With This Ring (Young Justice SI) (Thread Fourteen)

That's not been true for a very, very long time. IIRC it was 3e that changed the conditions for gaining XP from "kill enemy" to "overcome challenge". You're supposed to gain the same amount of XP for diplomancing the orcs attacking the village as you would gain from slaughtering them.

Holing up in a tower devoting your time to research and study should, in fact, be worth XP according to this rule, if you overcome a challenge by doing so. It just doesn't provide the instant gratification that you get from overcoming a life-threatening encounter.

This also means that a peasant farmer surviving the winter should be worth nonzero XP. It's more of a threat than a big angry rat, but probably less of one than stopping a bear that's prowling the farm, and off the cuff it feels like about the same as preventing the wolves from eating your sheep, so that's probably CR 1/4. (Maybe even CR 1/2 if it's a particularly harsh winter.) At CR 1/4, that means that getting through the winter is worth 50 XP, divided among everyone who "substantially contributed" to getting through the challenge.

Yeah, I know that's what you were trying to do, but it's an incomplete sentence -- there's no verb in that clause. At the very least, it could say that they HAVE Imperium grasers.

 

Hm... maybe farmers give xp to plants / animals they raise? I mean, cows are harder to kill than people sometimes. If you go down the route you suggest, each plant they grow has to be worth 1 xp at least. You end up with old farmers being fairly OP.

 

Hey Mr Zoat, what DID happen to Felicity?

It never seemed relevant enough to ask about, but now that Kalista mentioned it...

 

I said don't get me started. Pathfinder's success for literally years were people who didn't want to switch over to newer editions of DnD.

Then they decided to nuke that successful strategy to make a game more like the 4th edition that if people liked they wouldn't have cared about pathfinder in the first place.

How exactly that sounded like a good idea is a complete mystery to me.

That reminds me, I've been toying with a YJ story inspired by Zoat's New God fluff and the World of Prime series by MC Planck.

In World of Prime, experience, levels, classes, all the dnd mechanics aren't abstractions.

Experience is residual soul energy that can be harvested and sold/traded/stolen/given away. Consume enough of it, and you level. Classes are engineered pathways souls can grow.

And all the benefits are superhuman, so in World of Prime characters with some class levels are basically Wolverine. "Someone shot you in the face and slit your throat? Well then walk it off, not like you're really hurt, whiner."

Hence Zoat's "New Gods increase powers by their souls growing" reminding me of it.

So to make this reverse isekai situation work, I was thinking that life where the adventurer is from has the "alchemy gene" for lack of the better term, the natural ability to collect and assimilate soul energy to grow their soul, there are probably bears the size of minvans who can tank a cannon blast to the face, for example.

Intelligent figured out how to extract the soul energy, and how to formulate different abilities, as the state of the art advanced more and more options became available. I have a lot of third party pathfinder products, so fantasy staples get joined with self duplicators and "Iron Man but wearing a golem" and four dimensional skirmishers who smack people in the face with condensed pieces of space-time and the like.

In short, a young adventurer from a post singularity transhuman fantasy setting gets quite the case of culture shock coming to Earth 16, where people learn magic without leveling, make schizotech without leveling, races like kryptonians and martians flying around, and where superpower sharing is the exception and not the rule.

And the knowledge of residual soul energy extraction and class formulation come with him...

 

Sounds interesting, but I will say that there are reasons that sharing superpower technology shouldn’t immediately work / be embraced by everyone. The best implementations of it I’ve seen always have some sort of discrimination against the technology being shared, even if it’s due to fear, and acceptance of the tech doesn’t happen till the epilogue timeskip. You run out of ideas and your villains start lagging behind your civilians, or they become too different from canon, though you might be able to let them work their powers into your class systems. Though it does work if there are 1 or 2 “apprentice characters” slowly gaining power ahead of the curve. If he’s not gonna be able to teach people, that might also work, but wouldn’t let you use multiple classes.

At the very least, if you want to use multiple classes in the story, you’ll want to keep your characters at least partially using what they start off good at. It’s why the New God idea works. You’ll also want to give your villains similar upgrades, or they’ll either be too obviously overpowered by the good guys, or your heroes start looking incompetent if they’re not doing better than in canon for the parts you want to keep.

 

A variant rule I once saw took the rules for making money using the Profession skill and extended it in a similar fashion to earning XP. Projected over the expected career of most NPCs this would result in most people that work for a living being level 6-8 by the time they retire. It had bonuses and penalties available based on having a trainer and good tools and other circumstances (e.g. a soldier would get a bonus for fighting in a war).

This makes being a scribe something that actually works -- the way the suggestion balanced it out, a 5th level caster could earn enough XP with a side job to scribe one 3rd-level scroll per week with a few XP left over.

 

I find myself wondering about a Paul with an actual effective super power/power set that is a completely against his mindset and how he would adapt.

Because that's what I think of after watching 2 hours of Sumo Wrestling. I was rooting for him, but my little man Enho sadly was eliminated. Lot of fight in him though....and wow does this cold medicine make me loopy as all hell.

 

Make him able to cause explosions and be immune from concussive force.

 

Then stop trying to eat that kind of meat, if it really bothers you.

Vancian magic makes sense in its context. You're wrestling some kind of weird energy into a certain form in your mind, and you can only fit a certain number of such spells into your mind before you crack. Casting a spell is releasing that energy into the world. D&D, on the other hand, as others have point out hasn't used actual Vancian magic since AD&D 2e - it moved to prepared spells and spell slots from 3rd edition onwards.

So what's your excuse the rest of the time?

 

Then someone's R&D department didn't do enough work, because unless the military is involved, no one is going to be buying their crap-meat.

 

I don't know if it makes me bad or something, but I do, sometimes, prefer Grayven's more heavy handed approach. I'm pretty sure in his timeline you can easily count the number of people that are really missing the delightful presence of the Psions, the Gordanians, the Spider Guild chapter and the assorted group of pirates/slavers in the beautiful fabric that is Vegan space realpolitik.

I do agree with the initial help he provided to the pirates in settling down the peace treaty and everything but is not like he really owed them anything, I guess not all the Gordanians are bad but they enslave even themselves so no sympathy from me and I get the impression it was their, and the Branx's, original help which allowed for the Citadel to get so pre-eminent in Vega. The Okaarans are mercenaries and the Branx jump frequently the line between that and thugs so I think they just need a bit of intimidation. The Illustres probably didn't really want to take care of the region himself but while he was on Earth I had the impression that he did and I would have liked seeing him do so with his particular brand of insanity; instead of this "maybe I will, maybe I won't, I don't really care even though I already got involved".

 

The SI doesn't know.

 

Plus, mass drivers tend to have that little problem of massive seismic impacts... Much messier than setting things on fire.
(correction withdrawn on consideration)

Spoiler: Commentary spoilered for length

Bit hard to be a civilian in a warrior culture, especially a large race.

Basic logic. outnumbered, and the enemy has superior morale? Retreat.

Heh, the joy of a region where Lanterns are rarely seen, if ever.

"That protection can easily be revoked."

Never underestimate stupidity, or sheer doggedness.

...the laser failing to penetrate my shield and...

Oh, is he in for a treat...

Unusual line-break (likely already fixed...)

Small hope.

He slows as he reaches my shield, frowning at it.

Good to see he's not a total meathead.

Missing Full Stop.

A living legend, eh?

"No. They took your sisters because you publically joined the Omega Men."

Nice job breaking it, hero.

Cause and effect, kid. It's not always pretty.

I doubt this is doing OL's rep in Vega any favours. More info for the game developers though...

 

Thank you, corrected.

 

That was a bit harsh on Ryand'r, no?

Isn't the mess on this planet a direct result of OLs not-so-well-thought-through interference?

At least Ryand'r tries to change things for the better.

 

OL is at least... if not really feeling guilty, at least realizing that, "Ah, should have thought of that" on his own.

Ryand'r on the other hand, was only thinking "FOR JUSTICE!" until OL had to spell out the chain of events to him.

 

Beards. The ruination of all cute boys.

 

More so when applied to cute girls.

 

This particular mess, arguably. The general mess, no. That happened before he was born.

 

Oh sure. I meant more that he could symphatise.

 

His ring is orange not purple.

 

I don't know I think it makes him look rather dashing

 

I thought some Karnans were gordanian. Did you mean "karnans"?

 

Thank you, corrected.

 

I found this a little confusing; maybe because I'm not intimately familiar with the backstory.

The difference between "just left Okaara and joined them" and "you slapped them in the face with it" seems kind of vague. So it would have been okay if Ryand'r joined the Omega Men, but he did so in some "public" manner? He needed to be wearing a mask and using a fake name or something like that?

 

In a universe with time travel how much does the last really matter?

 

Yes, he publically denounced them at the time he did it. A mask would have been unnecessary.

 

Especially since Zoat changed the story from where it was Blackfire's fault.

Darkfire was literally an infant when his sister was given to the Citadel. So Darkfire was a bit busy wearing diapers and saying "Da Da!" to be responsible for interplanetary politics.

And I do mean sister, not sisters. Blackfire willingly joined the Citadel, where her hobbies were torturing and having Starfire raped. As a reward for betraying her people and helping the Citadel conquer Tamaran.

Then Primus recruited Darkfire to be the communication officer of the Omega Men. Yes, Darkfire was recruited to be their Uhura.

Where he got captured on his first mission and subjected to the same experiment his sisters were, giving him the ability to sheave his hands in a corona of energy.

 

Not a lot, but it matters even less when DC retcons major events a couple of times a month.