OOC

Hi everyone. Hope you are thrilled to feel like indiana jones and willing to let your DM to guide you though the overarching narrative.
Feel free to ask ANY questions here or PM anything to DM.

I will create a separate thread for game mechanics, but before I publish them want to hear your feedback. I plan to use following mechanics for chapter 1

What do you hope to achieve with those game mechanics? Is it to have some more Inspiration for us to play with?

Micro manage food, water and arrows are never really fun I think. So I am cool with skipping it altogether.

With food I want to achieve simplicity
With Lifestyle - I want to both more Inspiration and a reward for spending your starting money on Lifestyle expenses that do not give you other mechanical benefits, so technically you could all live on the street.
Also I want to railroad you to split among the two inns so that you don't miss events that will take place in each of two.

Sounds good to me. I know you mentioned there will be other ways to die than just monster attacks so food and water play into survival aspect. Question on the water though. You said we can only purchase 10 pints of water a day but we can carry more than that right? I just want to clarify as not to walk in the forest with only a day of water if we are traveling for a length of time.

Making food a minor/non issue makes sense (not many people would be foolish enough to wander into the forest with no food, at least I hope not)

But we may need to purchase some more water skins to keep on top of water I suppose.

Personally I think that going to a inn will be focussed on RP mostly. I am hoping that people are not number crunching gold and inspiration. RP is the choice that matters.

Lasme for example will be willing to go to the inn where the biggest party is or might be tagging along with her brother.

As for food and water managing. For a survival setting this could be interesting. If it is not a survival setting, I am fine managing it, but I wonder if it adds much. Especially if spells like create water exist.

1 CP per 10 pints is a price which is irrelevant for you as yous tay in inn. As for amount - you are only limited by water containers and carry capacity...
I will remove water management once you figure out how to deal with it. Magical solution is good enough for me (one PC would need to sacrefice his spell slots every day for that though - I am not removing that part)

I don't think I will be so good at remembering the water mechanic and how much we need etc but I guess we will be usually at the same amount of water each, so hopefully I can rely on my team members

Actually there is one more reason I'm touching inn expenses. I want you to think about your starting money as RP tool rather than ability to purchase adventuring gear, spell casting ingredients. I expect you to spend money not only on Inn, but also anything a tourist in exotic country would spend: guides, souvenirs, antidotes, tickets (i.e. dyno ride), night-life, ... I want to compensate those players who decide to spend more money on more expensive inn just for RP reasons - that is by definition the reason for me to give Inspiration.
Besides - in this module your PCs are not hired mercenaries, you will not get payed out right for "the opening quest". There are just no such quest. You are there to spend money not to earn it.

Pacan's all submitted, sorry for the delay!

I like the idea of the spending and playing tourists and with that in mind, the pool of money to make choices.

So with that I understand the system better niw.

However, the table on lifestyle might need some adjusting.

I start with 15 gp.
That suggests comfortable lifestyle. At 7 days that is 14 gp.
Not much left to spend on events or anything. Not exactly the way to prepare for vacation :)

And gold, or inspiration regardless. Lasme will go where the party is.

I like this non-adventure approach. I have made an in-game reason why she has swords + daggers, but I'm going to remove her bow from her inventory as it doesn't really make sense that a university would travel with one. It would give her 25gp more to spend as a turist

Yes, cool. Actually when I make my druids I usually forego metal weapons class allows to start with. My last druid I made has neither any weapon nor shield and magic stone is his only offensive means.
I would be open to discuss some boons for anyone who forego an item in starting equipment for RP reason, but you will not be allowed to "sell" them outside of game sessions

P.S. I could see how a PC takes a bow gift from their parents to a travel to Chult only to sell that bow there and get some money to spend in Chult. I will allow you to sell them at half price in Chult, but I would like you to choose whom you sell it to. As a family possessed items they may affect story.

I had a chat with a friend of mine about GM and player -styles. We concluded that there were two fundamentally different styles.
The crunchie style, where each element has one or more rules that could be adhered to. Games systems like shadowrun cater very much to this.
The freeform style, where the rules are guidelines to the game flow, and one consults the few rules when the player/gm wants to achieve something specific story-wise. Game systems like FATE cater very much to this.

I'm definitely lean more toward the freeform style. My friend suggested that it was because as a programmer and data analyst I wanted to get a counterweight to the otherwise unforgiving rules of programming.

My impression is that our GM style leans heavily on the crunchie style. I want to play ToA but I doubt that I'm going to enjoy it as much with this GM style. I'll step back from the game

runekyndig, thanks for taking care to explain - it was really helpful. Now I want to note to the other players:
1. I did plan chapter 1 to be significantly crunchier than I normally do DnD because I hope it will help to push you through the intro narrative of the module.
2. I do like exactly how crunchie a DnD is. I will not support freedom of level that FATE assumes within DnD game. I will be enforcing all of the DnD rules as written into the game and will document any exceptions (such as no food requirement)



Now on another topic. Regarding Haggling game
It was my idea. Module assume either random or DM decided mechanics of players learning about the city issues
I did decide to base it on money and charisma. I was afraid that role-playing Haggling and information gathering in pubs and on the streets will take a lot of PBP time so decided to design the "Haggling game".
I feel it is too complicated and willing replace it with a random tables based mechanism depending on players choice. So please comment how would you like to gather information and acquire quests:
A) DM rolling D 100
B) Proportion to PC invested money and rolled skill checks
C) Do this as I would do at the table - have each player to role-play their PC actions and reward players with info/quests based on DM subjective evaluation of how adequate PC action is for information gathering
D) Other

I don't know FATE so I can't really judge on that.

In my view it is RP > Numbers. DnD is quite a strict game, which is great to allow for thinking and planning out of the box and adds a lot of tactical play as well. I enjoy DnD for the same reason as I enjoy both superflexy story driven ttrpgs and enjoy super crunchy video games as Fire Emblem. In the end, I think it is still more an RP game though.

With the posts above I come to understand even better the rule on inspiration on inn-costs and the comment you made earlier on not selling rations. It never even occured to me that someone would want to sell the rations. But now I think of it, I once read a reddit discussion if players could sell their only set of clothes, for they are useless as they have no rules attached to it. That mindset is not the games I would be in.

I admit that I am curious on how you plan to use number crunching to push into the narrative. My gut feeling would say that crunching numbers drives away from narrative.

So far I am ejoying this game, and I just hope that number crunching will not get in the way of RP. As long as they can co-exist, I am fine. This includes combat. RP doesn't stop when initiative is rolled. Characters may do less optimal things in combat based on their motivations.


As for the haggling and info gathering. In my view that should be done by, and have the player roll a skill check based on how they approach the situation. That would be basically be why there are skill profs in the first place. Looking purely at myself, I have a lot of social skills on my character, especially for situations like these.

For achieving goals in game, I am always a much bigger fan of allowing the dice to speak. *I* as Dramasailor dont need to be an int 20 person to solve a riddle if my SuperWizard is. Just like I as Dramasailor don't need to be a 20 strength body builder lifting huge stones just to allow my barbarian to do so. To me, haggling and extracting information is the same. If my character has strong charisma and succeeds on rolls, thats the key to getting information, not how well I role-play it. I'm a big fan of how quality role-playing can grant advantage on a roll (a la inspiration).

None of this is meant to say I dont like RP investment into the story, because I do! Its what makes it an immersive tram game and not just me with a stack of sheets. I just dont want key game progress to hinge primarily on how well someone writes a situation with a game-system as dice-centric as D&D is. If I wanted that, I'd go play FATE or one of the other "softer" systems (mathematically speaking).

Hmm all good valid points. As for me i like the way it has been going. Almost every game ive been in ignores many rules that removes many challenges that are fun trying to find a solution for (find a dragons hoard but is too much to carry and you think whatever is left behind will be taken by local bandits. Do you leave thousands of pounds of gold? Do you leave your weapons and supplies to take more gold?)

Especially since this game leans more survivalist route not having unlimited arrows, torches, water, spell components etc is a big element in surviving. It makes the challenge more deadly. I am not really a fan of dnd games where i know no matter what i do i will survive.

The haggling is a nice concept. Most dnd game players try to haggle down the price anyways. Not sure why the skill profeciency is not allowed though. It would be weird in my opinion turning off any of the other skill profeciencies. Cant use survival while in the jungle looking for water would be weird.

But i like how things are going so far and the mechanics. Gotta try different things to get difgerent information. And gotta make sure you plan ahead or come up with creative solutions if you plan on surviving. Life is hard. Especially the adventurer life. Not everyone comes back alive.