The General D&D thread

Did your character at least die in an interesting or epic manner?

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Joey - Technically speaking, Greyhawk is the default/generic setting. It has absolutely everything you could ever want in a generic setting, from having the Free City of Greyhawk in the middle of the known world (or at least the middle of what is considered relevant), to several deserts, a lake or two, volcanos and just about everything else. It's massive - you could run several Epic campaigns with different characters and if you took care you'd never see the same place twice. A few things here and there are unique to it, but you wouldn't know it upon first reading about it.

I mean, just take a look at some 3.5 sourcebooks - sometimes when describing a place or a monster they'll also tell you how to adapt it to Eberron or Forgotten Realms, but never to Greyhawk because the basic assumption is that games take place in it.

You dont even need to mention any particular places or show a map - if you were running an adventure and suddenly decided you wanted to show off more of the world or whatever you can just say that you were in Greyhawk all along.

Of course, if you want to know more about the damn setting you'll need either the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer sourcebook or The Other Wiki.

Also, one of the things that first turned me off Greyhawk is that it was difficult to find a good map unless you know where to look. Dungeon magazine had an epic map poster of it split up in 4 sections, you can see it here◊, but it's not very easy to see even zooming in, so I searched some more and found this incredible hex map◊, which looks great even if you zoom all the way in. However, I found it hard to distinguish countries, so I found another one that has well-defined political states, although it's horrible on its own. I suggest using the last two at the same time if you're ever going to use Greyhawk.

edited 30th Sep '12 11:01:40 PM by Crinias

So, my party just barely managed to survive an insane battle that was intended to be a TPK (a "hopeless boss fight"). For winning, I got a spiffy new archmage's robe. Yaaaay.

, Araji, my rogue-barbarian kender, went down like a chump to a foe a few C Ls above what he could take alone. I get the impression that the GM didn't set it up for this to happen but it ended up flowing that way, in part because of my character's tendencies towards philosophical musings. Everyone laughed. Except me.

I kept trucking forward and rolled up a mute elf cleric.

How can you play a mute elf cleric? Silent spell? :P

Incidentally, you should totally play in Greyhawk, because it's the best setting.

The whole "Greyhawk is the default setting" thing really only applied to 3rd Edition, though*

. The other editions didn't really have a default campaign setting (except for 2E having Planescape as a default setting, in a Fridge Logic kind of way.)

A lot of Greyhawk-ish flavor made its way into the earlier editions, of course, but they didn't even mention Greyhawk deities in the core books, which seems, to me, like a prerequisite for anything being the default setting.

My book, THE LIVES OF THE APOSTATES, is out now!

Roughly half of last session was made up of us fighting an entire army of myconids. It was a bit more irritating than it would have otherwise been since around half of our party was pacified by their spores, though it did at least give us the sight of the resident min-maxer using a grapple check to hug one of the mushroom men.

edited 1st Oct '12 9:58:35 AM by Midna

Incidentally, there's been enough foreshadowing and metagaming that I'm pretty sure that my character is going to SERIOUSLY fuck things up next adventure.

Really, I'd say Greyhawk got the most support in 3rd edition through the magazines, Dungeon and Dragon. The numerous adventure paths and various articles seemed to tie into one another to tell what was going on in the greater world.

And while 2nd edition lacked a main campaign setting, there were slight hints of Greyhawk influence here and there. I recall the History non-weapon proficiency made mention of the Rain of Colourless Fire.

Strangely, I found the use of Greyhawk with 3rd edition, especially with the gods, helped me visualize my own worlds better. Since every cleric in 2nd edition cast the exact same spells, I recall many games I've played where the clerics didn't seem to worship any deity. 3rd edition cemented the use of deities to differentiate clerics. I do recall there were numerous specialty clerics in 2nd edition to particular gods, but those were all in splatbooks, and I question how balanced some of them were.

Don't take life too seriously. It's only a temporary situation.

So, it turns out that one of the players in the game that I'm in-that has been running 2/week-can't make the second/week day. Ergo, my schedule has opened up a bit. Ergo, I'm prooooooooooooobably going to be recruiting for a new campaign sometime in the near future.

The magazines did have a lot of great Greyhawk lore in them, although weirdly, Wizards stopped them from out-and-out calling them Greyhawk adventures. In Age of Worms, the P Cs go to the biggest city in the realm... Which is just called "the Free City." Wizards wouldn't let them call it the Free City of Greyhawk, because, I dunno, that would make it just too damned Greyhawky.

My book, THE LIVES OF THE APOSTATES, is out now!

@Crinias: thanks for the reply. Greyhawk is cool and all but it's a 3.5 campaign setting, 4th ed. default setting (if any where) seems to be closer to Forgotten Realms what with the Cities of Menzoberranzan and Neverwinter getting splat books.

edited 1st Oct '12 9:42:50 PM by joeyjojo

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Update: Yep, definitely gonna be recruiting for a new online 4E game. I'll start a thread in a bit.

Joey: Forgotten Realms has had the lion's share of support material since 2E, at least. But the default setting for 4E is definitely whatever world the Nentir Vale is in.

My book, THE LIVES OF THE APOSTATES, is out now!

Yeah the Nentir Vale definitely counts, it's just wizards never refer to as an official campaign setting. I think fanndom even places it as part of the Forgotten Realms a good hundred years or so after the Spellplagues.

edited 2nd Oct '12 6:03:05 AM by joeyjojo

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iPod wrong post.

edited 2nd Oct '12 1:20:44 PM by joeyjojo

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Oh. Egads. Yeah, I really really try to avoid those setups, because while everyone across the pond promises they can get up early, they're invariably always the problem.

Moreover, current expected day is Wednesday.

So I'm a little confused about Keira from Season 4. It seems like she has Sly Flourish baked into her basic attack and I don't know how she fixed that. She's an Essentials Rogue, but I tried making one in the Builder and they still depend on Strength for their dagger attacks. It's not a feat, either, because all she has is Toughness.

Thief. A human thief can take Sly Flourish as an at-will. Of course, since it's not an MBA, there's no real reason to do so-the +damage you get isn't as great as the amount of damage and boosts you give up by not just MB Aing.

edited 13th Oct '12 7:19:46 PM by TheyCallMeTomu

Right. So her MBA with a short sword gets +7... that's +2 from proficiency and +2 from strength and I'm not sure where the remaining +3 is coming from. Or the +4 to her damage, come to think of it.

No, I mean, thieves use dexmod for MB As, not Str Mod.

Aha! That's... really handy, actually.

Thanks.

I'm trying to get a group of friends to get into Dn D 4e with me and a good friend of mine. We're all pretty new though I have a fair bit of experience with 3.5e and its predecessors thanks to cRPGs.

One concept I remember really liking in a cRPG I played (MOTB) was the dream walking that one of my companions could do. I also heard somewhere that it was a spell in 3e for Pn P sessions.

But I can't seem to find anything about dream walking in 4e. I know there's a dreamwalker class but can they actually enter dreams and mess around in them? Cause I had this idea for an Inception style character who'd enter dreams and mess with peoples' subconscious- is that idea possible in 4e?

That kind of thing is really more ad hoc/ritual level. Mechanics in 4E are mostly about direct combat. If you want an inception style feel, build it as a stand-alone game mechanic from the ground up, rather than building it into the P Cs actual builds. That being said, there is a psion paragon path that has certain dreamlike powers, but that's mostly fluff.

Picked up the 4e book of vile darkness to day, it's got a wonderfull section of diseases to give P Cs. That's the sort of long term DM-player-fuckery I want to see more of from 4e.

The good news is that wizards is running a very drow focused campaign this season for enconters, So they have been plenty of good opportunities for backstabbing.

edited 10th Nov '12 2:16:21 PM by joeyjojo

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