Saturday, December 30, 2017

Looking Back To My Childhood Cartoons

    Ah the end of the year, a time when everyone looks back on the year past.  Phooey on that.  Why look back over the year when you can look all the way back to childhood?  So here are some links to a few of the cartoons I loved when I was a kid.


Super Chicken
     I had not watched an episode of Super Chicken for decades before making this post, and yet when it somehow came up in a conversation (tip: avoid starting conversations with me, god only knows where they'll end up) I discovered that I could still do his theme song.  And the line about "You knew the job was dangerous when you took it Fred" has been in my brain for as long as I can remember.  It's a terrible show, but I loved it.




M.A.S.K.
    These guys were so cool.  The transforming vehicles and helmets that did cool things, I loved these toys the moment I saw them at the store.  Sadly the cartoon isn't that great, I didn't think it was even back then, but the toys were great enough to earn this a place in my nostalgia collection.



Battle of the Planets
    I had always thought that Robotech was the first anime I ever saw (Americanized though it was), but actually that spot belongs to Battle of the Planets, which was another Americanized anime.  I cannot remember much of the story now (and only watched a few minutes before making this post), but I have a feeling that part of why I liked this as a kid was that it was not a silly and stupid as most kids shows.



Defenders of the Earth
    Superfriends was okay, but the best superhero cartoon was Defenders of the Earth for me.  This is where I got my love for the character of The Phantom, even though he isn't comic-accurate in this cartoon (he did get his own awesome cartoon years later with Phantom 2040).



Felix the Cat
    One of my most favorite characters ever, with that awesome bag of tricks.



So there it is, totally un-asked-for and no doubt un-wanted, a look into some of the things from my childhood that made me the way I am.



Thursday, December 28, 2017

YouTube Tutorials: Nazmus Nasir

    I'm coding the next section of the Character Tutorial right now, which you'll see next week.  Until then let me introduce you to Nazmus Nasir's YouTube channel.  I really like this guy, his videos are almost all around 10 minutes, and nicely focused on a single topic or a tight group of things.  Great for learning in easy to digest chunks or to look up a reference on something you forgot.  I highly recommend checking him out if you haven't already.

He's got tutorials on JavaScript (like, over 50)...


And Excel...


And C++...


Plus some other gameplay and tech videos.



Wednesday, December 27, 2017

The Elemental Empire - part 6 - Technology and Fantasy

    I talked before about the role of magic in the setting I'm building, and how it differed from technology.  Let me revisit and expand on that by looking at the flip-side, what is technology?

    Of course, I've got an answer for this too - if magic is the invisible emotions of a single individual made real, technology is the invisible foundations of the real lives of the individuals.  Let me illustrate, while watching too much Crash Course World History it struck me about the "agricultural revolution" when people went from hunter/ gatherers to farmers (hi Wikipedia).  A couple of thousand years later and we get the Industrial Revolution (why, hello again Wikipedia).  And I love this last Wikipedia page because it has the quote that sums up all of technology for me: "The Industrial Revolution marks a major turning point in history; almost every aspect of daily life was influenced in some way."  Oh ho, there it is, technology is that thing that influences daily life.
    We humans are tool users.  We didn't get a lot of innate abilities.  We don't have wings or claws, fur or feathers, we don't have a lot of physical advantages when compared to all the other animals out there.  We do have really big brains though, and we like to mess around with our environment.  We use stuff.  The old Star Frontiers game had a great quote about "Mr. Human and his indestructible junk show." (wow, I totally remembered it accurately too, page 7 of the Alpha Dawn Expanded book)  That's us all right, we use stuff - but given that our lives are not based on our natural abilities but rather on using tools, then it seems to be that when we change our tools we change our lives.
    Now, back in the day ovens were big and pretty hard to make.  So (if I'm remembering my limited history knowledge right) some villages would have one big oven that everybody would use.  A communal resource.  But now ovens are much, much smaller, and everybody has their own.  So cooking stopped being a communal resource and became a private resource.  But, we still have communal ovens, we just call them restaurants.  But, at the restaurant somebody else does the cooking for you, you don't have to know how to do it yourself, and so we get the people who rely on restaurants and have no idea about how to boil water.  Technology changes society, and that changes people's lives.  I have no idea about how to raise a cow or butcher it (I do at least know how to cook it), something that a less technologically developed person would have to know to survive.
    This is also one of my pet peevs about Star Trek.  In the Star Trek universe there are replicators that can create anything at will, holodecks that can simulate any reality, and characters make comments like "we don't use money anymore."  Okay, it's the far future, so sure, I'll buy that.  But wait a minute, with such reality altering technology at one's fingertips let me ask you a question: how many characters on Star Trek have tattoos?  Yeah, not many, like 2 maybe 3.  How many people on Star Trek have hair that is not a natural color?  Again not many, if any actually.  Why do I point out such mundane things after talking about super science?  Well, do you honestly think in a future where anything can be created or imagined that everybody would look like a white middle-age middle-class convention?  There is a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode where one of the characters creates a holodeck fantasy involving the other crew-members.  I don't remember the details now, but what I do remember is thinking: this would totally be everybody's problem.  If you could create your own physical, interactive reality at will - who the hell would stay in the real world?  Jeez, even today we have the stereotypical kid in Mom's basement playing video games; how many thousands of times worse would it be in a fully-immersive VR world like the holodeck?  That's what I hate about Star Trek, why I've lost my childhood love for it over the years: it presents all these super-technological advances and then acts like humanity and society would look like they do in our modern world.  Hell no.  Granted, the Enterprise is a military ship (spare me the science crap, they all wear uniforms), but the ship does have some civilians and they should be very flamboyant or exotic or incomprehensible by today's standards. (as a side note, I don't have the same problem with Star Wars because it is a fantasy with updated graphics, but I do hate Star Wars for the fact that it sucks at presenting magic as bad as Star Trek sucks at presenting technology)

    As humans, without natural abilities we build our lives around tools, and when tools change (ie, technology develops) our lives and society changes as well.
    Which then raises some big questions about how to handle technology in a fantasy RPG setting, and how that interacts with magic - because people with magic do have natural advantages and so would they even look at technology the same way?  Hmmm.... that's a good question given my Humins all are innately magical and the other races all have some kinds of abilities (since I'm basing them off the standard fantasy races, and they always do something more than humans naturally).  Magic seems like it would be the main force for society, which actually works since it explains why the setting has such low technology, why this is a medieval-based world, it never needed to rely on tools as much, it has relied on it's magic users instead and thus stayed smaller and less developed.
    The big question though, the one that I hate to even contemplate but have to because somebody out there will want it, is guns.
    Damn you Pathfinder for Ultimate Combat and guns.  Not that it started with you, shoot there was the ancient original D&D module that had lasers if I remember right, but Pathfinder was the first mainstream fantasy setting to include guns.  The problem with guns is that they changed everything.  They totally revolutionized combat, making the armor and swords and bows that most RPGs are build on obsolete pretty quickly.  So you just introduced the thing that is going to kill off most of your equipment tables.  Why the hell would you throw a shuriken when you could shoot someone?  But bigger than that, I hate the game for throwing in guns as if they were no big deal.  Again, society and technology are linked, you can't change one without a change in the other.  Guns do not grow on trees, they had to be developed, experimented, crafted.  You need to harvest all the components for gunpowder, you need to shape the metal for the guns themselves.  They are pretty big undertakings, not something that just anybody would be walking around with (and yes, granted you can say the same for plate armor and the like, RPGs are not good about modeling the scarcity of things (since we have to let every player do all the cool stuff)).  And they are a major cultural shift.  Running at the wizard with a sword is crazy-talk; but shooting him dead while he's babbling, oh hell yes!  With a gun anybody can be a wizard, with a gun anybody can do super-human things.  Do you think wizards would like that?  Do you think kings would?
    The gods heal right, not wizards (they can't do that healing thing they just kill everybody) (so are the gods blocking healing magic from wizards? that's the only thing that makes sense), but the gods can heal.  So how are the gods going to react to modern surgical methods that heal people and save lives, CPR that brings back the dead, and when people no longer need to turn to them for healing?  Will they be happy?  Mad?  Destroy the world?

    Okay, so I've rambled for a while.  And honestly, I don't have a lot of hard thoughts right now.  I'm going over the factors in my brain, thinking about how magic and technology are going to react to each other.  And more, the opportunities both offer for storytelling.  I just finished reading David Weber's amazing Safehold series a few months back.  It's an awesome story about far future technological humans who meet an alien species that wipes out all other species once they reach a certain level of development.  The humans fight and lose, so they hide away enough colonists to populate one world, Safehold, and create a religion that prohibits technological development - that way, this last remnant of humanity will not also be wiped out down the road.  But some of the settlers disagreed with that plan, they wanted to lay low and start over, but they also believed it would be possible to defeat the aliens if humans re-developed technology while knowing what they would someday face.  So the books start with a church-controlled world of limited technology, and over the series we see technological developments introduced and how society is radically changed as a result.  And some people take to that change, some hate it, but there is a lot of drama and compelling stories since the fate of the world is at stake.  Not in a stupid superhero "big beam in the sky" way, but a really interesting "what world are these changes going to make for the future" way.  I don't really want to set up this setting to tell the story of how technology changes the world - but at the same time I would be happy to leave some bits in that a GM and players who wanted to tell that story could use.

    I'm going to end this rant here, since it segues well into what I want to explore next: what is a setting good for?  What kind of a tool is it?  Or, even better to say - what kind of a tool am I trying to build for GMs?  I'll go over that next.
    The details are slowly being expanded too, I'm actually getting close to writing some real story and not just all this theoretical stuff.  That writing and revising is a part of what's been slowing down my posting, sorry about that.  I am working on some material though and it will be out as soon as it's ready.  Until next week!

Tuesday, December 26, 2017

Sample Characters: Starfinder

    I did a post earlier about making a character for the My Little Pony RPG, Tails Of Equestria.  At the time it was because I had nothing else to write :) but I decided to make it a thing.  So from time to time I'm going to create a character for an RPG and post it - and today we're going with Starfinder. Now, I know nothing about Starfinder except that it's "Pathfinder in space."  So I am not going to make an optimized character, heck I might not even make a playable character.  But it might be interesting for any of you who haven't played the game before.  So let's jump in.



    I'm only using the core Starfinder rulebook for this build, and it has a list of character creation steps on pages 14-15.  And then the following sections totally disregard that order.  So I'm going to write this in the steps that I went through.  In this case, both the book and I agreed to start with "a character concept."  I have no idea if I'll ever play this character, or with whom, or in what kind of a campaign.  So I want to make the most broadly applicable character possible.  And that means fighter.  Any RPG can use somebody who can kill monsters.  But I don't really like the "tank" fighter, I like the smart Batman (which sadly no filmmaker on Earth seems to also like), so I want to do a smart fighter.  With guns/ tech I think I'm looking at a Dex-based, quick kind of fighter.


    The next step (in my process) was to look at the "Themes."  These are little ways to flavor your character, kind of like the Backgrounds in D&D 5th Ed.  There are 10 of them, each one comes with 4 leveled abilities:
  • Ace Pilot - you're good at driving and flying and all that stuff
  • Bounty Hunter - you hunt people
  • Icon - you're a pop star, or have some kind of audience 
  • Mercenary - you're used to carrying stuff and working in a group
  • Outlaw - you have contacts in the criminal underworld
  • Priest - you're connected to a deity and church/ religion
  • Scholar - you're smart and good at reading
  • Spacefarer - you're a jack of all trades
  • Xenoseeker - you know about alien life forms
  • "Themeless" - you can choose to not have a theme, in which case you still get a small benefit (not quite as much as having a theme though)
    For a "fighter" the obvious choices would be Bounty Hunter or Mercenary.  But I don't really want to go that route, I feel like making something a little more unusual.  My first thought was the Icon, that maybe I was some kind of popular fighter, like a YouTuber of the future (maybe Xander Cage from XXX would be a better role-model though :) - but then I really liked the idea of Priest.  There is a list of 20 deities in the back of the book (starting on page 482).  The descriptions are very, very brief, and don't describe the kinds of churches or religious organization in very much depth, but one did strike me.  "Desna" is the goddess of dreams, luck, stars and travelers.  She jumped out at me because it says that she communicates with her followers through dreams, and they rely on instinct.  That seems like it would be a great tool for my GM.  If my character follows the dreams and hunches of his Goddess, then the GM can use me as a way to guide the party, a two-legged plot device.  I now from my GMing that sometimes it's great to have a way to tug on the party "in character" to help guide them when they get stuck or off course.  So with this character I can be the mouthpiece of the GM if necessary.  And it isn't the stereotypical military fighter.  So I'll go with that.


    With a Theme, let's skip over to the class.  Your class is the biggest thing about your character, since it'll have an impact on your character through the entire game.  The "fighter" of the Starfinder setting is the Soldier.  But there are 7 classes in the book:
  • Envoy - the space Bard
  • Mechanic - the summoner or cyborg
  • Mystic - the spacde Magic User
  • Operative - the space Rogue
  • Solarian - the space Soulknife (guy who summons weapon or armor for non-psychic fans)
  • Soldier - the space Fighter
  • Technomancer - the Magic User who uses technology
    As I mentioned I knew I was going to be a Soldier.  The Solarian would also fit with the "fighter" concept, and might even go a bit better in a way with the Priest Theme, but I didn't feel like making that character.  So a Soldier I will be.  At level 1 a Soldier has one class ability, they have to choose a "Primary Fighting Style."  They'll get 5 abilities from this style, starting at 1st level and every 4 after.  There are 7 styles in the book.  And I have to admit, they all looked pretty good on average.  The "Blitz" rushes into melee, which didn't sound like fun for me.  The "Bombard" throws grenades/ explosives.  The "Guard" is defensive, which would have worked with my concept but I didn't feel it.  The "Hit-and-Run" is a mobile fighter, while the "Sharpshoot" (yeah, no "-er" at the end of it) stays at a range.  Neither appealed to me.
    The two that I really liked were the "Arcane Assailant" who is basically the Magus from Pathfinder, and the "Armor Storm" who eventually wears Power Armor.  I love the idea of the Power Armor, the suit of armor with it's own weapons and abilities, basically Iron Man.  But I also really like the Wizard/ Fighter hybrid of the Magus, though the Arcane Assailant doesn't cast spells, just enhances weapons.  This was a really, really hard choice.  I actually wanted both, and I think I am going to make both down the line, but for right now I'm going to force myself to commit to the Armor Storm.  One of the things I like about Power Armor is that you use it's Strength in place of your own.  So I can focus on Dex, and eventually I'll let the armor handle the Str.


    Okay, with a Theme and Class, let's get the last major leg of the character and decide on a Race.  There are 7:
  • Android - sentient robots, tough and smart but not very sociable
  • Human - versatile, gain a bonus feat and choose an ability (exactly the same as Pathfinder)
  • Kasatha - 4-armed warrior poets
  • Lashunta - psychics, choose either the  smart or tough sub-types
  • Shirren - hive mind insects
  • Vesk - space Orcs
  • Yoski - space Hobbit-rats
    The description of the Androids talks about how they used to be slaves of the Humans and have some baggage over that.  I'm not really interested in that troupe, but I do like the idea that this character has chosen to be a servant of the Goddess instead of any mortal power.  I kind of have this idea that he's sort of broken though, or maybe considered defective by other androids.  Not sure if I really want to explore that, but it was an idea.  Also, Androids also get bonuses to Dex and Int, which are the two attributes I am aiming for, and the penalty to Cha is not a big deal since the typical fighter is not expected to be the talker.


    Okay, with the big three - I am an Android Priest Soldier - I've got the major part of my character.  Time to start filling in the details and actually playing with some numbers.  Let's get our Attributes fixed.  I've got +2 Dex +2 Int +1 Wis -2 Cha.  I like Starfinder for making Point Buy the default and rolling an optional rule.  I actually don't like rolling for attribute scores, I think point-buy is a better system to keep everything level.  So here are starting scores:
  • Strength             10
  • Dexterity            12
  • Constituation     10
  • Intelligence        12
  • Wisdom             11
  • Charisma            8
    To these scores I can add 10 points, with no score going over 18.  You can't lower a score, only raise them.  After some beard-scratching I settle on these...
  • Strength            10 (+0)
  • Dexterity          16 (+3)
  • Constituation    12 (+1)
  • Intelligence       14 (+2)
  • Wisdom            13 (+1)
  • Charisma           8 (-1)
    Forcing the odd score is annoying to me.  I think the whole odd-scores-for-feat-prequisites is stupid.  I doubt anybody would notice anything if we dropped the scores and only used modifiers.  But it is what it is.  So those will be my attribute scores.  Are they the best scores?  Are they a good base for developing in the future?  I have no idea, but they look good to me.


    On to Skills.  As a Soldier I get 4 skill points, and with the Int mod that's 6 total.  So basically I can pick 6 skills and have them always equal to my level.  While I could put points in skills one level, and then different skills another level, I think that would be stupid.  Might as well pick some skills and stick to them.  I have 8 class skills: Acrobatics, Athletics, Engineering, Intimidate, Medicine, Piloting, Profession, and Survival.  From the Priest Theme I add Mysticism as a class skill.  All of those skills will get a +3 bonus if I put at least one skill point in them, but I can choose any skills I want.  There are 20 skills total - I'm so not going to list them all here.  Here are the skills I went with, and my modifiers...
  • Acrobatics        1 sp + 3 class + 3 Dex = +7
  • Athletics        1 sp + 3 class + 0 Str = +4
  • Engineering        1 sp + 3 class + 2 Int = +6
  • Medicine        1 sp + 3 class + 2 Int = +6
  • Mysticism        1 sp + 3 class + 1 Wis = +5
  • Perception        1 sp + not class + 1 Wis = +2
    To be honest, I have no idea what skills to take.  None of them really jump out as something my character should be able to do.  I went with Acrobatics and Athletics to give me the ability to move around, and since the character is Dex based, so he seems like to should be mobile (through, granted, Athletics is Str based).  Engineering sounds good for a robot, and Medicine is something that he can use to help others.  Mysticism just goes with his spiritual side, and the last was a toss-up.  Stealth sounded like it could be useful, but I wasn't sure how well it fit with the character concept.  He doesn't seem like a sneaky guy.  Neither Diplomacy or Culture sounded right, though I'm still not sure about Culture, it might work to represent the places he's been and different kinds of people he's helped.  In the end I settled on Perception because it's never a bad skill really.  I'm not sure it should be a skill in the first place, and since it isn't class it's not very high, but nothing else seemed like a better choice.


    Now for the Feats.  Well, feat singular.  This is the part of Pathfinder I hate.  Feats can let you do cool stuff, but they have such incomprehensibly long feat chains and prerequisites, in some cases, and are totally useless in other cases.  And there are too damn many of them.  Thankfully I've only got one book, but even still there are a lot of feats to look over and choose from - 98 if my count is right (not listing that many).  After giving them all a quick look there were a few that looked good.  "Bodyguard" would let him boost an ally's AC, though he isn't a real tanky-tank fighter.  "Blind-fight" kind of works with the "follows instinct" background of his god's followers, and it isn't useless though you likely won't see enemies in cover all the time.  "Mobility" might work, though I don't see him dancing through enemies, I think more and more he's likely going to be a ranged attacker.  "Suppressive Fire" would let him pin down enemies with a ranged attack, which might be very helpful.  And "Weapon Focus" applies to a whole group of weapons now, instead of the single weapon of Pathfinder.  But what's better, there is another feat called "Versatile Focus" that lets you extend Weapon Focus to all weapons you're proficient in, and as a Soldier that's all the weapons.  A Soldier does get a bonus feat at 2nd level, so I would take Weapon at 1st and Versatile at 2nd and then get a bonus to hit with all weapons.  I think I'm going to go that route, even though I'm not sure if the bonus to hit is really that great, having a better chance to hit seems like a good thing for a soldier to have.  Okay, feat chosen and even my next level's feat to boot.


    The last big step is Equipment.  Fantasy Pathfinder has quite a bit of equipment, sci-fi Starfinder has pages and pages of really small lists of equipment.  Oh boy is this going to be a pain.  Well, I've got 1,000 credits so lets see how far they go.
    After a lot of small print, here's what I've got...
250cr        Pulsecaster Pistol (does non-lethal damage)
350cr        Laser Pistol, Azimuth
250cr        Second Skin (light armor)
120cr        2 spare Batteries (for either weapon)
7cr        Personal Comm
1cr        Flashlight
20cr        Engineering Tool Kit
which leaves him with 2 credits in his pocket.  Wow, that doesn't seem like a lot of gear, but so it goes.  The leveled gear like D&D 4th Ed. is kind of a pain in the backside since it makes the lists so damn long.


    And the final choice to make is Alignment, which I'm going to make Chaotic Good like his deity.  The rest is just copying down the numbers, which I will do and post the character sheet on my Google Drive here.  I used a great fillable PDF character sheet I found here.

   Well, this has been an interesting experience.  I do like the game from first impressions, there seem to be some neat potential characters from the races, themes and classes.  Picking feats is not as horrible as Pathfinder, but isn't really fun - and the equipment lists are a bear to navigate - both could use being listed by level, there are a lot of feats and gear that a beginning character cannot choose or afford.  It is a little daunting to wade through the options, and the skill list does not seem really evocative.  Making a character without any real knowledge of the system is kind of a pain, but I've done a lot worse.  No doubt with some experience it will be easy enough.  The character did seem to grow pretty well from concept to final details, so I liked how everything fit overall.  I'd give it a thumbs-up if I was bothering to rate it, but one character is not much to formulate an opinion.
    So there you go, there's a Starfinder character that you can use, and a little insight into how the system works.  Hope you enjoyed our little project, and if you were a Patron of mine (see the link at the right) you could choose what game you wanted me to make a character for next (shameless plug, hey, I like to eat).  Until next time then!


Bonus Legal Stuff - I used the logo from the Paizo Community Package, so here's the required legaleeze: "This website uses trademarks and/or copyrights owned by Paizo Inc., which are used under Paizo's Community Use Policy. We are expressly prohibited from charging you to use or access this content. This [website, character sheet, or whatever it is] is not published, endorsed, or specifically approved by Paizo Inc. For more information about Paizo's Community Use Policy, please visit paizo.com/communityuse. For more information about Paizo Inc. and Paizo products, please visit paizo.com."

Wednesday, December 20, 2017

Patreon Previews

    So I finally got some Patreon-only posts up at my Patreon page.  My apologies to my one Patron :)  I am going to keep posting there, even if I fall behind I'll post only to Patreon and catch up a week later here on the blog.  I like to eat, so the support is greatly appreciated and this is a thank you to my supporter and an FYI for why things won't be updated here this week.  Next week I'll have everything here on the blog and will try very hard to stay on track (I don't really do anything for Christmas, hopefully I can get a lot of writing done, that would actually be a wonderful present).

Monday, December 18, 2017

My brain is moving, just not very quickly

    Anyone who's been following me has no doubt noticed that I haven't been posting on the regular schedule I wanted to keep.  Things got strange a month or two ago (time is a blur currently) and I ahven't managed to get back into a routine that works.  But I am working on projects, and will have some updates coming up in the fairly near future...

5th Edition SRD - I'm transitioning from looking at characters to looking at running the game, which is going to close out this project when done.  This is a hard part though, I have only GMed a few adventures, and they came from the canned Starter Set (which is pretty good btw), so I need to do a lot of reading and thinking on how to approach this half of the game.  I am planning on going over non-combat encounters, the combat system, monster design and loot/ leveling.  That should take a minimum of 4 more posts (I'm betting on 6-8) and then I'm going to finish that project.

Night-Reign, aka The Elemental Empire - I have some over-arching story for this setting, and I am going to talk about the technology for the setting, and I did a post on terrain then of course decided to change all of that work.  I also am going to talk about how I want to write and present the setting, what kind of a tool it is meant to be for GMs.

The Open2 Engine - somehow Bookworm managed to merge with the tutorial character viewer project I was working on and things got all confused in my head.  I'm going to post a roadmap to what I want Bookworm to be, feature-wise, and get back on coding that.  It is the hardest project I have going as it requires me to learn all new things - I've been gaming as far back as I can remember, coding since last June.

    And I do have a few odds and ends to post/ share.  I am not sure when I'll get back on the daily schedule I want, things are still very strange for me, but I wanted to let anyone who cared know that I am still working and have not fallen off the Internet.  Hope you all are having a less hectic holiday season than I am :)


Thursday, December 14, 2017

YouTube Map-making Tutorials

    For this Tutorial Thursday here are a few YouTube videos that I watched to help me learn how to create maps.

This is the first of a great 6 part series...



This next video uses a similar system, but it's only one video...



And this video is just about how to do a cool effect...





Wednesday, December 13, 2017

The Elemental Empire - part 5 - Terrain Digressions

    Okay, I meant to do a post on the technology I wanted in my new setting, but I'm not going to hit that today.  I've had some ideas about the setting in general that may have me change some things in a pretty big way (while it may not seem like I have a lot of detail for this setting there is actually a lot in my head that I haven't posted yet).  So while I'm re-evaluating things I'm just going to throw out a quick post on some work I've been doing.
    I've been slowly adding terrain and detail to my world map so let me share some of that while I'm working on bigger things.  This is the continent with the Elemental Empire as it currently stands...


    I want a lot of different terrain types in the Empire.  To the south is a mostly desert, though I'm thinking it'll be a region that is pure desert at the top and that is very fertile at the south, someplace that floods like Egypt/ The Nile.
    There are two major mountain ranges to the West and East which divide the Empire.  They are a little too wide proportionally right now, I am still working on this.  They make up the forested lands.  The central Empire is the capitol, inside the ring of magically-created forest (the capitol itself isn't on the map yet) and a lake.  The surrounding farmland keeps the capitol fed, and there are only a few passes through the high mountains to the western and eastern halves of the Empire.  The artic north is sparsely inhabited.  On the south-eastern tip of the continent is a swampy area that may or may not be a part of the Empire (thinking it's uninhabited, with the forested northern parts being more inviting to live in).  Now that I've started laying out the terrain I might have to go and re-draw the shape of the continent.  The big landmass to the north of the capitol seems strange to me, and I'm thinking of adding a lot of islands to the western side.

I'm using the Sketchy Cartography Brushes by StarRaven on Deviantart (link here) which are awesome, a big thinks to him (her? never can tell online) for the great art.

I also found a couple of cool links on making terrain/ climate.  There is this post on Mythcreants about coloring the map (which I mostly ignored :) and this other post on creating plausible maps.  The Tao of D&D had a link to this cool Wikipedia post about the Koppen climate classification system too.

    Okay, admittedly this is not a very big post, but I will have much more detailed stuff to come, promise :)


Tuesday, December 12, 2017

5th Edition Rolls With 2d10 Instead

    I did a post a while ago looking at the DCs and odds of success for the 5e SRD.  I made the mistake of telling a friend about it.  He said, "well, you like the idea of rolling 2d10 instead of 1d20, so how would that change the odds?"  I hate him.  Don't get me wrong, he's my best friend and the coolest guy I know and nicer and more patient than any human has a right to be.  Still, I hate him.  He tends to say things like this that send me into some new project black hole that I may spend the rest of my life on.  In this case it isn't so bad - but making the table for all the odds in 5e was a lot of work, more work that it looks like, and making this damn table was a lot of work too.  Still, he was right, so let's look at what happens if you roll 2d10 instead of 1d20 with 5th Edition :)

    First off, why roll 2d10 instead of 1d20?  Well, multiple dice create a bell curve.  A single die is flat, it has the exact same odds of rolling any number, like so (again all this will be thanks to AnyDice.com)...
But add in a die and you create a bell curve, now the middle results are more common than the extremes...

The reason I like this idea (though granted I have not found a table to try it) is from my experiences with Pathfinder combat.  I'll give you the biggest example that comes to mind.  Some time ago I was working on an adventure and decided that I wanted to throw in a special encounter.  The evil Drow, dark elves, had been messing around in the background of the world and I wanted to have the party encounter them for the first time.  So I set up an adventure that would culminate in the party facing a group of Drow.  They would talk at first, the leader challenging the party's main fighter to a duel.  Everybody else would just watch the two champions face off.  But they wouldn't, after the 3rd round the Drow minions would ambush the party - showing how they were evil sneaky bast**ds.  Also I was going to use a new system where the Drow mages couldn't cast spells but could spend their slots for instant counterspells and to re-target the party's spellcaster - though that's tangential to my point, sorry.  Anyways, I crafted this Drow champion by hand to make sure she would be a good threat to the party's main fighter so we'd have a cool fight scene.  I didn't really narrate it as well as I should have, but the thing that killed the idea of this dramatic, tense, fight-to-the-death encounter with the PCs and NPCs watching was when NEITHER OF US COULD HIT A DAMN THING !!!!  Instead of having a riveting fight the other characters were bored and/or chagrined at how their champion couldn't hit the broad side of the proverbial barn.
    If you've played for any length of time you know what I'm talking about, that combat where it feels like 20 turns go by and nobody can hit anything.  Swing and miss, not the one-sided "oh crap we can't hit the bad guys" or "we rock we can't miss."  No, this is the frustrating, painful, boring "neither side can hit the either even though we're standing still two feet from each other swinging massive two-handed weapons."  Dice are random, that's why we use them after all (well, not random per se but unpredictable, sorry, tangent again) - but the thing is that flat dice like a single d20 are even worse.  The odds of rolling a hundred 1s are the same as rolling a hundred 10s or a hundred 20s.  With multiple dice and that bell curve the odds of rolling a hundred 2s or 20s is way, way lower than rolling a hundred 11s.  They are not quite as swingy.  In theory at least, again I've never played a game long-term that used multiple dice, so this is theory - and it's pretty subjective since the unusual edge cases, like my wiffle-ball fight, are the ones that stay in memory the clearest instead of the typical fight where most attacks hit.  So all this is based on feelings more than any real need or reason.

    That said, let's see what happens when we switch dice.  I'm going to keep Advantage and Disadvantage as rolling 3 dice and keeping 2.  I'm also going to do this from a +0 to +16 modifier against the 6 DCs in the 5e SRD, just like the last table, so here goes...



Okay, let's grab a few results and compare.  First let's look at a +0 modifier, a beginning character with no attribute modifier and no proficiency.

Very Easy    64  80  96 on 1d20        85  94  99 on 2d10
Easy             30  55  80                      38  64  85
Medium       9  30  51                        7  21  43
Hard             1  5  10                          1  1  3

Okay, so the easy is a little easier and the hard a little harder.  Now let's look at a +2 modifier, so having an attribute bonus or proficiency but not both.

Very Easy    81  90  99 on 1d20        98  99  99 on 2d10
Easy            42  65  88                      58  79  93
Medium      16  40  64                      15  36  62
Hard            2  15  28                         1  6  15

Okay, so looking at Easy - with a +0 it's 55 and 65 with +2 on 1d20.  It's 64 or 79 with 2d10.  So 2d10 is not a big boost, but does favor the players over 1d20.  The funny thing is Hard where 1d20's 5 / 15 is better than 2d10s 1 / 6.  So this would make reaching for those really hard DCs even harder, and Advantage doesn't give that much of a benefit.  That kind of sucks.

    Overall, I don't think I really like this.  Well, let me amend that.  I still like the idea of rolling 2d10 for attack rolls, I think that would help take out some of the crazy swingy results.  But for skills I would switch to the regular 1d20.  Okay, so that was an interesting waste of time :)  Here's the regular 5e Odds table below, and you can find another crazy way to use dice in my post on constraining results to simulate skill.




Monday, December 11, 2017

Looking at the 5th Edition SRD - part 11 - Skill Descriptions

    Having looked at how to roll, let's look at when to roll - so what skills does the 5e SRD have?  Although, as the Angry GM pointed out there are not really skill checks, they are attribute checks that can be increased by skill.  There is no "unskilled" concept, that is there are not any activities that the rules say you cannot do without proficiency.  So you can do open heart surgery without being proficient in "Medicine".  Another weird thing is that some actions one might think of as being "skill" are instead "tool proficiency" in the rules.  Like crafting - being a blacksmith means being proficient in balcksmith tools.  This is weird, but it does make a kind of sense.  You can't forge metal without, well, a forge, right?  And while everybody has a voice to sing with, you need a harp if you want to play the harp.  So if you don't have the tools (or at least improvised tools) then you can't do the action.  So it isn't as weird on reflection as I first thought (still feels weird though).
    By not having an "unskilled" concept the 5e SRD tries to work for a more "old school" game feel, where any character can do anything the player can make a case to the GM for.  Which is good for players who like that style of play that is more open to negotiation between the players and GM then more "rules heavy" players who use the details in the rules to handle player/GM interactions.  This is a matter of taste, whatever style you prefer is your preference, there is no absolute right or wrong (though it sucks when you and your GM or other players have different preferences).  The rules as written (or RAW in gamer slang) do lean towards that old school play-style though since they do not give very detailed guidelines for what each skill can be used for.
    In fact, let me list what the rules have to say about each skill.  I am going to re-organize the skill list though, the SRD puts each skill with a specific attribute which is stupid.  The easy example is Intimidation, which is under Charisma, but that makes no sense for a high Strength low Charisma Fighter.  Their bulging muscles, heavy armor and weapons and skill at killing do not make them scary at all (insert irony here).  That's an obvious place to add Strength instead of Charisma.  On the other hand, threatening someone with your powerful friends or that you'll cast a curse on them would totally be Charisma.  Likewise a sprint might be Strength, an obstacle course or hurdles Dexterity, and a marathon Constitution - even though all are the same skill of running/ athletics.  So for the list below I'm going to put the skill under the action categories I've been using (though not for a while now).  Also, I'm going to bullet point what each skill is good for, because frankly the SRD wastes a lot of words when describing the skills.  So let's look at the skill and what the SRD says to use them for...

Exploring

Athlethics
  • climbing
  • jumping
  • swimming
Acrobatics
  • keep your balance
  • dive, tumble, roll or flip
Stealth
  • hide from soneone
  • move without being noticed
  • (hiding does have a detailed breakdown in a sidebar)
Animal Handling
  • calm an animal
  • maneuver a mount
  • intuit animal's intentions
Perception
  • spot, hear or otherwise notice something in the environment
Survival
  • hunt
  • guide/ navigate
  • predict weather
  • avoid hazards

Investigating

Arcana
  • identify spells
  • identify magic items
  • knowledge about the planes
History
  • past events, people and civilizations
Investigation
  • look around for clues and make deductions from clues
Nature
  • terrain
  • plants and animals
  • weather
Religion
  • dieties
  • religious hierarchies
  • secret cults

Manipulating

Sleight of Hand
  • planting or lifting an object on/from another person
  • concealing an item on your person
Medicine
  • stabilize a dying companion
  • diagnose an illness
  • (I find it a little odd that healing is not mentioned at all)

Talking

Insight
  • determine the true intentions of a creature
Deception
  • hide the truth from another
Intimidation
  • influence another's actions through threats/violence
Performance
  • "delight an audience with music, dance, acting, storytelling or some other form of entertainment"
Persuasion
  • influence with "tact, social graces, or good nature"

Fighting
There are no skills for fighting, exactly, rather you have the weapon proficiencies and such that are scattered throughout the rules


    Okay, I'm not listing the full descriptions here, but if you read them please tell me if you think they suck.  I really don't like the way the SRD describes the skills at all.  There are no examples of actions that might be more difficult - that whole Easy, Medium and Hard DC chart that opened this section of the rules - which is the kind of thing that a more "rules heavy" table could use, and the descriptions get overly specific for what a "rules light" table needs.  I think in trying to accommodate both play styles they ended up being useful to neither.  And the tools/ tool proficiency do not really have any descriptions.  If you have a Herbalism Kit it is used when you "identify or apply herbs."  Wow, how helpful.  So if I want to heal someone by using herbs, how many HP can I heal?  Doesn't say.  If I want to remove a condition like exhausted by giving someone an all-natural Red Bull, can I and what's the DC?  Again, there is nothing there for "rules heavy" play, and even "rules light" GMs don't have a lot of guidance (for example, should herbs be allowed to remove conditions at all? should herbal and magical healing stack? that's a more rules light guidance on "should you let your players do this or will it screw up the game" the designers could point out).
    Also, a pet peeve, tool proficiencies are basically skills and weapons/ armor proficiency are basically skills, but they are not listed with the skills - instead the same basic concept is scattered in different locations.  I like more structure in the rules layout, listing and describing similar things in the same place.  Makes it easier to find a rule you forget at the table if you know everything skill-like is in the same chapter (and the fact that the pdf does not have a table of contents really, really, pisses me off).

    So, looking at skills overall - need a breakdown by DC levels, I think it would be good to have examples of how each attribute could be used with each skill (which might inspire "rules light" players in how to think in each skill in different ways too), put tools with skills (or just make them a kind of sub-set of skills) and fold in the weapons and armor since they are basically the same thing (or should be at least).  Some things I would change in the existing system.  As is, this is better than nothing, but more skilled and experienced players and GMs who like the "rules light" style will get the most from this I think.  18 skills is at least better than the 30+ of the 3.5 SRD, I do like the more focused skill list.  There is fairly good coverage.  Using skills at the table though, in particular for mysteries and NPC interactions seems like a problem since there is no guidance on the roll dice vs role-play minefield.  Off the cuff I think the skill system mostly sucks, but this was just a first look - next week I'm going to keep poking around the skills and how you'd use them at the table, along with some other checks.