General Discussion

[Armando]

Re: D&D

I never bothered to watch that cartoon, was it any good?

[cidbahamut]

Re: D&D

Yes, yes it was.

Uncle.

[Firewind]

Re: D&D

I'm going to be visiting family tomorrow. It shouldn't effect much but I may end up arriving home after 2000 my time. Basically I might end up having to hop in late.

[Yygdrasil]

Re: D&D

Should've taken one level in Cleric, then he could've been a Luchador Priest.

"You may be the Green Goblin of Pain, but I have the Legs of Power!"

I want... to let you... be this... so badly...

[Armando]

Re: D&D

I want... to let you... be this... so badly...

House rule a new Cleric or Monk archetype? Lol. I actually considered taking 1 level in Monk to punch shit without sucking, but it wasn't gonna scale well, so I just went with Fighter.

[Yygdrasil]

Re: D&D

I'll be hammering out some of the finer details of tomorrow's session all day today. Also... I'm considering doing things a little different for the session tomorrow.

Although the map on Traipse is awesome and all... I haven't been able to successfully eliminate the error problems that kept making Fire's and my Screens crash. That being said... I don't know that interactive maps with icons are going to be such a great idea. I'll still include maps... but we might have to do away with the Icons this time around to see if that fixes any of the problems.

I'm also thinking of a more ad-hoc way to make combat more fluid.

I want you all to work on your character's personality and try and think of how they'll react and behave in any given conversation or situation. From here on out we'll be focusing on details... and this includes combat.

If we're taking away visual combat, as I plan to... I want you guys to try and think of combat in a descriptive way. Don't just tell me "I attack Zombie 1 using my sword"... tell me "I take my attack of opportunity against the distracted zombie and thrust my rapier towards the nape of his unarmored neck".

I'll be doing the same for your enemies... at least for the larger-scale or boss type enemies... so keep your imaginations flowing and think of combat not as being a map and markers on the screen... but as a movie playing in your head.

The trade-off of doing combat like this is that things will more much faster... but you'll have to think much more quickly about your actions. It does take away the visual information that you get from the grid... like whether you can reach your polearm through another player's panel or not... but at the same time, I'll be judging your actions on the fly based on the physics of reality.

Take for example... last session and the confusion we all spent nearly an hour on regarding Armando and whether or not he could reach the kobold through Firewind... or whether Mezlo's color spray would hit the dukes daughter and various other things.

The grid helps... but as I've always felt... also hurts gameplay. It affords you the opportunity to vastly overthink even the smallest of encounters and stretch them out to no end in an effort to explore all possible options.

tl;dr

1: No grid for battles.
2: Practice being descriptive during combat.
3: Develop your character's personality in preparation for NPC interaction.
4: Dust off your ImAgInAtIoN

[Armando]

Re: D&D

Not sure how I feel about the lack of grid. I agree that it slows us down, but without it felt impossible to keep track of what was going on and who was where which also slowed us down. So we were equally slow, but also more clueless. Seems like the solution is somewhere in between. I understand that you're having trouble with Traipse though.

[cidbahamut]

Re: D&D

There's a trade-off to it all. I enjoyed being able to have a visual representation of roughly where my character was in relation to everything else, but on the other hand I wasn't a fan of all the grid-based micromanaging that came with it. I'll probably be content as long as there's some form of visual representation, doesn't have to be grid-based. I think the miniatures were a good move, Traipse crashes not withstanding, but having them all be the same icon got confusing. I found myself grabbing other people's miniatures a few times during the session when we were all packed together.

What is this "imagination" you speak of?

[Firewind]

Re: D&D

Does this mean that Yyg is going to stop describing my crits as like the average injury sustained in a Quentin Tarrantino movie?

[Mezlo]

Re: D&D

yeah, my 2 cents, we would need something visual for a frame of reference during battle. Does it need to be exact or even to scale, no, but it would be good to know approximate layout of a battle.

[Armando]

Re: D&D

Maybe the secret is to have a map but no grid. No fussing with squares.

[Yygdrasil]

Re: D&D

I shall experiment with a supplementary form of visual reference. Perhaps if we simply used a blank whiteboard on Traipse and drew out the encounters it would work. Nothing needs to be specific... but (without any offense to Armando) I would like to see the campaign's battle style move from it's current model... being calculated & mathematical... into a more fluid and improv model.

We'll figure out how to visually signal things together... but I really don't like grid based play unless I'm playing chess or a single-player Tactics-style game. Using a grid makes gameplay equally as slow as the 2 aforementioned comparisons.

[Armando]

Re: D&D

without any offense to Armando

None taken. I'm well aware of my OCD need to optimize every game I play.

[Mezlo]

Re: D&D

I'm well aware of my OCD need to optimize every game I play.

And the OCD optimization sometimes is buying the enemy a round of drinks... I fully understand.

[Firewind]

Re: D&D

And in this session Mezlo hawks Byakko's balls.