The Gaming Den

spongeknight wrote:I never stated that you'd miss multiple sessions, and that is a crazy assertion to make. Is his DM some sort of asshole who wouldn't let the guy roll a temporary character? I have no idea.

sabs wrote:That could potentially keep the player from playing for the next 3-10 sessions depending.

Oh, some other idiot who made the same mistake, and then we corrected him, and then you made the same mistake.

spongeknight wrote:Anyway, combats only lasting a few minutes is little consolation for not getting to play. I honestly don't know why you're arguing for effects that literally stop you from playing the game you have shown up to play.

Every time someone besides you acts in a turn based game you are not getting to act. This is not not playing the game. Every time someone casts Stun Ray, or Hold Person, you do not get to act, this is not not playing. Just because you are not acting literally every second does not mean you are not playing the game. Not acting for a couple rounds at most is not a fucking big deal. It is still playing the game.

spongeknight wrote:And unless effects that take you out of combat are trivially easy to heal- like, you can't ever not have the healing effects- there are times where that player will be waiting hours to play again.

Yes, it is almost like we are saying that you will be able to turn yourself back some time before hours, like right after the fucking fight.

For those who expressed interest:

Wepons of the Gods, for all its other failings (mostly in the area of balance- some weapons are completely unusable, many styles are horrendously bad, making your own style is easy to abuse) has a fantastic fight system. It's a pure kung-fu game, so everyone starts play with a few martial art styles based off of your core attributes that do different things to your attacks or defenses and cost different amounts, so every turn you have multiple options about what to do.

You attack and defend with dice pools of d10s, trying to match as many numbers on the die as possible. If you roll a pair of threes you get a 23 (before character bonuses from weapon stats, martial art moves ect). If you roll three threes you get a 33, four threes gets you a 43, ect.

The thing is you can take up to two dice from your rolls and set them aside for later. So if you roll two threes and a nine, you can squirrel that nine away for future use. Which means that after a few rounds of fighting where you've been rolling lots of pools of dice you're going to have a pair of something sitting in your river- and when it comes time to put the hurt out, you might roll a pair of the same number and then add them all together for a quadruple. And extra damage is assigned based on how much over their defense roll you got, so you generally do about half damage in the fight and half damage with the killing blow to most enemies.

It's definitely a fun system. I've ran several games of it, and I'd really like to play in one myself. I'm pretty sure there's an updated version of the system that's called a different name but I don't have that one.

@Cyberzombie: Well yes, I agree with that. The only thing I'm arguing about is the frequency in which players can be expected to die/instantly lose a fight. This whole argument started because of a disagreement about whether or not beholders in a beholder-themed adventure should keep all of their crazy "multiple SoD effects every round" abilities when adventurers would be expected to fight them a lot. I'm of the opinion that such a scenario would result in players constantly becoming bored and detached from the game because their characters keep dying arbitrarily and quickly with no imput from them, making them care far less about the health of the dude they're supposed to be and just generally shitting on their fun. Other people are claiming that SoD effects tossed out by both sides of the table make fights fast and interesting. I don't think anyone here is arguing against character death itself, just the expectations about it.

spongeknight wrote: @Cyberzombie: Well yes, I agree with that. The only thing I'm arguing about is the frequency in which players can be expected to die/instantly lose a fight. This whole argument started because of a disagreement about whether or not beholders in a beholder-themed adventure should keep all of their crazy "multiple SoD effects every round" abilities when adventurers would be expected to fight them a lot. I'm of the opinion that such a scenario would result in players constantly becoming bored and detached from the game because their characters keep dying arbitrarily and quickly with no imput from them, making them care far less about the health of the dude they're supposed to be and just generally shitting on their fun. Other people are claiming that SoD effects tossed out by both sides of the table make fights fast and interesting. I don't think anyone here is arguing against character death itself, just the expectations about it.

Any adventure that consists of one monster type encountered repeatedly is going to get stale. There's a reason why every edition of D&D has produced at least 3 monster manuals.

Regarding the boredom issue, I've played several editions of D&D and by far 4E seemed to have people getting the most bored. While save-or-dies may result in frustration, I've never seen them result in boredom. A rotating door of new characters is rarely fun, but as mentioned you can solve that by making save or die similar to ghoul paralysis, where you get disabled for the combat but not outright killed. A death ray can lower you to dying and prevent you from re-entering the fight. That feels dangerous without having all the complications of actual character death.

Cyberzombie wrote:A death ray can lower you to dying and prevent you from re-entering the fight. That feels dangerous without having all the complications of actual character death.

That's a much better thing than what 3.5 has where the same death ray makes you wander off and play smash bros until you can get resurrected, but how common will effects be that take you out of combat? Actually fighting people is the main fun of the game, so enemies having effects that make you stop fighting takes most of the wind out of the tabletop sails here.

I'm not entirely sure if people are advocating a whole "most fights should be both sides tossing SoD effects as the main element of the fight" or if they are just saying "SoD should be an option to potentially reduce some number of enemies/allies in some fights," because right now I'm not entirely sure what I'm actually arguing against. Are we even still talking about DnD 3.5 and possibly removing/altering SoD-based creature abilities, or are we talking about an entirely new game system here? Because, once again, this discussion started with whether or not it would be a good idea to have beholders keep their numerous SoD rays in an adventure where beholders are frequent fights.

I've always thought Beholders from 3rd edition were the biggest sacred cow in the Monster Manual. The defenses are terrible. Sub 30 AC, Sub 100 HP, no DR, no SR, no Fast Healing or Regeneration and not a single save over 11, with 2 of them under 10 and one them at 5.

A creature called BEHOLDER that is an 8 foot by 8 foot sphere with about 200 pounds of eyes and brain dedicated to sight doesn't have True-Seeing while at the same time incongruous, bizarre and conceptually weak monsters like the Glabrezu, a Giant Wish-Granting Lobster-Demon, has it.

The feats are all spent on save-boosting stuff because Aberrations only have Good Will and the Beholder has stats that are just a debacle and even then 9/5/11 isn't a place to be for a CR 13 monster.

They're called Eye Tyrants and built up as masterminds but they're a total "Monster's Monster." They exist solely to exist somewhere for a valiant adventurer to kill it. Zero out of combat utility. No Sense Motive or Appraise for creature with 15 or better in every mental stat that is literally 200 pounds of floating eyeballs? No Bluff, Diplomacy, Intimidate?
Charm Person/Charm Monster is it, folks.


It has a +9 touch attack which sounds good, few things for anything approaching a martial combatant sound quite as sexy as "touch attack," but at CR 13 and hundreds of thousands of gold at Wealth By Level, boosting Touch AC shouldn't be that hard.

It has 10 of these touch attacks and they either tickle you for 20 damage or flat out remove you from a combat. At DC 17 it is just low enough to be not that big of a deal but just high enough to piss most people off utterly when they roll low or roll a 1 and just straight, I don't know, DIE.

The thing is, it is supposed to be the 10th/11th level party Big Bad so if you tweak it so that its marquee ability of Eye Rays are better, it stomps those encounters and is just a big fat Kiter. The first instinct is Elite Arrary, 4 to 8 HD and call it a wrap but then you take the logical Ability Focus, +1 to Charisma, high Charisma route and you just whoopsie-daisyed your way into a creature with 6 or so "Save or Lose/Outright DIE" spells DCing around 30.

The thing has been conceptually brilliant but a mechanical mess for more than 10 years now. I don't even know if it is stronger than a max HD Large Gauth, the CR 10 "Lesser Beholder." It certainly fits a weird role.

Cyberzombie wrote: Look. I know losing sucks, but that doesn't mean we should have every football, chess and poker game end in a tie because we're afraid that one player may not have fun.

If you're playing regular chess and one player is still playing after the other player has lost, you're doing it wrong.

If you're playing poker, and a player has a chance to go bust before he even has a chance to make his first bid, your antes are probably too high.

Team sports are an interesting example, though. In most sports, it's possible (if unlikely) that a player could go from being perfectly fine to being knocked out after a single action (through injury or by getting kicked out of the game for a serious rule violation). I would argue that in almost all team sports, those actions are highly discouraged, though.

Cyberzombie wrote:While save-or-dies may result in frustration, I've never seen them result in boredom.

(a) That's pretty faint praise.
(b) In my experience, having a PC killed or turned to stone or whatever in the middle of an adventure almost always means: abort the current adventure to walk back to town, fork over some money for a cure, then walk back to the adventure site and resume where we left off. Even if you hand-wave some of that, it's usually pretty dull stuff.

One more thing: adding save-or-die effects to 4E while keeping the same system of "spam the exact same goddamn at-will power twenty times in a row" would not make it an interesting game. I would have thought that was obvious.

I personally like SoDs as a GM, but less so as a player unless the game has a 'One more time' power, like Shadowrun's Hand of God or Eberron action points.

As a GM though, it's a useful device I can use to up the tension - sure, you can slaughter hordes of beholders or demons or whatever - but miss a save and you're toast. It adds a sense of urgency that mid and high level DnD often lacks. That said, what I've done to alleviate the issue of a player dying and not having anything to do is that I'll let them control the mobs or an antagonist NPC, or give the player a solo session in whichever afterlife their character ends up in.

I'd go with something like Sentinels' dead powers -- you get a set of powers you can use while you're dead or otherwise rendered unable to take normal actions for the rest of the fight (5+ rounds of no actions).

spongeknight wrote: That's a much better thing than what 3.5 has where the same death ray makes you wander off and play smash bros until you can get resurrected, but how common will effects be that take you out of combat? Actually fighting people is the main fun of the game, so enemies having effects that make you stop fighting takes most of the wind out of the tabletop sails here.

All creatures have effects that take people out of combat. Damage can take people out of combat. It's just really a matter of how fast it removes you from combat.

How often you want save-or-lose effects in the game is going to be dependent on what kind of stuff PCs can do. CR X monsters are supposed to be roughly equivalent to a level X PC, so if wizards are tossing effects that can remove CR X monsters in one round, monsters need the same things. Whether they do that via damage or by save-or-lose effects can be varied, but if one side can drop people in one round, the other side needs to do the same thing.

3E is rocket launcher tag. Unless you go rewriting the entire game, you're more or less stuck with it. The best you can do is make people not die. Just have them get knocked out instead of killed.

Off topic post

name_here wrote:

Uploaded with ImageShack.us

Is that really from Fire Emblem?

The design of that map it looks more like one of the entrances to the Glast Heim castle complex in Ragnarok Online.

I'll have to assume that one game has informed or influenced the other.

Never played Ragnarok online, but I can confirm that is the last level from Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance.

Judging__Eagle wrote:Off topic post

name_here wrote:

Uploaded with ImageShack.us

Is that really from Fire Emblem?

The design of that map it looks more like one of the entrances to the Glast Heim castle complex in Ragnarok Online.

I'll have to assume that one game has informed or influenced the other.

You're right.
Totally looks like a private server.

If there is a thick curtain in the room, does it block the beholder's eye rays?

If you are in a cardboard box, can a beholder's eye ray hit you?

Do beholders eat? If yes, do they have an anus?

OgreBattle wrote:If there is a thick curtain in the room, does it block the beholder's eye rays?

It blocks line of sight. Yes.

OgreBattle wrote:If you are in a cardboard box, can a beholder's eye ray hit you?

It blocks line of sight. No.

OgreBattle wrote:Do beholders eat? If yes, do they have an anus?

Yes. And this question makes me want to shit out of my eyes.


My suggestion. Food is digested in the mouth and spat out when it is done like a spent stick of gum. Beholders have terrible breath.

Yeah, it's from the epilogue of Path Of Radiance (the first one with Ike).

erik wrote: My suggestion. Food is digested in the mouth and spat out when it is done like a spent stick of gum. Beholders have terrible breath.

[quote="Lords of Madness]Once the nutrients and oxygen provided by the fluid are completely consumed, the waste liquid drains back into the beholder’s cavernous maw. It is then expelled or, more often, it dribbles out in a constant stream of foul-smelling drool. A beholder that goes without food grows more lethargic as its body begins to dry out.
Anything a beholder finds indigestible is either vomited back up and spat out or slowly absorbed into the lining of its stomach and eventually embedded in the inside surface of its “skeleton.”[/quote]

Lords of Madness decided to go with the whole...

"They drool poop!" thing instead of just saying food is magically
vaporized or something. Thanks, guys.

I'd still take a 3E beholder over a 4E one.
At least the Beholder can get the job done and doesn't
do chickenshit damage or allow 4 saves or something.

It just kills 'em.

I feel like the main complaint about Save or Dies is that there isn't enough warning for the character death. With other attacks it takes multiple rounds for you to die, in which you can presumably run away or react, with SoDs its just boom you live or you die with little warning built in. SoDs can be tense and enjoyable when well used (you carefully listen for any signs of movement, intently gazing through your mirrors as you descend into the Medusa's lair...) but in the hands of a bad MC it can be really frustrating to die to a surprise save or die (oops you missed your listen check and rolled poorly against the beholder, your dead).

Beholder drool sounds like a potential delicacy

Like you catch a beholder and feed him nothing but raspberries, he'll start drooling fermented raspberry liquor.