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Yeah that's just it. Design team has no idea what "core" means, only that gnomes and spells need to be in it.
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Sep 10, 2014 14:04
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OctoberCountry posted:The whole "modular core" thing seemed like marketing speak from the beginning. Every mention I remember was during the playtest was in the context of somebody asking about the rules on twiiter and Mearls saying "it'll be in a module". I believe there will be modules, but they'll be half-baked little paragraph length rules changes (like that 4E thing above) and will create all sorts of balance issues and rules incompatibilities, to which Mearls will respond "well, the DM should tweak them to work with his campaign". There have been efforts in the past to make games modular. Traveller 1E had basic and advanced systems for most of its rules - trade, chargen, starships, combat, planet generation, and so on. GURPS has both an advanced and basic combat system. DC Heroes has a set of "sliders" that would change the rules based on how deadly you wanted the game to be (getting hit with an energy blast would have different effects based on where the GM had set the deadliness slider). I think it's an area of RPGs that is ripe for further development, but I don't see any reason to believe the backwards-looking 5E team will deliver anything but a bag of wet farts in that category.
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Sep 10, 2014 14:13
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Feels weird to say this, but nWoD is actually a significantly better designed modular system. You had a core book with all the system rules, and then satellite core books with rules specific to that game, further specialized with supplemental modules. But you never had an issue with dependency - your game about human cops investigating ritual murders didn't suffer if you jettisoned the Frankensteins rules, for example. You could use as much or as little as you please, and there was a whole splat book (Mirrors) devoted to optional systems and mechanics, even including a tactical combat miniatures grid. Hell, even the D20 system was modular! How do you screw this up? (Rhetorical. You screw it up by listening to fans that don't understand how modular/core systems work.)
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Sep 10, 2014 14:46
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Is there a decent cheat sheet out there for PCs? I'm talking about something that covers really basic stuff, like how to roll for initiative, saving throws, abilities/skills, etc.
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Sep 10, 2014 15:20
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moths posted:Is there enough core system to actually support those promised modules? The combat module would essentially be a new game, and "freeform story game" kinda needs to be that way from the start. It's the opposite problem, there's too much core. Most people aren't going to bother recalculating all the saves as defenses or any other significant conversions. A modular game needs a simple, solid foundation like Fate or PbtA. With Next you're starting with too many assumptions.
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Sep 10, 2014 15:25
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So any "module" is just going to be an alternate core, at best.
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Sep 10, 2014 15:34
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So is there nothing like Arcane Spell Failure chance in 5e? If you're proficient with a type of armor, you can cast in it, no questions asked?
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Sep 10, 2014 15:45
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Power Player posted:So is there nothing like Arcane Spell Failure chance in 5e? If you're proficient with a type of armor, you can cast in it, no questions asked? Yes, that's exactly right.
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Sep 10, 2014 15:48
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Sage Genesis posted:Yes, that's exactly right.
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Sep 10, 2014 15:55
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Power Player posted:That seems kinda silly. Why? It's not really objectionable to my eyes.
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Sep 10, 2014 15:57
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Jack the Lad posted:Why? It's not really objectionable to my eyes. That's not how it used to work in the D&D I remember! 
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Sep 10, 2014 16:00
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I don't think "too much core" is that much of a barrier to modules. You could have an insanely detailed base game and still have room for snap-in extras that cover other things. "Too many assumptions" is a much better way of putting it. Maybe "too much fluff-as-rules" would be even better. I'm not even sure what the distinct mechanical core of D&D actually is. Is it "roll 1d20 and beat a target number that will be called various different things depending on the situation"?
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Sep 10, 2014 16:01
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Jack the Lad posted:Why? It's not really objectionable to my eyes. Attestant posted:That's not how it used to work in the D&D I remember!
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Sep 10, 2014 16:02
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Power Player posted:That's not really it, it just seems like that's not too steep of a cost to wear medium armor and still cast, to give up one ability score increase. Or by being a Dwarf. Again, though, it's not really a problem. A level 1 Elf wizard has 16 AC with Mage Armour.
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Sep 10, 2014 16:34
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It's balanced out by spells like Mage Armour replacing the AC you get from armour and vice versa, rather than everything being mutually additive. Arcane Spell Failure was just a clumsy way to shoehorn in fantasy stereotypes anyway (everyone knows wizards wear robes, not chainmail!) so I'm glad it's gone, that's one of the better parts of 5E.
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Sep 10, 2014 17:03
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So I'm waffling between a Fighter and a Monk in a game that's using these houserules. Basically gives Fighter all of his archetypes. Thing is it looks like Monk can get comparable AC and better saves, stun lock, dodge, etc. I guess what I'm saying is the fighter still looks like it kinda sucks even with these houserules thrown at it. Anybody got some insight into a good fighter build under these conditions, or just insight in general into things I'm probably overlooking/undervaluing? Because I'm not seeing much appeal and leaning toward just going the kung-fu route or making a rogue (but I play rogues a lot and want to try something different).
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Sep 10, 2014 18:16
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Generic Octopus posted:So I'm waffling between a Fighter and a Monk in a game that's using these houserules. I think the "Legendary Actions" idea should just be boxed up and delivered to various martial classes at the higher level. Reading the abilities dragons and vampires can do just makes those monsters quite dynamic and powerful, so give a little bit of that to high level players. Start at like 14 (later for hybrids maybe) and give a new legendary action point every few levels so that the pure non-casters have the most by 20, hybrids with some, and pure casters with none. Then figure out buckets of legendary actions that they have access to, partition them based on class/specialization, or not, and attach action point costs to them to give a gradient on potency. Basically give them access to innate combat rule-bending abilities that the high level enemy NPCs employ. Bhaal fucked around with this message at 19:24 on Sep 10, 2014 |
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Sep 10, 2014 19:19
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When I played 5e I was quite fond of the rogue "You get an extra action that you can only use to do these things" feature. Maybe you could do more with that as you levelled, allow martial classes to break the action economy more and more while spellcasters break the actual world.
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Sep 10, 2014 19:54
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Man I haven't been posting much in this thread recently, had to go back more than 20 pages to find my last post. About those houserules, not sure if that means the Fighter automatically gets all 3 archetypes, or if those changes are only if they don't pick the Eldritch Knight archetype. Going back to trying to improve the fighter I am trying to find all the mentions I had about trying to improve it in this thread, which includes a quote from someone on another forum with a real neat idea that I wish they had finished. Ryuujin posted:So Fighter doesn't really live up to a lot of legendary heroes, but if we were to try and create a subclass specifically to emulate some of those things, perhaps not as powerful as slashing mountains but great leaping and various other heroic things how would you go about it? Seems it was just the one post after all. Still got some stuff from another topic on RPG.net: Yakk;18240363 posted:Talents Known Pretty much everything Yakk was doing sounded better than my idea, but isn't remotely complete as it needs a lot more options to fill all those choices as it levels. But if Yakk ever finished that just going off of the samples I would certainly want to play it. Yakk posted:It was stolen from the pre-Greyhawk thief I read about. Basically they used the M-U spell table, and instead of spells you learned Thief Talents. These talents where simply things you could do (like pick locks) automatically without a check. Ryuujin posted:Like I said I like the way it looks and would like to see you expand it. What kind of chasis is it on? The current fighter? Something else? And this is just a base ability rather than something gained from a subclass right? What kind of subclasses would it have? Yakk posted:Because I think pure combat attributes are a bad idea -- we should instead grant the character awesome abilities that can be used in combat, which would grant both combat utility *and* non-combat utility -- here is an attempt at a list:
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Sep 10, 2014 19:57
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The Bee posted:I love the huge, extravagant way in which they missed the point of healing surges. In hindsight, that might explain why the vampire in Mearls' Heroes of Shadow project had so janky surge mechanics.
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Sep 10, 2014 20:04
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Gort posted:When I played 5e I was quite fond of the rogue "You get an extra action that you can only use to do these things" feature. Maybe you could do more with that as you levelled, allow martial classes to break the action economy more and more while spellcasters break the actual world. How about this for the Barbarian (also give them charger by default): Fury of the Winds: Once per round, as your reaction/OA/whatevs, you can make a charge attack to a creature preparing to do a standard action. Force a CON save DC(idunno), On fail: That action is cancelled. The creature can still do move and bonus actions, if it does fail. Fury of the Storm: The mid-level improvement would be if the creature that was charged takes it's move action while you have not: make a standard melee attack against it, this doesn't use any resource. Once per encounter the charge attack now hits all enemies in reach. Maelstrom of Rage: The above now applies to any creature within reach after the charge resolves. Per encounter whirlwind charge limit removed. Rigged Death Trap fucked around with this message at 20:16 on Sep 10, 2014 |
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Sep 10, 2014 20:07
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I skimmed the last ~15 pages or so and didn't see anything about this, my apologies if it's a worn-out question. Other than DungeonScape, are there any -- or any plans for -- digital versions of the core materials? Even a PDF? Basically, I want a legal way to Ctrl+F my PHB or DMG. By the look of it, they're intentionally keeping digital distribution exclusive to DungeonScape, but I would love to be wrong about that.
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Sep 10, 2014 20:15
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pksage posted:I skimmed the last ~15 pages or so and didn't see anything about this, my apologies if it's a worn-out question. You're not wrong. http://www.dnddungeonscape.com/solving-digital-distribution-dungeonscape/
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Sep 10, 2014 20:53
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Bhaal posted:The problem is you're not going to fix a backloaded imbalance with frontloading the class, which is what half of those houserule look to be. The other half are across the board upgrades like bigger hitdice which help but still don't give them a hockey stick power curve like the casters have. Someone earlier hit the nail on the head: when you're leveling deep into the teens, the wizard is unlocking tiers of game-changer spells, while the fighter is going back over feats to pick up ones that he passed on earlier. It was easier to take Maneuvers to their logical conclusion, i.e. why aren't all martials using these, than even try to go through spells with red tape and scissors. When I first started writing those house rules I attempted to work on spellcasters and spells but it was like trying to errata charm sets in Exalted all over again; there are too many and they do too much. Strength of Many fucked around with this message at 21:11 on Sep 10, 2014 |
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Sep 10, 2014 20:55
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mirthdefect posted:You're not wrong.
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Sep 10, 2014 21:15
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pksage posted:I skimmed the last ~15 pages or so and didn't see anything about this, my apologies if it's a worn-out question. After I, and a ton of other folks, got burned hard by WotC on promised digital distribution options towards the beginning of 4e's life-cycle; there's little they can ever do to convince me that they actually intend to do anything to embrace or acknowledge distribution options that aren't "Buy the big honking book. You're all pirates."
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Sep 10, 2014 21:51
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Looking at the underlying fighter problem you can do a couple of things: *As brought up before: give them NotSpells, i.e talents or what have you, that are unlocked at set levels and also scale. Either new unlocks, "Gain 2 uses for 5th level talents at level 12!" or scaling up a talent of your choice when you hit certain levels, while keeping the whole list open all the time. These have limited uses, much like spells, or are weaker but can be used without resting (but still a limited amount of times per fight?). *Some sort of resource to keep track of, like maneuvers/superiority dice. Perhaps stacking up the more dudes the fighter puts into the ground (or hits, or blocks, or what have you). *Try to keep them different from the other classes, and spellcasters somehow. How do you have them not simply be tougher and also punchier rogues if you really start buffing them on a basic level? So what we have in terms of resources is one scale of "power" and one scale of "number of uses", with weaker stuff either having lots of uses or some sort of inbuilt regeneration / quick recovery mechanic. If you want to go full 3D there's also a scale with "Utility". But all this doesn't necessarily translate into vancian spell-casting like abilities. I was thinking more about just how those abilities would interact with the game-flow/meta, while keeping the class distinct from the others (and especially the wizard) in how it "runs". Reading that RPG.net thread and the idea about the "Gritty fighter that never stops coming" and thought... what if whatever resource or special abilities the fighters had scaled the opposite way of the wizards spells over the adventuring day? You don't run down your resources as you progress through the fighting day, nor do you simply regenerate them quickly after a quick rest (altough perhaps this too), but you unlock more and higher levels of abilities the longer you keep on going. Probably a bit hard to balance/make work, but something like unlocking the next "level" of talents for each new encounter fought during a set time period (the classic dungeon dwelve). Fight 3 encounters and now you're playing with the big toys, getting a bunch of automatic buffs, helpful self-healing abilities and really opening up the playing field. A more involved "rage" mechanic if you will. Stopping for short rests doesn't affect this, but put the limit at longer rests or between adventures. Basically the more run-down the rest of the team gets, the more hard-rear end the fighter gets, helping the team to carry on just a little bit longer. Now there's a conflict of interest (in a mixed class group) between those who wants to have long rests vs the fighter who don't mind keeping on going, perhaps finding some sort of sweet spot where the fighter is really bringing on the A-Game while the spell-casters aren't entirely out of useful spells yet. Which can either be interesting, terrible or both. Maybe not entirely reset the Fighters bad-rear end-o-meter if the party decides on a long rest, but allow a little cool-down (say an encounter or two worth of ramp-up). You'd want to avoid the fighter being entirely short-changed at the "start" of his turbo ramp-up cycle, still a tough customer with at least strong basic underlying functionality that makes the fighter useful. And by the time the team hits that Dragon at the end of the adventure, the Fighter is really ramped up and thirsting for blood and/or entrails. Call it the Brock Samson fighter 
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Sep 10, 2014 22:00
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Pimpmust posted:Call it the Brock Samson fighter The immediate problem I see with having one character get charged up more and more the longer things go while another character gets more depleted as things go on seems like a pretty obvious one...by the time the Fighter unlocks his cool goodies the Wizard is going to be petitioning to take a rest so he can get his own goodies back. Nobody's really going to be happy with this arrangement and I can only imagine the arguments that would result from something like that. You can try to ameliorate this, but once you're at the point where you're fiddling with variable "cooldown" rates and stuff it really is just easier to say "gently caress it" and give everybody their own set of powers/exploits/whatever just like in 4E because that way actually worked. The whole "we need these different classes to be playing entirely different minigames within the same game" thing that some people want to cling to seems incredibly asinine, like that's the only way you can have meaningful differentiation between classes is if one of them is playing a depleting resource minigame while the other is doing stuff with action dice or maybe just attacking really hard while this guy over there is messing around with a spinner or something, especially when there's really only one meaningful point of difference between classes in "true D&D" and that's "has spells y/n?" Otherwise everybody already engages with the rules in exactly the same way (skills, attacking, hitpoints, etc.), it's just that one set of classes has an extra layer bolted on top.
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Sep 10, 2014 22:21
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How much can you houserule a lovely system before it's better to just find another system?
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Sep 10, 2014 22:23
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Really Pants posted:How much can you houserule a lovely system before it's better to just find another system? Yeah, that's really my question - there's tons of other options out there now. If 5e is fundamentally broken, there's really no reason to even try to fix it when you could play DW/Pathfinder/4e instead.
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Sep 10, 2014 22:24
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I've been playing around with setting ideas using the basis of 'Clerics are rare and follow the vision quests their Gods send them'. Now, what happens when you worship a god of food, supplication, harvest? None of your spells really help with agriculture as we know it. So you spend your time in population centers, providing food and alms for the poor. Well now you've driven a lot of the food industry into the ground! Now lets ignore the fact that the angry masses of food vendors and merchants don't see you driven out at some point and you become a more permanent fixture. Suddenly, your city slows or even stops its food production. The fields go empty as old man cleric provides for all. Suddenly, the entire livelihood of every citizen is at your feet; keep it up or they starve. You probably start using this as leverage to effect change in what could be a corrupt local government, or even the whole kingdom if its where they conduct lawmaking. Saying you aren't assassinated by this point, you've skewed the whole dynamic of a country simply by trying to do 'the right thing' and provide for everyone. One person, potentially changing the economics of an entire region by 5th level. Now.. you know who DOES support the idea of an agrarian society and works better within feudalism? The Druid. But not really. All it takes is repeated castings of Plant Growth and wandering from farm to farm, plantation to plantation. Come harvest time every farmer worth a lick is out there paying their dues, not to the church or its wonderboy Cleric, but the Druid who comes wondering out of the woods. Of course, the farmers do it in exchange for honoring a mutual agreement that they not gently caress with the forest or nature too much and upset the tedious balance that keeps the whole world from sliding into the elemental plane of fire and sending us all to an agonizing death, but that's a small price to pay for year-round super harvests. In fact, it may wrap around into the same problem that the Cleric causes; too much production and absolutely destroying the demand. Farming suddenly became a hell of a lot easier to do and is reliable nearly 100% of the time. So.. what do our farmers start doing, now that they don't have to worry about a good harvest and simply do it. ... Stage a revolution as their lifestyle becomes slowly obsolete and yields worthless profits for them and their lords? I'm not going anywhere in particular with this, I just like the problems it both solves and creates. It reminds me of what Exalted was suppose to be like. Rather than a macro function, all of the world-shaping is suddenly at the feet of a handful of individuals who may or may not have questionable morals (i.e. player characters) Strength of Many fucked around with this message at 22:57 on Sep 10, 2014 |
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Sep 10, 2014 22:54
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Strength of Many it got brought up in my recruit, and I think in here, but does the Fighter houserule that gives it Champion and Battlemaster features at 3rd level mean that the Fighter ends up with all 3 archetypes? Or does taking that mean not getting the choice of Archetype at 3rd level, and thus no Eldritch Knight?
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Sep 10, 2014 23:11
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Strength of Many posted:farmerchat The industrial revolution and modern prosperity can be tied almost solely to reducing the percent of the population providing food. Drop that down to the current 4-5% with magic and there's suddenly the ability for artisan and entertainer classes to emerge and create a more modern-looking economy.
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Sep 10, 2014 23:13
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And suddenly there's a campaign in favor natural, non-magical foods, trying to convince people that druid food is harmful and cleric food is wrong. Something about the magic affecting your body and the old ways being healthier. Only eat food enchanted by spells you can pronounce!
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Sep 10, 2014 23:16
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Daetrin posted:The industrial revolution and modern prosperity can be tied almost solely to reducing the percent of the population providing food. The societal upheaval that would cause sounds like prime campaign fodder. Well, if your players are into macro/microeconomics and kingdom management. Somehow I think there would still be a social contract between (heavily armed group) and (civilians) on account of how hostile D&D life seems to be. Monsters and 'evil races' are practically around every corner. I lean toward a Monster Hunter arrangement myself. Who doesn't want to play in a guild of hyper elite monster slayers that use monster parts for weapons and tools to fight said monsters?? Ryuujin posted:Strength of Many it got brought up in my recruit, and I think in here, but does the Fighter houserule that gives it Champion and Battlemaster features at 3rd level mean that the Fighter ends up with all 3 archetypes? Or does taking that mean not getting the choice of Archetype at 3rd level, and thus no Eldritch Knight? I originally intended it to be the latter, but I also planned on writing or leaving space open for people to use their own homebrew archetypes to pick from besides Eldritch Knight. In a side thing i'm running a player in question has all three and we're play testing the changes extensively. I've yet to determine if the Fighter archetype amalgamation is 'too much' but so far it hasn't been. We'll see how it works out at higher levels. edit: For clarification on my first statement there, I'm of the opinion that the Champion archetype doesn't do much of anything interesting at all and Battle Master is being writ large across all martial classes with these house rules, so .. it makes sense to have to write new archetypes to actually pick from or go with Eldritch Knight. I don't think anyone will complain either way. Except for Caster Supremacy advocates. Strength of Many fucked around with this message at 23:32 on Sep 10, 2014 |
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Sep 10, 2014 23:24
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You could literally add "all bonuses give you advantage, all penalties give you disadvantage" to 4E and you'd be both A) Significantly improving 4E's combat timesink B) Extracting the sum total of innovation out of 5E, capped stats and more static bonuses by level not withstanding. The only asterisks I can think of would generally be: -If your 4E power lets you roll multiple times already to resolve one attack, you only get one extra roll total -To determine if you have advantage or disadvantage when you have both bonuses and penalties, calculate the sum modifier imposed by the effects and resolve accordingly.
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Sep 10, 2014 23:51
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It also makes the Avenger's shtick less impressive to be honest since anybody else would be able to duplicate it with minimal effort and much more flexibility.
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Sep 10, 2014 23:58
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Kai Tave posted:It also makes the Avenger's shtick less impressive to be honest since anybody else would be able to duplicate it with minimal effort and much more flexibility. I don't think the avenger would mind rolling three times, though. Although disadvantage would gently caress the Avenger up unless you just flat-out ruled they couldn't get disadvantage or something similar.
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Sep 11, 2014 00:00
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"You never suffer Disadvantage on attacks made against an enemy under your Oath of Enmity" would be decent, yeah. I still think just porting Advantage/Disadvantage to 4E wholesale would require some adjustment or fine-tuning. Not that 4E's math is perfect or anything but going from flanking providing a +2 bonus to the equivalent of +5 could introduce some hiccups here and there in terms of how much impact bonuses that are generally assumed to be smaller have on combat swinginess when they suddenly get much bigger. In fact, if the problem is dealing with stacking bonuses then what I'd consider is (ripping off slightly from the 4E trifold neonchameleon wrote) having there be two flat numerical bonuses period, you have minor advantage which is +2 and major advantage which is +5 and advantage never stacks so you only ever take the higher of whatever just like temporary hitpoints. Common things like flanking dudes in combat or Leader at-wills grant minor advantage while bigger, more impressive abilities and exploits grant major advantage. No extra dice rolling required, keep things simple.
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Sep 11, 2014 00:40
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For anyone that will be getting the monster Manual and playing with it. Here is a useful Monster by CR Index http://s3.amazonaws.com/slyflourish_content/monsters_by_cr.pdf MonsterEnvy fucked around with this message at 02:29 on Sep 11, 2014 |
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Sep 11, 2014 01:55
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