#encounter balance

[oldschoolfrp]

Balancing an encounter (AD&D Campaign Sourcebook and Catacomb Guide, TSR, 1990)

[buttercupshands]

Some crk-isat au things!

A sprite turned into art as well!

Fount of Knowledge in Mal du Pays role with Forgotten Country being somewhat connected to the Spire of Knowledge

It also works if replacing the sprites

Same with phase 1&2 of secret encounter

Also PV is now crowned as Isa, sketched this little thing bc it seemed funny to me

[tenleaguesbeneath]

Mine is when Boromir, Merry, and Pippin got jumped by a number of orcs calibrated to make an interesting fight scene that could nonetheless be cleared handily by characters of their combat capabilities and the three of them used their action surges and bonus dice to win the encounter because they were coming in fresh for their first combat of the day, and then they all high-fived each other and got a bunch of XP.

I've talked a lot about the specific types expectations that post-TSR D&D encodes in its players and I do think it's funny how some of the stuff I talk about sometimes seems to feel, like, huge and revelatory to people.

"What do you mean not all RPGs assume the player characters to be an adventuring party that goes on adventures together? What are they even supposed to do if there's no adventure?" Assume that D&D is like an Avengers film, about a group of heroes assembling and going up against adversity to save the day. A lot of games are soap operas, where the players create the central characters, pro and ant agonist alike, and then they're thrown into a powderkeg together.

"If there is no challenge rating or similar mechanic, how is the GM supposed to know if a given combat encounter is something the player characters can overcome?" A lot of games don't have combat encoded into the game as an activity that characters are expected to partake in just to demonstrate their strength. In fact, if combat does happen in lots of games it's usually as a last resort and something that requires an active player choice for it to happen. You won't get ambushed by bandits who are willing to fight to the death for no discernible reason just so your characters can demonstrate their strength and get one of their daily intake of five combat encounters a day (or whatever number games assume these days idk).

"Wait, there are modes of play besides combat that can have deep and granular rules? How can such a thing even work?" It can and it rules.

[sweetestflow3rs]

completely forgot i had written an LI!DOL!Vanida game mechanic and left her collecting dust on my google docs…

[genericpuff]

vent post

[andromeda3116]

fun things about homebrewing a campaign from the ground up with almost exclusively homebrewed monsters and items: remembering that random encounters don't have to be that complicated, going "if they get too cocky, they get five giant bats to the face" and boom. random encounter.

[thedeafprophet]

one problem with paranoia is despite it not being my fault, often times it makes me feel so mean. like no!! i shouldn't think that of people!! why are you fixating on people who've been perfectly nice and coming up with all these horrible things they could say about you! people wouldn't say things like that about you!

and i dont logically think that about anyone. but the eels....

[waitineedaname]

She would’ve expected the softness to have been beaten out of him by everything that had happened. She knew it would have been beaten out of her, if she were in his shoes. In some ways, he had hardened up. He was harsher, colder, more pragmatic. It fit him, made him seem more mature as a sect leader. And yet, by some strange miracle, she was allowed to see beyond the facade of Jiang Wanyin, sect leader. Hidden beneath those hard layers was a boy that still cared with such an intensity it would someday tear him apart.  For reasons she could not fathom, he shed that shell around her, and trusted her with the soft interior. She did not feel like she should be trusted with this vulnerable core of his person, but to explain why would be to change everything, so she took the vulnerability he handed her and did her best not to shake.

I've finally finished the Golden Core reveal part of my chengqing fake marriage au! this fic ended up way longer than I planned because I enjoyed writing Wen Qing's POV too much. oops.

[zincbot]

whatever lou wilson puts into his dnd characters to make them live in my brain forever....

[joshay98]

Hey Mom, Dad and Lil' Bro!

17. Campsite Manners

“Hey Mom, Dad and Lil’ Bro, I actually had a really interesting day today! After morning broke the sending stone, we got from the Prince, recharged. Rose relayed all the stuff that happened the past few days. Yeah, Prince warned us of those creepy husks. Not the nicest.

The weather agreed because halfway through the day it started to rain. Normally I wouldn’t mind it but this rain was really cold and felt biting. Really didn’t feel well in it. And same goes for Orah. We had to find shelter and rest. I really didn’t want to but I also couldn’t muster the strength to argue.

On top of that we got attacked by plants! And here I thought sentient plants were only in Greenpath. These ones were so awful as well. They had these really long vines that could wrap around you. And there were so many. Managed to snatch up Orah and Lune. And all the mud made it so difficult to traverse. I did turn the ground more solid but I think that was a mistake after Lune fell on the hard ground… You should’ve seen Orah though! She looked like she was completely in her element. That dagger of hers was too fast for my eyes. Like a blur!

The fight and the constant rain really just gnawed on my energy. Thankfully there was this metal structure inside a hill. Looked abandoned and was big enough for all of us. And very sturdy! Quite the craftship! Not very pretty but I think this was more for function than flair.

Shelter and a warm fire was exactly what we needed. Hm, but we did get interrupted by the metal door being opened. A group of three were just as much searching for shelter. They are really nice, though! They seemed shaken and definitely have been on the road for a while. Just as surprised to meet others as we did.

We did get along really well. Told us that they are wandering because a war between kingdoms forced them to. This entire world has been ravaged by it… Making everyone's life worse for greed…

Ah, sorry! Both of our groups had watches. Understandable that they don’t trust us. I had the first watch so I got a full rest later. Lenny, that was his name. Definitely get to hear very exotic names out here.

A really friendly soul! We had so much to talk about, really good listener, had so many problems we could rant to one another about… Ah, yeah, I was under a bit of stress recently. Being able to talk to someone about it all really helped. I don’t wanna put that baggage on my party. They are stressed enough.

Poor Lenny lost one of his limbs in the past. I might have an idea to help him. Is gonna require a bit of tinkering, though.

Don’t worry about me! I’m feeling really fine! I swear! Hope for a healthy return, Levee."

[horrorfilmlesbian]

Decided I'd try my hand at DMing and instead of doing the Reasonable thing and using a module, I'm homebrewing a whole Thing and of course this involves creating an entire continent (well. More like developing a whole world bulding exercise I've had kicking)

[unopenablebox]

there are all sort of self-deprecating people with high standards for their niche activities i encounter on tumblr but the ones who really warn me off learning about their hobby the most are serious Dog People involved in the Dog World (constantly in some kind of hideous agony about their dog's tail being slightly too high in a way no casual observer would find possible to perceive). this is surmounted only by Dog People who also have a hobby of Semi-Serious Photography that they seem to have started while trying to get good at photographing the dog. those people can be miserable about the quality of the photograph and the quality of the dog simultaneously while still never making a single complaint over years that im even remotely capable of comprehending

areas where it seems actively self-defeating for your ability to enjoy the activity if you learn too much information about it

[selfproclaimedunicorn]

google docs, I fucking did not mean "chainz" when describing the amount of chainmail shirts my party could loot from their combat encounter in the upcoming session of our asoiaf game

[jerreeeeeee]

i feel like we don't talk about twosun enough. its inherently very interesting. this is the world that shaped our heroes. but the minutiae is easy to make up to suit your purposes and none of it ultimately matters to the narrative. trying to think of what we know about this world. there are 2 suns. a purple sky. it was a hard world (aren't all worlds?). there was a spaceship.

so what's the technological state of this world? hard to say. there's a spaceship, first of its kind, but how specific is that? is it the first flying ship at all, or only the first to leave the planar system? the light fell down a year before the starblaster took off, since the hunger came down right on that day. the ipre had the light for one year. how much did that contribute to their technological advancement? (i hate the idea of 'advancement' as if it's some inevitable linear progress but bear with me here, that's the easiest language to use). were they building ships beforehand? what else did they have?

here's how i tend to think of it: the ipre has the light. the ipre is already quite "advanced" for this world. here are things the ipre has, so by extension twosun has: bond engines, indoor plumbing, industrialized steel production. however i don't tend to think of twosun as a globalized world. so there are many places that do not have these things. and of course these are all things we think of as "advanced" but they also lack many things we think of as technological "advancement," like steam engines, or concrete. anyway.

i don't think its possible for the light of creation to have inspired all of this in only one year. this world was already well on its way. the ipre already existed, it already built spaceships. just not as ambitiously, and more rooted in magic than technology (the idea that magic is just science/technology you don't understand yet is very fun, but in this case i think magic is very much different, and has a longer history. although it can be used in tandem with tech, like in the bond engine).

and aside from technologically i tend to think of it as very politically fractured and chaotic. small regional governments with little reach, fraught and difficult trade, certainly no formal schooling systems (there are, like, wizard universities, all with different inscrutable systems, and then the ipre, and that's your choices for "education"). which is why there's more tech in some places than others.

the most interesting thing is, i think, the difference in lifespans among our crew. magnus, lucretia, and barry know only a more or less industrialized world (although i do tend to have barry grown up rural, that'd be one of those places all this tech hasn't quite reached yet), where there's an organization that sends spaceships with engines to different planes of this reality, and now with a little extra kick from the light, to different realities entirely. magnus has only ever showered with water from pipes indoors. he doesn't bat an eye at buildings made of all metal and glass. but lup and taako grew up in a medieval fantasy world. this shit's all, like, seventy years old max, and they've been around for nearly two centuries. they were bathing in big medieval washtubs as kids. their clothes were all handmade. merle too, although he grew up off the grid anyway. and probably davenport as well, but he would've been more immersed in tech, growing up in a gnomish warren. which is maybe why he was such a good pick for pilot of the starblaster.

but also: we see some of the same happen in faerun. even there it's not clear what the time period is. it's fantasy, all swords and sorcery. but there's trains and arcane engines and skyscrapers. again, not globalized, these things exist in isolated pockets. is it the light? did it still manage to have subtle influence all those years? is it just the luck of the millers finding a window into the plane of thought? is the real answer just that it's inconsistent in whatever way makes the most fun story? is it fun to play in the space of trying to make sense of it anyway?

[galacticsabc]

gues who DMed for the first time this evening!

[sapphim]

(Last Line of Defense) Oh, thinking more on it, probably after the convo with orsino before the battle, warp Hawke and party to the courtyard, add more waves of templars attacking (enough to be equivalent so), get rid of the demons completely and have friendly npc mages in the gallows instead. When you finish killing the templars, go back to the room with Orsino and trigger that convo (ideally with the no harvester mod). Then go back out to fight Meredith. I totally get if you find that pointless, and I appreciate you even answering. I just personally have issues with how the battle is planned out on the mages side.

Ok that does actually make quite a lot more sense than what I was picturing! It's no secret that the mage ending is underbaked compared to the templar ending and they ran out of time to finish it properly. Given the constraints in place it's really not a bad idea at all, and if a toolset existed it would be a totally feasible project for someone to tackle.

The problem is that without a toolset you have to be singularly motivated to find it worthwhile to go to the amount of effort that would be called for here. Weighing out your options becomes a question of how you get the most value out of the time spent, and the value judgment will be different for everyone.

Thanks for elaborating :)