The Gaming Den

A standard D&D level-up includes potentially updating attributes, skills, feats, attack bonuses, saving throws, new special attacks, special abilities, and spells. That's a lot to handle 'on the fly'. You can give a similar effect with a single 'power up' similar to a Barbarian's Rage ability.

If you want someone to go Super-Saiyan mid-combat, make it a buff that does something like +x hit points, +4 on all rolls, regain a used spell slot/daily ability. Does that exactly duplicate leveling? No. Maybe it is even slightly better in some ways. But it would feel like a power-up, largely bridge the gap until the player can handle the actual leveling up, and would be easy to add/remove on the fly.

Ok, bit of an odd question, but occasionally there's discussions about Logistics and Dragons, specifically about how a game turns into it at high levels.

Was wondering, at what other points do games tend to change into other games? For example, if everyone in the party starts out not able to fly and later becomes able to, seems like a lot of things you start out with (or at least how you play) become irrelevant.

And, while it's a bit of a general question, but is that a good thing, having to change how things work (in practice)? Could stop things getting same-y, but again, could be a problem if people liked the old way of doing things which no longer really matters.

I think important milestones of game chaning can be good or bad depending on how they are implemented. Mostly you want to do things that make some part of the game which has started to seem boring disappear or drastically reduce and be replaced by a new different thing to manage that is at least as interesting as the thing that went away.

I think D&D 3.5 flight mostly doesn't actually happen like that. It's usually quite hard to get all day combat flight without significant cost, though Tome it is much more likely. So often you just end up with some people using it and not others, or even the people who can use it choosing not to a lot of the time. When it does happen (or if you are Tome and you all have flight) it usually replaces a bunch of ground combat interactions with fiddly 45 degree angles that are much less interesting, and kind of sucks a bit.

However, mounted transport flight and teleport are both big changes in how you move around, and I think those are actually mostly bad in D&D. They don't so much change how you deal with parts of the game as obviate them in extremely boring ways. It's not always bad to obviate parts of thre game, For example, it's good when the party stops accounting for rations, that's awesome, but the things obviated by Teleport are at least important enough to the gamem that Teleport should really be adding a different thing for PCs to interact with to replace that section of the game.

There's also the change from "People who wander around going into caves and murdering everything for loot" to "People who make decisions to change how society works and/or create their own goals" which is handled pretty badly in D&D in the sense that it is not signposted and most most content/modules/fluff/setting material is written as if you stay cave murderers forever, but D&D actually does have all the material there to do that better then a lot of games, so if PCs stumble into it or are already aware it can be a useful transition for making the players feel a sense of progress.

Ok, totally random and minor thing that's been bugging me. Current 5th ed D&D Shocking Grasp, you cast it and make a melee spell attack to touch the target. Would it not be better to cast it and then make a normal attack and if you hit the target gets normal damage and Shocking Grasp damage? Now, that's an action for a spell and and action for an attack, but in the description as it is it says that your action is to cast and then touch, and it'd make sense for the touching to happen forcefully. Maybe just an unarmed attack, or maybe you cast it and then attack next round.

But touching with the intent to harm, but doing so gently seems wrong and annoys me.

It's easy to invent flavour text that would make it make sense. Maybe you have to be holding your hand in a decidedly not-fist-shaped position to maintain the Shocking Grasp spell, and thus can't strike with real physical force while also delivering the spell effect.

Fundamentally, whoever decided what passes for balance in 5e land decided that you shouldn't be able to spell-attack and attack-attack in the same Action, so the fluff bends to the rules unless it's exceptionally brain hurting or causes the players to achieve a goal before the DM wanted them to.

Omegonthesane wrote: ↑

Mon Nov 07, 2022 12:30 pm

It's easy to invent flavour text that would make it make sense. Maybe you have to be holding your hand in a decidedly not-fist-shaped position to maintain the Shocking Grasp spell, and thus can't strike with real physical force while also delivering the spell effect.

Or you could do that, yeah.

Ok, not exactly on topic for this thread, but I didn't want to create a new post just for this.

I seem to remember a thread discussing Leviathan: The Tempest somewhere on the forum, but haven't been able to find it. I don't suppose anyone knows if there was just a thread or if I'm remembering it wrong, and where it is?

Might have been mentioned in here. viewtopic.php?p=343094

But my phone is not ideal for search skimming a thread whose image links are now a thousand pages of hashed junk.

It is mentioned there in passing, but I seem to remember a thread talking in some length about it.

Reading the rules myself, and it's bad. It doesn't have the pretension of most WOD stuff, but using established words for completely new ideas is there and it's somehow even more embarrassing than usual.

EDIT: Forgot to say, I do appreciate you having a look for it.