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Dodge Charms posted:Three characters (PCs) are attempting to run away from three groups of beastmen and one really large beastman. They are all on a winding road in the woods. N/A If you're trying to run away (with cover) or be caught you use skill rolls against the track rather than the combat rules. Either you'll outrun all of them (no main engagement), or you'll outrun some or none of them in which case the engagement is wherever they catch you. If they stop to take potshots at you that slows them down - and if they overrun you, you want to turn rather than be stabbed in the back. And the main engagement is where you turn and meet them.
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Jul 21, 2013 03:05
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^^^^^Did we post at the exact same time?Dodge Charms posted:Three characters (PCs) are attempting to run away from three groups of beastmen and one really large beastman. They are all on a winding road in the woods. You're using a track because that's not a fight yet, it's a chase.
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Jul 21, 2013 03:05
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Sorry, my fault for not giving enough information. It was a battle which turned into a rout (for the PCs), and led to a character death (the least fast guy). So it started out as three melee groups, then the big guy showed up, and it turned into a running away. The running away part didn't happen all at once for the three PCs -- some held out longer than they ought to have -- but how it went should depend (perhaps heavily) on the initial melee placement of the PCs vs. the beastmen. In the span between hopeful melee and the chase scene, first one, then two, then finally all three PCs were attempting to move tactically. Should we have transitioned to a chase scene when any one PC tried to run away? (Should this conversation happen in a different thread? I don't wish to derail.)
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Jul 21, 2013 03:12
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People really do never read the last post on a page  Here's the WFRP thread. Stick the question in there in a more condensed format and I'll try to explain without pointing at miniatures and things. A relevant piece of information is what counts as them having "gotten away". Splicer fucked around with this message at 12:04 on Jul 21, 2013 |
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Jul 21, 2013 11:50
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Splicer posted:People really do never read the last post on a page  Meh, my example isn't super important. It's not constructed to highlight the failures of WFRP3e, it's just a thing that happened in a game, and that game is long over. I do want to make the point, though, that in my experience WFRP3e's distance tracking system only works well if the number of entities being tracked is small enough that you don't actually need a distance tracking system. It failed my group in our one and only moderately complex combat. Combat participants can change, landmarks may change in some combats (jumping from ship to ship), and the tracking system needs to be robust enough to handle that kind of thing. Back on topic for D&D Next: the hybrid FATE system that was mentioned upthread is, frankly, awesome as a midpoint between tactical grid-based and abstract combat. IMHO it could work really well for D&D, too. One could implement all sorts of D&D-isms: - Flanking: in a group melee, when your side out-numbers the other side 2:1, you gain this bonus. - Rogue Tumble: in a melee group, you personally gain the Flanking bonus if your side out-numbers the other side. - Cleave: when you hit with a melee attack, you may also deal X damage to a different enemy in the same melee group. - 4e's "Close" cone attacks: hit everyone (or all enemies) in a melee group with X effect. - Defender: every round, choose one ally in your group. That ally gains this bonus. - Spear Defense: once per round, when an enemy attempts to join your melee group, stab it as an interrupt with bonus effect X. - Pull: move an enemy into your melee group. - Push: either move an enemy out of your melee group, or cause that enemy to treat one of your allies as being NOT in melee for this round. - Fireball: hit up to X groups in a zone of size Y or smaller. Target zone must be within Z distance of you. - Lightning Bolt: hit one group in your Zone, and one group per Zone through a number of Zones in a line up to total size X.
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Jul 21, 2013 21:33
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D&D Next should use an abstract grid made up of sectors, probably 12 or so for an average sized battlefield, and each sector can have field effects that change things up. Maybe one of them is On Fire and another is a Wide Open Space and you can call on those field effects to change up the fight. Big enemies and spells can even create new field effects. Give spells and ranged weapons ranges, like an enemy in an adjacent sector or whatever. That sounds like a good system.
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Jul 21, 2013 21:41
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Mikan posted:each sector can have field effects that change things up. Sold.
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Jul 21, 2013 21:50
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Mikan posted:D&D Next should use an abstract grid made up of sectors, probably 12 or so for an average sized battlefield, and each sector can have field effects that change things up. Maybe one of them is On Fire and another is a Wide Open Space and you can call on those field effects to change up the fight. Big enemies and spells can even create new field effects.
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Jul 21, 2013 21:59
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Zereth posted:Would sufficiently large enemies, like older dragons or the Terrasque, be large enough you could climb onto them, effectively having extra sectors? I actually literally did that in a game I'm running (not D&D mechanics at all, but using, essentially, the hybrid FATE/WHFRP3e system I mentioned earlier). I printed a picture of a dragon, with Zones laid on top of it, plus Zones laid out around the dragon. Being on the dragon gave bonuses to hurting it (especially the head), but it was somewhat hard to get there, and you ran the risk of being shaken off. Each of the dragon's various attacks targeted certain Zones, and its movement was represented by shifting the characters on the ground into different Zones. I.e., turning around swapped between the "near head" and "near tail" Zones, and retreating and advancing shifted characters into closer and farther Zones.
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Jul 21, 2013 23:33
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Cool stuff that RPGs can do if they're not being designed by people entirely attached to oldschool D&Disms ITT. The zones thing sounds drat cool.
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Jul 21, 2013 23:46
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The joke is that everyone should Play Last Stand.
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Jul 22, 2013 00:31
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thespaceinvader posted:Cool stuff that RPGs can do if they're not being designed by people entirely attached to oldschool D&Disms ITT. It's even something D&D has done before in Birthright's war system, complete with terrain features. It has the exact same zone arrangement as Last Stand. Appeal to tradition: fulfilled 
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Jul 22, 2013 00:53
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What the hell? Now mind you I don't actually think this is a bad idea but why are they going scattershot in the ideas department. Now we literally a mechanic that almost seems like they lifted it straight from Fate and Dungeon World making its way out. https://www.wizards.com/dnd/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4ll/20130722
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Jul 22, 2013 12:39
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MadScientistWorking posted:What the hell? Now mind you I don't actually think this is a bad idea but why are they going scattershot in the ideas department. Now we literally a mechanic that almost seems like they lifted it straight from Fate and Dungeon World making its way out.
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Jul 22, 2013 12:57
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Mr. Maltose posted:The joke is that everyone should Play Last Stand. Ah, hadn't seen that one before. Looks interesting. Does it include predrawn sector maps for boss monsters? I might pick it up just for that if it does.
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Jul 22, 2013 14:43
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MadScientistWorking posted:What the hell? Now mind you I don't actually think this is a bad idea but why are they going scattershot in the ideas department. Now we literally a mechanic that almost seems like they lifted it straight from Fate and Dungeon World making its way out. I don't think I'd say it's from Fate or Dungeon World. The phrasing makes it pretty clearly from Mouse Guard or Burning Wheel. I like how they made it expire quickly to make it seem like less like a metagame mechanic - not because that's a super idea, but because I'm amused that the only metagame mechanics allowed are the sacred cows like HP and XP. It's also amusing because if they're trying to appease the "dissociated mechanics" crowd, they've failed - your character doesn't have a decision about on which action to "spend" her inspiration so you shouldn't either according to that theory.
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Jul 22, 2013 15:02
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MadScientistWorking posted:What the hell? Now mind you I don't actually think this is a bad idea but why are they going scattershot in the ideas department. Now we literally a mechanic that almost seems like they lifted it straight from Fate and Dungeon World making its way out. I don't like roleplaying rewards.
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Jul 22, 2013 15:53
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Nihnoz posted:I don't like roleplaying rewards. Roleplaying rewards are weird. If you tie roleplaying too tightly to mechanics then it becomes an obligation rather than a reward-unto-itself and you start to run into that whole 'if you pay someone to do something they'd be doing anyway they stop wanting to do it without pay' problem. On the other hand, if the game does nothing to support roleplaying not as much will happen. I just like it when the game gives you little prompts to establish facts/quirks about your character, then follows it up with reminders, but I don't like actual rewards. The background thing in Next was good for this--you establish that you're a commoner cleric or a clergy knight or alchemist fighter or whatever and it gets you thinking about your character and makes it natural to keep filling in details about them until they get full-bodied. I think people are going to do plenty of roleplaying naturally, because roleplaying is fun, but sometimes it's easy to get distracted by character optimization and combat builds and everything and forget to get started on the roleplaying side of things. Inspiration has the basic problem that Exalted stunts have, which is that you ultimately end up making it a totally DM-fiat system (with such a vague set of conditions that it's really difficult to run fairly) or you establish clear and simple conditions you need to meet to qualify, in which case 'roleplaying' turns into a rote act of hitting all the required notes.
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Jul 22, 2013 19:13
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Nihnoz posted:I don't like roleplaying rewards. I don't either, but I do like FATE. And as has been pointed out, "Inspiration" looks a lot "Fate points". Where the distinction lies is that you don't earn fate points for roleplaying. You earn them by accepting harmful things happening to your character now, balanced by a future benefit gained from that point. The article doesn't define Inspiration that way, and with the short lifetime, I'm not sure it reasonably could. If you get Inspiration from something bad happening to you, and if a lot of the time the only thing you can spend it on is dealing with the immediate aftermath, then they're rather pointless.
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Jul 22, 2013 19:37
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See to me these don't feel like Fate points. They seem more like White Wolf's Nature/Demeanor analogs back in the oWoD days. "You have these words that describe your personality/backstory", it says, "and you get bonuses under circumstances wherein you acknowledge those." Fate points are, to me, much more nuanced and interesting than that.
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Jul 22, 2013 19:42
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OtspIII posted:Inspiration has the basic problem that Exalted stunts have, which is that you ultimately end up making it a totally DM-fiat system (with such a vague set of conditions that it's really difficult to run fairly) or you establish clear and simple conditions you need to meet to qualify, in which case 'roleplaying' turns into a rote act of hitting all the required notes. Or my least favorite part of the Exalted system, where roleplaying turns into something you only do when it's a thing your character is bad at. Die pool of 22? Why the hell do you care about getting another die in there. Just swing the drat sword. Why be cool? You might as well save any DM goodwill for when he asks for that Manipulation + Linguistics check later that you have 2 dice on. Personally I'm intrigued by Mearls' statement that this will allow them to bolt on more modules. I am very curious to hear how a slightly modern take on the old "Did Jerry roleplay well? Maybe give him 100 bonus XP" canard is going to allow for extra new rule interactions. A whole series of prestige classes based on Mother-May-I-style DM fiat? I sure hope so! Further I hope there's going to also be a module or two that directly key off whether or not someone touched the DM's pizza.
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Jul 22, 2013 19:46
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theironjef posted:Or my least favorite part of the Exalted system, where roleplaying turns into something you only do when it's a thing your character is bad at. Die pool of 22? Why the hell do you care about getting another die in there. Just swing the drat sword. Why be cool? You might as well save any DM goodwill for when he asks for that Manipulation + Linguistics check later that you have 2 dice on. Because you also get more Essence and Willpower regeneration from higher stunts, so you can continue to keep on tossing out huge dice pools because of the elaborate mote attrition metagame.  Aside from that, I do like the idea of roleplaying rewards. I think inspiration might be fun, and it's neat that you can give these points to other players, but what bothers me is this section: quote:In the current draft of the game, as part of character creation, you also flesh out a few things beyond alignment. Your bonds are your character's ties to the world, people, places, or things that are meaningful to your character in some way. Your flaws are your character's weaknesses, while your ideals represent the things that keep your character going when things are at their worst. It's certainly new for D&D but it's old hat everywhere else. I guess I'd have to see how this system works in plays but I never liked merits and flaws. You'd be bitter too if someone tried to convince you that an allergy to beef is worth a few points. Admittedly I could be wrong and this might not be a conventional merit/flaw system.
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Jul 22, 2013 20:45
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Bedlamdan posted:It's certainly new for D&D but it's old hat everywhere else. I guess I'd have to see how this system works in plays but I never liked merits and flaws. You'd be bitter too if someone tried to convince you that an allergy to beef is worth a few points. Admittedly I could be wrong and this might not be a conventional merit/flaw system.
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Jul 22, 2013 21:32
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Splicer posted:No game worth it's salt has included a "conventional" flaw system in some time. Flaws in modern game design reward you when they cause problems, not at character creation. If Next somehow twists the concepts this article described into a "Buy a flaw get a merit" style system then they will be confirming that they're just aping system components without understanding them. There aren't actually "merits", per se, described in the article. Bonds and Ideals, while positive in tone, can end up hindering a character as much as Flaw. And since the benefits and drawbacks are loose and highly DM-fiat driven anyway, you don't get the problems with GURPS-style flaws where you have loose DM-fiat flaws (allergy to beef) trying to balance specific, well-defined benefits (+1 on shooting guns). So while I don't necessarily like what they're doing for other reasons, it doesn't appear to suffer from that particular archaic design problem.
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Jul 22, 2013 22:02
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Gawd loving dayum, someone let Mearlsy off the leash on twitter: @mikemearls We did a clever thing and posted our design goals in a series of articles: http://www.wizards.com/DnD/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4ll/20130107 … @mikemearls HOWEVER! It is much more fun to ignore the articles and make up goals. It keeps the forums humming. @jknevitt What would you say Next's *raison d'etre* is, other than "it's D&D" and "this is a 'big tent' edition that caters to all fans"? @npilon basically, the "elevator pitch"? @jknevitt Exactly. Why should I choose Next over Pathfinder or 13th Age or 4e or the myriad OSR games out there? @mikemearls That's not the question we're answering. Read the goals. @jknevitt Mike, I have. Nothing in there that really makes Next stand out from the others I mentioned. Wish it were not so. @mikemearls I think the disconnect is that people buy into this concept of a tabletop RPG industry and what it means and where it is. @mikemearls It's not something that drives our decisions. Trying to compete with other TRPGs is a losing strategy. @mikemearls We're concerned with big picture trends in gaming and entertainment. "What's the elevator pitch?" "gently caress off, we don't have one lalalalalalaaaaaa." Great. Also, apparently the TTRPG industry isn't a thing. I think a number of successful and competing companies in the industry would disagree.
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Jul 22, 2013 23:20
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I think his intended idea is that the D&D brand, the name, is what will power sales, rather than actively trying to put out a better product than their many competitors. Wow, that actually sounds even stupider when I type it out like that.
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Jul 22, 2013 23:33
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"Trying to compete... is a losing strategy." - the manager of the biggest product in its industry. Can you imagine if Microsoft basically threw up their hands and said "we're not trying to be competitive anymore."
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Jul 22, 2013 23:41
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This marketing strategy is so horrible I had to go back in time to stop myself buying previous editions of D&D I think he is trying to sell shoes instead of a TRPG
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Jul 22, 2013 23:46
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I think he's trying to say "We're trying to make D&D into something that competes in a larger marketplace than just tabletop RPGs. That marketplace includes video games and other forms of entertainment." He's trying to say "We're thinking bigger" but of course it's Mearls and he's not a good communicator at all so it's coming out all muddled. Also if they really are trying to compete in a bigger marketplace then why are they so concerned about making something that appeals to aging grognards?
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Jul 22, 2013 23:47
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Because it is Next, and there is no known cure. Seriously, D&D COULD be big-brand, multimedia, interesting. A good D&D movie could really make hay. Good D&D computer games, similarly - but you have to actually work at it and have money behind it, which unfortunately is where they're going to fall down, because they won't and they don't. As a strategy, it would make sense if executed properly. But isn't that just D&DNext.txt?
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Jul 22, 2013 23:50
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thespaceinvader posted:@mikemearls I think the disconnect is that people buy into this concept of a tabletop RPG industry and what it means and where it is. Well that explains basically everything about D&D Next right there.
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Jul 22, 2013 23:50
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It's like he read this article, but didn't get that it from from the Onion http://www.theonion.com/articles/pepsi-to-cease-advertising,2816/ quote:"We know it's good, and everyone's pretty happy with the overall taste, so why spend all our time worrying about what other people think?" PepsiCo CEO Indra K. Nooyi told reporters during a press conference at the company's corporate headquarters. "Frankly, it just feels sort of weird and desperate to put all this energy into telling people what to drink. If they don't like it, then they don't like it."
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Jul 22, 2013 23:56
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The thing is, to a degree he's absolutely right. There are a not-insignificant number of people out there who will buy D&D Next simply because it has D&D on the cover. They'd buy it if it was a bunch of crayon scribbling printed on toilet paper. I'm not trying to make some "dumb sheeple" argument, it's just that for a lot of gamers "it's the new D&D" is in and of itself enough of a selling point that it doesn't matter how bad the actual game between the covers is. And of course there are also people who have their own preferred editions who'll buy it anyway because they're completionists or because even if they don't think they'll like it they "want to buy it just to see" or something. Next isn't going to crash and burn like Delgo no matter what, so trying to make the "perfect D&D," or even "a really good D&D," doesn't have nearly as much bearing on that as one might expect/hope. Where he's wrong is the idea that they don't need to compete with other TRPGs. They do, actually; WotC dropping the ball in terms of things like marketing and production is why Paizo has been eating their lunch. D&D Next will probably, at launch, reclaim the top spot, but it's only going to keep that spot if WotC shakes the dust off and starts working to keep it. Like them or not, Paizo has a solid grasp of how to market their not!D&D, how to keep their fanbase engaged, and how to get their name out there and be talked about. If Mike Mearls and the D&D team decide "man, we don't need to compete with anybody, that's for suckers" then Lisa Stevens is going to be salivating at that prospect, because I'm pretty sure she does think that competing with other TRPGs is worthwhile seeing as that's how she got Paizo and Pathfinder to where they are today.
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Jul 23, 2013 00:00
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Seriously. I mean, one of the real things that bugs me about playing 4e is that I bought a paizo drywipe battlemat for it. That could have been 10 bucks that went to D&D, but didn't. The fact that they're not pushing a game with accessories in 5e is a MASSIVE potential loss for a company owned by one of the world's largest toy manufacturers. I mean, the Kre-o D&D line sounds kinda cool actually (would be better if it were proper lego, but there you go), but they could be selling all manner of cheap plastic tat to the masses to go with D&D, and presumably making money out of it. It's just yet another marketing angle they're failing to grasp. But then, failing to grasp marketing, D&DNext.txt, etc.
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Jul 23, 2013 00:08
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Kai Tave posted:The thing is, to a degree he's absolutely right. There are a not-insignificant number of people out there who will buy D&D Next simply because it has D&D on the cover. They'd buy it if it was a bunch of crayon scribbling printed on toilet paper. The first is that they're not the far-and-away leader in their business; they're in competition with Paizo, at least. The second is that all the comparisons between how badly D&D manages itself as a brand to how well the Magic people and the Games Workshop personnel manage their brand ultimately don't apply. Why? Because while grognards will grumble about changes in Magic or Warhammer, ultimately 99% of them will roll with the changes because they're in it for the player network as much as for the game itself. This is not true in D&D; I can now, no kidding, get a Basic game going just as easily as a 3e or 4e game. There are even people making new content!
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Jul 23, 2013 01:53
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Mearls and I must have read the same article on advertising and brand identity. One brand-leader focused their image on their own identity, while competitors always compared themselves to the leader. The net effect was that the competitors' ads reminded consumers that they weren't the leading brand. I forget if it was computers or fast food or soda. The idea is that you don't remind customers that your competition even exists. You exude confidence. And then on the same day he introduces these not-Fate points. It comes across as a really desperate bid, like a McWhopper or Pepsi-Flavored Coke.
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Jul 23, 2013 04:41
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I will say that this:quote:@mikemearls We're concerned with big picture trends in gaming and entertainment. It's just that the tabletop bit is, as far as I know, the only bit Mearls is actually in charge of.
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Jul 23, 2013 05:19
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Halloween Jack posted:The first is that they're not the far-and-away leader in their business; they're in competition with Paizo, at least. I do wonder how Paizo will do with the release of Next, though. Next and 3e are way more similar than 3e and 4e (hell, there looks like a smaller gap between it and 3e than 3e and 2e)--I'm not sure Pathfinder's going to be seen as quite the alternative to Next that it was to 4e. What other really big name RPGs are really making waves these days? All the most exciting stuff seems to be happening inside of smaller studios that don't release much past the core book. Even if Fiasco is getting some good coverage in Wired and so on, I can't really see it becoming a Brand in the same way that D&D is.
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Jul 23, 2013 07:03
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While I hate to actually agree with Mearls, there isn't really an RPG "industry" as most people understand the term. It's a hobby that some people who enjoy it make a small amount of money in. The only companies that ever made anything close to comfortable money in it were TSR/WotC, White Wolf, and now Paizo... and even then D&D still accounted for something like 90% of the RPG business (and probably still does if you count Pathfinder). Most RPGs are so far down the long tail that ever since the slow decline of local stores as the internet took off that it took the invention of crowdfunding to really allow some previously niche games and ideas to have a chance of making a profit at all. You're not going to see another D&D-scale game barring some drastic shift in the community zeigeist, like with White Wolf in the 90's. That said, Mearls is still incompetent since even if it's unlikely that most gamers will switch to competing products, there's still the chance that they'll leave the industry entirely instead, and possibly take their friends with them and limit the amount of new customers. So it's not a matter of trying to advertise to compete, it's a matter of trying to advertise to show you know what you're doing and that the hobby is healthy and innovating, and by Mearls' admission he just doesn't care about that. With the end result of... well, like Halloween Jack said, they think they're like Games Workshop, but their position isn't nearly that secure. And if they gently caress Next up, there's a rally good chance we'll see a slow bleed of people from the hobby due to few new players joining, and by extention, fewer people moving on to other RPGs instead of just going and playing MMOs or something with friends instead.
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Jul 23, 2013 07:26
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Asimo posted:While I hate to actually agree with Mearls, there isn't really an RPG "industry" as most people understand the term. It's a hobby that some people who enjoy it make a small amount of money in. The only companies that ever made anything close to comfortable money in it were TSR/WotC, White Wolf, and now Paizo... and even then D&D still accounted for something like 90% of the RPG business (and probably still does if you count Pathfinder). Most RPGs are so far down the long tail that ever since the slow decline of local stores as the internet took off that it took the invention of crowdfunding to really allow some previously niche games and ideas to have a chance of making a profit at all. You're not going to see another D&D-scale game barring some drastic shift in the community zeigeist, like with White Wolf in the 90's. If we discounted every industry that had 1-2 major companies dominating the lion's share of the business, then there would not be many industries. And, in addition to Pathfinder, D&D gets more and more competition from increasingly numerous Warhammer products.
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Jul 23, 2013 09:08
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