The Campaign Builder's Guild

Quote from: SteerpikeI haven't been around here as much recently, but I will hopefully be popping my head in more this year

Ditto

Happy 2018 CBGians.

I was never a big Starcraft fan, mostly because I'm a horrible scrub who couldn't win a multiplayer game to save his life.  I have, however, many times thought "they should just re-release [insert great old game here] with a few fixes and better graphics," and I think it's pretty funny that Blizzard apparently decided to do exactly that.

PF has a number of weird and lesser-known rules that only appear when dealing with non-standard creature sizes.  They range from the fairly obvious (Tiny creatures get +8 to Stealth checks), to the uncommon (Tiny creatures have a reach of zero), to the downright esoteric (armor for creatures of Tiny size or smaller confers only 1/2 its normal AC bonus, a rule which is helpfully buried in a footnote of the "armor for unusual creatures" table in the armor and equipment section*).  Some of these may be desirable, or even part of the point of the exercise - certainly the +4 Stealth bonus for being Small is a reason people consider certain races for certain classes in PF.  Whether they all add up to broken-ness or not is just a personal opinion and depends substantially on the adventure itself.

I tend to agree with Xathan that in practice, huge physical disparities create unexpected difficulties.  That's not just true for size, but things like senses and limbs - having a blind character means you need to rethink your descriptions and possibly your plots as well, while a character without opposable thumbs (an awakened animal?) will produce all sorts of odd situations in which a character can't logically contribute to a task which would otherwise have been trivial.


*Presumably the idea here is that a fairy's plate mail is basically just aluminum foil to a human and thus not all that protective, although it's unclear why fairy plate would be only half as effective even against other fairies.  This is one of those "rules which assume you're playing this game the same way the devs are" which takes certain basic assumptions for granted - e.g., that characters are small-to-medium size, and that simulating the Hundred Years' Fairy War is not a priority.

Quote from: sparkletwistI mean, the counter-counter-argument to all this is that, even in a system like modern D&D where actions and results are a good bit crunchier, there's still room for improvisation. (...) If the only actions allowed are actions specifically mandated by the rules in certain predefined ways, you're playing a board game, not an RPG.

Sure, but how much room for improvisation there is depends on the system.  There is as far as I know no (TTPRG) system which allows only actions specifically mandated by the rules, because that would be insanity, but there is a gradation between systems as to exactly what "improvisation" can accomplish in a mechanical sense.  D&D is fairly restrictive in that sense, and ought to be, because when you pare it down it's basically supposed to be a grid-based tactical game.  There's plenty of improvisation in D&D, even improvisation with mechanical benefits, but the game encourages you to fit "improvised" actions into established rules ("You want to swing on that chandelier and jump on that guy?  Okay, roll Acrobatics...") and discourages you from making the effects of "improvised" actions more effective/potent than the game's own existing options.

Quote from: PolycarpThis is true in theory, and often in practice... but I've also noticed that groups tend to give a lot more latitude when something is needed that nobody in the group actually has. If someone in the group does have mage hand, then it's easy to say, "Ok, you do it," but if nobody does, then prestidigitation is probably going to get a bit of a stretch. And I personally don't mind that too much.

I don't mind it that much either, but the potential problem arises in the next campaign, when the party now has a wizard with mage hand and the sorcerer with prestidigitation is citing the previous rule-bending adventure as the reason why he should be able to accomplish the same thing now with prestidigitation.  If he can't, what changed?  After all, his character's even more powerful now, not less.  If he can, well, why did the wizard take mage hand?

If the choice is between bending the rules and screwing up an adventure because nobody has the capability to deal with a situation, of course no sane GM is going to choose the latter.  Ideally, however, you design the adventure such that characters can supply everything that's needed, or if a problem comes up you fudge the environment rather than the players' abilities ("oh wow it looks like that magic stone you need to lift really is under five pounds, must be made of pumice or something").

The example of the sorceress and Intimidate is the sort of thing that seems acceptable and probably is acceptable at many tables, but I can also see the counter-argument.  Does "firing off a bit of magic," for instance, create light?  Presumably it would - does that mean I can see in the dark with it, albeit briefly and dimly?  If it creates a little light or color, can I use it as a signal?  Since we're heading into an underground realm populated by blind olm-people, can we devise a "firing off a bit of magic" signal system with which to silently communicate with one another without alerting our olm-person hosts?

This all seems a bit silly, but if there's one thing I've learned from D&D it's that people are remarkably clever about finding tricks and shortcuts in all manner of rules if they aren't clearly and unambiguously written.  Prestidigitation tells you it can't lift more than 5 lbs (IIRC) so as not to step on the toes of spells like mage hand.  Its visual illusions are fake-looking and mono-sensory so as not to make ghost sound and silent image redundant.  If those limitations didn't exist, or were too vague, people would use prestidigitation instead of those other more costly spells, and if they believed a wizard could achieve similar effects without even casting a spell by "firing off a bit of magic" they would do that instead.  If D&D was a less mechanical, more interpretive system, that would be totally fine, but since it's a system with concrete mechanics and discrete effects like ghost sound and mage hand it can't afford to give up too much narrative latitude when it comes to magic and spell effects without undermining itself.

Regarding prestidigitation and resources, on that I agree with you completely.  There is no situation in which I would not take prestidigitation on a PF/3rd ed caster who had access to it, and it really ought to be an at-will ability for all such classes.  Presently it's not a huge deal as the cost is rather low (as you say), but if the cost is higher in 5e I can only assume it's because somebody goofed.

Quote from: SparkletwistThe description of prestidigitation in Pathfinder emphasizes how minor the effects are, and how it can't duplicate any other spell. So... what, in game terms, is it even for? It seems like it's more or less there to grant specific narrative permission to do various ultimately meaningless "magical" things that, honestly, a magic-using character should probably be able to just do, and that... feels pretty stupid, actually. Why can't magical characters just be magical?

I'm afraid I don't get this at all. Yes, it is "there to grant specific narrative permission to do various ultimately meaningless 'magical' things," if by "meaningless" we merely mean "without serious mechanical benefit."  That is what the spell is for.  A magical character can do magical things - they do them by casting prestidigitation.  They can "just be magical," in the sense that Prestidigitation is a class ability (or more accurately one possible choice within a class ability).

If your issue here is that a spell is required to do this as opposed to it being an implicit, unwritten assumption about wizards... well, alright, but the problem is that there are a lot of different implicit assumptions made about wizards which you, I, and everyone else do not necessarily share.  In a game as mechanically detailed as 3rd ed D&D/PF, it seems pretty sensible to delineate minor "flavor" magic from the actual effect-producing stuff.

In a more general sense, I don't think there's anything wrong with combining descriptive or "narrative" and mechanical things.  In fact if you separate them too much, you end up with bullshit: either grey mechanical bullshit that sounds like it was extracted from a MMORPG strategy guide ("deals X DPS over Y minutes at a cost of Z"), or airy descriptive bullshit in which the effect of a skill/spell/feat depends on your interpretation of the precise meaning of various flowery adjectives.  Separating the two or combining them lazily in a way that doesn't make intuitive sense is one of many reasons why 4th edition went over like a lead balloon - see, for instance, that infamous 4th ed rogue power which caused enemies to deal damage to themselves ("Okay, I get that the lizardman stabbed himself somehow, but how did the beholder go down?  Did I rogue so hard that it fatally bit its own tongue?").

Where I do agree with you is that D&D/PF goes too far in taking things people should reasonably be expected to do with parts of the system which already exist - skills, attribute checks, etc. - and making them into feats, but this is more of a product of system bloat in which devs constantly struggle to come up with hot new shit for your poorly optimized fighter to stuff his character sheet with.  Mechanical abilities without in-world explanations are lame, which necessarily means that some descriptive/narrative things end up "locked" within specific character options.  There's nothing at all wrong at that as long as you keep it sane.

The implications of any human aviation, whether on a griffon or a balloon, are significant in a variety of ways.  Since you've asked specifically about warfare, however, it depends chiefly on how numerous tamed flyers are.  This depends both on a) availability and b) domesticability - that is, are they actually domesticated and able to be bred in captivity (like horses) or must they be taken from wild populations and individually tamed (like elephants)?

A state that has twenty such flyers at any one time is going to be very different from a state with access to twenty thousand.  The former affects intelligence, planning, and command and control; the latter means a fully airborne army.

You know, I just re-watched "The Second Renaissance" for the heck of it and realized that there is no explanation given as to why the humans nuked 01.  The first part ends with a blockade of 01, and the second part begins in medias res with a nuclear salvo.  What the hell happened?  Did the blockade not work?  Did the machines turn to smuggling?  Did the president lose his mind?

So basically:

1. "Global naval blockade" against 01 (why by the way is in Arabia, notable non-island)
2. 01's admission to the UN is denied
3. ???
4. Thermonuclear War

The only reasonable answer to this bullshit is that "The Second Renaissance" is a propaganda film for machines, in which no further explanation of human actions is necessary other than "they are monsters."  Or, in other words,

D&D worlds, or at least the big published ones I know of, tend to operate off the assumption that the ladder of power goes up more or less forever, and there is always some bigger badder dude with an opposing alignment to smack down anyone who upsets the applecart.  On balance, however, the good guys are the baddest dudes at any tier (thus golds/silvers being canonically superior to reds).  "Evil" is like a plague in that it is usually absent or suppressed, but occasionally breaks out in some afflicted region, does a lot of damage, and in the end either burns itself out or gets extinguished by the Forces of Good who are personally invested in preserving the fundamentally decent status quo of the setting.  This is necessary because, given their power, if there was any kind of even match between "sides" the world would presumably be uninhabitable for 1st level human farmers.  Faerun is in the main a nice place to live as long as you avoid the occasional dystopian hellholes scattered about and don't happen to live during the "Year of Giants Just Wrecking Shit Everywhere" or similar periodic catastrophes.

I can't really take D&D dragons seriously anymore.  It's just too difficult to make D&D color-coded flying energy lizards fit into some kind of sensible ecology or world order.  When I tried to have "dragons" in a recent more-or-less standard fantasy world I was working on, I ended up changing so many bits that I was left with a totally unrecognizable concept.  These days I prefer my dragons to be Beowulf-style avatars of greed, who don't "rule the world" because they don't have the same kinds of motivations you or I do.

Quote from: SteerpikeThe real question is why anyone living is still tilling the fields or digging for gold or fighting the wars, and why benevolent necromancers haven't made the world a paradise built on the tireless, guilt-free labour of the unliving.

Guilt-free, sir?

Why do you think those uncontrolled skeletons attack the living?  They're "mindless," after all.  They don't have a malevolent will.  But they are animated by negative energy which, if not exactly sapient, is clearly a feeling thing.  Think about it: you're a ball of negative energy ripped from your cozy Plane of Negative Energy and thrust into a word full of life, which for you is like goddamn antimatter on fire.  You've been trapped in this place inside a prison of flesh and bone and, just to top it all off, imbued with just enough awareness and comprehension to follow instructions.

A skeleton doesn't "think," exactly, but insofar as it does, this is what it is thinking all the time: "AAAAHHH IT BURNS AAAAH AAAAAAAAAAAAH"

Creating undead isn't evil because of what it does to human bodies.  Nobody cares about bodies, they're dead.  It's negative energy torture-slavery.  And since the energy is sub-sentient it's like enslaving an animal.  Basically, raising a skeleton for farming is the moral equivalent of creating an immortal puppy and torturing it for eternity so you don't have to get your hands dirty.

You monster.

When it comes to titles, I tend to prefer clear, common English titles with in-world translations used sparingly.  For instance, Umbril in the Clockwork Jungle are frequently ruled by an Ivet, which literally means "foundation/base," but which I very often wrote as "Prince." (There's also at least one Ul-Ivet - "Great Prince.")  For the Gheen, I pretty much always used "Queen" and rarely used the in-world translation, Reeya.  I'd use the in-world terms in a game if the players seemed receptive, but I like to have a simple English equivalent near at hand.

Titles with specific historical connotations tend to put me off.  A fantasy Colonel, for instance, would throw me; that word has an etymology going back to the Spanish tercios and only refers to a high military rank in this world because of historical accident.  Some titles, however, are acceptable in any circumstance.  "First," "head," "ruler," and "power[ful one]" are all obvious, generic ways of describing authority, which is why their English titular equivalents - Prince/Princess, Captain, King/Queen, and Emperor/Empress - are always acceptable to me in any circumstance.  But I wouldn't use non-English translations of those - e.g. Fürst, Hauptmann, Raj, Tsar - unless it was a near-Earth setting in which I was specifically trying to evoke a real culture.  Having a "jarl" in Fimbulvinter is fine because it's specifically going for a Norse Mythology vibe, but a jarl in other circumstances would be jarring.

My feeling is that expecting true philosophical depth in gun-fu blockbusters is like expecting meaningful character development in adult films.  It's simply not the point of the exercise.

That said, however, I'll take issue with this:

QuoteThey retreat and build their own nation, we blockade them because their frankly better than us.

I saw the Animatrix too, and to be honest the machine conduct here was totally reprehensible unless you're some kind of neoliberal fundamentalist.  Let's assume that the Machine-City could indeed produce cheaper and better goods than humans could ever produce (leaving aside the fact that humans in the modern era already use machines and automation for heavy manufacturing).  Knowing that, to export massive amounts of cheap+quality goods to the human world is a pretty fucked up thing to do.  Trade is not morally neutral; if you dump dirt-cheap corn in a country where most of the people are corn farmers, you are going to destroy the lives of a lot of people.  This is already a concern today in the developed world, but the machines were presumably doing it even more efficiently and doing it to all of humanity.  That's not "retreating," that's economic warfare.  And what's truly fucked about it is that the machines don't even need money.  Presumably they're in some kind of supercomputer-dictated planned economy, and if they want natural resources from the human world there are probably better ways to get them than "hey let's ruin the lives of billions of humans because we can!"  And don't tell me they didn't know what they were doing, because if I can sit through Econ 101 then a sentient machine collective can figure out the law of supply and demand.

A blockade was honestly the most moral choice that the humans could have made, and the most sober and measured response to what was essentially the economic equivalent of cartoon-tier, mustache-twirling supervillainy on the half of the machines.

Interestingly, most feats with a requirement of BAB +8 are actually unarmed strike feats, intended for monks/brawlers.  I'm not sure why that is, but the number of BAB +8 feats actually intended for full BAB martials is very few, the only really notable example being Improved Critical.  BAB +6 is a much, much more important milestone for combat feat unlocks.

QuoteIf the problem is that martials don't have enough power, I don't think taking some ultimately not that impressive thing away from someone else (or ensuring that they never get it, whatever) is really the answer to close the gap. It's to buff martials to a level where they don't suck.

But this isn't a very useful comment for something based on E6, since the whole point of level-limiting schemes like E6 is to restrict character power to a level at which the classes are more equal.  That doesn't mean that level-limiting solves every problem or creates total equality - that's why we're discussing further house rules - but it's not productive to argue that taking things away from other classes in the name of greater parity isn't a solution when that is in fact one of the key purposes of E6.

Advancing from E6 to E8  (or just E8-style BAB progression) makes pure martials, fighters included, worse off in a relative sense because fairly important things that were unique to them no longer are.  If you're proposing that martials should have other unique things instead, then I'm all ears, bearing in mind that casters are already being somewhat nerfed by SoP and that within the context of this thread we're not really interested in PoW-style "magic martials."  Admittedly we haven't discussed class changes much, which is presumably where those proposals would come up.  Until that alternative exists, however, I'd rather not make things any worse for martials than they already are.

It depends a bit on which levels the game actually emphasizes.  Having only full-BAB characters get two attacks in a E6 system means that they don't get that particular special sauce until their last level, but once they turn "epic" that's an advantage they keep - their non-full-BAB counterparts might have other advantages, but they don't get iterative attacks no matter how many epic feats they stack up.  In a E8 game with normal BAB, full-BAB classes get their iterative attack a few levels before epic territory, but once at epic territory all the medium-BAB classes have the same thing they do.  In that game, iteratives are something that pretty much everyone gets unless they're a wizard/sorc (and thus have much better things to do than waste time hitting things with swords).

You also have to consider that there are a whole lot of combat feats, like the "greater" maneuver feats, that have BAB +6 as a prereq.  Unless you change all those prereqs, an E8 game, or a E6 game that uses E8 BAB progression, allows all medium-BAB classes to grab those feats too, albeit only once they turn epic.

The result is that going with E8 or its equivalent BAB progression makes full martials feel nifty for two levels when they have some nice things nobody else does, but thereafter they lose that advantage and their superior BAB is only worth +2 to hit instead of unlocking martial-only feats and iteratives.  It's a relative nerf for martials any way you slice it.

The reason it's undesirable to cram 8 levels of BAB in 6 levels is that having the full-BAB classes being the only ones who get iterative attacks is - at least to me - one of the main draws of E6.  The trouble with E8 is that it lets your clerics, rogues, etc. get two attacks just like your fighters.

You could "fix" that by delaying iterative attacks until +8 BAB - which is more easily done under this houserule system, in which attacks aren't so much "iterative" as functioning like a monk's flurry or Rapid Shot - but that just makes full martials wait longer for what is (unfortunately) one of the key attractions in being a full martial in E6.

Seriously Hoers, look at the Slayer and tell me what you think about that.  I'd be interested to know whether it fits the bill for the merged fighter and rogue you're thinking about, or whether there's something else you consider elemental that it doesn't have.