Difference between revisions of "Talk:Main Page"

Revision as of 11:55, 28 December 2010

PLEASE NOTE: I am going to be pretty much unavailable for any D&D grabassery - game or content - until next Friday. It's EXAM SEASON. -gm

End of Year Bookkeeping -> if there's something in the discussion page you want me to give a damn about, make a bullet point list below and I'll deal with it once my grades are posted and I'm free and clear on friday. -gm

Heheh. Most of the stuff currently debated is on Field Marshall and Leadership talk pages. Profession skills and magic item crafting a la the Tome is the only thing on this page I can think of, although there are probably about a million Tome-based rules that make me giddy with pleasure. -Slitherrr

Well, I actually *don't* have a problem with the penalties for leadership in the slightest. But, since that's going to require a LOT of 'splanin, Imma put that off until monday when I'm bored. Just wanted to set you up for disappointment, but ultimately I don't think the penalties are that damaging or punitive.

So it's almost Wednesday and you haven't done your 'splainin', yet. -Slitherrr

Yeah, I noticed that, too. Ultimately, I just don't see them as that substantial a "penalty", especially considering how high a leadership playing PC's leadership score is going to be. True, if you lose two or three cohorts, your score might drop to a point where you're getting cohorts that aren't level +2, but as of right now both of the leadership PCs are able to recruit cohorts, I believe, ABOVE their level, so just don't lose tons of cohorts. I still contend that if your first two valets get killed, recruiting the third is made that much more difficult. As for the followers, if the penalty was *cumulative* (like cohorts seem to be) I would agree with you, but I believe you said it was a one time only bonus on the follower chart, which also sits well for me- it's simply harder to convince people to join an operation where their lives are being put on the line. -gm

Actually, Kib's score is only barely above the minimum required for a cohort at level -2--one cohort death would drop him under that limit. If it weren't for the fact that Improved Leadership is a class feature of the Field Marshall that he's taking at 10, he would ALREADY qualify for an under-level cohort that level (which would bump back up to level - 2 at level 12, which means that my questions before about the XP to cohorts had a point, and weren't just me picking at rules), so a single accidental cohort death would indeed affect Kib, especially since I hardly think Tomes of Stat are lying around to be swept up willy nilly. Furthermore, if your goal is to make subsequent cohorts harder to obtain, an atonement-style quest to remove the penalty is pretty much the perfect way for you to do it, and even tune the difficulty to whatever player-abusing level you please, while gaining story hook potential to boot. -Slitherrr

I'm not against some form of Atonement to remove the penalty for a lost cohort, but imagine I will still keep the cumulative nature. (a 2nd lost cohort is still -4, even if you've had the first penalty negated, and will require a TWICE AS BADASS Atonement as the first. Though, when it comes to cohorts, I like Egg and *REDACTED* far more than I like Germain and Kib, so they might have little angels watching over them that you don't. Actually, I think only *REDACTED* is at risk of getting killed, since Egg steadfastly doesn't go out adventuring, or at least has not yet. <buffy>He's Giles to the Wydmoor's Scooby Gang. </buffy>-gm

Giles was way more badass than Egg. Sorry MattA, it's just true. I'm ok with the penalty being harsh, just not with it being permanent, so this is all resolved as far as I care, except for how we deal with cohorts that have managed to be at a lower level than the max that they can be for a given character level, which I expect we'll reasonably ad hoc if it comes up. -66.207.91.56

While we're on the subject, what is the Mainland's interaction with the spell Planar Binding? The whole subject of the Planes is pretty fuzzy on this wiki, but obviously there is some sort of interaction, if Thoven's Flame Disciple class is to have any real meaning. -66.207.91.56

HEY

I found a place with the latest compilation of the Tomes

-Slitherrr

Awesome! Substantial revisions, or just more?

I haven't read most of it, but there are a lot of little fixes. It's evidently pending a big rewrite, too. -Slitherrr

Looks mostly like added classes and the addition of enough of the SRD core mechanics to make it work as a standalone book. Here's a nifty gem from one of the prestige classes:

This does not result in a penalty or reduction to your Leadership score. I don't see why the hell not. I mean, Batman has only lost one Robin, and that's how he can keep getting more. -gm

The class is built on the hilarious expenditure of no-names. The class is Big Nob in the Tome, you should read it. -Slitherrr

Heh. -Slitherrr

Matter of fact, that entire prestige class is funny as hell. Some highlights:

• • • Gains size categories at levels 5 and 10
    • Can sacrifice minions to avoid damage
    • Minions are immune to fear effects from anything that isn't the PC

And so on. -Slitherrr

What? I hate this. Getting a second character generation that does whatever you want is enough reward.

Reposted here for GM's benefit:

• Valuable Raw Materials Aren't Valuable: This is a part of the rules that makes me cry. Since the amount of value you make each day is based on the dificulty of working the material and not on the value of said material, there is no way for a goldsmith to stay in business. Gold is very easy to work and therefore the DC to work it is very low, and therefore a goldsmith makes very little in the way of finished product each week. A five pound gold candle holder is roughly four ounces and fits into the palm of your hand, but it'll take a master goldsmith (+10 Craft Bonus) almost a year to finish one (500 gp value, at DC 5 = 50 weeks).
• The Costs of Materials are WHAT? Remember that five pound gold candle holder? It's worth 500 gp and therefore requires 167 gp worth of materials to make it. But it's worth 250 gp just as a lump of gold. So you can buy things as raw materials and sell them as trade goods and make lots of money. The reverse happens when you make complex or finely worked items. A masterwork sword is made out of pretty much the same materials as a normal sword and is much more expensive because it's better made. But because the higher quality crafting will make it sell for more down the line, the cost of the materials goes up by a 100 gp. Where does that money go? What are you getting for 2 pounds of gold? Sure, maybe you get some better coal or something, but really, that doesn't even begin to cover it.
• Field Fortifications Cannot Happen: Even the simplest of traps (such as a bucket with some acid in it balanced on a partially open door) has a cost that is very high { in the hundreds of gp. That means even the most gifted craftsman is going to take weeks to boobytrap a room or lay down some field fortifications. When longbowmen want to hammer some stakes into the ground to protect themselves from the knight stampede that's going to come when the battle starts, the Craft rules essentially tell them that they can't do it. Which for those of us who have seen Henry V, seems unlikely.
• Risky and Illegal Trades are Pointless: Some products are expensive because producing them is risky (poison, ower arrangements from the Bane Mires). Some products are expensive because their production and sale is in some manner restricted by the authorities (shrunken dwarf heads, disrespectful puppets of the king). In the real world, people produce these things because they can charge in infated prices because of the risk. It's a gamble, where sometimes you make big money and sometimes you get killed by hydras or agents of King Ronard. But with craft times directly dependent upon resale value, these crafts are gambles where

sometimes you make the same amount of money you would have making night stands, and sometimes you get killed by your own poison or Clerics of Torm.

[1] : A pretty awesome .pdf that .... some guys? .... put together. It's a LOT of crazy rule shit only good for the simulationist, but the chapters on economy and other races are phenomenal. Came out from the MeFi post about Lore's comic. (Which needs to start updating again.) -gm

Oh my Omnity, what have I done? Please forgive me.

The more I read the book, the less I agree with "shit only good for the simulationist". Almost all of the rules rewrites are there to correct imbalances, not to make things more simulation-y, and most of them are less complicated than the original rules (like the treatment for grapple that replaces the messy labyrinth of complicated rules with a sensible set of actions, and also gets rid of the opposed rolls that make for a variance of 40 (!!) points on a given contest). I'm not saying this to argue that we should change mid-stride, because that would be chaos, but it might be something to think about for a future campaign when these are done. You know, when we're like forty or fifty years old. -Slitherrr

By which I mean major sections of this are going to become canon over the Christmas holidays. Starting with languages.

Holy fuck, the bit about the Aboleth in the "Empirinomicon" section is AWESOME. -Slitherrr

After reading it, and then reading our own language section, our treatment is pretty close to the one in the TOME OF NECROMANCY, etc. etc. that you linked. We gloss over the Servitor languages, but we've also sufficiently hand-waved that into a question of cultural ignorance rather than canonical laziness. The only major changes I saw fit to add were to add regional qualifiers to some of Kib's languages (there are probably also other characters who need audits, notably Germain), and some more explanatory text on the Languages and List of Languages pages. -Slitherrr

Well, not a full on rules change, but more of a codification of flavor, but not going all the way into the million dialects flavor. The more I think about it, though, the less attractive it comes. I think we're in a pretty good place, happy medium wise. The Aboleth, yes, has become one of my favorite creatures literally overnight. Anyway, with the languages, I guess I liked the Pidgin and Creole discussions enough to want to incorporate them. In face, a lot of the langauges (the ones that end in -i, coincidentally, including Ubrekti itself) are Creoles that developed from regional dialects and Old Ubrekti. The ones with -n endings (Petaran, Odessan, Petaran) are from ethic groups powerful enough to have retained their own language (like, say, Greek.) I like what you've added, having just read it, and think we're on the same page.In fact, you've done a better job that I was even imagining - i actually wrote that bit about Pigin and Creole BEFORE I read your edit. (I'm reading them all and doing one big edit to not accidentally erase half of the talk page, like I have a .... history of.) Halfling, of course, just learned Ubrekti in the same way that, say, the Etruscans eventually just abandoned their native tongue for Latin. -gm

One Eratta: As to the Lizard Men... If anyone cared enough to actually pay any attention to them, I think they'd find that Ssel'it has amazingly little variance to none at all. I wrote a little sentence as a hint that I had to strike for being too spoilerly, but suffice it to say there is a reason for the uniformity and it makes sense. Hint: Lizardman Racial Class is Druid. Hmmmmmmm.

Also down with renaming. I've actually gotten into the spoke habit of referring to the language and the people of the dwarves as Gilden. Because, I mean, Gilden Home. It's not rocket science. Gnomish, OTOH, I hadn't really thought about in those terms. Hmmmm. -gm

Reading a few more changes it, I see we are once again on the same page. Time for me to Secret Page this bitch. (Another trick I learned from this book!) -gm

Read Econimocon from the beginning - I backed into the last half last night. It's worth noting, if only for backpatting purposes, that I preempted some of these concerns. Monetary policy was one of my thoughts putting this campaign together - banks and states (with large bank accounts) have been major actors from the beginning. I'm not done yet, but I think there's a place in his discussion for the idea of patronage. Essentially spreading out money as a sort of personalized social service program has been effective from Roman Patricians to modern Hamas. But, yeah, it is kind of sad how tiny dragon hordes have to be by the mechanics. Since there are really no Wyrm-tiered dragons in this game, and usually believe in a 1 or 2 dragons per campaign ever rule, I usually go with the You Are Fucking Rich option. My thoughts at the time, since we never got to the Alexandria endgame, was that by the time the party got around to taking out the last dragons, they'd be to the point that these coins were basically social currency and probably funded a pretty substantial portion of the campaign in her absence. Of course, I also just don't think some dragons horde. Black Dragons, for example, or really anyone who doesn't live in a cave. -gm

Econimicon was the first I read after Lexicomicon, and yes, it's extremely enlightening. The fact that we're sitting on a mere 100 gp in COPPER and finding it hard to carry definitely contributes a lot of insight. -Slitherrr

Oh god, I tried to read the economicon section and all this simulationist insanity is making my eyes bleed. Who cares how much coins weigh? I barely tolerate the lightly obnoxious attention that Jones pays to this... Hell, well over half the time he tells me loot numbers I just convert to gold! Money is as heavy or small as it needs to be for the game to be fun--when its in a dragon horde its huge, and when my PC is shopping it all fits in his pocket. Thinking about the weight of gold is about as entertaining as thinking about how my character stores his matches. Creating a hierarchy of currency systems to deal with the weight of gold is downright horrifying. Bleach! I suggest an alternative system where we convert everything into gold coins with two decimals of precision, so that my 157 silver and 13 copper become 15.83 gold! Now that's progress! --Msallen

I think you missed a large part of the point of that discussion. He mentions the weight of gold because it has economic repercussions, not because he's advocating keeping track of every pound. The gist of it is that once characters are dealing with things that cost more than 15,000gp, they're really not interacting with the "real world" economy with its currency, and that basically the distinction between having 15,000gp and five million gp, by the D&D rules as they stand (because he obviously can't know what homebrew caveats are in play), is really quite meaningless in terms of the power of the PC possessing that kind of money, because getting someone to accept a ton of gold in payment for something is just not something that will happen. The document instead talks specifically about things that need to be in place in order for dealing with currency above non-trivial amounts to make sense. In Jones's world, when you're shopping, you're doing it with promissory notes issued by banks in kingdoms that have strong national identities (to more or less degree, c.f. Fresia vs. Odessa), and not carting around a wheelbarrow filled with money. This allows us to easily separate the logistics of carting around a Dragon's Hoard (which is an essential part of the adventuring experience) from the logistics of making a simple purchase of a minor magical item (which is merely tedium).

Anything else that seems like tedious simulationism in that section is merely an explanation for why D&D worlds work like they do--i.e., why economies don't flourish in any "real world" sense of the word the way they "should" given the "technology" that exists. That's not asking for more rules to explain those mechanics, it's just explaining things that already exist, colorfully and amusingly.

Really, the whole point of the document is explaining the repercussions of things as they stand with the delivered ruleset, and in some cases, introducing reworked rules for balance (which often coincides with additional simplicity). That's not simulationist. Simulationist would be trying to introduce additional rules to attempt to model real-world complexity, and it's really not what's happening in this document. Really! -Slitherrr

But I don't care about the repercussions! There are two rules that I care about: If I want an item under 15,000.00 GP I have to have gold in pocket to buy it, and if I want an item more expensive than that I quest for it or make it. What is the repercussion there that I should even care about? --Msallen

And the text is saying exactly that. All the explanation is justification for those two rules. Some people like things being justified in a reasonable (and often humorous) way, others don't care, but the end result is the same--whether or not you read and absorbed the Economicon, the end result is that the reasonable way to handle money is that things under 15k gp are easyish to get (tending to "can pretty much be assumed to be had" once you're above level, say, 15), things above are less so. I just think it's important not to jump away from a text for a"simulationist" bent that isn't there, because this PDF is absolutely chock-full of astounding balance insights that are the fruits of hard play and discussion of tons and tons of campaigns within the 3.5e ruleset, insights that serve well to inform any crazy homebrew nonsense we may come up with, because it'll reduce the replication of effort that the people this PDF represents have already put into balance considerations. -Slitherrr

Bah, we should switch to pathfinder too then. You must not have cut your chops long enough in 1st ed/2nd ed/palladium/rolemaster to learn that games don't have to be balanced or reasonable to be fun! The point of homebrew nonsense is RPG onansim, and the value is in doing it for the sake of doing it, not in fixing anything (although "fixing things" is a reasonable fantasy about why you are making homebrew rules, its still a fantasy). --Msallen

Well, not entirely true, it's only when the rules pretend to be reasonable that I try to shore things up. But, that being said, I do prefer to long-windedly discuss the rules out-of-game to doing it in-game, and if I have a choice between balance and no balance, I always prefer balance. -Slitherrr

Also - it's a shame Daniel hates retconning so much. Those artisan rules would be right up his alley. -gm

I have to say, I really like the stuff in the Economicon. I'm going to even put in some possible changes in a section on Kib's character sheet in case you end up integrating all/most of it. -Slitherrr

I really LOVE all the -micon section. Whoever the hell these two are, have put a lot of really awesome though into HOW a truly fantastical, hero-based setting would operate and the long term ramification of some of the weirdo stuff tossed into D&D. (Like the Aboleth ability, or the Sahuagin) There is one part, somewhere, where the point is made that the analogue for D&D isn't the "middle ages" at all. Small patches of civilization surrounded by frightening wilderness? Small bands of heroes toppling empires? That's not Chaucer, that's fucking HOMER. D&D is an iron age mindset in medieval clothing. I read that part and was like "Holy shit, that's what *I've* always thought. These guys get it*. And then I looked up and it was bedtime and I'd read like half the document. If you haven't gotten to the part about aristocrats and heroes, I laughed out loud through it. Amazing work. -gm

Quite. -Slitherrr

The tone of loving mockery makes it very readable. It's like Aristotle and Lao-Tzu got together and answered every D&D argument that ever arose over mountain dew, pizza, hootch, and/or weed. There you go! Now that we’re all on the same page(page XX)-gm

The NPC class section is, in a word, genius. -Slitherrr

The host for this document is a computer science department at Bard, which is sort of a pretentious, expensive college focusing in the fine arts. Maybe the authors must represent some sort of bizarre intersection of engineering obsessiveness and artist creativity. And at least one of them knows the LaTeX typesetting language. Weird --146.127.253.14

Ha, you have described a large percentage of D&D players.

Should we consider asking Pokey if he wants to convert Gil into the version of Barbarian in the Tome? It's quite an improvement on the class, trading passive DR and avoidance abilities for massive bonuses that only apply while raging, giving a lot more reason to actually use the ability. -Slitherrr

Pete might be similarly interested in the Elementalist class, although that might be more of a retcon than you're willing to go for. -Slitherrr

In fact, Kib's character style might even be better suited to the Tome's Fighter than our dear Professional class. Argh! So much dataaaa. -Slitherrr

Feats section! ::eyes glaze over, froth appears at corner of mouth:: -Slitherrr

We are no longer on the same page. We are not even in the same book. There will be no revisions to any of the core mechanics of 3.5e. In fact, I basically skipped everything that was an actual rules mechanic. Heh. -gm

I... guessed as much. But I can dream. Their treatment of feats is really quite spectacular, and I love what they did with armor (more than chain shirt/mw breastplate/full plate is useful? Holy Alexandria!) -Slitherrr

Also, still interested in the tweak to Professions? Because that just downright makes sense.

I find the professional changes interesting, and I agree it's a lot more sensible. Does it also apply to crafting? I can't remember and i'm afraid to go back in. -gm

I thought I'd posted this earlier, but I guess I didn't pull the trigger before leaving to see the Nutcracker. Crafting has some changes, some in the Traps section, and a lot in the Magic Items section to make it more reasonable. -Slitherrr

More clarification: Magic Items get a pretty big rework for balance. XP and gold costs to make are gone, by the argument that they don't really work as limits, and instead magic items only take time (which, really, is one of the only really valuable commodities PCs have). Also, gone is the "+2 sword" thing. Basically, it'll be a "magic sword", and the bonus you get from it scales by level. There's a strict limit on number of items that can be providing a bonus to a character at a given time, and another strict limit on non-standard bonus types (to prevent stacking). Artifacts have inherent levels that replace the character level to determine effects if the character level is lower--for example, the Black Scythe might have an inherent level of 15, which means a level 4 or 7 or 14 character would wield it with bonuses as a level 15, but a level 16 or more character would wield it with bonuses of 16 or more. It's very, very reasonable and sensible, and might even be worth switching to, since neither group has even really gotten into the magic items gig and there would be very little disruption. -Slitherrr

Also also, I love this quote:

-Slitherrr

Haha, yeah, I remember that one. I wish the real source books were written so cheekily. -gm

There's a Leadership section in the Tome that has a statement that talks about a thing I had just asked about:

Just tossing that here for reflection. -Slitherrr