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Splicer posted:Except this isn't actually true. Often the difference between a convincing argument and a laughable farce is more to do with the person saying it than the actual facts. Social mechanics allow someone to play the suave dude who can convince you that yes, the red wagons do go faster, and an extra 10 platinum pieces is a small price to pay for go faster stripes. Take any two people and have them both say exactly the same lines to the same bouncer; one will get in, the other will be laughed away. If someone wants to be The Charming Guy then they should be able to do so even if they are not actually very socially confident. I'd be cool with having mechanics to represent this sort of thing. I don't think its necessary; this is the sort of thing the DM can pretty easily keep in mind on their own when they make their judgement calls. But if a game does want to provide mechanical support for social interaction, they should be designed with social interaction in mind. D&D-style skills for social interaction pretty clearly don't cut it for a lot of people, when they do work fairly well for non-social skills. Ultimately, my prime thesis here is that social skills are different, and for good reasons. Whether that means not having them, or having different mechanics for them, either's fine. But what games generally do instead is just lump them in with other skills under the assumption that what works for some skills will automatically work for all. Mormon Star Wars posted:I really hate it when people try to shoe-horn real puzzles into elfgames. "Yeah, you can keep going on the adventure - if you take thirty minutes to figure out this tower of Hanoi puzzle I've placed in front of you that exists only to take you out of the game for a huge chunk of time." I agree. Mystery plots that require some real-world critical thinking skills to figure out? Sure, lots of fun. Something that got copy-and-pasted out of a puzzle book? No, never liked that. eth0.n fucked around with this message at 21:00 on Dec 29, 2013 |
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Dec 29, 2013 20:57
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The real solution to the Tower of Hanoi puzzle is to have the other players distract the GM while you google a solver on your phone under the table.
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Dec 29, 2013 20:59
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Mormon Star Wars posted:I really hate it when people try to shoe-horn real puzzles into elfgames. "Yeah, you can keep going on the adventure - if you take thirty minutes to figure out this tower of Hanoi puzzle I've placed in front of you that exists only to take you out of the game for a huge chunk of time." To tie these kinds of puzzles back into the game, I like to have two tiers of skill checks. A relatively average result gets the players hints. A particularly high result results lets the players cheat.
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Dec 29, 2013 21:11
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I think puzzles like a sphinx's riddle or a complex trap that can be circumvented with logic or skill are good for DnD. Like in the first case if you get it wrong you just fight a sphinx, which is metal. In the second case you can bypass the ambiguity of dice if you know exactly what to do, in the same way that a key bypasses the need to pick locks.
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Dec 29, 2013 21:59
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Mendrian posted:I think puzzles like a sphinx's riddle or a complex trap that can be circumvented with logic or skill are good for DnD. Like in the first case if you get it wrong you just fight a sphinx, which is metal. In the second case you can bypass the ambiguity of dice if you know exactly what to do, in the same way that a key bypasses the need to pick locks. This is what I'm talking about when I say I like in-game puzzles. As long as the Sphinx isn't unbeatable, that's awesome because the results aren't about being able to progress or not, they're about whether you get to progress now or progress after you fight the Sphinx and steal her treasure. If the game is set up so that the difference between spending the time/resources fighting and not spending them is important, that's even better. If the Sphinx is obviously unbeatable and you need to solve the riddle to progress the plot, that sucks. If you've done the same thing but the Sphinx being unbeatable is not obvious, you hosed up. If the idea is that the solution to the riddle is found rather than guessed or known, then you better make it obvious that's what you're going for. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 22:19 on Dec 29, 2013 |
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Dec 29, 2013 22:17
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Mendrian posted:I think puzzles like a sphinx's riddle or a complex trap that can be circumvented with logic or skill are good for DnD. Like in the first case if you get it wrong you just fight a sphinx, which is metal. In the second case you can bypass the ambiguity of dice if you know exactly what to do, in the same way that a key bypasses the need to pick locks. Or in the second case no one knows how to figure it out except the GM (because what "logic" is easy to grasp by the GM may not be easily grasped by his players) in which case the game grinds to a halt while the players bug the GM for hints. edit: Putting in an actual honest-to-god puzzle is like handing your group a rubix cube. Mormon Star Wars fucked around with this message at 22:57 on Dec 29, 2013 |
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Dec 29, 2013 22:51
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Mormon Star Wars posted:Or in the second case no one knows how to figure it out except the GM (because what "logic" is easy to grasp by the GM may not be easily grasped by his players) in which case the game grinds to a halt while the players bug the GM for hints. Mormon Star Wars posted:edit: Putting in an actual honest-to-god puzzle is like hanging your group a rubix cube.
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Dec 29, 2013 23:07
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Splicer posted:In a badgame. In a goodgame they stare blankly at the puzzle and then the Fighter pulls a Gordian Knot and just starts punching the lock mechanism. I have a friend that has the Rubix Cube formula down pat. He can solve any rubix cube you give him in 20-30 seconds. So if a clever GM wanted to give our group a puzzle and handed us a rubix cube, one of two things would happen: 1) If he was playing the game he would solve the cube in 20 seconds while the rest of us twiddled our thumbs and we would move on. 2) If he wasn't playing the game it would die and the unsolved rubix cube would sit on someones shelf for the next year because none of the rest of us know the formula.
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Dec 29, 2013 23:14
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Solving Rubik's Cube is easy, you peel off the coloured stickers and move them round. On a more serious note: I don't mind real-life puzzles presented to the players - as long as they're cool with it, and/or there's a way to have the characters solve it using stuff on the character sheets as well. I'm cool with solving a crossword or whatever, but sometimes I just want to say 'my dude knows stuff about puzzles, he spends some time communing with Oghma who knows everything and is enlightened with the solution' after rolling good Religion.
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Dec 29, 2013 23:19
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Okay, it's like this: social skills ARE different. The difference goes like this. Whether you leap nimbly up or you use a secret ninja technique or you tie a rope to a boomerang, the wall you want to climb doesn't really get climbed any different. The end result is that you are at the top. If you intimidate a guard, the way you do it determines how he will respond. If you threaten his family successfully, he might rush at you in a rage. If you make it clear that you can kill him if he moves, he may stand stock still. Other successful results might be that he runs off into the night or that he dashes inside to raise the alarm, or even that he runs to the guardroom and starts guzzling wine as fast as he can (if you tell him he's been poisoned and alcohol will counter it). If you intimidate a guard, success indicates that, yep, you scared the poo poo out of him. What he does with that fear depends on what you said. Now, you can still let your character be more eloquent (or less) than you are, because you still have to roll the dice regardless. If I'm DMing, you don't need to speak in character or say exactly how you phrase your threat. You do need to give me some idea what you are threatening. Simply saying "I make it clear that if he moves he'll die before he can raise the alarm" is enough info. Saying "I intimidate him." is likely to cause trouble because if I pick one of the possible successes I listed above and it's not what the player expected, then the player might think I'm cheating him. E.g. "What?! I rolled a 20! Why is he attacking us?!" My group doesn't tend to talk in character much, and we certainly use social skill rolls rather than simply "roleplaying it out" but if the goal is to establish what can happen, you need more details than just the skill. You need to know at least a bit about how the player is doing it. Then again, I'd want to know some idea of how the player was trying to climb the wall in case of a failure - the method may give me a more interesting option for failure than simply saying "nope, you can't climb it." Does their gear break? Do they give away their clan's secret technique? The difference between climb and intimidate is that while both can have any number of outcomes on a failure, there are several ways a successful intimidate check might look but really only one option for successful climbing: the wall gets climbed. Some perspective on ways a couple of other games handle it: Apocalypse World does some of that work for you by telling you what the possible outcomes are. When you go aggro on the bouncer and get a 7-9, he might duck inside and bar the door, locking you out. That's a success, and it's one option the DM can take - you succeeded in threatening the guard. In a game like Burning Wheel, the possible outcomes are limited by your intent - if your intent is for the guard to drop his weapon and surrender, then when you succeed all the DM's options must include the guard surrendering. Locking you out would not be an acceptable thing for the DM to do because it violates your intent.
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Dec 30, 2013 01:36
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Splicer posted:In a badgame. In a goodgame they stare blankly at the puzzle and then the Fighter pulls a Gordian Knot and just starts punching the lock mechanism.
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Dec 30, 2013 01:44
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Jimbozig: if it's clear what the intention is (the guard sits quietly until you've gone past, or leaves) ANY of those threats should be able to result in that intention if they succeed. There's no reason why a threat against his family logically MUST send him flying into a rage but a threat against his own life or his job or whatever would do otherwise. If you say 'you picked the arbitrarily wrong reason, so even though you've succeeded on the check and it was obvious what your goal was in doing so, and it wasn't apparent despite there being ways to simulate one's insight into the other's responses that one threat would have a different result than another, you've actually failed' you're being a dick. Don't be a dick. Whilst I concur that it's important to say what you're attempting in more detail than 'I roll X' in most cases, NOT doing so (or saying the wrong justification, even when the check is successful) shouldn't be penalised. Some people just don't want to do those things. If what you want is to change that TALK TO THEM. Don't penalise them in-game, it doesn't work.
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Dec 30, 2013 10:37
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Jimbozig: I was 100% with you up until the "wrong kind of intimidate" type thing. I want to know how they're intimidating the guard not so I can see if they're doing it "right"; I want to know so I know how to flavour their response and potential fallout. Your description of the different kinds of "runs away" was spot on, but the point is they're all different varieties of "runs away", which is what the player wanted. Being afraid of giving the "wrong answer" is one of the reasons why people freeze up in these situations. e: I may actually have misunderstood you on something, it sounded like you were saying that what happens will depend on their actions rather than their intent, but on rereading that may not be the case. In your example if someone wanted the guard to stay still and they did so by threatening their family, would him flying into a rage still be a potential "success" option or would it just be a potential failure option, with a successful roll always resulting in the desired result (staying still)? Splicer fucked around with this message at 13:50 on Dec 30, 2013 |
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Dec 30, 2013 13:27
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What A DM should be asking when such a situation comes up is not "What do you do?" but "what are you trying to accomplish?" and then let everyone work it out from there.
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Dec 30, 2013 14:43
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Elfgames posted:What A DM should be asking when such a situation comes up is not "What do you do?" but "what are you trying to accomplish?" and then let everyone work it out from there. Or the player should be saying, "I want to scare him into opening the door by threatening his family", so a success is "he opens the door" and a failure is making him fly into a fury at you. A successful roll shouldn't really be putting you in a worse position than you started in.
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Dec 30, 2013 17:29
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Splicer posted:Except this isn't actually true. Often the difference between a convincing argument and a laughable farce is more to do with the person saying it than the actual facts. Social mechanics allow someone to play the suave dude who can convince you that yes, the red wagons do go faster, and an extra 10 platinum pieces is a small price to pay for go faster stripes. Take any two people and have them both say exactly the same lines to the same bouncer; one will get in, the other will be laughed away. If someone wants to be The Charming Guy then they should be able to do so even if they are not actually very socially confident. Oof, I think I see part of the conversation that I missed before now. When I say that I like it when social systems are mostly freeform I'm talking mostly about using the facts to your advantage and less the personal player charisma thing. I think the leverage you have on the NPC should be the most important factor, but I'm all in favor of giving mechanical bonuses to good player OR character charisma (using whichever's higher). I just really hate skill systems where the numbers get so big that the character's skills eclipse the details of the argument being used. AlphaDog posted:If the Sphinx is obviously unbeatable and you need to solve the riddle to progress the plot, that sucks. If you've done the same thing but the Sphinx being unbeatable is not obvious, you hosed up. If the idea is that the solution to the riddle is found rather than guessed or known, then you better make it obvious that's what you're going for. Yeah, 'puzzles' should really either be something you can muscle through (at a cost) or should really just lead to optional side-content. They should never grind the game to a halt.
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Dec 30, 2013 17:41
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eth0.n posted:
Mendrian posted:'Social interactions' are a skill but they aren't the same as swinging a sword. Most people understand the basics of conversation, and they have at least a subconscious understanding of how what you say or how you react reflects who you are. Yeah, it takes years of training to be a fantastic trial lawyer, or a politician, or whatever, but it's not like medicine or climbing where few people have real world experience with it. Not to mention glossing over conversation has consequences that glossing over rope tying does not.
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Dec 30, 2013 17:49
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Mendrian posted:'Social interactions' are a skill but they aren't the same as swinging a sword. Most people understand the basics of conversation, and they have at least a subconscious understanding of how what you say or how you react reflects who you are. Yeah, it takes years of training to be a fantastic trial lawyer, or a politician, or whatever, but it's not like medicine or climbing where few people have real world experience with it. Not to mention glossing over conversation has consequences that glossing over rope tying does not. Everyone can swing a sword. Not well, but yes your average person can pick one up and swing it, maybe go for the stab. In much the same way, the majority of people are pretty solid at talking, can hold a conversation and usually don't alienate everyone they know, but at the end of the day most people can't write a resume to save their lives, can't haggle worth a drat, and definitely aren't going to convince a figure with political power to act against their general will with the flick of a clever metaphor and an implication of threat. These characters are supposed to be far beyond actual human skill in terms of social ability; if you're going to let a warrior say "I do the sword-swinging-thing at the Orc [with the objective of hitting and killing him]" (rolls 18, hits) then why not just allow "I do the really-good-talking thing to try to convince the guy to tell us his secret" (rolls 18, learns about the secret passage) if that's what the players want to do?
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Dec 30, 2013 18:35
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Seriously, anyone who has studied acting, rhetoric, or sales knows that it is often less about the semantic or logical content of the message and more about the skill of delivery.
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Dec 30, 2013 18:39
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Paolomania posted:Seriously, anyone who has studied acting, rhetoric, or sales knows that it is often less about the semantic or logical content of the message and more about the skill of delivery. A salesmen gets you to consider a set of tires. A good salesmen gets you to buy them. A great one and you own a new car. Theres absolutely no reason to expect players to have the skills at all in line with whats on their sheets. Its another one of those int traps where people use themselves as the baseline for 18 not the baseline for 9.
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Dec 30, 2013 18:49
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And then add on another level of complexity where you're pretending to be an imaginary person talking to another imaginary person through a proxy. Did the DM just smile at the audacity your story or is the guard buying it? We've been talking about accessibility for a shy, introverted player have access. But those rules also prevent a straight up real-life con artist from scamming the DM at every turn.
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Dec 30, 2013 18:56
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It doesn't help matters that the skill system is binary pass/fail. To a certain extent it's like, "Why am I rolling this, I'm trained."
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Dec 30, 2013 19:10
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Barudak posted:Theres absolutely no reason to expect players to have the skills at all in line with whats on their sheets. Its another one of those int traps where people use themselves as the baseline for 18 not the baseline for 9. To further this point, this is also on a forum where within the same ruleset people have jokingly figured out that with enough skill points it's possible to convince literally anyone that you are the moon. It's also really funny that people aren't catching in on the fact that "I'm gonna roll to intimidate" might mean that the player doesn't actually want to RP it out.
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Dec 30, 2013 19:14
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thespaceinvader posted:Jimbozig: if it's clear what the intention is (the guard sits quietly until you've gone past, or leaves) ANY of those threats should be able to result in that intention if they succeed. There's no reason why a threat against his family logically MUST send him flying into a rage but a threat against his own life or his job or whatever would do otherwise. No no no, you're misreading me. I 100% agree that if the player's intent is clear, then you should give them their intent on a success. Unless you're playing a game like Apocalypse World where it doesn't work that way - then you should give them what the game says to give them, regardless of their intent. The point is that saying "I intimidate the guard" doesn't tell you what their intent is. You need more information, and you can get that by simply having them tell you what they are trying to get out of this, or by telling you how they are going about it. If you don't get that information, you're liable to screw the player by accident. I DO think that certain intents and tasks (to borrow Burning Wheel's terminology) don't align. For a nameless guard, any old intimidate should get whatever intent is reasonable for the skill, but for an important NPC with an established character, certain kinds of treatment will lead to certain reactions and preclude others. You won't use words alone to scare the President into bowing and kissing your shoes, but you might scare him into having you arrested by the Secret Service. If a player tries to use intimidate to get the President to lick their shoes, you don't call for a roll. There's no point rolling for something that simply won't happen. Splicer posted:I may actually have misunderstood you on something, it sounded like you were saying that what happens will depend on their actions rather than their intent, but on rereading that may not be the case. In your example if someone wanted the guard to stay still and they did so by threatening their family, would him flying into a rage still be a potential "success" option or would it just be a potential failure option, with a successful roll always resulting in the desired result (staying still)? If their method cannot possibly get them their intent, I tell them that, I tell them what the possible outcomes are, and then they can use a different method to get their original intent or they can stick to it and get whatever I outlined. Like I said, different games can do it differently. If I'm playing AW, then screw their intent. I'll give them what the move says to give them. If they went aggro with an intent that going aggro cannot give them, that's on them. That's the rules and they'll soon catch on. The rules in AW limit me as an MC in what I can say. Jimbozig fucked around with this message at 20:14 on Dec 30, 2013 |
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Dec 30, 2013 20:02
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Death Bot posted:These characters are supposed to be far beyond actual human skill in terms of social ability; if you're going to let a warrior say "I do the sword-swinging-thing at the Orc [with the objective of hitting and killing him]" (rolls 18, hits) then why not just allow "I do the really-good-talking thing to try to convince the guy to tell us his secret" (rolls 18, learns about the secret passage) if that's what the players want to do? But you can also say that you position yourself so that the enemy is between you and another ally, giving you a +2 to the sword-swinging-thing, maybe that could also be true for the really-good-talking thing? That's how I have always used the social skills at least. Just saying "I diplomacy at the king" gives you just your skill bonus, but saying "I diplomacy at the king and mention all the times I did all his lovely quests without complaining" will get you a +2 or something. You are still in binary resolution hell, though, but whatever.
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Dec 30, 2013 20:28
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Death Bot posted:To further this point, this is also on a forum where within the same ruleset people have jokingly figured out that with enough skill points it's possible to convince literally anyone that you are the moon. I'm of the opinion that if a high level fighter can suplex a dragon, toss entire mountains into castles, and pull up new islands with his fishing pole, then a high level bard should be convincing people he is the moon with his powers of wit and charm, singing songs so beautiful that all other music is ruined for the listeners forever, and twanging power chords that shatter down fortress walls. Because at high levels, everyone should be stupid awesome.
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Dec 30, 2013 21:00
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Death Bot posted:These characters are supposed to be far beyond actual human skill in terms of social ability; if you're going to let a warrior say "I do the sword-swinging-thing at the Orc [with the objective of hitting and killing him]" (rolls 18, hits) then why not just allow "I do the really-good-talking thing to try to convince the guy to tell us his secret" (rolls 18, learns about the secret passage) if that's what the players want to do? This is the worst when you're playing a high intelligence character. Like a super high intelligence. I used to spend forever trying to explain that yes, I don't know how my five-dot int Exalt was able to invent an airship or determine who was in a room by the pattern of air swirls, but that's okay because he's significantly smarter and more perceptive than I am, or indeed than any human ever was. But pick up an elephant and throw it to the moon? Sure, no problem, that's easy to visualize.
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Dec 30, 2013 21:09
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Spoilers Below posted:I'm of the opinion that if a high level fighter can suplex a dragon, toss entire mountains into castles, and pull up new islands with his fishing pole, then a high level bard should be convincing people he is the moon with his powers of wit and charm, singing songs so beautiful that all other music is ruined for the listeners forever, and twanging power chords that shatter down fortress walls. If I wasn't clear, I'm agreeing with you, I'm just saying that you shouldn't have to explain to your DM exactly how you convinced someone that you were the moon, that's what all the big numbers on your character sheet are for. Props to anyone who tries, but I can't really fault anyone who wants to do that stuff off-the-cuff so they can get to the punchy part.
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Dec 30, 2013 21:19
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Jimbozig posted:I DO think that certain intents and tasks (to borrow Burning Wheel's terminology) don't align. For a nameless guard, any old intimidate should get whatever intent is reasonable for the skill, but for an important NPC with an established character, certain kinds of treatment will lead to certain reactions and preclude others. You won't use words alone to scare the President into bowing and kissing your shoes, but you might scare him into having you arrested by the Secret Service. If a player tries to use intimidate to get the President to lick their shoes, you don't call for a roll. There's no point rolling for something that simply won't happen. Why would this simply not happen? What separates the president in this example from any other human being on the planet? Sure, he's got more power and guards, but if you're intimidating enough you should be able to convince him that all the power, money, and guards in the world aren't going to help him if he doesn't bow and scrape immediately. Sure, you're going to have an absurdly stiff penalty in whatever system you're using and it should be an extraordinarily difficult task that more or less requires external modifiers (like being some renowned enemy of the state that's pulled off successful attacks and is a legitimate threat, holding people he cares about or entire cities hostage, representing a foreign nation poised to destroy his country, catching him alone in the shitter far away from all his guards, etc.). More importantly, you don't necessarily need all these things to have actually happened, you just need him or her to believe that they have. There have been entire movies and books written about people coercing presidents and other leaders into doing what they want - why on earth should it be impossible in a tabletop game? If the players want to pull it off, it should be the climactic moment of their story, where they finally have scared up the power and influence to coerce a leader into doing what they need him to do.
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Dec 30, 2013 21:24
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Death Bot posted:If I wasn't clear, I'm agreeing with you, I'm just saying that you shouldn't have to explain to your DM exactly how you convinced someone that you were the moon, that's what all the big numbers on your character sheet are for. Props to anyone who tries, but I can't really fault anyone who wants to do that stuff off-the-cuff so they can get to the punchy part.  Alright then!I can buy the argument for a "Gilligan Cut" when it comes to outrageous arguments like that, the same way I can for a "black box" zeppelin that shouldn't be possible to build with the current level of technology the PCs possess, or the super strong person lifting a battleship that should by all rights crack in half because of where she's lifting it from.
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Dec 30, 2013 22:04
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MadScientistWorking posted:The general default is that everyone has problems being able to converse, form arguments, and understand social situations. We are horrendously flawed in so many ways that its impossible to get a consistent result even if the statement is as simple as,"I am lying. What I am now about to do is a complete and utter fraud. Its a fabrication." Yeah, if we're talking about produce reasonable simulations of communication and manipulation, then reducing a conversation to dialog loses the vast majority of what's actually important. The problem is, saying "I tell the orc that 'I'm going to start cutting off fingers until you tell me where the diamonds are'" is fun, and it's more fun if putting a bit of effort into it has real weight on the story. Mediating that with a die roll strips much of the importance from the phrasing and performance, which is a shame. There's no fun proxy like that for climbing a cliff or punching a dude, so you might as well go straight for the dice. I still like having social mechanics in the game. There's things they handle well, both for more complex social situations (long speeches, trials, etc.), and for situations where the GM needs some guidance on how to have an NPC react. But because of how limited they can be in practice, it's nice to have them silo'd off from other skills. In terms of simulating the real world, there's little difference in how little of the real-world complexity you can carry out at the table when it comes to social versus physical skills. Where it gets tricky from a game-design perspective is that social interaction has a much better only-slightly-representative proxy (casual dialog exchange) than the physical skills do.
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Dec 30, 2013 22:15
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Call preference then, because I know players that could give a poo poo and just want to get to the part where they roll dice to hit dudes 
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Dec 30, 2013 22:27
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Death Bot posted:Call preference then, because I know players that could give a poo poo and just want to get to the part where they roll dice to hit dudes Sure, there's a ton of these players. But these people do not need a game with social mechanics that allow for the actual complexity of persuasion and intimidation, which is what the post I was responding to was talking about. They will generally be happy with a pro forma bit of dialog to establish that, okay, this guy is the rat lord we're supposed to kill, and then just moving onto the combat. Sir Kodiak fucked around with this message at 22:38 on Dec 30, 2013 |
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Dec 30, 2013 22:34
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Dirk the Average posted:Why would this simply not happen? What separates the president in this example from any other human being on the planet? Sure, he's got more power and guards, but if you're intimidating enough you should be able to convince him that all the power, money, and guards in the world aren't going to help him if he doesn't bow and scrape immediately. Sure, you're going to have an absurdly stiff penalty in whatever system you're using and it should be an extraordinarily difficult task that more or less requires external modifiers (like being some renowned enemy of the state that's pulled off successful attacks and is a legitimate threat, holding people he cares about or entire cities hostage, representing a foreign nation poised to destroy his country, catching him alone in the shitter far away from all his guards, etc.). More importantly, you don't necessarily need all these things to have actually happened, you just need him or her to believe that they have. Oh, well yeah. If the character in question is epic-tier and has put points into intimidation, then sure - she can probably get the President to bow and scrape. In D&D, setting a really high DC works fine for things like that. It's just that telling the player to try roll a 40 and telling them that it's impossible is USUALLY the same thing. For specialized or high-level characters, or for characters that are getting bonuses from somewhere, a 40 might be possible or even likely. If the player is rolling a d20+8, I won't make any distinction between "try roll a 40" and "that simply won't be happening" because there is no distinction.
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Dec 30, 2013 22:42
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Honestly from our 3 session playtest of it, with some tweaking it could be rather good. I liked some of the mixes that felt like 3.5 Pathfinder and 4th getting picked apart and taking the fun from each of them. However, we still play 3.5 primarily to this day and have all but banned 4th for being to WoW-esque so the things I liked in Next that resembled 4th will probably be the reason to not switch for my group.
"I don't need a guild charter to kill you Inky." Drexith Heartblade
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Dec 30, 2013 23:54
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Dirk the Average posted:Why would this simply not happen?
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Dec 31, 2013 00:18
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Drexith posted:Honestly from our 3 session playtest of it, with some tweaking it could be rather good. I liked some of the mixes that felt like 3.5 Pathfinder and 4th getting picked apart and taking the fun from each of them. However, we still play 3.5 primarily to this day and have all but banned 4th for being to WoW-esque so the things I liked in Next that resembled 4th will probably be the reason to not switch for my group. This, right here, is why Next is going to fail. D&D Next has gone to great lengths to ignore literally everything that 4th Edition did or even that it existed at all, and somehow 3.5/Pathfinder edition warriors who think 4E is a MMO still think its too much like 4th edition. D&D Next isn't going to get 4th edition players to switch (because none of the good things in 4th edition have come back) and it isn't going to get 3.5/Pathfinder players to switch (because they're dumb enough to think that Next has any elements from 4th edition).
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Dec 31, 2013 00:23
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Piell posted:This, right here, is why Next is going to fail. D&D Next has gone to great lengths to ignore literally everything that 4th Edition did or even that it existed at all, and somehow 3.5/Pathfinder edition warriors who think 4E is a MMO still think its too much like 4th edition. D&D Next isn't going to get 4th edition players to switch (because none of the good things in 4th edition have come back) and it isn't going to get 3.5/Pathfinder players to switch (because they're dumb enough to think that Next has any elements from 4th edition). Won't it fail because it's too much like... actually, I dunno what it's too much like since Blizzard hasn't really released a non-sequel fantasy game since 4e. Maybe Next could go back to being too similar to Diablo, like 3e used to be. Or a simplified baby version of AD&D, like 2e was. Turtles all the way down Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 00:43 on Dec 31, 2013 |
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Dec 31, 2013 00:41
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Dungeons and Dragons is just a simple-minded version of Chainmail for people who can't handle rigorous simulation and strategy. 
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Dec 31, 2013 00:42
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Evil Sagan posted:Dungeons and Dragons is just a simple-minded version of Chainmail for people who can't handle rigorous simulation and strategy. Chainmail is just overcomplicated Chess for manchildren who believe in fairies and goblins. Chess is just pussified Hnefatafl.
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Dec 31, 2013 00:44
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