The Gaming Den

Well, I completely forgot about the fear. Otherwise, it went ok. It was just a wall of flesh to get them warmed up, but I'd realized that really was what i was looking for.

Prak_Anima wrote: Well, I completely forgot about the fear.

Oops.
In about half the encounters that I run, when I look back on them, it seems that I've forgotten some ability or another. Sometimes I tell my players, sometimes I don't bother.

Otherwise, it went ok. It was just a wall of flesh to get them warmed up, but I'd realized that really was what i was looking for.

Good to hear.

Come to think of it, I forgot the stinking cloud. I need to rethink my stat layouts, I think. Not quite late 3.5, but definitely something that puts field effects up front.

But, yeah, thanks for the help. It went well.

This is the layout I use in my notepad files for when I run games:

Bumfluff McGee (Human Sorc 3) 18/18
12 13 14 11 8 16 Speed 30' Init +5
AC 15 (Mage Armour) Flat 14 Touch 11
BAB/Grab +1/+2 MW Club +3 (1d6+1 20/x2)
F +5 R +2 W +2
Imp. Init, Toughness, Great Fort
1st Level: DC 14, 6/day [X][ ][ ][ ][ ][ ]
-Mage Armour, Magic Missile 2d4, Ray of Enfeeblement +2 RTA

Yes that's a shitty character you shouldn't play, and I only listed relevant skills (in this case: none!) but depending on how tiny your handwriting is, it could fit on the back of a stamp and everything you need is easy to see.

I might have to start using something like that. I've put DR/Fast Healing/Regen just off to the side in huge letters before too, which helps

I am about to run an After Sundown campaign. I have recently noticed that the stealth rules are, in fact, incredibly shitty, are missing key TN info on the charts, contradict themselves and have literal divide by zero errors in them. Does anyone see a problem with this as a replacement?

1. Hider announces where they are going to hide and rolls Intuition + Stealth.
2. Seeker announces where and how long they are going to search and rolls Intuition + Perception.
3. Multiply the Hider's hits by the base time for the area the Seeker is searching (consult the table). This gives the time required to find the Hider. Go up a stage or two for small to very small things and down a stage for big things.
4. Multiply the Seeker's hits by how long they decide to search. If this equals or exceeds the time required to find the Hider and the Hider is in the area searched, the Hider is found.

Other than order of operations, how does that differ from the existing rules.

In the current rules:

• The base time to find someone cannot be calculated. It is supposedly based on the Hider's hits on their Intuition + Stealth test and also on the chart of possible hiding locations.
• The chart of hiding locations cannot be used as written. If you're hiding in a closet you are almost certainly also hiding in a house and the rules don't say which entry to use.
• Some of the operations can result in 'undefined' as an answer. The rules tell you to divide the Hider's hits by the Seeker's hits on their Intuition + Perception test. If the Seeker gets 0 hits, the result required is not a number.
• Even if the above issues were resolved, the rules still don't give a way to translate hits (on either test) into hours or minutes or into hiding locations on the chart or into any other useful value.

Ok, so I need some better design minds to look at an ability I gave the soulknife in my group, and tell me exactly how full of shit it is.

Blinding Strike [Granted ability, 1/encounter]
As a standard action you may make a melee attack with your mind blade or any natural attack (including unarmed) against an evil creature. If you connect, instead of taking damage, the target is dazzled for 1 minute, and must make a Fort save (DC 10+1/2 character level+Cha mod*) against being blinded 1d4 rounds.

*I've also said he could use Con mod instead so that he's adding +5, not +1.

He thinks the ability isn't particularly useful, somewhat underwhelming compared to other status debuffs, and would never see use if it were a spell.

I'm thinking of changing it so that a miss doesn't expend it, or making it auto-blind and daze on a failed save.

He's also wondered why it's not a melee touch, and I just don't think it needs to be. Fluff wise, it's the ability to run up, and stab a demon in the face with glowy celestine mind energy to blind it. You're still penetrating, just not with a coherent blade. Hmm.... maybe it could be a touch attack and the glowy celestine energy is treated as brilliant energy. I could see that.

Anyway, the party's fifth level currently. Does this need to be boosted? Is it fine? Does it need to be nerfed?

Once per encounter is incredibly vague.

Anyway, Dazzle is such a bullshit status that it's better if everyone just pretends it doesn't exist. My suggestion would be "They are blinded for one minute, but a successful Fortitude Save reduces it to one round".

Given it's instead of damage and only on evil things (and remember, Outsiders have all good saves), you could just make it a touch attack.

So then what happens is half the time he blinds an enemy for one round, usually starting on "the turn after we lose any surprise", and then any rogues in the party can sneak attack the fuck out of that enemy for a turn (ie "the rest of its life") with full attacks. The other half of the time it actually blinds an enemy for a minute, which is longer than it's going to be alive if there are sneak attackers. If there are no sneak attackers or they have rings of Blink or whatever, then its value is reduced to "You gain a Miss Chance and a small attack bonus".

I also looked at the conditions and am considering changing Dazzled to Shaken so that the penalty is higher, applies to more things, and can stack with other fear effects, or Sickened so that instead of starting fear chains, it lowers damage. And I'm considering making it touch, yeah.

Prak_Anima wrote:Ok, so I need some better design minds to look at an ability I gave the soulknife in my group, and tell me exactly how full of shit it is.

Blinding Strike [Granted ability, 1/encounter]
As a standard action you may make a melee attack with your mind blade or any natural attack (including unarmed) against an evil creature. If you connect, instead of taking damage, the target is dazzled for 1 minute, and must make a Fort save (DC 10+1/2 character level+Cha mod*) against being blinded 1d4 rounds.

*I've also said he could use Con mod instead so that he's adding +5, not +1.

He thinks the ability isn't particularly useful, somewhat underwhelming compared to other status debuffs, and would never see use if it were a spell.

I agree with your player.
First things first. What is the ability supposed to do / be used for?
At low levels you're giving up the chance to murder your opponent for a tiny debuff + low chance off a slightly better debuff (that doesn't work on everyone).

At higher levels, you're not going to give up a full attack for this, and it is debatable whether it is worth it if you can only make a single standard attack (def worse than a spell, since you need to hit with your attack first and enemy still gets a save and your DC is going to be lower).

Solutions: A) just make it at-will and still buff it a bit
B) it does normal attack damage in addition to the debuff

Hell, since as soulknife you suck if you can't take a full-attack anyway (except at low levels), you could just make it automatically apply whenever the soulknife can't make a full attack in addition to the damage it does and it'll be fine.

He seemed to accept Melee Touch (because it's "Brilliant Energy but will still affect undead") and auto-sickened, and on a failed save, blinded instead. and in fact actually suggested the later part (though may have been angling nauseated which wasn't going to happen). So long as he's happy with it, I'm fine with it.

I just took a look at the default After Sundown hiding rules myself.

Grek wrote:The base time to find someone cannot be calculated. It is supposedly based on the Hider's hits on their Intuition + Stealth test and also on the chart of possible hiding locations.

True, the rules don't say how the Hider's roll affects the Base Time to find them. The simplest houserule would be to multiply the Base Time from the chart by the number of net hits on the Hider's roll to find the expected timeframe for the Seeker to find the Hider. This results in a smooth progression of hiding times with increasing Stealth hits and creates symmetry between the results of the Stealth check and the Perception check. The irreconcilable 0/0 error if both characters get zero hits can solved with a tiebreaker rule, or Stealth could be made slightly better than Perception with the formula (Stealth Hits + 1) * (Base Time) instead of (Stealth Hits) * (Base Time).

The other reasonable option would be to start with the Base Time from the hiding locations chart and move up one spot on the Timeframe Chart (in the Skills chapter) for every hit on the Hider's check. I infer this from the fact the Hiding Locations chart exactly matches the middle of the Timeframe Chart. This causes high Stealth rolls to be worth more than high Perception rolls, but doesn't require a tiebreaker rule when both characters roll zero.

EDIT: I agree that this means the hiding rules are nonfunctional as written, but they are relatively easy to patch.

The chart of hiding locations cannot be used as written. If you're hiding in a closet you are almost certainly also hiding in a house and the rules don't say which entry to use.

The rules specifically note that the table "assumes the seeker is looking in the right place," then goes on to say they might be searching the whole house if they didn't know the Hider was in the closet. Clearly, the chart entry to use is the area the Seeker announces they are searching. This completely fits with the idea that it takes longer to search a house than a closet, because no matter how fast the Seeker will find you when he opens it he still needs a few minutes to walk through the garage, swing by the kitchen, check the main bathroom, and peek under the bed before he gets there.

Some of the operations can result in 'undefined' as an answer. The rules tell you to divide the Hider's hits by the Seeker's hits on their Intuition + Perception test. If the Seeker gets 0 hits, the result required is not a number.

The Base Time is contained within the extended non-negative real number line, so division by zero can be defined as returning positive infinity. As a result, a Seeker with zero hits on his Intuition + Perception test never finds the Hider no matter how long he looks. Characters that are heavily wounded or completely oblivious are the most likely to roll zero hits, so that result seems genre-appropriate to me.

Even if the above issues were resolved, the rules still don't give a way to translate hits (on either test) into hours or minutes or into hiding locations on the chart or into any other useful value.

With the above issues resolved, the time it will take to find the Hider is completely unambiguous. The Seeker's intentions are an input into how long they'd have to search to find the Hider. If the Seeker rolls well enough, they'll find the Hider before their deadline. If they don't plan to search as long as it would take modified by their roll, they don't find the Hider at all. There deliberately isn't a "search as long as it takes" rule because if you guessed wrong about where the Hider is then "as long as it takes" is literally forever.

rampaging-poet wrote:True, the rules don't say how the Hider's roll affects the Base Time to find them. The simplest houserule would be to multiply the Base Time from the chart by the number of net hits on the Hider's roll to find the expected timeframe for the Seeker to find the Hider.

The Hider's roll doesn't have net hits. It doesn't have a threshold. Furthermore, there's no basis for multiplying the base time by anything - RAW tells you to divide the Hider's roll by the Seeker's roll. No multiplication is mentioned, nor does any operation involve doing math based on any time chart.

rampaging-poet wrote:The other reasonable option would be to start with the Base Time from the hiding locations chart and move up one spot on the Timeframe Chart (in the Skills chapter) for every hit on the Hider's check. I infer this from the fact the Hiding Locations chart exactly matches the middle of the Timeframe Chart. This causes high Stealth rolls to be worth more than high Perception rolls, but doesn't require a tiebreaker rule when both characters roll zero.

This just changes the failure state from 0/0 to 1/2. There's no entry on any of the time charts for going up half an interval.

rampaging-poet wrote:The Base Time is contained within the extended non-negative real number line, so division by zero can be defined as returning positive infinity. As a result, a Seeker with zero hits on his Intuition + Perception test never finds the Hider no matter how long he looks. Characters that are heavily wounded or completely oblivious are the most likely to roll zero hits, so that result seems genre-appropriate to me.

My rule also produces this result (If you get 0 hits, your time spent usefully searching is 0), but with less mind caulk and way less calculus.

After Sundown wrote:The hider makes an Intuition + Stealth test to determine how long the base time to find them would be, and that time is divided by the hits on the Seeker’s Perception test to determine how long it would actually take them to find the hiding character.

Emphasis mine. Whatever method is used to generate the Base Time, the actual time to find the Hider is the Base Time divided by the total hits on the Seeker's Intuition + Perception check. There is no issue with half-steps on the timeframe chart because the answer generated by that method is "half of whatever the timeframe chart says." Also, saying net hits was a mistake on my part. I meant to say total hits.

For division by zero, 1/0 being infinity on the positive line seemed intuitive from my mental model of division long before I learned enough calculus to justify it. After all, you can put nothing into a container as many times as you want without ever filling it up. I agree that the definition of 1/0 should have been supplied by the rules instead of having to be looked up on Wikipedia, but it actually is defined in this context.

As you said, RAW doesn't actually give an answer as to what the relationship between the Hider's check and the Base Time actually is, but after such a relation is invented no further mind caulk is required.

It's likely that in the next adventure if I want the characters to pick up on something, they'll need to put two skills together ...skills possessed by separate characters.

What's a good mechanic for representing one character using their specialized knowledge to help another character use their skill on something that would otherwise be unusable without said knowledge. Specifically, trying to decipher foreign musical notation when the bard isn't the one with Decipher Script?

Prak_Anima wrote:It's likely that in the next adventure if I want the characters to pick up on something, they'll need to put two skills together ...skills possessed by separate characters.

What's a good mechanic for representing one character using their specialized knowledge to help another character use their skill on something that would otherwise be unusable without said knowledge. Specifically, trying to decipher foreign musical notation when the bard isn't the one with Decipher Script?

Is there reason that you couldn't just count it as an Aid Another check?
In your example, the bard would simply roll his Perform check instead of Decipher Script.

Aid Another is a simple way to do it. This leaves the problem that whoever rolls the actual check could probably manage it on their own, theoretically.
I might let them add their results together, but halve said results (or double the DC; same effect, no rounding).
Or perhaps one of them (the one doing the primary skill - Decipher Script in this case - or whoever has the higher mod, or however you choose it) would roll the check but the other would have to succeed at their own check against a DC.
Or, as a subset of that last one, just require them to both roll vs the DC and both succeed to accomplish the task.

I suppose if you wanna be strict you could say that the Bard is the only one with the appropriate musical knowledge and thus the Bard has to roll the Decipher Script check, and someone else with the skill can Aid Another. That seems like you're just forcing them to fail at that point, though.

I was thinking about making it an aid another thing, is just seemed a bit odd.

Decipher Script check to determine that it is musical notation.

Perform check at -10 to perform the music from writing you cannot read. If the bard is willing to spend time 'learning' the piece with the help of the person who understands the notation (if not musical theory) they can get the check down to -4. If they gain the ability to read it (say with magic) the check is at +0.

The Decipher Script character could use aid another on the perform check.

Koumei mentioned making a Discworld d20 in some posts a few years ago (this is one of them). Was it finished? If it was, where can I download it?

This popped up in the "Bitching about mechanics we hate" thread, and it's relevant to my next session, but I didn't want to derail.

MGuy wrote:Any mechanic that has one player or only a single type of character play in a minigame that takes up a bunch of time and that no one else can compete in. Additionally any mechanic that actively discourages some number of people in the group from participating by punishing people who haven't maxed out the relevant stat resulting in a group loss whenever they fail.

So I'm working on a big party festival for the first part of the next adventure. Between the attacks by astral constructs, fugitive hunting soulknives, and psion hunting giant spiders, and being awarded with keys of Magnificent Mansion, I want my characters to be able to just walk around and do minigames and such.

What is the best way for me to do this without leaving people out?

I have a soulknife, an archery ranger/bard, a dualwield ranger, and a rogue.

I'm planning on

• an archery tournament
• an archery based game that is still rewarding if you're not super awesome amazing (because our archer actually kind of sucks)
• Summon Fighting (bear wrestling against Summoned Monsters)
• a game that basically simulates raiding a dragon's horde for shinies without killing said dragon first
• a game about climbing ladders while an attendant activates Heat and Chill Metal on them

Possibly also Summon Monster Chess (with provided staves) and Game of Forms.

And of course there will be gardens and menageries of exotic plants and animals and food and such.

Your best bet is to just divide them into two categories: "things everyone competes in (particularly team games)" and "specialist stuff that takes just a couple of rolls".

Alternatively, if they register as a team and take part in separate individual events, you can cycle through, exactly the same as if everyone fights their own goblin in a normal combat. You could even do it like Sword Coast Adventures.

Just for the record: Can you apply the same metamagic feat to a spell multiple times?

I think the answer is "no", but I don't know where the rules address that.