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The mechanics of the Vampire class were awful, but the way 4e handled the concept was great. You could decide exactly how important Vampire was to your character concept, either as a feat or a multiclass or a race or the full class. You could be a Dwarf Fighter who happened to be a vampire, a Vampire Wizard or an Elven Vampire and hypothetically be on par with the rest of the party. I liked that.
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Jul 3, 2013 02:54
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Kai Tave posted:Even then it seems a bit odd considering stuff like Sir Fang, Old Geezer's "Balrog Times reporter," etc. Gygax was all over the place with a lot of his DMing advice/RPG philosophy from Chainmail era to OD&D to AD&D to Unearthed Arcana and beyond. There's a lot of weird AD&D advice that flies in the face of earlier things he did/said.
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Jul 3, 2013 02:58
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victrix posted:Could anyone who was involved in 13th Age or DW beta testing comment on how those tests and iterations compare to Next? To be fair to D&D Next, both playtests were probably two orders of magnitude smaller, so a lot less noise to sift through. Splicer posted:The level adjustment option in that poll is getting slaughtered too. Level adjustment doesn't really fit in with the current Next paradigm of mostly ignoring monster math, so this may be coincidental. DalaranJ fucked around with this message at 03:14 on Jul 3, 2013 |
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Jul 3, 2013 03:01
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This is the best example of playing vampires in D&D:Old Geezer posted:One of the gang at the U of Minnesota wanted to play a vampire. This was LONG before vampires were sparkly, and, for that matter, long before they were Brad Pitt. A vampire was Christopher Lee or Bela Lugosi in tuxedo and opera cape, period.
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Jul 3, 2013 03:05
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Ferrinus posted:What the hell does the realm of faerie have to do with [the positive plane] anyway?
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Jul 3, 2013 03:05
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Positive Energy Plane is the Luckmeat Plane.
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Jul 3, 2013 03:09
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Halloween Jack posted:
A friend who liked plot/horror/vampires insisted I read it. It starts out very slow but eventually it got going. It was worth the effort for the genre. http://www.amazon.com/Sunshine-Robin-McKinley/dp/0515138819 OneThousandMonkeys posted:Positive Energy Plane is the Luckmeat Plane.
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Jul 3, 2013 03:12
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FRINGE posted:Theres enough stories about "the fey" of various sorts being "extra full of life/energy/power/beauty" that it makes easy mythic sense. Okay, now where are the stories about the fey being intrinsically related to healing magic and antithetical to the undead and all the other baggage associated with the utterly and clinically bland lore concept that is "positive energy"? An Arcadia that's its own distinct place is very different from an Arcadia that's a mathematical necessity because well hey there's got to be something between 0,0 and 0,100.
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Jul 3, 2013 03:17
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Well, the Positive Energy Plane is full of radiance and light and the power of life, and the Feywild is like the natural world on so many steroids and uppers that it gets kind of loopy. For something that was about nailing down and defining silly fantasy metaphysics, it's a pretty loose connection.
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Jul 3, 2013 03:22
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Halloween Jack posted:Well, the Positive Energy Plane is full of radiance and light and the power of life, and the Feywild is like the natural world on so many steroids and uppers that it gets kind of loopy. For something that was about nailing down and defining silly fantasy metaphysics, it's a pretty loose connection. It also leaves me confused as to why Ravenloft is now the Negative Energy Plane. The Negative Energy Plane was the domain of entropy and decay, while Ravenloft was spooooky.
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Jul 3, 2013 03:27
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DalaranJ posted:To be fair to D&D Next, both playtests were probably two orders of magnitude smaller, so a lot less noise to sift through. D&D Next opted for a gigantic PR campaign instead of a playtest. They were hoping for buzz, but got noise instead.
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Jul 3, 2013 03:28
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Halloween Jack posted:Well, the Positive Energy Plane is full of radiance and light and the power of life, and the Feywild is like the natural world on so many steroids and uppers that it gets kind of loopy. For something that was about nailing down and defining silly fantasy metaphysics, it's a pretty loose connection. Yeah, I see the connection, but even though it's defensible it's strictly inferior to the situation in which Arcadia is its own pinnacle rather than in which Arcadia is basically a transitional state between something rich and something boring.
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Jul 3, 2013 03:39
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Bedlamdan posted:It also leaves me confused as to why Ravenloft is now the Negative Energy Plane. The Negative Energy Plane was the domain of entropy and decay, while Ravenloft was spooooky. Well, the Shadowfell is spooky and full of death and undeathed things, and so is Ravenloft but people can actually live there, so there you go. It's dumb, but not nearly as dumb as actually hammering out perfect metaphysical elegance in a game where a (salt) elf kills a (vacuum) dragon with a magic (ooze) sword in a (steam) dungeon.
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Jul 3, 2013 04:14
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I thought Ravenloft was just a campaign setting/Prime Material realm of it's own. Or at least one of those random planes that you can kinda go to. Seems weird making it the Shadowfell, the two places are quite different in their use.
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Jul 3, 2013 04:23
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Also people can actually live in the Shadowfell too. Shadar-Kai live there and despite bad taste in facial piercings they seem to do all right for themselves. Yeah, the Shadowfell is full of nasty spirits and ghosts and stuff, they probably get undead like Florida gets cockroaches, but it's not like Ravenloft is prime real-estate either.
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Jul 3, 2013 04:28
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Halloween Jack posted:This is the best example of playing vampires in D&D: I think you meant of any D&D ever.
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Jul 3, 2013 04:30
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goldjas posted:I thought Ravenloft was just a campaign setting/Prime Material realm of it's own. Or at least one of those random planes that you can kinda go to. Seems weird making it the Shadowfell, the two places are quite different in their use. It was a demiplane located in, I believe, the Ethereal Plane. Honestly, I think it works quite well combined with the Shadowfell. Both are spooky alternate planes very similar to the PMP where the PCs can find themselves trapped for a time.
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Jul 3, 2013 04:37
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PeterWeller posted:It was a demiplane located in, I believe, the Ethereal Plane. Honestly, I think it works quite well combined with the Shadowfell. Both are spooky alternate planes very similar to the PMP where the PCs can find themselves trapped for a time. It's specifically called "the demiplane of dread", and isn't located in the ethereal, exactly - that's just he second easiest way to get to it. The easiest way is to find a DM who likes horror and D&D, but not enough to realise they're both better as separate things.
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Jul 3, 2013 05:54
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AlphaDog posted:It's specifically called "the demiplane of dread", and isn't located in the ethereal, exactly - that's just he second easiest way to get to it. The easiest way is to find a DM who likes horror and D&D, but not enough to realise they're both better as separate things.  )
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Jul 3, 2013 06:44
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They could have called it a snergleplane. It's literally just a silly way of announcing that they plan to support Ravenloft again. And for once I say power to them, there will always be a need for Ravenloft to support DMs like my high school one, who used the same growly Sepultura voice and dick personality for every NPC we encountered in his neverending stream of vampire adventures, be they jackalwere or small girl.
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Jul 3, 2013 07:13
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theironjef posted:growly Sepultura voice and dick personality for every NPC ... small girl.
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Jul 3, 2013 07:18
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I will support any system that allows the Elemental Plane Of <arbitrary thing>. Chocolate? Fruit? Spiders?
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Jul 3, 2013 07:25
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Halloween Jack posted:This is the best example of playing vampires in D&D: Don't get me wrong, it's amazing. But it's just another example of how people talking about "Real D&D" being a verisimilar fantasy Vietnam simulator are nuts when the origins of D&D are a pile of weird mechanics that make no excuses about being a game.
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Jul 3, 2013 07:33
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:You immediately realize why forcing a little more Tolkien on a group can be better when your four man group is taken up by a frog guy, robot guy, crystal guy, and shadow guy. That's what happened in my 4e campaign, so I decided to go full afterlife sci-fi superheroics, it's what 4e's good at anyway.
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Jul 3, 2013 07:57
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Mikan posted:The mechanics of the Vampire class were awful, but the way 4e handled the concept was great. You could decide exactly how important Vampire was to your character concept, either as a feat or a multiclass or a race or the full class. You could be a Dwarf Fighter who happened to be a vampire, a Vampire Wizard or an Elven Vampire and hypothetically be on par with the rest of the party. I liked that.
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Jul 3, 2013 08:15
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Or a vampire vampire who is a vampire, hunts vampires, and in his past life, was a vampire.
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Jul 3, 2013 08:59
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Namagem posted:Or a vampire vampire who is a vampire, hunts vampires, and in his past life, was a vampire. I hate this because, why would you ever be anything else.
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Jul 3, 2013 09:35
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Namagem posted:Or a vampire vampire who is a vampire, hunts vampires, and in his past life, was a vampire. Which is just so much less believable and serious than a race of pointy-eared skinny forest sniper magicians who appear frivolous during their thousand year lifespans but only because you like, don't understand their superior culture.
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Jul 3, 2013 09:40
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Namagem posted:Or a vampire vampire who is a vampire, hunts vampires, and in  )I wasted way too many hours reading DnD novels before bedtime when I could have been reading other things to go to sleep, like programming books or behavioral econ texts or or or ... edit: Also there was a demon-vampire that vampired off of demons. There were undead coming out of every narrative orifice the author could get his hands, ha! on.
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Jul 3, 2013 10:04
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Ferrinus posted:Okay, now where are the stories about the fey being intrinsically related to healing magic and antithetical to the undead and all the other baggage associated with the utterly and clinically bland lore concept that is "positive energy"?
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Jul 3, 2013 11:02
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Splicer posted:Sounds to me like this could be solved by ditching "positive/negative energy" and just having "life/death". It's not like anyone refers to Air as "Gaseous energy"
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Jul 3, 2013 11:13
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This is a bit late and we're deep in cosmology-stuff again, but I just wanted to contribute to the "what makes for good DMing" discussion from a few pages ago (starting around ~131 or so). The thing about "how to be a good DM" conversations is how much you can turn them into "how to be a good teacher" conversations with a quick find/replace function. That's a sentiment I try not to spread around too much, because it's easily misunderstood -- it's bad enough that we get people who think they know what it's like to be medieval elfmen, but it would be hideous if lovely grog DMs felt like they could do a better job at teaching than teachers. The main similarities are these: - Teachers and DMs both have the job of herding cats: getting a group of people to engage with a body of information and interact with one another. - Teachers shouldn't teach for themselves, they should teach for their students. DMs shouldn't be DMs for their own stories, but they should be for their players'. - Dogmatically relying on a a system stunts creativity (for teachers & students as well as DMs and players) - Shooting people down when they try an unconventional approach tends to remove the most invested people from the game. - Binary pass/fail mechanics tend to remove the least-invested people from the game. - "A good teacher/DM is system independent." The biggest difference, of course, is that there are objective goals in education, and saying "no, you failed, do it again" is occasionally (though rarely) necessary. What I'd really love to see is Wizards or some other company explicitly looking into techniques and philosophies of teaching for improving D&D. This thread really hit it on the nose with recognizing that some DMs are really bad, but a good system really does account for that. Dungeon World does a good job because it's outcome-focused rather than preparation-focused -- all the Adventure Front stuff with grim portents and impending dooms and what-have-you. It keeps encounters and player choices engaged with the plot. Throwing trash Orc encounters at your players like in that Next playthrough is the D&D equivalent of printing a worksheet off the internet for your class without checking what they know and what they're interested in. Have any companies done this kind of research for a DMing guide or whatever? Or has it just been a long re-inventing the wheel process that took us to some of these new DMing techniques?
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Jul 3, 2013 11:13
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Splicer posted:Sounds to me like this could be solved by ditching "positive/negative energy" and just having "life/death". It's not like anyone refers to Air as "Gaseous energy" (For some people anyway. For others they may as well call the Negative Material The Plane of Evils and Bogeys and Dastards or whatever.) There were some minor hooks for it floating around in any case: http://planewalking.dungeons.ru/inner/negative/negative.htm (I know there were more but I am not digging through the books for them.)
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Jul 3, 2013 11:15
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Dresden Files, love it or hate it, has the best name for the place that faeries come from. "Feywild" might be pretty accurate, and "Shadowfell" pretty goofy, but nothing captures the simultaneous childishness and danger that I expect out of my fae folk like "the Nevernever". Now there's a name that says "sure, we'll dance a merry jig in the moonlight, as soon as we're done devouring your children!"
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Jul 3, 2013 11:30
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J. Alfred Prufrock posted:Dresden Files, love it or hate it, has the best name for the place that faeries come from. "Feywild" might be pretty accurate, and "Shadowfell" pretty goofy, but nothing captures the simultaneous childishness and danger that I expect out of my fae folk like "the Nevernever". Now there's a name that says "sure, we'll dance a merry jig in the moonlight, as soon as we're done devouring your children!" ... and on Prime Plane 765559-a03 as cataloged by Mechanus, that is indeed what the Border Plane of the Elysian Plains leading to the Arcadian Gate is called. The old GR fit loving everything in it. It was properly Moorcockian/Zelaznyian.  edit: The Pattern agrees with me, I just checked.
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Jul 3, 2013 11:34
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I would be perfectly fine with the Positive Energy Plane if it was basically an infinitely large New Age store.
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Jul 3, 2013 11:53
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FRINGE posted:It could for some worlds/cosmologies. In others it would get tangled up in "the Gods are the source of Life" etc... The names being "elemental-ish" keep them pretty unaligned as far as intention(s) goes. Cheap shot, and as a D&D player I know what they "mean", but looking at them objectively? Nevermind that Positive is always channelled by Good gods and Negative by Evil gods. More importantly, in what cosmologies does Life/Death cause more of an issue than Positive/Negative thing does already? There are a number of Cleric effects that cause fire and such, nobody says "the gods are the source of fire"*. The gods can heal your people, which is a Life effect, just like they can Lightning your people, which is an... Electricity effect. Because they're gods. Of course the solution would be to have different metaphysics for different settings but  *e: Well, apart from most religions, but they say that gods are the source of everything. e2: If you're worried about Holy energy, then just have there be Holy (radiant) energy. But don't put it on your magical physics weed logic universe diagram because "God Energy" is not the same as Fire or Air or what have you. Splicer fucked around with this message at 12:04 on Jul 3, 2013 |
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Jul 3, 2013 11:59
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AXE COP posted:
I am pretty sure the idea is that the closer you get to the prime material, the more "stuff" you get. So the ones close in are made of the pure basic elements of THE NATUREY WORLD that combine into the prime in the center, and the outside ring is made of the pure undifferentiated stuff from which reality is quarried. I am pretty sure this mirrors some actual real world belief system, but I am blanking on my comparative mythologies right now.
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Jul 3, 2013 14:19
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Roctavian posted:Have any companies done this kind of research for a DMing guide or whatever? Or has it just been a long re-inventing the wheel process that took us to some of these new DMing techniques? I'm positive I read some stuff in a DMG somewhere that looked to be 'Bachelor of Arts with a focus on Philosophy and Theatre teaches DMing!'. I totally agree with you that one of the reasons DW works so well is the game is set up to make itself move, regardless of the improvisational or teaching or refereeing skill of the DM. The mechanical structure of the game is built around the deconstruction and then reconstruction of what makes a story flow well. A very specific story - action movie heroes basically. D&D lacks that mechanical impetus for the action, and has the double whammy of being preparation focused - not exclusively so, but enough that it can make a new DM freeze if the players go wildly off script. Combined, those two traits mean that a mediocre DM (who already bears more of the responsibility for Fun Generation than the players) can stall out an adventure in any number of ways if the players aren't behaving in a certain way (cue worst gaming experience ever posts). RPGs are, weirdly, something that actually require a bit of 'skill' to 'play well', if that makes any sense. But at the same time there's a powerful social dynamic at work, where the composition of any given gaming group is going to go a long way towards determining how much fun the participants have, regardless of how good or bad their DM or the system is. It's that last point that also makes it devilishly hard to iterate on an rpg systems rules (how do you know if a game is objectively good in and of itself if a good group can have fun with a bad system?), and why it doesn't surprise me in the least that rpg design was reallllllly slow for a great number of years until internet enabled connectivity made it a lot easier to rapidly test and receive feedback on a larger and faster scale than was previously possible. It's also why Next's goal of 'all inclusiveness' or 'the feel of D&D' or whatever is... kind of dumb. They should either be aiming to be THE brilliant rpg system to beat, or using their vast resources to figure out what the largest possible audience wants and then aiming directly at that audience, ignoring any internet voices to the contrary. Although one weird point there is that aiming at an established audience seems like a strategy that won't do particularly well at bringing new players into the hobby, which is bad if their goal is to grow the player base (and make buckets of money of course). And on an unrelated note, I really think that stuff like Google Hangouts On Air and all the other full video communication options we have today are the future of rpgs. If they wanted to be progressive with Next, they should be embracing technology on top of whatever else they're doing with the system itself. Does Insider offer anything like that? A suite of apps for phones and a web front end that enabled face to face gameplay with useful tools built in built on a much higher budget and supported by a professional team seems like it could be wildly popular, given the number of players already using fan made tools to play online.
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Jul 3, 2013 14:19
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In my ideal world they provide a simple, coherent, and end-user-fun-creating simple ruleset for DMs (a lot like the Dungeon World system) and then build into the technical game-complexity stuff with those mythical modules we've been talking about. Past that if people want to improve their skills at DMing they should make a Neverwinter Nights-type-thing that encourages interaction between people who are DMs (like having two people co-DM a module) and competitions and that kind of thing.
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Jul 3, 2013 14:49
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