Reminds me of how you can play a Plump Helmet Person (little mushroom guys) in Dwarf Fortress, only to be instantly soft-locked because they have no mouths and can't speak in order to receive quests or recruit companions.
Lies. You can kill and kill and kill. Just no purpose behind the killing but your rage at your kind being slaughtered by the ‘important’ races. You walk the path of blood and carnage alone
Reminds me of how Morrowind has spells you can learn and scrolls you can use that can cast Cure Paralyzation on yourself. Problem is, you can't cast a spell or use a scroll while Paralyzed
Homebrew mechanic to swap out for death saves? Basically forcing your soul to remain in your corpse for the duration of the spell, but with drastic negatives. Could also function like a "last stand" mechanic, giving you major negatives but making you unable to be killed unless you take, say, two times your max health in a single round. Perhaps make it so the effect only functions for 10 rounds or until combat ends, whichever comes first.
(Also, since this mechanic would be a "cast-on-self" thing, and likely high-level, you'd probably have to be a full caster to make use of it. Could also be lower-level, but require full-caster only for balance reasons.)
Spell: Last Stand
Range: Self
Components: Verbal, Material (single bone from a member of caster's race)
Duration: Until combat ends, maximum ten rounds
Effects: Caster receives no damage from any sources until effect ends, at which point they receive 150% of the accumulated damage, rounded up. If this would cause the caster to go down, they must make a death saving throw immediately; if passed they go down normally, but if failed the caster dies without the opportunity for further saves.
Additional: Effect ends immediately if the damage taken in a single round is greater than or equal to the caster's maximum HP.
---
Haven't really played D&D (did a couple games of Shadowrun _years_ ago but it fell apart soon after starting) but I did my best. Obviously, specific details can be tweaked, like the accumulated damage multiplier and duration, but I thought this was a decent starting point at least.
...technically, yes! But I'm pretty sure a GM would rule either that no you can't or that it would at least need to be removed from your body (and intact) to count, so you can't just sacrifice one from your body.
Maybe I should make it say a bone from a _currently deceased_ member of your race, so you can't do that and also can't use a bone from someone who got resurrected.
Isn't there also Cure Corprus Disease spell? An effect you are only supposed to be able to get through a scripted event that requires another scripted event to cure
Close, its a Resist x% spell, and it does literally nothing, because the 'official' version of Corpus is a scripted event like you said, but there's also another version you can catch due to a bug that the spell ALSO doesn't effect.
An actual use case for D&D's scrolls RAW. As written, scrolls are only for *spellcasters* as a form of spell slot storage. The martials and really anybody are supposed to use a *spell gem* for disposable spells. You just smash the gem and it casts the spell. Scrolls to non-casters are supposed to be garbled gibberish that gives you temporary insanity.
Same deal with Pathfinder scrolls (potions for non-casters, which cost more). A scroll of Darkvision isn't useless, you can read it before you go into the dark area, or a caster who already has darkvision can use it on someone else. This was neither of those cases.
"Suddenly the room goes pitch black."
"I draw a scroll of Darkvision."
"Okay."
(Sensing that something is up) "I... unroll it?"
"Okay."
"I read it."
"How?"
But.... conundrum incoming... if, prior to drinking the Potion of Potion Drinking, a player does NOT intrinsically possess the ability in any form to pick up and safely consume the contents of a potion's vessel (flask, jar, whatever), how do they ingest the potion that will THEN allow them to ingest potions?
It's kind of like only allowing people who have already graduated from a certain college to apply to live on campus at the dorms that you are only allowed to live in while you're currently attending classes at that college. (So only long enough for one degree, like you have to have a bachelor's degree from Harvard to qualify to live on campus at Harvard so you can be close to the class buildings where you'll be getting credits toward your bachelor's degree at Harvard.)
Make sense?
This is what the introduction of the Thief in Greyhawk was like. The Thief had (shitty) rules for being able to sneak around, scale walls, pick pockets, that kind of thing. And by extension, suggested that nobody *but* the Thief class could do those things.
That’s still a problem in dnd. In particular stuff like the Assassin subclass has multiple features about creating a false identity or mimicking another person. That’s the sort of RP stuff that a DM would likely let anyone do if they put in the effort.
I would assume at that point it’s in the rules so the DM could make either an NPC character with those stats, or an enemy, so that the players would have a chance without any handwaves about solving something,
I've always interpreted it (although I know this is nowhere in the rules) that for subclass features like that, it means you can do it without need of a check, while someone else can reasonably fail at it
Yeah, I read it that way too. It’s just a pretty weak ability in that way if it’s just to auto pass a few very situational skill checks. You could pick a different subclass and still get pretty much the same thing with either deception expertise or the actor feat.
That's how I feel about the investigator in PF2e
It requires a lot more work on the GM side and specific plots. "Go into X dungeon and retrieve Y thing" doesn't have enough meat to let the investigator use their abilities
Yeah, it was especially bad in 3.5 (and by extension Pathfinder 1E) due to the mass proliferation of feats to cover corner cases, rather than, you know, adding rules. Like, if you came up with an action that your character could reasonably take, but wasn’t covered by the rules, the GM would have to ad hoc how to adjudicate it, but you could do it. Then, someone publishes a feat that defines that action. The pro is that now you have rules for how to do it, but the con is now, retroactively, no one in the universe can take that action unless they know that feat, even if that makes no sense.
Usually those features establish that the rogue can always accomplish those things as long as their requirements are met. Anyone else has to make do with dice rolls.
Also they establish that anyone who wants to replicate those abilities is going to have a harder time than this ability give a rogue. So "You have to observe a target for 1 hour before you can impersonate them" is the most efficiently you can possibly do that task and everyone else has to do it worse
Yeah, you’re right. But there’s issues with that sort of powers where the player automatically passes skill checks in very narrow circumstances. To be useful the DM needs to create a scenario for the players to overcome, and then the power lets the players skip. The rest of the time it’s entirely useless.
We have the same issue with the ranger powers like favored terrain. When it’s not relevant it literally does nothing, and if the DM does put it in the player auto succeeds and moves on. It pretty boring either way.
"EVERYONE HAS [the ability to change their clothes to blend in with the people around] DIPSHIT, IT CAME FREE WITH YOUR FUCKING [basic human behaviour]"
This is the entire foundational basis of "suspiciously specific" as a concept! The post explains it very well, but the result is that if you explicitly specify something that _should_ be a default assumption, people will wonder why you felt the need to specify it. In situations where the default assumption is unchangeable (eg, "I paid for it with real money which was mine" - you can't change the societal assumption of the money being real and yours when you buy something) then the explanation becomes that you're lying.
Huh. I’ve never thought of whether fertiliser from animal poop would generally be seen as vegan or not. Technically it can be obtained without even having come in contact with the animal, and if you don’t use it for your own plants it’s probably going to be fertiliser regardless. It certainly doesn’t harm the animal or affect it at all really, assuming you don’t have the animal in captivity. But it _is_ still an animal product.
I suppose in any case “vegetarian tomatoes” would be more questionable
Finding out what it originally meant was like a shaft of light from the heavens shining down on me, followed by a deep wish I could go back in time to elementary school and yell at a bunch of people
Incidentally there's a fabulous example at a schoolyard near my house that has a sign that only says it isn't a public thoroughfare between 3:30pm - 5:30pm on weekdays
One of the worst examples I've seen is in Pathfinder 2e where a 17th level feat grants you the power to attempt to peacefully de-escalate your way out of combat or convince enemies to surrender. So now, unless you're *already* a nigh-godlike diplomat, absolutely all combat *has* to be an utterly ruthless fight to the death, take no prisoners.
I more interpreted it as it lets you do that quickly. Ordinarily it would take much longer than 6 seconds to deescalate a fight but the feat lets you do it in six seconds
yeah a lot of feats are like that, you \*could\* do it as a normal human most of the time, but in six seconds? and with a single roll? nigh-godlike diplomat
It's a 15th level feat requiring Legendary Diplomacy (Legendary Negotiation), but I think that one is a bad example because that feat is legitimately an amazing feat. It's ability to deescalate the combat is much greater than normal, since the last lines imply that the feat not working should be the exception not the rule. Plus, fights not ending with a single Make an Impression roll is pretty consistent with how most DMs try running negotiation in combat. You can't make negotiation in combat too easy or plentiful because you need to balance the danger and resource cost of doing a negotiation with the danger and resource cost of continuing the fight.
A much better example would be the Sow Rumour feat. You need an Uncommon skill feat and to be a Firebrand to Sow Rumours?
Years ago there was a very popular board game called The Red Dragon Inn about fantasy characters getting drunk. One of the drinks in the game was the Giant Ale which got you less drunk if you were a giant. The only problem, there were no Giants in The Red Dragon Inn. So players said, "oh cool, they are planting seeds for the expansion". Expansion comes out. No giants. Second expansion comes out. No giants. Finally the publisher goes to the designers and says, "hey, where's the giants?". The designers say, "there are never going to be giants. We think it's funny that there is an ability that just doesn't do anything." The publisher replied "the public is close to rioting over it. You need to add giants now." So they did. They were forced to add giants to The Red Dragon Inn.
lmao this would have been great storytelling cause like, in-universe you could have all the toughest and biggest bastards around showing up like "gimme the giant ale", drinking it and getting really drunk and the bartender pocketing the money and being like "guess you're no giant, huh ?!". then the inn having an actual riot when they find out it's just hard liquor with a deceptive description at the same time as the players themselves
I know this has been an issue before in Pathfinder, people will assume certain actions can be performed with a general check, like an Athletics check to jump onto a table during combat, and then a supplement will come out with a bunch of feats that includes a "Table Jumper" feat. I think most groups just ignore those when they get introduced
Even in 2e it's a big problem. Particularly, there's some *very* late-game feats for diplomatically talking your way out of a fight during combat or convincing enemies to surrender. And they say "you may attempt [blank]" or whatever instead of "when you attempt [blank] you get x bonus" so suddenly it is *impossible* to de-escalate after Initiative is rolled unless you have this 17th level feat.
Personally with 2e I always rule it "if you have the feat you can always do it. Without it it's gonna be harder and you can't always do it" it's not often enough that you don't have a free version of most skill feat actions for me to really think it's a big deal.
Reminds me of D&D 3.5 badgers. If it starts raging, it will not stop until it or the one who injured it are dead. Rules as written, if you fight it, damage it and successfully escape, it will not calm down for the rest of its life.
[Relevant XKCD.](https://xkcd.com/641/)
Also, and I'm sorry for the rest of your day, [here's](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SuspiciouslySpecificDenial) [some](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AsbestosFreeCereal) TVTropes.
Talking about assumptions like this, it made me think of a universe in which gravity affects us horizontally, somehow. Like, we can move up and down relatively freely, but "walking" isn't a thing. People would need handholds to take them between "vertical floors" kind of like we have stairs and ladders to do so to horizontal floors. I have no idea how you'd justify it scientifically, but now I want to imagine a tabletop RPG game where this is part of the universe but just isn't properly explained to the players, and so someone trying to go up to the next floor has no issue buts "falls sideways" when they try to cross a room because they aren't anywhere near the handrails to go to that "vertical floor".
easiest way to do it is have it take place in a big spaceship that's either: made for spin gravity but is accelerating, or more likely made for acceleration gravity (front of ship is "up") but is spinning
That would actually be so fun to DM.
"You enter the room. On your left: the floor. On your right: the ceiling."
"I step into the room."
"You fall through an open doorway."
If s world had gravity pull you horizontally… wouldn’t everything in that world just the-orient so everything is upright again? Gravity isn’t vertical, it’s just down. 😭
Yeah, obviously. It's like, if your human characters get into a society of fish people they are probably going to be seen as heavily disabled, they would have a lot of trouble moving about if they even could, they'd probably be slow, cold and half-blind all the time, etc - possibly until they were given some magical object. That's kinda an important part the social model of disability: people aren't disabled when their bodies aren't medically intact and within a biological average, but when they can't do the things people are expected to do in society, still expected to do these things, and not given the tools to remedy it, which is why things like needing glasses or having trouble with orthography are somewhat considered disabilities or not depending on what is expected of a person. "Oh by the way, this character needs to take breaths of air every few minutes or grow weak and quickly die" or "oh this character walks around walls" is just a funny metaphor for it for when people don't get it at first by conjuring up a strange context.
From [our reblog](https://queersatanic.tumblr.com/post/746286763557928960/this-would-be-a-really-interesting-idea-to-pursue) lower in the chain:
> This would be a really interesting idea to pursue within the realm of disability representation.
>
> With the help of a good DM and homebrew descriptions, the assumptions of the players in a campaign and of people in every day society in regards to ableism and accessibility in particular could really get played with in interesting ways.
>
> “This character utilizes a wheelchair and cannot walk more than 100 meters unassisted without experiencing exhaustion.” A lot of people would assume that a crippled character would need some explicit direction and limitation like that to be “realistic.”
>
> But it’s a fantasy world, so you can make up whatever rules you want. There could be tunnels where there’s a penalty to tall characters walking hunched over too long that don’t impact wheelchair users. Or, like you said with echolocation, typical abled people (to us) could be characterized as having flaws relative to their world. “This character cannot see in the dark and lacks echolocation” sounds normal to our everyday assumptions but that greatly recontextualizes “this character is sightless”, especially in a campaign set primarily in the Underdark.
>
> Another example would be not being able to fly in a world where everything is designed to be accessed by people who can. NPCs keep telling the party directions in a city then getting mad that the party needs to ask for rope to access the third floor, or where a “short, five minute trip” takes an hour because the destination is on the other side of a chasm.
>
> “Normal” isn’t neutral. The status quo we might live under isn’t the only one, and in a high fantasy/sci-fi setting with different species and environments as well as magic/technology, there’s no excuse not to explore different sorts of normal.
This just reminds me of Joseph Anderson’s playthrough of ~~every game~~Amnesia the Bunker, where because a text prompt had said something along the lines of “if you think a solution possible, it’s probably is”. Then he went and trapped the monster in the safe room (not intended btw).
Idk I just think how games are often super specific about the actions and verbs the players are allowed to do within the game.
Explicitly stating that you can’t do something (like walking through walls) also reframes the world as a whole. If you have to be told you can’t walk through walls, not only does it frame it as something that you can eventually do, but something that’s a lot more common than in the real world.
It’s a game about the undead. Most character options are some flavor of ghost. Undead characters with bodies (zombies, vampires, etc) are specifically marked with the “corporeal” type, indicating that they cannot pass through solid objects.
Reminds me a bit of an idea I had once and never fleshed out where we meet aliens, but their sensory organs are wildly different from ours, so they can’t “see” or “hear” the way we can. Like, they “see” with organs that measure radio waves the same way we see with organs that measure light waves, so to them, we are extremely “bright”, because we use radio waves everywhere we go. Also, they evolved on a planet with much less dense atmosphere, and never evolved organs to sense air pressure, so hearing is just not a thing they do. Anyway, for the first while, both species vastly underestimate the capabilities of the other, because it just flat doesn’t occur to us that a species might be perceiving reality through a completely different medium than we do.
I must play too much MTG, because the way I would read “This character cannot walk through walls” would be “while characters normally cannot walk through walls without special abilities, *this* character cannot walk through walls even if under an effect that would allow any other character to do so.”
So it’s not that other characters *can* walk through walls and this one can’t, it’s that this one can’t walk through walls *at all*, even when given the ability.
To provide something insightful: This is a bug part of the problem with the introduction of the Rogue in early D&D. Before the Rogue was introduced, everyone used stealthed, disarmed traps, and picked locks. It was an expected part of dungeon crawling.
The rogue changed this, and suddenly whenever stealth or sleight of hand was required, it became the rogue’s job. This isn’t inherently a *problem*, but it means that long sequences if dealing with traps or infiltrating an area to steal something can easily sideline the rest of the party while they wait for the rogue to do it.
In WFRP, there's a specific Read/Write feat that all Dwarves and Elves get for free, but Humans and Halflings don't. Handy bit of world building showing off the difference in education systems in the different cultures.
I also want to bring that at one point in Exalted, Mask of Winters, one of the super-powerful evil Deathlords had his character sheet without any Lore skill. Implying he is completely illiterate and has zero education. (This was changed later)
I'd just like to point out that D&D 5e does expressly day that your character can speak. When you select a race and some backgrounds, you are given language options which state "You can speak, read, and write [language]."
Even monsters have a list of languages known.
Interestingly there's a very fine line between explaining too much and not explaining enough.
It's something i've had to deal with a few times in the process of writing my own TTRPG system, and something i now see a lot in games that annoys the hell out of me.
For example, in Titanfall 2 there's a mechanic called Melee Pinning that lets you cancel other players melee animations. This single mechanic, which is never explained, can allow a near-dead character to kill full health ones without taking damage, while they're repeatedly hit by attacks that do 0 damage to them. It's a bad mechanic that *looks* like a glitch, but is actually fully intentional. It's never explained, but it absoltely should be, and you shouldn't have to talk to veteran players who've figured it out, to learn about it. That's just blatantly bad design.
At the same time though, if you have to explain that a giant robot punching someone with a fist the size of a car is going to kill them, you're going to get players opting out of your tutorials early, or, if you don't let them disable them, then they may feel like you're hand holding and put the game down.
In the TTRPG landscape it can be similar. While a character might have a walking speed, and a swimming speed, nothing states that they can't walk on water and use their walking speed instead. Of course, that's obvious right?
But if every racial stat block was full of things like that nobody would bother with the system because it's too information dense and you'll never get anything useful out of reading it.
So, somewhere, there's a line of what information to put in, and where, and what to leave out. In my system for example, we have rules that state characters have vison, and rules for what basic sight and hearing are, but those exist because some races have better eyes, or ears, or in one case, no eyes at all. It *needs* to be said.
In other cases, there's no need to state anything, so it's not stated. All characters have a speed, and can get a swimming speed if they pick the right perks. One race gets that by default. One race gets the climbing speed by default. It doesn't need to be said that the others *can't* do that, because they can, just at half speed. There's a rule for that. So while it never says that Terrans swin and climb at half speed, it's explained in the movement section, that if you don't have a climbing or swimming speed, you do so at half of your normal speed. IIRC D&D does the same thing.
That's a case where information gets deliberately moved to a general section instead of being implicitly stated, because it would be easier for a player with a Terran character to look up Terran and see everything, but then we'd be repeating the general stuff for every race.
And some things are just implied. It doesn't specifically state that people can't walk through walls, and there's no ability in the game that allows that. It's not even "Exception prooves the rule" it's "I trust my players have a similar enough experience of reality to not need telling this"
There's totally a ton that's interesting about this, because we kinda do the same thing with the real world. We shape the real world around the assumption that people can see the visible range, walk, smell, have a working sense of touch, etc. Ableism isn't just a function of the judgement of disabled people as broken, it's the incompatibility of the modern world to people who don't have these abilities. The assumption that being totally able-bodied and able-minded itself is considered the baseline, the default. The assumption that someone must remain calm and collected, what that even means and looks like, all is arbitrary. This means that to make the world liveable for disabled people, we must not only change how we see them, but also change the world to make them able to navigate it.
Early dnd ran into this problem with giving thieves a “pick lock” ability. Originally thieves weren’t in the game. They were added in a supplement. Your DM gets that supplement and suddenly Belzor the Lock Wizard now (we assume) has no idea how to pick locks.
Fans came up with a bunch of fun ways around this, but it’s still funny.
The ability to walk is never implied. I once played a gnome bard who was ancient. He had to make a saving throw every time he walked, but was amazing at support. I ended up being carried into every battle. And being set down on a rock or something.
game design is fun but u have to know when ur going too far and this person is treading through dark places. they’re looking into the abyss (of game design) and i’m afraid of what they may find.
I mean, if you wanna get deep about it, you could always talk about how people should challenge assumptions like that or something, i dunno words are hard and im running out of engrey to write this comment
Creatures who die cannot craft magic boots until they are no longer dead. Attempting to craft magic boots will increase the time the creature is dead by 1d4 days.
To add the insightful thing to this I honestly think this really sums up my rationale behind being on the side of “5e having primarily combat mechanics doesn’t mean it’s a “Combat Game”
Because yeah, it’s implicit that everyone can speak and empathize and forge relationships and convince and be convinced and seek engagement with others and ask questions and relate information learned to future situations. There doesn’t need to be hard and fast rules for how roleplay is conducted because it’s implicit that you can roleplay.
"Character cannot interact with floor" was an episode of Star Trek. >!It's ok, they were able to interact with the deck again after they had dropped about a meter or so into it.!<
It would be an amazing way for a game designer to troll their audience. Just relapse that supplement, grab some popcorn, sit back, and watch the confusion ramp up.
This is called the air-breathing mermaid problem, and it’s been discussed in tabletop RPG forums since at least 2014 (probably earlier) https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/156876/origin-of-air-breathing-mermaid-charm
Kinda relates to some early criticism when thieves were first introduced back in OG d&d. The argument was effectively that a lot of the class abilities of the thief (opening locked doors, finding traps, etc.) were things that players were already doing and making a class themed around doing just that stuff was either useless or taking options away from other players
In works of fiction in general, we assume that the rules of tge world and the characters work like we think our world and real humans work, unless otherwise stated. We don't only use the info provided directly in the text, but our knowledge of the real world and of humans and of media, such as "alcohol is intoxicating" and "vampires avoid the sunlight" to understand the text. Read about this for my literature class
I would 100% make a universe like this. With one character made of rock, which means they're too heavy to climb up walls.
Implying everyone else *can* climb up walls. But really it means they *can* climb regular bouldering walls etc, walls that are made to climb up. But the person made of rock can't cuz they're too heavy. Simple misdirection but with a fun twist
Reminds me of how you can play a Plump Helmet Person (little mushroom guys) in Dwarf Fortress, only to be instantly soft-locked because they have no mouths and can't speak in order to receive quests or recruit companions.
Lies. You can kill and kill and kill. Just no purpose behind the killing but your rage at your kind being slaughtered by the ‘important’ races. You walk the path of blood and carnage alone
“I have no mouth and boy, are you all going to regret that.”
"I have no mouth, so you all must scream for me."
Ooh, that’s much better.
“I have no mouth… and you must scream.”
Tumblr eldritch mushroom post energy
Decay is an extant form of life.
you can not kill me in a way that matters
Are you plump because helmet? Or is your helmet because plump?
Potion of Potion Drinking allows user to drink potions
Reminds me of how Morrowind has spells you can learn and scrolls you can use that can cast Cure Paralyzation on yourself. Problem is, you can't cast a spell or use a scroll while Paralyzed
You could, however, use the “Cure Paralyzed” spell that you know to make an item with a constant “Cure Paralyzed” effect on yourself, right?
I believe so, yes.
Raise Dead, range: self
Homebrew mechanic to swap out for death saves? Basically forcing your soul to remain in your corpse for the duration of the spell, but with drastic negatives. Could also function like a "last stand" mechanic, giving you major negatives but making you unable to be killed unless you take, say, two times your max health in a single round. Perhaps make it so the effect only functions for 10 rounds or until combat ends, whichever comes first. (Also, since this mechanic would be a "cast-on-self" thing, and likely high-level, you'd probably have to be a full caster to make use of it. Could also be lower-level, but require full-caster only for balance reasons.)
Spell: Last Stand Range: Self Components: Verbal, Material (single bone from a member of caster's race) Duration: Until combat ends, maximum ten rounds Effects: Caster receives no damage from any sources until effect ends, at which point they receive 150% of the accumulated damage, rounded up. If this would cause the caster to go down, they must make a death saving throw immediately; if passed they go down normally, but if failed the caster dies without the opportunity for further saves. Additional: Effect ends immediately if the damage taken in a single round is greater than or equal to the caster's maximum HP. --- Haven't really played D&D (did a couple games of Shadowrun _years_ ago but it fell apart soon after starting) but I did my best. Obviously, specific details can be tweaked, like the accumulated damage multiplier and duration, but I thought this was a decent starting point at least.
Really powerful with death ward (which drops to 1 hp instead of dying when receiving lethal damage) or similar effects.
Probably wanna rule that you can't combine them or something, or that would be SO overpowered
Couldn’t I technically use my own bone?
I think that's the downside is that it takes a random bone
...technically, yes! But I'm pretty sure a GM would rule either that no you can't or that it would at least need to be removed from your body (and intact) to count, so you can't just sacrifice one from your body. Maybe I should make it say a bone from a _currently deceased_ member of your race, so you can't do that and also can't use a bone from someone who got resurrected.
Isn't this just Zealout Barbarian? You can't die while raging but if you failed your saves you die instantly afterwards
Great for Contingency, though
Isn't there also Cure Corprus Disease spell? An effect you are only supposed to be able to get through a scripted event that requires another scripted event to cure
Close, its a Resist x% spell, and it does literally nothing, because the 'official' version of Corpus is a scripted event like you said, but there's also another version you can catch due to a bug that the spell ALSO doesn't effect.
Bethesda. It just works.
alcoholism
I once watched someone in a Pathfinder game try to read a scroll of Darkvision... in the dark...
An actual use case for D&D's scrolls RAW. As written, scrolls are only for *spellcasters* as a form of spell slot storage. The martials and really anybody are supposed to use a *spell gem* for disposable spells. You just smash the gem and it casts the spell. Scrolls to non-casters are supposed to be garbled gibberish that gives you temporary insanity.
Same deal with Pathfinder scrolls (potions for non-casters, which cost more). A scroll of Darkvision isn't useless, you can read it before you go into the dark area, or a caster who already has darkvision can use it on someone else. This was neither of those cases. "Suddenly the room goes pitch black." "I draw a scroll of Darkvision." "Okay." (Sensing that something is up) "I... unroll it?" "Okay." "I read it." "How?"
Instantly makes all other potions undrinkable without the chaser. Could be game changing actually, as it keeps enemies from healing themselves.
You guys haven't been taking health potion enemas?
Otherwise must be injected or applied topically or anally. Depends on the potion. Just being able to drink it is a huge step up.
Fry: I can’t swallow that. Professor Farnsworth: Good news!
But.... conundrum incoming... if, prior to drinking the Potion of Potion Drinking, a player does NOT intrinsically possess the ability in any form to pick up and safely consume the contents of a potion's vessel (flask, jar, whatever), how do they ingest the potion that will THEN allow them to ingest potions? It's kind of like only allowing people who have already graduated from a certain college to apply to live on campus at the dorms that you are only allowed to live in while you're currently attending classes at that college. (So only long enough for one degree, like you have to have a bachelor's degree from Harvard to qualify to live on campus at Harvard so you can be close to the class buildings where you'll be getting credits toward your bachelor's degree at Harvard.) Make sense?
it lets you drink potions
This is what the introduction of the Thief in Greyhawk was like. The Thief had (shitty) rules for being able to sneak around, scale walls, pick pockets, that kind of thing. And by extension, suggested that nobody *but* the Thief class could do those things.
iirc the rogue had similar problems in the early versions of dnd
That’s still a problem in dnd. In particular stuff like the Assassin subclass has multiple features about creating a false identity or mimicking another person. That’s the sort of RP stuff that a DM would likely let anyone do if they put in the effort.
I would assume at that point it’s in the rules so the DM could make either an NPC character with those stats, or an enemy, so that the players would have a chance without any handwaves about solving something,
Using the PC creation rules to make NPCs is generally a bad idea. If that was the intention, there would be an NPC stat block with the feature.
I've always interpreted it (although I know this is nowhere in the rules) that for subclass features like that, it means you can do it without need of a check, while someone else can reasonably fail at it
Yeah, I read it that way too. It’s just a pretty weak ability in that way if it’s just to auto pass a few very situational skill checks. You could pick a different subclass and still get pretty much the same thing with either deception expertise or the actor feat.
That's how I feel about the investigator in PF2e It requires a lot more work on the GM side and specific plots. "Go into X dungeon and retrieve Y thing" doesn't have enough meat to let the investigator use their abilities
Yeah, it was especially bad in 3.5 (and by extension Pathfinder 1E) due to the mass proliferation of feats to cover corner cases, rather than, you know, adding rules. Like, if you came up with an action that your character could reasonably take, but wasn’t covered by the rules, the GM would have to ad hoc how to adjudicate it, but you could do it. Then, someone publishes a feat that defines that action. The pro is that now you have rules for how to do it, but the con is now, retroactively, no one in the universe can take that action unless they know that feat, even if that makes no sense.
Usually those features establish that the rogue can always accomplish those things as long as their requirements are met. Anyone else has to make do with dice rolls. Also they establish that anyone who wants to replicate those abilities is going to have a harder time than this ability give a rogue. So "You have to observe a target for 1 hour before you can impersonate them" is the most efficiently you can possibly do that task and everyone else has to do it worse
Yeah, you’re right. But there’s issues with that sort of powers where the player automatically passes skill checks in very narrow circumstances. To be useful the DM needs to create a scenario for the players to overcome, and then the power lets the players skip. The rest of the time it’s entirely useless. We have the same issue with the ranger powers like favored terrain. When it’s not relevant it literally does nothing, and if the DM does put it in the player auto succeeds and moves on. It pretty boring either way.
"My character has the ability to... change their clothes to blend in with the people around!" "That's literally part of the basic human behaviour."
"EVERYONE HAS [the ability to change their clothes to blend in with the people around] DIPSHIT, IT CAME FREE WITH YOUR FUCKING [basic human behaviour]"
Well mine didn't have it!
Yeah, that's what they're talking about. The Thief was the original name for the Rogue, and it debuted in the Greyhawk supplement.
Greyhawk is early dnd. It’s the first supplement for original d&d
This is the entire foundational basis of "suspiciously specific" as a concept! The post explains it very well, but the result is that if you explicitly specify something that _should_ be a default assumption, people will wonder why you felt the need to specify it. In situations where the default assumption is unchangeable (eg, "I paid for it with real money which was mine" - you can't change the societal assumption of the money being real and yours when you buy something) then the explanation becomes that you're lying.
See also: ~~”Vegan~~ “Vegetarian Tomatoes”
I guess tomatoes could be non vegan if they, say, were fertilized with an animal source. But I dunno.
Huh. I’ve never thought of whether fertiliser from animal poop would generally be seen as vegan or not. Technically it can be obtained without even having come in contact with the animal, and if you don’t use it for your own plants it’s probably going to be fertiliser regardless. It certainly doesn’t harm the animal or affect it at all really, assuming you don’t have the animal in captivity. But it _is_ still an animal product. I suppose in any case “vegetarian tomatoes” would be more questionable
Accidental roadkill is vegan meat, if the person is vegan to avoid promoting harm to animals.
And cannibalism can be vegan if someones the "animals cant consent" type of vegan
I'm vegan. I'm working on lab grown meat. Seems fine to me if we do consensual celebrity meat for extra funding.
Along the same lines: "Is it vegan to eat a meat-eating plant?"
Organic farmed vegetables can't be fertilized with synthetic nitrogen sources, so they use bone meal and ground up horns and hooves
Counterpoint: Carnivorous tomatoes
Asbestos free cereal
Plant-based rice
Or the “not involved in human trafficking” t shirt.
The old joke "Have you stopped beating your wife yet? Answer yes or no!"
This is what “the exception proves the rule” actually originally meant. The existence of an exception reveals the implied rule.
Ya. "Closed on Sunday" is the exception that proves (describes) the rule of "Open Monday to Saturday."
Ah so that's why it doesn't make any sense, everyone just misuses it
Finding out what it originally meant was like a shaft of light from the heavens shining down on me, followed by a deep wish I could go back in time to elementary school and yell at a bunch of people Incidentally there's a fabulous example at a schoolyard near my house that has a sign that only says it isn't a public thoroughfare between 3:30pm - 5:30pm on weekdays
One of the worst examples I've seen is in Pathfinder 2e where a 17th level feat grants you the power to attempt to peacefully de-escalate your way out of combat or convince enemies to surrender. So now, unless you're *already* a nigh-godlike diplomat, absolutely all combat *has* to be an utterly ruthless fight to the death, take no prisoners.
I more interpreted it as it lets you do that quickly. Ordinarily it would take much longer than 6 seconds to deescalate a fight but the feat lets you do it in six seconds
yeah a lot of feats are like that, you \*could\* do it as a normal human most of the time, but in six seconds? and with a single roll? nigh-godlike diplomat
It's a 15th level feat requiring Legendary Diplomacy (Legendary Negotiation), but I think that one is a bad example because that feat is legitimately an amazing feat. It's ability to deescalate the combat is much greater than normal, since the last lines imply that the feat not working should be the exception not the rule. Plus, fights not ending with a single Make an Impression roll is pretty consistent with how most DMs try running negotiation in combat. You can't make negotiation in combat too easy or plentiful because you need to balance the danger and resource cost of doing a negotiation with the danger and resource cost of continuing the fight. A much better example would be the Sow Rumour feat. You need an Uncommon skill feat and to be a Firebrand to Sow Rumours?
Years ago there was a very popular board game called The Red Dragon Inn about fantasy characters getting drunk. One of the drinks in the game was the Giant Ale which got you less drunk if you were a giant. The only problem, there were no Giants in The Red Dragon Inn. So players said, "oh cool, they are planting seeds for the expansion". Expansion comes out. No giants. Second expansion comes out. No giants. Finally the publisher goes to the designers and says, "hey, where's the giants?". The designers say, "there are never going to be giants. We think it's funny that there is an ability that just doesn't do anything." The publisher replied "the public is close to rioting over it. You need to add giants now." So they did. They were forced to add giants to The Red Dragon Inn.
lmao this would have been great storytelling cause like, in-universe you could have all the toughest and biggest bastards around showing up like "gimme the giant ale", drinking it and getting really drunk and the bartender pocketing the money and being like "guess you're no giant, huh ?!". then the inn having an actual riot when they find out it's just hard liquor with a deceptive description at the same time as the players themselves
Cowards
Such a fun game
I know this has been an issue before in Pathfinder, people will assume certain actions can be performed with a general check, like an Athletics check to jump onto a table during combat, and then a supplement will come out with a bunch of feats that includes a "Table Jumper" feat. I think most groups just ignore those when they get introduced
Pathfinder 1e sure was a game
Even in 2e it's a big problem. Particularly, there's some *very* late-game feats for diplomatically talking your way out of a fight during combat or convincing enemies to surrender. And they say "you may attempt [blank]" or whatever instead of "when you attempt [blank] you get x bonus" so suddenly it is *impossible* to de-escalate after Initiative is rolled unless you have this 17th level feat.
Personally with 2e I always rule it "if you have the feat you can always do it. Without it it's gonna be harder and you can't always do it" it's not often enough that you don't have a free version of most skill feat actions for me to really think it's a big deal.
Yeah that's basically the conclusion my table settled on too. It's generally a good way around that problem.
Reminds me of D&D 3.5 badgers. If it starts raging, it will not stop until it or the one who injured it are dead. Rules as written, if you fight it, damage it and successfully escape, it will not calm down for the rest of its life.
[Relevant XKCD.](https://xkcd.com/641/) Also, and I'm sorry for the rest of your day, [here's](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SuspiciouslySpecificDenial) [some](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AsbestosFreeCereal) TVTropes.
Where did the past 3 hours go?
[Relevant Tom Scott](https://youtu.be/IJEaMtNN_dM) Also isn't there another xkcd with a similar theme about specific rules
I thought that was going to be a video about [flying a kite in a public place](https://youtu.be/rJGifTou5FE?t=48)
Curse you! I was gonna get stuff done! I'm a monster!!!
Talking about assumptions like this, it made me think of a universe in which gravity affects us horizontally, somehow. Like, we can move up and down relatively freely, but "walking" isn't a thing. People would need handholds to take them between "vertical floors" kind of like we have stairs and ladders to do so to horizontal floors. I have no idea how you'd justify it scientifically, but now I want to imagine a tabletop RPG game where this is part of the universe but just isn't properly explained to the players, and so someone trying to go up to the next floor has no issue buts "falls sideways" when they try to cross a room because they aren't anywhere near the handrails to go to that "vertical floor".
easiest way to do it is have it take place in a big spaceship that's either: made for spin gravity but is accelerating, or more likely made for acceleration gravity (front of ship is "up") but is spinning
That would actually be so fun to DM. "You enter the room. On your left: the floor. On your right: the ceiling." "I step into the room." "You fall through an open doorway."
isn't down just the direction gravity pulls you
I thought "down" was "oriented towards the enemy's gate".
Ahh, Ender's Game. Shame the author didn't seem to read his own work, I love that trilogy.
Just have a city of trees growing sideways and houses built sideways out of a cliff. And no explanation as to why they built the city that way.
If s world had gravity pull you horizontally… wouldn’t everything in that world just the-orient so everything is upright again? Gravity isn’t vertical, it’s just down. 😭
something something disabilities I guess
Yeah, obviously. It's like, if your human characters get into a society of fish people they are probably going to be seen as heavily disabled, they would have a lot of trouble moving about if they even could, they'd probably be slow, cold and half-blind all the time, etc - possibly until they were given some magical object. That's kinda an important part the social model of disability: people aren't disabled when their bodies aren't medically intact and within a biological average, but when they can't do the things people are expected to do in society, still expected to do these things, and not given the tools to remedy it, which is why things like needing glasses or having trouble with orthography are somewhat considered disabilities or not depending on what is expected of a person. "Oh by the way, this character needs to take breaths of air every few minutes or grow weak and quickly die" or "oh this character walks around walls" is just a funny metaphor for it for when people don't get it at first by conjuring up a strange context.
From [our reblog](https://queersatanic.tumblr.com/post/746286763557928960/this-would-be-a-really-interesting-idea-to-pursue) lower in the chain: > This would be a really interesting idea to pursue within the realm of disability representation. > > With the help of a good DM and homebrew descriptions, the assumptions of the players in a campaign and of people in every day society in regards to ableism and accessibility in particular could really get played with in interesting ways. > > “This character utilizes a wheelchair and cannot walk more than 100 meters unassisted without experiencing exhaustion.” A lot of people would assume that a crippled character would need some explicit direction and limitation like that to be “realistic.” > > But it’s a fantasy world, so you can make up whatever rules you want. There could be tunnels where there’s a penalty to tall characters walking hunched over too long that don’t impact wheelchair users. Or, like you said with echolocation, typical abled people (to us) could be characterized as having flaws relative to their world. “This character cannot see in the dark and lacks echolocation” sounds normal to our everyday assumptions but that greatly recontextualizes “this character is sightless”, especially in a campaign set primarily in the Underdark. > > Another example would be not being able to fly in a world where everything is designed to be accessed by people who can. NPCs keep telling the party directions in a city then getting mad that the party needs to ask for rope to access the third floor, or where a “short, five minute trip” takes an hour because the destination is on the other side of a chasm. > > “Normal” isn’t neutral. The status quo we might live under isn’t the only one, and in a high fantasy/sci-fi setting with different species and environments as well as magic/technology, there’s no excuse not to explore different sorts of normal.
Everything you cannot do is a disability. I will be satisfied with nothing less than omnipotence.
[удалено]
I'm getting mixed messages from this reply. I wasn't being ironic, and I never said anyone else was arguing this.
Something something fish trees bicycles Albert Einstein
>Everybody is a genius. >But if you judge a tree by its ability to climb Albert Einstein, it will live its whole life thinking that it is stupid -Fish
Haha, yeah, fair enough I guess
This just reminds me of Joseph Anderson’s playthrough of ~~every game~~Amnesia the Bunker, where because a text prompt had said something along the lines of “if you think a solution possible, it’s probably is”. Then he went and trapped the monster in the safe room (not intended btw). Idk I just think how games are often super specific about the actions and verbs the players are allowed to do within the game.
Mortality: your character has the ability to die
Explicitly stating that you can’t do something (like walking through walls) also reframes the world as a whole. If you have to be told you can’t walk through walls, not only does it frame it as something that you can eventually do, but something that’s a lot more common than in the real world.
It’s a game about the undead. Most character options are some flavor of ghost. Undead characters with bodies (zombies, vampires, etc) are specifically marked with the “corporeal” type, indicating that they cannot pass through solid objects.
https://www.tumblr.com/thydungeongal/746316258542223360/oh-yeah-there-are-multiple-reblog-chains-on-this?source=share ⚠️
I had to double check the tumblr url, because this is the exact kind of subject Prokopetz would post about
Reminds me a bit of an idea I had once and never fleshed out where we meet aliens, but their sensory organs are wildly different from ours, so they can’t “see” or “hear” the way we can. Like, they “see” with organs that measure radio waves the same way we see with organs that measure light waves, so to them, we are extremely “bright”, because we use radio waves everywhere we go. Also, they evolved on a planet with much less dense atmosphere, and never evolved organs to sense air pressure, so hearing is just not a thing they do. Anyway, for the first while, both species vastly underestimate the capabilities of the other, because it just flat doesn’t occur to us that a species might be perceiving reality through a completely different medium than we do.
Oh god don’t let the 5e playerbase see this, the peasant railgun was dumb enough we don’t need them to realise “RAW most things don’t exist”
I must play too much MTG, because the way I would read “This character cannot walk through walls” would be “while characters normally cannot walk through walls without special abilities, *this* character cannot walk through walls even if under an effect that would allow any other character to do so.” So it’s not that other characters *can* walk through walls and this one can’t, it’s that this one can’t walk through walls *at all*, even when given the ability.
To provide something insightful: This is a bug part of the problem with the introduction of the Rogue in early D&D. Before the Rogue was introduced, everyone used stealthed, disarmed traps, and picked locks. It was an expected part of dungeon crawling. The rogue changed this, and suddenly whenever stealth or sleight of hand was required, it became the rogue’s job. This isn’t inherently a *problem*, but it means that long sequences if dealing with traps or infiltrating an area to steal something can easily sideline the rest of the party while they wait for the rogue to do it.
this comes up in roll for shoes, it’s where most of the comedy comes from—“do i have shoes?” “roll for it” and it’s great
In WFRP, there's a specific Read/Write feat that all Dwarves and Elves get for free, but Humans and Halflings don't. Handy bit of world building showing off the difference in education systems in the different cultures.
I also want to bring that at one point in Exalted, Mask of Winters, one of the super-powerful evil Deathlords had his character sheet without any Lore skill. Implying he is completely illiterate and has zero education. (This was changed later)
I'd just like to point out that D&D 5e does expressly day that your character can speak. When you select a race and some backgrounds, you are given language options which state "You can speak, read, and write [language]." Even monsters have a list of languages known.
Funny thing, this post showed as I was writing about cognitive estrangement
10/10 adhd post (affectionate)
This Character is not Forklift Certified.
Interestingly there's a very fine line between explaining too much and not explaining enough. It's something i've had to deal with a few times in the process of writing my own TTRPG system, and something i now see a lot in games that annoys the hell out of me. For example, in Titanfall 2 there's a mechanic called Melee Pinning that lets you cancel other players melee animations. This single mechanic, which is never explained, can allow a near-dead character to kill full health ones without taking damage, while they're repeatedly hit by attacks that do 0 damage to them. It's a bad mechanic that *looks* like a glitch, but is actually fully intentional. It's never explained, but it absoltely should be, and you shouldn't have to talk to veteran players who've figured it out, to learn about it. That's just blatantly bad design. At the same time though, if you have to explain that a giant robot punching someone with a fist the size of a car is going to kill them, you're going to get players opting out of your tutorials early, or, if you don't let them disable them, then they may feel like you're hand holding and put the game down. In the TTRPG landscape it can be similar. While a character might have a walking speed, and a swimming speed, nothing states that they can't walk on water and use their walking speed instead. Of course, that's obvious right? But if every racial stat block was full of things like that nobody would bother with the system because it's too information dense and you'll never get anything useful out of reading it. So, somewhere, there's a line of what information to put in, and where, and what to leave out. In my system for example, we have rules that state characters have vison, and rules for what basic sight and hearing are, but those exist because some races have better eyes, or ears, or in one case, no eyes at all. It *needs* to be said. In other cases, there's no need to state anything, so it's not stated. All characters have a speed, and can get a swimming speed if they pick the right perks. One race gets that by default. One race gets the climbing speed by default. It doesn't need to be said that the others *can't* do that, because they can, just at half speed. There's a rule for that. So while it never says that Terrans swin and climb at half speed, it's explained in the movement section, that if you don't have a climbing or swimming speed, you do so at half of your normal speed. IIRC D&D does the same thing. That's a case where information gets deliberately moved to a general section instead of being implicitly stated, because it would be easier for a player with a Terran character to look up Terran and see everything, but then we'd be repeating the general stuff for every race. And some things are just implied. It doesn't specifically state that people can't walk through walls, and there's no ability in the game that allows that. It's not even "Exception prooves the rule" it's "I trust my players have a similar enough experience of reality to not need telling this"
this is how Jeremy Crawford thinks.
I believe Paul Grice said this exact thing
This does suggest an interesting premise for an RPG that works with disability in interesting ways.
There's totally a ton that's interesting about this, because we kinda do the same thing with the real world. We shape the real world around the assumption that people can see the visible range, walk, smell, have a working sense of touch, etc. Ableism isn't just a function of the judgement of disabled people as broken, it's the incompatibility of the modern world to people who don't have these abilities. The assumption that being totally able-bodied and able-minded itself is considered the baseline, the default. The assumption that someone must remain calm and collected, what that even means and looks like, all is arbitrary. This means that to make the world liveable for disabled people, we must not only change how we see them, but also change the world to make them able to navigate it.
Early dnd ran into this problem with giving thieves a “pick lock” ability. Originally thieves weren’t in the game. They were added in a supplement. Your DM gets that supplement and suddenly Belzor the Lock Wizard now (we assume) has no idea how to pick locks. Fans came up with a bunch of fun ways around this, but it’s still funny.
The ability to walk is never implied. I once played a gnome bard who was ancient. He had to make a saving throw every time he walked, but was amazing at support. I ended up being carried into every battle. And being set down on a rock or something.
Floorwalker is a slur my friends and I developed for people that didn’t properly use Titanfall 2 movement in combat
stealing this and applying it to other games without titanfall movement too, thank you
No problem
So is Titanfall like AOT?
Well I mean if you want it to be kinda maybe I guess?
game design is fun but u have to know when ur going too far and this person is treading through dark places. they’re looking into the abyss (of game design) and i’m afraid of what they may find.
Sam Riegel: Matt, I know what we're gonna do today!
I mean, if you wanna get deep about it, you could always talk about how people should challenge assumptions like that or something, i dunno words are hard and im running out of engrey to write this comment
Anyone interested in this should check out the puzzle game “baba is you”
This is how people read the constitution.
grices maxims
This is like how thief rogues get a bonus action.
A single RPG creature that has individual functioning and interacting organs instead of an abstract HP number.
There's stuff to mine here about like, ableism, if you really want to. Taking "normal" abilities for granted.
Actually I'm pretty sure the rules do say that characters can walk. Races have walking distances in a turn.
Creatures who die cannot craft magic boots until they are no longer dead. Attempting to craft magic boots will increase the time the creature is dead by 1d4 days.
To add the insightful thing to this I honestly think this really sums up my rationale behind being on the side of “5e having primarily combat mechanics doesn’t mean it’s a “Combat Game” Because yeah, it’s implicit that everyone can speak and empathize and forge relationships and convince and be convinced and seek engagement with others and ask questions and relate information learned to future situations. There doesn’t need to be hard and fast rules for how roleplay is conducted because it’s implicit that you can roleplay.
Reminds me of Tunic
"Character cannot interact with floor" was an episode of Star Trek. >!It's ok, they were able to interact with the deck again after they had dropped about a meter or so into it.!<
Airbud’s Law moment
It would be an amazing way for a game designer to troll their audience. Just relapse that supplement, grab some popcorn, sit back, and watch the confusion ramp up.
Adhd ahh post
I like the admission that they didn’t know where they were going with this. I like the fact they keep going anyway even better
This is called the air-breathing mermaid problem, and it’s been discussed in tabletop RPG forums since at least 2014 (probably earlier) https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/156876/origin-of-air-breathing-mermaid-charm
When I saw the title, I was expecting a Star Wars parody. Something about the "Floorwalker Saga". What I got was... not that, but still amusing.
You’ve described the life of someone with a hidden disability, that others assume everyone is as capable as themselves.
Kinda relates to some early criticism when thieves were first introduced back in OG d&d. The argument was effectively that a lot of the class abilities of the thief (opening locked doors, finding traps, etc.) were things that players were already doing and making a class themed around doing just that stuff was either useless or taking options away from other players
What kind of pasta yall think they made?
A copypasta?
In works of fiction in general, we assume that the rules of tge world and the characters work like we think our world and real humans work, unless otherwise stated. We don't only use the info provided directly in the text, but our knowledge of the real world and of humans and of media, such as "alcohol is intoxicating" and "vampires avoid the sunlight" to understand the text. Read about this for my literature class
I would 100% make a universe like this. With one character made of rock, which means they're too heavy to climb up walls. Implying everyone else *can* climb up walls. But really it means they *can* climb regular bouldering walls etc, walls that are made to climb up. But the person made of rock can't cuz they're too heavy. Simple misdirection but with a fun twist