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dwarf74 posted:Maybe I've fixated on my time spent running and playing BX/BECMI and AD&D, but I think finding cool-rear end magic items is one of the best parts of D&D and one of the main things that draws me to the game. It might not be precisely the puzzle piece which lets me optimize my frostcheeser, but gently caress it - variety's fun. Finding magic poo poo is integral to the "exploration" side of D&D for me, and it's one of the only areas where I think Next is doing pretty okay. Okay-ish, anyway, and a step above both 3e and 4e for once. Mind you, I'm more keen on relatively low-level adventures anyway, where finding a +2 sword is the equivalent of getting your hands on the nuclear football.
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Jan 14, 2014 11:07
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Mormon Star Wars posted:When you have to specialize to be effective, getting something off-spec sucks. A fighter who is only competitive with the rest of the party because he sinks every resource into being Great With Greatswords is naturally going to be disappointed when the random treasure roll comes up with a handaxe, even if it's a handaxe that glows in the dark. This assumes that you need that item in order to be effective. The whole point of this discussion is to decouple magical items with baseline effectiveness of characters. The discovery of the magical greatsword should be an exciting event, but not something that has to happen.
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Jan 14, 2014 11:54
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Transient People posted:I was actually going to say Guilty Gear first, but I figured that may be a little too obscure. Guilty Gear (and other ArcSys fighting games) are an interesting example, because while most characters have some power that seems Completely loving Broken and weird as gently caress, every character's got a toolkit of basic moves (normals, movement abilities, dust, roman cancel and burst) that should allow a competitive player to come up with some response to any bullshit that anyone else can come up with. Persona 4 Arena adds to this by giving every character a simple bread-and-butter normals-to-special-to-super move combo that anyone can perform simply by hitting the light punch button repeatedly.
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Jan 14, 2014 12:26
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Mormon Star Wars posted:When you have to specialize to be effective Splicer fucked around with this message at 13:16 on Jan 14, 2014 |
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Jan 14, 2014 12:51
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Wondrous Items instead of slightly better halberds or whatever. In my old AD&D games, at least half the fun was coming up with stuff to do with (for example) a vase that never loving stops pissing out water no matter what you do. Guys, it's filling the room up! poo poo! Seriously, the misc magic section of the AD&D DMG has nearly as many adventure hooks as there are items. You find a rod that doesn't move once you put it down - you start by using it to hold doors open and then you realise you don't have to carry tent poles and after that it's a short leap to building impossible structures. Wow, a portable hole's kinda cool, but it's really just a big bag - what if we built a mobile trench in it and had a prepared, provisioned fighting-position wherever we happened to be, complete with pintle-mounted heavy crossbows and pop-out ramparts? I remember one dude being super excited that he'd found a spoon that produced enough nourishing bland gruel to feed 4 people each day. He was never going to have to buy rations again. Because this dude couldn't possibly go hungry unless he lost his magic spoon. Provisioning for a journey? gently caress that, he's got his spoon. e: I gave that same dude Bucknard's Everful Purse later on. His happiness at always having pocket-change was unbelievable in a game where thousands of gold coins are a routine sight. e2: I forgot my point - it was that there's plenty of fun to be had with magic items that don't directly do much to your combat numbers, but D&D probably isn't the game for it. A deployable entrenchment is cool as hell, but it doesn't interact with the D&D rules very well. Baba Yaga's Hut is awesome weird swords & sorcery poo poo, but when you have a giant walking hut and it's hard to figure out exactly how to kick the poo poo out of your enemies with it, something's gone wrong. VVVVV My memory is of pages and pages of that sort of thing and like 2 pages of weapons and armor most of which were variations on the theme of "+1 to hit and also it bursts into flames or whatever". Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 14:49 on Jan 14, 2014 |
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Jan 14, 2014 14:37
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AlphaDog posted:I remember one dude being super excited that he'd found a spoon that produced enough nourishing bland gruel to feed 4 people each day. He was never going to have to buy rations again. Because this dude couldn't possibly go hungry unless he lost his magic spoon. Provisioning for a journey? gently caress that, he's got his spoon. Murlynd's spoon! One of my favorite items, that spoon. I think I'd get along great with the dude described. 
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Jan 14, 2014 14:43
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dwarf74 posted:What the...? Because I don't care for magic items at all. Like, at all. My amount of fucks given for them goes down to 0 after I get a weapon that gels with my character and has a cool backstory, and maybe an armor that works likewise. Why do I need to take all those rings of feather falling, eversmoking bottles, apparatuses of kwalish, boots of jumping, solitaires of various colors and whatever else if I'm not gonna get to pick them? Couldn't I just focus on making my character cooler instead of getting random geegaws? If you rate me on the Bartle test, first I Achieve, then I Socialize, then I Impact (other players), then, way down, I care about Exploring the world for the sake of exploration and getting random items. If I play a dungeon crawler it's to get to the bottom of the dungeon and see what awaits me there. The items are completely secondary and I would rather not have them at all first, and if I *have* to take them, I'd rather they be useful to me instead of getting stowed in the backpack forever and forgotten about.
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Jan 14, 2014 14:57
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Transient People posted:Because I don't care for magic items at all. Like, at all. My amount of fucks given for them goes down to 0 after I get a weapon that gels with my character and has a cool backstory, and maybe an armor that works likewise. Why do I need to take all those rings of feather falling, eversmoking bottles, apparatuses of kwalish, boots of jumping, solitaires of various colors and whatever else if I'm not gonna get to pick them? Couldn't I just focus on making my character cooler instead of getting random geegaws? If you rate me on the Bartle test, first I Achieve, then I Socialize, then I Impact (other players), then, way down, I care about Exploring the world for the sake of exploration and getting random items. If I play a dungeon crawler it's to get to the bottom of the dungeon and see what awaits me there. The items are completely secondary and I would rather not have them at all first, and if I *have* to take them, I'd rather they be useful to me instead of getting stowed in the backpack forever and forgotten about. Again, a lot of other games do exactly what you describe, with your signature weapon being something crafted during character creation and improved with experience points. But if you're doing it that way you can't have goblins guarding a chest full of inexplicably unused magical shields*, and then it wouldn't *well you can, but ehhhh it's not the same. Splicer fucked around with this message at 15:31 on Jan 14, 2014 |
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Jan 14, 2014 15:28
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AlphaDog posted:Wondrous Items instead of slightly better halberds or whatever. To this day the magic item I remember and loved the most was from 3.x, and it was the Rod of Ropes, because it was seriously just the most batman item. It had a grappling hook mode that was basically just the grapple gun from every Zelda game, you could just have infinite rope when needed, and it could shoot/connect off both ends and let you slide down anything or shimmy across basically any gap!
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Jan 14, 2014 15:43
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Hold on, if the argument is over "whats the point of magic items that don't help in combat" when according to Mearls they're explicitly balancing combat around *no* magic items...then whats the problem? DM's discretion, if you've given them +3 daggers of haste then throw some extra baddies into the fight, if they're running around with a bunch of fun, but not strictly "combat" items as adventure hooks or just to "see what happens" then the system is, by default, balanced for that setup (sans creative application of a jug that never empties of water) edit: you'd only run into issues if one character was a walking treadmill of +3 broadswords of dudeslaying and +5 armor of the invincible god, while another character has starter chainmail and a staff that grows flowers and can attract hummingbirds. so don't let that happen? treeboy fucked around with this message at 17:25 on Jan 14, 2014 |
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Jan 14, 2014 17:19
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treeboy posted:Hold on, if the argument is over "whats the point of magic items that don't help in combat" when according to Mearls they're explicitly balancing combat around *no* magic items...then whats the problem? DM's discretion, if you've given them +3 daggers of haste then throw some extra baddies into the fight Because it's a lot of extra work for a DM to figure out how the specific magic item's they've given out affect the strength of the enemies and accurately judge how much to change things? Especially for an inexperienced or not-great DM it's not going to be easy. quote:if they're running around with a bunch of fun, but not strictly "combat" items as adventure hooks or just to "see what happens" then the system is, by default, balanced for that setup (sans creative application of a jug that never empties of water) Except these aren't the type of magic items that are showing up, it's all +2 daggers and poo poo.
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Jan 14, 2014 17:23
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What, if anything, is the current threat title a reference to?
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Jan 14, 2014 17:23
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Piell posted:Because it's a lot of extra work for a DM to figure out how the specific magic item's they've given out affect the strength of the enemies and accurately judge how much to change things? Especially for an inexperienced or not-great DM it's not going to be easy. Well supposedly they're going to be assisting DM's int his endeavor. If the doubt is simply whether Wizards can do this ably or not then I can understand, but assuming it works then there should hopefully be a quick chart for X magic items = Y additional CR (or something along those lines). 4e did a decent job of opening up the 'hood' so to speak and revealing some of the underlying math to help DM's modify things appropriately. Hopefully this trend continues. I shouldn't think you need a book to tell you how to make flavorful non-combat items. Wondrous Objects are a good source for ideas.
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Jan 14, 2014 17:29
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It always baffled me how different D&D was from Shadowrun despite the relative similarities in their game structure. In both games, you need to get into a place, take some stuff, and get out again without being killed, despite traps, guards, and specialized defenses that certain characters were needed to disarm. Players in D&D will (in my experience, usually) take a Ring of Doing My Job Better +2 versus anything else if given a choice. Shadowrun players, in contrast, (in my experience) generally relish doodads that help them get out of a tight scrape or deal with rare or specialized problems. I think the key difference is that Shadowrun has a pretty finite upper limit on how good you can get at something, whereas D&D has 30 levels to account for in terms of growth,. Shadowrun also gives players most of their character defining gear at char gen and then slowly upgrades the core stuff over the course of play, so side-grades and secondary skill upgrades are pretty much the only option. I think the key difference might be the class system though. Classes silo the ability to deal with specialized problems into little piles, and when you're building your character you get very limited options to improve what you perceive as your core competency. You get Ability Scores, which even in Next are pretty much a forgone conclusion as to where you're going to put them (though not quite as bad as 4e.) You get maybe a Feat or two, which typically lets you specialize into some aspect of your class (for which 'combat' is always an option.) I say players are more interested in their area of competence than swording because I've noticed in 4e, wizards will take items to help them control better and thiefy types will sometimes take trap-related items because it makes them better at those things, with swording being a secondary consideration much of the time. I think the main issue is specialization. Since characters rarely have generalized skills, but instead get greater and greater rewards from deeper specialization, the obvious fix is to make general competence the baseline for difficulty (as opposite to 'mild to deeply specialized', as is the case with 4e's Skill Difficulties or 3e's everything) and to make options that don't offer deeper specialization. You can do that by not publishing book after book of options, because the more you publish the more likely you are to publish to abilities or items that have some kind of synergy if taken together. I don't know if there's any way to do it given D&D's history of option bloat. I had a guy in my normal 4e group who was pretty much bonkers for specialization. I think he had like 6 feats dumped into using a Fullblade, and specifically a frost-cheese Fullblade, and always (always!) having Combat Advantage. He's pretty much the poster boy for 'average D&D powergamer' and I don't think he's a bad person for doing it, but it meant that whenever he got an item that wasn't another frost-granting Fullblade, or when he couldn't get combat advantage, or when an enemy was immune to cold, he was operating somewhat below spec, and he often fought to get those things because he had so many of is resources bound up in them. And I think the state of the thing is amusing because the whole point of adventuring is to get piles of gold. If you need to spend those piles of gold on getting a slightly better (but otherwise identical!) sword of frosting, it sort of feels like a bankrupt exercise.
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Jan 14, 2014 17:30
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whydirt posted:What, if anything, is the current threat title a reference to? I think I remember the title changing to that after alot of posters got into a big argument over Next that was mostly ad hominemious. Then the topic, with Winson being the leader of this, turned into a chat about food --specifically steak -- and people got a lot less grouchy.
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Jan 14, 2014 17:33
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Right, I knew that. I just wondered if the specific wording was lifted from a poem or a song or something.
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Jan 14, 2014 17:38
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whydirt posted:What, if anything, is the current threat title a reference to? A while back, a Next supporter turned up here and tried to defend the game, which led to acrimony and accusations of "hive mind" when he got piled on. The topic was forcibly shifted to a riddle contest to defuse the fighting. ("Out of the eater came forth meat, out of the strong came forth sweetness" is a riddle Samson poses in the Bible.)
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Jan 14, 2014 17:40
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Selachian posted:A while back, a Next supporter turned up here and tried to defend the game, which led to acrimony and accusations of "hive mind" when he got piled on. The topic was forcibly shifted to a riddle contest to defuse the fighting. ("Out of the eater came forth meat, out of the strong came forth sweetness" is a riddle Samson poses in the Bible.) I have to mention its a complete bullshit riddle because its literally something only Samson saw and is such an odd occurrence that I assume Samson's face was frozen in a perpetual smug-face grin. And having + to hit magic items is just mind blastingly stupid if the math is bounded accuracy built around having no magic items. Thats an insane swing even with just a +1 bonus. As for why DnD people take general bonuses its because a) combat is what you need to be doing always b) you have no idea what sort of foe the DM will put infront of you and c) magic can invalidate huge swaths of interesting items and utilities and DnD is not a game where two of something is ever needed.
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Jan 14, 2014 17:44
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Barudak posted:I have to mention its a complete bullshit riddle because its literally something only Samson saw and is such an odd occurrence that I assume Samson's face was frozen in a perpetual smug-face grin. what's worse? An item treadmill that requires consistent upgrading of flavorless gear to make sure that combat doesn't turn fatal, or the hope that your GM has half a brain and can manage a few simple arithmetic operations to bring combat encounters closer to parity with the party? I don't have a particular dog in this fight, and quite enjoy 4e. The flavorless boredom of most of the heroic tier gear left me underwhelmed however. To me the latter is preferable to the former, but then I've had very good DM's
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Jan 14, 2014 17:48
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treeboy posted:what's worse? An item treadmill that requires consistent upgrading of flavorless gear to make sure that combat doesn't turn fatal, or the hope that your GM has half a brain and can manage a few simple arithmetic operations to bring combat encounters closer to parity with the party? What about not having either? Item grinding and gear tweaking are both terrible things in a table-top game. Hell even in MMOs they're god-awful and those at least have the justification of having PvP, Auction Houses, and trade systems to justify rarity and obsession with gear improvements.
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Jan 14, 2014 17:51
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treeboy posted:what's worse? An item treadmill that requires consistent upgrading of flavorless gear to make sure that combat doesn't turn fatal, or the hope that your GM has half a brain and can manage a few simple arithmetic operations to bring combat encounters closer to parity with the party? Or maybe don't gently caress with boring +1 magic items at all? What are they adding other than "they were in D&D before" (which should be D&D Next's tagline, apparently)?
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Jan 14, 2014 17:54
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Barudak posted:What about not having either? What would be your ideal situation then? Eliminating any magic items that give flat bonuses to combat abilities? edit: I'm legitimately curious, not trying to be snarky. I've played several of the playtest packets and have found the evolution of Next to be interesting and, for the most part, quite enjoyable. edit2: for instance reading through the magic items i find most of the minor enchantments/quirks to be pretty interesting. treeboy fucked around with this message at 18:04 on Jan 14, 2014 |
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Jan 14, 2014 17:55
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treeboy posted:What would be your ideal situation then? Eliminating any magic items that give flat bonuses to combat abilities? Yes. That is the solution.
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Jan 14, 2014 18:06
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treeboy posted:What would be your ideal situation then? Eliminating any magic items that give flat bonuses to combat abilities? Eliminating all except one type. I fully get players who don't want to have to worry about fiddly stuff - and instead we can have the Sword of Sharpness (gives a +2 bonus) competing with flaming swords and the like. But the Sword of Sharpness shouldn't come in tiers. And you shouldn't have a Flaming Sword +2 (or, worse yet, a Flaming Freezing Shocking Wounding Sword +1).
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Jan 14, 2014 18:13
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treeboy posted:What would be your ideal situation then? Eliminating any magic items that give flat bonuses to combat abilities? e: Also the unbalancedness caused by unexpected levels of wackadoodle magic items is a lot more fun than that caused by the "wrong" +x bonuses. If someone comes up with a hilarious combo of Alice's frost sword + Bob's jug of everflowing water to encase your magma giants in ice blocks then that's an interesting story. If your guys have a higher-than-expected DPR and end up stabbing them to death in two rounds then that's just a boring fight. Splicer fucked around with this message at 18:29 on Jan 14, 2014 |
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Jan 14, 2014 18:16
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Simply removing the +X items solves all of the attack math skew in one go. A +3 item will no longer skew the balance of the attack math because it doesn't exist. There ARE things that it could skew, such as a weapon dealing more damage, but clever design could easily avoid having weapons simply do +1d6 or whatever damage because it's on fire. It could instead have a chance of setting opponents on fire when you score a critical hit, while also acting as a light source and as, well, fire. It would still be an interesting item to have, but it won't make things difficult for the GM to figure out on the fly and its loss won't outright hamper a character. Of course, this forces writers to be creative, clever and interesting in new ways, whereas D&D mechanics are written to be easy to write fast and in bulk with as little thought and creativity as possible.
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Jan 14, 2014 18:21
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treeboy posted:What would be your ideal situation then? Eliminating any magic items that give flat bonuses to combat abilities? There absolutely should not be items which provide flat bonuses in combat whatsoever. Classes in and of themselves should be balanced because those can be exclusively controlled domain of players and can be more easily checked across. Having items grant bonuses creates a mother-may-I aspect as well as an inordinately huge new pile of math to work through to maintain any semblance of balance. That all said like I've repeated earlier this plan is non-fucntional if there isn't an equivalent pare down in what utility spells can cover. Having a sword that functions as a torch is cool and doesn't invalidate anyone else. Having a sword that functions as a torch when the wizard can cast a localized cloud of light that magically works as darkness is not at all.
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Jan 14, 2014 18:28
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Best option: No +X items at all. Acceptable for nostalgia option: No heroic tier item gives a bonus greater than +1, and all heroic tier opponents are balanced on the assumption that nobody has any magic. No paragon tier item gives a bonus greater than +2, and all paragon tier opponents are balanced on the assumption that nobody has any item better than +1. No heroic tier item gives a bonus greater than +3, and all paragon tier opponents are balanced on the assumption that nobody has any item better than +2. Bonuses may apply to hit, to damage, to AC and (maybe) to Saves/NADS. Items that simply add some flat bonus to an existing ability (+X when charging, +1d6 to eldritch blast, etc.) are banished to the land of wind and ghosts.
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Jan 14, 2014 18:55
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TheAwfulWaffle posted:Bonuses may apply to hit, to damage, to AC and (maybe) to Saves/NADS. Items that simply add some flat bonus to an existing ability (+X when charging, +1d6 to eldritch blast, etc.) are banished to the land of wind and ghosts. As a warning because of how messed up DnD is with its "you do jack poo poo on a miss" nobody will ever not take a +1 to hit as a priority item because while it may not be as efficient as say a +4 to AC its a static increase on your ability to do something on your turn.
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Jan 14, 2014 18:58
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Barudak posted:As a warning because of how messed up DnD is with its "you do jack poo poo on a miss" nobody will ever not take a +1 to hit as a priority item because while it may not be as efficient as say a +4 to AC its a static increase on your ability to do something on your turn. This is partly because of how limited the alternatives are in D&D, though. There exist, for example, quantities of bonus damage that would be sufficiently appealing to overcome a +1 to hit. D&D just doesn't provide items that do that as alternatives to +1 to hit. Sir Kodiak fucked around with this message at 19:07 on Jan 14, 2014 |
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Jan 14, 2014 19:02
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Splicer posted:There's nothing wrong with this game preference, but it seems kind of at odds with the "Kick in the door, take their stuff" style of play that D&D is based on. Sure, incrementally upgrading your sword of +x to a sword of +x+1 is boring, but the general theme of "Look at this neat thing I found!" is a big part of the game. Everyone here has been putting forward their general replacements for sword of +x+1 because for a lot of the people who play D&D, an important component of killing the Vampire Lord is ransacking the corpse for interesting things afterwards. The implementation of "Interesting Thing" has varied in quality and focus over the editions and across splats, but it's been fairly consistent in its presence. That's what D&D is based on, but not what it is right now. Primarily, your advancement comes from defeating foes, either in combat (primarily) or through noncombat solutions (to a lesser degree), and completing quests (codified starting with 4e beyond ad-hoc experience bonuses). The game *has* moved from its roots, and using the 'kick in the door get treasure' model to argue for what magic items should be is, I think, disingenious. I do think D&D is still a dungeon crawler, but like most crawlers, it's not about the pimp gear you got - it's about overcoming the game's challenges and finishing the dungeon. Look at Wizardry, Etrian Odyssey, Shin Megami Tensei and tons others. The gear is never the central focus like people think it is in D&D. Ever. Hell, in D&D we demonize Monty Haul campaigns, too. So why are we resorting to that paradigm to defend the existence of magic items as something that requires codification and a slot on the character sheet?
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Jan 14, 2014 19:03
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Barudak posted:As a warning because of how messed up DnD is with its "you do jack poo poo on a miss" nobody will ever not take a +1 to hit as a priority item because while it may not be as efficient as say a +4 to AC its a static increase on your ability to do something on your turn. In 4e, a power's riders - the conditions and bonus damage - tilt the scales heavily on favor of accuracy. You want to hit, because any hit delivers the deadlier condition payload. With Next largely taking away nice things from swordy folk, damage and accuracy are a lot more interchangeable.  Bounded Accuracy can handle a 1-point swing here, as a result. Things get knobbly once you get to +3 or higher, but +1 doesn't do much at all.
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Jan 14, 2014 19:21
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Sir Kodiak posted:This is partly because of how limited the alternatives are in D&D, though. There exist, for example, quantities of bonus damage that would be sufficiently appealing to overcome a +1 to hit. D&D just doesn't provide items that do that as alternatives to +1 to hit. Everything that follows is napkin math so if its wrong I'll adjust; Lets assume you the player deal 1d10 + 5 damage on a successful hit; translating to a range of 6-15 average 10.5 per hit and assuming bounded accuracy you hit 50% of the time for a 5.25 per turn damage. Now lets compare items. +1d4 damage translates to a bonus of 2.5 average changing the range to 7-19 average 13 with 6.5 per turn. +1 to hit translates to 10.5 per hit 55% of the time or 5.75 per turn. In fact your base damage would have to be 25 before an additional +1 to hit ties the average benefits of an additional +1d4 That all said, a lot of players would still probably take the +1 to hit because 1.75 more damage a turn isn't worth 5% more turns not doing a drat thing.
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Jan 14, 2014 19:22
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Barudak posted:Everything that follows is napkin math so if its wrong I'll adjust; A Sword of Accuracy that does nothing but give a +1 could be OK. Same for a Necklace of Deflection or what have you. Literally there for the player who doesn't want any more options and just wants to be better at what they already do. But even then it would probably be better served as a once-per-encounter reroll to avoid opening the Pandora's box.
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Jan 14, 2014 19:30
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Splicer posted:This is the big thing. Hitting more often is almost always more fun than any other option. Or rather, the fun gained from thing X is almost always going to be less than the fun lost by missing on a number that cold have/should have/felt like it should have been a hit. Completely agreed. The "no + to hit" is a stop gap solution to a bad solution for two other issues in DnD. 1) Characters will, typically by default, spend 50% of their turns doing literally nothing and 2) Rule 1 does not apply to Wizards. Seriously, Wizards are the problem in DnD that all other problems fester forth from.
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Jan 14, 2014 19:36
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Okay so I'm fine with the math, but I still don't see the issue. The game is explicitly being balanced around no magic, so if you don't want to do the extra math of creating +X+n weapons or encounters then simply don't include them in the campaign? Or remove the static bonuses from weapons that are found in the game but whose existence you would still like to make use of.
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Jan 14, 2014 19:36
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Barudak posted:That all said, a lot of players would still probably take the +1 to hit because 1.75 more damage a turn isn't worth 5% more turns not doing a drat thing. Sure, and that's an even bigger deal when you consider all the possible non-damage effects: healing, status conditions, forced movement, etc. But all that means is that for the options to be comparable you'd need to make the bonus damage larger. I have trouble imagining a 4e character where, whatever their level or build, I wouldn't take 1000 bonus static damage over a 1 bonus to-hit. I have trouble imaging a 4e character where, whatever their level or build, I wouldn't reject 1 bonus static damage over a 1 bonus to-hit. Obviously, 1000 would be ridiculous. But it establishes that somewhere between these two numbers, likely dependent on level and build, theres is a point where the two present a reasonable trade-off. Because of the un-fun of not hitting and possible non-damage benefits of attacks, it needs to be significantly higher than being made up for in expected value, but it still exists.
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Jan 14, 2014 19:36
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Rexides posted:This assumes that you need that item in order to be effective. The whole point of this discussion is to decouple magical items with baseline effectiveness of characters. The discovery of the magical greatsword should be an exciting event, but not something that has to happen. As splicer kind of points out, decoupling magical items from baseline effectiveness isn't enough. If you have a bunch of feats that give +2 to greatswords and you need several of those to make a decent character, it doesn't matter whether the greatsword you get is +1 or not.
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Jan 14, 2014 19:38
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Sir Kodiak posted:Sure, and that's an even bigger deal when you consider all the possible non-damage effects: healing, status conditions, forced movement, etc. Yeah in the initial version of that post I had a similar thing; I don't know where that trade off point is but my gut says it hovers at around +d8 or so damage (assuming a baseline of the aforementioned d10+5). The problem is you shouldn't do that because you've then knowingly introduced unbalanced mechanics to combat a problem which only exists because a core mechanic isn't providing the correct amount of fun. Assuming you redesign the classes around "only deals damage" and "only inflicts status effects" it could work because they're would be no singular OP item but you've now created a very basic trap option that is a hideously deep hole to climb from. It also removes any interest in new items unless they fall in your explicit category of interest; If I play a status inflicter I can get infinite +damage weapons and never ever take one and since I know +to hit exist and I still don't want things like "can light a dark room" because holy moly is a lot of my power/utility/funhaving tied up in the items ability.
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Jan 14, 2014 19:43
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Transient People posted:That's what D&D is based on, but not what it is right now. Primarily, your advancement comes from defeating foes, either in combat (primarily) or through noncombat solutions (to a lesser degree), and completing quests (codified starting with 4e beyond ad-hoc experience bonuses). The game *has* moved from its roots, and using the 'kick in the door get treasure' model to argue for what magic items should be is, I think, disingenious. I do think D&D is still a dungeon crawler, but like most crawlers, it's not about the pimp gear you got - it's about overcoming the game's challenges and finishing the dungeon. Look at Wizardry, Etrian Odyssey, Shin Megami Tensei and tons others. The gear is never the central focus like people think it is in D&D. Ever. Hell, in D&D we demonize Monty Haul campaigns, too. So why are we resorting to that paradigm to defend the existence of magic items as something that requires codification and a slot on the character sheet? Splicer posted:the general theme of "Look at this neat thing I found!" is a big part of the game. Everyone here has been putting forward their general replacements for sword of +x+1 because for a lot of the people who play D&D, an important component of killing the Vampire Lord is ransacking the corpse for interesting things afterwards. Splicer fucked around with this message at 19:49 on Jan 14, 2014 |
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Jan 14, 2014 19:45
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