years ago, i played the d&d board game, which was designed by someone who had a huge inexplicable boner for floor traps. recently, a friend got the temple of elemental evil board game, which follows suit.
more than half the playtime seems to be spent on dealing with endless floor traps! you’re rarely ever able to go anywhere or do anything because there’s traps blocking off every entrance and exit to a room!
this isn’t really related to actual d&d, but still. whoever designs those games is bad at designing games and should be stopped.
To the probable exasperation of my players, no matter what the roll is I try to ask “so what are you doing to use your skill” so like, if someone investigates I want to know what things they’re poking, what stones are they leaving unturned, whether @Father.Torque 's character tastes the object of interest, etc.
This solves the problem of enervating and monotonous skill checks while giving me good pointers to decide how to respond to the results of a check. If someone is trying to search for any treasures in a refuse pit by diving in and feeling around, their skill check failure could lead to them grappling w the creature that lurks in the trash. Whereas poking around from a safe distance might avoid an immediate confrontation on failure but will take longer to find anything valuable…
So, rather than setting stakes up front, I try to tease out the in fiction actions until the stakes of a roll are clear to me.
I’m also lazy and permissive of players rolling all the time, so you’ll often hear me work backwards from the roll result to clarify the fiction.
Anyway, my biggest issue with fine grained dnd rules is how everything is measured to the 5 foot increment
I try to run my game theater of the mind style for the most part and it is a constant source of difficulty for me that I don’t think in physical measurements when describing a space. “How far away is the other end of this gap” always bothere me as a question not because players are wrong to ask but because my answer is either “too wide to jump but close enough for other solutions” or “so far away you can barely see it” and I wish I didn’t have to make numbers up to justify those answers. If player abilities and rules weren’t written in terms of hyperspecific measurements I would be more comfortable.
Playing a Kenku Ranger and I’m sort of enjoying being the party’s scout/forager out in the wilderness, and one of the Do Crimes people when in town. In combat I mostly just sit back and arrow people a bunch, which thanks to stats/selected abilities & feats is pretty effective. Probably should have picked up a healing spell along the way, but I’ll just have to hope my idiot comrades don’t get themselves killed.
I mean, I really want to encourage you using magic vines as often as possible but its a pain to remember how far they reach and it feels weirdly videogamey to design spaces around player powers.
Oh I recognize this your DM must watch the same youtube channels I do
Skill challenges are cool but I don’t think you can link failure to immediate death. Rather it’s better to declare a straight win condition and fudge losses along how many failures accrue.
In NoRA Tulpa has run a skill challenge-esque thing the two times we’ve engaged in mass combat. It worked out great! It requires a lot of creativity and investment but also a certain distance that allows for the DM to get creative with failures. If you’re a really rulebound type it’d probably drive you nuts.
Ours wasn’t tied into an instant death sort of thing, just access to a treasure hoard. It just was executed kind of board gamey, and felt limiting instead of cinematic or whatever.
In the Dark Sun game I’m in, my little gremlin fucker Ickus, a halfling cannibal with a Kill Six Billion Demons devil mask, just made a series of absolutely absurd saves (including two nat 20’s in a row) and gained the most powerful item in the game, the “Obsidian Lens”, which grants me a pool of 50 mp and access to every psionic spell in the game.
I am god.
The downside is that I am now cursed with megalomania, and will turn fully evil if I fail a save after committing any evil act. If that happens I’m booted out of my character, must create a new one, and Ickus becomes a villain.
This is the second time something like this has happened to me.
I missed last week’s session for the work campaign, and joined mid-fight in a goblin warren. But the dry-erase ink had shifted somewhat on the DM’s battle mat in the intervening week, and the label for the pile of random junk the goblins had collected looked like it said Swans instead of Swag. Naturally I played to the bit.
So after all the helpless innocents were murdered we had to all try our hands at Animal Handling to get to the treasure. This is a very straight and combat-focused campaign but one player is considering changing alignment from Neutral Goose to Neutral Swan and I think eventually we might have some role playing at the table.
Combat rules offer structure and security to players that fear the vulnerability inherent in the unstructured parts of the game. And they’re sort of the only part of the game you can play by yourself with just a rulebook.
Why yes my personal experiences are universal obviously
when you get around to it, i would love to hear your impressions!
even though i’m interested by the setting and the system’s outline, i’m still not sure about the actual experience of playing it, specially since there seems to be a focus on the roleplaying aspect which is v hit-or-miss for me
