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Sage Genesis posted:Not sure if that's true, and also not sure what it has to do with the idea that it would be hard to do such a thing in 4e. Even if it were true that it would be a good idea in 5e... how does that reflect at all on the difficulty of doing it in 4e? It's true, read back ITT for very many examples. It's actually not hard to have guns in 4e, one of the licenced third-party settings was modern day paranormal-hunting commandos. E: I was wrong about Wraith Recon, it's still fantasy commandos. moths fucked around with this message at 21:14 on Sep 19, 2014 |
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Sep 19, 2014 21:08
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Sage Genesis posted:Not sure if that's true, and also not sure what it has to do with the idea that it would be hard to do such a thing in 4e. Even if it were true that it would be a good idea in 5e... how does that reflect at all on the difficulty of doing it in 4e? It is literally dirt loving simple to do it in 4e. Look at the weapon table. Go "Hmm. I'd like my melee character to have a sword which can be used to deal fire damage, and can also be used to deal ice damage." Then look at how weapons are built. Then say "Ok, it's a 1d8 weapon, and, once per turn, as a free action, you can change its damage type to fire, cold, or neutral." Boom. Done. The entire system is laid out, openly. You can see exactly what's going to happen, and how it's going to function, when you make these decisions, in 4e.
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Sep 19, 2014 21:09
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I can see why people didn't like 4e rules. Monsters and players having different scales of health/damage struck us as odd, and the guy who usually DM's in the group didn't find the 4e rules for creating NPCs enjoyable, which was a big enough issue to make it a non-starter for us by itself. Some of the encounter powers and at-will powers had abilities baked in that we couldn't decide if we'd allow outside of specific situations, a prime example being the avenger's at will that allowed teleportation with the attack. We also found battles to be extremely slow. Everything felt a little too sanitized, and we frequently felt limited to our available abilities, rather than empowered by them. That said, I did rather appreciate the smaller difference in relative power levels, and combat had a nice tactical crunch to it for when the mood for that type of thing struck. I overall enjoyed 4e, but it didn't work well for my usual group as a whole. Clinton1011 posted:I'm glad I didn't read this thread before playing d&d for the first time. Most people in this thread make 5e out to be a horribly balanced & broken game. Maybe I just don't have the required experience with previous versions to understand how horrible 5e is but I haven't heard any complaints from anyone else in my current game about how they feel weaker then the casters. The only issue that was brought up was the fact that all classes are equal in regards to chance to hit with melee and ranged if they are proficient with the weapon in question. Yeah, I think there's a lot of blatant dismissal of the system based on a few shortcomings in this thread. Everyone I've played with in real life (played with friends and at several official events) has liked 5e better than or at least as well as other editions of D&D, to this point. I've also found other forums to be more positive about 5e in general. Personally, I think it plays a lot smoother and, in practice, solves a lot of the bigger issues I had with 3.5 (eg casters at level other than like 3-7). I personally think that rather than being regressive, they've learned from the previous editions and brought back a lot of things people like.
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Sep 19, 2014 21:13
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Dairy Power posted:I can see why people didn't like 4e rules. Monsters and players having different scales of health/damage struck us as odd, and the guy who usually DM's in the group didn't find the 4e rules for creating NPCs enjoyable, which was a big enough issue to make it a non-starter for us by itself. Some of the encounter powers and at-will powers had abilities baked in that we couldn't decide if we'd allow outside of specific situations, a prime example being the avenger's at will that allowed teleportation with the attack. We also found battles to be extremely slow. Everything felt a little too sanitized, and we frequently felt limited to our available abilities, rather than empowered by them. While I generally agree with a lot of this, "we couldn't decide if we should let the class have its actual powers" is petty grognard poo poo. And for maybe the millionth time in this thread, anecdotes are nothing in the face of observable facts. Pretty much everything in 5E is poorly balanced and there have been multiple posters breaking this down painstakingly, only to be returned with "Well in my group we just smear poop on each others' faces instead of reading rules." That all being said, 4E is a miniatures battle game dressed up as an RPG, which ironically makes it closer to the original D&D than most anything published for it in the last 20 years. I can totally empathize with anyone who thinks it goes too slow, that it de-emphasizes and oversimplifies everything outside of combat, and that it makes you feel limited to what it says on your sheet in terms of your options--even though, if you'd been paying attention, you're more limited even yet in other editions, because D&D has always been bad at and not meant at all for narrative-based play. Don't confuse 5E's not actually writing rules for subsystems for a rules-lite system.
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Sep 19, 2014 21:43
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Bassetking posted:It is literally dirt loving simple to do it in 4e. Look at the weapon table. Go "Hmm. I'd like my melee character to have a sword which can be used to deal fire damage, and can also be used to deal ice damage." Then look at how weapons are built. Then say "Ok, it's a 1d8 weapon, and, once per turn, as a free action, you can change its damage type to fire, cold, or neutral." Exactly, that's my point.
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Sep 19, 2014 21:48
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PeterWeller posted:5E would have been an awesome game in 2007. A huge step back from 4E is still progress over 3E. 5e is a 2001 or 2004 game. It is in may ways a step back from late 3e materials. Compare the Eldritch Knight with Pathfinder's Magus, or the Duskblade. Compare the BATTLEMASTER with Tome of Battle. Compare the Rogue with Factotum. ~*~ The problem with 4e is that powers only work if you have an imagination, which most nerds lack. This is something RA Salvatore talked about in one of his interviews. Someone asked him "3E OR 4E" of course because nerds are petulant children, and his answer was "I grew up in AD&D so I choose that. My kids like 4e though. In AD&D you need a very creative DM. In 4e you need very creative players." In 4e you have to be able to describe things on the fly and be open to different interpretations of the same action. If you lack that ability - or you're a DM who wants to find excuses to punish players and need powers to aways work the same way - this doesn't work. But frankly, gently caress those people. poo poo "breaks verisimilitude" in 4e because D&D killed what small imagination they had and ruined their already stunted ability to play make believe.
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Sep 19, 2014 21:51
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Sage Genesis posted:Exactly, that's my point. So, your point is that 4e is....a mechanically understandable, modifiable system that has clear rules for how to use it?
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Sep 19, 2014 21:52
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Grimpond posted:So, your point is that 4e is....a mechanically understandable, modifiable system that has clear rules for how to use it? Well it helps to keep a bit of context in mind here. I was originally responding to "ascendance", who claimed that it was harder to make certain adjustments to 4e. My point is that I disagree with that idea.
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Sep 19, 2014 22:06
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ProfessorCirno posted:But frankly, gently caress those people. Salvatore really is one of my favorite D&D people. I went through the same Uggggh Drizzt phase as everybody else, but the minute I heard him introduce himself on a podcast as Bob Salvatore I was like ... Oh, hi Bob. He's insanely personable, which is not something you can say for much of the industry. And he is completely right. Earlier someone liked Next because they could imagine things and filled a notebook with campaign notes. And that's how Next is meant to be played. Not sitting at a table with friends, but clandestinely filling graph paper with dungeons in study hall, furiously scribbling NPC descriptions on the bus, or idly flipping through a monster manual amd imagining player's reactions, or what spells you'd use against an intellect devourer. I wish there was some kind of charity outreach that gave indie games more exposure. Nobody really has to settle for this; There are games that are both evocative and play well!
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Sep 19, 2014 22:19
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Sage Genesis posted:Well it helps to keep a bit of context in mind here. I was originally responding to "ascendance", who claimed that it was harder to make certain adjustments to 4e. My point is that I disagree with that idea. ohhhh, totally my bad. Yeah, that is pretty much not true.
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Sep 19, 2014 22:23
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The reason I like Salvatore is that he's one of the most humble dudes who's ever been connected to D&D. He knows he isn't writing brilliant masterpieces and works of art. He makes the same action-heavy pulp-quality books he likes to read, and that's frankly all he really wants to do. He's just a guy who thinks D&D is wacky fun (seriously) and loves to write.
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Sep 19, 2014 22:24
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:While I generally agree with a lot of this, "we couldn't decide if we should let the class have its actual powers" is petty grognard poo poo. Being able to teleport around in general is a lot different than being able to teleport as part of an attack. There were a lot of little things like that in our impression, and, while not a major grievance, it was frustrating. OneThousandMonkeys posted:And for maybe the millionth time in this thread, anecdotes are nothing in the face of observable facts. Pretty much everything in 5E is poorly balanced and there have been multiple posters breaking this down painstakingly, only to be returned with "Well in my group we just smear poop on each others' faces instead of reading rules." Look man, the stuff posted in here is theoretical damage in a vacuum stuff. It ignores plenty of class abilities on a regular basis and rarely amounts to more than a 10% difference besides. If you really want to do an analysis that'll support those claims, you'll need to do full blown simulations of the entire play that take both combat and non-combat abilities into account. Since that's neither worth the time nor particularly feasible, play experiences are far more telling about whether the system is fun and well enough balanced or not. More important than the facts is their interpretation, which tends to be heavily biased in the absence of experience.
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Sep 19, 2014 23:01
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Don't worry, if it feels good, it is good, and that's all that really matters
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Sep 19, 2014 23:04
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So obviously there's only the PHB, but any tips or suggestions for a fun Sorcerer, Warlock, or Wizard build? I'm a pretty amateur D&D player and I've never played a caster before at all. I've glossed over the spells and such, but there's just so drat many it's kind of overwhelming?
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Sep 19, 2014 23:12
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Grimpond posted:ohhhh, totally my bad. Yeah, that is pretty much not true. I'd disagree. It's easy to come up with a single element (a power, a magic item, a ritual) and have it be reasonably balanced. What's hard is homebrewing classes. Races too, to some extent. The sheer AMOUNT of content you need to create and balance to make a class is vast, doubly so if you want it to have multiple options and builds - and races are similar, because of the fact that to make a race on a par with others already in the game, it needs feats. I can understand the complaints about 4e being a difficult system to write content for - it's too drat BIG. It is, I suspect, another reason (beyond 'gently caress 4e') that Essentials went SO oldschool. It's an awful lot easier to write a class that doesn't need you to write 7 encounter and 7 daily powers plus 10 or 15 utilities in order to make it work. The Wizard worked because it half-inched the older material. The martials worked because of simplicity. The most complex were the warpriests. For better or worse, 4e is really hard to write good classes for, top to tail, in one go, and still be reasonably sure of a balanced result.
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Sep 19, 2014 23:37
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Dairy Power posted:I can see why people didn't like 4e rules. Monsters and players having different scales of health/damage struck us as odd Also, do you think that PCs and monsters don't have different scales of health/damage in 5e? Dairy Power posted:and the guy who usually DM's in the group didn't find the 4e rules for creating NPCs enjoyable, which was a big enough issue to make it a non-starter for us by itself. Dairy Power posted:Some of the encounter powers and at-will powers had abilities baked in that we couldn't decide if we'd allow outside of specific situations, a prime example being the avenger's at will that allowed teleportation with the attack. Dairy Power posted:Being able to teleport around in general is a lot different than being able to teleport as part of an attack. There were a lot of little things like that in our impression, and, while not a major grievance, it was frustrating. Even if there were, why would that be difficult to rule on? If you can teleport at will while making an attack, why would you not be able to teleport at will while not making an attack? What are you afraid that this will break, exactly? Dairy Power posted:We also found battles to be extremely slow. Everything felt a little too sanitized, and we frequently felt limited to our available abilities, rather than empowered by them. Dairy Power posted:Yeah, I think there's a lot of blatant dismissal of the system based on a few shortcomings in this thread. Everyone I've played with in real life (played with friends and at several official events) has liked 5e better than or at least as well as other editions of D&D, to this point. I've also found other forums to be more positive about 5e in general. Personally, I think it plays a lot smoother and, in practice, solves a lot of the bigger issues I had with 3.5 (eg casters at level other than like 3-7). I personally think that rather than being regressive, they've learned from the previous editions and brought back a lot of things people like. Dairy Power posted:Look man, the stuff posted in here is theoretical damage in a vacuum stuff. It ignores plenty of class abilities on a regular basis and rarely amounts to more than a 10% difference besides. If you really want to do an analysis that'll support those claims, you'll need to do full blown simulations of the entire play that take both combat and non-combat abilities into account. Since that's neither worth the time nor particularly feasible, play experiences are far more telling about whether the system is fun and well enough balanced or not. More important than the facts is their interpretation, which tends to be heavily biased in the absence of experience. Your posts, on the other hand... you've shared quite a bit of your own damage analysis, much of it incorrect - including your attempts to disprove mine. Jack the Lad fucked around with this message at 23:51 on Sep 19, 2014 |
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Sep 19, 2014 23:48
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thespaceinvader posted:I'd disagree. It's easy to come up with a single element (a power, a magic item, a ritual) and have it be reasonably balanced. The original statement was about giving guns to martials... what you describe is something quite different.
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Sep 19, 2014 23:50
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For some reason introducing guns to fantasy games always has to be a huge deal because ~they're guns~ and so nobody ever just wants to do "reskin bows, done." Like, shooting someone with a loving crossbow doesn't exactly tickle, crossbows killed plenty of people quite dead, but when you bring guns into the mix suddenly you've got to make sure things don't get too unbalanced and you've got reloading rules and misfire rules and exploding damage dice and the societal ramifications etc.
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Sep 19, 2014 23:58
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Jack the Lad posted:Also, do you think that PCs and monsters don't have different scales of health/damage in 5e?
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Sep 20, 2014 00:07
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Babylon Astronaut posted:There isn't a scale in 5e, but you know all about the NEXT math. From your analysis, and playtesting 5e for so long, I can't find any rhyme or reason behind damage and hp wrt CR or whatever you could index them by. Back in the day we had hitdice with *'s. You added a * for each special ability and you could parse roughly how hard it was going to be and there was a formula for how much xp it was worth. I don't know if they actually even considered special abilities in their CR when rust monster is CR 1/2 and still rolls +3 to hit and a d8+1 of damage. Meanwhile, it has the hp of an average level 5 cleric. Without the ability to destroy equipment, it still is overpowered for 2 level 1 characters. Keep in mind higher-level parties will by the math encounter swarms of them.
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Sep 20, 2014 00:16
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thespaceinvader posted:I'd disagree. It's easy to come up with a single element (a power, a magic item, a ritual) and have it be reasonably balanced. Despite the two years I spent playing regular games of 4e, none of my group actually tried to homebrew anything like a class, or powers, or totally new items. there were the occasional reskins, which is what I was responding to. Bows -> Gun, that kinda thing. That being said, I don't actually know how difficult it is homebrewing (in 4e) something that isn't already described mechanically elsewhere, which I can certainly believe would be a fair amount of work. e: I also never got into essentials at all, so that stuff is mostly a mystery to me Grimpond fucked around with this message at 00:29 on Sep 20, 2014 |
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Sep 20, 2014 00:27
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Grimpond posted:Despite the two years I spent playing regular games of 4e, none of my group actually tried to homebrew anything like a class, or powers, or totally new items. there were the occasional reskins, which is what I was responding to. Bows -> Gun, that kinda thing.
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Sep 20, 2014 00:30
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Grimpond posted:Despite the two years I spent playing regular games of 4e, none of my group actually tried to homebrew anything like a class, or powers, or totally new items. there were the occasional reskins, which is what I was responding to. Bows -> Gun, that kinda thing. Monsters are really easy, to the point where experienced DMs can make them up wholesale mid-game once they grok the maths. Classes are hard as gently caress. I tried once, and got about two levels in before I gave up. (I won the contest though!) There's just so MUCH to create. Reskinning is a lot easier and better though. The main reason for mentioning it was that I thought it was relevant to the debate about 5e. I just couldn't figure out how to phrase it without basically edition warring though. Because homebrewing in 5e is easier, but doesn't feel like it's going to be better, and at the same time, it feels like there's a lot less room to reskin, both with the simplicity of the martial classes, and the player base...
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Sep 20, 2014 00:34
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dwarf74 posted:On the DM side it's amazingly easy. Monsters are simple. And on the magic items side it's also incredibly easy. Think of your item. Work out what you want it to do. Write that down. Call what you've just written "Powers" for the item. Bam, you're done. Powers for PCs are only slightly harder. But writing a full class? That takes a lot of work.
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Sep 20, 2014 00:35
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I think that it would be possible for someone to sit down and write the homebrewer's guide to 4E since there are abundant examples through the game's lifespan of classes and powers to look at across the full 1-30 spectrum. It wouldn't be an exact science because I'm positive that WotC's own people weren't using any sort of set-in-stone formula, but you would still be able to say "at level X a power for [ROLE] should be within this damage range and here are some common examples of what riders/unique abilities it might have." The problem is that most people who want to homebrew just want to wing it. They go "well I've played RPGs for 15 years, that makes me qualified to change a bunch of poo poo I don't understand and have it work out fine if I just eyeball it" and then they get upset when their stuff falls apart or gets called out for being bad.
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Sep 20, 2014 00:36
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The great thing about 5e is that every defense about it could be straight from 2006 and I wouldn't notice the difference at all.
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Sep 20, 2014 00:37
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thespaceinvader posted:Monsters are really easy, to the point where experienced DMs can make them up wholesale mid-game once they grok the maths. Yeah, I can definitely agree with this based on what I've seen of 5e so far
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Sep 20, 2014 00:37
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Kai Tave posted:For some reason introducing guns to fantasy games always has to be a huge deal because ~they're guns~ and so nobody ever just wants to do "reskin bows, done." Like, shooting someone with a loving crossbow doesn't exactly tickle, crossbows killed plenty of people quite dead, but when you bring guns into the mix suddenly you've got to make sure things don't get too unbalanced and you've got reloading rules and misfire rules and exploding damage dice and the societal ramifications etc. Uh, thing is in most versions of D&D crossbows do tickle because they're by and large poo poo.  AD&D's Birthright campaign gave them some decent buffs, but otherwise, yeah.
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Sep 20, 2014 00:45
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Making new class content in 3.5e is as easy as making a 21-row chart and going to town, and because the game isn't really balanced to begin with you don't have to worry about breaking anything, per se.
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Sep 20, 2014 00:47
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Ronwayne posted:Uh, thing is in most versions of D&D crossbows do tickle because they're by and large poo poo. That was sort of my point though...in the really real world crossbows would gently caress your poo poo right up, in D&D they do like 1d8 damage, but bring up guns and everybody starts freaking out about unstoppable murder-wands slaughtering everybody in sight even though you could just as easily have guns do 1d8 damage too and they'd fit right in with all the other "lethal" weapons in D&D's arsenal.
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Sep 20, 2014 00:54
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If anything a big-rear end crossbow quarrel will probably gently caress your poo poo right up way more than a little bullet in the same place would.
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Sep 20, 2014 00:56
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Jack the Lad posted:If you click on the question mark by my name you'll see that I - and others in this thread - have looked at and analysed a lot of stuff. Out of curiosity have you figured out what kinds of formulas (...if any) are going into monster stats? I really think 5E monsters are terrible - like far and away the worst part of the edition, to the point where even though I plan on running a fair amount of 5E, I'm strongly considering just skipping purchasing the MM because I hate nearly every monster stat block I've seen so far. Most of the other design failures of this edition are things I can tolerate or work around, but the monster mechanics, ugh. So I'd like to homebrew some monsters, but as far as I can tell the relationship between a monster's CR value and its actual capabilities is tenuous at best. Like, a monster with CON 18 is clearly going to be a lot tougher than one with CON 8, because it'll have 5 additional HP per hit dice. But there's no pattern I can see in terms of what that does to a monster's CR value; their stats don't appear to be budgeted for in anyway. Same thing with weapons - if you give kobolds shortswords instead of daggers, clearly they're more threatening. How far does that bump up their CR? Without some clear guidelines for how monster difficulty and stats are linked, I'm basically stuck just experimenting, and while I'm willing to do that I'd prefer to avoid as much of the trial-and-error where I'm presenting the PCs with undertuned or overtuned encounters as possible.
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Sep 20, 2014 00:56
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Kai Tave posted:That was sort of my point though...in the really real world crossbows would gently caress your poo poo right up, in D&D they do like 1d8 damage, but bring up guns and everybody starts freaking out about unstoppable murder-wands slaughtering everybody in sight even though you could just as easily have guns do 1d8 damage too and they'd fit right in with all the other "lethal" weapons in D&D's arsenal. But in the common conciousness, guns are like a secular magic wand of death that sprays everything. That's why they're hated by grogs. 360 noscoping knights at 300 meters.
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Sep 20, 2014 01:00
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branar posted:Out of curiosity have you figured out what kinds of formulas (...if any) are going into monster stats? Well to be fair to 5e, perhaps you should hold off on some of those questions until the DMG comes out.
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Sep 20, 2014 01:05
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Sage Genesis posted:Well to be fair to 5e, perhaps you should hold off on some of those questions until the DMG comes out. ...in a few months, give or take.
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Sep 20, 2014 01:10
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Kai Tave posted:...in a few months, give or take. But the staggered release feels so delightfully D&D! Remember how we couldn't play 3e for months after it was "released" at first? Clearly that's something we needed again. Alright alright, jokes aside, I think they gave a reason for that? Something like... they wanted to be able to concentrate their full team on polishing up the MM and next the DMG? Which suggests that they designed their classes and spells before they knew what the opposition really was. In D&D, which is at its core a dungeoncrawling PVE style game, apparently you can design the damage output of spells before you even know what sort of hit points the targets will have. I don't even know man.
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Sep 20, 2014 01:15
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branar posted:
That's because you have been going out of your way to hate them. Could you give me several examples of monsters you dislike. (On the Int Devourer I understand why people dislike it.)
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Sep 20, 2014 01:15
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Sage Genesis posted:But the staggered release feels so delightfully D&D! Remember how we couldn't play 3e for months after it was "released" at first? Clearly that's something we needed again. The Math Wringer takes a lot of time to get up to speed, it's one of those models that you have to hand crank and everything. I hear Ron Edwards invented a Math Wringer that runs on solar power but Big Dungeon sent a team of corporate assassins after him so now he's in hiding.
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Sep 20, 2014 01:22
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Sage Genesis posted:Alright alright, jokes aside, I think they gave a reason for that? Something like... they wanted to be able to concentrate their full team on polishing up the MM and next the DMG? The oppressive silence you feel is the fully operational Math Wringer, wringing at 200%, accomplishing negative progress.
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Sep 20, 2014 01:22
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Sage Genesis posted:But the staggered release feels so delightfully D&D! Remember how we couldn't play 3e for months after it was "released" at first? Clearly that's something we needed again. It's because you're going out of your way to hate them. Its not like the math behind them is faulty or anything, right?
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Sep 20, 2014 01:37
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