sirblastalot @ sirblastalot @ttrpg.network

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2 yr. ago

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Listen, if Bashir can casually turn Sisko into a klingon in an afternoon, outpatient, I'm pretty sure becoming my fursona gender transition is nbd

My boring dayjob is to sit in front of the holodeck and shoot anything weird that comes out.

I’ve always just treated it as a natural 3D extension of the 2D grid rules

I believe that's how it's handled in D&D too, or at least how my table has always done it. I meant more as a practical matter, you're very unlikely to have a vertical wall grid and some kind of stand of the correct height for your minis, so you can't just count squares like you would for horizontal movement. That's when the Pythagorean Theorem comes up in my experience.

That's fair. Perhaps another style of DMing and/or a different system are more your speed.

If you actually have to use that much math more than once in a blue moon, you're doing it wrong.

There's no grid in the sky, though

• Deplete their resources by putting the fight at the end of a dungeon or other chain of different kinds of encounters
• Higher level monsters
• Smart enemies. Sit down and think about what they do as if you were playing them in someone else's game. Dumb dragons land and get murdered, smart dragons stay in the air, flame the party, and have been abusing contingency spells for the last millennium.
• Stakes other than player death. Sure we can kill these bandits, but can we do it before they get away with the orphanage fund? What if they take hostages? What are we going to do about all these fires they set on the way in?
• Make it feel more dangerous than it is by use of good description. A hippo is a relatively low level monster, but when that one player that knows how scary they are IRL realizes what you're describing, they will crap their pants.

I only recall seeing the hallway bunks in Lower Decks, and I think that was intended as a joke.

What is a "domain game"?

I don't think "reasoning" is the right perspective to examine Picard's comment from. He's not making a debate point, Picard is politely telling Ralph that he's acting like an assclown and that it WILL stop.

Sometimes restrictions breed creativity, though.

The DM can not metagame, definitionally

The secret to writing (or playing) characters that are smarter than you are is that you can take your time coming up with what they do. Maybe in-game your character has a razor wit and would have a snappy comeback for any situation. Out of game you've got a list of pre-prepared retorts you can bust out as needed.

It may be less impartial than a book with no financial connection to its subject.

I don't know where this 1982 reference point is coming from. This is a history book about a game series, not a reprint of an 80s game. If you walk into a book store and pick a history book off a shelf, even a well researched, nice, hardcover, it's like $20-25.

It's a little sus that it's published by the same company that owns Traveller now. That said, I think $7 is not a lot of money for a book you're interested in. $60 for the physical is outrageous though.

Stick with Star Wars, they have nice, safe-for-work Jizz Music.

There's also Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force where they get transported to a ship graveyard.

Blast off and nuke the site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.

So I guess that's actually several questions, and they each have different answers.

Why does combat feature heavily in D&D? It doesn't. Or at least, not necessarily. How much or little it features is dependent on your DM.

Ok, so why has it historically been featured heavily? Because of D&D's lineage. The game evolved mechanically from wargames, where combat was the whole thing, and thematically from works like Conan the Barbarian and Tolkein, where fighting monsters featured prominently.

Why so many types of monsters, then, if works like The Hobbit only had a half dozen or so? Because The Hobbit is a single story, whereas D&D is a framework for creating lots of stories. Maybe one short campaign or a campaign arc has as many monsters as a Tolkein story, but then you go on to the next arc, the next campaign, and you need something new. You can obviously recycle lots; orc bandits are different from orc soldiers are different from orc cultists. But with (tens of?) thousands of games going on continuously, year after year, there's always a demand for new content to slot in, and monster design is often a handy thing for DMs to outsource. Hence, there are a lot of kinds of monster because there is demand for them.