Quote from: sureshot on February 23, 2021, 08:24:32 AM

Quote from: RandyB on February 22, 2021, 02:51:00 PM

The original assumption was that the player was a straight white male, thus the SJW shriek-and-swarm. *Then* it was discovered the the player is a woman of color, at which point hilarity ensued.

Not only did hilarity ensue they refused to apologize for their mistake and claimed they were blameless because the puppet had triggered some kind of sexual dimorphism or something similar.

They never apologise.

People that never apologize show that they do not care for anyone's feelings but their own. in the case of woke SJWs this was brilliantly demonstrated all summer long by them calling black, brown, asian, and any non white people the most vile and racist names simply because those people chose to think differently than the SJWs and exercise their rights to chose their own political preference. This abhorrent act of ultimate evil meant that they were no longer immune from being attacked and had become the other and the SJWs could take off their masks and show the real hatred and racism in their hearts.

They show this in the gaming world as well but to a much lesser degree with very few instances (that I have seen) of open racism against minorities, and when the offender turns out to be a minority they quickly back pedal just like in the case of the thread topic. I truly cannot comprehend the hypocrisy of these people and the utter lack of self awareness they have. I am genuinely concerned for the future of gaming and society as whole. My hope is that if enough people stop supporting the companies that embrace the wokeness that the loss of income will prompt a return to normalcy and this will just become a bad memory like when TSR changed demons and devils to placate the Satanic Panic crowd.

Quote from: Samsquantch on February 23, 2021, 11:14:03 AM

How these people actually got into positions of power and influence in the RPG world is beyond me.

Well, they're not CEOs, or writers of anything but vanity project RPGs. So their influence is no more than is given them by others. The middle class have always been very risk-averse, but this has been magnified by online stuff - the nightmare world of Sandra Bullock's The Net has been brought about - and the nightmare there wasn't that she could be deprived of her identity, but that she could live her entire life without in-person contact, at home with her keyboard and mouse.

A life without in-person contact will eventually make any person insane. This insanity may be expressed in anxiety and depression, which the person may channel into The Cause - whatever they happen to latch on to. And so you get a keyboard warrior, a lonely person with too much time on their hands - time enough to harass people's twitter feeds, and the like. And the people owning companies and their staff actually doing productive things see this wave of lonely losers posting on their social media and think "Shit, that's a majority! We better listen to them!"

And of course, the furry transgender nerdfury crowd weeping about "microaggressions" and the like are actually a tiny minority, they're just a very noisy one - online only. But they get listened to by the timid middle class, who are terrified of everything.

I think that sums that up quite well.

There were flu pandemics in the 1890s, 1910s, 50s, 60s, 90s and 00s. So, calling a flu pandemic in a given decade is roughly a 50/50 bet.

Hong Kong flu in the 60s is estimated to have killed between 1m and 4m people (COVID 2.5m and counting).

And yet COVID is the DeAdLiEsT pLaUgE eVeR! We HaVe To ClOsE eVeRyThInG aNd  RuIn ThE EcOnOmY oR wE aLl GoNnA dIe!!!!1111!!
People have very short memories... Like you say, it's a 50/50 bet and not at all uncommon.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on February 23, 2021, 06:30:35 AM

I've tried using CR with Pathfinder, 4e and 5e, and so far, I wind up ignoring it or trying to reverse-engineer it to make sense to me.
My usual stumbling point is that the system assumes a party of X characters and one monster as it's base value. And I rarely use just one monster in an encounter. So I'm almost always having to apply some kind of modifier.

Anybody like it? Using it sucessfully?

I pretty much rewrote my entire system around fixing the CR system and its somewhat in line with the "CR-There Is a Better Way Part 2" article that Steven Mitchell linked to upthread.

The real honest to God key to a functional CR system from my experience (and why its never worked all that great in D&D) is that for it to be able to reliably measure anything you need the system to have linear instead of quadratic scaling.

In D&D, your improvement in combat is generally quadratic. Not only are you becoming more accurate, you're also dealing more damage per round. You're not only getting more hit points, you're also getting harder to hit.

So instead of five 1st level threats being of similar danger to you at 5th level as one was when you were 1st level. Its likely you'd need ten or even twenty (and maybe more) to present a credible threat to the PC. The result is that your challenge rating has to be quadratic if its going to measure anything accurately... Ex. a level 1 is CR1, a level 5 is CR10, a level 10 is CR40, etc.

But even that has its limits because, in 3e/4E, the scaling was so great that often a 10th level PC was virtually immune to any number of 1st level threats. 4E even directly referenced this with statements about how a solo monster at level 1 would have to be restated as an elite if facing the PCs at level 10, as a standard monster at level 20 and as a minion if the PCs encountered it at level 30. In one epic tier adventure they even statted up a legion of thousands of ghouls (heroic tier threats) as DIFFICULT TERRAIN for the PCs during a fight with an Exarch of Orcus.

My solution to creating a fully scalable and easily usable CR system (also a system that allowed mass battles without needing special conversion rules... the original purpose of the change) was to remove one of the axes of growth so that level progression was linear. Specifically, to-hit and defenses are almost static; about +10% over the entire range of the game; while damage and hit points scale linearly for both PCs and monsters.

The result is that you can more-or-less just use a monster's hit points to determine its relative threat to the PCs*. If a PC has 25 hp, then a group of monsters with a total of 25 hp will be a normal challenge for them. If an adventuring party has 220 hp, then monsters with about 220 hp will be a normal challenge, 330 hp will be a dangerous fight and one with 440 hp will almost certainly result in a TPK if the PCs don't beat a hasty retreat.

This also makes it easy to account for henchmen and hirelings in encounter balance too. Just add their hit points to the PCs side to determine what's going to be an easy, typical, hard or lethal fight for them.

* Its slightly more complicated than that since monsters can trade hit points for better defenses and visa versa, and can trade accuracy for damage and visa versa (that way there's more variety than just level between monsters); but the default "Challenge Point" value is just the pre-adjusted hit point total of the monster with everything else about the monster scaling in ratio with that.

Using HP as guideline is what I found myself doing as well. I know that my group can do X amount of damage on average and can take X amount per round so I have been adding extra mobs to encounters with base HP or increasing boss HP to compensate. It seems to be working fine whilst still providing a decent challenge. Still get a good amount of downed PCs but so far no deaths from missed saves or massive damage.

Quote from: TJS on February 10, 2021, 07:22:15 PM

Edit: I've seen some of this spilling over into live games.  I've seen several GMs run 5e by printing out battlemap size maps of dungeons, cutting them up and progressively laying them out as the party move around with the miniatures never leaving the table.

You say that like it's a bad thing 
I am a huge fan of figures on the table for RPGs but prefer one of the modular 2.5D or 3D dungeon terrain sets to maps.

And that is how I came to own three 3d printers... I couldn't justify buying Dwarven Forge stuff anymore.

I have never played in Ravenloft as a setting beyond the original AD&D module I6 Ravenloft. It didn't really go over well with my group at the time and we preferred the more traditional medieval setting with a few Barrier Peaks type adventures thrown in from time to time.

I was not surprised to see the cult of PC come for Ravenloft though.

Pretty sure early editions of CoC had deck plans for an airship. I'd have to dig to confrm

I do recall one adventure that did but the name escapes me. My intent is to have my players watch the video or use some stills from it during play.

It would have been such a thrill to have travelled on one of these. I'm going to write up an adventure on an airship for Callnof Cthulhu I think.