Looking for Players, play by chat, 5th edition

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Zelknolf
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Re: Looking for Players, play by chat, 5th edition

Post by Zelknolf »

I note well the grim cost of people playing D&D instead of playing D&D, but the players indicated their availability, and I picked the timeslot when the most people were available. Everyone volunteered their participation and is free to leave at any time for any reason. I might be sad if the reason is to grind on static content, but it's no more a "barrier" than any social engagement.
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Re: Looking for Players, play by chat, 5th edition

Post by Veilan »

I think that any activity under the ALFA umbrella - especially if it is as open to all comers as this is - can only serve to energise and enrich the community. Who knows, some of the non-ALFA friends tapped to participlate might just end up enjoying the game & roleplay with ALFAns and have their curiousity about our "core game" piqued?

Either way, people having something fun to do together seems the purpose of our being here to me. My only regret is my own timezone and limited availability - but you should give it a shot, Gala, table or not :).
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Re: Looking for Players, play by chat, 5th edition

Post by Galadorn »

Zelk and Veilan: Absolutely! I'm so jealous of this plan, was just spittin' inta the wind.

I am so happy Zelk has thrown this out there, and I certainly would join if she'd have me, and if I could have played in the time slot for sure. I'll check that whenitsgood again, maybe I can.

I'm in a 5th edition PnP group now that plays once a month at an awesome hobby shop RPG store here in Bangkok (shameless plug: www.battlefieldbangkok.com), my PC is a truly alcoholic Dwarven Paladin (and I mean that, even other dwarves would shake their head slowly at this dwarf's drinking habits), taking "Tavern Brawler" at 4th level since it suits him so perfectly (don't really want to and Ithildur would certainly tell me i'm wasting a very valuable and rare feat choosing it...), but anyway, he's so fun thumping along with his Maul over his shoulder growling at the team if we pass by a tavern. I love 5th edition very much. Good luck!

(I'd make a Rogue or Ranger if I can play :))
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Re: Looking for Players, play by chat, 5th edition

Post by Zelknolf »

The official time is posted here:
http://www.alandfaraway.info/phpBB3/vie ... 60#p628078

It would be 9am Saturday in Bangkok. Still two empty seats.
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Re: Looking for Players, play by chat, 5th edition

Post by Galadorn »

Zelknolf wrote:The official time is posted here:
http://www.alandfaraway.info/phpBB3/vie ... 60#p628078

It would be 9am Saturday in Bangkok. Still two empty seats.
holy hannah! I can do that. :P
Can't garantee though.....


So, how EXACTLY would we all "meet up" for this? What sort of communal cyber venue will we be using?
How do rolls go again? both for character creation and during game play? I don't mind if I play, if Zelk rolls all my attacks and skill checks for me. Of course if we did have a communal rolling system online where we could make our own rolls, i'd like that too.
How long do you believe sessions to be lasting? (9am is "late" in the morning, if games are 3-4 hours long, i'll be divorced by 12:00 if it's with any massive frequency, god forbid every week). Not even looking for changes to accommodate me, i'm just testing the waters...
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Re: Looking for Players, play by chat, 5th edition

Post by Galadorn »

........and just saw first session is the 10th. I'm on a school camping trip with 85 ten year olds during that time :(... happens only once a year, so not gonna happen next week for me. :) poop!
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Re: Looking for Players, play by chat, 5th edition

Post by Zelknolf »

Galadorn wrote:So, how EXACTLY would we all "meet up" for this? What sort of communal cyber venue will we be using? How do rolls go again? both for character creation and during game play? I don't mind if I play, if Zelk rolls all my attacks and skill checks for me. Of course if we did have a communal rolling system online where we could make our own rolls, i'd like that too.
Stat generation is happening in alfa-tech mostly, because there's no idle presence in the roll20 game. I'm holding people to their first roll, unless it's a mulligan by my above-defined terms. Saw when I woke up that you threw a few sets of stats, but I've got to hold you to the first ones, when just rolling 4d6 six times, before figuring out the !stats command. Would be too easy for folk to claim non-counting rolls if I didn't go that way.

For actual play, we'll be connected to a Discord channel, which Foam will set up, and a Roll20 game, which I'm setting up. The Discord channel is really just for voice chat; the players who are going to use voice seem to prefer it to Roll20's voice chat. We'll all want to be connected, though, even if not speaking, so everyone can hear them.

Dice for play go through Roll20; I'm looking into what I can automate-- Roll20 wants to be platform agnostic, but I'd rather minimize the amount of time we spend using meat-based computing to manage numbers. Numbers management will probably be largely manual in earlier sessions, and I'll automate and abstract away problems as they start to annoy me.

How long do you believe sessions to be lasting? (9am is "late" in the morning, if games are 3-4 hours long, i'll be divorced by 12:00 if it's with any massive frequency, god forbid every week). Not even looking for changes to accommodate me, i'm just testing the waters...
Eh... 3-4 hours is about what I had in mind. Sessions shorter than 3 hours tend to not be very satisfying play, and longer than 4 hours would have me up past midnight (which I try not to be in the habit of).
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Re: Looking for Players, play by chat, 5th edition

Post by Galadorn »

Ok then, I wrote those first rolls down. I'll make a character but can't make 1st session :( cheers!
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Re: Looking for Players, play by chat, 5th edition

Post by Zelknolf »

The chat bot also repeats the channel's contents to to Discord, which persists chat history, so we can retrieve if we need. Missing the first session is fine; the selected time is unambiguously trying to make something work when we have few options and none of them are ~quite~ good.
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Re: Looking for Players, play by chat, 5th edition

Post by Zelknolf »

Missing two people while we were resolving character generation -- so here's hoping that folk don't have questions needin' answers in conversational timelines, because very little overlap.

So right now, we have
Foam -- playing a ranged Ranger (in 5e, this is a striker)
Rumple -- playing a barbarian (in 5e, this is a tank)
shad0wfax -- playing a diviner (in 5e, this is control)
SwordSaintMusashi -- playing a monk (in 5e, this is a striker)

The group is going to be short on healing (Foam's ranger will learn to heal at level 2, but ranger heals tend to only be good enough to stop someone from bleeding to death this specific round) as it reads. Damage output is probably fine (ranger and monk can both do "burst" damage by spending spells and ki, respectively). Secondary folk on tanking or control would also probably contribute and not feel redundant. We also might end up with a game where we play it extra grim and every fight ends with attempts to bandage the mess the party just got themselves into.
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Re: Looking for Players, play by chat, 5th edition

Post by HEEGZ »

Sorry I missed session zero. Been an awful weekend. I can make these times though. I'll play a life cleric. More soon.
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Re: Looking for Players, play by chat, 5th edition

Post by HEEGZ »

Just putting it on my calendar for the rest of the year. . . I have Courtwarming game this Friday night so I will be late to the session. Last home game of the year for my twins.

I also have a thing March 10th. Other than that my schedule is free. I'm hoping to hop on IRC and roll stats in the next hour. Can someone remind me the command for drop lowest for the bot?
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Re: Looking for Players, play by chat, 5th edition

Post by Galadorn »

I just typed: !roll 4d6, and then it shows you the actual 4 numbers rolled in brackets, and take away the lowest manually. :)
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Re: Looking for Players, play by chat, 5th edition

Post by Zelknolf »

Zelknolf wrote:To match, there would be some house rules that prevent building cities on magic (so non-repeated use of spells like Goodberry works as written, but trying to survive exclusively Goodberries would result in some serious problems) and some mild alterations to resting (specifically, I'm going to make people roll medicine to spend hit dice on a short rest -- getting care lets you extend your vitality, but sipping beer and joking about farts just makes you drunk and giggly).
I promised house rules when I wrote the first post, and then didn't post those house rules. So!

Spellscorched Land and the Spellscorched Sickness
Spoiler:
In this setting, the use of the most-powerful magic, the malfunctions of magic, and eating or drinking the products of magic comes with a risk. Legends going back as far as they can be found seem to agree that the term comes from when gods were young and didn't know how to interact with mortals. They would attempt to visit, and the ground would be burned to glass, and everything in line of sight of the landing would die and look like it had been burned in a kiln.

When mortals understood magic well enough to see the effects themselves, they found that they had much less control over similarly-explosive events, and mishaps as they attempted to expand into the construction of portals and airships would tend to explode, and not only destroy the project and the land it was on, but curse the land itself with the spellscorching that was a short-term death with the gods; when mortals did the same, it would mean land where nothing would grow, and no person could safely live, for decades. This dissuaded some, but not all, mages from work in the highest reaches of magic, airships would eventually fly and portals would eventually open, particularly when driven gnomish ambition, but many who would have otherwise sought such reaches of power chose a safer ambition, and countless great mages have been snuffed out prematurely from a failed experiment.

Creatures who suffer from the spellscorched sickness mostly feel very lethargy and flu-like symptoms. Those who become sick very abruptly, such as being present for a magical accident or bearing direct witness to a god, tend to also get covered in knobby purple blisters, which then heal inconsistently and lacking pigment, making survivors appear pockmarked once healed. The effect fades over the course of years, but it has become a stereotype of hard-living to have these scars.

Spellscorched Land comes in a handful of severities, classified by how often you need to make a save vs. the sickness while on it (generally per round [at the site of a disaster when it happens], per minute [days after the disaster], per hour [months after a disaster], or per day [years to decades after a disaster]). These areas vary in size, but the general description is anything in line of sight from the objects hit by the disaster's shockwave. The saving throw is Constitution DC 10, but the DC increases by 1 for every additional save you make between long rests. Each failed save results in a level of spellscorching.

Magical food and water (e.g. the products of spells like Goodberry, Create or Destroy Water, or Heroes' Feast) is generally safe to eat, but it does become toxic if it becomes a pattern. If a creature who is not already spellscorched gets more than a third of its diet from magical sources over the course of a week it must make a DC 10 Constitution saving throw or gain a level of spellscorching. If a creature already has a level of spellscorching and eats any magical food over the course of a week, it makes a Constitution saving throw at the end of that week at DC 10 + the current spellscorching level or it takes another level, if a creature recovers from spellscorching before this week is out, the tolerance for magical food uses the former calculation.

To recover, a creature must not eat/drink any magical food and must leave and stay out of any spellscorched land for a full day and must complete a long rest. At the end of the rest, the creature may make a Constitution saving throw of DC 10 + the current spellscorching level. On success, one level of spellscorching is removed.

Greater Restoration has the option to reduce spellscorching by one level added to its list of available options.

At each level of spellscorching, a different effect is suffered, and each level includes the effects of all lower levels. These effects are the same as Exhaustion, (1: disadvantage on skill/ability checks, 2: speed halved, 3: disadvantage on attack rolls and saving throws, 4: max HP halved, 5: speed reduced to 0, 6: death), but they don't stack with Exhaustion (e.g. a creature who is 1 level exhausted and 1 level spellscorched only counts this as 1 source of disadvantage on skill/ability checks; it would become a straight roll with one source of advantage).

The limit of three attuned items is from the DMG, and stands here, though the narrative explanation here is "the fourth attunement makes you quite ill, and you're useless until you unattune one of them." Though owning and carrying magic itself doesn't seem to be harmful. Potions also don't normally show up in the volumes necessary to calculate this -- though, presumably, if you adventured to high level and turned your wealth into a potion binge, you'd probably die. The common wisdom is to not worry about the magic you have on you, but to be careful about the magic you put in you.

Magical items to protect against this also exist; immunity would be legendary, but advantage vs. spellscorching is only uncommon
Spending Hit Dice
Spoiler:
The extra requirement that I promised above is that you must have a member of your party proficient in medicine who is not incapacitated and isn't spending the time doing something else (like attuning/identifying an item or casting a ritual spell) in order to spend hit dice. If no party member is proficient in medicine, or if the healer won't spend the short rest on healing, then an untrained character can use their short rest to roll Wisdom; the party can spend hit dice only up to the number of the roll -10. (so to spend 2 hit dice on a short rest, your impromptu healer needs to roll a 12) -- then that character can't attempt to heal the same people again until they complete a long rest.

Of course, if the problem is that the healer is busy, rather than incapacitated, there's nothing to stop a party from just spending the time of two short rests to get things done and get necessary medical attention. Except, perhaps, plot points.
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Re: Looking for Players, play by chat, 5th edition

Post by HEEGZ »

How are we sharing char sheets? My PC is essentially done.

[edit]
I'm on roll20 already at:

https://app.roll20.net/users/122982/heegz

if someone will invite me to the game or share a link, thanks!
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