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AlphaDog posted:So why not have at least one monster that makes you save STR or die (call a spade a spade and make it a "Muscle Eater"). It should obviously mostly target wizards' poor STR saves, because abilities that target weak saves are good. Wizards shouldn't have a way to alleviate this, because that would be min/maxing by shoring up their weakest save, which is bad and makes the game flavorless. That basically exists. 
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Oct 14, 2014 07:38
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1d4 isn't close to the same.
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Oct 14, 2014 07:41
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It is if you have 8 strength. You can heal up a wizard that drops to 0hp indefinitely but this just kills them outright. Shadows are only 100xp, you can budget about 4 of them for every ID.
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Oct 14, 2014 07:43
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No, actually, a STR 8-10 wizard taking 1d4 strength damage is not the same as an INT 8-10 fighter taking 3d6 intelligence damage.
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Oct 14, 2014 07:49
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They're both immaterial, though. What, you're going to include Shadows in every encounter to give the wizard a hard time? Throw in Intellect Devourers whenever the fighter gets too uppity? The guy who dumped the stat the game told him to dump maybe has a hard time for one or two fights and then continues merrily on his way with good defenses against the vast majority of the game's dangers.
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Oct 14, 2014 07:53
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S.J. posted:No, actually, a STR 8-10 wizard taking 1d4 strength damage is not the same as an INT 8-10 fighter taking 3d6 intelligence damage. You're right, the ID is a binary live-or-die based on the 3d6 result. Shadows are cumulative damage that also results in death. You need to be hit a number of times equal to your Strength score / 2.5 to die from average shadow drain.
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Oct 14, 2014 07:54
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The fighter doesn't actually die without a followup, he just becomes a vegetable until they can get him to somebody. That said, does 0 str actually kill, I thought it was only certain stats?
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Oct 14, 2014 08:11
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The shadow's strength drain kills per its description. Ferrinus posted:They're both immaterial, though. What, you're going to include Shadows in every encounter to give the wizard a hard time? Throw in Intellect Devourers whenever the fighter gets too uppity? The guy who dumped the stat the game told him to dump maybe has a hard time for one or two fights and then continues merrily on his way with good defenses against the vast majority of the game's dangers. As MM1 monsters, there's a decent chance that they show up in normal play and in official modules. IDs go with an underdark theme. Shadows are pretty generic undead. It's not a situation of targeting the weakest members with their kryptonite, but the chance that they could die by accident in the normal course of events, to an encounter that wasn't balanced to be deadly. The problem is a decent chance of death outside of the normal HP and death save system, which allows for rocket tag fights. In this case the rockets will tag and blow you up. The guy with no brain can't even be raised.
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Oct 14, 2014 08:23
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30.5 Days posted:The fighter doesn't actually die without a followup, he just becomes a vegetable until they can get him to somebody. That said, does 0 str actually kill, I thought it was only certain stats? Read the monster Ritorix posted. ritorix posted:As MM1 monsters, there's a decent chance that they show up in normal play and in official modules. IDs go with an underdark theme. Shadows are pretty generic undead. It's not a situation of targeting the weakest members with their kryptonite, but the chance that they could die by accident in the normal course of events, to an encounter that wasn't balanced to be deadly. The whole point of the phrase "rocket tag" is that it means "get hit and you're dead". An Intellect Devourer taking out a fighter in a single attack is rocket tag. A pack of Shadows teaming up on one person isn't "rocket tag" since it's not "get hit and you're dead" - even if they're rolling maximum damage against the most vulnerable party member, that party member's still not dying in one hit. Both monsters are terrible design, of course - I'd say the Shadow is better design though, since you actually have a way of recovering from encountering them without requiring spells way above the level you're meant to encounter them at. Gort fucked around with this message at 08:28 on Oct 14, 2014 |
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Oct 14, 2014 08:24
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The art is awesome, too.
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Oct 14, 2014 09:15
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Malcolm posted:No more than the min-max master, who also loses out on 3 ability scores. This way doesn't favor arbitrary point ability point spread to make sure you have at least 1 good save in each of the 3 categories. But that's just it though, in 4e people dumped NADs all the time. It's not a great idea or whatever, but there are a number of classes that just can't afford to spread out that way and you just say gently caress it and assign those Secondary/Tertiary stats whereever you want. Here's the basic problem. People want their characters to live, so first we assume that players familiar with the system will trend towards tactics that make their characters survive long term. In 4e, that means most players want to have at least one good stat in each pair of STR/CON, INT/DEX, and WIS/CHA. This limits players who otherwise would have done things like STR/CON double-ups or WIS/CHA, which is fairly substantial, since that represents tough characters and leaders pretty reliably. Fair enough. In 5e, you want good stats in CON/DEX/WIS. This limits any character who wants any other stat. If we're assuming the same logic here the only way players are more 'free' to choose non-optimal stats is if they have no awareness of which stats are the 'good' ones to take. You're limiting things like INT/CHA here and STR/CHA because nobody who is following the same allowances as the 4e character would make a choice like that if they didn't absolutely have to. Personally I think that you can't have six frigging saves and SoDs in the same game.
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Oct 14, 2014 10:22
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Mendrian posted:But that's just it though, in 4e people dumped NADs all the time. It's not a great idea or whatever, but there are a number of classes that just can't afford to spread out that way and you just say gently caress it and assign those Secondary/Tertiary stats whereever you want. Most characters have to dump one NAD in 4E because of the way the point buy works out. Thus monsters have an 80-95% chance of hitting one of your particular defenses. This is decent design in theory (every character will always need help with certain situations, is the idea), but in general, any class build where you have to dump both Cha and Wis gets the shaft because of the system's peculiar love affair with stun/daze/dominate. If you don't have Superior Will in 4E you're going to get constantly abused by the monsters from late heroic-tier onward.
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Oct 14, 2014 10:32
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:Most characters have to dump one NAD in 4E because of the way the point buy works out. Thus monsters have an 80-95% chance of hitting one of your particular defenses. This is decent design in theory (every character will always need help with certain situations, is the idea), but in general, any class build where you have to dump both Cha and Wis gets the shaft because of the system's peculiar love affair with stun/daze/dominate. If you don't have Superior Will in 4E you're going to get constantly abused by the monsters from late heroic-tier onward. But this brings up a different thing with that. There were specifically feats to increase your defenses and you could take all of them, unlike Resilient. And they improved with level. And if you already had a rather high number there, you could take variations that gave you more effects. But yeah, stun/daze/dominate sucked.
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Oct 14, 2014 10:38
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djw175 posted:But this brings up a different thing with that. There were specifically feats to increase your defenses and you could take all of them, unlike Resilient. And they improved with level. And if you already had a rather high number there, you could take variations that gave you more effects. Generally it's a waste of resources to increase your third-lowest NAD in 4E. You get much better returns maxing out what you are good at than being any kind of generalist, which definitely confuses new players.
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Oct 14, 2014 10:41
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AlphaDog posted:So why not have at least one monster that makes you save STR or die (call a spade a spade and make it a "Muscle Eater"). It should obviously mostly target wizards' poor STR saves, because abilities that target weak saves are good. Wizards shouldn't have a way to alleviate this, because that would be min/maxing by shoring up their weakest save, which is bad and makes the game flavorless. As is basically anything that can drop a Silence.
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Oct 14, 2014 12:21
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ascendance posted:isn't the Beholder, with its anti-magic cone a classic Wizard screwing monster? The beholder is a gently caress everything monster. That they screw over Wizards within anti magic cone range is a bonus. But they can just stay out of range and pelt it with appropriate spells.
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Oct 14, 2014 12:42
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So I just started reading through the Starter Set stuff and I've got some questions for anyone with a PHB. Does your Proficiency Bonus go up considerably at higher levels? It seems for Wizards that they're casting any spell with an attack roll at a +6 bonus max, which would mean anything with an AC of 25+ is Essentially Impossible (5%) to hit. Granted the only things with AC that high are probably dragons or whatever. The last I played was 3E, I don't understand why they felt the need to change spell failure into "everyone uses a d20 now, wizards aren't special, roll the same dice as everyone else you rear end in a top hat". The distinctions between which spells you need to roll a d20 for now and which are Saving Throwable seem really arbitrary and nonsensical; you can't dodge Magic Missile because, well, it's magic, I guess, but you can dodge lightning, a force literally moving at the speed of light. Meh. Also are there feats or something to maybe specialize in certain schools of magic? At level 1, a wizard casting Ray Of Frost, a 0 level spell, at a goblin with AC 15, has a 40% chance of spell failure, IF the wizard has 18 INT, 45% chance of failure if he "only" has 16 or 17. I don't remember ANY spell ever having a 40% chance of failure in 3E.  Looking at the other classes, I suppose everyone at 1st level is in a similar boat against something like a 15 AC Goblin, and I'm sure it gets better with levels, but man... a 40-50% chance to fail at the first 10 encounters or so at the start of the game just doesn't seem very 'fun'. I suppose in order to really make you feel the progression, they decided to basically make you retarded at 1st level?
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Oct 14, 2014 13:23
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Quad posted:So I just started reading through the Starter Set stuff and I've got some questions for anyone with a PHB. Proficiency bonus starts at +2 and reaches the +6 maximum at level 17. A wizard adds their Int modifier to spell attack rolls. You increase your ability scores as you level up*. Cantrips are at-will abilities. Why does the fact that a wizard (specifically) might miss with an attack that they can make every round bother you? Also, an Ancient Red Dragon has AC 22. I'm pretty sure the only monster with 25 is the Tarrasque. And yeah, characters at level 1 are kinda poo poo. The first few levels are training wheels or something now, but you'd have to ask someone who was reading the dev blog more closely than I have been if you wanted to know why. e: You've always been able to dodge or partially dodge lightning bolts with a saving throw (even in 3e, reflex for half damage), right back to BECMI. You've never been able to dodge Magic Missile. The only reason for that is that's how it's always been. *e2: so a high level wiz is likely to have a 20 in Int, for +5, on top of the proficiency bonus of +6. 1d20+5+6 doesn't make hitting AC 25 a 5% chance. Even if you've only managed to get your Int to 18, that's still 1d20+4+6, which is still better than a 5% chance. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 14:05 on Oct 14, 2014 |
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Oct 14, 2014 13:42
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AlphaDog posted:e: You've always been able to dodge or partially dodge lightning bolts with a saving throw (even in 3e, reflex for half damage), right back to BECMI. You've never been able to dodge Magic Missile. The only reason for that is that's how it's always been. Tbf, there was a point in 4e where it was a normal spell against reflex. Then it got Errataed to be how it always goes.
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Oct 14, 2014 13:55
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Quad posted:So I just started reading through the Starter Set stuff and I've got some questions for anyone with a PHB. Ok, first of all, because I am a pedantic motherfucker: lightning bolts don't travel at the speed of light. They're fast by human standards but not nearly that fast. If you don't recall any spell having a 40% chance of failure, then I guess you only played with monsters who lack magic resistance and have all their saves at +0? Every Wizard specializes in a school of magic at level 3. You don't need a feat to specialize, it's just free. And finally, don't forget that Ray of Frost is an at-will beam of frozen death. It can kill a goblin instantly, even at level 1, and will continue upgrading on its own. It just happens to not auto-hit all the time. That's not a big deal, sometimes you just happen to miss with your ice-laser. It's an attack. In D&D, attacks can miss. No worries.
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Oct 14, 2014 13:59
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They're never going to make another character builder as good as the original 4E one ever again, are they
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Oct 14, 2014 14:23
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AlphaDog posted:Wow, I thought it didn't. I guess I was wro...  Serves me right for not having my PHB at the office.
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Oct 14, 2014 14:34
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Generic Octopus posted:I understand liking the Battlemaster, but really, compare the EKnight to either Bard or a fighter with 15-18 wizard levels. The Bard is the most direct comparison, since Valor has only 1 less attack at 11 (down by 2 at 20, but really, if we're comparing level 20s the Bard is going to come out ahead just due to spells) and has a nearly identical "cast a spell and swing sword at once" feature (and actually gets it 4 levels before the EKnight; you could argue that EK gets the cantrip + attack thing sooner but eh).
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Oct 14, 2014 14:45
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AlphaDog posted:You've always been able to dodge or partially dodge lightning bolts with a saving throw (even in 3e, reflex for half damage), right back to BECMI. You've never been able to dodge Magic Missile. The only reason for that is that's how it's always been.
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Oct 14, 2014 15:09
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Really Pants posted:What does this even mean? An adventure is a series of encounters. An encounter is an event that has a level assigned. In order to succeed at an encounter, the players must collectively pick up 20-sided dice and roll 11* + half the difference between the encounter's level and their own a number of times determined arbitrarily by the DM (the DM may not always know this number, but it is derived from factors arbitrarily chosen by the DM). The DM also chooses one of the following failure conditions:
Variations on this pattern exist. They are called "eyeballing" or "improvising" depending on whether the person currently talking is the one doing it. *Occasionally, a player may end up in the circumstance where this number is a 12 or 13. If this happens, the situation is known as a "trap" and the player is due either sympathy or scorn on the internet. In rarer cases, this number may be a 10. If this happens, every situation other than this one is now known as a "trap" and should be treated as above.
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Oct 14, 2014 15:11
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Quad posted:Looking at the other classes, I suppose everyone at 1st level is in a similar boat against something like a 15 AC Goblin, and I'm sure it gets better with levels, but man... a 40-50% chance to fail at the first 10 encounters or so at the start of the game just doesn't seem very 'fun'. I suppose in order to really make you feel the progression, they decided to basically make you retarded at 1st level? "You rolled too low, you missed, nothing happens, next player" is a problem that D&D (and other RPGs) have struggled with for a while. Some very basic ways around it are to guarantee 1 point of damage per attack even when the players (and only the players) miss, or giving the players (and only the players) a cumulative +1 to attack rolls for every round that they're actively fighting.
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Oct 14, 2014 15:21
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gradenko_2000 posted:Some very basic ways around it are to guarantee 1 point of damage per attack even when the players (and only the players) miss, Yeah I don't think that'll go over well with the D&D crowd at large. When this was briefly put into the D&D Next playtest, people flipped out so much on ENWorld that they had to make a temporary subforum just to house the shitstorms. I am not even remotely kidding. This is thing that happened. Damage on a miss? People went loving nuts over it.
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Oct 14, 2014 15:30
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gradenko_2000 posted:"You rolled too low, you missed, nothing happens, next player" is a problem that D&D (and other RPGs) have struggled with for a while. Some very basic ways around it are to guarantee 1 point of damage per attack even when the players (and only the players) miss, or giving the players (and only the players) a cumulative +1 to attack rolls for every round that they're actively fighting. That cow is so sacred a lot of people don't even know there are alternatives though.
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Oct 14, 2014 15:35
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polisurgist posted:An adventure is a series of encounters. Hmm yes this is definitely some sick ownage of 4e and nobody reading it will be painfully embarrassed on your behalf
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Oct 14, 2014 15:40
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ImpactVector posted:Or you could always ditch binary resolution. I've always wanted to do this but I'm not well versed enough on dice probabilities to set good ranges for critical failure-marginal failure-plain success-critical success on a d20. VVVVV I suppose that's something else I should think about as well. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 15:50 on Oct 14, 2014 |
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Oct 14, 2014 15:41
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There is no acceptable threshold for critical failure. If you want to be comically terrible five percent of the time, play Rocky and Bullwinkle Party Game.
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Oct 14, 2014 15:43
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polisurgist posted:An adventure is a series of encounters. Congratulations on describing basically every roleplaying game ever, minus edition-specific terms.
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Oct 14, 2014 16:03
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Really Pants posted:Hmm yes this is definitely some sick ownage of 4e and nobody reading it will be painfully embarrassed on your behalf I'm sorry to be so terribly reductionist. Tell me more about this post-it note.
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Oct 14, 2014 16:06
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For a joke to be reductionist it has to have fewer words than its subject.
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Oct 14, 2014 16:07
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polisurgist posted:An adventure is a series of encounters. But that's just wrong. Like, both of these descriptions are inaccurate. Even the one of skill challenges, which A) everybody, fan or detractor of whatever edition, hates and B) actually are boneheadedly, tediously simple. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 16:17 on Oct 14, 2014 |
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Oct 14, 2014 16:13
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polisurgist posted:An adventure is a series of encounters. Can you give specific examples, please?
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Oct 14, 2014 16:15
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gradenko_2000 posted:I've always wanted to do this but I'm not well versed enough on dice probabilities to set good ranges for critical failure-marginal failure-plain success-critical success on a d20.
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Oct 14, 2014 16:23
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Jack the Lad posted:Can you give specific examples, please? Literally every complaint about THE MATH boils down to whining that an entire game session may not average out to exactly that description, plus or minus some cosmetic variables. I really don't think 4th edition has to play this way, but this is the impression one gets of how the game must play from people who feel compelled to squat in conversations about unrelated games to complain that those unrelated games aren't 4th edition.
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Oct 14, 2014 16:25
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gradenko_2000 posted:I've always wanted to do this but I'm not well versed enough on dice probabilities to set good ranges for critical failure-marginal failure-plain success-critical success on a d20. It works fairly well in *World because you're generally adding from +3 to -1 to your checks and there are no difficulty modifiers, so things generally fall into that 6-/7-9/10+ range fairly easily.
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Oct 14, 2014 16:28
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polisurgist posted:I really don't think 4th edition has to play this way, but this is the impression one gets of how the game must play from people who feel compelled to squat in conversations about unrelated games to complain that those unrelated games aren't 4th edition. I don't understand how you still think everyone wants 5E to be 4E when people have told you repeatedly and often that they want it to be a better game than the previous editions, not that they want 4E again. 4E is a good point of comparison because it got a lot of things right (and also a lot of things wrong).
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Oct 14, 2014 16:33
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