@Panda we've got a lot of cheap dice we ordered from Amazon, and they're fine! I think everyone in my group has one or two main sets that are Their Dice Set, but we've all been playing for years so it makes sense that we'd eventually get some nicer sets. But we have like 40-60 random dice from a giant variety pack that we keep around (in a box that looks like a d6 no less) in case people forget, we have new players, or someone needs to replace a die because it has been put in Dice Jail.
There are plenty of good dice on Amazon, yeah! I hear that transparent dice are generally pretty reliable balancewise, so if you go for plain transparent sets they're likely to be okay I think? (If I'm recalling correctly from the video about checking your dice are balanced with salt water, haha.) But also as Loq said, Chessex dice are great, also very pretty, I have two sets and would recommend! If you want more visually pretty dice they're very nice.
Thank you guys!! I think I'll go with cheap transparent dice then, I've heard the thing about those being (usually) pretty balanced too. And yeah, I'm making heart eyes at soooo many sets of Chessex dice but they cost an arm and a leg in shipping and I don't really have reliable transport so going to see if the game store has them isn't really an option. Maybe at a later point, Chessex has so many pretty sets... We're all new anyway, so no one's picky about dice yet (and it's not even sure we'll keep playing yet). Maybe if our game really becomes a regular thing I'll suggest everyone pitching in for a pound of dice from Chessex, I bet that'd be fun :D
thank you for an incredibly entertaining couple of hours. :D honestly the Marty Sue and sundry other DMing sins don't bother me as much as the, fuckin. BANNING CHEMISTRY JESUS CHRIST IT PAINS ME like. dude. dude I don't care how insecure you are banning things you don't understand is not a solution and. and you CAN'T JUST BAN ANTIMONY IT'S A FUCKING ELEMENT THERE GO THE FUNDAMENTALS OF CHEMISTRY AND SUBATOMIC THEORY god. I am so indignant. I don't know a lot of the science the writer is trying to use, but I think it's really interesting and creative, probably because I'm not an insecure self-aggrandizing douchebag, MARTY. like. goddamn, your player is a really good problem solver and has the stats for it in game, suck it up! I for one would be delighted by my players displaying that kind of ingenuity. or, if he's fucking up your plans and you can't improvise in time, just tell him no! not "no, the totalitarian government fuckin. owns all the lab equipment ever," or "no, literally the only chemical you can obtain commercially is ethanol, because I didn't realize that was what you wanted liquor for," just no! don't bullshit terrible explanations for everything please fuckin. those eldritch shapeshifter thingies that were. "immune to chemicals" I just can't (side note, from how I understood it Marty was the engineering student, and the author was a recently-graduated... biochemist? something more specific than that, I think, but point was he was working as a researcher.) OH GOSH I FEEL REALLY GUILTY NOW UH I'm already babysitting, as you put it, a couple of D&D 5e noobs (as you probably know if you looked at the D&D threads), and, uh. I mean. nine characters is not that many more than eight?? so, um. if you'd like, you can give me a character sheet and I'll see how integrating you goes. :) I also want to stress that it isn't, like, bad guilt? manipulative, I mean? it's just that I love playing so much and I'm enjoying DMing and I would like to SHARE THE JOY ...do most people not like DMing?? why? is it too much work, or?
I can improv character responses just fine but improving numbers is Hard and boy does pathfinder love its numbers
...ah. fair point! I was thinking, foolishly, of my own PbP game, which takes all the improv out of it, and I can see why that would be more difficult. personally I think I'd be better with the numbers than the LARPing, but I'd still like it a lot? idk.
i played for 20 years before i tried GMing. if you're not following a pre-made adventure path, it requires coming up with plot, which is a lot harder than RPing one OC.
DMing is more work, between being the main person running the world and NPCs, preparing the story elements and making the calls on game mechanics. And, acknowledging that this is a subjective thing, I think it's important for a DM to be familiar with at least the basic rules of the game, since that's a mechanism for resolving conflict that players and DM can all know in advance. Too much improv "eh we'll wing it" is uncomfortable for me. I like to use game mechanics as written, especially when getting familiar with a game, so that I gain the ability to join pick up games. Basically... how much fun it is depends a fair amount on how the players get along with each other and the DM -- and how everyone's playstyles mesh, how able and willing they are to compromise so everyone's having fun or finding a group that fits better. Like, I genuinely like having character sheets and game mechanics and dice; the game part is part of the fun for me. A group that's purely or mostly improv story-telling isn't a game I would want to DM. Play in, maybe, but not run. I'm trying to work my way up to bring a dm (again), and deciding whether I want to try making something on my own (and the eight bazillion decisions that go into that), directly use a module (there are only so many for 5e, but on the other hand do I want to read them deciding what to use -- and then spoil it for myself to ever play blind?), or perhaps the best choice, look to a module for inspiration and reorganize and reskin it so I only have two bazillion choices to make... :p
@hyrax yeah, I can see how constructing a narrative like that would be daunting! personally I'd be worried about the collaborative parts—fitting the mechanics for players to interact, and reacting when they do stuff you don't expect. but. storytelling, I really do love it. oh, definitely! I like knowing the rules (particularly the class feats :P). I think it's my Must Tell Interesting Fact!! impulse, but like, knowing what someone's Persuasion modifier is is relevant and helpful, whereas people... don't always agree that my other facts are interesting. I must've sunk a lot of time into learning them, too, but it didn't feel like much of an effort? but that's important prep too. ...interpersonal things. riiiiiiight. well, I wouldn't want to walk in to a random gaming store and start DMing, I guess. Kintsugi's different somehow? I suppose I Know all you guys, and Know that you'll be forgiving of social fuck-ups. same if I had a group of good friends, I guess. there's this giant module (or series?) that I know people are playing, and it sounds like the same sort of thing as Tyranny of Dragons, except, y'know, with giants. and if it helps any, I'm enjoying taking a heavy editing hand to our campaign (see: the Kobold Social Justice Campaign, instead of the book's treating them as interchangeable minions). well, to future events in our campaign, anyway, and certainly to characters. :P and I have disdained the little read-this-dialogue/expostion-out-loud thingies, because Art. but like, I can still use that Here Are Things For The Players To Do framework without changing it much if at all, so.
Yeah, Marty was an aeronautical engineer. The author was a chemist of some stripe - at the time the campaign was going on, they were both in college, but I believe author is *now* working as a researcher. Eldritch thingies being 'immune to chemicals' is certainly a dramatic way of making them otherworldly, but...
all I can think of beings "immune to chemicals" is "what did they replace neurotransmitters with then"
well i just fell down the infinite hole of the angry gm blog and reading its various articles and i'm taking some notes on the real fundamental basics because having this in mind gives the words for asking questions when i'm confused or frustrated and a lot because he's angry and complains a lot about a lot of the trite cliches about roleplaying that i've unhappily absorbed over the years and it's refreshing to read him poking fun at them and then offering alternative paradigm that he's very quick to say are better. it's definitely better for the sorts of games he describes enjoying; competitive games where the dm and the players attempt to match wits, where solving mysteries is based more on the ability of the players to think things through than on their willingness to announce rolls of investigation. some of it suits me, some of it i'm reframing to suit me, and some of it i'm not including because i don't think it'll be of use to me. everything you need to know about game mastering skill/action resolution describes the fundamental sorts of things the players and gms do in roleplaying. the rules, and my paraphrased explanations of them: in declaring actions, they say (1) what their goal is and (2) the method they're using to do so it's best that they don't simply grab dice and roll them and announce what they tried to do after the fact; it's up to the gm to determine if there's even any need to roll, let alone what skills are relevant. (see, that delightful post that went around tumblr recently about "player: i want to identify the body" "dm: roll acrobatics" "player: UH OKAY??" "dm: the undead corpse grabs your hand when you touch it" and all) in videogames, sure, one's options are ultimately limited to what the game engine permits. in tabletop games? yes, some are run strictly according to some module, where there's zero allowances for neat ideas and the only permissable paths are the pre-decided rolls, where one only gets a single attempt to pick a lock and then it inexplicably breaks and can never be unlocked, because... the cost of failing a roll for a mundane unrushed task is to create a reason why it can't be pushed at until success? who knows. but that's an optional thing that not all do. if the player's declared methods can't succeed, due to being as impossible as convincing a king to pardon their crimes because their mundane dog is cute, just say so, or using an unmagical paintbrush to build a ladder. Spoiler: some exceptions may apply if it's possible to succeed and nothing's preventing them from doing so (no time restraints, no one acting against them, etc) then that's where the "yes, and" school of improv comes in. the dm describes the immediate result of the player's actions, making private note for anything that it changes in the ongoing situation. if success is possible, failure is possible, AND there's possible costs or penalties to failure, THEN out come the dice. generally speaking, a single roll is enough to count for the full length of the effort if extended effort expends a finite resource, like time, some fragile resource, their own hp, and the players are aware that their efforts are running through that resource(s), then multiple rolls is a good way to let them choose to stop and change tactics before using it all if the player has to ask the gm a question, then the player is thinking out-of-character and the game is slowed. this'll inevitably happen at least some of the time, but there's ways to minimize it. suggested methods include: the gm offers information upfront; descriptions of their surroundings, the kinds of details that most people notice quickly, and asks for relevant rolls of perception/insight/knowledge skill checks as they come up (example: a party walking into a room with a circle of runes on the floor, anyone proficient with arcana is likely to recognize it, and the gm asks upfront for that roll so as to move on to describing it as a summoning circle and giving the 101 of what it is) use that passive perception thing as a basis of what to tell people who aren't actively searching, add passive insight and passive knowledge skills (arcana, history, nature, religion, maybe even the common sense things a character proficient with a skill would know when not pressed for time) generally speaking, players like to use the methods that they believe suit their character's strengths (use the highest numbers on their character sheet) because it gives the highest chance of success. but different methods are different, and impact the world in different ways, leading to somewhat different results. the summary in the article says: suppose the party wants to escape a monster, and they find a locked door. they could keep going, and risk running into the monster or finding a dead end. they could pick the lock, but that might take long enough for the pursuing monster to find them. they could break open the lock, risking making noise that attracts the monster and leaving the path open behind them for it to continue following. if the players are thinking in terms of the consequences of their methods, none of these is a RIGHT or WRONG solution; this isn't a pre-programmed videogame, and a good storygame allows for multiple ways of approaching any offered situation. or, summarized in another post: adjudicate actions like a boss help! my players are talking to things article about challenges where a player wants to get something from an NPC via the use of words, he calls these interACTIONs to emphasize the action aspect of it winning D&D
and gaming for fun (part 1): eight kinds of fun which expanded off this pdf with the 8 kinds it specified
of course i go and like all this stuff, but re: dice rolling on the other hand with the maze of the blue medusa, we did a roll early on about the painting that we'd stolen, and i rolled a nat 20. so that ended up shaping a little bit of my character's motivation and history and interests, i decided that she was some major fangirl of this mysterious painting and its long-running theories, and involved in organizing the group to steal this work as opposed to some other one rolling non-essential things can be used as a cue to think of stuff like that
@swirlingflight yeah, I feel like that roll set the tone of our group's Oh My God An Academic Let's Go See collective personality, and even established Lyriae as the Only Sane One? and given those, it also had a lot to do with why we all went into the painting like total chumps. 's a good.
A lot happened last session, so much I'm probably gonna forgo posting my session writeup and skip forwards a bit.... Unfortunately Holgar's player can't make it to D&D any more, but we've filled his place with one of mine and Wyrm's mutual friends. We had a little meetup to introduce her to the group today, and at the end our DM had us play out a little scene to catch us up on why Tsalta (her character, who I'll touch on in a second) is where we are, and to bring us to the point where she meets the rest of Team Jailbird. So, Tsalta. Tsalta is a half-elven, half-dwarven mix. Thanks to a strange fluke born of mixing these odd genetics, she's gigantic. She's a huge, soft-but-mega-buff, Scottish-accented ranger who's been living wild in the woods after losing track of her family. She's very gentle, very naive, and ever so fond of animals. Also she knits. A lot. When our group happens across her, Faeleth was carrying our gnome, Spindleshanks, by the scruff of the neck (and much like a real bobcat, he just sort of hangs there). Big ol' Tsalta, during our introductions, mistook him for a real cat. (Spindle is very small, and Tsalta very tall. Easy mistake to make.) But oh dear, actually, he seems a little bald on most of him! What strange breed is the wee cat? Faeleth, deeply entertained by this misunderstanding, told her, "He's got a skin condition." Wyrm rolled a 18 for deception. Tsalta's player rolled a natural 1. "Oh noooo, the poor wee thing. I probably have something for that, you know!" Tsalta starts rootling through her belongings, chattering as she goes... "But then, there are those funny little hairless cats, I suppose...look just like a pair of bollocks, they do - not that I go around looking at bollocks, mind-" (by this point, the DM is creasing up) "-but with all that wrinkly skin, you know... He is a cute little dear, mind you..." She got cut off by our antagonist getting all Psychic Telepathy Missive to us, but how our DM managed to regain composure long enough to do it I have no idea. I think we're going to like Tsalta! (Especially Spindleshanks. He's gonna get all the ear-scritches he could possibly look for, I imagine...)
A thought process I went through while doing character design, represented in text: Ok, this chaotic evil Blackguard* needs to have a gigantic sword, like, an effing big sword. He's meant to be brutal and merciless so I want a shit ton of imposing sharp metal that threatens actual death, not a few cuts and bruises. Let's start with a greatsword, though, not a claymore; I want him to be able to sheathe it and shit. Alright, design choice 1: big sword. Nice, several feet of metal, the blade itself should be simple, sword-shaped, with a nice taper, but mostly it's a solid block of metal. Nothing fancy, nothing to distract the eye, emphasis on the fact that this is a sword and it will kill you. Done. Ok, on to the hilt. He's a madman and he's 'chaotic evil, emphasis on the chaotic,' so I want to incorporate the chaos wheel** somehow because I LOVE the chaos wheel. And his minor god's*** symbol of a black sun with rays would look similar to a chaos wheel, so that's good symbolism. And you know what, this is fantasy, I can make some absurd-looking fantasy weapon that will be hard to wield. Minimal hilt that matches the minimal blade, but with an eight-inch diameter (AT LEAST) metal wheel as a handguard covered in seven spikes with the sword blade forming the eighth spike. A spiked wheel, and he has to reach into it to wield. Chaotic evil antagonist weapon designed!! Excellent! May add details, might inscribe symbols, may prettify the wheel a little bit, but I like this as a starting base. Now, I need to name it, because a Blackguard is like an evil knight and knights should name their preferred weapons... it won't be named for a virtue because he's evil, so the name of a woman, mayb-- Catherine.**** *Mostly. He also has levels in cleric and some shit I made up. He's an npc antagonist. **A wheel with eight spokes representing the many paths of chaos, and also being a metal motherfucker. Used by occultists, pagans, and actual chaotes to symbolize chaos, does not seem to have a historical precedent. ***Tharizdun, god of insanity, entropy, and being a prick. ****https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_wheel
