TTRPGs & D&D

[JakeEkiss]

My biggest complaint about this is just the concern that it could get to be way too much very quickly. I've been playing D&D since I was a kid and I -still- sometimes forget all the stuff my character can do. Especially at later levels.

This is valid, and it's sort of a known quantity for the game's learning curve, which is why I bought their starter adventure, because it does the "unlock" thing for you as the Director as well as the players. I knew about Malice going in, and the adventure lists it on the goblin encounter sheet in case you've played DS before, but the adventure itself doesn't talk about what to do with Malice until encounter 2. Players, though they have features they can modify with their heroic resource, also don't get their heroic abilities which are powered by it until encounter 2 as well. So they've made a real attempt to make the learning curve easier.

Add to that, at least from what I've run so far, the design philosophy they brought to flee mortals carries over here. They want the baddies to be real straightforward to run. The basic goblins have a stat line, a skill line, one signature ability (the attack they'll use every round) and the assassin has their 'slip away' feature. It's definitely a game with medium to high crunch, but I can tell how they're working to make stuff easier for me to work with it.

In our first session the players were really active reminding each other about accumulation of their heroic resource, even though they don't have much to do with it yet.

I've been watching Matt's content for a really long time and sometimes it can be hard to get a read on him because he gives amazing advice -FOR D&D-, but he also likes a lot of games that are very non-D&D-like. So it was hard to figure where he'd go with his own game system when given the opportunity. I'm glad he really settled into his core D&D advice of 'you're all here to have fun together.'

The reason he's one of the few D&D tubers I ever watched regularly is because the majority of running the game videos are totally game agnostic advice. There's only a few that reference any D&D mechanics at all. The only one I can really think of having any mechanics in it is the tactics video where he talks about splitting movement and ranges.

To your point though, yeah, he's on record being very much not the adversarial DM type. He's gotten shit for it because he openly talked about doing things like tweaking monster HP and such mid combat to attenuate for how an encounter was going. His point about that was that generally you're running an encounter for the first time with your players, so you're alpha-testing it. Encounter design does not end when initiative is rolled.

 

[Damien]

This is valid, and it's sort of a known quantity for the game's learning curve, which is why I bought their starter adventure, because it does the "unlock" thing for you as the Director as well as the players.

When he first mentioned that, I was like 'Jesus Christ, how has Wizards NEVER bothered to release an adventure that teaches you to play. It's so brilliant in its simplicity.'

To your point though, yeah, he's on record being very much not the adversarial DM type. He's gotten shit for it because he openly talked about doing things like tweaking monster HP and such mid combat to attenuate for how an encounter was going. His point about that was that generally you're running an encounter for the first time with your players, so you're alpha-testing it. Encounter design does not end when initiative is rolled.

Absolutely. His advice, in general, is so good. I haven't really DM'd in years and I still religiously check out his content. I think he's actually the only D&D/TTRPG guy I pay any attention to on YouTube. Him and Dael Kingsmill - who I was watching back when most of her content was mythology related. But seeing her start collabbing with my favorite DM has been crazy fun.

 

[docsilence]

Him and Dael Kingsmill - who I was watching back when most of her content was mythology related. But seeing her start collabbing with my favorite DM has been crazy fun.

If you're ever looking for an easy listen in the car or whatever, the Eldritch Lorecast has Dael, James Haeck, Shawn Merwin, and Ben from Ghostfire Gaming talking TTRPG industry stuff every week and Dael's a fucking hoot on that.

 

[JakeEkiss]

Him and Dael Kingsmill

Lol, our watchlist has some heavy overlaps. These are the only two D&D tubers I watch with any regularity.

When he first mentioned that, I was like 'Jesus Christ, how has Wizards NEVER bothered to release an adventure that teaches you to play. It's so brilliant in its simplicity.'

Even if I hated the system and everything about it, I'd still be super impressed with how much the starter adventure is actively built around learning to play. It has printouts for encounter sheets to make enemy stamina tracking easier. It has a rules quick reference printout. It has a more extensive (but not as involved as the hero book) starter rules pdf. It really wants you to learn the game.

 

[Damien]

If you're ever looking for an easy listen in the car or whatever, the Eldritch Lorecast has Dael, James Haeck, Shawn Merwin, and Ben from Ghostfire Gaming talking TTRPG industry stuff every week and Dael's a fucking hoot on that.

I should watch it. I've seen it in my recommendations and I genuinely love Dael. She has a wonderful energy.

Even if I hated the system and everything about it, I'd still be super impressed with how much the starter adventure is actively built around learning to play. It has printouts for encounter sheets to make enemy stamina tracking easier. It has a rules quick reference printout. It has a more extensive (but not as involved as the hero book) starter rules pdf. It really wants you to learn the game.

I don't get why more TTRPGs aren't like this, since LEARNING those games is usually the biggest hurdle to getting people to play them. The easiest time I ever had getting people to try a new game was Pathfinder, because you could sell it as 'slightly crunchier 3.5' and everyone went 'oh, that sounds easy to learn.' It fucking ISN'T, but it seems like it would be because you already kind of know the rules. That's the part that scares people off.

 

[docsilence]

I should watch it. I've seen it in my recommendations and I genuinely love Dael. She has a wonderful energy.

It's a great combo. Dael is Dael, Ben has a very logical approach to gaming with passion for wargaming and grimdark that colors his vibe, Shawn is probably one of the most logical, no bullshit game designers working right now (he talks and educates like a technical writer, something that is a lost skill in TTRPG design), and Haeck has a very new-school experimental vibe to his work, so they do a good job covering all the bases. And the eps are never more than a hour.

(Mastering Dungeons is also great and doesn't only cover D&D. They've done deep dives into Shadowdark, a lot of Free League and Modiphius stuff, Draw Steel, Daggerheart, etc. And Teos like Shawn has a very scientific approach to 'does this work, does this not, how can we fix it' that leads to some great breakdowns.)

 

[TheSameIdiot]

I miss Dael's regular D&D YouTube videos. She gave me many of the DM tools I use today.

It's all in the stamina drain. This is why they called it stamina and not health. At halfway down your stamina track you are "winded", the in world narrative is that you're being worn down either by small wounds accumulating or simply through fatigue until you run totally out and either collapse from exertion or because you got an ax to the head one too many times.

One of my major issues with TTRPGs is that you fight just as well with 1 HP as you do with 125. "Okay, you made your death saves. Now you're on your feet, ready to swing your axe like nothing happened."

I've seen a few systems try to rectify this with a scar system or permanent damage, like a lost limb. I've been less impressed with the solutions than "you're back on your feet, what do you do next?"

I'd be curious about how winded worked in practice. The trouble is it's excruciating to take a player out of the action, even for two or three turns. That's why I prefer status effects.

A big problem I have with the D&D combat system is -precisely- that narratively the intent is for you to be a badass group, but -mechanically- you have very limited options for working as a team in combat. I can do this on my turn.... but it makes more sense to do it after you do your thing, but that means I can't even do my thing until my NEXT turn and then maybe the enemy won't be there or will be dead and then I wasted my turn NOT doing the thing... okay nevermind, I hit it.

Yep. You don't ever get the Avengers-style, Cap throws his shield—electrified by Thor—at the baddies. 13th Age at least tries to give the players the ability to work together. I'll let you all know how it goes whenever my next campaign starts.

 

[JakeEkiss]

I'd be curious about how winded worked in practice. The trouble is it's excruciating to take a player out of the action, even for two or three turns. That's why I prefer status effects.

Winded is mostly there to be a trigger for other features and mechanically it doesn't affect your fighting so far as I can tell. I've played in systems where you got penalties the more hurt you are and as much as I like it in theory, typically what happens is that creates death spirals in combat. You rolled badly, now it's harder and harder to roll well, so if you don't start rolling SUPER well you are more and more terminally fucked every round. Works fine for horror games, less so for heroic action ones.

I *do* like distinguishing injuries/conditions with damage as a concept, but I think they sort of have to be gated behind some sort of relatively infrequent mechanical incident. Crits work to some degree, but still happen pretty often in most systems. It's a tough one to balance. I need to look further into the DS rules to see if they have provisions or optional rules for that sort of thing.

 

[Fletch]

Goblin Assassins are special, they have a feature that allows them to hide even if they are observed, so it still requires cover and concealment

I approve!

My 4e games back in the day had a simple "you still have to explain how the ability works in this situation" rule, and I had one player who pushed back on that from time to time, saying the text of the ability let him do it.

I'm still a Gygaxian Naturalist at heart, and some of the smallest things still irk me. Like using multishot abilities with crossbows.

 

[Damien]

I miss Dael's regular D&D YouTube videos. She gave me many of the DM tools I use today.

I would often think while watching her D&D stuff that if I were to be running a game again, and at that time I didn't even think I'd ever get a chance to PLAY again, I'd need to steal everything she says because she has so many cool ideas.

One of my major issues with TTRPGs is that you fight just as well with 1 HP as you do with 125. "Okay, you made your death saves. Now you're on your feet, ready to swing your axe like nothing happened."

This is why I hate hit points, generally. It feels like -too much- of an abstraction for a game that otherwise is not actually quite that abstract. Sixteen different status effects and an entire page of different weapons with different effects, damage amounts, critical multipliers (at least in the old days), and requirements for use. But my entire survivability in and out of combat boils down to '97 HP.' I don't know that I ever truly found a -better- system, but I still hate it.

I accept HP more in systems where you have very little of it and combat is about avoiding or tanking damage, rather than just 'absorbing' damage. But that's a hard line to walk as well.

I *do* like distinguishing injuries/conditions with damage as a concept, but I think they sort of have to be gated behind some sort of relatively infrequent mechanical incident. Crits work to some degree, but still happen pretty often in most systems. It's a tough one to balance. I need to look further into the DS rules to see if they have provisions or optional rules for that sort of thing.

I don't like injury conditions conceptually because what it does is solidify the abstraction of HP into 'this is literally your physical health.' Took too much HP damage? Now you've got a scar, or lost your hand, or whatever. So now instead of HP being an abstraction for a lot of different things, it's becoming closer to a literal expression of how much blood is left in your body.

And it seems like no mechanic is infrequent -enough- to not end up with a 10th or 11th level party looking like a photo from one of those WWII field hospitals.

I'm still a Gygaxian Naturalist at heart, and some of the smallest things still irk me. Like using multishot abilities with crossbows.

I've spent most of my gaming life as a realism junky looking for a game that I will never find. And even all these years later, I still get really irritated when the DM is like 'you take 6 damage from his claw attack.' Oh, I do? My fully plate-armored 6'3" brick shithouse fighter with a shield TALLER THAN THE GOBLIN just took six damage, did he?

 

[Fletch]

I still get really irritated when the DM is like 'you take 6 damage from his claw attack.'

I'm fully on board with HP as a general description of stamina. If anything, I'm more annoyed by how often you have to say "you take an arrow to the shoulder" every time a character gets hit by a non-killing blow. So I'm fully on board for stuff like "you stumble back under the blow and have to recover your footing" as a description of HP loss.

Decades back I read an idea that stuck with me but I've never used. Making an HP pool for an encounter. Five ogres have 30 HP each (don't fact check that) so as soon as the part collectively does 30 pts of damage spread out over all of them, the one just hit dies.

I like the idea of it as it allows for more dynamic fights and less "we all focus on the injured one" dog piles. Again, never tried it, though.

 

[altcunningham]

Under th

I approve!

My 4e games back in the day had a simple "you still have to explain how the ability works in this situation" rule, and I had one player who pushed back on that from time to time, saying the text of the ability let him do it.

I'm still a Gygaxian Naturalist at heart, and some of the smallest things still irk me. Like using multishot abilities with crossbows.

Even in 5e you're meant to justify how you hide or take cover.

I played a Rogue arcane trickster through an entire campaign, 1-14, and I loved the forest and urban setting because I was always tapping Batman logic as to how I could wage Guerilla warfare and melt back into the shadows. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes the DM wasn't buying it.

 

[altcunningham]

Decades back I read an idea that stuck with me but I've never used. Making an HP pool for an encounter. Five ogres have 30 HP each (don't fact check that) so as soon as the part collectively does 30 pts of damage spread out over all of them, the one just hit dies.

I like the idea of it as it allows for more dynamic fights and less "we all focus on the injured one" dog piles. Again, never tried it, though.

I've done this in my Star Wars game. Keeps the odds insurmountable and the action feeling cinematic. I'm big on flow in the Star Wars/Fantasy Flight system, trying to nail that Indiana Jones and Uncharted mobility from set piece to set piece.

 

[JakeEkiss]

My 4e games back in the day had a simple "you still have to explain how the ability works in this situation" rule, and I had one player who pushed back on that from time to time, saying the text of the ability let him do it.

TBF, the rogue analog in Draw Steel is, as I understand it, explicitly magical, so goblin assassins trained in just enough shadow magic to cloak themselves would not in the least bit bother me.

I don't like injury conditions conceptually because what it does is solidify the abstraction of HP into 'this is literally your physical health.' Took too much HP damage? Now you've got a scar, or lost your hand, or whatever. So now instead of HP being an abstraction for a lot of different things, it's becoming closer to a literal expression of how much blood is left in your body.

Yeah, I like the idea of injuries more narratively than mechanically. I love the idea that you *could* lose a hand and then have to replace it with a mechanical or magical one. I love the idea that you *could* end up with a character that has like, the Batman scars of a life lived in combat. And I like the idea that those can happen as emergent from the game itself in specific fights.

I definitely do not like the idea of it being tied to a set amount of damage taken. It has to be some sort of rarely occurring mechanical add on that has some sort of prerequisite. I almost think a critical with a confirmation roll, and then a roll on a chart to define the injury would work, but then it might be too infrequent. Like I say, hard to find the right balance. It could also be something tied to bosses specifically, and that *might* work for how it usually happens in heroic fantasy, and it would certainly make bosses more scary, but I have a feeling it would adversely affect the psychology of players entering into a boss battle (making timid players even more anxious, encouraging over-planning or cheese tactics always, etc)

Making an HP pool for an encounter. Five ogres have 30 HP each (don't fact check that) so as soon as the part collectively does 30 pts of damage spread out over all of them, the one just hit dies.

This is exactly how minions (a special mob class of monsters) work in Draw Steel. Minions are treated as a squad, and have a shared stamina pool. Due to this they cannot be "winded" (reminder that winded is largely used to trigger abilities, it doesn't change their fighting ability), and they cannot regain stamina or gain temporary stamina in a battle. Whenever you hit the squad with enough damage that it equals one minion's stamina, one minion from the squad drops. Each minion that drops lowers the overall squad's effectiveness in various ways (don't want to go into the full page of rules).

There are more specifics defining how AOE and such work, and if you hit them so hard it would take out more than one the spillover gets narrated as something cool like you sliced through the neck of one and the blade stopped halfway through the skull of the one next to it or something. You get the idea.

 

[Fletch]

I almost think a critical with a confirmation roll, and then a roll on a chart to define the injury would work, but then it might be too infrequent.

This actually feels perfect to me. I don't know when D&D stopped using confirmation rolls for crits, they didn't happen all that often as I recall. In hindsight, they feel perfectly timed to those rare occasions where you risked a disfiguring wound.

There are more specifics defining how AOE and such work

Oh. I hadn't considered how AOE would affect an HP pool. Good thing I never tried to implement it.