Dodge Charms posted:

Not really, but it sounds much more interesting than the current argument, so I'd be delighted to see a D&D rules interpretation of various Wolverine incarnations.

Barudak posted:

Berserker, Avenger, and original incarnation a Wolverine Druid with Animal Shape: Human Form.

neonchameleon posted:

People did. Your point?

S.J. posted:

Have you ever read grognards.txt? Serious question

Covok posted:

Also, I've been looking through the latest playtest packet and, besides the Druid and Paladin, I'm not really noticing anything different. Anyone see any other changes?

ProfessorCirno posted:

There were a few differences. The Pathfinder RPG was a working beta rather then quickly changing alpha. The Paizo employees interacted a lot with their audience on not just their own forums but multiple others as well. Paizo is if anything good at building their community, and they did that nonstop with their playtest.

There's a huge difference between talking on the forums with people and releasing another weekly survey. There's a difference between a working beta and an alpha that changes every time you look at it. And lastly, there's a massive difference between releasing "a new version of the edition you love!" and "A new edition we hope you like."

D&DNext was always going to have to fight being lukewarm. It's a part of it's whole THING. Stuff uses "new and improved!" for a reason - it turns out "Old and sorta how you remember it" isn't a really good selling point. As I said, there are absolutely people who like Next. But few of them are excited about it.

kingcom posted:

From everything I've seen and read about Paizo, they are really good at selling their product and identifying an audience who will actually spend money on them. I will be interesting to see how marketing takes D&D Next to release.

Mendrian posted:

NEXT is trying to capture people who ... are still playing 4e (medial priority).

Babylon Astronaut posted:

It doesn't help that they are trying to sell an easy to run stripped down D&D, bogging it down with legacy mechanics, and Basic D&D is already a thing and you can play it free from tons of different sources.

Barudak posted:

Berserker, Avenger, and original incarnation a Wolverine Druid with Animal Shape: Human Form.

moths posted:

I think you're being a bit over-generous here. Next has disavowed 4e from the get-go, and was created on Earth 617 where 4e never happened. This was epitomized in the Monte Cook article where he modestly proposes a "passive perception score."

Quadratic_Wizard posted:

[Fighters with too many options]

Quadratic_Wizard posted:

Quadratic_Wizard posted:

At the same time, people that want a more tactical 4e-ish experience can just skip right on ahead to level five or whatever and feel right at home.

Quadratic_Wizard posted:

Because when I say Action Surge, if you've read the book, you know what I'm talking about. You get a whole other action, which at the higher levels lets you make a whole fuckton of extra attacks... ...And if you want those cool things, there are the Maneuvers

AlphaDog posted:

That's the marketing spiel, yeah.

I'm not sure why you think classes not "hitting their stride" until level 3 is a good thing. I mean yeah, they don't, but you've chosen things at level 1 that make the level 3 "choices" bullshit - you still have to build your dude from level 1 if you want to be good at what you're choosing at level 3.

kingcom posted:

In his defence, not having to pick a feat at level 1 is the best part of this edition. Though thats not really a high bar.

Quadratic_Wizard posted:

Rather than dump every single rule and option on you from level one, classes don't really hit their stride till level 3, so it's the kind of game you can learn as you play

Covok posted:

Also, I've been looking through the latest playtest packet and, besides the Druid and Paladin, I'm not really noticing anything different. Anyone see any other changes?

ZIGfried posted:

The way everyone is talking is making me feel like I missed a packet update but it looks like barbs got pretty heftily nerfed. They get temp HP while raging instead of just taking half damage and they need to take damage every turn to stay in a rage. Someone playing a monk in my group said they got buffed too something about advantage on attack rolls.

Quadratic_Wizard posted:

So why do I think the Next fighter is hands down the better class? Because when I say Action Surge, if you've read the book, you know what I'm talking about. You get a whole other action, which at the higher levels lets you make a whole fuckton of extra attacks. If I say Steel Serpent's Strike or Villain's Menace, you don't know what I'm talking about. They're fighter attacks. They do something. Something cool. But you need to look that up to remember what it is.

Quadratic_Wizard posted:

I'm one of the people who like DnD Next. I honestly think it has better design than 4e and makes 13th Age look like a half-hearted attempt at redoing DnD. Take the fighter for example.

At level 3, a 4e fighter has two at-wills, two encounters, a daily, and a utility power. Five different kinds of attacks to choose from at the start of every encounter. Awesome. They also had their marking mechanic that made them sticky as hell. And two feats! Plus their racial stuff! Holy crap, that's a lot of stuff. And the powers were good too. In the first player's handbook, a fighter's first encounter attacks let them choose between doing stuff like battlefield control like helping an ally get out of range of a monster's attack, or darting between two enemies and striking them both and hitting goons hard enough to knock them on their rear end. The choices you made building your character and playing it were both meaningful and rewarding.

To compare, a Next fighter at level 3 gets their Second Wind that has been rightfully lampooned for being a crappy shadow of its 4e glory, a fighting style that gives a rather boring +1 bonus to attack, Action Surge which lets you act twice one round every encounter, and if you're going Weaponmaster, three special attacks you can use twice per battle. They've also got their racial stuff, but they won't even get a chance at a new feat until level 4.

So why do I think the Next fighter is hands down the better class? Because when I say Action Surge, if you've read the book, you know what I'm talking about. You get a whole other action, which at the higher levels lets you make a whole fuckton of extra attacks. If I say Steel Serpent's Strike or Villain's Menace, you don't know what I'm talking about. They're fighter attacks. They do something. Something cool. But you need to look that up to remember what it is. And if you want those cool things, there are the Maneuvers, whose design--you use them after you've already hit, and even if they fail they give you bonus damage--is a whole lot better than 4e's 'whiffed on a daily, at least you can deal half damage' design. This idea of scaling complexity to what a player wants is really good. It's something that started with Essentials, was tried with some success with 13th Age, and what they're doing right now with Next is really good.

Quadratic_Wizard posted:

More than that, the design philosophy of Next seems to be to paint things in broad strokes. Take a look at the Fighter, and you'll see that every single goddamn level gives you something solid. An extra attack, a new feat--which, let's be honest here, completely blows lovely 4e feats out of the water--new maneuvers, advantage on every single save, and so on. And it's the same with every class. Every level is a freaking nice cookie, compared to earlier version of the playtest where the rogue literally had something like 11 dead levels.. And there's really no reason to believe that wizard's isn't going to use the same "deck building" approach to character options that 3.5 and 4e had, so when Next finally does roll out, you can bet there are going to be a whole fuckton of cookies to choose from, with more to come.

Quadratic_Wizard posted:

When they say they want to please every fan of DnD, it looks like they're serious. The game is easier to learn, run, and play than either 3.5 or 4e. Rather than dump every single rule and option on you from level one, classes don't really hit their stride till level 3, so it's the kind of game you can learn as you play. At the same time, people that want a more tactical 4e-ish experience can just skip right on ahead to level five or whatever and feel right at home.

Quadratic_Wizard posted:

All that said, I don't think the game is by any mean's perfect. Healing is mess, and the lack of opportunity actions ala 4e really hurts things. They need some actual guidelines to magic item rewards and monster building. But you know what? I'm hyped. I think they can pull it off.

Rosalind posted:

Isn't the consensus that Barbarians need to make an attack or take damage, not both, to stay raging? The language is confusing as heck and I think that people were debating what exactly it meant a few weeks ago.

Quadratic_Wizard posted:

I'm one of the people who like DnD Next.

quote:

To compare, a Next fighter at level 3 gets their Second Wind that has been rightfully lampooned for being a crappy shadow of its 4e glory, a fighting style that gives a rather boring +1 bonus to attack, Action Surge which lets you act twice one round every encounter, and if you're going Weaponmaster, three special attacks you can use twice per battle.

quote:

But you need to look that up to remember what it is.

quote:

And if you want those cool things, there are the Maneuvers, whose design--you use them after you've already hit, and even if they fail they give you bonus damage--is a whole lot better than 4e's 'whiffed on a daily, at least you can deal half damage' design.

quote:

When they say they want to please every fan of DnD, it looks like they're serious. The game is easier to learn, run, and play than either 3.5 or 4e.

quote:

Rather than dump every single rule and option on you from level one, classes don't really hit their stride till level 3, so it's the kind of game you can learn as you play.

quote:

At the same time, people that want a more tactical 4e-ish experience can just skip right on ahead to level five or whatever and feel right at home.

Mr. Maltose posted:

Oh boy, an extra attack a day!

quote:

Man, someone else can explain the problems with that, just don't call anything involved with 13th age halfhearted. You can call it inferior or not good enough or whatever, but don't imply that there was anything less than 100% effort in making that thing.

AlphaDog posted:

I'm not sure why you think classes not "hitting their stride" until level 3 is a good thing. I mean yeah, they don't, but you've chosen things at level 1 that make the level 3 "choices" bullshit - you still have to build your dude from level 1 if you want to be good at what you're choosing at level 3.

quote:

Why do you think this? "More options" isn't the same as "tactical game".

Splicer posted:

I'm going to quote-snipe a bit because it's better to dissect this example and then apply it more broadly.
These mechanics (action surge, multiple attacks, and manoeuvres) actively fight against each other. Assuming combat lasts three rounds, a Fighter starts off being able to perform three attacks per combat, capping out with twenty attacks at level 20. That sounds pretty drat neat! But someone who picks the "Gimme all the powers" Fighter path only gets to attempt two cool things per combat initially, capping out with four at 20. Remember, these are players who explicitly chose the "I want to do cool things" path. If I am explicitly choosing the option that lets me smash heads and stab shins I would like my level 20 fighter to be able to stab more than four shins per combat. Once you hit level 2 it's quite possible (and probably optimal) for a Fighter to blow all his interesting things in the first round, with that becoming increasingly easy to do as levels advance.

The Fighter ability to give up an action to gain an additional superiority dice seems like it should somewhat mitigate this issue. Ignoring the problems that giving up an action to do something cool later this has on its own, this is where multi-attacks start causing serious trade-off issues. At higher levels it costs four attacks now for the ability to boost a single attack an entire round later. This is worse than useless.

This is symptomatic of the problems with Next as a whole. There's no coherent design going on. Thy're just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. There's some neat ideas in there, but there's no cohesion. Good ideas merge together to make bad ideas, and already bad ideas make good ideas worse. Next as a whole that is actually less than the sum of its parts.

AlphaDog posted:

That's nice, but it's got nothing to do with
.

There's no element of learning and adapting involved.

At first level, the fighter chooses Fighting Style from the options Archery, Defense, Great Weapon, Protection, and Two Weapon, which you haven't got to try yet. If it turns out that "Big weapon!" was a bad choice, then you're stuck with it.

Your level 3 thing is a choice between 2 sets of features you haven't got to try yet. If you learn that Weaponmaster is a bad option for you, then you're stuck with it.

I guess with feats you don't have to think about them at first level, but there's still no element of learning. If it turns out that taking any feat was a worse choice than increasing your primary score, then get hosed, you're stuck with it.

Spoilers Below posted:

I respectfully disagree with you here. The fighter can describe what she is doing, then read off the pre-printed power card she has next to her character sheet to tell you what the mechanics are. No flipping through books, checking tables, etc. And after that, you can simply turn the card face down, so no one can get into any arguments about how many uses of power X you've got left this day.

If looking at a card is harder than keeping a book open to a certain page, I'm not sure what's easy.

Transient People posted:

So, I'm gonna take this one in a big chunk, because I may as well shoot down a bunch of dumb ideas in one go before getting to the arguable stuff. First, like others have said, 13th Age isn't half-hearted. I read it, I played it, I didn't like it because it sacrificed the thrilling tactical depth of 4e without making combats go significantly faster, I thought the idea of Icons was pretty dumb because attaching players to not-Vecna and not-Tiamat and not-Iggwilv and not-Elminster/Mordenkainen with them having no choice in the matter is lame as hell, and yet I would not say J. Tweet and R. Heinsoo were halfhearted about it. Both clearly love D&D to bits, and they went all-in with real playtesting to ensure their baby, their own special unique version of D&D, turned out as good as it possibly could.

quote:

Second, your argument in favor of Next's 'clarity' is 100% subjective, and you should feel bad for trying to use such blatant subjectivity as a point in favor of a game (or against it). When you say 'Action Surge' my mind doesn't go to 'take an extra standard action', it goes to 4e's '+3 to action point attack rolls' or Saga Edition's 'take an extra move action', or the identical d20 Modern ability (to Saga, in case you're unsure which game I'm referring to). It's a piece of jargon. It is no more or less clear than any other piece of jargon. Whether you could remember something or not has absolutely no bearing on how good or bad it is at being easy to remember. Off the top of my head, I can tell you Villain's Menace gives +4 to damage rolls and +2 to attack rolls, that it had a companion Warlord D5, that you'll trade it out ASAP for D15 Stance power Unyielding Avalanche which grants free [W]s or Dust Storm Assault, that you generally want to favor your encounter powers anyway because a stun or multiattack is better than a bonus to attack rolls, and that 'maneuvers are better because even if they fail they give you bonus damage' is moronic when dailies do the same (since if you miss they turn your damage output from 0 to 'half my full output'), and that you picked a really bad example anyways because Villain's Menace ALSO grants you its attack and damage bonuses on a miss, just halved.

quote:

Lastly, there isn't anything about the NEXT fighter that screams 'scaling complexity'. I don't have the option to play a ToB style fightman if I am bored by just saying 'I hit it with my sword, autohit on a 2 or higher, deal 25+ damage per hit, is it dead yet?'. It's still the same boring, lovely class with the depth of a kiddy pool where you just spreadsheet things out so you can find the optimal feat combo of extra action granting and maximum attack and damage bonuses and turn enemies into chunky salsa, hoping against hope none of them do anything but try to push your face in because you're going to be kinda hosed. It's not scaling up to what I want, by a long shot. What, you thought 'scaling complexity' only applied downwards?

quote:

Disregarding the fact that 4e's feats are ten times as powerful as NEXT's (seriously, find me one feat that is as consistently useful as Skill Power: Insightful Riposte or World Serpent's Grasp, or adds as much damage as Headsman's Chop), why do you think these things are solid? Advantage on saves is worthless because you're still going to have inexcusably large weak spots, gaining an extra action per day is pathetic because for the price of that same slot you could acquire free HP refills from Wild Shape (if we assume each class feature is worth just as much...surprise surprise, they aren't!) or advantage on every strike you make so you can deliver your killing payload efficiently, and so on. You're suffering from The Monk Effect. Just because you get something that sounds cool at every level (anyone remember Tongue of the Sun and Moon?), doesn't mean it is cool. The fact that I will have to buy ten splatbooks to replace the poo poo options with something that isn't poo poo and helps me create a more cohesive fighter package so I can at least do the one job of exploding dudes with a glance is not something to be enthused about, it should all work well and have meaningful choices from the get-go. After playing games like Mutants and Masterminds or FATE for such a long time, I no longer appreciate a splatbook model without an enticing basic framework to lure me in in the first place.

quote:

This is bullshit. Here's a challenge for you: build me an encounter consisting of an enemy githyanki adventuring party. It'll have a planar-jumping warrior who moves through folds in space to attack enemies and quickly retreat, a captain who coordinates the group riding a red dragon drakeling who uses a blunderbuss, a war wizard specialized in heavy evocation effects, and two sturdy frontline gishes who use defensive spells to empower themselves and protect the wizard and captain. Got it all memorized? Good. Now build it in NEXT and see how long it takes you to do it. For bonus points, do it using /only/ the monster building guidelines and not consulting the spells section. I can do this in 4e, and in fact just did it. All it took me was thirty minutes, total, for this whole monster party. I suspect it won't take you so little time to get it done in NEXT. This wasn't even an insanely esoteric thing, either - just a standard group of elite mooks who've been part of the game since AD&D. And yet the system can't handle a request like that. I'm not even going to talk about the whole 'motherfucking Vancian Casting minigame, uuuuuuuugh' thing, which is infuriatingly boring and spreadsheety. Just the fact that NEXT is demonstrably not as easy to run as 4e because you can't actually do something cool while GMing by the seat of your pants.

neonchameleon posted:

In short no structure that makes things easy to learn, a half-weight ability, and the ability to hit often. Whereas Steel Serpent Strike shows you how your PC moves - as does Tide of Iron. How a fighter moves is integral to their personality. And the half-assed design brought back in Essentials that means that a fighter is not about positioning, but instead stays around their five foot square playing patty-cake until one side drops rather than maneuvering into position as a part of the attack.

Even a "simple" next Fighter is more complex than a 4e Slayer. Or an AD&D fighter.

quote:

And this is why Next is not easier to play and the claim that it is easier to run is, quite frankly, risible. The big difference is where you need to look things up. You look things up in 4e on your character sheet. Not in the rulebook. And speak for yourself - I know what all the powers of my currently active characters do. This is because I design the characters and pick powers to fit that character design. I don't know what the powers for fighters I have never played do.

As for you claim that you need to have looked through the rulebook to know what a given ability does, off the top of your head can you tell me what "Step of the wind" does? After all that's a low level standard ability. If you can't - and can't tell what "Natural Explorer" does off the top of your head the entire argument for not needing to look things up vanishes in a puff of smoke.

quote:

That design decision rips the heart out of tactical fighters. It turns the fighter from a tactical class watching the combat unfolding and trying to position yourself in the right place to take advantage to a purely reactive class who always goes at the enemy in the same old way and either kills them in the same old way or fails in the same old way. The Next tactical fighter has the complexity of a Fisher Price toy compared to the 4e one - and the basic fighter is no simpler than the Slayer.

Now I accept that you might not want a tactical and complex fighter and like them to be simple. But if you do, the fighter you get in Next is a poor excuse for one.

quote:

And this is complete and utter nonsense. And will be for as long as the bestiary makes you look in another book each time you want to use a spellcasting monster. Possibly easier to run than 3.5 - but in the absence of complete monster statblocks the idea that it's easier to run than 4e is a joke. And an even worse joke if it doesn't get skill challenge rules that allow me to take the hairiest of my PC's plans without breaking my stride.

Next is significantly harder to run than 4e.

quote:

As opposed to learn in about 20 minutes (I'm currently seeing if I can fit all the necessary rules of 4e onto a tri-fold) and not have to re-learn each time you start with a new class. Next is only easier to learn than 4e for your first character and then only as long as that character is not a spellcaster.

quote:

And feel incredibly short changed. Honestly, I have at least as many tactical options in Dungeon World as I do in Next with a supposedly tactical fighter. The Next fighter doesn't get options that vary in utility with an unfolding situation. They have no element of strategic resource management - and the sort of tactical utility where the best move is normally to blow everything in the first round. They have no movement, no forced movement, and no battlefield control at all. People who want a more tactical 4e-ish experience can just skip right on ahead and ignore the Martial classes entirely; there's a deeper tactical experience in the 4e knight than there is in the D&D Next fighter. (There's also deeper tactical experience in the 13th Age fighter - and 13th age basically gives up the tactical elements of 4e).

Quadratic_Wizard posted:

Dungeon World and *World games in general are poo poo that rely on freeform and ignoring how bad the rules for doing things actually are.

Mr. Maltose posted:

EDIT: What kind of bizarro hell world do you come from where 13th Age wasn't playtested to hell and back?

Mr. Maltose posted:

This is it. This is every reason to know that you are wrong. Get hosed. Your post is a festering pustule of incorrect and disingenuous bullshit, but this is all anyone needs to see.

EDIT: What kind of bizarro hell world do you come from where 13th Age wasn't playtested to hell and back?

Mr. Maltose posted:

This is it. This is every reason to know that you are wrong. Get hosed. Your post is a festering pustule of incorrect and disingenuous bullshit, but this is all anyone needs to see.

EDIT: What kind of bizarro hell world do you come from where 13th Age wasn't playtested to hell and back?

Quadratic_Wizard posted:

gently caress you too, buddy. As for 13th Age, look at all a fighter power called Deadly Assault does is boost a damage roll range from 6-15 to 7-15. Look at Cleric's strength domain and try to tell me Power Attack isn't the exact same thing, only worse. Look at the fact that as casters level up, every single spell they have scales not just in damage, but in effect. Or how magic users in general have a "do anything, solve every problem" ritual power while martial classes are stuck with dumb icons and backgrounds.

It's fine to like 13th Age. Like whatever the gently caress you want. But it was designed with some absolutely terrible understandings of extremely basic math and whatever playtesting they did didn't address those issues at all.

Mr. Maltose posted:

Before anything kicks in I'd like to apologize publicly to Quadratic Wizard and the thread at large for that loving terrible post. I need to stop gettin' mad at elfgames, yeah.