The Gaming Den

After Sundown question:

What is the purpose for Karmic Advancement, as opposed to a point system? It's the biggest point of contention for two potential players, and when they ask "what is the in game reasoning?" all I can say is "fuck if I know, but I think it's interesting." What was the actual concept behind it, why can't someone just go strength train or something?

I have my own thoughts (that begin with "If you know Patience of the Mountains, strength training is literally impossible"), but I'm curious to the actual design intent.

Prak_Anima wrote:After Sundown question:

What is the purpose for Karmic Advancement, as opposed to a point system? It's the biggest point of contention for two potential players, and when they ask "what is the in game reasoning?" all I can say is "fuck if I know, but I think it's interesting." What was the actual concept behind it, why can't someone just go strength train or something?

I have my own thoughts (that begin with "If you know Patience of the Mountains, strength training is literally impossible"), but I'm curious to the actual design intent.

In a point system, people don't normally branch out without the creation of exponential advancement costs that make diversity advancement "free". The purpose of Karmic Advancement is to avoid punishing people for training in new paths or diversifying their holdings.

If you could simply decide to spend all your points on Logic, all the pyromancers would do that, and their characters would be boring and the game would be less balanced.

-Username17

For your personal enjoyment.

Would Handy Haversnatch be more appropriate as a feat or a class ability of a female-only prestige class?

Assuming that there's a pressing need for a character to store an arsenal in her vagina.

hyzmarca wrote:Would Handy Haversnatch be more appropriate as a feat or a class ability of a female-only prestige class?

Assuming that there's a pressing need for a character to store an arsenal in her vagina.

No, but she can take it twice whereas males can only take it once.

FrankTrollman wrote:

Prak_Anima wrote:After Sundown question:

What is the purpose for Karmic Advancement, as opposed to a point system? It's the biggest point of contention for two potential players, and when they ask "what is the in game reasoning?" all I can say is "fuck if I know, but I think it's interesting." What was the actual concept behind it, why can't someone just go strength train or something?

I have my own thoughts (that begin with "If you know Patience of the Mountains, strength training is literally impossible"), but I'm curious to the actual design intent.

In a point system, people don't normally branch out without the creation of exponential advancement costs that make diversity advancement "free". The purpose of Karmic Advancement is to avoid punishing people for training in new paths or diversifying their holdings.

If you could simply decide to spend all your points on Logic, all the pyromancers would do that, and their characters would be boring and the game would be less balanced.

-Username17

Thanks, Frank.

zugschef why do you bother. The actual argument one of those guys makes is "FoI stacks with itself because you could be taking other feats as a factotum", and another's is "Factotum/Chameleon is good because they do the same thing and that's good".

It's just terrible. Don't waste your time.

hyzmarca wrote:Would Handy Haversnatch be more appropriate as a feat or a class ability of a female-only prestige class?

Assuming that there's a pressing need for a character to store an arsenal in her vagina.

Probably neither because it duplicates a very low-level piece of magic equipment.

I'd say that it should be something that the priests of the Bandersnatch God will install after a reasonable donation.

Can you use Magic Jar on a mindless creature? Like, say, a Giant Crab?

Grek wrote:Can you use Magic Jar on a mindless creature? Like, say, a Giant Crab?

Yes.

There is no restriction against mindless creatures and magic jar is not tagged as mind-affecting magic nor any other sort of magic that mindless creatures are immune to so mindless creatures get no protection from it.

erik wrote:

Grek wrote:Can you use Magic Jar on a mindless creature? Like, say, a Giant Crab?

Yes.

There is no restriction against mindless creatures and magic jar is not tagged as mind-affecting magic nor any other sort of magic that mindless creatures are immune to so mindless creatures get no protection from it.

The only things immune to Magic Jar are Constructs who have an immunity to Necromancy.

This can lead to odd situations like possessing ghosts.

...You Lost Me wrote:zugschef why do you bother. The actual argument one of those guys makes is "FoI stacks with itself because you could be taking other feats as a factotum", and another's is "Factotum/Chameleon is good because they do the same thing and that's good".

It's just terrible. Don't waste your time.

The other thread (A wizard can learn and cast spells not on his spell list?) isn't better, it might be worse. Among other things, people are seriously misquoting rules text (and are secretely adding words, in this case the word "only") to make their argument:

Kethrian wrote:Whichever spell list they can draw from is the list they cast from. Here, let me do a clarifying edit of the sentence for you. "A wizard casts arcane spells [...] from the sorcerer/wizard spell list." Now can you understand the plain english they used in that sentence?

Prak_Anima wrote:After Sundown question:

What is the purpose for Karmic Advancement, as opposed to a point system? It's the biggest point of contention for two potential players, and when they ask "what is the in game reasoning?" all I can say is "fuck if I know, but I think it's interesting." What was the actual concept behind it, why can't someone just go strength train or something?

I have my own thoughts (that begin with "If you know Patience of the Mountains, strength training is literally impossible"), but I'm curious to the actual design intent.

I've had players ask me the same thing in my own games.

My own explanation was that it's meant to foster organic character growth, as well as curtail players from picking up all of the "hot shit" stuff that they want (like Edge, Attributes, and Magic) over other stuff; like Backgrounds.



I guess my question would be, how to make Backgrounds more valuable to players? The players use them; but they're not necessarily used to using them enough to want more of them. Such as when they show up as minor arcana in a chapter end pull.

Also, what should I be doing as a referee when there are minor arcana cards that no one wants to bid on? Just shuffle them back into the deck; and let people keep saving up their Karma?

In general, the holy grail of an advancement system would:

• Be player directed.
• Relate to the character's actual recent experiences.
• Produce balanced results.
• Produce interesting and diverse results.
• Stay on the RNG.

You can see the popularity of level based systems right from that list. If you could simply "choose a level", and it would give you a collection of offensive and defensive abilities that marched along in balance that would be great. If you could actually tweak 3e's open multiclassing with prestige classes such that it produced balanced and playable results when people made Monk/Sorcerer/Boneblade Reapers or whatever the fuck, it would pretty much hit all the high notes.

Now, it would still have a problem where not all games have "levels" and sticking them in sideways doesn't always work. Certainly any game which doesn't have the genre convention of knowledgeable sages also being able to beat holy hell on whole groups of thugs with their walking stick is not going to benefit from being converted into a level based system even if it did handle character advancement in a satisfying way. And there's good empirical evidence that 3e style open multiclassing can't work. But you can certainly see why people keep trying.

After Sundown uses a random number generator (the cards) in order to force diversity advancement, and provides a bunch of cards that advance skills and magical abilities that you've used in the previous session in order to make recent actions feel like they lead organically to the character's growth through foreshadowing or learning by experience or whatever.

It is of course entirely possible for the random card drawing to fail. If one player is an Android and runs off Charisma and none of the other characters use the stat for much and the Charisma card keeps coming up over and over again, it's possible for one character to simply end up way more specialized and boringly powerful than the other characters. But the law of large numbers is such that usually that won't happen.

-Username17

How would you modify the Karmic Advancement system for players who felt that it completely removed control of advancement from their hands? I mean, assuming you were inclined to do so.

I'm inclined to say that a person who wants to pick up Body Colony should be able to go to The Laughter Factory and pay some enough to just do that. I'm not sure what to do about people who want to go down to the gun range and practice their Combat or lift weights in their down time, though, other than perhaps say they can spend three karma points to gain a single dot.

Prak_Anima wrote:How would you modify the Karmic Advancement system for players who felt that it completely removed control of advancement from their hands? I mean, assuming you were inclined to do so.

I'm inclined to say that a person who wants to pick up Body Colony should be able to go to The Laughter Factory and pay some enough to just do that. I'm not sure what to do about people who want to go down to the gun range and practice their Combat or lift weights in their down time, though, other than perhaps say they can spend three karma points to gain a single dot.

I'm really unsure how it could be construed to take anything out of peoples' hands. You bid on the available cards, and most of the cards give you a number of choices. My best guess is that the people claiming to be concerned about that sort of thing are actually concerned about competing with other players for cards. That it is the negotiation with other players that is giving them panic attacks rather than the fact that the have the option to buy cards that don't give any further options.

For those people, I think I'd give each card a fixed cost and let multiple people buy the same card if that is what they wanted to do.

Alternately, maybe they are freaking out because they are used to "builds" (which I think are terrible for the game, but whatever), and the thing they are freaking out about is that they don't know what future advancement options are going to be. For those people, I guess you could preview some or all of the cards for future sessions by drawing them ahead of time so that those players could retreat to the weird comfort of plotting their character advancement well into the future. I think that would be stupid, but I could see people insisting on it. Especially if they played a lot of 3rd or 4th edition D&D.

Of course, it's also possible that the person in question is simply wholly irrational, and making completely random changes would make them happier. I don't know. It doesn't make a lot of sense.

-Username17

I really don't understand it either. He makes some semi-valid points ("why is my advancement impacted by someone else's," "fighter guy will just buy up all the strength boosts") but seems... to be religiously resistant to "if fighter guy outbids you for strength, then save your points and buy it next time."

This guy wants me to hack in a WW style point buy xp system, which I don't want to do for a number of reasons, including that being about as like to hit a balanced point as a stream of piss is to hit a toilet in a dark room, my finding Karmic advancement interesting, and my desire to try a system without immediately houseruling it at least once.

Thank you for the suggestions, Frank.

Edit: there's a strong possibility that part of the hate for system from my guys subconsciously stems from the knowledge it came from the Den.

Actually, I think the problem is that the player doesn't want diverse or interesting outcomes. The player doesn't really care that fighter guy is going to buy strength. He really cares that when he wants to increase his attributes, he can't be sure one will even come up, and if it does, he might still not get it.

He just wants to build a character and know that he is going to increase Str next level, because he feels like if he increases in any stat that isn't directly helping him the most, he is losing.

Basically, you should explain to him that your game world is Morrowind and not Oblivion/Skyrim, so he can level up the shit skills without being worse against the Draugor menace.

That might help. Thanks Kaelik.

Are there and games where the PCs are explicitly Marry Sues who can do whatever the fuck they want with no personal consequences?

hyzmarca wrote:Are there and games where the PCs are explicitly Marry Sues who can do whatever the fuck they want with no personal consequences?

Munchhausen.

-Username17

Exalted as a solar, mostly.

I think Nobilis, but I haven't actually read it, so I can't say.

Nobilis is not like that. Once you're enNobled, you don't have to worry about things like hostile millitary superpowers, the laws of physics getting in the way of your plans or necessarily even "being dead", but you have a whole slew of new and exciting problems.

Yeah, people have said "the great thing about Nobilis is that you can't MinMax it" to which my answer was "bullshit, if there are stats and the stats mean anything, and you can choose what the stats are to any degree, then guess what?" And because those stats exist and mean anything (albeit, very loosely), your abilities are limited (albeit, very loosely).

You can easily be "the best in the world" at basically anything, but so are the rest of the PCs, and any opposition you face is either also "the best in the world", or is a conceptual entity that can't be fought in the conventional sense. To some extent it rewards you for doing the Munchausen thing where you make some in-genre shit up (or rather, make shit up as applies to your domain of influence), but you are actually limited. And when in your magic space base, the character with the highest "Control over the magic space base place" stat basically rules over the others in that team (so one person gets to be the Sue).

Is it possible to buy an acceptable microphone for $200?