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Comments
^^^
>writing books in present
Why do people do this
That kis the best line.
Zelda will never be rescued now that I gave him Luka's blog instead of a sword.
Zelda's a he?
No, Forzare was supposed to rescue Zelda.
Speaking of Zelda and 50 Shades, this happened.
I just need to bitch about this case
See I got a call from an old lady in Oregon.
So the old lady wants me to activate her phone. Now normally this takes around 3-5 minutes if there are no set backs.
I clocked in at 44 mins right before she asked me to call her again.
And it was because...well. I don't know how to put it, but she seemed really lonely and in need of a friend.
She apparently was living in the middle of buttfuck oregon and her sons and daughters had gone on and blah de blah, you know?
And she was on a wheelchair and had bad eyesight and so on.
So I helped her with the phone and she was joking about her eyesight and her health shortcomings and she sounded so cheery. But it was that sort of nervous diposition that you see in certain people when they're trying to sound really no-i-don't-feel-horrible-what-are-you talking-about-y?
So I normally hate my job and the people I talk to because they're either racist or total assholes but she was really nice.
And then when I was just about to finish the case, my system crashed and I couldn't help her.
I swear to you were it not because I've learned to be really stoic about things, I would have cried right there
Well, that plain fucking sucks.
I hope she'll turn out ok.
I actually do like Pokemon (I'm up to Gen 5 too), I just don't talk about it much.
I thought I'd never have to see those lines again...
I kind of dislike this mechanic and love it at the same time.
Someone say Pokemans? Because I like the Pokemans! Up to Gen V, I do!
Well, to be honest, the idea of gaining less XP the more overleveled a mon or RPG character is essentially the same idea as easier opponents granting less XP in general, or more XP being needed for higher level progression.
I'm not exactly sure what the difference is between these methods, other than differences between specific implementations.
My periodic urge to run a D&D campaign is acting up again...
Moved to Gaming.
-also moved-
Last night: visit rival frat in sunglasses, beaver hat, swimming trunks and sandals while coated in foam. https://maps.google.com/maps?q=werfpark&oe=utf-8&aq=t&client=firefox-a&ie=UTF-8&hl=en This night: scare stoners in nearby park with a clown mask. https://maps.google.com/maps?q=werfpark&oe=utf-8&aq=t&client=firefox-a&ie=UTF-8&hl=en
I'll type up the full story when sober.
same :<
Whereas mine is temporarily very off because I just got done running a 16-hour encounter. I shit you not, a single battle went from 5:00 yesterday evening to about forty minutes ago.
what
what the shit
how
Admittedly, the circumstances behind this are highly contrived, but:
-D&D 4e, level 30.
--Combat at that level takes really long anyway.
-Eight characters of ours, eight enemies.
-I had the enemies fleshed out enough in my head (and in terms of the plot, they were basically the bad guys, so sort of special), so I statted them out as if they were PC's rather than NPC's, which was also for the sake of hopefully setting the balance more evenly, since they also get magic items and shit. But it also meant I had tons of character info to deal with.
-At this level, certain characters can gain multiple ways to resurrect themselves or their allies.
-Some of the enemies were heavily disruptive by nature. Multiple mind-controllers disruptive. And one good guy was disabled from attacking for about five rounds or something like that.
--(also, despite Team Good Guy winning easily in the end, one of the more disruptive bad guys was never hit once in spite of TGG's efforts and got away near the end).
-OOC banter.
But, uh, the first round of combat took four hours in real time, as I recall. Maybe more than that.
> level 30
oh
I dunno; I set it up to be a sleepover in the first place, knowing that it could take that long, so if they whined about how long it was taking, I basically just laughed at the absurdity of it all. On top of laughing at the poor sap who kept positioning himself to get his character dominated. And the guy who got crit'ed three times in a row at the beginning of the encounter by fire-users.
IJBM: it takes forev--wait, gaming thread
I mean, I can see how you'd go for a long encounter for absurdity and humour, but there's a point where that wraps back around and it becomes tedious again. I'd imagine that point is somewhere around the three dozenth time you've rolled a d20 in a single encounter.
...that IS interesting, that thread is a video games thread, not a general gaming thread.
Anyway, here goes: Battles take forever in TTRPGs (i.e. tabletop).
It's completely, totally different from stereotypical JRPGs, where you usually have lots of battles, but they're minor events that can be easily dealt with--i.e. go in with a strategy, implement it, watch baddies disappear, collect XP and money and loot, move on.
If anything it's more like SRPGs (a.k.a. TRPGs, that's strategy or tactical). Think of, say, Fire Emblem or Final Fantasy Tactics. The battle IS the main feature of the game, and battles are indeed very complex events that take up most of the time--and not only that, the game plays as one battle per chapter. That's much closer to the rate of, like, one or only a few battles per dungeon or per session for a TTRPG.
Except that TTRPGs don't have automatic calculations for lots and lots and lots of numbers to keep track of, so that just makes the battles even slower.
^^ It got tedious near the end because everyone was running out of their flashy abilities, but by then it was a little softened by the fact that the good guys were winning handily.
Of course, I only did this because it was a group of my best friends and I wanted to do something grand before I head to college and become unable to see them again for a while. I would never consider setting up an encounter like that with any other group.
^ I don't remember encounters in D&D 3.5 taking that long. But that might have just applied to real-life games. And I would hate to see how slow a 4e game would be online.
I have played TRPG's, both online and offline. I'm pretty sure that I'm qualified enough to say that a sixteen-hour battle is far longer than a battle should really take, ever.
A single person's turn should not really take longer than two minutes. Some turns run longer than that, because they're thinking about the situation or because they're sourcing things from sourcebooks, but as a general rule, a couple of minutes should be more than long enough.
Admittedly, when it's an eight-on-eight battle, that changes things a bit, but there should have been around three turns an hour per person anyway, especially as the DM can fudge rolls on the opponent's side in order to move things along quicker.
This is good as a general rule because, well, there's more than one person involved. In All Nine's example here, for every turn one of his friends had, there were fifteen turns in which they weren't doing anything within the game. That is to say, they were having perhaps one-sixteenth of the total playtime.
The circumstances are a bit different here, because it sounds like they wanted an encounter like that, but if it were me, I probably would have tried to come up with something different and more engaging anyway, more like an eight-on-one battle that still provides a challenge, or sequential battles, or something that gives the players more than 1/16th playtime.
Which is incredibly hard to do in 4e unless the DM just fudges things completely. One of the problems with 4e is that solo monsters are never, ever going to be threatening alone at high levels, and minions are way too easy to deal with, so you'd still need a fair number of creatures on the enemy side to keep things balanced, so it'll basically work out to everyone gets 1/8 playtime except the DM anyway. Maybe more Elites than regular monsters, but in that case they still get extra actions to make up for being the value of two creatures. It's kinda wonky. Really fun (certainly moreso than I could imagine with high-level 3.5e) if done right, though.
I suppose I could have just made the enemies NPC-built, but they would have still had a lot of stuff, but all with much more HP, and it probably would have been even less fun due to the lack of challenge.
Not the way my group, and therefore presumably others, play. I dunno, it doesn't help that they're kind of lazy fuckers at times.
Dunno where my screen is, and there was a lot of stuff that still did things on a missed roll. And I was also afraid that fudging rolls would mis-balance the encounter and potentially remove some of the fun of it.
I guess I'll note that there were actually only four players, and we all decided that they'd each run two characters because it would be more fun that way, way back when. So it was more than 1/16th, and there were enough shenanigans going on that a player who wasn't on their turns could still get a good laugh out of the scenario.
I guess I'm sounding a little defensive, but I wouldn't have put this much effort into the session if I thought it would be a bad idea. It really depended on us being bff's, though. And I'm sorta sharing this because if I left people incredulous or amused in some way by sharing this story, I've done a day's work.
I guess that's being added to my list of 'reasons I don't play 4e'.
It's definitely not a hard and fast rule, but when there's a large-scale, time-consuming battle, it's a really good idea to hurry it up, so that it doesn't... run sixteen hours.
I mean, quite honestly, there are battles which take up entire sessions. A lot of battles with a lot of narrative impacts can, because those battles tend to be very involved. Battles against many, many enemies tend to run for a long time, even with DM fudging and rolling for multiple enemies at once, because that's the way large-scale encounters are set up.
The thing to keep in mind is, though, most people who play TRPG's meet like, once a week on a Tuesday afternoon after work, to pig out on pizza and Mountain Dew beer, play a game, and have a laugh with people who have similar interests to you. Battles that drag on work sometimes, but most of the time, you just want something to be over with within an hour so that you can do something else before you have to go home.
There are exceptions, like you and your friends, as I noted earlier. But most people don't have the time to waste on a sixteen-hour battle- and most campaigns don't do so well if every battle takes up the entire session, as it takes forever to progress in a campaign.
That's also another reason why a lot of campaigns generally limit themselves to four or five players, because having more than that tends to eat up a lot of time.