hahahaha this race is not actually a reference to Dwarf Fortress, I just said that because I can't IMAGINE what possessed me to go "I must stat up the wombats from Digger for 5e, RIGHT NOW." (Digger is a Good Webcomic) Come to think of it, the dwarves in Digger are all offscreen, but the main character refers to them as irresponsible bastards who are always digging dangerous mines full of magic that goes wrong and makes them uninhabitable for years... so that maps pretty well to Dwarf Fortress dorfs, actually.
(Digger is an Excellent Webcomic) I am full of sads because my regular gaming group is on indefinite hiatus. I am trying to start a smaller Rogue Trader game that I'm running, but one of my players is being really flaky u.u
I just had the most intense fight of my life in Curse of Strahd We'd rolled a random encounter. 2 werewolves. We were level 2. This was WELL beyond a deadly encounter and they were faster than us, so running would just mean dying tired. By all rights this should have been a TPK. Except for 3 NATURAL 20s on death saving throws, one from the cleric and an astonishing TWO from the (homebrew class) bloodhunter. Essentially, both of these people took lethal wounds and got back up. We lost our warlock. I spent most of the fight running, casting ineffective spells, or unconscious. I don't even care. We pulled a "never tell me the odds" and SUCCEEDED.
...I'm really tempted to buy Maze of the Blue Medusa. The PDF is only $5. Any of the OSR folks (@Wiwaxia) have opinions? Does it live up to the hype?
The local geek shop apparently has D&D on Saturdays (like it's starting to having MtG on Thurs and Fri), and even better, it's 3.5! I didn't think to ask whether it's separate sessions, or whether any homebrew is okay, or any of that.... but I'm gonna make sure I've got at least one or two playable, core rule, level 1 characters with projected level 5 or so builds ready to go... and go check it out! And if turns out it's better for me to sit it out and work on making a more compatible character... I can do that. eta: UGH I forgot how much of a pain in the ass it is to try to make a character sheet from just the core books, and tbh I don't really want to do the work and find out I could use other things. So I'm browsing Tumblr and getting ideas for things.
Hmm, sort of a quasi-DnD related writing question here. It's a bit hard to articulate, so forgive if I cannot words. So I'm gonna be eventually DMing a game once my players get all their IRL issues squared away, hopefully. I've been idly running over possible eventual scenes in my mind; various NPCs that might turn up and whatnot. And one thing has kind of stumped me- the issue of describing androgynous NPCs to my players when they encounter one. I mean, I COULD describe the NPCs in question without mentioning gender/sex at all (and really, all characters, because just because a character LOOKS particularly masculine or feminine doesn't mean they actually are the gender they present as- not to mention the possibility of disguises), but my mind frankly recoils at the prospect of using 'they' pronouns constantly for the NPCs in question at the very least until the PCs determine their gender for certain (and who's to say they'd even care?) I mean, if my NPCs USE the 'they' pronouns or are truly gender neutral or genderless, I'd use em, but there's two NPCs in my head in particular that are both biofemale and identify that way, but they're both quite androgynous/easy to mistake as male and wear clothing that does not really give hints to their sex. So for simplicity's sake should I just use female pronouns when writing them at my players, or is that uncomfortably meta? I dunno, it's just kind of an odd situation and I don't want to godmod my players' perceptions of what they're seeing, or be Problematic with my writing of characters that aren't There's situations where I could probably get around it by having their gender implied in dialogue, "presenting (androgynous NPC), daughter of Someone Significant" and then going with female pronouns accordingly, but that's not always gonna be an option. :V
@The Mutant going with "they" until the PCs realize what gender those NPCs are seems fine to me. like, i don't think anyone really knows what anyone else's gender is in real life is until they're told - they just make guesses and some are more accurate than others and some people present more androgynously than others and some people present more binarily than others.
I did "they" and I ended up with players split half-and-half on what the NPC's gender was. This fit em perfectly, and I just rolled with whatever they called em for a few rounds, then switched to the other. It was confusing for them, but the NPC was a gender-neutral assassin who used eir androgyny as camouflage so it was supposed to be?
Just finished introducing my sister to Gamers 2: Dorkness Rising, the night before we're planning on starting our new campaign. That movie will always have a special place in my heart, because it's what convinced me I wanted to try playing D&D. (Edit: it will also always hold a special place in my heart for the Osric outtakes. "The spatula of purity will scramble the eggs of your malfeasance!!!!")
I did! I can write up my thoughts in more detail if you want. Though there are some parts I didn't like, I'd say it's definitely worth the $5 and then some.
OK. TL;DR: huge, complicated to run, full of cool ideas that interact with one another in interesting ways (though a couple of them fall flat for me). Minor spoilers below. Spoiler: Maze of the Blue Medusa In terms of content it's amazing. Close to a hundred distinct NPCs with unique personalities and mechanics. An interdimensional prison/art gallery full of the detritus of fallen empires, some of which still lives. I don't think a party in here would EVER get bored, and because of all the ways various items, environmental features, and characters can interact, I think DMing it would be as much an exploration of the unknown as playing it! This is both a strength and a weakness in terms of usability. Patrick Stuart's trademark style of concise, jewel-like sentences that evoke vivid images with few words works really, really well to create atmosphere. But it doesn't hold your hand or spell things out. It's pretty easy to deduce that you can use the light-thread in the Reptile Archive to weave imperishable garments for Chronia and thus earn her favor (if you can figure out how to contain the shadows that the Grim Spindle produces). But I had to read it twice to figure out how the Chameleon Women (important, recurring enemies!) of the Neonate Empire even get into the Maze in the first place. The way the water pipes in the Gardens interact is pretty unclear. And I still can't tell how the PCs are supposed to ESCAPE. On to the mechanics. It's supposed to be system-agnostic and I think it does that pretty well -- but it's impossible to make something totally system-agnostic. Unsurprisingly it seems built around 1st edition and retroclones thereof. I think it translates pretty easily to 5e (though some things like percentage chance to hide in shadows and climb are artifacts of earlier editions, and it doesn't give XP values), and that's what I plan to run it in if I get a chance. 3.5 would be difficult to convert to -- there are so many stats that its monsters don't even HAVE. And 4e's entire design philosophy is so different that I suspect it would be a disaster to even try. Without any particular game's assumptions to draw on, the authors have come up with some interesting mechanics. I love that each subsequent group of Chameleon Women gets harder to fight. I love the weird halls of tapestries that give a flavorful, beneficial effect on the first walk through but negative ones on each subsequent -- and vice versa. Other things I have mixed feelings on because they feel kind of cheaty. The Cryptosaur's riddles immobilize the PC until the player answers the riddle (2d12 decay damage if incorrect!) and I can't decide if that's cool or just mean. There is one exception: I do not like Levalliant Green. I like the fact that he's hidden helpful caches throughout the maze foreshadowing his role as a clever antagonist of the Medusa, but after all that foreshadowing, the adventure tells you to run him as a 1 HD human with no special abilities other than just... doing something cleverer than the first 4 things the players think of. Like "he disappears" and if they think he drank an invisibility potion -- nope, it's something else. That doesn't feel like challenging and rewarding clever players. It just feels like god-moding ("no but this guy has SUPER INVINCIBLE ARMOR that blocks your armor-piercing spear"). I think I'm going to rewrite him as a high level rogue/diviner or something. Speaking of which. It looks as lethal as the reputation of OSR adventures at first glance (there are two three rooms in the entire thing that don't trigger random encounter rolls every 10 minutes. I checked), and resource management is definitely going to be a factor in PC survival. That said, on a careful read there are lots of available resources, both on the treasure table and in specific rooms, that help the PCs get food, water, healing, and information. The Bondye Reparate (there's an entire island culture that considers the Maze to be their otherworld, and its inhabitants capricious spirits to be placated!! Elatior might be my favorite part just for how ridiculous it is) and Tyko Wort (helpful ghost boy who guides the party to safety) are both on the random encounter table. A cautious, diplomatic, and innovative adventuring party with lots of expendable hirelings could do very, very well here. This is already a wall of text, but a quick note on the actual look of the thing. One early review complained it was in two-page spreads unusable on a tablet. By the time I bought it, it was available in spreads AND pages. It's generally very visually appealing and about 3/4 of the art is great. Unfortunately, the other 1/4 is unidentifiable black squiggles. In short: it's great, but it looks very demanding on the DM to run. This is not something you or I can just take off the shelf for an impromptu game session. I suspect that's the only way to make an adventure this complex and ambitious feel real and still be small enough to print and bind. Spoiler: ETA: for players/GMs with triggers The adventure itself includes a trigger warning for the nasty body-horror zone (the Gardens) so elaborating on that one would be pointless. There's some D&D-typical insensitivity about mental illness ("roll a random insanity," cringey description of one character as a "helpless autistic savant") but overall I found very little to complain about. Those seeking substantive evidence of how terribly Problematic Zak Smith is will be disappointed.
only played two sessions of d&d earlier this year before our gm flaked out on us and never told anyone why 3B| kinda want to find a new group, but not sure how bc roll20 is kinda meh on finding a group that isn't all guys
ughhhhh I was talking about the game I'm in and remembered how frustrated I am with the lack of, like, character in everyone's characters. uuugggggggghhhhhhh
Mildly confused as to what's wrong with all-guy groups. My issue with roll20 sounds to be more like the problem with your GM. Hardly any games I'm part of seem to last over five sessions.
all guy groups are fine, but I'm not a guy and I'm weird about id-ing as a girl, and also I don't like being the only girl-like person in the group. makes me feel all kinds of unsafe but yeah that gm was definitely the problem, but I've also had no luck finding a new group on roll20 and have been really discouraged
@emythos ugh, being the only person interested in roleplaying when everyone else just wants to roll the big numbers is annoying. @Paradigm Shift re: @thegrimsqueaker All-guy groups tend to be a little unwelcoming to non-guys, whether intentionally or not. This is not to say there aren't plenty of male D&D players who respect women and nb people -- I like to think I'm one myself -- but when you're not playing with friends and you're searching for random strangers, I can see how it'd make one cautious.
@The Frood Abides YEP and it's pissing me off cause I'm already the person directing everyone in my world of darkness game, I don't wanna be the only one doing stuff here too!!! (in the wod game it's BECAUSE of character stuff that I do the directing thing, so I don't mind, but it's exhausting.)
some quotes from my first campaign so far: (paladin) on a scale from 1 to 10 how much do you admire justice? (paladin) wake up! there is justice to attend! (barbarian) I am to sober for this REI: really expensive inn is mushrooms a personality trait? (bard) i stealth to hide under the weapons on the paladins back (succeeds) (bard) i steal the cutlery for payback (bard) accidentally punches goblin to death (8enemies 2killed by barbarian 2 by paladin 4 by bard) (bard, same fight) kills goblin with vicious mockery (bard) can i cast long strider on the direwolf? actually, can i just write the entirety of what happened? it's so funny! OuO or would that be a start a new thread thing?
