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Mendrian posted:I think this is actually a really cool question and worth exploring. Why are Wizards allowed lateral growth as well as level-based growth while fighters are limited to the latter? Wizards theoretically have versatility going for them. So the idea is, "Do more, less often" while martials are, "Do less, more often". But that's stupid design, as has been covered like a million times. So you can either give the wizard less to do or give the fighter more to do. I prefer combo of the two. Because tradition, basically. The guy who designed the first edition did it badly, and now that same bad design is so ingrained and expected that the thought of it not being there is anathema to both the designers and the core audience.
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Feb 13, 2014 00:50
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Rulebook Heavily posted:Wish is actually a hilariously bad capstone. Your entire class is built around just saying what happens and it happens, and then you get a spell where you can say anything you want, but unlike every other spell some of the control you're used to is taken away by the DM? How is that an upgrade compared to "declare something happens, no one can gainsay you"? Speaking of Wish, it's interesting to look at how they are actually doing it in 5e. The spell has three different functions. The most simple is to replicate any single lower-level spell. So the mage gives up their highest-level slot (mages only ever get 1 level 9 slot, which they gain at level 17) and cant have something potentially more useful like Time Stop. In exchange they get perfect versatility for one spell slot, they can even duplicate a cleric spell like Resurrection or whatever. Just by itself, that's a great capstone. Then there's a list of things the Wish can do without DM intervention. Create valuable objects from thin air, heal a bunch of people to full, or force a reroll of any single recent roll. But if they choose to do any of these, they lose the ability to cast spells until they complete a long rest. And their Strength drops to 3 for a few days, for what that's worth. Finally there's the traditional 'do whatever you want, but you better be specific' use of Wish. And the only possible way to balance out that sort of thing - the word balance doesn't even really apply at this point - is to let the DM adjudicate it as they wish. "The spell fails" is an option. The 'cant cast for the day' penalty applies here too.
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Feb 13, 2014 02:34
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ritorix posted:The most simple is to replicate any single lower-level spell. So the mage gives up their highest-level slot (mages only ever get 1 level 9 slot, which they gain at level 17) and cant have something potentially more useful like Time Stop. In exchange they get perfect versatility for one spell slot, they can even duplicate a cleric spell like Resurrection or whatever. Just by itself, that's a great capstone. You mean exactly like Wish was in 3.5 (except for the loss of spellcasting for the greater effects)?
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Feb 13, 2014 02:53
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fool_of_sound posted:You mean exactly like Wish was in 3.5 (except for the loss of spellcasting for the greater effects)? With that change that you can't use it to raise your ability scores. But spellcasting loss for a spellcasting class is a significant penalty under most circumstances.
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Feb 13, 2014 03:15
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ritorix posted:With that change that you can't use it to raise your ability scores. But spellcasting loss for a spellcasting class is a significant penalty under most circumstances.
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Feb 13, 2014 03:44
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:It's also a really loving dumb penalty in a game where the ratio of people to characters is going to be 1:1 most of the time. If you were playing a full party in a Baldur's Gate or the like, having one person's capstone be "do a unique thing and then be worthless" would be a strategic resource to deploy while you move the rest of the 6 people you control around to protect the now-spent plot device. In a 1:1 (so, table-top) the balancing factor is "and now Gary plays his 3DS while the rest of us finish the encounter out, if there's any left." Thats the niche the new dnd mobile games are designed to fill.
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Feb 13, 2014 03:55
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If you really want to get down to it, one of the problems is that "wizard" is not a class. It is an archtype. Imagine if you had a class who's power was "Everything not magic." Would that make sense? Why does the opposite make sense, then?
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Feb 13, 2014 05:05
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:It's also a really loving dumb penalty in a game where the ratio of people to characters is going to be 1:1 most of the time. If you were playing a full party in a Baldur's Gate or the like, having one person's capstone be "do a unique thing and then be worthless" would be a strategic resource to deploy while you move the rest of the 6 people you control around to protect the now-spent plot device. In a 1:1 (so, table-top) the balancing factor is "and now Gary plays his 3DS while the rest of us finish the encounter out, if there's any left." A spell that turns your character class into "Level 18 Spectator" unless the party takes a break from adventuring is just not a great mechanic.
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Feb 13, 2014 06:11
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ProfessorCirno posted:Imagine if you had a class who's power was "Everything not magic." Would that make sense? Why does the opposite make sense, then? This would be amazing. quote:The Overachiever dedicates every aspect of their being to the perfection of mind, body, and spirit (except for magic). Mix Richard Feynman, Bo Jackson, and Bruce Lee, and you're still not even close to how perfect these folks are at every non-magic related task. Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 07:18 on Feb 13, 2014 |
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Feb 13, 2014 07:15
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dwarf74 posted:This, so very much this. Eh, I don't think it's that bad. It makes using Wish that way into a party decision, which in my experience is often how Wish spells played out in older editions. The wizard cast the spell, but only after consulting the party as to how best to use it. It's still lame that other characters don't get equally powerful abilities. More and more I realize how good those free armies were for balancing narrative power. It's not the ability to alter reality at will, but an army is a pretty good tool for impressing one's will on the other inhabitants of reality.
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Feb 13, 2014 08:10
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If you had to put a cap on the rough upper limit on a Wizard's maximum narrative power, what would it be? A big part of the problem with wizard's is the breadth as well as depth of their powers but still. Where Level 5 spells are now? Level 6? Teleportation? Flying? What do you consider the highest acceptable limit of wizardly radness?
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Feb 13, 2014 08:32
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Mendrian posted:What do you consider the highest acceptable limit of wizardly radness? It can be wherever the hell you want it to be. But the Fighter and Rogue have to have an equal amount of radness. A lovely amount of contribution that you can "do all day" isn't acceptable when you're trying to design classes that are going to be played at the same table.
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Feb 13, 2014 09:24
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I always liked 4e's power sources so if I were splitting up wizards that's how i would do it. Arcane: power over elements Primal: power over plants and animals Divine: power over radiant and necrotic energy Psionic: power over force and telepathy Shadow: power over illusions and so on Of course I also kind of dislike martial classes being seperated into really niche things i don't think a fighter and a sneaky fighter (rogue) need to be separate classes.
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Feb 13, 2014 10:30
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Elfgames posted:Of course I also kind of dislike martial classes being seperated into really niche things i don't think a fighter and a sneaky fighter (rogue) need to be separate classes.
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Feb 13, 2014 10:43
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Waaaay back in the day, Gygax wrote an article for Dragon (or Dungeon?) talking about the birth of the rogue class. See, everyone in his campaign was trying to sneak about, or pick locks, or climb up walls and into rooms, so he wound up making an entire new sneaky class for sneaky players to be sneaky with. Suddenly the party went from everyone being stealthy and sneaky, to only the rogues doing it. It was a cross-the-board nerf to effectiveness, forcing everyone to choose between "Being sneaky" and having a class that won fights. Eventually they added backstab to try to bring rogues back up to parity, but it was a crippling change that the Man At Arms never really recovered from, to this very day. (The lesson Gygax took from this was to not sweat the rules so much, which is why he was a fantastic DM and kind of a bad game designer)
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Feb 13, 2014 10:52
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Matthew Colville, who is a dude that's said a lot of things I disagree with, actually wrote up a blog post on the creation of the Thief that more or less examined it from that premise, that once the Thief was turned into its own separate class that it instantly walled off a bunch of conceptual space that had, prior to its creation, been something for anyone to do. And I can't say I really disagree with that one, having a bunch of narrow, niche martial classes and then "one guy for all arcane magic, one guy for all divine magic, one guy for nature magic plus shapeshifting maybe" is not good design.
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Feb 13, 2014 11:18
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Sounds like there'd have been a lot of bother saved if they'd instead given the Fighting Man the Thief skills and had him be Master of the Material.
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Feb 13, 2014 11:32
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Hell, roll every martial class up into one if you're going to toss out 4E's roles the way they are. Have one single "martial" class that can focus on a schtick or broaden out into several disciplines...a cunning mercenary equally skilled with a blade and a bow who isn't shy about resorting to thievery when times are lean, a master tracker and scout with a greatspear who inspires his allies with grit and determination, a battlefield tactician with a silver tongue and proficiency in a surprising variety of weapons, etc. Stuff like "ranger magic" can simply be handled through multiclassing or as alternate class features...at level X instead of taking "Peerless Tactician" or "Rip Some Fucker's Arm Off and Beat Them To Death With It" you gain a limited spell progression. The same goes for things like animal companions, though you could even make "has an animal companion" something like a theme anyone could take. I mean, this'll never happen for a variety of reasons but if someone put a gun to my head and told me to make a fantasy heartbreaker I'd absolutely consider just shoving all the various "mundane guy with weapons" classes together for a start.
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Feb 13, 2014 11:45
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If I were to redesign DnD to have only four broad classes, I would go with role or style of fighting instead of power source. I think that the guy who is good with a sword because he is swole shouldn't be a different class from a guy who just pumps magic into his blade or someone who prays to his god for swording skills. Maybe the details will change, the swole guy can probably push people around and the magic sword guy could set them on fire, but the underlying structure of the class is the same: get in there and sword a dude in the face.
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Feb 13, 2014 11:56
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Kai Tave posted:Hell, roll every martial class up into one if you're going to toss out 4E's roles the way they are. Have one single "martial" class that can focus on a schtick or broaden out into several disciplines...a cunning mercenary equally skilled with a blade and a bow who isn't shy about resorting to thievery when times are lean, a master tracker and scout with a greatspear who inspires his allies with grit and determination, a battlefield tactician with a silver tongue and proficiency in a surprising variety of weapons, etc. Back when I was doing a heartbreaker for one of the contests, that's how I had it set up. You chose your power source, not your class.
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Feb 13, 2014 13:05
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Mystic Mongol posted:Waaaay back in the day, Gygax wrote an article for Dragon (or Dungeon?) talking about the birth of the rogue class. See, everyone in his campaign was trying to sneak about, or pick locks, or climb up walls and into rooms, so he wound up making an entire new sneaky class for sneaky players to be sneaky with. Kai Tave posted:Matthew Colville, who is a dude that's said a lot of things I disagree with, actually wrote up a blog post on the creation of the Thief that more or less examined it from that premise, that once the Thief was turned into its own separate class that it instantly walled off a bunch of conceptual space that had, prior to its creation, been something for anyone to do. The thing is, the Thief doesn't have to work like that, even just playing by those same old rules. Everyone can roll Dex to sneak, the Thief just has a percentage chance to automatically Hide in Shadows without rolling Dex. Anyone can roll Str to climb, the Thief can just sometimes Climb Walls without needing to roll. Nothing, as far as I can remember, said your character couldn't try to tip toe without making noise. Nothing stopped your Magic User from pouring water onto the dungeon floor to find the hidden pressure plate, even if you didn't get to roll a percentile to Find Traps. It was really, I think, a misinterpretation of the rules that lead to "only Thieves can find traps, no matter how diligently you search for them". Then 3e took that misinterpretation and ran with it in the form of Trapfinder and Wild Empathy, which turned "certain classes sometimes just succeed on certain tasks" into "certain classes are the only ones who can succeed on certain tasks".
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Feb 13, 2014 13:14
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That is kind of true but it falls flat once you realize that failure has a penalty. If you're trying to go unnoticed then failure means a fight (so damage+ lost time) or when you're disarming a trap you take damage so having the fighter do it instead of the theif means that you're exposing yourself to more risks without any extra reward so of course only the person with the best chance is going to do it. And that's not completely a bad thing if someone devotes resources to doing a thing he should get to be the one who does that thing but that's a really needless overlap between class and skills we already have skills so why is there a need for a class that is fighter + Skills?
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Feb 13, 2014 13:48
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Elfgames posted:That is kind of true but it falls flat once you realize that failure has a penalty. If you're trying to go unnoticed then failure means a fight (so damage+ lost time) or when you're disarming a trap you take damage so having the fighter do it instead of the theif means that you're exposing yourself to more risks without any extra reward so of course only the person with the best chance is going to do it. And that's not completely a bad thing if someone devotes resources to doing a thing he should get to be the one who does that thing but that's a really needless overlap between class and skills we already have skills so why is there a need for a class that is fighter + Skills? e: well, except that then Fighters would have been better than the other two classes, since pre-3E wizards/clerics weren't the crazy business they were in 3e.
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Feb 13, 2014 14:03
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Rexides posted:If I were to redesign DnD to have only four broad classes, I would go with role or style of fighting instead of power source. I think that the guy who is good with a sword because he is swole shouldn't be a different class from a guy who just pumps magic into his blade or someone who prays to his god for swording skills. Maybe the details will change, the swole guy can probably push people around and the magic sword guy could set them on fire, but the underlying structure of the class is the same: get in there and sword a dude in the face. I think if you took the Diablo 2 setup but mixed in some multiclassing you'd have something cool. Take the Druid Summoning tree and Elemental tree, mix in the Amazon's Bow & Crossbow skills and suddenly you have something approximating a Ranger. Mix Paladin and Necromancer for different flavors of Cleric, or give the Necromancer the Druid's shapeshifting to make a Warlock. This was the original basic idea for my heartbreaker. You have a mage that does nature/primal magic, warlock that does dark/black/evil/necrotic magic, cleric/paladin that does divine magic. For martial dudes there's the lightly armored, dexterity-based rogue/monk/assassin type, your archery-focused ranger/hunter, and then the heavy soldier who's awesomest with shields. Edit: really, any class setup can work just fine, as long as there is some thought put into balancing them against each other from the ground up. What 4e did was get rid of the bullshit where they were trying to balance apples against oranges. Someone should make a 4e class compendium, leave out all the trap/garbage feats/powers. Like, most PHB classes were alright but some only hit their stride with the Power books, and class design in general sorta peaked in PHB2. Instead, we're getting "Next" P.d0t fucked around with this message at 15:25 on Feb 13, 2014 |
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Feb 13, 2014 15:13
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quote:Ultimately fighters are thematically stronger than wizards. The most boring, cut & paste, forgetabble rolled up in thirty seconds and named the same as the last one but with a new first name fighter actually comes with a lot of flavor simply from his choice of weapon. We've got the traditional longsword, which means your warrior isn't a jumped up peasant because the only use for a sword is killing, so he's a mercenary or maybe a soldier or a knight. You can probably tell which by the armor he's in. He could have an axe or a scythe, suggesting a more pastoral background, or a thick club or a pair of torches, showcasing his despearation and hard times. Choice of one hand or two says a lot of personality about the way they approach combat (the primary activity of adventuring) and thus how they approach their life in general. They could have something exotic like a khopesh, making them a foreign trader or maybe an outlaw driven from their land. They could favor small, fast weapons and live on their wits, robust, simple weapons and fight straight up, polearms and try to keep their problems away from themselves and approach combat methodically, or just some giant two and a half handed monsterous axe and reduce all their problems to their simplest components, a pile of bits. And all this is ignoring what some weird exotic weapon says about them, or what someone who has three or f`our or twelve different weapons. This is the reason I can't stand playing DnD style wizards in any game. Setting aside any mechanical considerations they're just so very, very lame. I don't want to play a slow, helpless old man with a bathrobe and a pointing stick and no class abilities aside from "all the spells". No one does, except DnD nerds. Give me a Paladin or a Shaman or a Monk or a Necromancer or a Ranger or whatever, something with flavor and style and a focused theme and hell, equipment choices I will play the hell out of it, all day every day. Even knowing Wizards were OP I could never play them back in the day because boring. So very, very, boring.
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Feb 13, 2014 17:31
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ProfessorCirno posted:If you really want to get down to it, one of the problems is that "wizard" is not a class. It is an archtype. Actually that's how the very early games, the pre-published beta if you want to call it that, of OD&D played. Originally there were only Fighters and Wizards, so they were both archetypes. Fighters were the "everything not magic" class. Class as specific profession evolved over time as more classes were added to the game.
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Feb 13, 2014 17:56
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J. Alfred Prufrock posted:The thing is, the Thief doesn't have to work like that, even just playing by those same old rules. The rules are really, really bad at communicating this. There are multiple instances in the rules of how you only roll once for a check, and nowhere does it say that you can or should run thieves like this with a one-or-two roll system. On top of that, it's needlessly clunky and the thief pays for this ability by being incredibly crappy at actually surviving the consequences of failure. All this just means that there should be ways to do it better. D&D traditionally solved this by making the thief ever more of a niche that someone "had" to fill, just like the cleric.
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Feb 13, 2014 19:21
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Thought experiment! Let's say the Wizard is completely unchangeable from its current state. What's the best way to buff martial classes to the same power level both in combat and narratively? I've got some ideas myself but I'm interested to see what everyone else thinks.
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Feb 13, 2014 20:02
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You'd have to heap more and more powers on the fighter until he was just as generic and forgettable as any of the other wish fulfillment casters in the various caster editions.
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Feb 13, 2014 20:09
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Give them full casting progression because there's no way to balance that.
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Feb 13, 2014 20:11
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CaptCommy posted:Thought experiment! Let's say the Wizard is completely unchangeable from its current state. What's the best way to buff martial classes to the same power level both in combat and narratively? I've got some ideas myself but I'm interested to see what everyone else thinks. Turn all fighters into Goku.
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Feb 13, 2014 20:40
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socialsecurity posted:Turn all fighters into Goku. Son Goku or Sun Wukong? Because either is acceptable.
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Feb 13, 2014 20:43
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If campaigns can have slow medium and fast xp progression like from the xp table in pathfinder why cant characters have a low medium and high power campaign progression? Each character page has three columns of advancement. Low power campaigns have fighters and rogues as they are in 3.x and Casters have one or two types of magic missle spells with infinite casts but only get to about some of the lvl 4 spells by lvl 20. Also there are few magical items, settings are gritty and dark. Medium power campaigns Have some of the better martial feats added from third party books. Casters get to lvl 7 spells with some of the more powerful ones still omitted. High power campaigns have everyone flying around breaking the rules and fighting gods by lvl 20. Martials start out with feats that negate penalties already learned at lvl 1 and a new feat every level allowing super jumps, slicing spells in half mid flight, or whatever. Everyone has +10 weapons by lvl 20. The towns people are used to dragon or necromanmcer attacks every week.
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Feb 13, 2014 20:51
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Mystic Mongol posted:Son Goku or Sun Wukong? Because either is acceptable. All Fighters get to be Vegeta All Paladins are Goku. All Monks are Sun Wukong. There. I fixed D&D.
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Feb 13, 2014 21:01
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CaptCommy posted:Thought experiment! Let's say the Wizard is completely unchangeable from its current state. What's the best way to buff martial classes to the same power level both in combat and narratively? I've got some ideas myself but I'm interested to see what everyone else thinks. Turn Killing into a Fighter class skill and Murdering into a rogue one. Either skill can be attempted any number of times in combat.
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Feb 13, 2014 21:41
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CaptCommy posted:Thought experiment! Let's say the Wizard is completely unchangeable from its current state. What's the best way to buff martial classes to the same power level both in combat and narratively? I've got some ideas myself but I'm interested to see what everyone else thinks. Leave the wizard unchanged, and the other class gets cleric spells, barbarian rage, thief abilities, druid shapeshifting, animal companions, bard songs, warlord buffs, holy swords, fighter attacks/armor, six different types of kung fu, and an army. Serious answer: Roll all the martial types together and you might begin to approach wizard-like power/utility. I mean, a fighter/thief/ranger/paladin/warlord/barbarian might do the trick, if they were allowed to do Kung-Fu Hustle type poo poo. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 21:53 on Feb 13, 2014 |
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Feb 13, 2014 21:48
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Wizards have a be REALLY AWESOME at something for a bit a day and then be kinda useless afterwards mechanic. Either all the classes need to have the same length adventure day and replicate that same wizard mechanic or the game needs to somehow prevent the party from resting at will / force the party to adventure for a certain length of time. The other martial classes also would need to use the wizard bench marks that Mearls laid out in the latest L&L article. When wizards can cast fireball, fighters need to be able to wig out and stab everything within 30 feet, and that damage needs to scale at about the same rate as a wizard and needs to be repeatable about as frequently as 3rd level spell. They’d also have to be able to switch that attack out for powers that are about as useful as say, flying for a limited time, becoming invisible, or dispelling a magical effect. These power choices would also have to be non-exclusionary, so if you dispelled magic today, but you needed to stab everyone in the room in the face today, it wouldn’t be any harder than saying when I do my warm-ups for the day I pick multi-face stab, instead of ignore nerdery. That would have to repeat at all the other major milestones. When spell casters are throwing death-spells around martial types are doing Dim-Maks. How you might fluff those guidelines is sort of a different matter. Since the last time wizards tried a scheme like this, the names created a weird racist-ish internet backlash (weeaboos!) and this edition is all about the deendee feeeeeel. It would be dramatically easier to divide up the wizard into a handful of thematic classes which can excel at one thing but not everything.
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Feb 13, 2014 23:12
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Now this is interesting. NDAs being violated? No idea, but the first good Next news I've seen in a while, from the current closed playtest.Cybit;6261340 posted:Not true - there are now complex fighters & simple mages. Dausuul;6261437 posted:Just curious, by "latest documents" do you mean the current private playtest, or the final public one? Cybit;6261463 posted:Private. Dausuul;6261472 posted:Fishing for confirmation of news about private playtest: Achieved. Also: Cybit;6261494 posted:So, speaking as someone who is currently running 3 D&D Next games, started playing with 3E in 2000ish, and ran a five year 4E game (and for several years, had 2-3 4E games at the same time)....
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Feb 14, 2014 00:53
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I'm going to call bullshit on this because he's posing as a 4E fan. e: A 4E fan that somehow wasn't driven off by the official forums and aggressively regressive playtests.
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Feb 14, 2014 01:08
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It would be really nice if Next turned out to be good.
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