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Countblanc posted:This makes a lot of sense, yeah. WotC had significant resources (compared to the rest of the hobby) to spend on things like balancing and pushing through content, and it let them do a lot of stuff with 4e that simply wouldn't have been feasible for a small developer.
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Jul 22, 2014 19:22
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mastershakeman posted:How did tsr nearly kill d&d with 2e?
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Jul 22, 2014 19:32
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ImpactVector posted:I don't really know a ton about 13th Age other than the initial hype and what I've gleaned from the D&D/chat threads, but it seems like there are enough differences that it seems pretty unlikely they were even going for "4e but better!". That hype was probably just 4e fans projecting since Heinsoo was working on it. It really seems more like a D&D/Fate hybrid with the abstracted movement and backgrounds. That comment wasn't really directed at 13th Age (or any specific game), more a general statement on why we haven't seen any serious effort to do a 4e-style game from other developers. Working with numbers to that degree is both challenging and often pretty boring, especially compared to writing more freeform stuff like DW's playbooks. Sacred BBQ's upcoming kickstarter might fill the niche of "4e but without some of the issues we hate/are bored with," though.
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Jul 22, 2014 19:34
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zachol posted:I feel like DW, 13th Age, and Fantasy Craft pretty much cover all the bases in terms of games that are like D&D but better. I'd add Torchbearer if you want something to support that itch for really deadly fantasy with a lot of crunch and where keeping track of stuff like food and light is important.
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Jul 22, 2014 19:43
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It's more "like 4e but without a decade of ginned up hostility." It's nice being able to run a game at the LGS without drive-by shitheads making the same "tabletop WoW" cracks. And it's nice having players excited about fun mechanics, able to do interesting things, and participate as non-wizards.
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Jul 22, 2014 19:59
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13th Age really doesn't have anything to do with 4e. I'm not sure if there's a 4e but better game out, it seems like 4e-style design is difficult and involves a lot of very careful thought when creating new powers. Torchbearer is super neat and occupies a similar niche of DW in terms of evoking a specific kind of playstyle through actual written rules instead of habits and social contracts. Winson_Paine posted:Because 13th Age is a small run by a small company, and D&D 5E will appear in Target and Toys R Us and wherever around the nation. I am prepared to suggest the veteran internet savvy player with a lot of options is not their target demo here. This was my point--imagine if 5e wasn't D&D, but instead "Ruins & Riches" or something, getting put out by "Stone Bridge Games" or even Frog God or whoever, where marketing consists of posting ads on a handful of forums and trying to get people to blog about it. Would anyone be talking about it? I feel like almost certainly not, it wouldn't be getting any more press than a game like Blood & Treasure, which is another underwhelming but okayish reinterpretation of the divide between 2e and 3e that at least doesn't have baggage like Mike loving Mearls weighing it down. Like a single guy and his dozen or so playtesters made a game that's pretty much just 2e with 3e-looking math, still has caster supremacy but at least kept stuff like fighter strongholds, has an entirely serviceable and useful section called "Creating a New Monster" at the very start of the monster section with actual real guidelines focused on the final stats (not this bullshit naturalistic "determine abilities, stats follow" poo poo from 3e), and overall looks pretty much on par with 5e, a game made by multiple professional designers and released by the biggest company in the hobby, two whole years later. Seriously what the actual gently caress.
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Jul 22, 2014 20:39
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Even the formatting and PDF tech is way substandard on the 5e side. There's no table of contents or index in the Basic doc, there's no internal hyperlinking, and they have some kind of lovely text-layer thing which prevents copying and pasting (from their free PDF file) and messes with eReaders and some tablets.
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Jul 22, 2014 20:49
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Every spell description, of every class and level, is in one big alphabetical list That's the only thing about the layout that really gets me. Mostly because I really, genuinely don't understand it at all. Someone decided that that was the best way to present them.
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Jul 22, 2014 20:59
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fidgit posted:I'm having fun with the starter set as well. But, I've been playing D&D for a long time and don't mind TPKs. My players are experienced and have a good idea when to run away. It does seem like this system was made to placate the vocal grognards. It's been touched on, but the difference is that Mearls just says "yeah sure whatever, DM call" when asked any question. DW gives you a set of principles and an agenda to help you make said calls. Fiat in and of itself is not a bad thing, you should change a game for your group if it makes things better, but telling people to just do that instead of helping them decide when to fiat and what kind of fiat to use is bad. The difference is that most RPGs treat DMing as some sort of mystical art that cannot be taught, DW gives real advice for people looking to DM.
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Jul 22, 2014 21:01
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Rulebook Heavily posted:Even the formatting and PDF tech is way substandard on the 5e side. There's no table of contents or index in the Basic doc, there's no internal hyperlinking, and they have some kind of lovely text-layer thing which prevents copying and pasting (from their free PDF file) and messes with eReaders and some tablets. Jack the Lad posted:Every spell description, of every class and level, is in one big alphabetical list Really, a PDF is a pretty bad way to present this kind of information, even in the best case. An wiki-style web app would be infinitely more usable as a reference, and able to be reformatted to work easily on smartphones. It's easier to sell a self-contained PDF, but the basic rules are free.
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Jul 22, 2014 21:06
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What people really mean most of the time when they talk about a game that encourages "GM freedom" is "this game obfuscates stuff enough that nobody's likely to notice or argue when I start making poo poo up." Funnily enough, these are the exact same sort of people who are likely to say things like "pretty much no one will give a poo poo about a formula," because clear, easy to understand formulas are anathema to the "GM freedom" crowd.
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Jul 22, 2014 21:08
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As a GM I like clear and obvious guidelines (especially encounter building guidelines) because then I can go full adversarial play for keeps without feeling like an rear end in a top hat.* I think those sorts of "GM freedom" people maybe have a thing about seeing themselves as generous or kind or magnanimous or something, like "oh well I could throw a dozen giants at you, but I'm such a nice guy that I won't." e: *4e looked neat for this, like I could build an encounter and the players had enough backups & things that I could play the enemies as fully and effectively as possible without worrying about overwhelming the PCs. You could never do this in 3e with some random "appropriate CR" monster, you always have to double check the stats and powers to make sure it's not going to gently caress the party up, and why would anyone hold that as a value in GMing? It's just more work, holy poo poo. zachol fucked around with this message at 21:20 on Jul 22, 2014 |
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Jul 22, 2014 21:18
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Jack the Lad posted:Every spell description, of every class and level, is in one big alphabetical list That's how it was in all previous versions of D&D, by which I mean, third edition
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Jul 22, 2014 21:20
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zachol posted:As a GM I like clear and obvious guidelines (especially encounter building guidelines) because then I can go full adversarial play for keeps without feeling like an rear end in a top hat.* I think it's more that they want the freedom to do whatever they want whenever they feel like it without the players going "uh, no, this is really stupid, these enemies are way over/underleveled and also you removing healing surges was really stupid because they're an integral part of the game's combat engine, just run the game as it is."
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Jul 22, 2014 21:37
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That seems incomprehensibly silly but alright. I can accept there'd be an appeal to not feeling an obligation to look up every rule in the book but then 3e/5e seems like a really bad fit. Maybe they could try DW or some kind of more stripped down retroclone?
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Jul 22, 2014 21:49
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So, I never really played much 4e [our group took a break after 3.5, played a few sessions of 4E then reverted back to Pathfinder because explaining anything to a few of the players took longer than it was worth to use the new system] but apparently some of the story-arches in 4e changed the face of Faerun/FR from what I've gathered. Is there a good time-line/plot points/etc that can help someone catch up who hasn't really payed attention to FR since.. Baldur's Gate?
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Jul 22, 2014 21:52
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zachol posted:As a GM I like clear and obvious guidelines (especially encounter building guidelines) because then I can go full adversarial play for keeps without feeling like an rear end in a top hat.* It's way less work if you don't do any of that, though. Food for thought.
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Jul 22, 2014 21:55
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Gorelab posted:Really the fact that D&D Next says it's gridless is probably the most mindboggling thing about it. It doesn't really support gridless play at all, the rules pretty much clearly are written with some sort of grid in mind, with all it's 5 feet intervals and stuff but hey we SAY it's gridless and it's supposed to be so? It's gridless in that you could play it like Warhammer with a tape measure or whatever. The big illusion is that it's in any way non-tactical or supports "Theater of the Mind". Whereas there ARE many systems that support TotM either through abstraction (like 13th Age) or just not caring too much about weapon ranges and firing into Mel's and all that nonsense.
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Jul 22, 2014 22:31
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Rannison posted:So, I never really played much 4e [our group took a break after 3.5, played a few sessions of 4E then reverted back to Pathfinder because explaining anything to a few of the players took longer than it was worth to use the new system] but apparently some of the story-arches in 4e changed the face of Faerun/FR from what I've gathered. They put out a nice book at the end of 3.5 called Grand History of the Realms that explains everything up to the Spell Plague, which was the big event that changed everything for 4E. 4E picks up about 100 years later, and the events of those 100 years are vague and scattered across a few novel timelines. But none of that really matters now because the current big event, The Sundering, is going to revert many of those changes. Here's a short list of stuff that happens between the BG games and now if you don't wanna search further: *Khelben hooks up Fzoul so the latter can take control of the Zhents. *Fzoul kills Manshoon unleashing scores of pissed off, crazy Manshoon clones and Manshoon wars begin. *Khelben gets booted from the Harpers and starts his own crew. *Xvim splits open and Bane comes out. *Manshoon Wars settle down leaving 3 left including one who is a vampire and runs the thieves in Westgate. *Phaerimm almost destroy Evereska. *In related events, Netherese enclave returns from the Shadow plane and begins trying to reclaim the old empire. *Crazy flight of dragons happens caused by Sammaster, who is destroyed by adventurers thwarting his plan. *Azoun dies slaying a red wyrm. His bad rear end niece becomes regent. *Obould unites orc hordes, establishes Kingdom of Many Arrows and signs treaties with Mithril Hall and the Silver Marches. *Hidden Imaskari return. Are pretty cool. *Crazy Drow poo poo goes down, leaving only Lolth, Ellistrae, and Ghaunadar standing. Ched Nassad is destroyed. *Crazy Mask poo poo goes down involving his chosen. Mask "disappears." *Hosttower of the Arcane is destroyed, Luskan falls into more chaos. *Cyric tricks Tyr into killing Helm and exiling himself. Cyric then teams up with Shar to murder Mystra. All kinds of magical hell breaks loose and setting gets changed for 4E. *Badass warlocks take over Vaasa. *Vampire Manshoon takes over Zhents. *New Netheril expands. *New nice Imaskar expands. *Cormyr expands. *Lords Alliance retracts. *Neverwinter is almost totally destroyed when Mt. Hotenow blows. *Neverwinter Campaign book happens. *Ao decides to rewrite the Tablets of Fate. Crazy god and chosen poo poo goes down. People you love and people you hate come back. *5E begins. E: despite the length of that, there's stuff I have forgotten about involving Yuan-Ti and places like Amn. Also, the order may be incorrect in places. PeterWeller fucked around with this message at 22:51 on Jul 22, 2014 |
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Jul 22, 2014 22:36
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moths posted:It's nice being able to run a game at the LGS without drive-by shitheads making the same "tabletop WoW" cracks. I still don't see how this is an insult: if you could give me an rpg with the fights of WoW, and roleplay in between, that'd be drat close to perfect for me. Though I guess the actual words could be anything, they just wanted you to know that you're having fun wrongly.
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Jul 22, 2014 23:04
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Only in the tabletop roleplaying hobby could "That game you're playing is like a massively popular game played by millions upon millions of people, designed to be readily accessible to casual and hardcore players alike, and that earns billions of dollars in revenue and stands as the unassailable leader in its class which other games fruitlessly aspire to emulate" be considered an insult.
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Jul 22, 2014 23:16
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axelsoar posted:DW gives real advice for people looking to DM. This is true, and I've become a better DM/GM thanks to my exposure to the *World games. To keep things on topic, I have a feeling that one of the first things I might house rule is the full hit points after a long rest. I'll have to see how that affects the pace of the typical adventuring day.
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Jul 22, 2014 23:49
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PeterWeller posted:They put out a nice book at the end of 3.5 called Grand History of the Realms that explains everything up to the Spell Plague, which was the big event that changed everything for 4E. 4E picks up about 100 years later, and the events of those 100 years are vague and scattered across a few novel timelines. But none of that really matters now because the current big event, The Sundering, is going to revert many of those changes. why_i_hate_FR.txt
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Jul 23, 2014 00:02
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moths posted:Oh my bad, I thought those were from preview material. Are you insulting my design skills? I worked really hard to make those more interesting than Next monsters.  treeboy posted:edit: did you intend any of these guys to have saves on their strong stats? just wondering. I errored on the side of caution since it seemed like there weren't very many. Let me take another look. Judging by Jack's chart it looks like only creatures with 'class levels' get proficient saves. I would probably give the prophet Wisdom (and Charisma but who cares). Unless you meant did I intend for those stats to boost their saves inherently. Yes, I did, that's why I only listed those stats. You can assume all the others are 10s.
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Jul 23, 2014 00:03
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zachol posted:As a GM I like clear and obvious guidelines (especially encounter building guidelines) because then I can go full adversarial play for keeps without feeling like an rear end in a top hat.* People are saying a bunch of stuff about 5e like "if Mearls is saying that whether an elf can see the world around them or not as they mediate is up to the GM, then why am I paying for these rules?", but I think that this is really the key thing. Your GM can rule elf sleep however they want and nothing too weird will happen to the game, but poo poo like encounter-building, that consistently has huge impacts on how sessions actually swing, is what I really think RPG design is all about. The DM making uninformed judgement calls on poo poo that doesn't matter isn't a big deal. The DM making uninformed judgement calls on "beat these guys or the story derails" encounter composition really is. Edit: PeterWeller posted:*Khelben hooks up Fzoul so the latter can take control of the Zhents. Not going to lie--part of me is convinced that this whole post is just a giant Markov chain.
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Jul 23, 2014 00:07
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DalaranJ posted:Are you insulting my design skills? I worked really hard to make those more interesting than Next monsters. No you did good, the influence shows and I figured it was another page they "borrowed" from more competent designers. It's not like you collected four years of paychecks to copy Heinsoo's homework on the bus.
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Jul 23, 2014 00:18
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LFK posted:Incredibly lovely business decisions piled on incredibly lovely business decisions. Lots of shovelware (both core products and merchandising), a bad habit of not paying their printers on time, firing all the real designers who knew what they were doing, alienating their better writers, and so on and so forth. TSR produced something like 600 books over the span of 9 years.
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Jul 23, 2014 00:19
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I had the chance to buy an entire palette of the Complete Book of Elves for 5 dollars once. That's how worthless a lot of the TSR library really was.
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Jul 23, 2014 00:23
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DalaranJ posted:Judging by Jack's chart I like your monsters, especially the Blasphemous Statuette. And I agree with your sentiment that it feels like the system is fighting you. I want to just ignore 1/2 the stats, because they don't matter, but then there's some little junk about it that does matter, so gently caress it, gotta do all the stats. Like Charisma and Int are the only things you can actually ignore, except if it's a caster because their Int will impact both their save and their to hit and damage, and it's in theory easy enough to just ignore all that simulation crap, but it's forever hovering behind you, reminding you that making monsters is Fantasy Biology and Taxonomy. Really, well and truly, discarding Fort, Ref, and Will is one of the few cases where making one thing simpler (fewer derived values) made many, many things far more complex. Yes, 1/2 of the saves are more or less ignored, but they're not totally ignored, and there's just as much incentive to try and fix things by adding in more Str/Int/Cha effects as there are reasons to ignore them entirely to make monster stats easier. ON THE PLUS SIDE The system supports interesting and synergistic monster abilities like 4e, so that part of monster design is still fun.
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Jul 23, 2014 00:28
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Rulebook Heavily posted:I had the chance to buy an entire palette of the Complete Book of Elves for 5 dollars once. That's how worthless a lot of the TSR library really was.
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Jul 23, 2014 00:29
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OtspIII posted:People are saying a bunch of stuff about 5e like "if Mearls is saying that whether an elf can see the world around them or not as they mediate is up to the GM, then why am I paying for these rules?", but I think that this is really the key thing. Your GM can rule elf sleep however they want and nothing too weird will happen to the game, but poo poo like encounter-building, that consistently has huge impacts on how sessions actually swing, is what I really think RPG design is all about. The DM making uninformed judgement calls on poo poo that doesn't matter isn't a big deal. The DM making uninformed judgement calls on "beat these guys or the story derails" encounter composition really is. Ehhh...stuff like "can elfs see what's going on while they're not!sleeping" may not be a fundamentally game-breaking issue but A). it's kind of an important thing to know in a game where ambushes in the middle of the night while you're camping aren't exactly an uncommon occurrence and B). it's such a stupid thing to not have an answer to. It's not like it's some weird outlier situation here, we're not talking the sort of thing that only arises when you jump through a series of hoops and technicalities like a video game QA tester jumping up and down in a corner 100 times and falling through the geometry. It's a simple yes/no question that you'd expect the guy who led development of a game for 2-3 years to have an answer to, not "just make it up, whatever." (It's also exactly the sort of thing that someone who's been in this hobby as long as Mearls has should expect players to want an answer to, which is another reason why his non-answer says a lot about the level of effort that went into making Next.)
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Jul 23, 2014 00:31
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Looking at Blood & Treasure reminded me, why did 5e completely get rid of the simplified 3 save/defense thing? Like half the retroclones do this off hand as one of the few things from 3e that was a good idea (along with the unified d20 mechanic). Hell, even if they'd gone back to save vs spells/petrification/farts/whatever it still would've been better than three main saves that obviously draw from those advances and three saves with all of ten things that target them apiece. Ugh.
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Jul 23, 2014 00:32
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Rulebook Heavily posted:lovely text-layer thing which prevents copying and pasting (from their free PDF file) and messes with eReaders and some tablets. Its a non-unicode font (which also probably screws with a lot of screen-reader software). But it works in the "print friendly" version just an FYI
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Jul 23, 2014 00:33
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PeterWeller posted:They put out a nice book at the end of 3.5 called Grand History of the Realms that explains everything up to the Spell Plague, which was the big event that changed everything for 4E. 4E picks up about 100 years later, and the events of those 100 years are vague and scattered across a few novel timelines. But none of that really matters now because the current big event, The Sundering, is going to revert many of those changes. Didn't Eilistraee get tagged as well, and Ghaunadar went "welp, I'm out"?
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Jul 23, 2014 00:34
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I mean, there basically are just three saves, and each class gets to be good at one of them. That's what it looks like in the basic set, anyway - can anyone in the full rules confirm that none of the printed classes are good at more than one "real" save? Actually, I would't be too surprised if some were, precisely to make members of those classes be unusually resilient - I'd expect monks and paladins to have at least two "real" saves, for instance. If psionics came out and targeted nothing but the bullshit saves - Int to resist psychic domination, Str to fight back against telekinesis, etc. - that would actually be pretty funny. You could almost see it working, too, since suddenly each class's lovely save is the star of the show.
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Jul 23, 2014 00:36
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LightWarden posted:Didn't Eilistraee get tagged as well, and Ghaunadar went "welp, I'm out"? I really don't know. I didn't read any of the War of the Spider Queen stuff and just extrapolated based on the GHR and how stuff stood in 4E. I thought Ellistrae made it and became a part of the good elf pantheon. My understanding is that Ghaunadar revealed that he was more powerful than anyone thought and used that power to stay out of the big fight between Lolth and the rest of the Drow pantheon. E: According to the GHR, Ellistrae stops Vhaerun's attempt to destroy her and absorbs his church. The stuff between Lolth and Ghaunadar is a separate later event. Kiaransalee also doesn't fall until after the WoSQ. PeterWeller fucked around with this message at 00:46 on Jul 23, 2014 |
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Jul 23, 2014 00:39
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If it was actually designed so that bullshit saves being bullshit was an assumption, and were like 2 or 3 lower than non-bullshit saves, that would be a pretty neat alternative instead of offering accuracy--+2 to a Con save being equivalent to swapping to a Str save. But then that would remove the fiction of the abilities/saves being equal.
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Jul 23, 2014 00:39
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Jack the Lad posted:Every spell description, of every class and level, is in one big alphabetical list Not even a listing by spell level first. "But what happens later when warlocks and Druids get wizard spells?" They get 40 pages of alphabetical spells to look through too, I guess. Also what was it someone was saying about a short rest getting back a spell each time? I thought it was only the once.
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Jul 23, 2014 00:59
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Cassa posted:Not even a listing by spell level first. "But what happens later when warlocks and Druids get wizard spells?" They get 40 pages of alphabetical spells to look through too, I guess. Yea its once a day. Problem is, how often do you think your party is going to be thinking we've got time to take two hours of breaks today but we're not going to take 8 hours because reasons. Given how everyone gets resources back through completely different means, your likely to just pick the one that gets everyone back unless theres a time limit. Theres not a lot of time limits you can put where you've only got two hours but not eight.
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Jul 23, 2014 01:11
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LFK posted:My chart... Sorry, Jack did all those earlier charts in Imp Zone. I should have realized he didn't own a copy of the starter set though. LFK posted:I like your monsters, especially the Blasphemous Statuette. http://brogue.wikia.com/wiki/Goblin_Totem  I thought it would retheme well to the idol from The Call of Cthulhu. LFK posted:ON THE PLUS SIDE This is true. This is a really nice thing inherited from 4th. Unfortunately, I feel like the condition list is considerably weaker combat-wise than 4th. (Obviously this makes it a joke compared to 13th age which outdid 4th in the area of conditions.) Damage over time is out, immobilized now disadvantages you both directions, dazed is right out because of the change in action structure, no sliding, and vulnerability is now always double which is scary powerful. I think the conditions I feel work best in combat are poisoned; frightened; and strangely enough, charmed. Not coincidentally, those are the ones I used in the monsters I created.
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Jul 23, 2014 01:24
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