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Any D&D/D20

Shadowrun

World of Darkness

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Other (feel free to post about it)

[Kagus]

I was wondering recently how much it'd break stuff if you gave the party a kind of "collective fund", like a guild treasury or something, and the only way they could earn XP is by donating cash to the fund. Collective XP, naturally, so it's not just the person stuffing coins into the chest who gets a bonus. Sorta like the age-old system, but not quite.

They'd be able to take money out as well when necessary, but would have to make up the difference before earning XP again.

I think it could potentially be an interesting mechanic in a fairly equipment-heavy campaign, where they'd have to evaluate looming threats and decide on whether they needed loot or levels more at the moment. Plus it gives players a regular and predictable sense of progression (without being locked to simply beating things over the head), and a reason to keep returning to a central hub.


It also opens itself up to incredibly scandalous get-rich-quick schemes, bickering, and exploitation. So I'unno.

[Grim Portent]

I generally feel exp/levels should happen in response to players making progress towards goals. Doesn't matter what the goal is really, but as long as the player is achieving something of some merit, or overcoming an obstacle it should be rewarded.

Defeating enemies, making friends, upgrading a castle or a spaceship, securing investments for an expedition, getting engaged, winning a contest, so on and so forth.

[delphonso]

Yeah, if you and your players enjoy wealth-gain fantasy, then this is a good system because it incentivizes getting money even more than the base game already does. I personally don't enjoy that type of play, but two of my players do, so it gets sprinkled in. They would certainly love a campaign focused on that.

[Loud Whispers]

Ressurection is one of my pet peeves with D&D. It undercuts basically all the possible drama that comes from what should be an important moment.
If a character dies, be it a heroic death, a tragic one or even a stupid one, it should generally be permanent or only able to be undone at great cost.
I'd much rather my character just be dead than rezzed, unless bringing them back is going to leave a permanent mark of some kind.

Yeah it completely broke my investment in the campaign. Hard to really care when a char is brought back from the dead and the party reaction is essentially "cool now where were we"

Really the only 'resurrection' mechanic I think I've ever liked is cyber-resurrection from Dark Heresy. You take a recently dead or nearly dead character, and fill them with cybernetics to get them back on their feet, at the cost of severe damage to their mind and humanity. It basically turns you into a bionic zombie, and for some characters is a fate worse than death.

One of my favourite resurrection mechanics also came from dark heresy; it was a chaos artifact that could bring someone back to life if you put their corpse in the machine. Only, being a chaos artifact that draws souls from the warp, it was an object of high value to multiple factions, and your radical colleagues would no doubt try to kill you to steal the artifact, whilst your puritan colleagues would try to kill you and destroy the artifact, and in addition to taking corruption for using it you'd have a fair chance of being declared a traitor or heretic. To top it all off, once you went through the trouble of finding the artefact - using the artefact, there was a good chance the corpse resurrected would be a demonhost. So you'd then have to contend with the demonhost with all the skills of your dead comrade. If you managed to then capture the demonhost, and exorcise the demon, without causing so much damage that you killed the host - the player char would now be usable again, and this time they would gain all the benefits of being an exorcised character. You get to have resurrection, fight up hill every step of the way to triumph over life or death, and establish several good reasons why it's not worth it to try it carelessly.

I'd actually like it if D&D treated proper resurrection magic as much harder to do, instead making the readily available option be necromancy. Your character dies and gets the option of being brought back as an undead with their previous class levels intact kind of thing.

There are a few background descriptions for characters which are "revived". Like the "rogue/revived" and the "reborn" race, so there is definitely the framework for it, and it's easy to homebrew

Unfortunately, the chaos 40k is probably the one I'm not particularly interested in playing, personally. I don't really have an idea of BC games goes though. But I'd be worried of it being too "edge for the edgy throne" if you know what I mean.

I'm of two minds about BC. The mechanics heavily heavily reward aligning your character with one of the four chaos gods in everything. Skills, talents AND most of all, roleplay & actions. So a Khornite character gets rewarded infamy for making a charge towards a bunker over open ground armed only with an axe in hand. The kind of characters that worship chaos undivided like the Word Bearers, seek to master it like the Black Legion, or hold chaos in contempt and look at it as just another tool like the Iron Warriors or rogue inquisitors, generally have a much harder life. I remember having this discussion with some anon about how I was annoyed that characters sliding towards chaos were usuallly very interesting characters. But the moment they achieved victory and reached apotheosis, they became living incarnations of just BLOOD or SCHEMING or POO POO or DICKS. They pointed out very correctly that it's almost like they were called the ruinous powers for a reason. And on reflection, I thought that Black Crusade had actually succeeded greatly in creating a system where the roleplay lore and mechanics matched up wonderfully. Because as you reach closer and closer to apotheosis, you resemble more and more your patron deity in action, body and values. If you choose to walk a path undivided, it is naturally going to be much harder because all the gods are pulling at your soul and all of them are trying to make you fail or choose them. So it's a double-edged sword, because if you try to RP something outside the spectrum of ALL CAPS PHILOSOPHY, it's going to be much harder. So it's more satisfying when you pull it off, but can bring its own problems, e.g. misaligned chaos players are expected to work against each other but not every group has the experience (or the maturity?) to pull off inter-player competition

That is the largest niche that exists among people looking for a game that isn't D&D.

The problem is not that he wanted all of those things, it's that the game he described wanting to play... Was DnD. But he didn't want DnD. It's like someone describing how they want bacon in between two slices of bread but they don't want a bacon sandwich

Encounters is supposed to include things like traps and social interactions. Convincing someone that they should sell you stuff at a discount, gate guards that they should let you pass, or fording a deep river for example.

I thought it was 5-8 combat encounters at a same CR as the party to exhaust your long rest resources & HD

[Criptfeind]

In theory diplomacy and various other skill non combat encounters can count as encounters and thus should be included, but the issue there lays in that the 6-8 encounter "average" is based on the encounter difficulty, and it's not obvious how to translate non combat encounters into exp (and thus difficulty). Like "Convincing someone that they should sell you stuff at a discount" sure that can be an encounter, but how much exp would you say that's worth? If it's just a diplomacy check, or even less, just the players managing to not be hobos for some roleplaying, that'd probably be worth a trivial amount of exp, low enough to be below the easy encounter threshold and do nothing to eat into your daily encounter budget. Of course, that's entirely GM dependent, maybe you DO decide, especially at low levels, that's worth 100-150 exp and count it as an encounter. Or maybe you can go ahead and make the task much more complex, the rogue sneaks though the trapped and locked backrooms for dirt on the merchant, the fighter helps rebuild a broken wall that starts to dangerously crumble well you are there, the cleric distracts, buffs, and heals as the warlock and bard work together with their magic and wiles to rouse up a protest against the high prices, then calm it down, all to convince the merchant to sell to the party. But at the point where you've added enough stuff that certainly you're back to the point not going to do 6-8 of these per day.

So yeah, unless you have a GM that's very generous with exp for trivial tasks the encounters per day metric is pretty absurd. Although I guess it'd be sorta funny and okay to give out exp prizes to level 1 characters for doing things like talking their way past gate guards. Might be a reasonable way to get out of the low levels quickly without going into the rocket tag that is level 1 combat.

[Persus13]

Ressurection is one of my pet peeves with D&D. It undercuts basically all the possible drama that comes from what should be an important moment.
If a character dies, be it a heroic death, a tragic one or even a stupid one, it should generally be permanent or only able to be undone at great cost.
I'd much rather my character just be dead than rezzed, unless bringing them back is going to leave a permanent mark of some kind.

Yeah it completely broke my investment in the campaign. Hard to really care when a char is brought back from the dead and the party reaction is essentially "cool now where were we"

Did you consider simply saying "No, my character wouldn't want to come back."? Spells like Raise Dead generally specify that the soul needs to be willing to return.

[Great Order]

So I had a weird, pretty fucked up dream which gave me an idea for an encounter.

Undead, sapient, talking horse. It's made up of various parts of different horses and even animals, with bits of it rotting, sloughing off etc. It claims to have no knowledge of how it's undead, as far as it's concerned it woke up in a battlefield torn to pieces. It took it a number of weeks to learn that it could reanimate nearby body parts and attach them to itself, turning it into the hybrid undead thing you meet. It's perfectly nice in personality, although its head has a habit of falling off which it's a bit embarrassed about, and asks the players to look away while it reattaches it. It's looking for a way to bring itself back to life properly, it hates being undead and the fact that it keeps needing to replace bits of itself as they rot down is inconvenient.

Its set up shop in some old ruins, where there's loads of stuff that it's scavenged like magic books, alchemy equipment and the like. There's a number of arms that it controls in order to make stuff and do experiments to try and bring itself back to life.

Now it'll try to isolate a player, get the rest to bugger off somewhere, perfectly nice again. Maybe ask them to grab some stuff while one stays behind to help with some alchemy. Once the player's by itself the head will fall off again, and it'll ask the player to turn around while it reattaches it. If the player does they'll suddenly be grabbed by a load of rotten meaty tentacles/viscera which will then try to drag them into the torso of the undead horse. Because it wasn't a horse, it was a centaur, and it's after an undamaged upper body. It's also why the head kept falling off - It wasn't actually a part of it.

The player can basically lose the ensuing fight by either dying to it or, if they're idiotic, they refuse to resist and wind up being integrated into it.

Now I've no idea what the fuck made my brain come up with this while I was asleep. I don't think I'd have thought up of something like that in my waking hours, but apparently my brain goes full original gore-horror once my eyes are closed.

[NJW2000]

Hey, or they can pass a will roll or whatever to become an unexpected new class and race 

i.e. zombie flesh-taur

[Kagus]

"I'm not getting absorbed into you... You're getting absorbed into me!"

[Egan_BW]

What's the difference, when you think about it?

[King Zultan]

That's pretty metal, it feels like there should be a chance to over power it and take over the body as your own.

[Loud Whispers]

Did you consider simply saying "No, my character wouldn't want to come back."? Spells like Raise Dead generally specify that the soul needs to be willing to return.

It's hard to retroactively withdraw consent based on a reaction you didn't anticipate

The player can basically lose the ensuing fight by either dying to it or, if they're idiotic, they refuse to resist and wind up being integrated into it.

Now I've no idea what the fuck made my brain come up with this while I was asleep. I don't think I'd have thought up of something like that in my waking hours, but apparently my brain goes full original gore-horror once my eyes are closed.

Is there any chance you saw some of the drawings about this exact concept? I know there were two anons years ago who drew undead centaur-capture things, and some WHF art where the centaur was just the vascular system and muscular system of one person

[Great Order]

Possible, but if I did I don't remember it.

[Loud Whispers]

Possible, but if I did I don't remember it.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: mild nsfw warning (click to show/hide)

I think these are the earliest depictions of this concept

*EDIT
There is also the older concept of the Nuckelavee
And these ones from WHFRP which are made out of one person

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Kagus]

Chaos: Not Even Once