Pteryx the Puzzle Secretary

When it comes to 3.5, the biggest potential slowdown lies in trying to keep status conditions straight, especially 1) stacked buffs and 2) those with durations measured in rounds at low levels. What sort of arrangements does your table have to track status conditions?

Note also that actually paying attention to the battle instead of treating it as background noise when it’s not your turn helps. There’s a big table speed difference between having a plan and asking for a summary.

Those of us who *actually knew how to write* before 2020 deeply resent the slander against em dashes.

Yep! The relative smallness of D&D in Japan is only secondarily about Sword World existing, and primarily about just how popular CoC is there, from what I can tell. CoC seems to just generally be better-known internationally than Pathfinder is, or was at the time at least.

I understand that in some countries, Call of Cthulhu is more popular than D&D, based mainly on a series of video interviews by Don’t Stop Thinking asking about various DungeonTubers’ local scenes. Pathfinder was also lesser-known outside the US at the time of those interviews, though that might have changed by now since the interviews happened before the OGL debacle of 2023.

It makes a *little* more sense in the context of video games, where some people’s idea of “fun” is turning their brains off and mashing buttons.

In the context of TTRPGs, though, not only does the medium itself demand too much effort for “turning your brain off” to be viable, and not only is an easier alternative right at hand, but there’s a whole other vista TTRPGs offer that video games don’t that is being forgotten.

Even in the context of a video game, having nothing but a pre-programmed turn rotation sounds boring. There’s a reason more modern MMOs never appealed to me on a gameplay level.

Even in a more video-gamey TTRPG (or, well, a video game), it’s more fun for me to have enough options to be able to adapt to different in-world situations, even if that makes me weaker with each option. Give me FFXI’s Red Mage (an adaptable generalist) over FFXIV’s (a DPS with a good heal) any day.

…and, apparently, everyone else who has ever DMed in their lives.

On the assumption that this is a serious question… Game Master, which in turn is a more generic version of D&D’s term of DM/Dungeon Master.

One particularly wild bit: that’s actually the *second* time I’ve had someone decide that the role they’d chosen in the party was meant to make them Always Smart and Right to the point of having more narrative power than the GM… in a trad game structure. (The first time, instead of an erzatz detective/leader, it was a scholar.)

I have a whole blog post about one game I ran that entailed a largely (though not *entirely*) disastrous few months…

https://pteryx.dreamwidth.org/3448.html

@juergen_hubert
The chapparal, or similar semi-arid locations. You see lots of plains and lots of deserts, but rarely the scrublands in between.

It’s my experience that many players have no idea that deciphering is *even a thing that needs to be done* with clues. They assume that clues are MacGuffins that you just collect in order to redeem for the ending once they’ve got enough, or that their characters are CSIs and the DM is the detective. Even if they intellectually understand the need to figure stuff out, there’s a chance they won’t think to talk to *each other* about ideas, or think that anything other than a one-step solve loses.

@INeedMana
From what I can tell, adapting it requires writing entirely new species, and therefore entirely new sets of lifepaths, from scratch… and while some specific adaptations exist, like Burning Empires and Mouse Guard, there doesn’t seem to be the kind of culture of homebrew surrounding the game to help with arbitrary adaptations. (Or at least there wasn’t a decade ago, when you could actually *see* communities on the open web instead of them being locked away in Discord…)

Referring back to my “sorcerers have a superhero origin” proposal elsewhere in this discussion… one of the Dragon suggestions for an alternative source of inherent magical power is being the subject of magical or alchemical experimentation.

In Eberron, since it just came out of a massive war that involved advancements in combat magic and artifice, it’s easy to imagine that type of origin specifically manifesting as “Captain America, but a sorcerer”.

Seoni, the iconic sorcerer of Pathfinder.

I’ll note that one thing that bugs me about the Sorcerer class *is* that, despite how fairly early in D&D 3e’s life there was a Dragon article talking about many alternative ways to have innate magic other than being born with it, both D&D itself and Pathfinder after it doubled down on the “magical bloodline” lore and terminology.

My preference is more “wizards have an education, warlocks have a magic sugar daddy, sorcerers have a superhero origin”.

While the Eberron setting doesn’t directly tie dragonmarks to the Sorcerer class, it does explore hereditary magic as a privilege. In general, if you’re not of the bloodlines who are “supposed to” get particular constructive magic and want to go into business using that magic, you need to either sign a contract with the appropriate Dragonmarked House or they’ll go Pinkerton on your ass. This cuts the other way, too, where anyone in the House with such powers is pressured to participate.

One idea that pops to mind is simply learning about the strange and sometimes dangerous flora and fauna of a new region… or, more fantastically, about its spirits. Rather than having the tension come from the usual “and we need to find X kind of resource to exploit in the process” (since that’s more colonialist thinking), there should be a dawning realization that the region itself is in danger from something the PCs need to stop.

Have to agree about six. The classic D&D videogames didn’t choose a party size of 6 by accident in their designs.

That being said, the push towards four instead definitely started in 3.0’s playtesting, on the assumption that parties would have one of each basic archetype (warrior, rogue, arcane caster, divine caster) for some reason. It probably also had a lot to do with how scheduling a dedicated table becomes exponentially more difficult with each added player.

Essentially, yes.

PCs having grievances can happen too, but it tends to be more of an intermediate technique than a basic one for players, and dependent on them already having a solid understanding of the setting.