OOC Chat

[drpete]

Hi, how's it going?

[kalstone]

Pete, what's the background for this module? It may help to come up with a character concept.

[Rex]

Are we rolling or doing a point buy thing?

[drpete]

We'll do point buy, I think.

Situationally, it is the Forgotten Realms. Generally, you are fledgling adventurers in the Northern Sword Coast. You can set up a connection with one other PC, if you want to. Otherwise, you are strangers who will meet in play, "in media res" when the game begins, in a 5e version of a "meet".

As, mostly, surface dwellers who will be traveling in the Underdark, your connections to "back home" will be kind of in the background. You will be "fish out of water", so your resourcefulness will totally be tested.

There have been strange things going on lately... calves born with two heads, milk going sour, nightmares, etc. Something is stirring.

[ravenn4544]

checking in!

May be a few days until I get up to speed as I'm travelling at the moment.

I would very much appreciate a little hand holding as we get going as I'm not fully famliar with 5e but chipping away

Looking forward to the adventure!

[Scott308]

No problem, Ravenn. I've got plenty of experience with 5e, both running and, to a lesser extent, DMing, and I'm happy to help if anyone has questions.

[Pulpatoon]

Re: Shadows.

I like the idea of this system—it's much more engaging than a flat declaration of alignment, especially for the character I have in mind, who is pretty tortured about his relationship with some of the darker elements out there.

However, mechanically, I'm a little concerned about how singularly reliant on Wisdom it is. Especially since, once a character is Miserable, they fail all Charisma checks. This means that, if you're playing a Charisma-centric character, you need to boost Wisdom just to be able to use your basic central stat. In a point-buy system, this puts you at a serious disadvantage, compared to say, a Wisdom-centric character, or even one that can use CHA as a dump stat.

As it happens, I wouldn't mind my character going mad, but if that weren't the case, I wouldn't want to play a Warlock or Bard under this system. It seems like a good way to encourage Monks and Clerics, though.

Do you think this system would work if it made use of Corruption checks against more stats than just WIS? Could INT and CON come into play?

[drpete]

I'll look at/think about it, and see if I can find some people's reactions to the issue in AiME you are talking about.

The miserable condition is, I think, a (relatively) brief period on the descent.

Say a character has a 10 wisdom...
1) character gains corruption until they hit 11+ shadow.
2) at this point, they are miserable. The bad stuff in the world has got them down. They are broody like Boromir once the ring has got hold of him...
3) at some point, they roll low enough on something to trigger the next step... they are wound tight, and this point they snap, and have a bout of short term madness.
4) Once the madness clears, their shadow points clear, the miserable condition clears, and they have a new flaw that reflects their slide into shadow.

That said, the shadow system AND the journey system are very wisdom-centric (I grabbed them because they seemed cool, but haven't totally dissected everything). I'm thinking maybe keep the wisdom save, but change the threshold away from wisdom to something else. Wisdom isn't really willpower in 5e, charisma is...

How about build the threshold the way that the grappling threshold is built...

Charisma score + wisdom bonus + 2xproficiency bonus instead of comparing to raw wisdom?

[Pulpatoon]

On the face of it, that seems like an excellent way of balancing it out. Let's give it a whirl and see what we think of it!

[Scott308]

I have some additional concerns with the initiative system. While it is true that after the first round, the initiative order doesn't really matter, but that is because it relies on the initiative order staying the same. There are a number of things that could get changed drastically by altering when characters act in the order. For example: Say the party loses initiative. Someone is going to move and cast Ray of Sickness, putting them in the last quarter of the round as a loser with slow initiative. The character decides they are not going to move in the next round, just casting another spell, putting them in the second segment because they have fast initiative. The target of the Ray decides to move and attack, putting them into the third segment as they would now have slow initiative. One of the features of Ray of Sickness is that the target is poisoned until the end of the casters next turn. In this situation, the caster would go again before the target gets to go, thereby ending the poisoned condition before the target has a chance to make an attack or skill check with disadvantage due to poison. Conversely, you could have a situation where the caster has fast initiative and casts the spell upon a foe with slow initiative, so the foe would have disadvantage on their attack that round. In the next round, if the poisoned enemy ends up with fast initiative and the caster ends up with slow initiative, the opponent would have a second round of combat with disadvantage because they would be going a second time before the caster is up in the initiative order again. There are a number of spells that end with the casters next turn, and they could be made doubly powerful or have their impact lessened considerably with the initiative order being changed.

Another set of examples would involve melee combat. Say character A and character B are engaged in melee with enemy C. Both A and B decide they are going to go for fast initiative as they are going to stay where they are and attack the enemy. Character A goes first and kills the foe. Now Character B is unable to really act as they were not planning on moving and there is no longer an enemy in range. Or, the enemy goes first, having won initiative, and disengages, moving away from the two characters. Now they are again in a situation where they are unable to make their planned action as there is no longer an enemy there. With the current initiative system, plans can change and adapt to what happens in combat before it gets to your turn, as there is a predictable order to combat. That is erased when individuals can move up or down the order based on what they plan to do that round. I can have a plan, but if my enemy decides to forego an action and only moves, I may end up going after them in order instead of ahead of them, thereby preventing me from carrying out my plan.

One final question: How would this affect death save? Those are made on the character's turn in combat. Say the cleric did not move and ended up going ahead of the ranger, who planned on moving and engaging in combat. A caster is able to do damage at range to the ranger, bringing him down to zero hit points, requiring a death save on the ranger's turn, which the ranger fails. Next round, the ranger doesn't need to move or do anything else, so he is now a fast initiative. The cleric needs to move over to where the ranger is lying so they can cast a healing spell upon the ranger, causing them to go after the ranger in initiative. Ranger goes, rolling a 1 on his death save, which becomes his second and third failed death save, causing him to die. The ranger never got a chance to get healed, because the changing initiatives put him in a situation where he went both after the cleric in the round he became unconscious and before the cleric in the next round.

I'm not trying to be a pain in the ass about initiative, though it may seem that way and if so I am sorry. I am concerned that someone without a lot of experience with a system may be making changes to a part of combat that may be more integral than you realize. I'm also afraid that what makes rogues extremely dangerous in combat- their ability to move into melee, attack, then use a bonus action to disengage and move away again- may get nerfed by dropping the rogue back in the initiative order. I believe I have all the details correct in my examples, but I admit I am not familiar enough with how you have it planned to be certain. I think the Journey system is pretty cool, and am looking forward to getting into that. I think the Shadow mechanic is interesting, although I 'd be interested to know what the built-in mechanic was and why you chose not to use it. Grappling I'm not too sure about, but I'm not planning on doing any grappling so it likely won't affect my character much. Now that I say that, I'm sure it will come into play and I'll need to pay more attention to the actual rules.

[drpete]

Wow, ok... lessee. Thanks for really engaging with the nuts and bolts! I'll try to engage the non initiative questions first, then come back.

The journey system I wanted to use because the default system for hex journeys is one that I'm basically familiar with... every day, roll for foraging, to get lost, for wandering monsters, etc. There are potentials for month long journeys, and I know that that hex crawl routine will not shine

The default system is an exposure to certain demonic influences... corrupted areas, meet a demon lord, etc, take a madness check, or get a level of madness of various durations. I'm reducing the number of long term/indefinite madness conditions and modelling it more as turning evil due to demonic influence.

Grappling is basically expanded conditions that are determined by an hp-like system. The "control points" can also get converted into effects, like throws and stuff.

[drpete]

On initiative... I'm gonna need more time to ponder, but...

I feel like some of these are *more* of an issue for Greyhawk initiative, or speed factor initiative than for this.

We'll be doing an everybody declare what you want to do/ roll, then I'll resolve the round system, which I'd pretty standard for pbp. Fundamentally, this is different from a regular tabletop "declare when you reach your turn" system... see the tyranny of dragons game for how that impacts decision making... if you are late in the order, you just give some contingencies. If you wanted to do a fast action, but your opponent moved away, or your opponent got killed, you would turn into a one phase slower initiative while you ran over to another opponent to attack... pbp has to allow that kind of fuzzing since you don't declare on your turn, but at the beginning of a "round" of turns.

Rogues don't really benefit from high initiative after the first round in raw. They do their move wherever it's their turn, and they can still do that here... there's just also some negotiation about turn order that doesn't exist in the default system. If it was pure side initiative, the rogue would just do his thing, too.

That's as far as I could get thinking it through tonight. I see the duration issue you're taking about, and I'll think about it.

I think death saves maybe should be end of round instead of on your turn, if this was the system?

[Scott308]

I see your point on dropping down in the initiative to add movement. I wasn't sure how it was going to work, but I agree that the PbF forum kind of requires a bit of DM adjustment when someone gets killed or moves away before the character can act. DMs do this in every game already, so it really wouldn't be an issue as I had originally feared. I think death saves at the end of the round would work just fine. That way you don't get in a situation where nobody has a chance to help the downed character. Now, PCs still might not be able to help, but that would be due to specific circumstances regarding character distances and enemy opposition, not a fluke initiative situation. It would be game situation related, not mechanically flawed, and would still require bad rolls on the part of the player to have any chance at dying in just two rounds. Maybe for spells that end on the casters turn, it remains in effect until until everyone has had an opportunity to be affected one time, so if initiative shuffles out like in my example, the affected characters would still be affected only once, which is the intent of the rules as written. If someone ends up going twice before it would end, they are only affected the first time, while someone who ends up not going before the caster's next turn would still be affected even though the spell has technically ended. That prevents shifting initiative in order to escape the effects all together, or for the caster to end up doubling up a spell's effect. Like I said, I'm willing to give this a shot and see how it plays out. I think with these few additional tweaks, things should work out pretty well.

[drpete]

I think the duration issue is the trickiest problem with having variable turn order of any kind... speed factor, greyhawk, fast/slow, etc.

For actions, I think it just means each combatant has one action effected.

Reactions seem trickier, since it's so situational. Generally speaking, it looks like the reaction "clock" is the trickiest part of these, as far as fairness goes, when your location in the order bounces around.

If this turns out to be a noticable issue, I'm open to fixing it or doing something else.

Looking through the characters we've got, I see that this speed thing would make your rogue fast in melee with fine weapons, Sabyllos would be slow with a crossbow, and the casters would be slow with 3rd+ level spells, but otherwise it's just taking a full turn or a fast turn.

[ravenn4544]

Stuck in Denver. Can’t get a flight out so our group is renting a van to drive to Kansas City airport (600 miles ) to get a flight home tomorrow. Maybe.

[drpete]

Stuck in Denver. Can’t get a flight out so our group is renting a van to drive to Kansas City airport (600 miles ) to get a flight home tomorrow. Maybe.

Good luck getting home! Sounds like quite an adventure. We'll see you when you recover

[Scott308]

Good luck!

[Scott308]

I'll be in the Chicago area for a conference this weekend, so I don't know how much time I'll have to check in here.

[drpete]

Have a good trip!

[Scott308]

Thanks! Last weekend I was at Gary Con, this weekend I'm at the North American Reptile Breeders' Conference, so I should be coming home with some new spiders and/ or scorpions. Yes, I know they aren't reptiles but people that keep arachnids often have reptiles as well, so there are a few tarantula vendors there.