I’ve probably watered my character down enough that I’ll lose potency at later levels if I don’t commit a bit more. As it stands I’m Ranger 5/Rogue 1/Cleric 4 and I should probably just go Cleric the rest of the way but I dunno.
Makes sense. It is hard to get a feel for how the mechanics scale just by skimming the rules. Since it seems that the scaling mostly comes from more powers/abilities.
1 Like
I died; trying to deal with ‘Simut’… (I was a thief!)
1 Like
I read a 1e ad&d homebrew blog years ago that suggested kobolds as monotremes and I can’t imagine them any other way now.
3 Likes
I think actually everything except proficiency bonus is right? And maybe the way spell slots work for multiclassed casters
What if every monster is a monotreme
By virtue of being kobolds being stacked in a trenchcoat
5 Likes
probably! I never bothered to learn the 5e rules properly and rely heavily on tools
edit it me
2 Likes
Damage increases for cantrip spells increase based on character level vs class level, which I always found odd but 
1 Like
Makes sense in the way HP scales in 5e. Challenge rating is based on char level so naturally damage output has to match that.
Oh I’ve been underestimating the utility of multi classing by quite a lot in that case
Okay another one of my characters BOUGHT IT, taking some heavy losses this month.
For the first game’s character, I’m going with a College of Eloquence bard, but she’s also a harpy, so she eats people and is generally a shit, but is very well-versed in how to behave politically, so that should lend to some good comedy.
The other character death was in the Tomb of Annihilation game, where my character has cheated death about seven times so far, by my count. Not this time, unfortunately.
Tomb of Annihilation spoilers
Latest near-death was us breaking into this room, me fumbling with a cursed throne, and an UNDEAD TYRANNOSAURS WITH SKULLS IN ITS MOUTH exploded out of the floor for a brutal encounter we all narrowly survived.
We then decided to long-rest in this room, so my character made a bed out of a pile of baby skulls, which caused me to get inhabited by some spirit and turn against my team, which was another truly brutal encounter that downed me but did not kill me.
After the long rest, we found this new room with a tiny maze on the wall where, if you touched it, you got teleported into the maze. Long story short, one of us decided not to go into the maze, and they started getting piled on by zombie minotaurs. We managed to escape the maze in time to get back to them and save them from their final death save.
We fought them back, rested, and the next day, I found a secret passage in the corner of the room.
We went in, and I found this grandfather clock. I went to touch it, but my claw was blocked by some kind of invisible wall. I was able to fumble around until I found a key hole in this invisible wall, and PICKED AN INVISIBLE LOCK, which I was very proud of.
We scoped out the grandfather clock, but nothing stuck out. Eventually, I decided to wind the hands of clock to 12 noon. This AGED EVERYONE IN THE ROOM UP 10 YEARS, bringing our Thri-Kleen to middle age and me, an aarakocra, to an ancient 30, which is near the maximum lifespan of that species.
The rest of the team moved back, and I tried winding the hands backwards, to 12 again. THIS AGAIN AGED ME 10 YEARS, which killed me. The DM shook his head and was just like, “you’re the first player I’ve ever had die of old age.”
So anyways I have to roll a new character. I chatted with Gary and ended up with a rabbitfolk 3 Rogue / 6 Fey Wanderer Ranger. Should let me try ranger for the first time, and also try out one of the new Tasha’s sub-classes, while also letting me still check for traps, lockpick, and all that jazz.
Personality-wise I’m going for “nervous midwestern nerd”/Entrapta. The backstory the DM floated was that I’d been a part of the Yellow Banner, then got petrified for countless years until now, which should be a fun way for me to further explore the history in this setting.
Also: There is zero rabbitfolk art online that isn’t Judy Hopps porn or that FFXIV rabbit race.
3 Likes
the game @scratchmonkey is running has inspired me.
7 Likes
I’d like to put together a superhero-themed one-shot, to run in situations where my current slew of DMs want to play a few sessions as characters, or when they’re not up to DMing. I’d also like to really get into the weeds on one particular system that I could conceivably run a longer-form game in the future.
Tone would be pretty light-hearted, like somewhere between Spider-Gwen and The Tick. I would likely discard the setting stuff for whichever system I used.
I loved City of Heroes and theoretically love the idea of people playing both heroes and villains, but I can’t really imagine a way that could work without half the group sitting and watching as the hero side does one thing, then the hero side sitting and watching as the villain side does another thing, etc. They’d have to be working together on the same thing, I think.
@Tulpa recommended Wild Talents, which looks really cool. I’m scoping this one out primarily for the system, which uses something called the ORE system:
The One Roll Engine introduces players to the basic ideas of ORE. In a nutshell, ORE uses a dice pool of d10s. Often this is a “Stat+Skill” formula, but in the case of powers a single number may be used. No more than 10 dice are rolled ever, although having a pool of more than 10 dice can come in handy as dice are lost to penalties. When dice are rolled, players look for matching sets. The matched number is called the “height” and the number of matching dice is called the “width”. So if you roll four 8’s, that’s a height of 8 and a width of 4 (and a very impressive roll). Height is usually used to reflect quality of success while width is used to reflect speed, but there are a lot of fiddly exceptions to that.
When players buy dice in something (like a Stat or a Skill or a power), they can choose to purchase regular d10s, “hard dice”, or “wiggle dice”. Regular d10s are just that: you roll them and take whatever number you get. Hard dice are automatically a 10, and are generally considered to reflect maximum force or effect with no option of holding back. Wiggle dice, the most expensive dice to purchase, allow players to choose whatever number they want; a single wiggle die guarantees a matched set on any roll. Hard dice cost twice what regular dice to purchase, and wiggle dice cost four times what a regular die does.
Reviews say that it’s easy to abuse this system, but, I’m not so much worried about that. I’m good about enforcing a rule or making changes if it looks like it’s gonna fuck up the game.
I’m also hearing Mutants & Masterminds is pretty good. Looks like that one’s a d20 system, but has really cool ideas for chargen.
From this RPG.Net review:
The core mechanic is the same as other d20-based systems; roll a d20, add various modifiers as appropriate, and compare the result to the target number, or Difficulty Class. However there are a number differences between Mutants and Masterminds and other d20-based systems. There are no character classes, the closest equivalent being packages of traits which are more of a convenience or archetypes, which are an excellent range pre-generated example characters which means you can start with a character pretty much right away. The entire game is run entire with the d20 with no other die involved, there are no hit points (using grades of damage instead), and there is a metagame resource of Hero Points. These are used to improve a roll, dodge, invoke a feat, escape death etc, and are acquired therough narrative elements; setbacks, complications, heroism, and roleplaying.
Any of y’all ever been in a game like this? Have any thoughts on what was fun and adventurey vs tedious or frustrating?
1 Like
Another interesting suggestion, The Window. It’s meant for horror games, but it could work just as well for something goofy like this.
Does lack that interesting dice system of Talents though.
Masks is a good game but its very much focussed on that whole ‘young justice/teen titans’ vibe
Not a dis-recommendation more than a caveat.
1 Like
Wild Talents is ‘easy to abuse’ by design, as it’s specifically about letting you simulate superhero characters at all power scales, up to and including an example character that the author made that can kill the sun by looking at it.
Would not recommend Mutants and Masterminds especially in comparison to Wild Talents. Like it was cool when it was new because there weren’t many good superhero systems at the time and it was like a simplified D&D3E but that’s still… a lot of D&D baggage with the powers themselves feeling stapled onto the core mechanics rather than an integrated core part of the system.
2 Likes
im playing a mecha ttrpg and my name is mettler toledo. im an ex farmer whos repurposed my robot for fighting instead of just planting and its name is AGRI GUY
we learned combat mechanics with a game of dodgeball
last session i got my body swapped with a dolphins and i had to lead everyone to an underwater room that had a radioactive ray to switch me back, but i couldn’t say my reasons or i would explode. it was a hoot. i think next week we’re actually doing mecha combat but no one cares about the combat we keep just having good dialogue and its super fun to play ttrpgs where everyone just wants to RP
6 Likes
which system! This game sounds great
the system is two long ass rulebooks with bad art and one of them has a z and one of them has a g at the end. we are barely touching it
2 Likes