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Really Pants posted:"It's not bad once you figure out which rules you have to ignore" is not much of a defense, and it's the best anybody here can come up with. I just wonder why they keep at it so desperately. We all know D&D 5 Has Problems.
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Sep 20, 2014 13:07
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ascendance posted:We all know D&D 5 Has Problems. Jesus stop making GBS threads on D&D!!!!!! 
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Sep 20, 2014 13:10
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ascendance posted:Right. Because there is one exceptional Epic Destiny about letting you kill poo poo, and let you steal something intangible from them, it means Epic Destinies are really chock full of awesome epic powers. holy poo poo, go read Exalted sometime for some actual epic powers. Exalted? That's cute, there's an Epic Destiny where you become a Ravenloft Darklord and get your own Demiplane of Dread.
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Sep 20, 2014 13:11
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Really Pants posted:Jesus stop making GBS threads on D&D!!!!!! (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Sep 20, 2014 13:14
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ascendance posted:I'm not even whining about anything other than how people are just showing up in this thread to poo poo on 5e. ascendance posted:Yeah, you keep beating that dead horse. It just gets funnier every time.
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Sep 20, 2014 13:20
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ascendance posted:Right. Because there is one exceptional Epic Destiny about letting you kill poo poo, and let you steal something intangible from them, it means Epic Destinies are really chock full of awesome epic powers. holy poo poo, go read Exalted sometime for some actual epic powers.
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Sep 20, 2014 13:55
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Perhaps, but how easily can you ignore those mechanics to play Civilization instead?
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Sep 20, 2014 13:57
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Really Pants posted:Perhaps, but how easily can you ignore those mechanics to play Civilization instead? Not easily because Bureaucracy Charms! 
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Sep 20, 2014 14:02
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Actually I was probably being unfair to 5e earlier. I haven't heard of any 5e games falling apart due to bad mechanics yet, but it's definitely happened to me with Exalted.
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Sep 20, 2014 14:16
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It's impossible to measure how many 5e games were entirely prevented by bad mechanics.
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Sep 20, 2014 14:18
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With the spell Message, can you talk to things that don't share a Language?
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Sep 20, 2014 15:59
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Thing is, when talking about a system you love, its part fun and part cathartic to discuss its missteps and failings. I think everyone has a game they love so much they can't just help but want to tear apart and see rebuilt way better (diehard Spore apologist here, for example.) Do I think a thread for positivity might be a bit of a help and cut down on the arguments going on in here? Maybe. But I don't think anyone's criticizing 5E out of hate and badwrongfun, just out of sadness at the system they love taking a huge step back while hogging attention from less known, more capable ones.
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Sep 20, 2014 15:59
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Sab669 posted:With the spell Message, can you talk to things that don't share a Language? Sure, you absolutely can talk to things that don't share a language with you. It's just that they won't understand what you're saying. The spell only repeats words that you've whispered - if they wouldn't understand the whisper, they wouldn't understand the repetition. But you can still talk to them. Or talk at them, strictly speaking.
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Sep 20, 2014 16:04
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Fair enough, that makes sense.
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Sep 20, 2014 16:28
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The Bee posted:Thing is, when talking about a system you love, its part fun and part cathartic to discuss its missteps and failings. I think everyone has a game they love so much they can't just help but want to tear apart and see rebuilt way better (diehard Spore apologist here, for example.) Do I think a thread for positivity might be a bit of a help and cut down on the arguments going on in here? Maybe. But I don't think anyone's criticizing 5E out of hate and badwrongfun, just out of sadness at the system they love taking a huge step back while hogging attention from less known, more capable ones. 5E also has some legitimately great ideas buried in it, so it's sad to see a lot of potential that will go unfilled because the designers couldn't be arsed to bother balancing anything.
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Sep 20, 2014 16:33
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Gabriel Pope posted:5E also has some legitimately great ideas buried in it, so it's sad to see a lot of potential that will go unfilled because the designers couldn't be arsed to bother balancing anything. An irredeemable pile of poo poo isn't anywhere near as bad as something that could have been great until they went and ruined it. You can just ignore a pile of poo poo and move on with your life, or get together with your friends, get drunk, and make fun of how lovely it is. It doesn't make you dream for what could have been, or spend so much time trying to fix it that you put more thought into it then the people who created it in the first place. You can't have true despair without hope, because the hope for something better makes the reality seam so much darker by comparison.
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Sep 20, 2014 17:12
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Gabriel Pope posted:5E also has some legitimately great ideas buried in it, so it's sad to see a lot of potential that will go unfilled because the designers couldn't be arsed to bother balancing anything. I'm not even just saying this to keep heaping onto the dogpile but the two halfway decent ideas anybody can point to that come from Next are: 1). Advantage/Disadvantage, which I'm personally not entirely sold on but enough people seem to count it as a good idea so we'll stick it up here, and 2). Lair actions for enemies. That's it. Action dice are a good idea in theory but Next does virtually nothing interesting with them. The rest of Next is basically dusted-off 3E and AD&D, and the only other stuff anybody points to as a positive is "but combat is faster than in 4E (because there's less to do)" or "look how spellcasters can do this crazy poo poo!"
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Sep 20, 2014 17:57
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Kai Tave posted:I'm not even just saying this to keep heaping onto the dogpile but the two halfway decent ideas anybody can point to that come from Next are: Concentration would have been a good idea (in a game with Defending anyway) but it seems pretty easy to ignore it.
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Sep 20, 2014 18:04
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The concentration mechanic limiting you to a single big ongoing spell at a time and removing automatic spell scaling by caster level were decent ideas too. I also quite like giving rogues an extra action they can spend every round to do rogue poo poo.
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Sep 20, 2014 18:05
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Fair being fair, I'd probably throw concentration on the list too.Gort posted:I also quite like giving rogues an extra action they can spend every round to do rogue poo poo. Yeah, I liked stuff like this too back when they were called "Minor Actions." One of the most laughable things about Next is how they made a huge deal about simplifying the action economy, then found awkward ways to cram not!Minor Actions all over the place whenever they realized that just an Attack and a Move were kind of limiting, who knew.
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Sep 20, 2014 18:09
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Gort posted:The concentration mechanic limiting you to a single big ongoing spell at a time and removing automatic spell scaling by caster level were decent ideas too. It also hangs on to a fair bit of good stuff from 4E, albeit in wierd, compromised ways.
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Sep 20, 2014 18:10
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The death rules are actually less lethal than 4e as well - in 4e you had to be knocked to negative bloodied to die, in 5e you have to be knocked to negative full HP. Unlikely to happen except at the lower levels.
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Sep 20, 2014 18:17
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Gort posted:The death rules are actually less lethal than 4e as well - in 4e you had to be knocked to negative bloodied to die, in 5e you have to be knocked to negative full HP. Unlikely to happen except at the lower levels. Sort of... you can also die if you get hit three times, regardless of how much damage each hit does. If you normally have 100 max hp while you lie at zero, a single blow of 99 damage doesn't really threaten you. But three blows of 1 hp each, and you're instantly off to the Styx.
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Sep 20, 2014 18:22
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And there's also Save-or-Die! 
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Sep 20, 2014 18:24
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Sage Genesis posted:Sort of... you can also die if you get hit three times, regardless of how much damage each hit does. If you normally have 100 max hp while you lie at zero, a single blow of 99 damage doesn't really threaten you. But three blows of 1 hp each, and you're instantly off to the Styx. I think the idea behind this is that if someone is TRYING to kill you, it is easy to succeed. But it is hard for a monster to overkill you enough to actually outright murder you with a single hit. I don't really think that's a bad idea, but the mechanics representing it are merely adequate.
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Sep 20, 2014 18:27
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They've also managed to secure the rights to Illithids, Beholders, and Rust Monsters, which is more than any other D&D clone has been able to do. e: That probably looks harsher than I meant, but it's a roundabout way of saying that it's still brand identified as Dungeons and Dragons (the worlds most popular RPG). That carries a lot of weight with people. To the degree that it will get fourth and fifth glances (where mechanically better games don't get a second), someone in every group is pressuring everyone else to just give it a chance, it's the first RPG new players look at, the proper nouns are the same as when you were 12, etc, etc. It does have that going for it, and while that's not a great "idea" per se it's definitely giving this momentum it otherwise wouldn't have. moths fucked around with this message at 19:15 on Sep 20, 2014 |
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Sep 20, 2014 18:47
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Sage Genesis posted:Sort of... you can also die if you get hit three times, regardless of how much damage each hit does. If you normally have 100 max hp while you lie at zero, a single blow of 99 damage doesn't really threaten you. But three blows of 1 hp each, and you're instantly off to the Styx. Well, that's less lethal than 4e's dying rules where everyone automatically criticals you when they attack you in melee while downed. The "no difference between a blow doing 99% of your health or 1%" thing is really odd though. Doubt it'll come up much if I was to run 5e again, though, I tend to ignore downed PCs in favour of the TPK. (at which point they wake up captured)
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Sep 20, 2014 19:06
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"0 HP but not dead dead" even in whatever edition is a real tricky area rife with gentleman's agreements and not a lot of in-built advice for how to handle it when it comes up. A lot of GMs seem to have enemies move on from someone who's been taken down to 0 but still might get back up but it's a situation that the game fobs entirely off on social contract and washes its hands of.
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Sep 20, 2014 19:13
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Yeah, the whole 'down but not dead' thing was always weird in a world where people KNOW that about a quarter of PCs can do things that get downed people back up. But then, in a lot of cases as a DM, the monsters have to behave dumbly or the game doesn't work very well.
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Sep 20, 2014 20:42
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Kai Tave posted:"0 HP but not dead dead" even in whatever edition is a real tricky area rife with gentleman's agreements and not a lot of in-built advice for how to handle it when it comes up. A lot of GMs seem to have enemies move on from someone who's been taken down to 0 but still might get back up but it's a situation that the game fobs entirely off on social contract and washes its hands of. I think you could solve this by giving monsters some kind of critical wound condition they inflic when they attack people with 0 or less life which dosn't kill them but stops them from being able to to rejoin the battle even if they are healed back above 0. That way monsters can combat kill a PC and move on, because they have no reason to waist turns trying to finish off someone who's already out of the fight. Then you just say that anyone with a critical wound dies without medical attention but characters who are healed up recover after a short rest. If you wanted to be mean you could even make the critical wound drain health every turn until the character dies or another player uses a heal to stabilize them. You could even give some class like clerics a high level spell which removes the critical wounded condition mid battle. Giving you a powerful but expensive panic button for big fights, and mechanically separating healing classes from classes who can heal.
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Sep 20, 2014 20:53
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The Dragon Age PC games let anyone knocked out in a combat stand up at the end on full HP, but they got an "injury" - a lasting debuff to something, like +5% damage taken or slower movement. You could steal that if you thought people were abusing the 0 HP rules.
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Sep 20, 2014 20:58
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Just throwing this out there, my level 3 Barbarian was killed in a Hoard of the Dragon Queen encounter. He got grabbed by a Roper (whose average damage was 22 and had 20 AC), and then eaten because the DM managed to land a crit before I even made it to my second saving throw. Our fighter found a similar fate in the same encounter. Apparently the encounter itself had some way to negate it entirely, but the Roper still had enough reach to grab you from essentially the entrance of the cave and made a shitton of attacks on its turn. This isn't even including the Kobolds and Drakes in the room. Allegedly the encounter was balanced for our level 3 characters, but considering that two of us got straight-up eaten, I'm not so sure. Especially since the centerpiece monster couldn't be hit by any of our non-casters on a roll less than 15. I get that supposedly combat isn't always the best option, but it's not like my barbarian is going to think there's a problem he can't solve with his great sword (especially since there's not much else to do besides rage and hit things). So, my character died and I spent the next thirty minutes rolling a Paladin while my DM smoked outside and the rest of my party hung out. Mecha Gojira fucked around with this message at 21:18 on Sep 20, 2014 |
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Sep 20, 2014 21:01
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Vorpal Cat posted:I think you could solve this by giving monsters some kind of critical wound condition they inflic when they attack people with 0 or less life which dosn't kill them but stops them from being able to to rejoin the battle even if they are healed back above 0. That way monsters can combat kill a PC and move on, because they have no reason to waist turns trying to finish off someone who's already out of the fight. Then you just say that anyone with a critical wound dies without medical attention but characters who are healed up recover after a short rest. An idea I just had springboarding off this is that attacks which reduce you to 0 HP drop you but leave you "stable"...you're down and can't act until you recover some hitpoints somehow but you aren't on the cusp of death. Then if someone attacks you while you're downed, that's what triggers "roll a death saving throw, fail three and you're dead." Gort posted:The Dragon Age PC games let anyone knocked out in a combat stand up at the end on full HP, but they got an "injury" - a lasting debuff to something, like +5% damage taken or slower movement. You could steal that if you thought people were abusing the 0 HP rules. 4E had the disease track which was a woefully underutilized bit of mechanics and I once kitbashed a quick and dirty "battle wounds" system out of it when I was bored one day.
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Sep 20, 2014 21:02
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ImpactVector posted:You're not really helping your case here, because Exalted might be even more of a mechanical shitshow than 5e. There is no might, it is, through all editions including the new one. Don't play Exalted. Go make a Fate or AWorld hack of it. Or realize its actually not that amazing and a lot of its setting wealth is from bulk rather than anything explicitly interesting beyond its very basic core setting conceits. I encourage you to write your own setting with divinely empowered mortals. Ironically, you could do this in D&D 4e with Divine power source classes,
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Sep 20, 2014 21:23
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If we are looking at what D&D 5 does that's new and positive, I think we can't leave out being able to split movement between your multiple attacks.
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Sep 20, 2014 22:05
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Forgive me if I'm wrong since I've never actually seen the rules for editions earlier than 3.x, but didn't 2E have something like this? Or am I just grasping at threads based on secondhand knowledge? (I know that not being able to move and full-attack at once is distinctly a 3.x-ism, at least.)
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Sep 20, 2014 22:15
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Movement in ToTM is kind of a joke, since you're wherever the DM says you are. Being able to split movement is huge in miniatures-based play, though.
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Sep 20, 2014 22:26
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The concentration mechanic and the rogue getting an extra move to do rogue things mechanic both basically existed in 4E as part of minor actions (hell, Concentrate as a minor is on a lot of spells/powers in 4E) so I don't know that I'd really call that an innovation in 5E or anything.
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Sep 20, 2014 22:41
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ascendance posted:If we are looking at what D&D 5 does that's new and positive, I think we can't leave out being able to split movement between your multiple attacks. "Completely neuters a fighter's ability to engage in melee" may be new, but it's far from positive.
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Sep 20, 2014 22:45
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ProfessorCirno posted:"Completely neuters a fighter's ability to engage in melee" may be new, but it's far from positive. How does being able to move and make multiple attacks at any point in that move neuter the fighter's ability to engage in melee? Surely it enhances it compared to 3e, where if you moved you got one paltry attack instead of your full number. goldjas posted:The concentration mechanic and the rogue getting an extra move to do rogue things mechanic both basically existed in 4E as part of minor actions (hell, Concentrate as a minor is on a lot of spells/powers in 4E) so I don't know that I'd really call that an innovation in 5E or anything. Very true. However, 5e isn't an upgrade to 4e, it's more of a worse alternative to 4e. If you want it to seem good, you need to forget 4e existed and pretend that D&D skipped an edition entirely.
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Sep 20, 2014 23:29
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