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Kai Tave posted:D&D Next: the XBone of elfgames. It got enough mentally-impaired Goons to spend hours of their time complaining about it.
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Jul 23, 2014 01:51
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LFK posted: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. That's not really a simplification, is the thing. The only difference between "derived stat" and "ability score" is the former is calculated from the latter at character creation, and sometimes when you bump a stat or get a +stat magic item, so roughly every other level. The other 99.5% of the game, they're all just more or less fixed numbers, same as any other. Going from 4 (AC + Fort + Ref + Will) relevant defense values in combat to 7 is not a reduction. Fuschia tude fucked around with this message at 02:19 on Jul 23, 2014 |
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Jul 23, 2014 02:04
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DalaranJ posted: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. Sliding is still in, actually, it's just... stranger. Precise slides are obviously out, unless you're willing to accept that, yes, most everyone will be playing with a board. Big forced movement is still in, though, just look at Thunderwave, so knockbacks, throws, drags, go for it. Ongoing damage I've actually seen in game. While it's not codified with a keyword (hahaha, keywords are for successful games like Magic) there were a couple cases in the playtest where monsters and fighter maneuvers could cause ongoing damage. The Malebranche had "hit: 1d6+6 piercing damage and the target takes 5 damage at the start of each of its turn as it bleeds. If the target regains hit points or someone spends an action to bind the wound the bleeding stops and the effect ends." Other option is like the Stirge where If X then creature auto-hits until stopped. Damage auras are totally still in, so Chillborn are totally back. And Reactions are a huge canvas to work with.
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Jul 23, 2014 02:08
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Fuschia tude posted:That's not really a simplification, is the thing. The only difference between "derived stat" and "ability score" is the former is calculated from the latter at character creation, and sometimes when you bump a stat or get a +stat magic item, so roughly every 4th level. The other 99.5% of the game, they're all just more or less fixed numbers, same as any other. But it's not. You've got AC, which is often base + dex mod, and spell DC, and a dozen other things that are already X + Y - Z, so that ice is already broken. It's easily the most confusing change they made, since even 3e's detractors will heartily agree that going from "save vs. death ray and poison" to fort/ref/will was a great decision. I mean, I don't see it appealing to the 2e holdouts, since "make a Charisma save" has all the hassle and none of the charm of "Save vs. Rod, Staff, or Wand".
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Jul 23, 2014 02:27
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LFK posted:I'm probably going to run 5e for a while Do some PbP games; the goons who are in on those are cool and chill as gently caress.
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Jul 23, 2014 03:32
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So let's talk about the hour long short rests. Still seems to me just another way to gently caress over... Well, anything that's not a Daily spellcaster. 4e's 5 minutes was easy, but an hour? We're getting into some serious fiat and/or strictly defined random encounter territory, here, with defined rates. When's the last time you rolled for random encounters outside a retro clone? I'll repost a thing from ENWorld. Apologies/greetings if this is a goon. Capricia posted:You're right that longer short rests make for more of a resource management minigame, but the problem is that if you only have 1 or 2 short rests a day when you're having 4 or 6 encounters, then those classes are coping with vastly fewer resources than the other classes that rely on daily or at-will abilities. At level 4, you can have a situation of a cleric being able to pick and choose between 7 different daily abilities and cast them in any combination 7 times, plus the benefit of their channel divinity encounter ability. A fighter in the same boat has 2 encounter abilities. Preserve Life is a far better encounter power than Second Wind, and Hold Person or Spiritual or Bless or any number of other spells AND the flexibility in casting those spells is a hell of a lot better than Action Surge's ability to make another attack. But assume they're equal. Hell, assume that 1st level spells aren't as valuable as making an extra attack on your turn, say they have only half the value. Say that the cantrips are absolutely worthless.
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Jul 23, 2014 03:57
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dwarf74 posted:So let's talk about the hour long short rests. The overwhelming problem still comes down to 'If we have the option to get some of the party's resources back or all of the party's resources back, we choose all of them.' The imaginary restriction of a timelimit you need to follow doesn't really come into account when your still blowing an hour for the short rest anyway.
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Jul 23, 2014 04:00
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dwarf74 posted:So let's talk about the hour long short rests. How it matters is that it punctuates exactly what kind of a break in action qualifies. If a short rest were thirty seconds that would mean sitting and doing nothing for 5 rounds is all it takes to get all your encounter abilities back. If it's 2 minutes that means basically any time you're not right in the thick of combat is good enough. If it's 15 minutes it means you can conceivably be kinda quiet, hunker down, and be ready to go before anyone finds you. An hour means you need to be safe. Kingcom's right in that "the option to get half or all, always choose all" is an issue, which is why the super-short short rest is useful: because it just happens, so it's not an "option." Ideally a "short rest" is "any span of time long enough that the DM feels it is appropriate to re-roll initiative." Take the decision making out of it: classes that use encounter powers get their encounter powers, full stop. Just looking at the starter set, basically any time the party can take an unharassed 1 hour Short Rest they can just as easily pack up and take a Long Rest instead. On the flip side there's an awful lot of the module where the options are "no rest" or "leave (at which point you take a Long Rest)" So I guess I'm a liar: I agree and disagree. The time is only relevant in that it justifies the mechanics. The problem is that Short Rest has clearly been dictated by the verisimilitudinousness of Arcane Recovery, which is actually just a daily power disguised as an encounter power.
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Jul 23, 2014 04:40
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Is the basic rules going to be rewritten or added too when the manuals come out? If so, it seems to be worthwhile holding off printing a copy till later.
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Jul 23, 2014 05:33
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Comstar posted:Is the basic rules going to be rewritten or added too when the manuals come out? If so, it seems to be worthwhile holding off printing a copy till later. Added to at the least. Monsters and they've confirmed a couple spells will be added.
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Jul 23, 2014 05:53
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dwarf74 posted:So let's talk about the hour long short rests. Ritorix opened my mind so I can see the matrix. And by the matrix I mean Next design philosophy. If you're wondering why short rests are 1 hour long let me enlighten you. At some point during the private playtest they tried short rests that were 30 minutes long, but some people complained that that didn't feel long enough. I guarantee that is what happened. The duration of short rests is completely arbitrary. What really matters is how often the DM chooses to disrupt rest attempts, that's what determines whether the party will short rest after every encounter or rarely short rest.
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Jul 23, 2014 06:58
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DalaranJ posted:Ritorix opened my mind so I can see the matrix. And by the matrix I mean Next design philosophy. Right and this inevitably leads into this super DM vs Player conflict where the players are carrying around steel door frames and heavy equipment to seal themselves in and save up a bunch of explosive rune spells on the door every time they need to rest or the players are wrapping the wizard up in bandages and clogging his ears full of wax and covering his bag with a sack all to make sure nothing interrupts his full rest. This is a thing that happens in other games.
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Jul 23, 2014 07:02
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Hour long rests are there to have "short rest mechanics" for 4e players, while effectively neutering because gently caress 4e players.
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Jul 23, 2014 07:06
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4e players like rests, right? And feats? I heard those guys love feats. What the heck, throw 'em in.
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Jul 23, 2014 07:18
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ProfessorCirno posted:Hour long rests are there to have "short rest mechanics" for 4e players, while effectively neutering because gently caress 4e players. People were physically incapable of accepting the notion that people could quickly bandage their wounds and take a breather in 5 minutes.
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Jul 23, 2014 07:23
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Everyone knows that most major team sports have two hours for halftime, so a one hour rest is even more heroic than real life!
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Jul 23, 2014 08:02
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I'm way behind. Why is a one hour rest bad? Sounds fine in plain English.
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Jul 23, 2014 08:06
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FRINGE posted:I'm way behind. Why is a one hour rest bad? Sounds fine in plain English. LFK posted:How it matters is that it punctuates exactly what kind of a break in action qualifies. If a short rest were thirty seconds that would mean sitting and doing nothing for 5 rounds is all it takes to get all your encounter abilities back. If it's 2 minutes that means basically any time you're not right in the thick of combat is good enough. If it's 15 minutes it means you can conceivably be kinda quiet, hunker down, and be ready to go before anyone finds you. An hour means you need to be safe. Kingcom's right in that "the option to get half or all, always choose all" is an issue, which is why the super-short short rest is useful: because it just happens, so it's not an "option." Ideally a "short rest" is "any span of time long enough that the DM feels it is appropriate to re-roll initiative." Take the decision making out of it: classes that use encounter powers get their encounter powers, full stop. tl;dr if you aren't under any sort of pressing time constraint and you have the wherewithal to hunker down mid-adventure for an entire hour, there's not much of a compelling reason for you to simply not take the full eight hours and get all your stuff back instead of just part of it. And if your options are "no rest" or "leave" then there's even less incentive to consider resting an hour instead of eight. Yeah, you can throw ticking time bombs at the players to keep them from constantly cashing in on a full rest whenever...but when even a Short Rest is a solid 60 minutes long a "ticking timebomb" is going to keep you from doing even that. So in a roundabout way it seems like 5E really really wants you to either A). Just take a long rest, it doesn't matter, or B). Don't rest at all. A 5-minute or so short rest like in 4E lets you regain resources (and burn resources as well, regaining encounter powers even as you probably wind up spending some healing surges) while still giving you the ability to maintain a sense of urgency. It also means that the players themselves rarely feel compelled to simply stop mid-adventure for eight hours because 5 minutes is enough for them to top off their HP and regain their encounter powers (which are the ones that get the most use in any given fight) so it mostly heads off the issue before it even arises.
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Jul 23, 2014 08:28
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It's not even as if this is a "natural language" issue. If a short rest was listed as "any length of stress-free time to bind your wounds and catch your breath" it'd be entirely in "natural language" and still wouldn't last a goddamn hour. The problem is Mearls has stated gently caress 4e and gently caress fighters.
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Jul 23, 2014 08:33
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ProfessorCirno posted:It's not even as if this is a "natural language" issue. If a short rest was listed as "any length of stress-free time to bind your wounds and catch your breath" it'd be entirely in "natural language" and still wouldn't last a goddamn hour. The thing is, the sort of GM who takes "an uninterrupted 60 minutes of rest" as a challenge is basically the sort of GM that's going to look for any excuse to deny the characters a Short Rest unless they jump through a series of hoops and rear end-checking beforehand (and maybe not even then, look out for random monsters). Any other sort of GM is going to just handwave "60 minutes" into "okay, some time passes, now back to the adventure." It's both completely arbitrary and completely pointless.
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Jul 23, 2014 08:38
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4e had once-per-battle powers and 'short rests' that effectively served to separate battles and show when those powers were supposed to recharge. Narratively, they really were short rests, a few minutes of stretching, bandaging etc. so groups could handwave them and assume their once-per-battle powers would actually recharge for the next battle unless the DM specifically wanted to pull some long battle with waves and poo poo. Come the 5e "design" team and their pick'n'mix approach, and they just simply lift some once-per-battle powers and then realise that they will need to include some sort of short rest as well. In an amazingly dumbfucked design decision, they decide to make these short rests take one hour, because reasons (probably because their pasty nerd asses need an hour to recover from any strenuous physical activity). As an hour long rest is much harder to justify narratively than a coffee break, this hoses classes that don't rely on Vancian powers, because gently caress jocks. If the party is not on a strict timer, i.e. they can take an hour long rest willy-nilly, they can arguably take a longer rest as well, so  can get their powers back, too. Mission accomplished.
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Jul 23, 2014 08:42
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Kai Tave posted:The thing is, the sort of GM who takes "an uninterrupted 60 minutes of rest" as a challenge is basically the sort of GM that's going to look for any excuse to deny the characters a Short Rest unless they jump through a series of hoops and rear end-checking beforehand ProfessorCirno posted:and still wouldn't last a goddamn hour. Littlefinger posted:In an amazingly dumbfucked design decision, they decide to make these short rests take one hour, because reasons (probably because their pasty nerd asses need an hour to recover from any strenuous physical activity). If the idea is so offensive (which seems weird) then just call it five minutes at your game and its like it never happened.
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Jul 23, 2014 08:46
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FRINGE posted:If we're going to have the nerd-bashing about this one weird little topic, have you ever been in a fight? Had a non-trivial injury? It takes more than five minutes for the adrenaline shakes to wear off. Appeals to realism have never really had a lot of firm traction in a game where people insist that hitpoints are a literal measure of how many arrows you can have sticking out of your body before the next one kills you. This is the sort of thing that leads to "well I tied a mouse to my wrist and tried using the cord to pick it up and couldn't, therefore we're going to errata this feat."
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Jul 23, 2014 08:52
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Kai Tave posted:This is the sort of thing that leads to "well I tied a mouse to my wrist and tried using the cord to pick it up and couldn't, therefore we're going to errata this feat."
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Jul 23, 2014 08:57
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FRINGE posted:Ive heard this mentioned but totally dont get it... whats the story? It's a thing Jason Buhlman of Paizo apparently did in order to see how powerful some feat or item that let you tie a cord to your weapon and the other end around your wrist in order to pick it up easier if disarmed should be, and based on his personal experiences they changed how it worked. He later said that it was all a joke but the changes stayed, so. "Realism" is a lovely reason for anything in D&D because D&D is not realistic, period. Nothing about how fights in D&D work is realistic, so saying that one hour resting times to regain your encounter powers/martial dice/whatever make sense because "well that's more realistic" is dumb as hell. The change is "offensive" in the sense that it's a dumb change for no reason. It's completely arbitrary, adds nothing to the game, fails at being a sop to 4E fans (which you might ostensibly assume it is), doesn't aid the fiction, etc. Saying "you can handwave it away" doesn't make it any better than any of the other stuff Next wants you to handwave.
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Jul 23, 2014 09:04
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FRINGE posted:Thats what it seems like to me. An hour sounds perfectly alright for narrative purposes of bandaging/cleaning/sharpening etc. Five minutes doesnt make sense at all. Bad DMs will still be bad DMs. Why would you not just full rest then if your going to be safe for an hour?
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Jul 23, 2014 09:10
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Kai Tave posted:doesn't aid the fiction, etc. kingcom posted:Why would you not just full rest then if your going to be safe for an hour? Reading between the lines I dont think that story-level time matters that much in more recent styles, and I'm not sure that random encounter lists are really a thing anymore. From a tactical game perspective the 'actual' time allotted to resting is probably pointless. Thats why I mainly pointed to the fiction/story part. The mouse/wrist guy is an idiot. He shouldve at least used a truncheon. 
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Jul 23, 2014 09:20
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FRINGE posted:The rest I get, but that one I guess I dont totally agree with. "Realism" gets into that "feeling" topic where of course none of it is real but "seems realistic" can help a story. (If youre playing with the story/narrative nerd poo poo to begin with, which we do (well, did ... no time for a while now). Except for the fact that "realism" in this context is being defined as "what seems realistic to a bunch of pasty 40-somethings who spend all day in front of a computer or playing AD&D." And again, no amount of making rests take 60 minutes for the Fighter to regain his special dice makes a game with hitpoints, AC, or the other zillion abstractions D&D employs any more realistic than having them recover in five minutes. I guarantee you that the sort of person who scoffs at 4E's five minute short rests as too unrealistic to preserve immersion is more than willing to happily handwave away all the discrepancies to be found in hitpoints because "that's the way it's always been."
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Jul 23, 2014 09:39
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Kai Tave posted:Except for the fact that "realism" in this context is being defined as "what seems realistic to a bunch of pasty 40-somethings who spend all day in front of a computer or playing AD&D." Its also a very minor thing, which was my main point. It really seems like that specific one would fall into the "who cares" bucket.
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Jul 23, 2014 09:44
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FRINGE posted:Well we wont agree, but we apparently play with different kinds of people. If you can point to someone on the D&D Next design team who spends his off hours fighting orcs and dragons with a longsword while wearing plate armor I will happily stand corrected. Otherwise I think I'll stand by my point that D&D is a game made by nerds who don't know anything about what fighting (or athletic endeavor in general) is actually like, for nerds who don't know any better either. FRINGE posted:Its also a very minor thing, which was my main point. It really seems like that specific one would fall into the "who cares" bucket. It's a minor thing that's representative of the design philosophy of Next as a whole. It's not like this one thing exists in isolation or it's the only thing people have been critiquing here.
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Jul 23, 2014 09:51
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FRINGE posted:Its also a very minor thing, which was my main point. It really seems like that specific one would fall into the "who cares" bucket. Problem is its not a minor point as has been pointed out. Some classes depend upon having multiple short rests per day to get and use their abilities. Nobody is going to do that when your giving up a huge amount of time to begin with. Everyone is just going to take the full day rest meaning the control to keep the wizard from dominating things is completely irrelevant. Again you either don't rest or full rest. Classes that regain resources of a short rest get screwed. FRINGE posted:Aside from saving time (if youre in a game that uses time for anything that matters), one (old) thing going back to 1e/2e is if doing the old "random encounters" thing, and dont really want to 'really' camp then you take care of your necessary poo poo and get moving. You will either have 0 or 1 rolls-worth of a chance of something bothering you instead of a bunch. Time sensitive scenarios are generally going to mean you won't be stopping for an hour and push on, hurting the classes that depend on short rests. Random encounters encourage really lovely things to happen. It means as a player I want to have a single fight. Rest, trigger a random encounter and rest. Never advancing beyond a single fight at a time to make sure I have plenty of resources left to deal with another random encounter. Nothing will progress and everyone will be fluffing around. Your still getting xp so its not like its even a bad thing to do. That 1 hour time matters as again, some classes depend on getting that short rest to refuel their very limited powers.
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Jul 23, 2014 09:55
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DalaranJ posted:Ritorix opened my mind so I can see the matrix. And by the matrix I mean Next design philosophy. 010100N010010E101001101X00101001T01010 1101S10101U00010C1011001000K1001S01001 Resting was a huge point of grog contention during the playtest. Remember, 4e didn't exist, so they are coming from a game where you regain 1HP per day if lucky and frequently have to leave a dungeon to rest, and suddenly you can recover in 5 minutes and all your HP come back at night. What is this poo poo?! They had to rename healing surges to hit dice to sneak a 4e concept into the game in the disguise of something familiar. You should be happy that HP actually recovers overnight because that was probably the next thing to go. That's why HD only recover half per night of rest instead of all of them. So now, narratively speaking, the short rest is a lunch break. They are still going to happen at least 1/day because spending HD and using Arcane Recovery is still pretty important. The funny thing is they made it intentionally hard to interrupt a long rest, but easy to interrupt a short rest. It takes an entire hour of interruption for a long rest to fail. That's a lot of combats. kingcom posted:or the players are wrapping the wizard up in bandages and clogging his ears full of wax and covering his bag with a sack all to make sure nothing interrupts his full rest. That's a great idea, I'm going to write that one down.
ritorix fucked around with this message at 10:37 on Jul 23, 2014 |
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Jul 23, 2014 10:34
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So yeah, I have a question. In 4E hitpoints are pretty much not anything to do with damage, rather than a big abstraction of stress, bruises, cuts and scrapes. My read of 4E basically says that until you hit bloodied no one has actually done anything more than bash your armour or kick your shin, bloodied is the point where someone rakes a blade across you but doesn't hit anything important, and it's not until you actually go down that something important has happened. It's heavily abstracted, of course, but it largely made sense. You haven't actually been badly hurt, so of course your hitpoints come back. A surge isn't so much your bones knitting together, it's you nutting up and fighting on despite the fact your arm really fuckin hurts. I never really played 3X, but do those systems actually assume that hitpoints are pretty much a measure of your remaining blood? Why else would they come back at an extremely limited rate? If people are concerned about "realism" in 5E, then surely outright saying "hitpoints are a loose measure of how much you can screw up before someone gets something important" makes more sense at literally every level than "hitpoints are a literal measure of damage and you are covered in far more meat at high level"
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Jul 23, 2014 13:08
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ShineDog posted:So yeah, I have a question. You have pretty much the correct interpretation of what HP actually are. 3.x had the same logic. 5e too. People themselves seem to believe that hp = meat chunks blowing off of people because they have come to the conclusion that D&D is some kind of medieval historical fantasy simulator despite nothing in the mechanics remotely supporting this idea. It primarily comes about as a result of forcing martial characters to be dependent on spell casting characters to function. This is supposed to be a two way street of the spell caster relying on the martial except the spell casting classes often are granted abilities which allow them to replace martial characters in most situations or allow them to support their own resource systems with limited restrictions.
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Jul 23, 2014 13:37
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"Have you ever tried working out? I did once, and I was sore for days!" -> "HP should take several days to recover" -> "First level mage regains 1hp a day" -> "well, it'd add complexity if everyone had different rates"
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Jul 23, 2014 13:39
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I think a lot of the "HP are actual wounds" thoughts come from editions where the only way to get HP back was to sleep for a ridiculous amount of time (which nobody did) or use spells with names like "Cure Light Wounds" (which everyone did). Both of those methods emphasise that you're healing up wounds. That said, I'm pretty sure there's a definition of hitpoints in 3e somewhere that says that they're not measuring actual wounds but all your ways of getting HP back approximated healing your wounds, so I guess that's where people got the idea from. Of course, the whole "lost HP = wounds" thing falls apart when you consider that there are no wound penalties in D&D. You fight as well with 200 HP as you do with 1 HP, so they obviously can't be actual wounds. But there are spells that cure your wounds that give you HP back... so... It's almost as though a new edition would be a good chance to clear up stuff like this forever, but that didn't happen.
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Jul 23, 2014 13:44
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FRINGE posted:Well we wont agree, but we apparently play with different kinds of people. The issue is that "short rest" abilities are substantially weaker (and/or less plentiful) than daily resources, since there's an understanding that they can be used several times per day. With shorter rests, this is a sensible conclusion. With hour long short rests, it's not. dwarf74 fucked around with this message at 13:58 on Jul 23, 2014 |
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Jul 23, 2014 13:51
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FRINGE posted:If we're going to have the nerd-bashing about this one weird little topic, have you ever been in a fight? Had a non-trivial injury? It takes more than five minutes for the adrenaline shakes to wear off.
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Jul 23, 2014 13:54
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I think the disconnect comes primarily from use of the word "hit" when an attack succeeds. All the DoaM freakouts would certainly support this.
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Jul 23, 2014 13:57
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I was going to post something then realized they'd changed short rest from the previous version adding in the "nothing more strenuous" which is dumb. Drop combat? Explored for a bit? boom short rest.
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Jul 23, 2014 14:29
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