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Dairy Power posted:The result of doing said math is only as good as the assumptions of the model and the interpretation of the results. The fact that in any round an enemy is dropped, a greataxe comes out ahead in expected damage over a polearm in the presence of Great Weapon Mastery is completely ignored (and falsely said to require a critical when I brought it up before). The fact that an actual difference in number of actions required to drop an enemy for any difference in expected damage to matter in practical application is also ignored. Or the fact that many turns will be suboptimal, completely changing the required mathematics. The math being done here is useful, but it's interpreted far too broadly. quote:Dairy Power posted: Would that be the math you're referring to here?
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Sep 23, 2014 21:49
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PeterWeller posted:The problem with the 5E Fighter's power curve is that everyone is buying, or at least playing lip service to, the "magic items are optional" bullshit. Obviously, magic items are an unspoken requirement because that's the only way the fighter balances out. The only way the fighter balances out is by the use of items made by wizards and clerics, who can also make those items for themselves.
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Sep 23, 2014 21:50
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Power Player posted:Do you think these grogs don't exist or something? One or two pages ago someone linked a Kotaku article about Next which is filled with people talking about how Pathfinder is the true heir to the throne. Like, less then two pages ago. No, I know they exist elsewhere. But folks seem to act like everyone here who likes 5E are one of "them". Sure it's "possible" to get conga-lined if your DM is bad and metagames for his monsters. Tons of monsters should probably be able to get by the (presumably) lone fighter once he's occupied (such as surrounded). If you're getting dogpiled, it seems silly to me that you'd magically be able to keep them from rushing past, especially with anything smarter than a goblin. Regardless, I don't like that they removed the Attack of Opportunity either.
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Sep 23, 2014 21:50
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Power Player posted:Fighters aren't forever useless but to act as if they scale properly or aren't made obsolete by all of the poo poo magic-users get is true. I also don't see how it's out of the realm of possibility to get conga-lined when it's stated RAW that you only get one reaction attack per round, and the Next rules pretty much encourage you to have tons of monsters at higher levels. Talmonis posted:Sure it's "possible" to get conga-lined if your DM is bad and metagames for his monsters. Babylon Astronaut fucked around with this message at 21:58 on Sep 23, 2014 |
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Sep 23, 2014 21:51
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Engaging with the game rules isn't some bad form of metagaming. It's not like you'd be getting upset that the PCs are using the movement/action economy to inform their decisions, there's no reason to harp on the GM about it.Talmonis posted:Sure it's "possible" to get conga-lined if your DM is bad and metagames for his monsters. Tons of monsters should probably be able to get by the (presumably) lone fighter once he's occupied (such as surrounded). If you're getting dogpiled, it seems silly to me that you'd magically be able to keep them from rushing past, especially with anything smarter than a goblin. Regardless, I don't like that they removed the Attack of Opportunity either. So the ability for heroes to act heroic ought to depend on whether or not you think it's silly? I can already tell where this is going.
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Sep 23, 2014 21:52
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homullus posted:The only way the fighter balances out is by the use of items made by wizards and clerics, who can also make those items for themselves. The items aren't made by anyone. They are found in treasure types E-L and P-Y.  But seriously, do we know that only casters can make magic items in 5E? Are there even item creation rules?
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Sep 23, 2014 21:54
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Also the conga line doesn't literally have to be a dozen goblins with their hands on each other's shoulders, dancing to the beat. The point is that the fighter doesn't have any tools to deal with a rushing mob.
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Sep 23, 2014 21:55
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Since it got brought up, "verisimilitude" as a lot of people use it re: D&D stuff is a nebulous shorthand mashup of "realism" and "things that don't strain my suspenders of disbelief" but actual verisimilitude as it's used outside of elfgaming arguments has nothing to do with realism, all verisimilitude is concerned with is internal consistency. That's it, that's all verisimilitude is. Something can be simultaneously completely and utterly impossible, implausible, and/or improbable and still be A-OK with verisimilitude. Where things break down is that verisimilitude is the quality by which a fictional world aims to achieve the illusion of being a real place and drawing the viewer/reader in without snapping them back out of it and going "oh right, this is a story/play/movie/whatever," but some people wound up using the world to mean "this violates my own personal measure of what is/isn't possible in the eyes of fantasy physics, therefore it ruins verisimilitude." Except verisimilitude isn't, doesn't, and never has been concerned with that sort of thing. A fighter chokeslamming a dragon isn't inherently anti-verisimilitude, nor is Hercules diverting the path of a river with his bare hands nor is Beowulf doing everything Beowulf did. You might argue that the rules of an RPG are what set the guidelines for verisimilitude...that is, if a game doesn't provide rules for a fighter chokeslamming a dragon then it breaks that game's verisimilitude to suddenly have a fighter chokeslam themselves some dragons. Even by this standard though, 4E doesn't "break verisimilitude" because the rules of 4E are entirely consistent in that regard. What people usually mean in cases like this is that 4E's sense of verisimilitude isn't backwards compatible with 3E's. There's an idea that there's a single universal sense of verisimilitude that should apply to all D&D's ever, and so even if 4E is perfectly consistent with itself it's not consistent with this other D&D's way of doing things, therefore it's wrong. Also the absolute value of verisimilitude gets really fuzzy when the audience is no longer just a passive observer (like you get when you're watching a movie) but also an active participant (like you get in RPGs). Some people really try to push the "total and complete immersion" angle really, really hard and anything that even hints at "metagaming" is the province of storygaming swine but to be honest it strikes me as pretty dysfunctional to pretend that RPGs aren't, on some level, a product of both in-character and out-of-character considerations happening simultaneously. You can't escape being part of the creative process as a player and just hand things completely over to the imaginary character that doesn't exist, and that means at some point you're going to be interacting with game rules.
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Sep 23, 2014 21:59
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Tendales posted:Also the conga line doesn't literally have to be a dozen goblins with their hands on each other's shoulders, dancing to the beat.
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Sep 23, 2014 22:03
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Gonna write up some stats for a literal conga lining gimmick fight for my next 4e game. Which is going to be a mecha reflavoring, so extra awesome!
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Sep 23, 2014 22:12
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Dairy Power posted:Heaven forbid that play experience is mentioned-- that's unscientific. You know, because subject matter expertise and surveys aren't valid methods of aiding in the interpretation of results. Considering the game has a participant (the DM) whose whole purpose is to use and bend and break the rules to make the game fun, it's kinda stupid to say 'hey! those guys over there had fun - it must be good!!'
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Sep 23, 2014 22:15
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Esser-Z posted:Gonna write up some stats for a literal conga lining gimmick fight for my next 4e game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQQN9Sc7mfE I concur this would make a great set piece for DnD
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Sep 23, 2014 22:16
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Jack the Lad posted:In addition to what I said in my first post to you I want to emphasise what people have already said. There are a bunch of ways to get telepathy in 4e! You can be a Kalashtar or Shardmind. You can be a Changeling, Deva or Tiefling and take a racial feat. You can take the background from Psionic Power. You can be a Psion. You can take the Elan Heritage feat as any race or class. What were the racial feats and backgrounds? I know about Elan Heritage because it's one of my favorite feats, but I haven't heard about the others. NorgLyle posted:Storm of Vengeance is a spell that can be cast by Clerics and Druids and other divine casters by getting to level whatever and spending a night preparing it. It can be cast by a Ranger by getting the DM to create a special sidequest to go find a magic item that lets you do temporarily what the other classes can do whenever they want. Eh, if you want to kill a poo poo-ton of weak dudes in a big area without resorting to the weirdness that is a heavily metamagicked Locate City, Frostburn introduced the Blizzard spell as a level 5 druid spell. Salient points were a 100 ft radius/level spread, 1 round/level duration, deals 1d6 nonlethal cold damage per round to unprotected creatures in the area and drop a foot of snow per round. Spike your caster level using Circle Magic and then use a metamagic rod of Extend Spell, and you then bury everything within a mile under 50 ft of snow. Since the snow doesn't vanish after the spell runs its course the army has to dig its way out while freezing and suffocating, assuming they didn't freeze to death via the nonlethal damage transitioning into lethal damage while the blizzard was actually in motion. Arivia posted:People can have good ideas and bad opinions. Jonathan Tweet is a evolutionary psychology dork. I was reading a lot of good gaming advice from the Alexandrian recently, one of Zak S's biggest supporters. Etc etc etc. The Alexandrian is also the dude who wrote "Calibrating Your Expectations" and "Dissociated Mechanics", two terrible articles that have unfortunately become nerd gospel and are frequently invoked to prop up really bad ideas about game realism. He seems cool enough on some other points, but man those two articles of his have done some damage. LightWarden fucked around with this message at 22:35 on Sep 23, 2014 |
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Sep 23, 2014 22:22
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LightWarden posted:Eh, if you want to kill a poo poo-ton of weak dudes in a big area without resorting to the weirdness that is Locate City a, Frostburn introduced the Blizzard spell as a level 5 druid spell. Salient points were a 100 ft radius/level spread, 1 round/level duration, deals 1d6 nonlethal cold damage per round to unprotected creatures in the area and drop a foot of snow per round. Spike your caster level using Circle Magic and then use a metamagic rod of Extend Spell, and you then bury everything within a mile under 50 ft of snow. Since the snow doesn't vanish after the spell runs its course the army has to dig its way out while freezing and suffocating, assuming they didn't freeze to death via the nonlethal damage transitioning into lethal damage while the blizzard was actually in motion.
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Sep 23, 2014 22:36
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I mean it isn't as if it's hidden, literally every time someone talks about "FINALLY I can do the things I couldn't in 4e!" the example is every singe time "break the game as a spellcaster." In that example, it was just superceded with "Get a magic item that lets me"
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Sep 23, 2014 22:41
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ProfessorCirno posted:I mean it isn't as if it's hidden, literally every time someone talks about "FINALLY I can do the things I couldn't in 4e!" the example is every singe time "break the game as a spellcaster." Well there are some things you can't do in 4e, or that the game would crumble in your hands and die if you tried to do it. Like I'm doing my hexcrawl-megadungeon game in Pathfinder, since 4e is kinda poo poo at that kind of play, but that's not bad, just different. And most of what I can think of is just on the DM's side of things - you're right that it's pretty much jock-trampling from a player perspective.
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Sep 23, 2014 22:44
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Why is this thread filled with angry people who prefer 4th edition? Isn't there another thread for that? Personally having a blast with 5th edition. I love the simplified movement action without any of that stupid 5ft step rules from 3rd. Running a Birthright campaign with a focus on some old school dungeon crawls and the logistics around that, which usually means everything is balanced around the short rest. At the early levels (4th) the fighter is by far the best combatant (as they should be). Maybe that'll change at later levels, but who the hell actually runs campaigns at 9th level and above? Campaigns always seem to fizzle out and start over again at that point.
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Sep 23, 2014 22:51
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Discussion of a system also includes discussing the problems! Again, people aren't saying you CAN'T ROLEPLAY or that it's NOT D&D or YOU'RE JUST PLAYING VIDEO GAMES. People are giving critiques of the actual literal mechanics.
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Sep 23, 2014 22:56
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For instance: why does this game have levels past 10?
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Sep 23, 2014 22:57
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Kaizer88 posted:who the hell actually runs campaigns at 9th level and above? Campaigns always seem to fizzle out and start over again at that point. This thread has said somewhere the reason campaigns fizzle is because those levels aren't supported.
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Sep 23, 2014 23:01
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NorgLyle posted:Um.. yes? I guess? Nobody is saying it's the most efficient way to kill a lot of dudes. It was just the specific spell that he was talking about in his "Global Warming? Then how come I'm shoveling snow?" post. I don't think anybody cares about the specifics of the stupid 3e trick that was used. Sorry, I just found it funny that there are ways to stomp up and down on armies even from midlevels without needing any sort of grand quest or anything like that. Arivia posted:Well there are some things you can't do in 4e, or that the game would crumble in your hands and die if you tried to do it. Like I'm doing my hexcrawl-megadungeon game in Pathfinder, since 4e is kinda poo poo at that kind of play, but that's not bad, just different. Aren't Pathfinder's hex exploration mechanics largely system-agnostic?
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Sep 23, 2014 23:04
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Kaizer88 posted:Why is this thread filled with angry people who prefer 4th edition? Isn't there another thread for that?
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Sep 23, 2014 23:09
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Daetrin posted:This thread has said somewhere the reason campaigns fizzle is because those levels aren't supported. You're confusing the thread for Mike Mearls.
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Sep 23, 2014 23:15
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Daetrin posted:This thread has said somewhere the reason campaigns fizzle is because those levels aren't supported. I have to agree with that. When you're past 9th level, your pc's power levels start becoming more like some episode of DBZ. Players of that level could slaughter whole legions of town guards. I think 5th edition is at least better with regards to the power difference between really high level things and 1st level schlubs ; Ac doesn't go much higher than 20, and proficiency bonuses don't go higher than 6. You'd still get the ridiculous HP bloat though.
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Sep 23, 2014 23:24
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LightWarden posted:Aren't Pathfinder's hex exploration mechanics largely system-agnostic? They are, but 4e dies on the vine when you do lots of "regular" combats instead of larger set pieces. So sure you could do a hexcrawl in 4e and it would be incredibly boring.
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Sep 23, 2014 23:28
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Arivia posted:They are, but 4e dies on the vine when you do lots of "regular" combats instead of larger set pieces. So sure you could do a hexcrawl in 4e and it would be incredibly boring.
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Sep 24, 2014 00:02
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Arivia posted:They are, but 4e dies on the vine when you do lots of "regular" combats instead of larger set pieces. So sure you could do a hexcrawl in 4e and it would be incredibly boring. what's a hexcrawl
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Sep 24, 2014 00:02
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Arivia posted:They are, but 4e dies on the vine when you do lots of "regular" combats instead of larger set pieces. So sure you could do a hexcrawl in 4e and it would be incredibly boring. Are you saying that Pathfinder is better at doing lots of 'regular' combats than 4e?  Dairy Power posted:The result of doing said math is only as good as the assumptions of the model and the interpretation of the results. The fact that in any round an enemy is dropped, a greataxe comes out ahead in expected damage over a polearm in the presence of Great Weapon Mastery is completely ignored (and falsely said to require a critical when I brought it up before). The fact that an actual difference in number of actions required to drop an enemy for any difference in expected damage to matter in practical application is also ignored. Or the fact that many turns will be suboptimal, completely changing the required mathematics. The math being done here is useful, but it's interpreted far too broadly. As pointed out upthread and at the top of the page, I've debunked your math in some detail and at some length. Also, you have yet to answer any of the questions I asked you earlier. Jack the Lad posted:I asked you a few questions last page and pointed out that Avengers don't have an at-will with a teleport, which is one of the things you've said you have a problem with. Jack the Lad fucked around with this message at 00:07 on Sep 24, 2014 |
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Sep 24, 2014 00:03
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Dairy Power posted:Heaven forbid that play experience is mentioned-- that's unscientific. You know, because subject matter expertise and surveys aren't valid methods of aiding in the interpretation of results. i played and it was poo poo hth
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Sep 24, 2014 00:07
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I wouldn't say that but I'd sure as duck say 5e is better than either at routine combat. Combat feels like it takes forever in both PF and 4e and there's so many god drat things to keep track of. Marks, penalties, conditions, special modifiers, its a real pain. You need a computer to run it effectively. 5e runs very smoothly and quickly. I greatly appreciate how simplified the combat is and how much crap they decided yo throw out the window.
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Sep 24, 2014 00:08
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PeterWeller posted:The items aren't made by anyone. They are found in treasure types E-L and P-Y. A mundane person can only produce mundane items, and only 5GP worth of an item per day, and only things that can be made with a tool they are proficient with. It would take 10 consecutive months to make normal plate armor.
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Sep 24, 2014 00:08
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Lord of Bore posted:A mundane person can only produce mundane items, and only 5GP worth of an item per day, and only things that can be made with a tool they are proficient with. It would take 10 consecutive months to make normal plate armor. And then it gets eaten by a CR 1/2 rust monster.
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Sep 24, 2014 00:11
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greatn posted:I wouldn't say that but I'd sure as duck say 5e is better than either at routine combat. Combat feels like it takes forever in both PF and 4e and there's so many god drat things to keep track of. Marks, penalties, conditions, special modifiers, its a real pain. You need a computer to run it effectively. How far into the game have you gotten, out of curiosity? Our party has only just hit level 4, so while combat has been quick and sometimes brutal, none of our characters have very much to do. Our cleric casts his cantrips, our Wizard used up all of his spell slots and has been stuck firing a bow he doesn't have proficiency with, our rogue... mostly runs away and hides, our fighter gets in people's faces and my barbarian rages and charges. Something tells me combat is going to start bogging down soon enough though once half of us pick up our extra attack per round while the other half gets an increasingly large and powerful spell list. I think my group's infatuation with 5e almost exclusively comes out of playing 4e to the point where combat DOES bog down because of all the fiddly modifiers and large, increasingly complex power lists. So being able to do a handful of combat encounters per session seems fresh and exciting. By the time my DM gave up on our last 4e campaign, we were level 10, though. Like I said, now we're level 4 in 5e. I just imagine soon enough we'll be seeing the same issues, just instead of all of us having to sit down and say, "Hmm, what power do I want to use this round," it'll probably mostly be limited to our casters doing basically the same thing.
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Sep 24, 2014 00:20
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Jack the Lad posted:As pointed out upthread and at the top of the page, I've debunked your math in some detail and at some length. You didn't "debunk" any of my math. You made different assumptions than I did and then said I was wrong.
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Sep 24, 2014 00:28
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Dairy Power posted:You didn't "debunk" any of my math. You made different assumptions than I did and then said I was wrong. Have you not read any of the thread at all? Seriously?
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Sep 24, 2014 00:31
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This thread really is a helpful reminder as to how 4e fans were different from the 5e trash. 4e fans are more then ready to talk about 4e's flaws. There's far too much chaff in feats and powers. Numbers and skill gaps get too high at higher levels. Some classes lack needed support, others have too much. The focus on status effects in later levels leads to unintuitive defensive needs. High paragon and epic gets bogged down by choice paralysis. Certain group combos destroy the game balance. Attribute scores, despite being one of the first things you choose on your character, have extreme long term effects that can screw over players. The overall design leads to heavy usage of "builds." These are all flaws that 4e fans talk about at length. Meanwhile in this thread literally any complaint at all, be it about game design or adventure design or even about the actual math that makes up the game itself, is handwaved away by "OK BUT WHAT ABOUT THE CIRCUMSTANCES?" because babbies can't handle their mommy having any flaws.
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Sep 24, 2014 00:37
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ProfessorCirno posted:Meanwhile in this thread literally any complaint at all, be it about game design or adventure design or even about the actual math that makes up the game itself, is handwaved away by "OK BUT WHAT ABOUT THE CIRCUMSTANCES?" because babbies can't handle their mommy having any flaws. drat man. Those are some sick burns. I'm impressed that you actually managed to avoid typing "grog" for a whole post-- kudos for that. Dairy Power fucked around with this message at 00:54 on Sep 24, 2014 |
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Sep 24, 2014 00:47
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Dairy Power posted:You didn't "debunk" any of my math. You made different assumptions than I did and then said I was wrong. Nope, I proved your assumptions and assertions wrong. With charts and everything. Jack the Lad fucked around with this message at 00:57 on Sep 24, 2014 |
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Sep 24, 2014 00:48
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Jack the Lad posted:http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3647634&pagenumber=7&perpage=40#post434962833
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Sep 24, 2014 00:51
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Nihilarian posted:Is that supposed to go to one of your posts? It just takes me to page 7. It is, yeah; phone posting and can't get it to work. If you hit the question mark it's on page 7 there, with the 2 charts.
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Sep 24, 2014 00:56
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