Category Archives: Tabletop

Gaming, Tabletop

On Fires, Part 2

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Blaugust Post #30

A major part of what makes Burning Wheel interesting to me is the character creation. The Lifepath system is really a modified version of point-buy, but you have the character’s entire backstory built-in to the process. It’s got some… balance issues, but it makes the actual process of creating a character rather fun.

The basics are that you determine the various professions and/or roles that your character follows through life. Each one adds Time (measured in years), Resources, Skill Points, and Trait Points, some of which will automatically be spoken for in the way of required skills/traits. They’re divided into settings, such as City Dweller, Noble Court, etc. Your next lifepath can be any that you qualify for in your current setting, or a setting specified by the last lifepath you took. Moving to some settings (such as Noble Court) is fairly difficult, but some settings (such as Outcast) can be entered from almost anything.

Learn by Doing

To demonstrate the process, I’ll start with a character concept from the first RPG I played where I was more focused on the character than the character’s combat effectiveness. (The fact that the setting was modified World of Darkness helped this a lot.) Zane Dimetrius was a sorcerous professor with a decent bit of martial ability. He specialized in earth spells, but that doesn’t really seem to be an option in this system. In Burning Wheel, this means he’ll need to pick up lifepaths along the way that enable magic and some bit of physical ability, while I’d like to end at Scholar (which is in City Dweller).

Looking at Scholar, it informs some other requirements by itself. It requires either one of a number of related academic lifepaths or any sorcerous one. Since this character is intended to be a spellcaster anyway, that requirement shouldn’t be too hard to meet. You have to start with a “Born” lifepath, and I decided to go for Born Noble. Being born noble gives you the required trait “Mark of Privilege” (which may or may not be good depending on where you find yourself). The bit of martial ability is covered by becoming a Page. Page is normally the start of the path to Knight (you also have to go through Squire), but Zane decided that wasn’t for him and moves off to Arcane Devotee. This is the Noble version of the “starter” spellcaster lifepath; it grants the “gifted” trait required to actually cast spells.

From there we move out of the Noble setting. Arcane Devotee can lead to the City Dweller setting, which contains Sorcerer. (It can alternately lead to the Noble Court setting, which contains the somewhat different Court Sorcerer). Having finally picked up the sorcery skill, we finish at Scholar.

Preliminary Results

Tallying up everything gained in this process, we have a character who is 37 years old, with the required traits Base Humility, Mark of Privilege, and Know-it-All. Gifted is also a requirement, but doesn’t come automatically, one of the remaining 3 trait points must be spent on it. For skills, Riding, Calligraphy, Sorcery, and Read are required; many optional ones can come along with this choice of lifepaths like Write, Sword, and Instruction. The skill system is interesting enough to be expanded on in its own post, but there are a lot of skills listed in the book.

The number of stat points you have to spend is based on your final age, with some bonuses for various paths along the way. Generally starting older will give you more points for mental stats and fewer for physical stats, although starting younger than 15 will make you a bit short on both. While there are still plenty of decisions to make about where to spend all of the resulting points, the framework of the character is here. This is a lot more than you can get out of a lot of other systems, and it also makes the creation process itself interesting. Using a session to create characters while in a group seems like it would add some fun as well.

Gaming, Tabletop

On Fires, Part 1

Blaugust Post #29

On the recommendation of another, I recently picked up Burning Wheel Gold. This is the most recent version of Burning Wheel, which is so far the only pen-and-paper RPG I’ve taken a glance at and said I’d never want to play. So far my opinion on that hasn’t changed, but it does have some really interesting ideas.

BW_logo

The Catch

Unfortunately, getting a book is somewhat annoying. This edition of Burning Wheel was never released as a PDF. A limited number of stores around the country are even listed as carrying them, and the one closest to me was sold out. Amazon does not have new ones for any reasonable amount of money. The only real option is to order it from the official website, which means another account and all that goes with it.

Wikipedia claims that there’s no PDF because of piracy, but this seems like a ridiculous justification. This is really the iTunes problem again: if something is easy to access in a legal manner, people tend to do it. If the book was on, say, drivethroughrpg.com, then lazy people would just get that instead of pirating it. The people too cheap to do that weren’t going to buy the book anyway, and considering them as a lost sale is fallacious.

Gaming, Tabletop

On High-Value Targets

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Blaugust Post #24

Shadowrun is certainly going interestingly. Our group has managed to make a name of sorts for ourselves in Boston, getting us closer to some of the objectives we got there for (and a brand new one that pays really well). The problem is that completing some of these jobs is likely to bring a ton of heat onto us in very short order, probably to the level that will force us to leave Boston.

the prodigies

We’re nothing if not ambitious, however.

Instead of picking and choosing, we’re trying to get several of the jobs done within a time span of about 48 hours. During this period, we’ll have to erase police records, protect a series of shipments (with a large side order of gang violence), break into a well-guarded mansion, and potentially recover a magical item of unknown origin (currently held by a shadowrunner team with different goals). On top of all of this, another opposing team is probably keeping track of us and may have to be dealt with.

the prodigies home base

As the team’s decker, I get to study up on the disabling aspects of matrix use. I’m far from the most gifted character in combat, and it looks like we might be doing a lot of it. On the other hand, forcing things quickly means that subtlety is not as much of a concern. This is good for me, because my ability to be loud and break things is better than my ability to sneak, both electronically and in meatspace.

At this point, what could possibly go wrong?

Gaming, Tabletop

On Abstraction

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Shadowrun has done interesting things with hacking over the years. In the game I’m currently in, I am our decker, which is to say I’m called on whenever something needs to be hacked. Given the setting, having someone capable of doing this is almost required, although they don’t have to be a decker. Regardless, they’ll need access to the matrix (the internet, according to Shadowrun) and some way of doing things in a less-than-legitimate fashion.

The Way Things Were

In 4th edition, the section of the book that dealt with hacking was rather long and complex, and required a lot of knowledge of real-world networks to make any sense of. Actually using any of it in-game basically required the GM to be running two games at once, one for the hacker and one for everyone else. If complex enough, possibly the rest of the party could go out for lunch in the meantime. (As a side note, this is the real reason you never split the party.) The hacking in 4th was an attempt to make things “more realistic” but it wasn’t great for the pace of the game, or even really for good play.

The Way Things Are

5th decided to abandon that, and went for a system where hacking things depends on establishing marks which can be used to access/control/whatever a given matrix entity. It also established that the “inside” of a host should resemble the physical area, which means that if you need to provide on-the-fly support to a run, you can be presented in the same game space. This obviously has no relation to how actual networking works, but it’s a much better fit for the game system. If you also tack on things like an inability to do the required hacking ahead of time (because you can’t be logged in forever without consequence and marks fade when you log out) and the requirement to be somewhat physically close to whatever you’re hacking (because there are noise penalties for trying to hack a building from across town), suddenly the hacker is a member of the team again, and has to play the game along with everyone else.

Cutter

“More Realistic”

That phrase I used seems to come up a lot, although usually in the context of video games and not Tabletop RPGs (although that might explain how it found its way into Shadowrun 4). It was the driving principle behind the failed Kickstarter, Clang. Yet when people get what they ask for, the result is often not what they expect.

When I was working at the MIT Game Lab (then called the Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab), one of our projects looked at the (then relatively new) Wii Remote, to see what we could do in terms of using it as a motion control device. One of the first things we tried to simulate was the cracking of a whip. If you’ve ever done this in real life, you might know that it’s not quite as easy as it looks in media, and at first we attempted to require similar motions in the game we were building. We eventually found that this frustrated players, and eventually eased off and implemented a much simpler (but more intuitive) motion.

I think what’s desired isn’t to have more realism, but more believability. As long as this thing works this way, and always works this way, it doesn’t matter quite as much if reality doesn’t also work this way. Sometimes reality is boring, that’s why we play games in the first place.

Gaming, Tabletop

On Pink Mohawks

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So as the D&D game is winding down (possibly involving both dungeons and actual dragons), I’m looking to the next thing that I’m likely to take part in, which is Shadowrun. For those who are unaware, Shadowrun is a cyberpunk setting that also happens to include magic and some “traditional fantasy races” although not in traditional roles, in some cases. For more info, play one of the recent Shadowrun Returns games.

The Shadowrun setting is a bit of a relic of the 80s, and has some weird things in it associated with that. Some of those have been touched on in later editions (4e and 5e decided that “everything is wireless”), but some have not. The New Age movement influenced the political landscape in Shadowrun, including a nation of hippie elves and Native Americans taking over most of the US. Megacorps are a product of the time the game was written (and the term itself is borrowed from William Gibson)*. Virtual reality did not quite take off like the writers expected**. The fall of the Soviet Union was unexpected, but the only effect in the setting is that the name is changed from USSR to “Russian Federation”***. In 2015, some of it is quite anachronistic for what’s supposed to be the future. On the other hand, they were prescient about a few things. The Internet wasn’t really a thing in the 80s, but it is in Shadowrun, and it absolutely is now. Everything having wireless capability can’t really be credited to the 80s (it was introduced in 4e, written in 2005). Drones that were part of Science Fiction in the 80s are a very real part of military technology now. Other things aren’t quite a reality, but we’re getting there, like cybernetics and brain interfaces.

*We can talk about Wal-Mart and GE and Google and Japan in general, but they aren’t quite there yet.

**We can talk about the current VR wave if you want, but I’m not yet convinced it’s going to go differently than the last few.

***This one I’m not going to talk about, sorry.

Berlin

Black Trenchcoats

A major part of the way the game is assumed to go is that you are part of a team doing somewhat illegal things for a mysterious benefactor (called Mr. Johnson regardless of their actual name). Some players view this whole conceit more seriously than others, and the terms that have arisen to describe this are “Black Trenchcoat” and “Pink Mohawk”. The names play off of sterotypes: In a Black Trenchcoat game, everyone is wearing a black trenchcoat and trying not to attract attention and complete the mission, and so on. In a Pink Mohawk game, someone shows up with a Pink Mohawk, and everyone else is okay with that.

Personally I don’t see the distinction as quite so black and white, but that might be because I’m predisposed to the latter style anyway. Even if the tone of a game is entirely serious, I think things are more interesting with a bit of personality. Shadowrun mechanically encourages this somewhat with the addition of positive and negative qualities available during character creation. (For the curious, a pink mohawk would almost certainly fall under “Distinctive Style”, a negative quality worth 5 Karma.) Being serious, and competent and yes, even optimized doesn’t necessarily exclude having a bit of fun.

Cover

Interesting times

One of the best things to me in tabletop RPGs are what I’d like to call “Interesting Bad Ideas”. If everything goes as planned things can get boring (although a good GM won’t let this happen), and these provide nice hooks for things that are likely to be fun. While Kodra is usually a nice source of these in games we end up playing together, I’ve been known to make my fair share. Our previous D&D campaign was largely defined by a deal I attempted to make with a red dragon in the first session (It seemed like a good idea at the time). This is how we end up doing things like starting (and sometimes ending) wars and uncovering very odd artifacts and sometimes destroying large sections of the countryside and/or planets.

This Shadowrun campaign might be interesting, as there are two groups (one local to the GM and one through Roll20) running for similar goals. It’s yet to be seen if we’ll come into conflict, although I’m guessing we will, indirectly. My planned Shadowrun character is a bad idea personified (as well as the very incarnation of a running joke about a previous character of mine). Details of this aren’t exactly available to the rest of the party (the GM knows, of course), although a few of them would be able to quickly figure it out if they knew what to look for. From what I know so far of the other characters, I might not be the only one playing a disaster waiting to happen. It should be fun to see whose number comes up first.

Box_Cover

Tabletop

On Random Number Generation, Continued

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One of the things I like about d20 systems is that doing math relating to a d20 is really easy. There’s a 5% chance to roll any given number, so probability calculations can be done quickly without having to get out a calculator. That said, D&D does have a fair bit of math for which a calculator can be helpful. Usually I resort to anydice for complicated math, because I believe in making informed decisions. The most obvious thing here is the Advantage/Disadvantage system 5e adds.

More Like “This Advantage”

Advantage and disadvantage were among the first new mechanics revealed in playtesting for what was once called D&D Next. If you’re unaware, having advantage (or disadvantage) on a d20 roll allows you to roll two d20s and take the highest (or lowest) result. Mathematically, how many pluses or minuses this works out to depends on what number you needed to hit; it’s exactly equal to +5 or -5 if you’re looking at a target number of 11, decreasing as you need rolls that are farther from “average”.

advantage graph
The nature of this bonus makes sense if you stop and think about it. If you only need a low number, then your already high chances of success aren’t increased much by rolling a second die. If you need an extremely high number, your chances of success still aren’t very large. The system math keeps things mostly in the middle, so estimating it as +/-5 works in most cases.

Let Justice Be Done

I looked at it when examining fighter features, but paladins also get to pick a fighting style (but from a reduced list consisting of Defense, Protection, Dueling, and Great Weapon Fighting). It turns out that Paladins don’t value these equally, as great weapon fighting would appear to apply to smite damage, making it way out of line.


Normally, GW Fighting is an average boost of 1.33 damage per hit normally, but if you start adding smite damage this changes, getting better and better as you roll more dice. Jury’s still out on whether or not this works, so check with your DM. (Speaking of checking with your DM, it turns out the dueling style is intended to apply to sword and board. Point them at this if they say otherwise, but remember rule 0.)

Tabletop

On Random Number Generation

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Blaugust is over, but that doesn’t mean my posting is going to stop. I’m aiming for Tuesday/Thursday, with maybe an extra post on the weekends at times. This week is a bit weird due to Labor Day.

This past Monday was the first D&D session with the new group, starting with being captured by a very powerful wizard and then escaping from the bandits and trapped dungeon she left to guard us. The party is now headed to Watchwall for various reasons, united primarily in the goal of figuring out why we were captured in the first place.

My virtual dice primarily failed me: I did not manage to hit anything with my Paladin’s giant stick at any point and rolled a 2 on survival (a skill I’m allegedly proficient in) in trying to figure out where we’d been taken. My track record with physical dice isn’t much better, I still remember rolling a 9 on a 6d6 Flame Strike. There were some successes: I rolled max damage on dragon breath and a very high persuade roll, earning us a break in the fighting until someone else put a dagger in the back of the person we were attempting to get information out of. (Even as a Paladin, you can’t save everyone.)

Like the Mountains of Illinois

D&D 5 is very flat, and the difference between being good at something and not good at it is not very large, especially at low levels. Previously (in 3.5) full ranks in a skill meant level+3, or +4 at level 1, going all the way up to +23 at level 20 (but probably much higher than that from synergies and magic) which meant that some skills had unusual rules interactions at high levels, and the difference between trained and untrained was impossible to overcome on any dice roll. By contrast, proficiency bonus is +2 at level 1 and only goes up to +6 at level 17, which means that even an untrained character can make certain rolls (albeit with a flat 30% lower chance of success). Rogues and bards can get double proficiency to certain rolls, so they can get up to +12, but they’re intended to have outlandish values on skill rolls as part of their class design.

In general, I like this approach, but I can see how some people would not. It does lead to a lot of chance inherent in most actions, as it’s next to impossible to have anything be a “sure thing” (although you can get close in some special cases). The trade-off for this is that untrained actions have an actual chance of success without rolling 20. (As a side note, this edition doesn’t give 20 or 1 special effects on skill checks or saves. They’re just numbers.) The highest suggested DC for anything in the player’s handbook is 30 for tasks that are “nearly impossible”. A non-bard/rogue with a 20 in the relevant stat at level 17 or higher would only hit such a target number when rolling 19 or better, so that description is fairly accurate.

I was going to discuss how I use anydice to sort out numeric things, but I think I’ve rambled on long enough. Maybe I’ll get to that next week.

Tabletop

On Fighter Options

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I was asked about this, and what was a short email became a blog post. Fighters in D&D 5 have a number of choices to make quite early in their character development, so let’s examine them in a bit more detail.

Fighting Style

The first choice is what fighting style to take. For the sake of this particular discussion, I’m ignoring the fighting styles that don’t boost damage in some way, although they’re certainly worth considering (Protection in particular is rather powerful). We’re going to be examining these using Kodra’s assumption of 15 AC as a decent target, and a 16 in the primary attack stat.

  • Archery: This is a +2 to hit, or a flat 10% increase in your chance to hit (advantage/disadvantage can mess with that a bit). Longbow damage is therefore going to be .6(7.5)+.05(12) = 5.1 DPR at level 1. Fighters don’t get any thing that directly boosts this until their subclass choice, but that’s for later. No other style provides a boost to hit, so this one provides the most consistent damage.
  • Dueling: This would seem to be the default choice, but our DM has ruled that it doesn’t apply to sword and board. Anyway, at +2 to damage modeling this is also pretty straightforward: .5(9.5)+.05(14) = 5.45 DPR. Not bad, and it gives you a free hand to work with (which might be important depending on later choices).
  • Great Weapon Fighting: The important note here is that if you’re in this category, you’re probably planning to use the King of Weapons, the Greatsword, as it’s the objectively most damaging weapon in the book (although the Maul got moved up to match it). As such, this would come out ahead of the Dueling numbers without taking the style (5.85) but the style is another damage boost on top of this. The end result (assuming that you always reroll an initial roll of 1 or 2) is 6.65 DPR.
  • Two-Weapon Fighting: This should probably be evaluated differently because hitting with both hands requires your bonus action, but as a low-level fighter you don’t have any other uses for that anyway. This also requires light melee weapons (without a feat), which means you’re down to shortswords (or similar). Final damage is (.5(6.5) + .05(10))*2 = 7.5. This lead decreases when Extra Attack comes into play.

Martial Archetype

The choice between these really depends on what you want to do with your fighter. One thing to keep in mind is that fighters are still mostly supposed to use their weapons on things, and this remains true even if you’re a Battle Master or Eldritch Knight.

Champion

This one’s definitely the most straightforward. More criticals, another fighting style, and some bonuses to checks you’re probably not doing a lot (although it’s worth noting Remarkable Athlete does cover stealth checks if you don’t have proficiency). I don’t quite have Kodra’s patience for calculations, so I’ll trust him when he says that the critical bonus isn’t worth that much at low levels. The additional fighting style can be used either for defense or versatility. This archetype gives nothing that uses a bonus action, so TWF works fine with it.

Battle Master

All of the things people liked about the 4e Warlord ended up here, except constrained by a limited pool of superiority dice (which are recovered in a short or long rest). Many of the maneuvers you can pick from allow you to add the superiority die roll to the damage of an attack, making it better for damage than Improved Critical (as long as your dice last). Some of these require you to use a bonus action, making TWF a less attractive option for this archetype. There are other interesting things you can do in this one, like getting an off-turn sneak attack out of a rogue in the party if you have one (requires your bonus action and the target’s reaction). Once you run out of superiority dice, this archetype doesn’t have much to offer, but I know it’s Kodra’s favorite.

Eldritch Knight

This one’s a bit odd. The paragraph at the start of the archetype description hints at where this one is going, and what it gives you. While it does grant cantrips, they’re less likely to hit than weapon attacks unless your INT is abnormally high for a fighter (maybe you rolled for stats; consider Blade Ward if you’re more… typical) and will also do less damage in most cases (especially if you’re using a greatsword). The primary power here is access to one of the better Wizard defensive spells (Shield is very good) and some AOE that other fighters cannot duplicate (look for spells that still deal half-damage on a successful save like Burning Hands, or later, Fireball). At much later levels, you can start taking other wizard buffs, like Haste or Stoneskin. Spell slots are limited, so the primary thing you’ll be doing is still using your weapon. Because casting most spells requires a free hand, and later features do use your bonus action, TWF is a no-go for this archetype. Jury’s still out on if you can cast spells with a two-hander, so check with your DM. (I’d say yes, but it’s not entirely clear.) I personally think this might be the best archetype for “tank” type fighters.

Conclusion

That’s a lot of words to say “different choices work better in different situations”. Unlike Ranger, where I firmly believe one of the archetypes is weaker than the other, the fighter ones are all good in their own way. The Fighting style question is a little easier, as Great Weapon is great unless you have compelling reason not to use it (dex-based fighter, want protection style, etc.). Hope this helps anyone who’s intending to play a fighter in an upcoming game!

You know what this link is by now. Also, you have until the end of the weekend to finish the Four Job Fiesta. I apparently owe another $10 now.

Tabletop

On Placeholders

I was going to write about Hangeki, a game I enjoyed much more than RefleX, but I find myself away from my computer and that one deserves screenshots. Instead, you get more D&D.

A Dragonborn Paladin isn’t the most original of characters, but I think it’s what I’m going to play. I like lizard people, and I’ve honestly liked Dragonborn since the 4e Player’s Handbook. (I play Argonian in the Elder Scrolls games by default.) I like the “otherness” that races like that represent. The stereotypical class for Dragonborn is the paladin, and with the new options it’s finally a class that appeals to me. A new system seems like a good time to try something “standard”, so this is what it’ll be.

At the same time, I don’t want a stereotypical background. Unless I’m given a strong reason to do otherwise, I’m going to take the Outlander background, representing a character that grew up away from society. I want to break from the idea of the trained holy warrior because I dislike zealots. I liked the Guardian in GW2 for similar reasons. I still need to finish my character’s background, but I have a fairly good idea of where it’s going.

Tabletop

On Terrible Ideas, Re-examined

Wrapping up a week of posts primarily about D&D, I think I’ll take another look at that evoker from earlier.

Actually a Bad Idea

Overchannel does let you use it on spells from 1st to 5th level, but there really are limits to this sort of thing. Using it on Cone Of Cold is nice for your first maximized spell of the day, but as the second it will do 10d12 damage to you. At level 14 on average rolls you would have 80 hit points as a wizard (Con 14 assumed, which might be generous), so this is 65 damage to yourself on average and has a roughly 10% chance of dropping you from full HP. Fireball isn’t quite so bad, but 39 damage is a rather high number to be doing to yourself. If cast in a 5th level spell slot (the highest number for which you have more than 1/day). This represents a ~25 damage increase over casting it normally per target that doesn’t save, so you’re technically doing more damage out than you’re taking if you can catch two or more targets. It’s still a bad idea except in the most desperate of circumstances. Don’t do this.

fireball

Maximizing Potential

A generally better idea is to maximize something big for the one you get for free, and spend the rest on something like Chromatic Orb. As a first level spell, you only take 2d12 damage (average 13) from overchannelling this. It does 7d8 damage in a 5th level spell slot (4 points less when maximized than Fireball), but only hits a single target, and uses an attack roll instead of a DEX save (which is better for hitting monks/rogues and worse for hitting heavily armored fighters/paladins). Burning Hands (7d6) or Thunderwave (6d8) are other first level spells worth considering for use with this feature if you are a bit too close to a few too many enemies.

evoker
Since Concentration rules make CC in general worse than it used to be, I don’t think evoker is as much of a noob trap as Kodra makes it out to be. It just requires not overdoing it, and being aware that Fireball is not the only spell on your spell list.

For more posts about… everything, check out the Blaugust initiative. For a quick look at Divinity: Original Sin, check out Stargrace’s post from yesterday.