Pteryx the Puzzle Secretary

@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.

The first thing to understand about how to have NPCs with legitimate grievances be a thing in a TTRPG is to imagine the world as a real one and the NPCs as people within that world. If you’re just thinking of the setting as a flat backdrop for gameplay and the NPCs as colorful questgivers whose protection is a thin excuse for the plot to happen, then you’re not going to be thinking in terms of things like what needs various NPCs might have and why they’re unfulfilled or violated.

Thing is, your typical clear-out-the-humanoid-tribe dungeon crawl could be considered pretty evil in its own right by modern standards. Just putting an emphasis on how much that old trope would actually involve disrupting lives and destroying families could be enough, depending on what she’s going for.

@ICCrawler @Zagorath
You can still buy materials from their store. I think they’re counting on that alone to prop it up.

The kinds of people who find replacing artists a “desirable purpose” do not belong in a creative community.

Sounds like you might need to explain that NPCs in TTRPGs aren’t like NPCs in video games. They’re not ambulatory signboards, but non-player *characters*, emphasis on character.

Just that while the setting sounds fundamentally very similar between the two Vampires with just differences in details, it sounds very different between the two Werewolf settings and the two Mage settings. Notably, from what I’ve heard the relationship between werewolves and spirits is fundamentally completely different between the two, to the point that I’d expect system differences.

Plus I’ve heard Werewolf: the Forsaken criticized as being more of a shaman game than a werewolf game.

So are you saying that all the mechanics are generic enough that they don’t support the Forsaken’s specific story anyway?

Isn’t Werewolf: the Forsaken built around a completely different story and cosmology, though? At that point you may as well use a generic game…

I’m thinking Ecology would likely be very useful for helping to restore areas damaged by the machine revolution – the worse the damage, the harder the job. Maybe one easy roll to replant after a clearcut, a whole adventure to restore a mechanized town.

As for Academics… the use of that sort of skill in TTRPGs in general is often to enable exposition and determine how extensive that exposition is. (Basically look at how Sally’s handheld computer Nicole is used.)

I have never played nor read this game, but the moment I heard about it I was struck with how it was clearly inspired by a specific cartoon from the early 90s which I’d hoped would eventually see inspired-by, serial-number-filed knockoffs: the ABC Saturday morning version of Sonic the Hedgehog. If you’re not familiar with “the SatAM”, looking into it might help you make some connections (it’s obvious to me what an Ecology skill would be good for in a SatAM game, for instance).