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Messages - Bloody Initiate

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1
Other RPGs / Re: Shadow Run
« on: May 15, 2018, 12:37:48 AM »
My group played 3e, 4e, and 5e.

We liked 4e the best, and it has most of my fondest memories for gaming at a con (Origins) as well as the coolest characters I ever played in pretty much any system ever.

5e kind of lost us. We’ve recently discussed trying it again, but basically they copy/pasted a ton of 4e (you could actually find identical paragraphs) and screwed some stuff up so they could release a new edition for some money. After that it was just a matter of new systems not having as much material as old systems, so why bother?

Also only 2 of our players knew the game well enough to run it, and one of them left. AND we loved going as a team to Origins and laying the smack down. When half the GMs left, and the version that lets us show off in public is smaller and plainly shittier, we ran out of enthusiasm for it.

Perhaps when I have some time tomorrow I’ll include descriptions of my favorite 4e characters. Not just because I love talking about them, but because it helps to understand what the system allowed on the street level.

I loved all my Shadowrun characters, and it’s amazing what you could do. It’s all well below the power level of D&D, but the delight is in the details. You don’t compare an Avengers movie to Enter the Dragon. They’re both action, but they’re not trying to do the same things at all.

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Min/Max 3.x / Re: How did you lose your CO virginity?
« on: March 17, 2013, 04:38:53 PM »
There was a similar thread called "When was the first time you were broken?" or something similar that asked a similar question. Since your subject line was dramatically different I answered it first.

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As for the first time I personally played a character who was broken, I played a fox-shapeshifter in Shadowrun before an errata kept their regeneration from healing drain. The character could overcast spells at a high force without worrying about hurting himself due to regeneration, and he had the capacity to control and re-write characters. He could sieze control of an NPC, probe their mind for any and all information he liked, and then re-write their memories to suit his purpose. He also had an extremely high initiative and made it his business to end encounters before they started. He made me think that perhaps a good way to measure if a character is broken is if you would tolerate them being used against you, and no player should tolerate having their backstory re-written and much of their RP personality dictated to them. My character never did it to a PC, but there was nothing really stopping him from doing so aside from my personal discretion and the GM's as well (Neither of us would have let it go in that direction). I didn't build that character though.

The first one I built who was really genuinely broken was my first character in a diceless system called Marvel Universe Roleplaying Game (MURPG). He would drain energy in a massive radius uncontrollably, killing thousands or millions depending on his location, and then have all that energy to teleport anywhere in any world to do it again in the next turn. The way I'd set him up he wouldn't actually have any choice about draining the maximum amount in the maximum radius, so the only way he could stop himself was to deliberately NOT relocate and let himself starve. Without stopping himself he'd kill all his allies and all of the world in a matter of days perhaps. I didn't even realize he'd work like this until a GM pointed it out to me when I PMed the character for approval in a PbP game. Given the rules of the world in which he existed, most of the more powerful heroes would have had a hard time stopping him, and since I didn't even want him to work like that, I scrapped the concept.

3
I'd rather get an apology from every single person who still hates on elves to this day because they got all butt hurt a few decades ago about some stupid splat book and act like in 3E elves are still overpowered when in fact they're probably the worst core race in the game that doesn't have split heritage.

I think you're mistaking the source of most hatred toward elves, especially considering the amount of people who have never heard of the Complete Book of Elves.

4
Given that the prices for making the goods are already lower than the prices listed in the books, I've always just assumed that any taxes are already factored into the final price. That may not be economically believable, but none of it is, I always just let stuff like this go because I favor the simplicity of set prices.

"How much does this cost?"

"Well let me look up the creation price, multiply it by four, modify it based on demand in this area, account for the size of this merchant's operation, include the sales tax of the region...."

...is just much slower and stupider than:

"10k cuz the book says it's 10k"

While I'm sure some very uninteresting people find all the possible economic factors fascinating, you occasionally have to step back from your fascination with numbers to play the game. It's similar to when you cross-class or template your character into and unrecognizable mess because doing so gives them the best statistical odds of defeating the encounters in the Monster Manual. You've just taken your numbers game too far, and someone should have told you so. Most optimizers have a basic affinity for this stuff, and pursuing it is pleasurable, but you have to be careful that you don't end up sitting at a table full of other players just playing with yourself.

5
I definitely agree with the negative sentiment toward builds that just slow the game down. Each system has a rhythm, and each system has builds that completely destroy that rhythm. I tend to dislike these builds no matter how powerful they are, because I'm always thinking of the other people at the table.

I was horrified recently to find myself being the amateur summoner who halted the game every time it was my turn because I had to flip through the book find out whether I could do something (I'm playing a summoner with the possession tradition in Shadowrun). My solution was to borrow the books for a week as well as hitting up forums and such to learn my damn business, now when the GM asks me a question about my character's capabilities I've got an answer for him or I can tell him that it's up to him because it turns out the developers did a lousy job of fleshing out my concept. None of us knew that until I did my research, but now that we do my character's turns are the simplest.

It is for this reason that I have always despised D&D's magic system. It's too much about preparation, which sounds fantastic and intellectual in theory, but when everyone else can just pass 8-hours in-game by saying "We rest 8 hours" and you've gotta crack your damn tome to figure out whether you'll need a flashlight today, I lose interest. It doesn't take that much longer, but it shakes you out of the flow of the adventure, and I've always hated it for that.

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General D&D Discussion / Re: Restating the Tarrasque as an Elder Evil
« on: March 06, 2013, 12:04:47 PM »
The more puny sentient beings try to "tame" the world, the bigger chance the Tarrasque awakens and crushes some civilizations for good measure (all those unlooted buried ruins have to come from somewhere after all).

This also explains the millennia-long failures to advance that plague fantasy settings ("The elder king's sword from 2k years ago is an artifact of enormous power.... and for some reason better-crafted than anything we've done since"), and in fact their tendency to DE-Evolve rather than evolve ("Damn those giants and dwarves built some fancy machines, more artifacts of enormous power and mystery!").

The only way most fantasy settings work is if they keep suffering cataclysms. This is actually why I liked the steampunk-ish Eberron ("WTF are you doing walking anywhere? Catch a train cave boy!").

Real great civilizations fall, there's plenty of historical evidence of that, but the way it's often handled in fantasy settings is just a little annoying. That being said fantasy settings are frequently devoid of the most annoying real life problems, like plagues wiping out massive portions of the population, and I don't remember the last time my D&D character had to use a lavatory. Maybe the absence of problems caused by poor infrastructure explains the lack of advances in that very infrastructure. If you never got a parasite from drinking out of the stream, maybe you never thought to build an aqueduct.

So yeah, it helps having the Tarrasque show up and destroy stuff every now and then. That woud explain the rather unique weapon technology of D&D without the corresponding societal advances, if you live in a world where giant bugs just eat people who walk on trails due to random encounters, maybe you'd be less worried about whether your city is making the best use of sunlight and rainwater.

7
Off Topic Fun / Re: Tips for the First Date?
« on: February 22, 2013, 04:59:25 PM »
Yeah I have a helluva time getting my GF to go see movies, she tends to see it as a lot of time spent sitting quietly not paying attention to each other. She is a bit extreme in her inability to sit still, but it's not a bad point to make.

As for actually going on dates to feel someone out I've done very little of that, which I think can work out to your advantage some times. So long as you're honest and attentive I'm not sure it matters where you go, just so long as she can trust that you'll reward her attention by being youself (honest) and that you'll return the favor (attentive).

I also saw a quote once saying something like "You can make more friends in one week by getting interested in people than you can make in one year by trying to get them interested in you."

I wouldn't worry about specific rules like "No kissing on the first date" or "pay for everything" because people love to play with those types of rules (I thought a kiss on the first date was the way you knew it was a good date) and adjust their boundaries just to throw you off guard, you don't want to play that sort of game. Some aren't bad assumptions though (Like people never mind when you plan to pay for things).

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General D&D Discussion / Re: My big character creation pet peeve
« on: February 22, 2013, 04:42:38 PM »
You changed your posts around, and I had a big reply. I have truncated it, the spoilers are unnecessary.

I basically see that every group is different and what works for one often won't work for the other. We obviously discuss things in terms of "most" games or "average" experiences, I simply suggest that those circumstances aren't nearly as prevalent as we think. A "general practice" may seem like a good measure for things, but I've learned without doubt that one size does not fit all in RPGs.

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As for "plants or moles" within the party
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I get tired of playing entry-level characters as well, but eventually I've learned to sort of welcome their expendability. I can't get attached to them either, but that ends up working because they either die or live long enough for me to build a connection to them. This has caused me to invest less and less in the character at chargen, because I find myself much more invested after playing them. I don't even name them half the time anymore, which seems ridiculous - because it is - but I've often been so much more thrilled with a name that came from the game.
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I have to play into a character's value, they don't usually start with much until they've earned it in-game. If people demand certain investments of me (Like a backstory, or the very reasonable demand that I name them) I don't mind, but I end up playing them all the way that feels right anyway, so having a backstory to live up to just seems like a hassle. In one particularly challenging years-long PbP game I find myself shedding almost every bit of the character's "identity" just to get my team through the missions alive. He was originally supposed to be selfish and generally a bit of loner (many of the characters were, it's an evil campaign) but very often I've had to ignore that RP to keep us from getting crushed as a party or to at least keep the GM from having to dispense too much mercy. The GM might have even hinted that he'd like more roleplaying from me, but he's good at making the fights tough, and my only salvation so far has been to keep him guessing.

For me I'm there to play, not write stories by myself or ponder personalities. I'm not the best at playing a character other than myself, but only because in my experience a lot of energy spent focused on your own character is a lot of energy you could have spent away from the table without taking other people's time.

This causes me to streamline my chargen and focus a lot on the party dynamic instead of my own character. Since this kinda works for me, I tend to find it frustrating when people haven't learned the same lessons I have. It's fine to have a different preference, I just place the table above the person at all times and prefer other people do the same.

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Gaming Advice / Re: Looking for Fighting Naked People rules. Are there any?
« on: February 22, 2013, 03:42:49 PM »
I would hate to have to fight a bunch of sexy naked women. I wouldn't find it especially distracting, I just hate the idea of making a world with LESS sexy naked women. It's one of the reasons I don't understand why young women are so disproportionately the victims of murder and other violent crime, don't the criminals have any sense of preserving great works?

As for rules for it, I think I would perhaps increase the crit range of everyone who was fighting them by 1 or 2, and make the non-naked fighters succeed on a sort of composure test (If they weren't immediately threatening I think a lot of combatants would struggle to justify attacking naked people). I think the composure test would be a will save vs. (10 + Cha Mod + Con Mod or the target's diplomacy check, if you want it to be a sexual thing remove the con mod for foes that don't fit the player's sexual preference). They aren't making an auto-seduction check, they're making a check to see if you count them as defenseless/harmful, or at least to see if you'd rather take prisoners than go for kills. A lot of times it isn't a sexual thing, but I think I'd have an easier time striking down naked dudes than I would have striking down naked women.

I think once you've made your first slash into naked flesh though, destroying its appeal, you really don't need to make another test to see if you can do it again. It's a lot less appealing now that it's bloody and missing some of the best parts. You see a sexy naked person who fits your sexual orientation and you think "Damn it would be shame to ruin that" but once you hit it with a sword your feelings probably switch to disgust very quickly and you'd like to make it stop writhing and moaning ASAP. No arguing for your character's fetishes because we aren't playing THAT game. I do like that BoEF introduces an appearance score though, saves me from using the con mod.

As for things like naked undead and other things that are clearly outside your racial category, they don't really get a check. A naked dead person coming at you is just as appalling as any other dead person coming at you, and if you don't see a creature as anything like you then you will not sympathize with it no matter its state of dress.

When it comes to Supernatural abilities and similar such things, I don't really see it as the same discussion. In addition to plenty of such rules being present in-game, their primary effect is ignoring any preferences player characters bring to the table.

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General D&D Discussion / Re: My big character creation pet peeve
« on: February 22, 2013, 02:48:18 PM »
To me the disaster drawing people together or other means of grouping up for the first session is fine, but it is vital that the players communicate during the creation process so they are all playing people who are willing to work together even if thy haven't work together before.
Pretty much.  And also for the niche protection issue that someone else brought up above. 

We always talk about our characters ahead of time, though.  It seems pretty ridiculous not to, or, better said, to forbid people from doing so.

It doesn't seem as ridiculous when you are interested in the intrigue of strangers working together or if you just want to make things easier on your players RP-wise (AKA roleplaying strangers is easier when you start out as such). I've played in game where one of the members was a plant and she attacked us part way through the adventure, that was very memorable. I don't think it's necessarily the best way to do things all the time, I just think it's a legit way to play a certain style of game. Overall I think most strange ideas can work if you do them right and so long as your plan is for everyone to have fun. A good GM with a good group of players can make almost anything work.

Similarly a good director can make it OK to strangle one of their actresses. It sounds ridiculous from every angle, even when you see that everything turned out OK it seems ridiculous, but someone made it work and no one actually got hurt.

The important thing is to have an objective for your strange-ness and to focus on making sure it's still fun for everyone. Not knowing what everyone did can be fun and can change how you approach situations, it's challenging and engaging. However it's also very easy to spoil the whole thing, which can and does happen. Get the right group and the right GM though and it's just more territory you can cover with your team of badasses that other groups never knew could work. A group that's played with each other a long time gains a lot of competence just from knowing and working with each other for a long time. If they devote the energy and the focus though then they simply have more playing power than a less-experienced group. My group that I've been playing with for years can just do MORE than other groups because we know where we stand with each other.

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General D&D Discussion / Re: Katana=Schimitar? Discuss.
« on: February 22, 2013, 01:08:17 PM »
There's a 3rd party source book called "mercenaries" I think that offers more of what should have been in the game to begin with regarding martial weapons and craftsmanship.

Something that annoys the hell out of me with D&D is that crafting is the realm of wizards and "well-made" = "magic." The best a smith can do is make something "masterwork" or "dwarvencraft."

I like non-magical power, it's harder to detect, harder to dispel, and more cost-effective (Although since 3.5 hates non-magic it's also extremely easy to destroy with level 1 spells).

So that mercenaries book gives you options like laminated weapons (I think it's "laminated," but it's layered steel) that add +1 damage I think and serrated weapons that add +1 crit range (Again, going on my memory here).

The point is there just isn't a lot of room for mundane improvement in D&D, and mundane improvement is exactly what made feudal weapon technology special. Katanas were a brilliant design for their time and location, but the superior craftsmanship and all that were what made things special. There were great craftsman all over the world making weapons for the combat appropriate to their time and place too, comparing them is silly.

It's not apples and oranges, it's the craft skill making a difference instead of being magic, and the differences in mundane power being irrelevant compared to magic. Weighing the value of +1 damage vs. +2 potential damage is exactly the problem with the non-magic classes. It's completely irrelevant past level 2 and you aren't getting a big boost one way or the other. Who cares if your weapon is better at slashing than piercing? You still suck because you brought a sword in the first place. Nothing about D&D 3.5 supports debates like these. It's a black hole in the system.

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General D&D Discussion / Re: I Don't Like Weird Races in My Games
« on: February 22, 2013, 12:46:43 PM »
I don't like the horrific monstrosities that result from a lot of templates, and just about anyone with an aberration in their family tree isn't welcome, but I like the roleplaying opportunies that arise from a bloodline or a minor template. Things like a good-aligned crusader with a demonic bloodline appeal to me because I like the idea of the character who has to reconcile their life with their family tree. It's a source of conflict and difficulty, and that's what I like about it.

I also love warforged, and play them a LOT. I stick with making them combat-oriented because to me the idea of being created with a clear purpose sounds both liberating and interesting. I think in the last several games I've played a Warforged the DM made it clear that we were NOT in Eberron, and still liked the idea of this strange-looking metal man romping about in the wilderness. It adds mystery and character.

I also like treating weird races as loot or as assimilated companions. So if a player's character dies infiltrating the lizard temple, suddenly they have the option of coming in as a lizardfolk or something similar because there are lots of those in the area. Or when your party is smashing through the tower of some mad wizard, you pull the blanket off a suit of armor that turns out to be a conscious sentient being (A PC). We've had a lot of orc and goblin party members come from these scenarios.

Changelings I also enjoy because they basically fit in anywhere, that's their whole schtick. The best part is you don't have to look or behave any differently because you're disguising yourself to blend in and acting appropriately. In one game I plotted to play as a changeling who pretended to be a shifter. One odd race pretending to be another. That character would have been a warshaper too, so they would have been a very convincing shifter who was also mysteriously charismatic when necessary.

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General D&D Discussion / Re: My big character creation pet peeve
« on: February 22, 2013, 12:08:10 PM »
When another game does something better I copy it.

In one RPG I play the players are typically contacted as a team because they're known for functioning as one (Kinda like a security firm).

In another (Shadowrun) typically only one player gets the mission pitch and they recruit the others from their contact list or otherwise (Sometimes the NPC assigning the mission has their own specialists they want you to bring along, these are other players).

In multiple other systems you begin as members of an organization. You are typically "recruit" level characters and you're on a first assignment that will turn out to be bigger than anyone expected.

In D&D we've gravitated toward a "disaster brings exceptional individuals together" scenario where there is no NPC in a tavern with a mission, we're just all around an area at the same time something tremendous happens and we band together to fight it off. Even large Medieval cities won't have been THAT big, and so it's not too strange to have a few exceptional individuals within ear-shot of a zombie attack.

Typically we make characters with the other characters in mind, and while I don't mind a scenario in which we haven't met each other I get irritated when players or the GM don't appreciate the anti-catalytic nature of such a meeting. As another RPer once put it "If you guys don't work together, we don't have a game." So as long as players are willing to put aside stupid things like the idea of elves and dwarves hating each other, then this type of approach can work. If everyone starts roleplaying too hard too early though then you really don't have a game, and for those of us who never gave a shit about fluff (Me), this can get annoying.

My pet peeves at character creation are:

Wanting backstories on entry-level characters. "My backstory is I just graduated from fighter college and I'm about to spend the rest of my life hating myself for it." I can't stand the idea of people having epic back stories when they've never been on a single damn adventure yet.

Now if the GM was willing to back up their demand with an Exp reward between 0 and 1000 for a good back story (With a limit on length), then it would make sense. Instead of "Yeah some orcs killed my family but I fought them off when I was 12" from a level nothing punk, I actually like the idea of "Yeah so I killed some orcs once, but I made it sound cool in my backstory, so now I'm level 2 bitches. Suck it!"

That gives you a more diverse group experience-wise (believable), satisfies the backstory fetish, and gets players who have a knack for storytelling a leg up. I'm very big on rewarding good behavior and punishing bad behavior. If you simply set yourself up to "train" people, they'll all learn very quickly what works and what doesn't. Any power discrepancy gets sorted out over 1-2 sessions.

Another pet peeve of mine is players who make decisions at character creation which will adversely affect everyone else's options. I got to my group one night and we were supposed to be playing some WoD game, and the first two guys there had chosen to play hunters. That meant all of us had the choice of also playing hunters who were weak, or playing something supernatural that the hunters would hate. That pissed me off.

I like freedom, I like choices, and I like variety. So when someone else at the table is making a character with an attitude of "if they don't like it, to hell with them" they're putting the whole group in a tough situation. I played a Ravenloft game where the sorceror character decided ahead of time to be evil and to be greedy about every bit of power we found, our characters fought multiple times. In another game the same player wanted to play a rapist, you can guess how well that went. In another he played a child-rapist, which he argued none of us should have had a problem with because we were all evil characters that game, but if you go to prison for raping children that's the one offense all the other bad guys won't tolerate. That player as you can imagine was a consistent source of dischord within the group, especially with me.

GMs have to be realistic about their demands on players at character creation, and players need to keep in mind that the other people at the table are as essential to the success of the game as they are. GMs have the power to reward and punish players, other players have that power as well as the power of their characters who are actually within the game (So if players dispense justice and save the GM the trouble, the GM doesn't lose face. Unfortunatey group-wide punishment denies the punished player a scapegoat, so they don't handle it nearly as well).

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Gaming Advice / Re: How do you feel about fudging die rolls?
« on: February 14, 2013, 07:15:08 PM »
Generally I see this on a spectrum like:

Less GM Preparation<-------------------------------->More GM Preparation
Lots of fudging and improvising<-------------------->Very little fudging and situational improv

The better you prepare the less you'll have to work and improvise come game night. However no one is perfect, or even if they are their schedule won't be, so most people can't prepare games as meticulously as they might like.

Perhaps most importantly, you shouldn't expect your GM to have their shit together when they just found out they were GMing 2 minutes before the game started. However as a GM you should prepare as much as possible if you know far enough ahead of time. Basically players and GMs both have a job to do to make the game work, and neither should have unrealistic expectations of the other.

I personally like to let things run their course as much as possible, but have enjoyed the mercy of the GM too often to issue a blanket denial of mercy when I'm GMing. I PREFER to have things arranged and plotted so well that encounters will be engaging without being super deadly to players. However I am never that prepared because I'm lazy and don't GM that often.

That being said I voted for the "GM can fudge as much as they want" option in the poll because it doesn't actually contradict the other options. The GM CAN fudge as much as they want, they're the GM after all, but each will have personal preferences for how much they do it and the different situations will call for differing levels of GM interference. My personal preference is much stricter, but if I see fit to fudge a roll I don't want any fuss about it. I CAN fudge as much as I like, I WILL fudge as little as possible, aiming for "never," making my way there one game at a time.

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Other Games / Re: Ticket to Ride
« on: February 26, 2012, 04:28:30 AM »
Got to play with 5 people tonight, definitely a lot busier. Luckily everyone but me drew tickets on the East Coast (Playing the U.S.A. version), which is basically a nightmare for everyone there, so I didn't have to get involved in their rat race. However I DID get to watch them fighting each other like mad for every bit of track.

I mostly just screwed around collecting cards and buying the 15 point tracks, but eventually their fight spilled over to the West Coast and they immediately were cancelling each other all over the place again. I only got blocked two or three times the whole game, but I still lost horribly because I made no effort to get any of my tickets done (It just seemed like more fun to build the big 6 train lines :P ). The amount they suffered at each other's hands just made me so glad I wasn't in there with them. One guy spent the whole game building around the blockades people had dropped on him (Probably always by accident). He couldn't get anything down with minimal effort, what sucked is it was his first time playing too.

By the end of a 5 player game though there isn't anyone who can do things the way they originally intended. You can't see most of the board for the trains all over it.

16
Gaming Advice / Re: How often do you min-max?
« on: February 17, 2012, 05:40:25 PM »
For the record, according to the 3.5 MM Kobolds worship a god who isn't a dragon and whose only power appears to be misanthropy. I know that specific beats core or whatever, but when the specific sources suck I tend to fall back on core fluff. The idea of kobolds becoming badass because they're actually dragons is ridiculous, thus I fall back on the story that they're dog people who resent everyone specifically because everyone is better than them. Dragon are impressive, the idea of them needing to pick their chosen people from the most pathetic things on any planet is LOL-worthy. I know that's not the official word, but like I said the official word is dumb.

As I said above though, if you just like kobolds, that's just fine. I just reject all suggestion that they have a mechanical or fluff advantage. For me that part of that book is just graffiti.

17
Gaming Advice / Re: How often do you min-max?
« on: February 12, 2012, 06:21:04 PM »
If you actually like kobolds that's fine, but for me kobolds were always the pathetic ratty dog people who I would annihilate idly (kinda like drumming your fingers on a table or desk). At their peak they might be a punchline. I believe WotC actually shares my view, and thus laughed their asses off when they tricked optimizers into loving kobolds. I have not fallen for their trick.

I remember awhile back I either arrived late to a campaign or my character died, I don't remember which. Either way it resulted in me having to make a new character mid-game. My first encounter was with kobolds who had a lot of elevation on the party and were raining crossbow bolts on us. I realized I'd failed to put a ranged weapon on my character, so I picked up a garden stone (we were in a courtyard of some kind) and threw it, killing one of the kobolds. We used appropriate rules for improvised weapons and cover and all that, kobolds are just that bad. I recall I had to roll well, but I don't think it was a nat 20 or anything, just about what you'd expect.

18
Gaming Advice / Re: How often do you min-max?
« on: February 12, 2012, 12:03:11 PM »
I find the idea of NOT min-maxing to be thoroughly weird. As far as I'm concerned if you didn't want me to use the rules then you shouldn't have taught them to me. I don't just go for the most powerful options I know all the time though, and in fact I don't think I ever have. Especially in D&D I always felt the most powerful builds required you to sacrifice way too much. As much as I enjoy D&D, I genuinely hate a lot of the staples and favorites. Wizards and kobolds, for example, are a staple and a favorite respectively, and I think the first is intolerable to play and the latter is WotC's biggest prank they've ever played on min-maxers (And of course it worked).

There really isn't any point to having rules if you don't want people to try and master them though. The notion is idiotic. One of the biggest optimizer-haters I know even accepts that "asking players not to optimize is like asking a bear not to have fur." It's ridiculous.

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Other Games / Re: Ticket to Ride
« on: February 11, 2012, 05:11:54 PM »
When I've played there isn't a LOT of deliberate route cutting, it hurts pretty hard when people do it to you though. Typically if I have a route that requires a specific easy-to-take piece of track I buy it within my first few turns.

The trouble is there's no really hiding what you're doing, it's just a matter of pure luck whether or not it's convenient for them to kill you or not. If it is, then you're fucked. You can pretend to bluff or whatever, but it doesn't really work that well if someone is in the mood to hit you and they have the cards to do it. Usually the spot in which they'll cut you off is a handy piece of track to have anyway. Also if you have certain high-traffic tickets and they do too, there's a good chance they'll cut you off without even knowing it.

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General D&D Discussion / Re: Rolling dice Vs point buy
« on: February 11, 2012, 01:39:21 AM »
I dislike point buy because it creates characters with stupid stats. Dump stats are stupid. Having my character lack any personality, force of will, or sense of self just so I can survive is stupid.

That being said, rolling shitty stats is just as stupid. I've done both.

Really I lean toward the view that having bad stats is really lame, and they aren't that big a deal anyway, so I tend to favor rolling with a very high-power arrangement (Like roll 12 times, take the best 6). It's never that I want mad power, I just get sick of roleplaying retards or otherwise wildly one-dimensional characters. If you use point buy, you are going to dump one or two stats and if you roleplay that stats you end up being a one-dimensional dweeb, which is usually going to make you comically bad in one area. I would rather just have a 10 or 11 in those areas.

If point-buys started at 10, I don't think I'd have a problem with it. Starting at 8 creates all kinds of annoying issues with how you roleplay and how your character interacts with the world. Everyone plays differently, but generally speaking they all let a character's stats influence their view of the character in different ways. So it sucks having that 6 or that 8 right there, because everyone zeroes in on it and gives you shit when you don't act that stupid or that reserved. Everyone also has a different idea of what each stat means, so that 6 in Charisma means you're ugly to one group but just means you have no personality in another group. It doesn't matter who's wrong, because you aren't going to waste the group's time arguing with them. Give me "average" any day, please, because at least then people don't expect anything of you. Point buy almost guarantees that people will look at your stats and decide how THEY want you to roleplay, and you're going to catch shit at one point or another.   Like the view or not, what you end up with is a waste of time.

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