Arivia posted:

Arivia posted:

Kai Tave posted:

The various complaints about how Eberron should totally have guns aren't really any more creative though. As soon as a certain subset of nerd sees anything in a fantasy game that's even slightly more advanced than your standard Tolkienian pastiche they immediately leap straight to gunpowder and latch onto it singlemindedly.

Evil Sagan posted:

I picture a row of adventurers, sitting at camp. The wizard mutters under his breath as he reviews his arcane incantations. The cleric silently prays to his god, holding the holy symbol to his chest with reverence. Meanwhile, clicking can be heard from the gunlugger as he disassembles, cleans, and reloads 10 guns with expert timing and precision.

Spincut posted:

I haven't played Pathfinder, but the Gunslinger class didn't look too bad. The Grit powers looked pretty cool, at least. Did it fail under scrutiny?

Spincut posted:

I haven't played Pathfinder, but the Gunslinger class didn't look too bad. The Grit powers looked pretty cool, at least. Did it fail under scrutiny?

M. Night Skymall posted:

Unrelated to guns, how are you liking 4e Zeitgeist? I'm getting ready to run it and I'm curious how well the encounters work as written or if I'll end up having to re-balance stuff like I did with War of the Burning Sky.

S.J. posted:

From what I remember it's complete garbage. Also it shipped with a feat (Prone Shooter?) that actively made the class worse.

Spincut posted:

I haven't played Pathfinder, but the Gunslinger class didn't look too bad. The Grit powers looked pretty cool, at least. Did it fail under scrutiny?

Zereth posted:

No, the feat that's always a bad idea to use was something else.

Prone Shooter just removed the penalty for shooting a crossbow while prone.




... You know, the penalty which didn't exist. So the feat literally did nothing.

Prone Shooter posted:

Benefit: If you have been prone since the end of your last turn, the penalty to your Armor Class against melee attacks made against you is reduced to –2. In addition, the bonus to your Armor Class against ranged attacks made against you is increased to +6.

Baron Snow posted:

I ran the first few adventures as well, so I'm going to chime in as well.

My over all impression of Zeitgeist is odd. I know they write the adventures for 4e first and then port them to Pathfinder, but the structure of some of the adventures felt more 3.5 then 4th, especially in the way they seem to avoid Skill Challenges by making their own versions of them.

As to the combats, I feel that the maps are generally too large. 4e seems to work on a scale of 20x20 and less at lower level, but every encounter has a map that's a struggle to fit on a table. For the 4th mod the train was something stupid like 18 feet long and there's a combat that's supposed to use the whole thing.

Adjustments for more or less players are pretty poorly defined. They'll be there for one encounter, and be absent for the next 3. I'm used to LFR mods telling me to add another 2 skull crushers or whatever for a 6th player and it's sorely lacking here. My party was pretty highly optimized, so several fights ended a bit faster then solos had a chance to use their oddly 3 tiered powers, and the only time the party was close to death was when I poorly adjusted a combat a bit too high.

Fake-Edit: Also to get back to guns, I just noticed that they changed the way guns work in their expanded players rules that went up in February, because reloading so quickly was "unrealistic".

Spincut posted:

I haven't played Pathfinder, but the Gunslinger class didn't look too bad. The Grit powers looked pretty cool, at least. Did it fail under scrutiny?

Winson_Paine posted:

Good luck, I asked for this thread for like two years and no one made it. MAYBE Y'ALL WILL MAKE IT FOR THE NEW GUY.

Actually, I hope so. That would be a neat thread.

Try it anyway, maybe use it as a LIVEBLOG for your KS experience. OH NO, TAXES. OH MY UNEXPECTED NONSENSE. And so on. People could follow your THRILLING KS DRAMA. Plus it would totes boost signal on the KS itself.

Mors Rattus posted:

The only Elminster I've ever seen in practice was a neat one - it was from an old 2e box on the Dales and particularly Shadowdale and the caves underneath it, so you'd think Elminster would figure in largely, right?

He doesn't. He is played as a senile old wizard who shows up in the adventure in the book exactly once - in a cave where the party is likely to wander in after having had to fight through a horse of mutant cave monsters, drow traps and some derro. He is using this cave to teach his new puppy, and every time he says the word 'heel' the wand in his pocket goes off and heals one of the party members.

E: The book also pointed out that pretty much everyone in Shadowdale has class levels and is a retired adventurer. Shadowdale is like some kind of adventurer retirement community. They never do stuff except beat up shoplifters or whatever, though, not even explore the massive tunnel complex under the inn.

E2: The book also noted that the draw spike traps had salt sprinkled over them, solely because drow are total dicks.

Lord Frisk posted:

My GM also tended to make pains to stifle the gunslinger from being more powerful, for what reason I still don't know. Basically it was a few hours worth of "full attack" and "spend moves to reload."

quote:

I've always liked Gamma World's system for guns. They're effectively an Encounter power, but you can fire them more than once in a fight at the cost of running out of ammo until you find more.

Mormon Star Wars posted:

See, if I'm going to be spending a lot of resources to be The Guy Who Shoots Guns, I'd like to be able to do it more than twice a day.

S.J. posted:

IIRC in Gamma World, you're not The Guy Who Shoots Guns, you just have guns and can use them until you run out of ammo. But I never owned Gamma World myself so I could be wrong.

Evil Mastermind posted:

Yeah, 4e-based Gamma World wasn't so much about being the gun guy as the half-swarm-of-rats-hive-mind-half-robot guy.

everythingWasBees posted:

This sounds amazing.

M. Night Skymall posted:

My main issue with WotBS was the amount of tiny meaningless combat it threw in there, which is fine in 3.5/pathfinder where combats like that can end pretty quickly but in 4E slogging through 5 equal level soldiers or something is just tedious and doesn't even use a lot of resources. Fortunately the only guy in my party who's highly optimized is a defender so they get to see the solos do everything as they whittle it down, the solo just isn't really hurting anyone very effectively.

everythingWasBees posted:

This sounds amazing.

M. Night Skymall posted:

I'll be running it in Roll20 so it's not as much of a concern logistically. Sounds good overall, even with the janky encounters the parts of WotBS I ran were a lot of fun and sounds like Zeitgeist will be similar with a little less work on the encounters. My main issue with WotBS was the amount of tiny meaningless combat it threw in there, which is fine in 3.5/pathfinder where combats like that can end pretty quickly but in 4E slogging through 5 equal level soldiers or something is just tedious and doesn't even use a lot of resources. Fortunately the only guy in my party who's highly optimized is a defender so they get to see the solos do everything as they whittle it down, the solo just isn't really hurting anyone very effectively.

Evil Mastermind posted:

Gamma World has about 20 backgrounds (like android, rat swarm, mind breaker, hypercognative, and so on), and you pick two randomly. They determine your stats and powers. The two expansions added another 20, such as AI, vampritic, wheeled, and magnetic. So you could become a octopus with Plastic Man-style powers, or a demon who could manipulate magnetism, a gelatinous yeti, or a reanimated plant.

oriongates posted:

Speaking of, Gamma World has always struck me as a good Adventure Timish setting.

Baron Snow posted:

That reminds me of the last major issue I had with combat, which is that it doesn't hold to the encounters per day philosophy at all. Most fights are the only fight of the day, so everyone gets to dump their dailies all the time.

Fuego Fish posted:

This is probably because Pendleton Ward was inspired by Gamma World (among other influences) when making Adventure Time.

dwarf74 posted:

Yeah, I mentioned that upthread. You pretty much need to toss the "1 day = 1 extended rest" rule out the window, and I'm a little surprised it was never addressed in the materials. I've generally switched to a "per act" model, where they're only guaranteed an extended rest when it's narratively appropriate. (Or when they've been horribly mauled, which has happened a few times.)

Lynx Winters posted:

13th Age rules one adventuring day as four normal-difficulty battles. After battles you get a short rest to use your recoveries (healing surges or whatever) but if you want your big poo poo back you need to press on and go be heroes instead of narcoleptic bookworms.

Comrade Gorbash posted:

So your argument is that you have a detailed enough understanding of a completely made up magic process to make declarative statements about what is obviously possible with it.