards of the Coast made available thru the OGL) but not all of it - for example, they have not touched the epic level rules, the deity rules, and psionic from WotC.
From what I remember, most of Paizo's focus at the time was updating the available portions of 3.5 to fix some of the issues that they felt affected the base game while remaining backwards compatible, with a focus on not invalidating the several adventure paths that they had already published under the 3.5 rules set.
Player Entitlement is what people say a player has when they aren't happy with the player. GM Entitlement is what people say a GM has when they aren't happy with the GM. :)
You can post links to the offending accounts to this thread. Please post a link to the user in that thread or flag the offending posts, and pleas do NOT reply to the spam posts since it just makes more work for the moderators to clean up to remove the offending thread title from the forums.
Sadly there were some responses to this spam thread which are still present after the OP was removed. I flagged them but wanted to leave it here as well.
The OP might be interested in the strain-injury variant house rules, which alters how damage is recovered from - it doesn't totally eliminate the need for healing magics or other conventional ways of recovering hit points, but does greatly reduce the need for them. At the very least, it has some excellent discussion in the threads about how these types of changes to the hit point paradigm alter gameplay (which would also come into play with the proposed ring).
They don't have Displacer Beasts, Carrion Crawlers or Beholders because those are copyrighted by WotC, the same way Paizo has replaced "Mordenkainen" with "Mage's" in various spell names. That's done to work within the OGL by not infringing on WotC's product identity.
I'm not familiar enough with the OSR products to comment. My understanding is that the "Mage's" spells were released that way in the SRD (the material that was made available via the OGL); WotC intentionally created a generic version that would be available without opening up their PI.
Depends on what you mean by "force you into being a ranged character" as well - having a decent ranged weapon as an option for times when you cannot or do not want to get into melee is very different from preferring to fight at range at all times.
You can't use Natural Bond/Animal Companion to improve an animal's intelligence via hit dice.
An Animal that gains an Int of 3 gains sentience and becomes a magical beast. Since it is no longer an animal, it is no longer eligible for natural bond/animal companion, and you get to start the process all over.
Ergo, you can't do it.
==Aelryinth
That doesn't seem to be the case in Pathfinder (at least not anymore). There was a blog post from March 29, 2011 about the effects of increasing intelligence in animals. If there was a later change that reversed this, please let me know and accept my apologies - I didn't find anything on a quick search. Here's the part of the blog that I think governs this:
Blog wrote:
Note that while the monster guidelines talk about a maximum Int for an animal, this only applies to the creation process. Giving an animal a higher Intelligence score does not somehow transform it into a magical beast, unless the effect says otherwise, such as in the case of awaken. Animals can grow to have an Int higher than 2 through a variety of means, but they should not, as a general rule, be created that way.
Is that fair to the socially inept introvert who'd like to try running a silver tongued Charismatic guy once?
If a guy wants to play a barbarian with a 20 str, do you make him do pull ups for a STR check?
DrDeth wrote:
It *IS* a roleplaying game. One of the nice things in ROLEplaying is trying a character that doesn't match your IRL skill set. It's unfair to penalize that guy too much.
And then DrDeth developed a split personality.
Doesn't he just view the "role" part of roleplaying differently than the standard boardspeak of "roleplaying means you are acting it out, not just rolling dice" - or am I having a moment here?
Granted, I thought DrDeth had developed a split personality when he started crusading for simulacrum and scry and fry to be clarified.
why is the movie "Saw" the first thing I think of when you say "design test"?
I'm thinking some combination of MacGuyver and Minecraft. You receive a package with some sticks and thread, and note telling you that you have until nightfall to secure your place of residence because Cosmo is being sent to stalk you :)
If you're joining an established group that has been playing RPGs for decades playing fast and free with the rulebook and with the GM making rules for many things up on the spot as they go, they may not even consider that something unusual enough to be worth mentioning. If they're particularly isolated there's a good chance they assume everyone plays that way.
This ^^
Though the problem is, you often don't even realize that it is something that should be discussed - because the element you are used to is just there like the air in the atmosphere or the water in the aquarium. Everyone gets something different out of these games, and some of the essential elements for one person's game can seem like the weirdest bit of minutia to the next.
If I were a player, I would probably think I was being polite by mentioning my desire to acquire such an enhanced weapon for my character, so the GM could decide if he wanted to work it into the adventure or make it a plot point. I would feel like I was imposing if I first wanted the GM to homebrew a feat for it; I'm just used to GMs who are concerned about making that large of a change (especially now that they can point to a *mythic* feat for this); so please everyone remember that the assumptions and baselines go both ways. There are other GMs on these boards who want some level of wishlists so that the PCs can get some desired items from loot and the GM is freed from the "magic mart" that they feel like they would be doing otherwise.
Could you imagine if the players get to play a monster/villain during combat? That's the exact same thing.
So if a PC gets dominated and ordered to kill the other PCs, do you play the PC for the player or do you trust them to play their character to the best of their ability within the confines of their characterization?
Just curious since I have seen it go both ways on how groups handle it.
I would take over a dominated PC, mainly so players don't get a PvP vibe, I tell them what die to roll and they still roll for the PC. I don't understand what that tells you or what you hoped to hear.
You've foolishly walked into my fiendish trap... er, well, it was mostly a tangent from being distracted. I was wondering just because of your comment about how fair it would be for the players to run a villain - I know a lot of groups struggle with whether the player is sandbagging their characters effectiveness when the get the kill order in this situation. The power attacking greataxe barbarian who suddenly thinks the best idea is to pull out their unmodified shortbow to shoot at the party from a distance, etc.
It hasn't come up in my games yet - I'll probably have to ask how people want it to be played.
One of the things that keeps getting brought up in this thread is GMPCs ruining GM impartiality. So my question is, is GM impartiality really that important? I'm not necessarily saying this in reference to GMPCs. For example, what if the GM is rooting for the PCs, fudging things to give them the upper hand, and refuses to kill off characters? Is this a bad thing? If yes, why? Does it change things if the players are unaware of this?
Basically what Matt said: it depends on if the players want an impartial GM. I think it also depends on the player's definition of impartiality; is it fair for the GM to retcon an encounter if the GM realizes he designed it in an unbalanced way? What if the encounter was one or two levels below the party level, but the GMs dice refused to roll below an 18 and the players couldn't roll above a 3?
The answer is going to be different for each group. Some groups want the GM to fudge, but they don't want it to be too obvious. Others want everything to be played straight and out in the open; if they think the GM cheated (for or against the party), then it ruins their sense of accomplishment.
Could you imagine if the players get to play a monster/villain during combat? That's the exact same thing.
So if a PC gets dominated and ordered to kill the other PCs, do you play the PC for the player or do you trust them to play their character to the best of their ability within the confines of their characterization?
Just curious since I have seen it go both ways on how groups handle it.
