Mafiascum.net

This thread is for discussing pen and paper RPGs.

- what you are playing at home;
- upcoming books you're excited about;
- that one cool story about your character;

Any system is welcome, no edition wars please.

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So, is anyone else playing it?

My groups' Numenera campaign was not going so hot, so I decided to pick up and GM the new DnD. We played a very short game that I homebrewed based on the online materials, and now we are going through the published adventures "Lost Mine of Phandelver" and "Hoard of the Dragon Queen". I'm doing a mix-and-match of both modules.

I'm very pleasantly surprised with the new rules. They seem like a "Best of all editions" mash-up, and play very fluidly. We have finished 3 sessions now, and we can easily cover 4-6 encounters in a 3 hour game session.

If anyone is interested I can give more detailed game reports.

I'd like to play when I go back to Uni next year unless I find an interesting group locally. It's hard at the moment.

I did the playtest. Was meh, but they seem to have streamlined it considerably.

Then again, we're still playing 3.x locally so not much point in jumping for what is essentially a retroupgrade from 4.0.

As far as I can tell, 5th edition feels more like an upgrade to 2nd edition than a return to 3.x.

Also, I killed the party's cleric last game, hooray!

I want to try it, but the only possible way to do so right now is online, and I can't find anyone who wants to play.

Bump cuz i need a fix.

I broke down and got a starter kit, the PHB and 4 sets of die.

I know how to make a character pretty well...

feels good man. Here's Carric

I still feel like i made some mistakes. but eh.

I like good the monk looks now when its not trying to use multiple stats for everything.

the only thing is.. i dont like the crit mechanic. roll double your hit die... i prefer the old "max damage plus your hit die."

more people need to talk on this.

Has anyone tried roll20.net?

yes. apparently its both conveinient and cumbersome for dms and players.

I dunno, 13th Age just feels better to me. It feels like it did what 5E wanted to do, but just... better. More options in terms of class difficulty, more clearly defined strengths and weaknesses, less baggage, more coolness.

I'm not predisposed to like the new edition, but seriously.

^just doesn't like DnD

I'm not predisposed to like the new edition because the people working on it hardly deserve that title.

Tell me more about 13th Age?

5e isn't OGL, so I'll always be kind of apathetic about it. If someone wants to DM a game on roll20 or some other virtual tabletop, though, I'd be up for it at least to learn the system.

Well, I'll leave system mechanics to the 13th Age SRD, but I'll talk about the feel.

The feel of the system is incredibly open ended. It's built from the ground up to support exactly the sort of D&D adventures that are remembered nostalgically. Due to the icon mechanic, DMs have an incredible toolbox to allow the players to set a direction without a lot of the drawbacks of collaborative worlds (lack of surprise, etc.). They've created this amazing world - the sort of world where giant behemoths migrate along a set path, and entire cities of traders an nomads set up on their back (yes, the behemoths are THAT big). The clouds being made of water vapor? Hah! They're quite solid, and giants live on them. Sometimes they slam into mountains and break apart.

And the players are meant to wander through it. They have a "one unique thing" mechanic, their backgrounds, and their icon relationships, meaning no matter what they choose to do, plot will essentially always be finding them, and you always have hooks and themes for them that feel personal to their characters.

The mechanics of the classes themselves are equally powerful and flexible. Most classes work by picking a number of perks at creation that slowly increase (very slowly). So a ranger might pick up "Two weapon fighting" and "Animal companion" and be Drizzt, or pick up "Archery", "Lethal Hunter", and "Tracker" and now you're a loner who stalks people for miles and then snipes them with your bow.

Another great thing is the difficulty scaling. There's a LOT of times when you get someone who wants to play D&D to be part of the game, and someone else wants to play it for the mechanics and do all this stuff with their sheet. And for the most part, in the history of D&D, the less is happening on your sheet, the less effective you are. 13th Age throws that all out the window, by giving you an extra dice of damage every level. So the Barbarian might have Rage, Whirlwind attack, and Cleave as literally the only things they can do - but by god are they excellent at being a living mass of steel sweeping everyone before them.

Do you like luck and biting your nails? Play a sorcerer, who gets perks on their spells if the dice are odd (and take half elves, who can tip the odds on that one occasionally). Do you like the very formulaic "I know what I can do, and I hate luck" style? Wizards hate luck too.

Bards can be everything from blademasters who chant while leading people into battle to singers at the back. My favorite Bard was a Half-Orc who played War Drums lined with the skin of his enemies, was enormously charismatic, and typically lead by standing in front, bashing someone's face in, then yelling battle cries while beating the drums. Quite inspiring.

i hate this.

yeah i mean cool make a DnD thread and have everybody's mother come on in and shit all over it with alternatives.

I mean, okay... thats great. you found another Alternative so that you can preach against it. good. thats good. meanwhile can we be happy? like please? to at least TRY SOMETHING? to Make something OUT OF THIS? so that way way we can have our OWN experiences BEFORE you shitheads tell us "We're not having fun properly"?

no. no of course not. were trying to have fun with a system you dont like and thats unacceptable.

assholes.

Huh?

I asked him to explain 13th Age, and he answered. There's nothing wrong with 5e, even if it'll never be my first choice for reasons completely outside of its mechanics. Like I said, if Mafiascum pulls a game together that isn't PBP, I'd be up for trying it.

I consider all D20 games D&D basically, as well as Dungeon World.

It's not like I said D&D sucks, or started an edition war, or stated my opinion on Pathfinder. I just said I didn't think 5E met its goal of moving the system forward, while 13th Age felt like an actual evolution of D&D.

There's certainly not anything dramatically wrong with 5E, and even systems with huge gaping flaws (like Exalted) people have had huge amounts of fun playing. Play what you enjoy.

Okay so I've tried running Pathfinder & 3.5 before and it just felt way too expansive, like there was always some little rule tucked away in some corner somewhere that could upend your plans because you skimmed that paragraph instead of read it closely ten times over. I want a more streamlined, simplified (but still with plenty of choices/options) system. Does 5e fit the bill?

yes.

mind you the DM guide isnt out yet but its only 300 pages.

if you wanna do the obscure rules bit homebrew maybe best but at least in the starter kit and the PHB the language is plain and the rules are easy to look up. lotta spells thoo.

I'd recommend 5E for first time DMs. It doesn't seem broken off the bat, they removed the 3E/PF obsession with developing rules for how to sneeze properly, it fixed the fucking mess of a skill system that has characterized D&D since... it added a skill system, the monster manual is well written and easy to use (basically 4E's ease of use without 4E's format) and overall it's just friendlier than other systems that rely on more DM experience.

Oh if you can, pick up the 4E DMG2. It has some fantastic advice for GMs, and ignoring the system specific stuff is easy.

say greyice?

I want to try and set up lost mine oh phandelver campaign. you know how to use roll20.net, i dont. i want to do a intergrated system. a game that is both PBP and roll20.

need some help setting up. how do?

I'll need to write out a long explanation with pictures really.

It's not too hard, but they like their iconography, so I need screenshots.

well lost mines is pretty simple.

i can try and use a google doc spread sheet as a imitation map and describe the areas in of themselves.

Well Roll 20 lets you upload images, that's what I want to do a tutorial on. Once you have the image uploaded, everything goes great, you just have to put it in the map layer, and scale it properly to your tokens.