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Any D&D/D20

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[Digital Hellhound]

Any ideas on demonic temptation-type scenarios? I'm having a baddie being sent from Hell to bring in one of the PCs (there's a bunch of backstory here about bets between Hell and Heaven and such) in my Mutants and Masterminds campaign, and he's holding a series of wicked tests to try to get the PC to damn himself.

I've got one occasion where he appears in the PC's home with one of their old enemies captive. She's been plotting her vengeance and telling the press/lawyers/police all kinds of terrible things about the PC to ruin his reputation and get him charged (most of it is even true!). This is a basic 'save yourself by doing a bad thing' scenario; the baddie will tell the PC to kill her to stop her from wrecking his reputation.

Then another where the baddie offers all the PCs something (power, truth, taking away bad haunting memories, etc.)... in exchange for them standing aside and not even trying to stop a bad guy from killing some innocents.

Both of these scenarios are crooked, anyway - if/when the PC refuses, bad things happen anyway. For example, in the first he's already called the police, who'll find the poor villain bound and gagged and set to be murdered in the PC's apartment, requiring some good explainin' or hidin' the body to get through.

Any ideas on other offers/temptations/scenarios to throw in? Can be subtle, can be obvious. The end goal is to make the PC(s) choose to do evil things and damn themselves. Tricking them into such choices counts as well.

[Avarice]

Give them power then take it away.
I had a player who died too much, generally playing stupid or out of character so I had the deity they revived curse him to constantly reincarnate. His character eventually became a walking skeleton and he was shunned from society and became a enemy in the campaign after sucking up the rest of the gods mojo.
The player was fine with this and we discussed it often with him getting bored of characters quickly.
I design my campaigns by putting encounters on the map and doing a half assed job to connect it to a lore. Usually each town has one main quest and a few shit ones.
They took the bait for the dead god quest and the rogue had let himself become trapped when he put the deity ring on.
Making him roll will saves every play through to break him, so when his cha died he got up a day later as the party was burying him.
Im a sucker for god interfering campaigns

[milo christiansen]

Plane of Elements (my custom setting and rule set) now has a super crappy website of it's very own!

Honestly it is simply a place to put the rules and setting document where the links will work and the formatting won't be totally screwed. Currently it doesn't even try to be a "real" site.

Anyway, I am just finishing v2 of said rules, so this is a draft version of v2.

[BlackFlyme]

Starfinder's available now. For those out of the know, it's Pathfinder in s^paaace.

It's a bit early to tell how it be, but everyone's complaining about it.

[Trekkin]

Yeah, it's not great. For one thing, they've added even more numbers into Pathfinder; you have Stamina Points now as well as HP, and Armor Class is two numbers. Hero Points are Resolve Points now. The rest of the rules are almost a carbon copy of Pathfinder, although weight is now the more abstract 'bulk'. if you aren't tired of race-class-and-level d20 yet, it might be okay. Oh, there are themes now, which are just templates all over again with some situational and mostly bad abilities at 6th, 12th, and 18th level.

The races are exactly what you'd expect: robots, people, bugs, Gambian pouched rats (no kidding, they have cheek pouches as an ability) , lizards, and telepaths who can be either space elves or space dwarves. The classes are kind of boring too: we've got a fighter, a soulknife, a favored soul, a techno-sorcerer, rogue, a mechanic pet class that's not dissimilar to a ranger, and a bard. Of note: they do give you the option to ignore themes, go "Themeless", and just put a stat point wherever you like. Alignment is the same 3x3 grid we've been arguing over forever.

I don't think they were really trying with the languages. There's Dwarven and Ignan and so forth in there. Humans are exactly as they are in Pathfinder. Their art shows them smirking a lot. The classes are built like Paizo classes: there's a whole lot of the usual picking an ability from a list that's tiered by level, with a capstone at 20th to theoretically discourage multi-classing. Annoyingly, they've gone with symbols rather than words to indicate which abilities are mind-effecting and so on.

The capstones are all over the place, as ever. The mystic clerics get a free miracle once a week, for example, while the rogues get to roll two dice on skill checks and take the higher result. Fighters get a save-or-die, but they have to spend a hero point to use it. Sorcerers, on the other hand, can spend two hero points to cast wish.

Archetypes are reworked slightly; they're all indpendent of class, and you lose class features depending on your class (which also means they're mutually exclusive by level). Skills and feats are mostly the same. Paizo's toothy little bobblehead goblins are here too, this time in fishbowl helmets with goofy looking ray guns. The equipment has a lot of "sciency" words slapped on it. Magic weapons are now weapon fusions, for example. Everything is still color-coded for your convenience. Harrow decks are digital now.

Honestly, if you really liked the Iron Gods adventure path -- and I mean really liked it -- this is just that writ large. It's kind of boring and predictable in that regard, and the science fiction coating over the high fantasy is tissue thin. This is space opera so fantastic it makes Star Wars look grounded. 

[BlackFlyme]

There are a lot of good changes. Questionable ones too. Two steps forward, one step back, I guess.

Lots of merging of skills. No-one stuck with a paltry 2 per level, and many classes get to choose a skill or two to become class skills. Themes give a class skill as well.

Anyone with ranks in the right skills can disable traps now. It's no longer restricted to certain classes.

That said, monster creation is basically just 'slap shit together, it doesn't need to make sense'. More math is focused on the creature's CR than any other facet. Feats aren't displayed either. Makes customizing monsters more difficult.

DCs can be absurd. A specialized character going at a CR-appropriate challenge may only have a 50-50 chance of success compared to a non-specialized character, or so the theorycrafters say. Some DCs scale off of things like CR or item level, such as Piloting using the ship's Item Level, leading to end-game DCs being 70+

[KingofstarrySkies]

Hm. Might look into that, I dig space RPGs.

[SOLDIER First]

:3

[Trekkin]

Hm. Might look into that, I dig space RPGs.

That's a good word for it. It's not science fiction by any stretch; it is literally a fantasy RPG in space. Maybe people will like that.

[MrRoboto75]

Its still no spelljammer I tell you hwat.

[Rolan7]

It's not science fiction by any stretch; it is literally a fantasy RPG in space. Maybe people will like that.

You mean like Spelljammer-
Frick, ninja'd!

[Trekkin]

It's not science fiction by any stretch; it is literally a fantasy RPG in space. Maybe people will like that.

You mean like Spelljammer-
Frick, ninja'd!

Now that you mention it, ditching all the tissue-thin chrome veneer and just using Starfinder to run Spelljammer is a really good idea.

[Arx]

Iron Gods adventure path

This reminds me - my group is currently playing through this path (pls not spoil), and parts of it are hilarious because most of us have quite a lot of technical background. Thus we end up with the particle phycisist DM trying vainly for a moment to explain something that's clearly a nuclear reactor in a non-meta way, to a party that includes at least two other people with some nuclear physics background.

Also the moments where the DM starts reading a description and falters half way through because something makes no sense at all in the faux-scientific backdrop. As they say, every time you apply real-world physics to DnD, a catgirl dies... which is why she has DM'd a campaign nicknamed "Killling Catgirls" before.

[scriver]

Kingmaker of Starry Skies when?

[Jimmy]

Throwing myself into the "not a fan" faction for Starfinder.

No dwarves, elves, or other standard fantasy fare at launch for player races. Instead, we specifically see a very strong focus on Paizo IP races. This is despite the lore ostensibly occurring within the same universe as the Pathfinder series.

Seems to me it's Paizo's attempt to break away from the Pathfinder series and sell their own trademarked IP with only a tangential link to their original material. Given I was only here for the fantasy RPG, it's of little attraction to my tastes.