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quote:Basically. It's in the lovely middle ground of having rigid encounter guidelines and numbers, while at the same time having those numbers not actually match up at all to the actual challenge levels. it's pretty clear a set up of expectations and ideals for a given level were used when making the monsters. in any case, I'm not sure how one would characterize the encounter guidelines as rigid; all they do is try to give you an idea of the general lethality of a given encounter.
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Oct 14, 2014 21:44
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friendlyfire posted:You could house rule at least some of the biggest complaints in this thread in like two sentences. E.g. I'd give fighters indomitable at 1st level and advantage on all saves at 9th. One could also house-rule fighters to have unlimited attacks of opportunity, were one so inclined. If a DM wants to go through the monster manual and pencil in CRs that he feels are more appropriate, that's pretty easy too. These changes are hardly "massive." If these issues can be fixed by some simple houserules, what does it say about the quality of the work of the designers that they didn't catch it? If, on the other hand, the game is supposedly well-designed/well-balanced, how do you know that implementing these houserules is actually an improvement on the game?
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Oct 14, 2014 21:48
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30.5 Days posted:And I did just search for this- here's the grand total list of common houseruling: I feel like once 5e has eighty pages of errata and several years of supplements, it too will only require a few things like that to be "fixed". I think there are a lot of other common house rules around reactions, acceptable/broken magic items, action point use, to name a few. It's not like these rules are absolutely necessary to play 4e, but neither are any for 5e. In my view, anyway.
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Oct 14, 2014 21:49
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friendlyfire posted:I feel like once 5e has eighty pages of errata and several years of supplements, it too will only require a few things like that to be "fixed". I think there are a lot of other common house rules around reactions, acceptable/broken magic items, action point use, to name a few. It's not like these rules are absolutely necessary to play 4e, but neither are any for 5e. In my view, anyway. But the only additional thing at the beginning of 4e's lifespan was the monster math fix (reduce HP, increase damage), and that wasn't even a BALANCE change, it was a FIGHT LENGTH change. Like there was nothing this hosed up design-wise at any point in 4E's lifespan. I think it's insane people are like "well there are design decisions that made fights in 4E too long or less fun than they could have been" as a response to "a level 15 fighter might as well not exist", "who knows how hard this encounter even is", etc. EDIT: And the game was designed enough that most people didn't even feel comfortable using the monster math fix unti an awful lot of analysis was done because surprisingly when you houserule a well-designed game too hard you make it worse. 30.5 Days fucked around with this message at 21:53 on Oct 14, 2014 |
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Oct 14, 2014 21:50
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ascendance posted:it was part of the poo poo of the OGL that the language specifically forbade online tools. Would have protected and benefited WoTC, if they had gotten their poo poo together and released their promised online tabletop. However, due to unrealistic expectations, hiring murderers, and other stupidity, WoTC has consistently failed to deliver on their computer tools. It also looks like the latest round of computer support is also going to be terribad.  what?
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Oct 14, 2014 21:53
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gradenko_2000 posted:If these issues can be fixed by some simple houserules, what does it say about the quality of the work of the designers that they didn't catch it? Designers are human beings. Even the most comprehensive playtesting in the industry (which it seems like 5e received) cannot catch everything, or match the varying expectations of all players. Some mistakes are expected. Also, house rules are great and I'm sure regular gaming groups have a pretty good understanding of what is and is not an improvement to their game experience. I'm not really sure what kind of weird theoretical argument you are trying to make regarding house rules being unreliable. I don't need my house rules to be carved into a table from Mount Sinai. Are you criticizing that it makes for inconsistencies between gaming groups?
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Oct 14, 2014 21:53
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Super Waffle posted:
http://www.examiner.com/article/the-murder-suicide-that-derailed-4th-edition-dungeons-dragons-online Pretty sure dude was a narcissist, and hence able to agree to completely unrealistic expectations given the size of the development team, too.
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Oct 14, 2014 21:56
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friendlyfire posted:Designers are human beings. Even the most comprehensive playtesting in the industry (which it seems like 5e received) cannot catch everything, or match the varying expectations of all players. Some mistakes are expected. See the problem here is that for most, game designers are professionals who know their job way better than you. I can understand why you wouldn't develop that concept playing older D&D editions, but it's often true. In a game that is well-designed, fiddling with random design elements will frequently not improve the experience.
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Oct 14, 2014 21:57
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30.5 Days posted:But the only additional thing at the beginning of 4e's lifespan was the monster math fix (reduce HP, increase damage), and that wasn't even a BALANCE change, it was a FIGHT LENGTH change. That monster math fix was a pretty huge one, and I think if they had done it prior to release it would have retained a lot more players. It really was a great fix, and I think the problems it addressed were as hosed up or more than anything I've seen said about 5e. I think 5e fighters are sub par and agree that some of the challenge ratings are wrong, but it isn't a gaping chest wound in the rules system.
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Oct 14, 2014 22:00
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friendlyfire posted:the most comprehensive playtesting in the industry (which it seems like 5e received) You mean the survey where they asked people what sort of things "feel like D&D?"
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Oct 14, 2014 22:00
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friendlyfire posted:I'd give fighters indomitable at 1st level and advantage on all saves at 9th. Which would still suck compared to the Monk's Diamond Soul. Like, the degree to which the fighter class has been hammered into the dirt relative to other classes is boggling, and truly my main complaint of 5e. "Play any other class" is an easier fix than trying to salvage it at this point.
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Oct 14, 2014 22:01
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friendlyfire posted:That monster math fix was a pretty huge one, and I think if they had done it prior to release it would have retained a lot more players. It really was a great fix, and I think the problems it addressed were as hosed up or more than anything I've seen said about 5e. I think 5e fighters are sub par and agree that some of the challenge ratings are wrong, but it isn't a gaping chest wound in the rules system. You think "fights go on too long" is worse than anything you've seen in 5E? Really. "Two of my players died doing the starter module because the encounters were so jacked." - A real post in this thread, not as bad as "fights go on too long"
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Oct 14, 2014 22:01
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S.J. posted:It's easy if you have no idea what you're doing and no intention of doing it well, you mean. Which will just lead to an equally broken mess for probably the exact same reasons. But that's not what anyone is talking about, they're talking about changing things so that the system works. It turns out that if the encounter building system, which basically every fight in the game is going to be based around in some way shape or form, doesn't work, then that is a pretty massive change you're going to have to make. I don't think so. It would take the people in this thread less than an hour to come up with a list of monsters with more accurate challenge ratings. It wouldn't be some horrible thing for DMs to print it out and slip it into the back of their monster manual, either.
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Oct 14, 2014 22:02
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ascendance posted:http://www.examiner.com/article/the-murder-suicide-that-derailed-4th-edition-dungeons-dragons-online After this happened, they basically put the entire online program in the hands of the small contractor company they had hired to make a gaming social media site. So the social media plans got abandoned and replaced with some lovely forum software, and all the BIG PLANS they had for D&D online tools had to be reworked from scratch at a much more modest scope.
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Oct 14, 2014 22:02
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friendlyfire posted:Mike Mearls does not know whether my players optimize their characters well, whether they make sound strategic decisions or just gently caress around, or whether they make good use of teamwork. I do. One party's TPK is another party's cakewalk. This is true. If the encounter design system is consistent and robust, you will still be able to follow the guidelines but make it slightly easier or slightly harder than the recommendation, and compensate for your groups level of system mastery. If it's not consistent and requires you to thoroughly analyze every monster before using it, you have to do that no matter what kind of group you have.
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Oct 14, 2014 22:03
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Bassetking posted:I GENUINELY want to be convinced, here, this is not some Masterstroke, or cunning trap. Unfortunately I kind of agree with your price tag gripe. I don't think a game like that has legs enough to make it worth the $150 buy-in (or even a $50 one for the PHB relying on the basic rules for monsters and DM stuff). It'd end up being an entertaining mini-campaign, but would probably get old kind of fast. And I've already got Gamma World for that kind of thing. Plus my current group is actually strangely storygame-y, and we're in the middle of a sweet Inverse World game that we're all enjoying. And I'd probably have to be the one to run something like this, so I wouldn't even get to play with the cool bits.
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Oct 14, 2014 22:07
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30.5 Days posted:You think "fights go on too long" is worse than anything you've seen in 5E? That's what I think, yes. Really Pants posted:You mean the survey where they asked people what sort of things "feel like D&D?" No, I mean where they crowdsourced playtesting the actual rules. You don't think 5e received a lot of playtesting? Or at least as much playtesting as 4e? This is besides the point, anyway. My point is, no other game system is likely to receive as much playtesting as the most commercially successful game. I think a perfect rules system is impossible, and am willing to forgive a few Intellect-Devourer-shaped peccadilloes. Generic Octopus posted:Like, the degree to which the fighter class has been hammered into the dirt relative to other classes is boggling, and truly my main complaint of 5e. "Play any other class" is an easier fix than trying to salvage it at this point. Yes. I am also at a loss as to why the fighter class is the way it is, except that maybe they really wanted a boring, subpar class for new/disinterested players. If that's what they wanted, mission accomplished. But many of the other classes are interesting, and many of the people in this thread could fix the fighter if they wanted to (and probably enjoy doing it). It still doesn't tank the edition in my view.
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Oct 14, 2014 22:07
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friendlyfire posted:That's what I think, yes. "Two of my players died doing the starter module because the encounters were so jacked." - A real post in this thread, not as bad as "fights go on too long" EDIT: "I ran two average encounters and a deadly encounter, the first one killed a player, the second one nearly did too, the deadly one disintegrated under a light breeze." - A real post in this thread, not as bad as "fights go on too long"
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Oct 14, 2014 22:09
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30.5 Days posted:"Two of my players died doing the starter module because the encounters were so jacked." - A real post in this thread, not as bad as "fights go on too long"
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Oct 14, 2014 22:11
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cbirdsong posted:This is true. If the encounter design system is consistent and robust, you will still be able to follow the guidelines but make it slightly easier or slightly harder than the recommendation, and compensate for your groups level of system mastery. If it's not consistent and requires you to thoroughly analyze every monster before using it, you have to do that no matter what kind of group you have. Does every monster require thorough analysis? Or is it more like half a dozen? 30.5 Days posted:"Two of my players died doing the starter module because the encounters were so jacked." - A real post in this thread, not as bad as "fights go on too long" Good. I enjoy games where player death is a common thing. I also enjoy games where it is not a thing. Maybe 5e is the former, though? Also, maybe your players played like chumps because it is a new rules system that they are bad at?
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Oct 14, 2014 22:12
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friendlyfire posted:Good. I enjoy games where player death is a common thing. I also enjoy games where it is not a thing. Maybe 5e is the former, though? But shouldn't the deadly encounter be more likely to kill players, not less? EDIT: They're not MY players, but if I recall one of the players was killed on turn one by a centaur charge and another was killed instantly by a roper out of ambush. Also we come back to: "The players should be the thing that surprises you."
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Oct 14, 2014 22:14
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friendlyfire posted:Good. I enjoy games where player death is a common thing. I think the issue is this sort of player death isn't necessarily common, but seemingly random.
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Oct 14, 2014 22:15
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30.5 Days posted:But shouldn't the deadly encounter be more likely to kill players, not less? Sure, but I want more information. What were the encounters like? Was your party doing things the way that the game system incentivizes them to? Like, were they rocking an all-fighter party with poo poo feats and no attempt to focus fire? To what do you attribute their demise?
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Oct 14, 2014 22:17
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friendlyfire posted:I don't think so. It would take the people in this thread less than an hour to come up with a list of monsters with more accurate challenge ratings. It wouldn't be some horrible thing for DMs to print it out and slip it into the back of their monster manual, either. Unfortunately if the encounter building math is wrong, we've got to ask why. If we ask why, we find that's because the monsters CR isn't actually based on anything concrete. At that point you're talking about reworking the monsters from the ground up and figuring out why certain CRs are assigned to certain monsters and under what circumstances, which people have unsuccessfully been attempting to do. That fix may or may not be easy (it won't be, because the monster difficulties need to be based on or in relation to PC power, which is all over the drat place as well), but it's absolutely a time consuming process.
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Oct 14, 2014 22:17
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friendlyfire posted:Sure, but I want more information. What were the encounters like? Was your party doing things the way that the game system incentivizes them to? Like, were they rocking an all-fighter party with poo poo feats and no attempt to focus fire? To what do you attribute their demise? System mastery traps are awesome and the main reason I play RPGs
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Oct 14, 2014 22:18
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friendlyfire posted:Sure, but I want more information. What were the encounters like? Was your party doing things the way that the game system incentivizes them to? Like, were they rocking an all-fighter party with poo poo feats and no attempt to focus fire? To what do you attribute their demise? I mean you could maybe read the thread at all, but it was a balanced party, I know the one dude was killed by a centaur charge because they do up to 30 damage off the charge and it was level 2 so the bard had 14 HP. They were focusing fire because it was the only thing in the combat. The deadly encounter was a pack of skeletons and they just kind of fell over. By the way the centaur and I think the doppleganger's a good example, are both good examples of why just changing the CR isn't going to help. I don't think the centaur's CR is necessarily WRONG per se, just you've got these mobs who are high speed or sneaky and have all their damage wrapped up in an alhpa strike. So you've got this monster that is MOSTLY ok but then also does most of their damage on turn one ostensibly before half your party can even act, so what's the tactical response here? It's not a poorly designed CR, it's a poorly designed monster, and there are a lot of them.
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Oct 14, 2014 22:20
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friendlyfire posted:Does every monster require thorough analysis? Or is it more like half a dozen? How can you know if you don't read them? "Memorize or cross-reference with a list of poorly-rated monsters from some forum" is not a terribly great answer, even though it is probably going to be the solution for 5e. friendlyfire posted:I don't think so. It would take the people in this thread less than an hour to come up with a list of monsters with more accurate challenge ratings. It wouldn't be some horrible thing for DMs to print it out and slip it into the back of their monster manual, either. This is really hard to do without decent class balance. If the power delta between players is large, then it's much harder to come up with a set of guidelines for monsters. A 5e party of a fighter, a rogue and a ranger have an immensely different level of power than a paladin, druid and wizard. Going back to this post: friendlyfire posted:You could house rule at least some of the biggest complaints in this thread in like two sentences. E.g. I'd give fighters indomitable at 1st level and advantage on all saves at 9th. One could also house-rule fighters to have unlimited attacks of opportunity, were one so inclined. If a DM wants to go through the monster manual and pencil in CRs that he feels are more appropriate, that's pretty easy too. These changes are hardly "massive." If you did this in a game with a decent monster/encounter system and reasonable class balance, it would completely throw everything out of whack. Making big interlocking game systems work well together is hard, and if everything was working together smoothly, you'd have to be much, much more careful when throwing out these kind of sweeping house rules. I'm guessing the only reason this seems okay to you is because you're so used to weird labyrinthine piles of rules that somehow end up kinda working, like the non-4e versions of D&D, where class balance was mostly accomplished through people not wanting to be an rear end in a top hat who overshadows their friends, and encounter balance is managed by the DM fudging things when they go off the rails, and everyone still having a lot of fun because they're playing a game with their friends. (Please don't take the "yous" in that paragraph personally, I'm just trying to show you why people here are reacting to your suggestions the way they are.)
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Oct 14, 2014 22:22
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S.J. posted:Unfortunately if the encounter building math is wrong, we've got to ask why. If we ask why, we find that's because the monsters CR isn't actually based on anything concrete. At that point you're talking about reworking the monsters from the ground up and figuring out why certain CRs are assigned to certain monsters and under what circumstances, which people have unsuccessfully been attempting to do. That fix may or may not be easy (it won't be, because the monster difficulties need to be based on or in relation to PC power, which is all over the drat place as well), but it's absolutely a time consuming process. Were I or you so inclined, we could very easily go through the monster manual and nudge the most egregious mis-classified monster CRs up or down as we felt appropriate, based on our predictions of what the PCs fighting them will be like. I feel that the problem is not so serious that we need to bother, though. As an aside, I think that if monsters and players have interesting abilities and those abilities have interplay (I'm thinking turn undead, specifically), then a certain amount of encounter design is always going to be guesswork. What if nobody feels like being a cleric? I can design around that, but a simple CR system can't. If every encounter is a bland re-skin of the same six encounters with the same mathematical underpinnings, I am going to get bored real fast.
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Oct 14, 2014 22:23
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"CR's can never be as accurate as me because I am interested in pre-empting player abilities."
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Oct 14, 2014 22:25
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Really Pants posted:System mastery traps are awesome and the main reason I play RPGs I'd hate to play a combat-themed tabletop game so boring that it was impossible to be good at it. I'm not talking "taking skill focus: hat crafting" here, I mean maybe they wasted actions running around instead of actually fighting, or were otherwise ineffective.
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Oct 14, 2014 22:25
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friendlyfire posted:Were I or you so inclined, we could very easily go through the monster manual and nudge the most egregious mis-classified monster CRs up or down as we felt appropriate, based on our predictions of what the PCs fighting them will be like. I feel that the problem is not so serious that we need to bother, though. The system is much more interlocking and problematic than that. None of the monsters specific abilities, before we even get into their stats and CRs, are standardized, and so there's no way to determine whether or not they're appropriate. Like another poster said, do you reassign CRs or do you fix monsters themselves? The fact is you'd have to do both. The fighter is wildly less powerful than the druid, cleric, or wizard, does CR reflect this? Ought to it? In what was does it or does it not? If we can't find good answers to these questions we haven't found a good system for the monsters yet, and that still doesn't address the first problem which is that the CRs are meaningless primarily because character balance isn't even close. Like, if there were some differences in PC balance in and of itself that would be fine, many other posters and I have said many times that you're going to have at least some variance - but if you can't lock the player character power into at least a reasonable bracket, none of the changes you make to the monsters will end up mattering.
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Oct 14, 2014 22:31
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friendlyfire posted:It still doesn't tank the edition in my view.
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Oct 14, 2014 22:31
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30.5 Days posted:I mean you could maybe read the thread at all, but it was a balanced party, I know the one dude was killed by a centaur charge because they do up to 30 damage off the charge and it was level 2 so the bard had 14 HP. They were focusing fire because it was the only thing in the combat. The deadly encounter was a pack of skeletons and they just kind of fell over. This is a long thread. I have read dozens of pages of it but not all of it. Sorry about that. I agree that the centaur is much harder than it should be. I could see designing an encounter with the expectation that the players might begin down a player, but I doubt it was intentional in this case. It's easy to fix in practice, though, and probably an issue that more affects low-level parties. So up the centaur CR by 2 or decide it does less damage. It's not perfectly designed but neither does it tank the whole system.
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Oct 14, 2014 22:32
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30.5 Days posted:"CR's can never be as accurate as me because I am interested in pre-empting player abilities." That's not what I said or meant. Nor is it clever. Babylon Astronaut posted:So what tanked the edition in your view? That everybody is going to keep playing Pathfinder because they don't want to spend $150 just to start. I really dislike Pathfinder, so I find this disappointing.
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Oct 14, 2014 22:33
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friendlyfire posted:I'd hate to play a combat-themed tabletop game so boring that it was impossible to be good at it. Not playing 5e is a good choice, then!
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Oct 14, 2014 22:34
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Really Pants posted:Not playing 5e is a good choice, then! Thanks for all these cheap one-liners that I and everybody else really enjoys, please keep them coming.
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Oct 14, 2014 22:35
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friendlyfire posted:I don't think so. It would take the people in this thread less than an hour to come up with a list of monsters with more accurate challenge ratings. It wouldn't be some horrible thing for DMs to print it out and slip it into the back of their monster manual, either. Are you going to pay me to correct the work the 5th Edition team should have been responsible for? How much do I make per word when my qualifications are "played 3.X for 5+ years." friendlyfire posted:As an aside, I think that if monsters and players have interesting abilities and those abilities have interplay (I'm thinking turn undead, specifically), then a certain amount of encounter design is always going to be guesswork. What if nobody feels like being a cleric? I can design around that, but a simple CR system can't. If every encounter is a bland re-skin of the same six encounters with the same mathematical underpinnings, I am going to get bored real fast. friendlyfire posted:I'd hate to play a combat-themed tabletop game so boring that it was impossible to be good at it. I'm not talking "taking skill focus: hat crafting" here, I mean maybe they wasted actions running around instead of actually fighting, or were otherwise ineffective. These aren't even arguments. These are just statements you are making that aren't based on any sort of reality. It is 100% possible to stick a number next to a monster that tells you what level it is appropriate to fight at. If you then spend the first 3 turns of that fight pointlessly running around the monster in circles then yes of course that fight is going to end up more "challenging" then the number indicated. If the monster was instead designed in a way that made players of the correct level ineffective against it then you have at best a poorly designed monster and at worst a poorly designed system.
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Oct 14, 2014 22:35
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friendlyfire posted:This is a long thread. I have read dozens of pages of it but not all of it. Sorry about that. The player was not "down", he was Dead. His HP instantly went far enough negative to kill him, before he came up in initiative order. friendlyfire posted:That's not what I said or meant. Nor is it clever. I know it isn't what you said, or what you meant, but it's what you're doing. If you're rebalancing undead encounters based on the fact that your party had turn undead, that is what you are doing. EDIT: And again, the centaur is not the only monster that has "turn one alpha strike" as its basic design, I already named the doppleganger, I'm sure there are others but I'm no interested in searching the MM. And this is just one archetype of shittily-designed encounter!
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Oct 14, 2014 22:35
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The centaur does 9,11+10 if it charges, and 9,11 in melee all other times. It's not incredibly frontloaded. it should probably be slightly tougher and be cr3, tbh. Or maybe lower STR by 1 and change the charge bonus to a knockdown. It's not drastically out of line at any rate. TheDeadlyShoe fucked around with this message at 22:42 on Oct 14, 2014 |
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Oct 14, 2014 22:39
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friendlyfire posted:Thanks for all these cheap one-liners that I and everybody else really enjoys, please keep them coming. You support 5e, it's too late to pretend you know what anyone else enjoys.
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Oct 14, 2014 22:40
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