treeboy posted:with skills and languages often tied to background vs class, this is not nearly the issue it was in 3.x for any class. If you're simply referring to characters going around dominating NPCs constantly to solve problems, that has its own consequences. I'm not talking so much about skills, dude. I'm talking about the mechanics to compel knowledge. Skills are a weak example of that, because they're written backwards. What's more important are spells or prayers that allow people to commune with the gods or ask a question of an oracle and insist on answers or knowledge that everyone can understand should be meaningful. In other words, certain characters are guaranteed the ability to find out answers about the Great Boojum that's been terrorizing the countryside or the secret of the island they're trapped on, but others are dependent on the DM's choice of DCs and what they consider to be appropriate for a given roll, which is a pretty big burden given the way skills are written.
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Aug 12, 2014 14:08
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Pecos Bill broke a cyclone and rode it like a bronco. I don't think that's really in line with "high jump slightly lower than a real life athlete" in terms of fantasy adventure or mythic exploits.
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Aug 12, 2014 14:09
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treeboy posted:I almost exclusively play martial characters actually. I generally don't care for casters, I find them pretty boring and too squishy for my liking, though in one of the Next playtests I ran a Mad-Professor-esque wizard who was convinced his party was actually a group of graduate students assisting him in his research of magical mud, it was a little wacky, but fun. I'm pretty sure an abjuration or hell even any wizard with any level of sense could probably tank more damage than a fighter except maybe at level 1 or 2
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Aug 12, 2014 14:12
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The really funny thing about all the whining about how Bone Company of Skull Battalion is completely unrealistic is that this is exactly what playtesting is supposed to uncover. Playtesting must eventually start trying to break the system in order for it to be worthwhile. That doesn't mean that 5e was playtested poorly (although the intimations about the "math team" are suggestive), but it is a worthwhile discovery.
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Aug 12, 2014 14:16
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If someone is really desperate for early survivability they can just take 1-2 levels of fighter and the remaining 18-19 in wizard.
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Aug 12, 2014 14:17
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treeboy posted:Actually bringing Fighter in line with casters (which again, largely isn't the problem, it's the reverse of the problem, wizards should be brought down) would be just giving Fighters Wizard spells, but with a sword. The first part, I don't think anyone will argue with. It's primarily a wizard problem, not a fighter problem, sure. Maybe maybe the fighter could have some extras and the wizard could lose a bit less power though. The bolded part is why people say "D&D causes brain damage". Fighter abilities don't need to be spells. They can be stuff the fighter can do all day. You can add daily abilities without them being spells. Here are some examples (in no particular order). I made them up as I was typing them. I'm sure a salaried game designer could do a better job, given several months to work on it. "You can jump the distance of a bowshot". No dex check, no "unless the ground is slippery", you can just jump that far. Like, whenever. You provoke OA as normal when you do it, you're not teleporting, you can just jump real far. "You can see in the dark". Not "gain infravision", not "as per the wizard spell darkseeing 2/day", you can just do it now. No problem. Because you're a hero. It just works. "You can go without sleep, food, or drink for up to week". Because you're tough like that. It doesn't even bother you. When you get this ability, it halves or quarters your rest requirements too. "Hold the line". Once during a given fight, you can declare that you will not be moved. You have to do so loudly and obviously. You can't be pushed or pulled from your spot, knocked down, dragged away, or anything else until either the fight ends, you die, or you choose to move. Any ally adjacent to you is affected too. "The feat of the spears". You can throw three spears at once, at three different targets. Because you practised. Upgraded, you can throw spears that return to you at the end of the round, whether or not they hit their targets. "Don't kill the hostage". On a successful attack, a target holding a hostage or item released that hostage or item to you, undamaged. On a miss, nothing bad happens. Of course, they might kill the hostage on their next round, but you don't do it accidentally because you're a professional. "Behead". The ultimate ability? Once per day, you can attempt to chop the head off something that has a head. It makes a saving throw. If it fails, its head is chopped off. If that was its only head, it dies. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 14:24 on Aug 12, 2014 |
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Aug 12, 2014 14:18
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Effectronica posted:That doesn't mean that 5e was playtested poorly (although the intimations about the "math team" are suggestive), but it is a worthwhile discovery. I'd counter that this explicitly means it was poorly tested, as nobody in the process stopped to even consider the most obviously predictable outcome of using rules. Edit: Beheading ought to be standard level one issue. moths fucked around with this message at 14:24 on Aug 12, 2014 |
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Aug 12, 2014 14:22
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Tendales posted:The party has to cross a raging river; the fighter insults the river's mother until the living incarnation of the river itself manifests to throw down. The fighter wrestles the river into submission; once it's calmed down the refugees the party's escorting can safely cross. Afterwards, the fighter and the river go out for drinks. They still keep in touch. The river is getting help for its anger issues. I may have wandered afield from my original point, but I 100% want this scenario to just be poo poo Fighters Do. Break Laws, Bend Rules. I can sort of understand why some people would want martial classes to feel more grounded, because to them having a mundane point of reference makes the supernatural seem more supernatural. Of course I'm completely in a different boat: my thinking is that in a fantasy world suffused with magic the baseline of what is natural should be different: I mean, this is a world where there are literally creatures that have been created by gods or otherwise through divine intervention that still qualify as natural for the purposes of the setting (including dwarves and goblins). To me it just stands to reason that in a setting with magic the lines between natural and supernatural might get a bit blurry. And to me a setting where even the mundane has just a touch of magic to it feels more magical than one where there is a clear line drawn in the sand between the natural and the supernatural.
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Aug 12, 2014 14:22
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moths posted:I'd counter that this explicitly means it was poorly tested, as nobody in the process stopped to even consider the most obviously predictable outcome of using rules. Well, it's entirely possible for people to make mistakes. I don't have a whole lot of confidence that this is the only big area where the changes to magic cause the system to break down, but I'm keeping an open mind.
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Aug 12, 2014 14:25
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Giving wizards the ability to summon skeletons while ignoring the consequences of summoned skeletons is pretty bad production.
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Aug 12, 2014 14:27
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Has anyone tweeted the skeleton issue to Mearls in any capacity? (I mean, we know what his response will be, but I'm curious.)
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Aug 12, 2014 14:32
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I hope not, I'd prefer to have one fun thing to do if I ever get stuck playing Next.
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Aug 12, 2014 14:37
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Okay big post still to come but just another thing I randomly noticed; mundane vs magical crafting.  You wanna make plate armour? gently caress you, 300 days. Unless you're a Wizard, in which case it's Instantaneous.
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Aug 12, 2014 14:45
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Jack the Lad posted:You wanna make plate armour? gently caress you, 300 days. Unless you're a Wizard, in which case it's Instantaneous. Wizards: We're better than you!
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Aug 12, 2014 15:07
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Jack the Lad posted:Okay big post still to come but just another thing I randomly noticed; mundane vs magical crafting. I like how it points out a wizard can simply invalidate obstacles with Fabricate (sheer cliffs, bottomless chasms). Now, a wizard can't insta-build a gigantic stone bridge, but Fabricate is only a fourth level spell.
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Aug 12, 2014 15:11
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No one is still pretending the skeletons are okay in game balance terms, right? Like we're not seriously entertaining the notion that "some trolls" or "a narrow corridor" solves the problem? I got caught up on this post from three pages back:seebs posted:I think that's probably, and this may sound odd, higher-fantasy than D&D normally is. I mean, yeah, you could have epic fighters doing that, but then they'd probably be up against wizards who were moving mountains rather than just throwing a few meteors. No! Bullshit! The fighter starts out making weapon attacks, and ends the game making more frequent weapon attacks. That's literally what the fighter gets. It attacks more times. The wizard starts out shooting magic missiles and making, I don't know, fog clouds. If the wizard progressed the same way the fighter did, it would end up, at level twenty, casting more magic missiles at a time and making bigger fog clouds. What you don't understand is that the wizard already has the ridiculous progression to transhuman skill built in. Calling down meteors, stopping time, and opening portals directly to Hell are not normal feats, they are the exertion of godline power. This poo poo is beyond the ken of mere mortals and represents a qualitative evolutionary leap above, like, lighting your pipe without some tinder or whatever. "Normal" magic, strictly speaking, should be limited to temperature changes, spooky noises, weather prediction, and summoning minor ghosts and spirits who you have no means of actually controlling. It's very telling that you're like "well if fighters got to do anything more impressive than they could at level 1, then wizards should become even more impressive", because as Catastrophe said it's not actually about verisimilitude, it's about getting to play the highest level character at the table. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 15:28 on Aug 12, 2014 |
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Aug 12, 2014 15:26
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seebs posted:I'm mostly used to quasi-simulationist GMing, where the answer to the question "are there a lot of bones here" is primarily determined by where you are and what the GM thinks the world should be like there, not whether or not the GM loves or hates the necromancer idea. You're not, because this doesn't exist. "Simulation", in tabletop games especially, is an illusion. At best, it's a feeling produced by a good game that's being used to tell good stories that feel natural and coherent. But if it's ever used as a justification for something, then it's always a bullshit excuse covering for something else. Now, that's not to say there's malice involved. More often than not, a DM that uses that excuse genuinely believes that they're making a decision based on "that's just how it would be", but they never actually are. If there's a necromancer in the party, and the only thing holding him back from game breakingly powerful is "he can't have more than a few bodies at any given time", and the DM says "gosh darn, wouldn't you know, you just can't seem to find bodies", no matter how carefully he grounds it in the "simulation", he's just bullshitting to ad-hoc a backdoor fix to a game design problem. This is bad. The DM's correct answer to bad game design is to fix it, explicitly and openly, in a conversation between reasonable adults. Passive aggressive "simulationism" is toxic. seebs posted:I think that's probably, and this may sound odd, higher-fantasy than D&D normally is. I mean, yeah, you could have epic fighters doing that, but then they'd probably be up against wizards who were moving mountains rather than just throwing a few meteors. There's not some immutable law of reality that wizards must be more powerful than fighters. Guess what happens in almost all non-D&D fantasy fiction involving swordsmen and sorcerers? The sorcerers are the villains that lose. There's absolutely no reason why "epic fighters" couldn't exist alongside the same Wizards we have now. A fighter doing something as awesome as a Wizard doesn't make it "higher fantasy". It makes it "the exact same fantasy". eth0.n fucked around with this message at 15:52 on Aug 12, 2014 |
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Aug 12, 2014 15:48
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moths posted:I'd counter that this explicitly means it was poorly tested, as nobody in the process stopped to even consider the most obviously predictable outcome of using rules. Or these problems were noticed and just ignored, because if they were good enough for previous versions (non 4e) then good enough for this one - i.e. 3rd edition - 4HD of skellies or zombies per level. Over the course of the playtests there has been lots of suggestions and feedback on many systems and "features" of the new game. One of the frustrations by people playtesting the packets was that most problems were never addressed.
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Aug 12, 2014 15:56
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Jack the Lad posted:Okay big post still to come but just another thing I randomly noticed; mundane vs magical crafting. Doesn't it say that you can't use the spell to create armour? What am I missing?
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Aug 12, 2014 16:04
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AlphaDog posted:The first part, I don't think anyone will argue with. It's primarily a wizard problem, not a fighter problem, sure. Maybe maybe the fighter could have some extras and the wizard could lose a bit less power though. Like i said, 90% wizard problem, 10% fighter problem. I'm not suggesting the fighter needs to literally have spells, but even your examples, as heroic as they are, are simply bigger versions of what Fighters can already do. It doesn't change the fundamental issue that Wizards are operating on a completely different paradigm (like the crafting example above demonstrates) wherein they can change the nature of reality on a semi-regular basis. Now, this difference does not break the game in the sense that it cannot be enjoyable for everybody sitting at the table, especially with considerate DM'ing making sure each character gets a moment to shine from time to time or an adventure geared towards their background/story. But if you're going to buff the Fighter to "wizard levels" then they inherently need reality re-defining abilities. Whether the mechanics suss out exactly the same as wizard spells, at the end of the day the two would be roughly interchangeable. That's why I say it's not a Fighter problem, it's a wizard problem. By all means, give the fighter the ability to just Jump 30' because reasons. That sounds great/cool/heroic. But you also have to remove (or limit) the ability of Wizards to do *everything* Again, even as poorly written as it is, Animate Dead would not be such a huge issue if Necromancers didn't also get all the other spells and benefits of being a wizard. edit: homebrew fix really is to just make Animate Dead a concentration spell.
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Aug 12, 2014 16:04
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Seldom Posts posted:Doesn't it say that you can't use the spell to create armour? What am I missing? "Unless you have proficiency" Which you can grab with a background.
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Aug 12, 2014 16:04
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eth0.n posted:You're not, because this doesn't exist. "Simulation", in tabletop games especially, is an illusion. At best, it's a feeling produced by a good game that's being used to tell good stories that feel natural and coherent. Were the melee powers in 4e really so mad an magical? I HIT THIS GUY REALLY HARD. or I CLEAVE AN AREA AROUND ME or I loving RUN AT YOU AND YOU GET IT IN THE FACE AND EVERYONE ALONG THE PATH FALLS DOWN or I TAUNT THIS GUY SO loving HARD HE TRIES TO SMACK ME kind of covers most of the 4e fighter "spells" but apparently thats the worst thing ever. Theres no game reason that wizards need to have the power of a sun at their fingertips though, particularly if it helps them design a coherent game. I certainly never felt less than heroic in 4e when my sorcer was slapping people with rainbow blasts of chaos, despite my powers being less than apocalyptic.
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Aug 12, 2014 16:09
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treeboy posted:Now, this difference does not break the game in the sense that it cannot be enjoyable for everybody sitting at the table, especially with considerate DM'ing making sure each character gets a moment to shine from time to time or an adventure geared towards their background/story. This is a useless standard. By this standard, it is literally impossible for a game to ever be bad, or even in need of improvement. A "considerate" DM can fix any and all problems with a game. The correct standard is "does this design choice tend to promote, or inhibit, enjoyment for everybody at the table? Would another choice tend to promote that better?" quote:But if you're going to buff the Fighter to "wizard levels" then they inherently need reality re-defining abilities. Whether the mechanics suss out exactly the same as wizard spells, at the end of the day the two would be roughly interchangeable. I agree with this. The Wizard is excessively powerful and complicated for what is still largely a tactical combat game. While I think it's entirely feasible to have a game where both swordsmen and sorcerers wield ultimate power, I think that's better suited for a narrative-focused game, than a tactics-focused game. ShineDog posted:Were the melee powers in 4e really so mad an magical? I HIT THIS GUY REALLY HARD. or I CLEAVE AN AREA AROUND ME or I loving RUN AT YOU AND YOU GET IT IN THE FACE AND EVERYONE ALONG THE PATH FALLS DOWN or I TAUNT THIS GUY SO loving HARD HE TRIES TO SMACK ME kind of covers most of the 4e fighter "spells" but apparently thats the worst thing ever. Yeah, definitely. 4E was great not just because it made Fighters useful, but also actually put thought in what Wizards ought to be doing in the modern D&D tactics-game context, and what ramifications magic has on the world. Boring people who lack imagination thought limiting wizards "ruined" them. No, it makes them all the more interesting. eth0.n fucked around with this message at 16:18 on Aug 12, 2014 |
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Aug 12, 2014 16:15
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4e is a master class in retaining a fighter's "mundane" aesthetic while keeping that fighter even with a magic user, yeah. Mind you, in 5e there'd be more call for out of combat exploits, like the power to forge a legendary spear in a single night's work or the power to swim an entire sea or the power to cut straight through a standing enchantment with your sword alone. Generally, you'd want to merge "fighter" and "rogue" into a single "hero" class.
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Aug 12, 2014 16:23
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A few pages back, but:thespaceinvader posted:the descent 2e-style movement is one of the better things about the edition actually - being able to use your movement as points during the turn rather than discrete actions is an improvement over 4e, though the 4e action-economy puzzle was often interesting. What does this mean, exactly? That you can half-move, act, then finish the rest of your movement speed?
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Aug 12, 2014 16:32
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Fuschia tude posted:A few pages back, but: Yes you can split your move. Move 3 - Attack - Move 3 (Provoking an OA potentially)
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Aug 12, 2014 16:41
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I always love the "but the Fighter needs to be mundane" argument because if the wizard was held to the same standard they'd have powers like "set a broken bone", "look at the sky and predict tomorrow's weather", or "trick some peasants with some sleight of hand or minor pyrotechnics". Which, honestly, seems pretty much in line with "hit dudes really hard with a sword".
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Aug 12, 2014 16:46
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ImpactVector posted:I always love the "but the Fighter needs to be mundane" argument because if the wizard was held to the same standard they'd have powers like "set a broken bone", "look at the sky and predict tomorrow's weather", or "trick some peasants with some sleight of hand or minor pyrotechnics". Which, honestly, seems pretty much in line with "hit dudes really hard with a sword". Right - I've said it before, but expecting someone to play a mundane Fighter alongside a fantasy Wizard makes as little sense as expecting someone to play a mundane Wizard alongside a fantasy Fighter. How many people would enjoy being Penn or Teller in a party with Beowulf or Cu Chulainn?
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Aug 12, 2014 16:50
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eth0.n posted:You're not, because this doesn't exist. "Simulation", in tabletop games especially, is an illusion. At best, it's a feeling produced by a good game that's being used to tell good stories that feel natural and coherent. Simulation/simulationist is a horrible derail-causing word. There's the GNS description, the idea of reality-simulation, and then whatever weird private definitions people come to conversations with, all doing their best to try to get people to talk past each other. In my experience, people who functionally play with the style that I think is being talked about here aren't doing it out of any sort of desire for realism so much as a desire to have a baseline of expectations for how the world works in able to let people make more meaningful choices about their actions in a fair environment. The end goal isn't 'realism' so much as it is 'avoiding world-expectation miscommunications'. I think you can really get some fun play out of a campaign where the GM just sets up a little world with interesting stuff going on in it and just tries to resolve the consequences of the players' actions 'fairly'. That said, a game like that needs incredibly careful design. I'd say that kind of campaign requires a ruleset that doesn't need GM rules-patching way more than almost any other type of game, since that shifts the style of gameplay away from 'fair adjudication' and destroys the whole strength of that style of campaign. It's not that a sim sandbox world is okay with poo poo being unfun because 'that is how it would really be', it's that a sim sandbox game absolutely needs to be designed twice as carefully as any other type of setting because it is 100% mandatory that you need to create a world where 'how it would really be' is something that naturally guides the campaign towards fun. Basically, skeleton fuckery is twice as bad in a sim game as it is in most other styles of play.
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Aug 12, 2014 16:52
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But guys you're forgetting that jocks are really mean.
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Aug 12, 2014 16:58
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OtspIII posted:Simulation/simulationist is a horrible derail-causing word. There's the GNS description, the idea of reality-simulation, and then whatever weird private definitions people come to conversations with, all doing their best to try to get people to talk past each other. And that's really my point. That "simulation" is basically a meaningless term, so whenever someone says they're making a decision "because simulation", it's not actually a reason. Sometimes there's actually a good reason that they're not articulating well, but it more often seems to be cover for a bad reason. quote:In my experience, people who functionally play with the style that I think is being talked about here aren't doing it out of any sort of desire for realism so much as a desire to have a baseline of expectations for how the world works in able to let people make more meaningful choices about their actions in a fair environment. The end goal isn't 'realism' so much as it is 'avoiding world-expectation miscommunications'. I think you can really get some fun play out of a campaign where the GM just sets up a little world with interesting stuff going on in it and just tries to resolve the consequences of the players' actions 'fairly'. Sure, that makes sense. I'd say that's a particular style of narrative guidance. But's what's absurd is to say that balance issues aren't really problems because the simulated world will just inherently, without the GM making an implicit rebalancing decision, arrive at some equilibrium where imbalances are canceled out. A high level wizard is simply not going to have trouble procuring and transporting a sufficient quantity of bones in a truly "simulated" reality that wasn't specifically crafted to stand in their way.
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Aug 12, 2014 17:17
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Stormgale posted:So I got to sleep wakeup and we get like 100 posts of skeleton Chat, now for an addition to this discussion: Chain pact sucks, though. You know what is worth giving up PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWER? An "improved familiar" that does not scale at all. At 15th level, you can at-will hold a demon, though!
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Aug 12, 2014 17:33
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Jack the Lad posted:Okay big post still to come but just another thing I randomly noticed; mundane vs magical crafting. People have been complaining about this poo poo for fourteen years, how did they not fix it?
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Aug 12, 2014 17:36
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LightWarden posted:People have been complaining about this poo poo for fourteen years, how did they not fix it? ManMythLegend posted:But guys you're forgetting that jocks are really mean. Pretty much that
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Aug 12, 2014 17:41
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Also in the Hamzanama, the spirits of Gabriel, Khizr, and Ali show up and bestow our heroes Amir Hamza, Amar the Ayyar, and Muqbil the Archer, with the gifts of Ascendant Luck in Combat, Faster-Than-Wind Speed, and Supernatural Peerless Archery. How come this stuff never happens in D&D.
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Aug 12, 2014 17:43
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LightWarden posted:People have been complaining about this poo poo for fourteen years, how did they not fix it? at the very least you could keep the spell but add a premium cost of double the normal item or something
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Aug 12, 2014 17:43
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Or you could just let normal people craft plate in a more reasonable timeframe. On the bright side, all you need is 300 smiths to turn out a plate per day. Henry Ford, here we come.
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Aug 12, 2014 17:51
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Jack the Lad posted:Right - I've said it before, but expecting someone to play a mundane Fighter alongside a fantasy Wizard makes as little sense as expecting someone to play a mundane Wizard alongside a fantasy Fighter. I'm going to say that playing Derren Brown alongside Beowulf or Cu Chulainn could be great fun. Confidence tricksters, conmen, and mentalists conning people who can squash them. It also makes much more sense of the archetypes than the fighter being weak.
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Aug 12, 2014 17:51
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LightWarden posted:Or you could just let normal people craft plate in a more reasonable timeframe. Look at all the peasant fighters working for their wizard overlords! I guess D&D really is a class-based system, huh guys? 
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Aug 12, 2014 17:57
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LightWarden posted:Or you could just let normal people craft plate in a more reasonable timeframe. I don't know how accurate a figure it is, but I remember reading once that for modern armourers it took somewhere around 1200 man hours to make a full suit of plate armour. Unfortunately I don't know if they were using modern stuff like power hammers though. But still, 4 hours a day, lazy bastards.
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Aug 12, 2014 17:58
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