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I don't really understand the point into putting much effort into roleplaying a character I'm only going to play once and never again, even though I do like roleplaying in things like encounters, 1 shots in general, and high death fantasy vietnam type games I have a hard time really caring about any of these dudes I'm just creating to die or to just play once. That's where this kind of stuff always fell short for me, but I guess if you can put your all into a character that is only going to see a few hours of play tops all the more power to you, I just can't really do that.
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Jun 17, 2013 01:12
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goldjas posted:I don't really understand the point into putting much effort into roleplaying a character I'm only going to play once and never again, even though I do like roleplaying in things like encounters, 1 shots in general, and high death fantasy vietnam type games I have a hard time really caring about any of these dudes I'm just creating to die or to just play once. That's where this kind of stuff always fell short for me, but I guess if you can put your all into a character that is only going to see a few hours of play tops all the more power to you, I just can't really do that. See, I never really understood your point of view. The way I see it is that playing a character is playing a character. And while I'll get more invested in and further develop a long-running character, that doesn't mean I will roleplay that character any more or less than a one-shot comic relief character. Either way, I will be making up details as they become important and developing a relationship with the other characters, and I will be having a blast doing so.
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Jun 17, 2013 01:55
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Our Encounters tables next week are starting at level 7 (accompanied by buffed monsters) because one of the tables from last season turned into a free-wheeling RP marathon that went five hours every week and now no one wants to give up their character.
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Jun 17, 2013 01:55
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goldjas posted:I don't really understand the point into putting much effort into roleplaying a character I'm only going to play once and never again, even though I do like roleplaying in things like encounters, 1 shots in general, and high death fantasy vietnam type games I have a hard time really caring about any of these dudes I'm just creating to die or to just play once. That's where this kind of stuff always fell short for me, but I guess if you can put your all into a character that is only going to see a few hours of play tops all the more power to you, I just can't really do that.
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Jun 17, 2013 02:15
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PeterWeller posted:See, I never really understood your point of view. The way I see it is that playing a character is playing a character. And while I'll get more invested in and further develop a long-running character, that doesn't mean I will roleplay that character any more or less than a one-shot comic relief character. Either way, I will be making up details as they become important and developing a relationship with the other characters, and I will be having a blast doing so. I think the big part is knowing that with in a few hours these dudes cease to ever matter and some people dont like playing the one-shot comic relief character. Its a personal preference thing, I generally dont care unless I know this is building up to something bigger.
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Jun 17, 2013 02:16
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Yeah, I think I roleplay better in one shots, in general. There's lower stakes, so I'm more likely to make riskier choices in the name of characterization.
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Jun 17, 2013 03:00
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:I played the cleric and noticed immediately that the cleric is now totally a healbot of the most boring, regressive sort imaginable.
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Jun 17, 2013 03:36
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LuiCypher posted:
Let me tell you the secret recipe my mother handed down to me for how to make the Best loving Chicken when I asked her many years ago. It is closely related to the recipe Varjon alluded to: Varjon posted:You can literally just rub a chicken with salt and rosemary, put it in a pyrex dish and cook it until the internal temperature is safe, basting it with its own juices every 15 minutes or so, then take it out and carve it up and have delicious moist chicken. For bonuses, stuff the cavity with garlic and onion, or pear slices, or something. The recipe is: broil it with the skin on. There is no salt, no rosemary, no basting. Just a broiling pan and a bird and an oven rack adjusted as high as is reasonable. Speleothing fucked around with this message at 05:49 on Jun 17, 2013 |
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Jun 17, 2013 05:47
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Halloween Jack posted:They were going to change that, but then the poll results said you loved the poo poo out of it. That was over a year ago. We actually had a talk about this a couple of pages back. Mearls made an L&L post about Clerics. His conclusion was that the reason people liked modern clerics (4e and clerics from other D&D-ish games) was because they could do stuff and heal. If you're concerned about doing other stuff and want to heal (Mearls argues) you must not really want to heal. Since all real clerics are healers, and people who don't want to heal enjoy doing other stuff, people who are playing modern clerics don't want to play clerics at all. They want to play some other class - one that casts spells or deals damage. Therefore, if you don't like heal-botting, you wouldn't like playing the cleric. Pick another class. (These are his arguments, not mine.)
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Jun 17, 2013 05:52
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It takes a designer of Mearls' calibre to follow that up with a very narrow and specific interpretation of hp, a nerf to non-magical healing (so people would roleplay while in town R&Ring) and making healbot clerics pretty much mandatory. D&DNext is so mired in backwards thinking at this point that the designers believe bullying Jack's little brother Timmy to play the cleric because no one else wants to is a necessary part of the authentic D&D experience. Littlefinger fucked around with this message at 06:09 on Jun 17, 2013 |
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Jun 17, 2013 06:05
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Regaining hp between fights shouldn't really depend on magic (and should be way more reliable/useful than these stupid "Hit Dice"), but I feel like there's something to be said for a party role that would be focused a lot on shields and healing. I like healing, even/especially when I'm not killing stuff, but with 3e (and Next) it was always a massive hassle to heal in the middle of combat. If it were less of a hassle (ranged, gave a lot more healing), and (important!) there were actual reasons to extend fights, it would be pretty fun. Like if there were a 13th Age-style escalation dice, or something similar, where there were reasons to do stuff other than "focus fire and kill things as fast as possible."
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Jun 17, 2013 07:08
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Littlefinger posted:D&DNext is so mired in backwards thinking at this point that the designers believe bullying Jack's little brother Timmy to play the cleric because no one else wants to is a necessary part of the authentic D&D experience. Agreed. On the other hand, there is something strangely compelling about a game where an ordinary commoner can trick Satan into putting on normal iron chains that it cannot break. Stupid poo poo like that is also a part of the authentic D&D experience, and I'd be more willing to play a game that's bad in a way that's hilarious rather than boring. At the very least, I'd probably try to play this game once.
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Jun 17, 2013 07:43
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Littlefinger posted:It takes a designer of Mearls' calibre to follow that up with a very narrow and specific interpretation of hp, a nerf to non-magical healing (so people would roleplay while in town R&Ring) and making healbot clerics pretty much mandatory. Well Next IS actively recruiting groggy players that went to Pathfinder. A favorite talking point in places like grogs.txt is "earn your fun". So maybe if Jack brings his brother/girlfriend you just tell them to play the party butler until they're ready to play real D&D. If this showed up in a blog post right now I wouldn't be surprised.
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Jun 17, 2013 07:48
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Had a chat yesterday with a friend who's run every edition of D&D (mainly 2nd and 4th) and he is completely in love with Next. This conversation also involved the phase "feels like D&D" a lot though, but having someone at least happy with it who isn't a straight up grog is nice?
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Jun 17, 2013 08:39
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Uncle Khasim posted:Had a chat yesterday with a friend who's run every edition of D&D (mainly 2nd and 4th) and he is completely in love with Next. You guys, what does D&D actually feel like? Because for me, I'd rather have games that focus on amoral murderhobos doing shenanigans up and down Faerun/Khorvaire/Greyhawk without also getting my teeth kicked in for playing a sword and board fighter. D&D 3E was my first D&D for me, and it never felt how I imagined it after absorbing so much cheap licensed D&D fiction beforehand.
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Jun 17, 2013 08:53
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Bedlamdan posted:You guys, what does D&D actually feel like? Because for me, I'd rather have games that focus on amoral murderhobos doing shenanigans up and down Faerun/Khorvaire/Greyhawk without also getting my teeth kicked in for playing a sword and board fighter. D&D 3E was my first D&D for me, and it never felt how I imagined it after absorbing so much cheap licensed D&D fiction beforehand. I only first heard the term "sword and board" during the pre-release marketing for 4E and I'm not sure I've ever heard it used seriously since.
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Jun 17, 2013 10:05
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I saw it fairly often throughout 3e and in various video games. I dunno where the terminology comes from but I see it enough in both.
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Jun 17, 2013 11:26
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ProfessorCirno posted:I saw it fairly often throughout 3e and in various video games. I dunno where the terminology comes from but I see it enough in both. It's pretty popular in SCA circles, I think.
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Jun 17, 2013 11:36
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Doing a quick Google Search, it looks like the term originally game from MMO communities, and is most prolific in WoW. The earliest reference I can find right now is in reference to LARP, though, so who knows whether the chicken or the egg happened first.
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Jun 17, 2013 11:44
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Namagem posted:Doing a quick Google Search, it looks like the term originally game from MMO communities, and is most prolific in WoW. We said Sword and Board throughout the 90s but I have no idea where we got it from. I'm pretty sure we were using the term before anyone had an internet connection.
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Jun 17, 2013 11:54
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Namagem posted:The earliest reference I can find right now is in reference to LARP, though, so who knows whether the chicken or the egg happened first. Which is part of why I consider it hilarious to see people go "D&D is too much like a video game/MMO!!", when if anything it's the other way around and always has been. We've only now in the last few years really started to see innovations from video games being back-ported into tabletop RPGs.
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Jun 17, 2013 12:06
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Oh the memories of arguing over whether 'buffer' or 'tank' was the correct term for the warrior.
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Jun 17, 2013 12:21
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Razorwired posted:A favorite talking point in places like grogs.txt is "earn your fun". This one kills me every time. This isn't being discerning, this isn't having refined tastes, this is straight up Stockholm syndrome. I don't think 4e was perfect, it had some pretty serious flaws in fact. But Next is not only throwing out everything 4e did right, but something like half of what 3e did right. Just let Mearls put thac0 back in and be done with it.
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Jun 17, 2013 13:08
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Uncle Khasim posted:Had a chat yesterday with a friend who's run every edition of D&D (mainly 2nd and 4th) and he is completely in love with Next. I have a friend who usually runs events for Wizards at cons and stuff. I mean, there are a bunch of people who do that, so it's not like she's unique but she's run a lot of D&D. She loved 4th and hated 5th. Until she ran a scenario at a con recently. Now she thinks it's great. Nothing changed about the stuff. She just said it 'feels' right. I hate 'feels'. I hate them so much. I wish people would just say, 'we ran it and it was fun, so I think I like it'. It doesn't immediately excuse all of the game's horrendous problems, I guess, but yeah. I think it 'feels' like hack job. But I guess I only started playing during AD&D so my opinion doesn't matter in these 'feel' discussions. Reclaiming a feeling is such an asinine practice. Nobody who set out to make D&D in the first place was after a feeling. Doing it deliberately dumb.
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Jun 17, 2013 13:27
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EscortMission posted:This one kills me every time. This isn't being discerning, this isn't having refined tastes, this is straight up Stockholm syndrome. It's a warped version of a valid design consideration. That a small dose of frustration can pay off in a large dose of satisfaction later on is pretty much the core of pacing.
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Jun 17, 2013 16:12
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In an ideal reality where I have an arbitrarily large amount of free time to play elfgames, I would have gone with the "earn your fun" approach personally.
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Jun 17, 2013 16:22
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Mendrian posted:I have a friend who usually runs events for Wizards at cons and stuff. I mean, there are a bunch of people who do that, so it's not like she's unique but she's run a lot of D&D. She loved 4th and hated 5th. Until she ran a scenario at a con recently. Now she thinks it's great. Nothing changed about the stuff. She just said it 'feels' right. Honestly this seems like a lot of it. It does a decent job of playing like D&D, and as such with a little DM fiat and a little player interaction it comes out the other end playing like an okay game. Other people have said it before, but how is that different from any previous version of the game? When Mearly himself says "you don't have to buy it if you don't want to" you know there's something seriously messed up with the game. Rexides posted:In an ideal reality where I have an arbitrarily large amount of free time to play elfgames, I would have gone with the "earn your fun" approach personally. If you're presented with two games that are exactly the same, except in one game one member of your party has to play the class that (for most people) is not fun? Why? Even with an infinite amount of time to play elfgame, why would you choose to have your amount of fun be infinity minus (x+y), where x is the amount of time you end up playing the boring cleric you don't want to play, and y is the amount of time your party has a mexican standoff of "well I don't want to play the cleric this time"s 
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Jun 17, 2013 16:40
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Razorwired posted:A favorite talking point in places like grogs.txt is "earn your fun". So maybe if Jack brings his brother/girlfriend you just tell them to play the party butler until they're ready to play real D&D. EscortMission posted:This one kills me every time. This isn't being discerning, this isn't having refined tastes, this is straight up Stockholm syndrome. Rexides posted:In an ideal reality where I have an arbitrarily large amount of free time to play elfgames, I would have gone with the "earn your fun" approach personally. The problem is that in D&D "earning your fun" rarely comes from shrewd tactical choices. Learning D&D is not like learning chess. It comes instead from learning how to manipulate the DM and figuring out a few pretty simple system mastery bits. Some want to pretend that learning D&D is like learning chess, as if it's hard to figure out that save-or-die spells rule. I used to optimize characters all day in 3e, and it didn't require any genius--just the ability to remember a lot of particulars and way, way too much of my free time. The other thing about earn-your-fun? It is indeed ridiculously time consuming. I'm too busy to start over because my epic-level character slipped on a puddle of elf jizz. Mendrian posted:We actually had a talk about this a couple of pages back. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 17:45 on Jun 17, 2013 |
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Jun 17, 2013 17:37
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Probably the most "entertaining" part of the current cleric design is that yes, there is no real point in doing anything but casting Cure. But you still get a pile of worthless trap options from the "classical" cleric spell list because it "feels D&D, man." All that wasted ink.
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Jun 17, 2013 18:05
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:Probably the most "entertaining" part of the current cleric design is that yes, there is no real point in doing anything but casting Cure. But you still get a pile of worthless trap options from the "classical" cleric spell list because it "feels D&D, man." All that wasted ink. It doesn't feel like DnD if there aren't trap options buried within trap options. You don't just build an underoptimized character; you build an underoptomized character who has taken additional specialization into underoptimization.
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Jun 17, 2013 18:11
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AlphaDog posted:We said Sword and Board throughout the 90s but I have no idea where we got it from. I'm pretty sure we were using the term before anyone had an internet connection. I'll be honest, I just took the term from another pen and paper website when in high-school, though I can't remember which one.
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Jun 17, 2013 18:23
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Death Bot posted:If you're presented with two games that are exactly the same, except in one game one member of your party has to play the class that (for most people) is not fun? I was talking about the game being hard and punishing, not about class imbalance. Why are you jumping to assumptions?
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Jun 17, 2013 18:42
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Rexides posted:I was talking about the game being hard and punishing, not about class imbalance. Why are you jumping to assumptions? Because the beginning of the conversation was talking about earning your fun with regards to bullying your brother into playing the "party butler"? I don't think it's a large leap of logic to assume you were talking about the same thing, but I'm sorry for misunderstanding you.
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Jun 17, 2013 18:47
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Death Bot posted:If you're presented with two games that are exactly the same, except in one game one member of your party has to play the class that (for most people) is not fun? I think that 'earn your fun' is actually more fun during the period where you're earning it than the period where you've attained it, is the thing. Slinking around as a 4-hp wizard, knowing that you're almost certainly going to die before you hit level 2, but knowing that if you do your chances of surviving for much longer go way up--that can be even more fun that playing a high-level character for a certain kind of personality. There can be more fun in effort than success. The unfun cleric is just Bad, though. The system's providing no 'put in effort to earn X' incentive, it's just making a lovely to play class. I guess my point is that earning fun is an inherently (if misleadingly worded) fun act.
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Jun 17, 2013 19:19
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Usually, I've tended to shrug off the whole criticism of Mearls not understanding how 4th edition actually worked but if anything the latest Legends and Lore article takes the cake. He criticizes 4th edition's solo mechanics which at a point he's right about but then proceeded to design a dragon that pretty much is a 4th edition solo.
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Jun 17, 2013 20:00
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MadScientistWorking posted:Usually, I've tended to shrug off the whole criticism of Mearls not understanding how 4th edition actually worked but if anything the latest Legends and Lore article takes the cake. He criticizes 4th edition's solo mechanics which at a point he's right about but then proceeded to design a dragon that pretty much is a 4th edition solo. I have a lot of sympathy for Mearls, actually. I like to imagine he spends a great deal of time sweating about the precise wording he's going to put into those things. I mean if you think about it he's taken on (or been assigned) an impossible task. Sometimes I imagine him screaming into a text-filled monitor. "WHAT DO YOU PEOPLE WANT?" Then he cries.
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Jun 17, 2013 20:03
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Mendrian posted:I have a lot of sympathy for Mearls, actually. I like to imagine he spends a great deal of time sweating about the precise wording he's going to put into those things. I mean if you think about it he's taken on (or been assigned) an impossible task. Sometimes I imagine him screaming into a text-filled monitor. "WHAT DO YOU PEOPLE WANT?" Then he cries.
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Jun 17, 2013 20:06
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MadScientistWorking posted:Honestly he had a point though. Initially solos in 4th edition sucked because the action economy meant that they really were much weaker than they should have been. The problem is that he engaged in blanket statements which aren't really right because honestly 4th edition did fix that problem which is why the stat block he posted as an example is a 4th edition solo with all of the rider effects removed. Oh yeah no doubt about it. The Legendary Action thing is really just the exact same thing you'd expect from a 4e Stat Block. Except there isn't a Minor Action anymore so now there's another 100 words or so to describe a thing we could have done in the core once, and never again. I don't hate what he has written here. I'm just curious why he had to defame 4e to get around to it. 
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Jun 17, 2013 20:09
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I'm pretty sure Mearls actually is designing the exact game he wants, I'm be shocked if he's panicking about trying to "bring everyone together" or whatever.
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Jun 17, 2013 20:23
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What he wrote is really dumb, even for a Legends and Lore article. I mean, look at this: quote:I was never quite happy with how the solo tag from previous editions transformed into a mechanical contrivance. The original concept in 4th Edition was that solos and elites were meant to be size Large and bigger creatures—massive foes that by their nature posed a constant threat. Imagine a group of goblins with spears and short swords attacking an elephant. Even as the beast shifts in place and moves, it can inadvertently trample and crush the goblins. You can see how a solo is dangerous even when it's not the creature's turn. He ties it entirely to size, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It doesn't follow from what he originally says either, the part about how the tag turns entirely into a mechanical contrivance. He's saying Solo and Elite somehow initially meant a thing that is already conveyed by size tags, and 4e hosed up by not using two separate indicators to do the same thing. That original concept must not have lasted long either, since the 4e Monster Manual has Elites like the Orc Bloodrager and Githyanki Gish. Next: quote:That definition didn't stick over time. In part, I think the definition didn't maintain consistency because I believe that elite and solo didn't clearly represent something within the world of the game. So, we've recast solo and elite as legendary, a description that applies to truly powerful, notable, and important creatures in the world of D&D. These are monsters whose very nature is tied to the fabric of the cosmos. Magic runs through their veins, and their mere appearance is a noteworthy event. Dragons, titans, most fiends, and elder elementals are a few examples of legendary creatures. Artifacts can also make creatures into legends. The orc king carrying the spear of Gruumsh is a legendary figure. As noted above, that definition didn't stick from the very first Monster Manual so he's either talking pre-release or he's trying to revise history. Mearls then goes on to explain that Legendary means exactly the same thing Elite and Solo meant in 4e, but it uses a different word. However there's one interesting, big change:  magic can make things legendary. No legendary figures unless they are carrying some kind of magic item.And then he goes back to size for some reason? quote:Big creatures that still pose a physical threat can simply have mechanics to reflect their abilities. They don't need to dip into the legendary mechanics to pose a threat. which doesn't make any sense. The rest of the article is dumb along the same lines, no point in analyzing it any further. It's full of  and stuff that might sorta make sense if you skim it, exactly like any of the dissociated mechanics or Combat As War/Combat As Sport bullshit essays, so it's perfect for the target market.It's even better when the monster he posts to show how well this works is basically a worse, fiddlier version of late-era 4e Solos.
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