Looking at Things
This shit is verbatim from my own table. Maybe not the Egyptian-themed sand trap, but you best believe that’s me wrapped up in toilet paper there in the background.
“Make a Perception check. I mean Wits + Awareness. What game are we playing?”
This stuff happens when you switch frequently between systems. Hell, I just paused writing this blog to run a bit of Pathfinder 1e, there to shame myself before all the other grognards by asking them to make “Wisdom Saving Throws.” Game for long enough and the bits and pieces begin to crash together. Echoes of my mom calling our Playstation “the Nintendo” begin to sound uncomfortably familiar.
At the table, this kind of thing usually doesn’t matter. If you ask for a Heal check, most folks understand you meant Medicine. Ask for Arcana and your Starfinder pals will assume you meant Mysticism. You might catch a little side-eye from the Clerics of the world, but as long as communication is afoot, everything is groovy.
The one spot where these memory lapses actually bug the crap out of me is more computer-related. If I want a spell that does mind-control, I might have to wade through a dozen or so obscure creatures abilities and dominate variations before I find the right one. And gods forbid I need that one cold-based spell that I can’t quite recall. Asking the internet for “list of cold spells” will not help me to distinguish Creeping Cold from Obedient Avalanche. (Of course, this may just be a 3.X problem. Great Gygax in the sky but I love me some splatbooks.)
What about the rest of you guys? Do you ever have trouble separating your game terms? Are there any handy tricks for keeping all that terminology straight? Or is the answer something more like “get good noob?” Tell us all about your cross-system mix-ups, lost spells, and superpowers that you’ll never find again down in the comments.
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I’m sorry to say my memory, which is highly flawed in some ways, tends to keep gaming systems separate.
I mean, I forget stuff, but I don’t mix systems up. All it takes is a refresher now and then; this is why I get the books, ’cause looking stuff up on the computer can indeed be inconvenient at times.
In my headcanon, that mummy is asking Occultist to make those checks because it’s been trying to escape the tomb as well – for a looooong time. Maybe it should throw her an assist? 😉
How dare you have a better memory than me! I call hacks!
Heh. Now I got an image of this mummy riding around on Occultist’s back like that talking cadaver from Hellboy.
Heck, why not? ^_^ It could become her Necromancy implement / spirit advisor. I bet Occultist could ‘nudge’ the rules to make it work.
A good way to avoid mixing up Wisdom (Perception) and Intelligence (Investigation) is this simple rule of thumb: “Do I notice it?” is Perception. “What conclusions do I draw from it?” is Investigation.
I’d qualify that slightly… “perception” isn’t simply whether you notice something, it’s whether you recognise it as being important… that’s the wisdom part of it.
And that’s why in some editions, you get the seeming-oddity that eyesight and hearing get better with age. The actual senses don’t get better, but the older character is very experienced at recognising when something is trying to kill them.
> “What conclusions do I draw from it?” is Investigation.
Weird. I just use metagaming for that.
Metagaming without an Intelligence roll is like sneaking in without a Stealth roll. You’re skipping out on a central mechanic to automatically succeed.
Intelligence skills are how you metagame.
The trick is to only play one edition of one system, even if other systems are better suited to the type of game you want to play. No, ESPECIALLY if other systems are better suited.
Joking aside, I do find it very helpful to have a DM Cheat Sheet, or to carefully reread my monster stat blocks, to keep my terminology straight. As for the searching issue, I don’t have a solution beyond “hope your google-fu is strong or keeping your own Excel-or-equivalent sortable spreadsheet and tagging the hell out of things to make them more searchable according to how your brain works.
That’s a lot of effort, though, so most people do just suggest getting good.
Yeah… S’about what I thought. I’m gearing up to actually be a Pf1e player again in the near future, so trying to wrap my head around spell selection is ever so slightly intimidating.
“Wisdom saving throw”
😮
:'(
>:(
*insert SWAT meme here*
PS: TIL, do not insert any text in between the less-than and greater-than signs in here. It will think it’s an html tag and remove it. Well, at least the user comments were being sanitized, that’s good.
Dishonor on me…
https://c.tenor.com/cW5g219Vb78AAAAC/mushu-dishonor-on-your-cow.gif
I know this feeling. Personally I have the sort of mind that’s pretty good about keeping the terms themselves separate, but cross-pollination happens nonetheless.
For instance in my last 5e game I reflexively went to confirm my critical hit only to be reminded by the GM that that wasn’t a thing there and a nat 20 was enough in and off itself.
On the other side of the issue I remember a Dark Ages vampire campaign where we felt the need to ask the ST whether he really meant Perception+Awareness rather than perception+alertness. Awareness being your six sense making your hairs raise on your neck and such-like when spooky magic or ghosts are afoot, while alertness is the one you use for looking at things (or hearing or so on).
At some point we switch into this conversation:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/utility-shot
Not a problem I have personally, but one of the group regularly calls for “Diplomacy” checks when GMing… even though we’ve not played a game with a “Diplomacy” skill since moving from D&D 4e many years ago now.
DM: “Roll Deception.”
1: “But my character believes what they’re saying.”
DM: “Okay, then roll Performance to convince them you actually believe this nonsense.”
1: “Can’t I just use Persuasion?”
DM: “You can, but the DC is going to be waaaaaaay higher.”
2: “This is why I just go straight for Strength/Intimidation.”
Yeah, too many different social skills is definitely a thing. I understand the desire to distinguish “charming” from “devious” from “scary”, but it ends up pretty silly when you find that your master deceiver finds it easier to convince people that the sky is green than that it’s blue.
That’s why I like “diplomancy.” It covers most situations.
Having played Exalted, Orpheus and CofD, I’m very well-versed at being confused over ‘Seeing stats’. I started on CofD which has the cleanest option imo with Investigation being a trained skill and Wits + Composure covering everything else.
Orpheus has the White Wolf patented Perception Attribute, but two vaguely different skills of Alertness and Awareness. Alertness reflecting seeing normal thing and Awareness used for seeing ghosts, but all players can see both states of the real world and the ghost world simultaneously so what is the real difference?
When the skills get this close, I think it becomes the 5e athletics/acrobatics thing all over again.
“Can’t I just roll the one I’m good at?” is the common refrain.
I had some problems with doing that in 5e, as even after playing it for longer then i had 1e pathfinder, I still called the saves will, reflex, and fort. That has served me well now that I’m doing pathfinder2e though, as I didnt even have to bother relearning things. Typically though I don’t have that many problems with this in ttrpgs, but I have a considerably bigger problem with this for video games. For example, in any game with a character select, such as super smash bros, i call the characters champions as if from league.
“Who’s your favorite mii?”
“I main Samus.”
Unlearning things from 3.5e/PF1e for 5e isn’t easy. DM had me roll survival for driving a horse-drawn car. I was just about to ask him why not simply make a ride check, but noticed those don’t exist anymore.
I was able to unintentionally sneak positioning-based flanking rules without using an action as well. Those are actually a welcome addition, and are fair since enemies use them as well.
Your DM apparently has trouble too, since vehicle proficiency is a thing in 5e.
Not surprising. I don’t think vehicle proficiency has come up once in any of the 5e games I’ve played, and I’ve been playing 5e since the playtest.
Yeah, it’s a tool proficiency rather than a skill… fundamentally the same thing, given both are nothing more than justification for adding proficiency bonus to an ability check, but I think a lot of players and GMs alike forget that they exist.
My character has actually used his proficiency with sailing ships in our current campaign… on a couple of occasions, we’ve found ourselves in control of boats and small ships, so as the only member of the party who knows port from starboard, I’ve always taken command.
Weirdly, I think vehicle proficiency is one of those obscure sort-of-skills that only come up when someone actually does that… As in playing a charioteer PC. For all others, you’ve just got to make do with close-enough skills.
That mummy sure got ripped off with its funerary arrangements, being put in a place that some schmuck is going to crack open their sarcophagus and leave you drowning in sand for the rest of your Egyptian-themed afterlife.
Must be why he’s trying to help that tomb-robbing adventurer.
I regularly get editions crossed in my head. There are four of them (plus pathfinder) that im familiar with to some extent and spells do different things in all of them. It finally got to the point where i gave up on remembering anything i didnt explicitly copy down, so i just check every time i need to use a spellcaster.
The old Magic: the Gathering adage of “read the card” springs to mind.
It’s been years since I’ve played 3.5, and I still remember rules that both Pathfinder and 5e changed. At least I remember that Perception is one skill now. Usually.
The problems come when we at the table need to remember how something shared by the different D&Drivatives. Luckily, everyone at the table has a smartphone, and some of us have dedicated PF/5e apps that let us look up those things without even needing an Internet connection, so it’s not so much “grinding things to a halt” as it is “pausing for a couple of minutes while people google the answer”.
> “pausing for a couple of minutes while people google the answer”.
Noooo! My flow!
To this day, Pathfinder 1e with Spheres of Power/Might is just “DnD” in our circles. Makes it easier for innocent bystanders to understand when we talk about it.
As far as mix-ups, it is sometimes hard to remember what got “ported” to pathfinder and what was deemed to cheesy to make the transition (I’m looking at you crescent blade rogues). All things considered, we only play a couple different dogs, so it’s not too hard to compartmentalize.
> Pathfinder 1e with Spheres of Power/Might is just “DnD” in our circles.
I bet you call hook and loop fasteners “Velcro” too, you heathen!
I know a guy who call all tabletop roleplaying ‘Dungeons (complete with that short stop at the beginning words and phrases get when they are shortened), as through he was a stereotypical parent who keep up with their children’s interests rather than a gamemaster/player of several decades through more systems than I have fingers.
Just be happy it’s pathfinder that put under the DnD umbrella rather than say an Exalted/L5R crossover game using what began as a superhero Savage Worlds Hack for a system.
Heck, just within Deadlands there’s Scrutinize, Search, Track, and Cognition (the base stat that the above 3 are based on, but which also gets used on its own sometimes). As much of the current adventure has revolved around searching for clues that include *tracks* this has caused me no small amount of suffering.
So uh… How do you look for tracks in Deadlands?
Well, you’re supposed to roll Tracking… but none of my players actually had it. In that case, they’re supposed to use a single die with a big penalty, but I figured Search was close enough for this specific task. So I was letting them roll Search instead, but with an ad-hoc penalty.
I usually have a character sheet handy, with all the skills that the players use. Both to know the name of the skill, or to search for two skills to combine to get the proper effect. But even with that, I tend to mix terminology. And my daughter always remarks that as long as she has awareness/perception or any similar skill/ability sufficiently high for her character, she has no problem playing and surviving in any RPG that I GM
I always liked the idea of making Perception (or whatever) a derived skill. Getting information about your environment and then reacting to it is the core of this hobby, so making most PCs generically “pretty good” at it strikes me as a good idea.
I like how Pathfinder 2e and GURPS don’t even make it a skill. It’s just another stat, because it’s just ludicrously important compared to other skills; boosting it is usually better than boosting any other skill, and failing to invest in it can seriously handicap a character.
(GURPS has a bunch of skills for specific types of perception, like Blind Fighting, Lip Reading, and Urban Survival, because of course it does.)
@Colin “making most PCs generically “pretty good” at it strikes me as a good idea.”
Unless the PC is //supposed// to be terrible at it, as a Player choice (this can be fun). My Barbarian Ogress Wrestler is famously bad at noticing things, even when pointed out to her. Frex the Doomchild stabbing her in the calf (because that’s all it can reach) and she doesn’t notice because she’s so tough it’s not hurting her at all (despite dealing damage that would cripple other PCs). She’s often found at the end of fight on fire (and it’s not //always// the party Wizard’s fault) and doesn’t notice because she’s (illogically) impervious to regular fire, despite still being flammable, due to the quirks of the system.
@GreatWyrmGold
/pushes thick rimmed glasses up greasy nose
Akshually… In GURPS Dungeon Fantasy the skill for “noticing things are important” is Observation, but you can use //either// base Perception or Observation, whichever is higher for ‘general’ Perception rolls. Sometimes Observation is called out as specifically being needed, and the only time you //can not// substitute Observation for Perception is with “ranged supernatural senses” rolls… which I consider to be bunk, but whatever – I mean it’s aimed at keeping Scouter McSpotterstien (and their monstrous equivalent) from getting powers of “badguy/goodguy detection” and then always detecting monsters and baddies (or PCs) because their Observation is jacked to the roof, but I say that’s easily controllable by just never giving Scouter that damn ‘unlimited use’ amulet in the first place.
Side note for the non-GURPS proficient audience, skill cost progression is 1 point for the first 2 levels (this gets Observation equal to Perception) and then 2 points for the next level, then 4 points per level thereafter. Perception just costs 5 points per level to raise. So always just spend 2 points on Observation, then raise Perception. That way your Per/Obs rolls are identical, and all your other Perception based skills go up with Perception*… cheeseless crisp GURPS is stupidly designed sometimes.
.* Indeed, I always just spend the points needed to make my Perception skills equal to Perception and then start jacking Perception to the sky, if that’s the character’s shtick. Or the opposite, or a nice middle ground, whatever I need for the Character.
As I’ve said before, I play pretty much everything on R20 these days, which is nice because I am either using the character sheet with its built in macros OR I make all the macros myself.
I have a tendency to make macros for super commonly used things like perception checks in particular. I name the button ‘Spot.’ No matter the game system, no matter which game, that button is always ‘Spot’ on my screen. The CONTENTS of that button may be dice roll Perception/Awareness/Sense/See/Hear/Smell/Touch/Taste/ESP, but the *button* is always Spot.
That said, when we play 5e, we’re always calling saves by Fort/Ref/Will instead of the new convention…but since they correlate with the same stats anyways, it’s a wash.
Heh. I wonder if you could make a macro that just rolls are your saves simo. The GM just picks out the ones they need.
I’ve done that, but it’s a bit spammy on chat, so I mostly only use it when I’m GMing for monsters and such.
I put a lot of the burden on the players. “Roll to notice stuff” or “What would you like to roll to figure out how the machine works?” lets them get creative with their approach and also puts the burden on the players to learn what their character is capable of doing. Then as GM, I get to decide on fun situations like: what the result might be if they try to use “deception” to persuade an NPC that they got a machine working instead of actually getting the machine working…
Yeah… But when they start making those checks all willy-nilly the emergent narrative sometimes goes haywire:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/spot-check
Yeah mate, this way lays the madness of the Brujah with only Potence:
Brujah Dominate: I hit you until you do exactly what I say.
Brujah Advanced Dominate/Windwipe: I hit you until you forget what I want you to forget about.
Brujah Obfuscation: I hit you until you can’t see me.
Brujah Celerity: If I break your legs you run slower than me.
Brujah Presence: I will hit you until you love me.
Brujah Protean: I hit you until you believe I can turn into a wolf.
…etc.
In the Dungeon Fantasy genre this is replicated by “Barbarianing the Dungeon” instead of bringing a Rogue. I mean, who needs a Rogue when Throg AxeSkull can smash open every door and chest? Who needs traps found when Throg will just go first and survive the traps? This has actually revealed a serious flaw in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy where many games find the Thief profession is superfluous, for exactly those reasons.
There are answers to this problem, but that way is also fraught with it’s own perils.
You misspelled “Mindwipe” as “Windwipe” and now it sounds like some kind of advanced bidet that uses air power instead of water
I simply refuse to play any other d20 based game besides P1e.
Mutant, Year Zero was sufficiently different to try but dissolved after the current d20 campaign got rolling.
But what if that means you have to play with the same grognards in the same basement for the rest of your life? Will you just… like… enjoy what you like with your friends? The horror!
The real trick for consistency is to never remember anything
Zen and the Art of Dementia
It’s okay Colin, ot’s okay. We understand. At certain age memory starts falling and things get blurred. Nothing to be shame of 🙂
Also it would be a Skill Architecture 🙂
Honestly, obscure stuff like Profession (architect) is where players *should* pipe up with, “Can I roll X instead?” I’ll never remember to ask for that obscure-ass roll on my own.
Next game make someone roll Performance: Balaklava to keep them on edge 😀
Profession or Knowledge skills in 3e were always kind of pointless – but one GM I played with gave out one free skill point per level, with the proviso that it was a “hobby skill”, and had to be placed into one of those skill categories.
They only rarely came up, but they were a fun tough for adding depth to characters – particularly for classes where skill points were too scarce to waste on non-core skills.
I flat-out died and caused our group to fail in the first 10 minutes of a RPGA tournament module because my excessive LARPing led me to expect that a *bless* spell from my cleric would grant 5 bonus hit points rather than a measly +1 to saving throws vs fear and a +1 attack bonus.
I was so ashamed.
I hope you were beaten by many boffer swords for your transgression.
Have this exact problem in a GURPS Dungeon Fantasy game with my current GM, he’s got a long tail history with other games and real world disparate lore skills (just like I do) but doesn’t have the equally stronk memory skills to separate it all out, so he keeps asking for different skill rolls than what actually exist in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy…
Usually I can rerail him just by asking “Do you mean [other similar name] skill” and usually this would nudge the GM’s memory and get the Players to roll the “correct” skill, not the hodge-podge the GM asked for… however, there is one “skill” the GM just kept insisting existed, and, unfortunately for me, it does //and// it doesn’t.
GURPS has a set of catch-all skills, you’re probably used to similar in D&D, Profession (Whatever), Craft (Whatever), Art (Whatever), Etc (Whatever)… you get the drift. Well in GURPS the “big three”† are “Expert Skill”, “Profession Skill”, and “Hobby Skill”, and they do roughly what you’d expect. Hobby Skill gives a hobbyist’s or enthusiast’s level of knowledge, Professional Skill let’s you make money at it, and Expert means you know basically) everything there is to know in the field. Now, to make it slightly annoying, the Professional Skill is actually the useful one, it’s the skill you use actively when doing said thing, like if you take Under-Water Basket Weaving as a Hobby skill, you’ll know a lot of trivia about the art, and could maybe even perform it, but you’re rolling with penalties to make baskets underwater because Hobby is just that, a Hobby (the penalties can be offset by just taking a lot longer to do it than a Professional would). The Professional Skill is used to actually make baskets under water, as well as know useful things about the profession. What balks people is the Expert Skill, it’s useless except for knowing things, and it’s absolutely not intended to be a ‘practical’ skill. It’s there to cover a person who has way more useless and esoteric knowledge about the subject than even a Professional would have, but is sometimes handy as a complimentary skill.
So what did my enterprisingly stubborn GM decide? Yes, he decided that the “Natural Philosophy” skill he kept asking me to make (in figuring out stuff about weird magically altered or mutated animals and other stuff), that I didn’t have, was an Expert Skill because it is in one or two other genre settings for GURPS, it’s just not used in DF. So //not// the Naturalist skill I’d taken (which in the DF setting treatment would be the proper skill for this), and not any of the many Hidden Lore skills I’d taken… but another skill that does, but doesn’t, exist.
*le sigh*
But it’s all good. Adding one skill is easy in GURPS, if this were an inferior system, like say D&D (ZING!), I’d have stronger complaints.
I uh… I’m glad it all worked out?
We’re getting this a fair bit switching between 5e and Call of Cthulu from one day to the next. I’m not the DM, but exclamations like “What’s my perception skill?” are standard fare (spot: hidden appears to be the closest equivalent), and my failure to understand the significance of a “navigate” skill at character creation has led to endless jokes of my wilderness-savvy mexican guerillero being unable to find the end of a street with a map and a compass.
As a DM, my most regular rules-call slipups are still “will save” and “reflex save”, and, yes, “search” – but my players are used to it by now, they just go straight to the right thing.
Oh man… It remember undervaluing the near-mandatory “ox body” charm in Exalted.
“I’m I lithe and graceful creature? Why would I take something called ‘Ox Body?'”
Turns out that’s the equivalent of dumping your Con.
I keep calling the “Nimbleness” statistic from Dungeons of Dredmor “Zip” which is from Toon
How is Toon? It always sounded like a fun genre to try out, but I’ve never actually looked through the book.
Despite having the rulebooks, I’ve never actually gotten a chance to play it, with the exception of a short Toon-based CRPG that someone uploaded to Newgrounds years and years ago, which was pretty neat
Here it is:
https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/117212
You’ll probably have to install the Newgrounds Player plugin (or better yet, an old browser) to play it
In terms of “the ancients”, I’ve done some work and planning on integrating ancient civilizations and “fallen empires/etc.” into my campaigns, partly as a response to that ill-used trope.
If you would like to report ancient abuse, please dial our hotline.
Think I’ll pass 😉