Best Version of DnD?

[Sylverthorne]

2 hours ago, TheAuldGrump said:

The only 'official' thing I could find for Al Qadim and 5e was a free book on DM's Guild for Classes and Backgrounds.

 

I will have to ask Julie and Jon - they may have been talking about some fan work that is out there.

 

The Auld Grump - I really hope that it really is in the works.

 

I'll ask Mr. Thorne where he found his article; he said Kobold Press had the license.

 

Hokay. I'm not sure what he was doing poking around here, but... hunt the Dungeon Master's Guild for 'Genies Great and Small: 21 New Genies of Zakhara'. I'd link it, but.. Commerce. ^^;

Edited November 12, 2017 by Sylverthorne
Adding stuff, like you do...

[TheAuldGrump]

1 hour ago, Sylverthorne said:

 

I'll ask Mr. Thorne where he found his article; he said Kobold Press had the license.

 

Hokay. I'm not sure what he was doing poking around here, but... hunt the Dungeon Master's Guild for 'Genies Great and Small: 21 New Genies of Zakhara'. I'd link it, but.. Commerce. ^^;

No, that was enough for me to find it - Seers of Zakhara, Elemental Magic of Zakhara, Zakharan Bestiary, The Sha'ir and the Elemental Patrons, Al Qadim Archetypes.....

 

*EDIT* And, yes, Kobold Press.

 

I would have to say that both Jon (or Julie (or both)) and Mr. Thorne are, indeed, correct.

 

Maybe no setting book, yet, but there is definitely a shifting in the sands.

 

The Auld Grump

Edited November 12, 2017 by TheAuldGrump

[Jokemeister]

Wow - this thread exploded over the weekend!

 

Anyway, some random thoughts below.

 

Quote

You've got to be careful with this idea in ways other than avoiding a TPK.  Not every player is keen on the idea that there is a requisite quantity of abuse they have to take in order to move things along.  I've seen DMs get trapped in the "this has been too easy for them" mentality and ruin games, even if the players were all otherwise  having a good time.

 

I'll agree with this.  If the players are clever and think of an easy way to get past an encounter, they should be rewarded with that encounter being easy.  As a player, I would absolutely hate it if the DM "cheated" and pumped up the difficulty simply because we were clever - it would effectively make me think that there was no point in thinking about what we should do as all decisions are meaningless. 

 

My point was really that during the initial design, encounters should be designed so that they are dangerous but not so dangerous that you expect a TPK.  Basically, the party should be concerned when they see what they are up against.  Obvious caveat here is that encounters should also be varied so not every encounter should be life threatening.

 

On 11/11/2017 at 10:08 AM, Unruly said:

There's something to be said for playing in a game where the DM really doesn't pull punches, though. Some of the most fun I've had in the last couple years was in a game where the DM basically threw the book at us and we had to be very smart in how we played in order to survive it. But then again, I don't want my characters to be invincible and I go into every new campaign knowing that at some point I'm going to do something really stupid and end up dead.

 

 

To be clear, I'm not saying that character death is to be avoided at any cost.  Even with my principles of trying to avoid TPK, if you do something stupid - I will absolutely kill your character.  And if the party does something stupid - I will absolutely kill the party.  If the decisions of the party result in a TPK then so be it.  The key difference is that I'm not setting out to kill the party.  

 

My view is that having a goal of actively trying to kill the party is pointless as getting a TPK is trivially easy.  For me, designing adventures/encounters so that the PCs get beat up badly but still survive doesn't count as the DM pulling punches because, as mentioned above, getting a TPK is trivially easy.  I would see the DM pulling punches as a situation where the DM deliberately only designs easy encounters or "cheats" during the encounter in order to keep the party alive (eg if the DM rolls their dice behind the screen, then the villains suddenly start missing a lot).

 

8 hours ago, TheAuldGrump said:

And, for the sake of entertainment - Eric Mona's post on the Paizo boards as to whether or not Paizo would be going 4e.

 

Which... comes down to 'We don't know - WotC still hasn't released details about either the system or the license'.

 

(See the above mentioned 'natural 1 on Profession[Marketing]'.)

 

The Auld Grump

 

Wow - I didn't know that much about the history of Paizo.  Had no idea that WotC effectively created their own biggest competitor (at least, it feels like Pathfinder is the biggest competitor to D&D currently).

Edited November 13, 2017 by Jokemeister
typos

[PaganMegan]

8 minutes ago, Jokemeister said:

Wow - this thread exploded over the weekend!

 

Anyway, some random thoughts below.

 

 

I'll agree with this.  If the players are clever and think of an easy way to get past an encounter, they should be rewarded with that encounter being easy.  As a player, I would absolutely hate it if the DM "cheated" and pumped up the difficulty simply because we were clever - it would effectively make me think that there was no point in thinking about what we should do as all decisions are meaningless. 

 

My point was really that during the initial design, encounters should be designed so that they are dangerous but not so dangerous that you expect a TPK.  Basically, the party should be concerned when they see what they are up against.  Obvious caveat here is that encounters should also be varied so not every encounter should be life threatening.

 

 

To be clear, I'm not saying that character death is to be avoided at any cost.  Even with my principles of trying to avoid TPK, if you do something stupid - I will absolutely kill your character.  And if the party does something stupid - I will absolutely kill the party.  If the decisions of the party result in a TPK then so be it.  The key difference is that I'm not setting out to kill the party.  

 

My view is that having a goal of actively trying to kill the party is pointless as getting a TPK is trivially easy.  For me, designing adventures/encounters so that the PCs get beat up badly but still survive doesn't count as the DM pulling punches because, as mentioned above, getting a TPK is trivially easy.  I would see the DM pulling punches as a situation where the DM deliberately only designs easy encounters or "cheats" during the encounter in order to keep the party alive (eg if the DM rolls their dice behind the screen, then the villains suddenly start missing a lot).

 

 

Wow - I didn't know that much about the history of Paizo.  Had no idea that WotC effectively created their own biggest competitor (at least, it feels like Pathfinder is the biggest competitor to D&D currently).

I don't think most DMs PLAN on TPKs.

 

They are just unprepared when the lemmings jump off the cliffs and head out to sea. 

 

Grump has a Grim Reaper figure he pulls out and puts on the table as he intones " Are you SURE about that?"

 

I am always amazed how often that doesn't work.

[BlazingTornado]

5 hours ago, TheAuldGrump said:

*EDIT* And, yes, Kobold Press.

Yeah but if it's on DMsGuild it's less "has the license" and more "puts out homebrew that isn't really WOTC-approved, it's just OGL and on DMsGuild"... And considering how bad Kobold Press's official 5E stuff has been, I shudder at how bad this stuff that doesn't have PROPER WOTC approval can end up being.

[Nunae]

I just learned that 5e apparently has gotten a German translation like a year ago. Even though I don't want to switch, this is rather exciting to me and I hope the game will get more of a following around here and make player recruitment easier on me. Especially since one of my players has two pre-school sisters who she wants to corrupt introduce to role playing over the next few years.  And DnD is just such a nice system to introduce players to compared to the German DSA (or at least that's what multiple regular DSA players and game masters told me).

 

Speaking of that player, she is actually going to DM a oneshot on the 22nd and I will be playing for the very first time ever  (there needs to be a party hat emoticon). She took one of the Adventure League Modules from DMsguild and seems to be rather excited for the day. Besides me our cleric player from the main campaign and three of the DM's friends from uni gonna be there, for an all female round of broccoli kicking and world saving. I so hope it's gonna be great and she will catch the DM bug so I might one day play in a real campaign with character development and stuff.

 

 Oh, and just in time to the one year anniversary of our campaign in January we might be getting a 6th player. I'm content at 5, but he is a good friend of ours and we have been teasing him with a stable RPG group for over a year. Would be mean to exclude him now that he'll move to the city.

[Club]

20 hours ago, TheAuldGrump said:

Pretty sure he was in the minority, in regards to the magazines. The mags had been focusing on TSR material since before 2e. Circulation had been diminishing before WotC bought out TSR - which may mean that they were focusing to much on the wrong portion of their audience, at the cost of general popularity. Or had simply lost the part of the audience that wasn't buying what they were publishing.

 

Didn't say I agreed with him, or even have firsthand knowledge of the issues he was talking about, but he said that they'd had rules-lite social, intrigue, investigative and political scenarios; which got swapped out for rules-heavy dungeons to kick in the door of.

 

Quote

*EDIT* Paizo has not-nice things to say about the magazine industry - calling it the 'organized crime controlled magazine industry' - and I am not sure that Ms. Stevens wasn't serious.

Apparently part of the reason congress went after the comics industry in the 50s was that it was largely controlled by the mob. wouldn't surprise me if they got back in, or if she's just talking about them being a trust.

[Doug Sundseth]

1 hour ago, Nunae said:

... (there needs to be a party hat emoticon).

 

 

Hooray! Today is your lucky day!

 

 

(If you start to enter anything in the "Find emoticons" box in the emoticons menu, more emoticons show up. At least this is true on Chrome.)

[klarg1]

On 11/9/2017 at 9:21 PM, Jokemeister said:

 

I'm with Sylverthorne on this.

 

I have no problem with Tomb of Horrors but I would only run it as a one-shot with the players fully aware that it was a grindmill scenario and that the whole point of the one-shot was to see how long they survived.  It wouldn't be for the purpose of rewarding the DM with a chance to win because honestly, if winning is a TPK, I can win at any time. 

 

Seriously, getting a TPK is trivially easy (I've even managed it when I wasn't even trying!).  Can any DM here honestly say that they couldn't find a way to kill their party of PCs if they were really trying?  And you don't even have to resort to ridiculous insta-kill traps ala the original Tomb of Horrors.  Getting a TPK can be achieved as easily as putting the PCs into a level inappropriate encounter.

 

The difficulty of the DMs job is not in killing the PCs - it's in taking the PCs to the point of death before they heroically succeed despite the odds.  Trying to find that thin line where the players feel as if their characters are really in danger of death - where the player starts to feel apprehension for their characters - but yet are still able to win through in the end.

 

 

Nicely put. ( @Sylverthorne too ) 

 

When I GM, I take great satisfaction in putting the fear of character death into my players, but not so much in actually offing a character. (although it happens.)

 

At it's heart, I approach role playing as a group story-telling process.

 

Update, based on @Unruly's comment from the previous page: No argument: If the player earns a death through heroic sacrifice, or brute stupidity, who am I to stop them?

Edited November 13, 2017 by klarg1

[TheAuldGrump]

Which is why Jon has the record - for both the Heroic Sacrifices and the Brute Stupidity. (Dude! You're first level, charging four orcs with Long Spears! - you're gonna get skewered!)

 

The Auld Grump

[TheAuldGrump]

I have to add a few things to the Sam version of Beyond the Borderlands.... It apparently suffers from a lack of cranky black dragons with Scottish accents and good natured medusas that sculpt....

 

Sam apparently told her parents all about the cranky dragon.

 

The Auld Grump

[BlazingTornado]

Well due to personal problems Little Miss Chaotic had to drop out of the game... so now I have to find a new fourth.

 

Guy I know on another forum is keen on joining up, although he had issues with being flexible... wanting to play a catgirl race lifted from a Final Fantasy game (couldn't be D&D's Tabaxi, had to be this awful fetishized catgirl instead) or wanted to play some bird guy lifted straight from the newest Zelda game... I'm hoping now that he's settled on a human fighter he might mesh with the gaming group's good groove.

 

 

Also, I'm finding it hard to create my own hobgoblin activity in a keep... because I am not a military strategist and military strategery is what distinguishes em from orcs... Hard to figure what sort of guard setup they'd have going. But I want to use hobgoblins because there's a less evil hobgoblin around that owes em a life debt and if they remember, they can call him in and hopefully sidestep a decent chunk of the encounters.

 

Edited November 19, 2017 by BlazingTornado

[Jokemeister]

As long as the players don't know military strategy themselves, I don't think you need to worry too much about guard activity that is realistic and authentic.  If you can come up with something that feels realistic (based on the various tropes the players may have previously encountered), then that is probably enough.

 

To answer the actual question though, what I would do would depend on whether the hobgoblins were expecting an attack.

 

If they were on a war time footing and expecting an attack, I would have at least 20 guards at the keep portcullis at all times and have them rotated out on a very regular schedule.  In addition, I would have guards stationed within eyesight of each other at regular points along the walls.  Naturally, these guards are also rotated out on a regular schedule.  There would also be regular patrols around the keep walls and within the grounds itself.  All of this would put the guards very much on edge and on alert and I would try to make it very difficult to sneak in.  Naturally, the grounds around the keep have also been cleared so there is no cover on approach to the keep.  If the keep has a moat, stuff that moat with dangerous animals.

 

If the hobgoblins aren't on a war time footing, I would basically have less guards standing around at any time.  Also, while they are still rotated regularly, they aren't rotated as quickly (so they would have to stand guard for longer hours before the rotation).  While not on guard duty, I would put the guards as lounging around inside the keep in various activities (some sleeping, some practicing, some lounging around gambling, some grabbing snacks etc).  Ultimately, the point is to give the impression of bored guards.  If you want, you could even have the guards spending less effort in maintaining the clear ground around the castle.

 

In case it's not clear, the above is simply what I would do and is not based on any knowledge of military strategy.

[Nunae]

On 19.11.2017 at 9:20 AM, BlazingTornado said:

 

Also, I'm finding it hard to create my own hobgoblin activity in a keep... because I am not a military strategist and military strategery is what distinguishes em from orcs... Hard to figure what sort of guard setup they'd have going.

I'm also not a military strategist, but I would assume a pretty elegant alarm system in case the guards spot someone. Also probably some 'open' guards to scare off lowly bandits and stuff, and some more hidden guards that sound the alarm/help in case of an actual attack.

They should also use their home turf to their advantage (forcing the attackers to run through a small opening single-file, separating the attackers, fighting from higher ground or upstairs, ...).

[edz16]

There's some great stuff about Hobgoblins in Volo's Guide to Monsters (5e).