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S.J. posted:Since we're on lethality chat, what's the best RPG to play for fantasy vietnam? And can those ideas be ported into 5e? The only one I'm really familiar with at all is the level 0 character games for Dungeon Crawl Classics. Hackmaster 4th Edition (the first one), and use all the rules. It's not lethal in that you're super likely to die from the first thing that hits you, but I think it would make a good fantasy vietnam. PCs will get tired unless they get proper rest. PCs will get hungry/thirsty/diseased/exhausted unless you take appropriate measures (and your supplies might be lost or destroyed). PCs will be able to avoid death, but come out of it with a loss of honor, limbs, or sanity (not CoC "you are insane, game over", but they'll develop tics, awful habits, etc as well as more mental stuff. Like "coward"). PCs will get wounded in a lasting fashion and still have to continue. Death or forced retirement is almost assured, but not always sudden. You need to take a FNG under your wing, who will be nearly useless in combat but who will become your PC when your original PC dies, is crippled, or simply can't take this poo poo any more. It's nigh-impossible to "win" an adventure without PCs ending up dead, mad, dishonoured, mutilated, or crippled in some way. Even if you win, you might find that word of whatever you had to actually do to win has got back home and people shun you. The rules support all of this, although they're a bit complicated (not much more than AD&D, and they're better organised). All of that happens RAW. If you're not at least kinda an oldschool gaming fan, you'll hate it so much.
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Oct 16, 2014 01:30
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LightWarden posted:(and again, in theory magic items are optional) I agree with ascendence that this is proof that mearls is very, very dumb but doesn't really make a successful mark against 5E because it's not even sort of true and it's pretty apparent that nobody tried to make it true. So it's not like 5E wanted to be magic-items-optional and failed, some dudes just lied about 5E. Of course if they use that as an excuse to put lovely item-collection text in the DMG....
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Oct 16, 2014 01:37
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Warhammer Fantasy is a legit good fantasy vietnam. One of the classes is rat catcher. You play super shitfarmer detective team who gets bitten by a rat and dies of the infection. Its a game actually designed around doing that so its genuninely lots of fun.
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Oct 16, 2014 01:43
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I've got the 3rd edition WHFRP and it's got plenty of nasty poo poo for stress, fatigue and corruption, and it's plenty lethal, though maybe not quite as lethal as 2nd ed. I love it. The stress/fatigue stuff is partially why I like it so much, and I'm glad I just found out about Torchbearer earlier because that kind of poo poo is awesome. Honestly I don't personally care much about the divide between old school style games and newer stuff like 4e or dungeon world - as long as the game's mechanics are good at performing what the game is trying to do, I'm alright with playing whatever kind of game. If 5e had dived headlong into grinding low level characters into dungeon death marches I'd be fine with that as long as it was honest about it and did it competently.
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Oct 16, 2014 01:57
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AlphaDog posted:Hackmaster 4th Edition (the first one)
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Oct 16, 2014 02:16
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Peas and Rice posted:The big bad in my Halloween game is Strahd, so I'm slapping some levels of necromancer over the vampire from MM. I'm guessing he'll be at least CR 15 if not higher. There is a varient vampire with spells in the Monster manual listed above the Vampire Spawn. CR 15 and can animate dead. I would say level 10 to 12 for starting depending on the number of enemies you have around. There are 6 of them so this should work out well. (Plus Strahd likes to do the run away and come back attack later when fully healed thing.)
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Oct 16, 2014 02:18
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quote:Heres a cool post that everyone should read BEFORE they post in this thread. I'm going to quote it a lot. This is what you shouldn't do. Its a driveby shitpost that is here to make a comment without reading anything about the context. Ignoring what people are saying to you. Then saying the thread is groggy and not willing to listen and loving off. This is why the thread dogpiles people. This has been happening for 200+ pages. Please dont do this.
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Oct 16, 2014 02:56
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TheDeadlyShoe posted:I wonder how many people posting 'this thread is kinda lovely and hostile' it takes before you will realize the thread is lovely and hostile. Then it would be perfectly fitting to a game that is lovely and hostile to players new and old!
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Oct 16, 2014 03:08
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Babylon Astronaut posted:Is that the one with the example of someone failing a ride check, falling off a camel, rolling a critical, breaking their neck, and then dying in the desert of dehydration? In the original base game, you couldn't be crit on a non-attack, so probably not. I mean, it's the sort of thing that happens, but that specific example wouldn't work RAW. A RAW scenario would be getting a wound infected, and then you get "lucky" enough to be able to keep going even though it's done something terrible to you (and made you less effective at fighting, and maybe scarred you or made a limb useless). Or else you've been near-killed and wounded so many times that the sight of blood makes you freak out. Or you've survived without supplies but developed this little problem with hoarding. Or you've simply lost your legs, or an arm, or you're horribly burned. Or all of the above. Or you're the guy who, after losing lots of friends to disease, accident, enemy action, and general awfulness, does win the day and make it home unscathed. But everyone there already heard it was mostly other people who won the day (because your honour score is terrible) and now you're just known as that useless gently caress who tries to take the credit. I mean, you can win and not get hosed up and also get the credit for it. It's totally possible and I've seen it happen. It's just that it's almost impossible that a party of 5 heroes sets out to <do x> and at the end of the campaign, x is done and the same five heroes return victorious and tired-but-fine. Like I said, fantasy vietnam. But not just because "you die" is an option. Like I also said, it's upfront about being the game that it is, and if you don't like that kind of thing, you'll hate it. It's unfair, but mostly in predictable ways. TheDeadlyShoe posted:I wonder how many people posting 'this thread is kinda lovely and hostile' it takes before you will realize the thread is lovely and hostile. Maybe people who want to discuss the game should try discussing the game instead of whining that they didn't get a hug. I posted a fighter archetype homebrew a few pages ago, but nobody wants to comment on it, they want to complain that nobody's discussing the game. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 03:17 on Oct 16, 2014 |
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Oct 16, 2014 03:08
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TheDeadlyShoe posted:I wonder how many people posting 'this thread is kinda lovely and hostile' it takes before you will realize the thread is lovely and hostile. I wonder how many of them think feeding the hostility will somehow help things.
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Oct 16, 2014 03:10
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WOTC just posted a preview of the DMG, although its just an item rather than anything pertaining to mechanics:  AlphaDog posted:Maybe people who want to discuss the game should try discussing the game instead of whining that they didn't get a hug. I posted a fighter archetype homebrew a few pages ago, but nobody wants to comment on it, they want to complain that nobody's discussing the game. I thought it was a fairly clever way of letting the Fighter have his "I am a Lord now with an army/retinue" style without adding a bunch of NPCs that need to be controlled in combat gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 04:00 on Oct 16, 2014 |
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Oct 16, 2014 03:38
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gradenko_2000 posted:I thought it was a fairly clever way of letting the Fighter have his "I am a Lord now with an army/retinue" style without adding a bunch of NPCs that need to be controlled in combat Messing with the action economy seems to be the fastest way to mess up turn based tactical combat. Summoner / Army Of Dudes definitely needs something like that, where the Dudes are abstracted into Things The Player Character Does. Really anything that mimics the way spells work (e.g., declaring a thing or changing the terrain) would help bring them to parity, with whatever fluff.
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Oct 16, 2014 03:59
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Daetrin posted:Messing with the action economy seems to be the fastest way to mess up turn based tactical combat. Summoner / Army Of Dudes definitely needs something like that, where the Dudes are abstracted into Things The Player Character Does. Really anything that mimics the way spells work (e.g., declaring a thing or changing the terrain) would help bring them to parity, with whatever fluff. I did mess with the action economy with that archetype, in that each of the grunts can make an OA. That would be a really easy thing to remove if it was a huge problem. Maybe it would be a reasonable formation though. I think the biggest deal with a class/subclass like that is the ability to bring several competent-but-mundane dudes to the out-of-combat side of the game and to do the non-combat-rules combat stuff that this game's supposedly so great at. Like, you've got 3-7 dudes in the field, so you can do stuff that you couldn't "realistically" do alone without casting a spell (like restraining several enemies at once, for example). Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 04:22 on Oct 16, 2014 |
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Oct 16, 2014 04:11
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AlphaDog posted:I did mess with the action economy with that archetype, in that each of the grunts can make an OA. That would be a really easy thing to remove if it was a huge problem. Maybe it would be a reasonable formation though. Yeah. If you're not going to go with Beowulf or Hercules or whatever where a single man can in fact do all these things than having a group of dudes to do them is the best way to couch it. And the OA thing might be fine, I am nowhere near a mathy expert. If it's kind of the Fighter's premiere feature, having the action advantage for OAs might be balanced just fine.
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Oct 16, 2014 04:34
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Gort posted:You really shouldn't include how "MMO-seeming" a mechanic is as a serious criteria when you're designing it. MMOs, computer games and RPGs share so many elements that you'd be left with nothing to use if you tried to exclude it, not to mention that "MMO-seeming" is basically a meaningless term. "MMO-seeming" is absolutely a thing. It's a value-judgment that is loudly opined by a group of people that WOTC hopes will buy their games. When designing things for that group of people you have to avoid their perception of what is similar to an MMO.
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Oct 16, 2014 05:53
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Seeing as how it's completely made up as a lovely excuse by people to not like games they don't understand, for reasons they can't articulate, it definitely isn't a thing. That term gets applied to all kinds of things that it doesn't apply to in the least.
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Oct 16, 2014 06:06
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friendlyfire posted:"MMO-seeming" is absolutely a thing. It's a value-judgment that is loudly opined by a group of people that WOTC hopes will buy their games. When designing things for that group of people you have to avoid their perception of what is similar to an MMO. Ok, so I'll take it as a given that Next needed to seem like it wasn't an MMO. What actually makes Next seem less like an MMO than any other version of D&D, or indeed any other TTRPG? Daetrin posted:Yeah. If you're not going to go with Beowulf or Hercules or whatever where a single man can in fact do all these things than having a group of dudes to do them is the best way to couch it. And the OA thing might be fine, I am nowhere near a mathy expert. If it's kind of the Fighter's premiere feature, having the action advantage for OAs might be balanced just fine. I'm trying to avoid the Beowulf/Hercules/Cuchullain idea for a couple of reasons - reasons I don't agree with but am going to roll with because enough people believe they are important that this game seems to use them as a baseline. 1) Those guys would have to be magical/divine/special in some way in order to do what the stories say they did. 2) Fighter, rogues, etc are all "realistic" or "normal" in the sense that they are not magical/divine/special. 3) Even famous heroes are constrained to something close to "realistic/normal" actions, in the sense that they can't perform any action much in excess of what a real-world human could do. So "you have (or you are) a team of three to seven tough, competent guys" looks like it could get around a lot of that. Like, one guy plays a wizard. It's pretty neat, he can blow things up, has a number of different ways to get past different obstacles, and shoot like 6 dudes at once. The other guy plays the A-Team. It's pretty neat, he can blow things up, has a number of different ways to get past different obstacles, and can shoot like 6 dudes at once. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 06:31 on Oct 16, 2014 |
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Oct 16, 2014 06:08
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friendlyfire posted:"MMO-seeming" is absolutely a thing. It's a value-judgment that is loudly opined by a group of people that WOTC hopes will buy their games. When designing things for that group of people you have to avoid their perception of what is similar to an MMO. Its an extremely general term that doesn't mean anything because a) every persons definition of what they think that means is different, b) every MMO is rapidly different so theres no cohesive definition for it other than massively multiplayer which by the very nature of a TT rpg its not c) large amounts of the content of all forms of player action and narrative is form from the same general premise that its extremely difficult to define what any of the difference are other than their interface with actually going into detail. As a result saying MMO-seeming is not helpful to describe anything since it can be used to literally describe anything that been made ever.
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Oct 16, 2014 06:11
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Designing for those people is fishing in a mud puddle. Try reading "Like an MMO" as "Like an industry more popular by millions that earns more dollars annually than a decade of tabletop RPGs combined." Which ignores the point that "MMO mechanics" is completely arbitrary among people who don't know poo poo about MMOs and think you just faceroll for the privilege of mailing BIG GAMING a monthly check for digital goods. People like the backers of million dollar kickstarter Pathfinder Online, for example.
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Oct 16, 2014 06:11
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For example: The clarinet is very MMO like because I only get to have a small handful of repetitive actions which produce the same results every time. I do this for the entire song book they give me and you only get 1 book when you get a clarinet. Also each song has an optimal rotation you just repeat for the whole thing. If I want to change or modify any part of it I have to spend $100s of dollars on expensive modules to fix it their content which just breaks if you use it for long enough anyway. Also the music just has predefined notes sitting right there. I dont need notes to create music. I wish the notes themselves weren't so restrictive and were a lot more swingy even if it means my orchestra produces the wrong note every so often. It lets the group be more dynamic when we try and fix the song half way through the performance!
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Oct 16, 2014 06:19
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It's also important to point out that any action(s) that follows a standardized formatting is literally a selection on an MMO action bar.
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Oct 16, 2014 06:23
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S.J. posted:Seeing as how it's completely made up as a lovely excuse by people to not like games they don't understand, for reasons they can't articulate, it definitely isn't a thing. That term gets applied to all kinds of things that it doesn't apply to in the least. It's a thing in mind peoples' minds. That's a thing. AlphaDog posted:Ok, so I'll take it as a given that Next needed to seem like it wasn't an MMO. I don't have an in-depth knowledge of fantasy MMOs and so am not the best person to answer that question. Reduced emphasis on specific party role and making the monk less magical-seeming might be a couple examples, though. kingcom posted:Its an extremely general term that doesn't mean anything because a) every persons definition of what they think that means is different, b) every MMO is rapidly different so theres no cohesive definition for it other than massively multiplayer which by the very nature of a TT rpg its not c) large amounts of the content of all forms of player action and narrative is form from the same general premise that its extremely difficult to define what any of the difference are other than their interface with actually going into detail. As a result saying MMO-seeming is not helpful to describe anything since it can be used to literally describe anything that been made ever. Even if they are entirely made up, value-judgments can still be pretty important. Also, for the purposes of this discussion it does not matter that there are probably hundreds of MMOs out there; people comparing tabletop games to MMOs are pretty much universally comparing it to World Of Warcraft. moths posted:Designing for those people is fishing in a mud puddle. Try reading "Like an MMO" as "Like an industry more popular by millions that earns more dollars annually than a decade of tabletop RPGs combined." I like how you seem to simultaneously be refuting that a tabletop game could be "like an MMO" while at the same time embracing that concept. People complaining about the MMO thing dislike how it's different from their game (if they're dumb), the DPS-Tank-Support worldview (if they are less dumb), or a game can be so "well" balanced that it feels like all the fun has been sanitized out of it (if they're me). edit: to clarify, that's how I feel based on my limited knowledge of WoW, so if I compared something to an MMO that would probably be what I was talking about friendlyfire fucked around with this message at 06:30 on Oct 16, 2014 |
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Oct 16, 2014 06:26
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friendlyfire posted:I don't have an in-depth knowledge of fantasy MMOs and so am not the best person to answer that question. Reduced emphasis on specific party role and making the monk less magical-seeming might be a couple examples, though. I always love less magical seeming monks, because if you look at media, they do some hella magical stuff. And even in real life, some monks have enough control over their body to regulate their temperature, such that they can dry towels on themselves.
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Oct 16, 2014 06:31
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friendlyfire posted:I don't have an in-depth knowledge of fantasy MMOs and so am not the best person to answer that question. Reduced emphasis on specific party role and making the monk less magical-seeming might be a couple examples, though. D&D has pretty much always had a requirement for specific party roles, or at least for someone to play a healer. And how does the monk seem less magical now that it uses Ki to cast wizard spells?
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Oct 16, 2014 06:37
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friendlyfire posted:People complaining about the MMO thing dislike how it's different from their game (if they're dumb), the DPS-Tank-Support worldview (if they are less dumb), or a game can be so "well" balanced that it feels like all the fun has been sanitized out of it (if they're me). I get the emotional judgement. I was talking about being actually rational about a topic. No offence but you are the textbook case of this issue. You don't really have a particularly good familiarity between either of the systems/games your making comparisons about but your making them anyway. This is a big issue because the balance doesn't actually do anything to detract from fun. There may be reasons for this but the idea that if your fellow players have equal relevance to you, then you cant have found just seems to come off as a profoundly selfish kind of motivation. I'm saying thats you but thats what it comes across. That one or more people must be better than others is important or you cant have fun. Generally there are a lot of different sub systems that interact with each other that cause it. One of the extremely common misconceptions about World of Warcraft for example is that its not the balance that tends to sanitize the game but actually the idea that 90% of the game is a solo experience so you will never interact with players anyway. Its pretty difficult to judge interclass balance without actually running long term with people filling the same group role as you (in WoWs case the holy trinity). A lot of people feel the classes grow slowly, seem the same and dont see how classes operated together and make a judgement call. Thats fine but class balance might not necessarily by the reason.
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Oct 16, 2014 06:37
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AlphaDog posted:D&D has pretty much always had a requirement for specific party roles, or at least for someone to play a healer. Honestly thats why something as simple as proper healing surge mechanics would make life infinitely better in 5e. Not needing to force my players into picking the group class they need was just a game changer in 4e.
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Oct 16, 2014 06:38
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djw175 posted:I always love less magical seeming monks, because if you look at media, they do some hella magical stuff. And even in real life, some monks have enough control over their body to regulate their temperature, such that they can dry towels on themselves. I don't espouse or endorse that view, I'm just saying that these are things that someone might do if they were deliberately courting people that hate WoW and anime. Reserving the more magical effects for wizards would probably generally be helpful in that regard. Since bringing those people back into the fold is basically the premise of d&d next, it might have influenced some design decisions that don't otherwise make sense to people. Like, I loving hate that massive death rule, but it is clearly there because of popular demand. Thankfully, it and the game are packaged in such a way that it is easy and even encouraged to ignore big parts of it.
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Oct 16, 2014 06:39
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I always thought that the MMO thing was more a complaint about how every character was 'Big Destiny, Epic Hero' vs 3.5's/etcs 'Big Plot, Epic Battles'. The difference between being inherently heroic vs doing heroic things that probably derived from the 'superhero' nature of the game. That having been said - it's stupid to try to design around avoiding the characters being inherently heroic as many people see that as the point of D&D.
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Oct 16, 2014 06:41
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Also, if you prefer the single-person option with a fighter, especially the strong, silent type, you can just parse "grunt" as a guttural vocalization.
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Oct 16, 2014 06:44
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Serdain posted:I always thought that the MMO thing was more a complaint about how every character was 'Big Destiny, Epic Hero' vs 3.5's/etcs 'Big Plot, Epic Battles'. Naw it always seemed to me to be generally targetted to the role system in 4th and the mark/defender stuff in specific. So now instead of being able to debuff monsters who don't attack them, fighters do nothing and then paladins have a literal MMO taunt that physically forces a target to attack them. Pretty great~~~
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Oct 16, 2014 06:45
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friendlyfire posted:It's a thing in mind peoples' minds. That's a thing. Not really. It's something that gets used as an excuse to justify their dislike of something, not to describe an established pattern or mechanic that is reminiscent of MMO design. It's impossible to account for that - the kinds of people who are going to be levying this kind of criticism are going to do it regardless of whether or not it's accurate.
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Oct 16, 2014 06:45
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Serdain posted:I always thought that the MMO thing was more a complaint about how every character was 'Big Destiny, Epic Hero' vs 3.5's/etcs 'Big Plot, Epic Battles'. Wait. 3.5 wasn't about a Epic Hero? I remember playing a wizard who wrenched open a portal to my own pocket dimension and flooded out an army of angelic beings to hold back the tides of evil saving the world. I think I was like level 13 or so. I felt 4e was much lower powered than 3.5 in my experience (until you hit epic level but thats kinda throwing things out the window). friendlyfire posted:I don't espouse or endorse that view, I'm just saying that these are things that someone might do if they were deliberately courting people that hate WoW and anime. Reserving the more magical effects for wizards would probably generally be helpful in that regard. Since bringing those people back into the fold is basically the premise of d&d next, it might have influenced some design decisions that don't otherwise make sense to people. Like, I loving hate that massive death rule, but it is clearly there because of popular demand. Thankfully, it and the game are packaged in such a way that it is easy and even encouraged to ignore big parts of it. I think WoW is pretty boring as hell, a single player game pretending to be a multiplayer game that really doesnt work unless your going in with a bunch of people. I also hate anime, I think its unintelligible and not engaging for the most part. Yet I really am not enjoying running 5e. I can't run a low powered dangerous game because the system doesn't support it and characters like a wizard, bard and cleric can just ignore chunks of it. I cant run heroic fantasy because different classes just cant keep up. I'm not sure what type of campaign to run with it and what style of storytelling im supposed to use. Its a bunch of work so trying to adapt both mechanics and theme can be a pain in the rear end. kingcom fucked around with this message at 06:50 on Oct 16, 2014 |
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Oct 16, 2014 06:46
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friendlyfire posted:I like how you seem to simultaneously be refuting that a tabletop game could be "like an MMO" while at the same time embracing that concept. People complaining about the MMO thing dislike how it's different from their game (if they're dumb), the DPS-Tank-Support worldview (if they are less dumb), or a game can be so "well" balanced that it feels like all the fun has been sanitized out of it (if they're me). Having played TTRPG's for nearly 2 decades now and mmo's for over 1 I can safely say that only a complete loving maroon would ever compare them seriously. In terms of how they play, they share virtually no real estate other than "are games." Fundamentally, TTRPG's are about emergent gameplay and very, very few mmo's (and especially not WoW) are. The idiot comparison starts and ends at, "4th edition powers look like ability tooltips in WoW and this makes me angry because I hate clear and concise rules." With a healthy dose of martials shouldn't be allowed to do cool stuff mixed in for good measure.
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Oct 16, 2014 06:52
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kingcom posted:Wait. 3.5 wasn't about a Epic Hero? I remember playing a wizard who wrenched open a portal to my own pocket dimension and flooded out an army of angelic beings to hold back the tides of evil saving the world. I think I was like level 13 or so. I felt 4e was much lower powered than 3.5 in my experience (until you hit epic level but thats kinda throwing things out the window). This is your regular mundane guy doing an epic thing. The class doesn't state 'Whizzards/Fighters/Barbarians are Rare And Super Mighty God-Beings and by Being One They Will Have Great Destiny' - like MMOs where every player has a specialness that sets them above NPCs. I guess the distinction of 'Like an NPC but doing cooler things' makes you feel more personally responsible for the epicness, or something? Again, just my interpretation of a stupid argument. I would say that the argument of "what, feels like something that is SUPER PROFITABLE??!" is a similarly stupid argument because profitability of a game is rarely the reason you play it.
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Oct 16, 2014 07:01
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Bitching about MMO elements is a classic grogging point. They know MMOs are popular, and don't know why - but can say with absolute certainty that it completely 100% is not because they're genuinely fun games that people enjoy. So they make poo poo up based on wild speculation and a Little Bit of Knowledge. TTRPGs can have MMO elements, but complaining about them is a signal that you haven't got a clue about them. TTRPGs should be bending over backwards trying to emulate MMOs. The WoW TCG did a fairly good job of bringing raiding, PVP battlegrounds, arenas, and eventually dungeons to the table. Eventually MtG stole a lot of these concepts. How's MtG doing these days? Do people still like it now that it "caters to the casuals?" Was there a huge exodus after The fact is that most RPGs are desperately trying to incorporate MMO elements. Living Forgotten Realms, Organized Play, Pathfinder's... somethings, D&D Days, etc are all trying to shoehorn the MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER into a hobby best enjoyed by a single table of players at a time. Companies are scrambling for online elements, but trying to do it all in some clandestine way that won't alert the base. Because they're loud and willing to go to great lengths to be heard. Successful businesses learn to send these people a form letter and file their correspondence in the crank file. In RPGs, these people get hired as "Consultants," get the ear of designers, and can literally condition a design team by coordinated flaming into producing mediocre content that appeals to them. This is exactly how D&D Essentials happened. friendlyfire posted:People complaining about the MMO thing dislike how it's different from their game (if they're dumb), the DPS-Tank-Support worldview (if they are less dumb), or a game can be so "well" balanced that it feels like all the fun has been sanitized out of it (if they're me). friendlyfire posted:I don't have an in-depth knowledge of fantasy MMOs. This is something we can agree on.
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Oct 16, 2014 07:01
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friendlyfire posted:...or a game can be so "well" balanced that it feels like all the fun has been sanitized out of it (if they're me). Given our differing opinions on whether or not balance is a good thing, I'd like you to point me at this "balanced to the point of blandness" MMO so I can finally enjoy playing one where I don't have to re-think all my poo poo every few weeks and can just go with whatever looks coolest. e: I'm not being sarcastic and this is not some kind of trap or something. You don't like super balanced games, I do, and I'd like to play a fantasy MMO that was super balanced because gently caress if I can ever keep up with the current "best" builds in those things, I just want to be able to have a cool looking guy in-game and smash through dungeons with randoms whenever I feel like it. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 07:16 on Oct 16, 2014 |
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Oct 16, 2014 07:12
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AlphaDog posted:Given our differing opinions on whether or not balance is a good thing, I'd like you to point me at this "balanced to the point of blandness" MMO so I can finally enjoy playing one where I don't have to re-think all my poo poo every few weeks and can just go with whatever looks coolest. Guild Wars 2 is pretty great, you can get away with pretty much anything build-wise. Like, the classes play different and are better suited to different play-styles and certain roles (they did away with the strict tank/heal/dps model), but generally you can make a class do whatever if you feel like. Also the endgame is entirely getting varying forms of currency to buy outfits/armor skins; it's trivial to get gear with high-end stats so any "grind" is purely self-imposed because you want to look pretty. Generic Octopus fucked around with this message at 07:23 on Oct 16, 2014 |
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Oct 16, 2014 07:15
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I think one "MMO problem" people have is that there is more happening than you could absorb in a single pass. Humans are literally unable to compute everything that's happening. The balance is asymmetrical, things interact in ways you can't expect. 4e had a LOT of subtlety and nuance in the writing that was nearly invisible until it hit the table, and some people really didn't like that. They want to be able to hold the whole thing in their brains because that's how they 'play' D&D when they're not playing D&D. I see some of this in games like Malifaux and WMH, where an amazing rule just looks bizarre, useless, or ineffective in text but then makes complete sense when you see how it works in play. In this situation, "Like an MMO" means "I don't understand what will happen when this rule is used." Next's return to natural language and "let's just kinda wing it" design is probably a more direct response to this than anything else.
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Oct 16, 2014 07:27
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I think people called out 4e being "MMO-Like" primarily because it codified abilities into At Will, Encounter, and Daily powers. Rather than having a character be a patchwork of class abilities, feats, and spells, it was all presented in a nice, tidy package. When listed all up front like that, it reads a lot like an MMO Skill bar. With that very clear ability structure combined with such a focus on marks, tiles, and listing class roles, I can understand the accusation. It's silly chicken/egg thing though and honestly the focus on heavily structured tiled combat is the most grognardy thing since it harkens back to the D&D's wargaming roots.moths posted:Bitching about MMO elements is a classic grogging point. They know MMOs are popular, and don't know why - but can say with absolute certainty that it completely 100% is not because they're genuinely fun games that people enjoy. So they make poo poo up based on wild speculation and a Little Bit of Knowledge. TTRPGs can have MMO elements, but complaining about them is a signal that you haven't got a clue about them. Organized play stuff like Adventurers League is exactly what game companies should be doing. This isn't an attempt at making the game "massively multiplayer." It's an attempt to foster community and make the game more accessible to new players. It's not emulating MMOs, it's emulating Friday Night Magic.
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Oct 16, 2014 07:56
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Babylon Astronaut posted:Is that the one with the example of someone failing a ride check, falling off a camel, rolling a critical, breaking their neck, and then dying in the desert of dehydration?  My paladin once dropped into a short coma for casting a non-combat, lowish level spell (for him) in a non-combat situation and blowing my rolls really, really badly. The sequence of dice that made it happen had odds of about 0.01%, though I came pretty close to the limit on the Extraordinary Spell Failure table where it basically just says "Your brain explodes out your ears and you die". Our group played RM for years, we houseruled the poo poo out of it so much that we had a private wiki to keep track of our version of the game. It was actually pretty fun, once we found a collection of house rules over the years that sort of fit. Very much a different experience, but with the right mindset and a GM who knows how adjust combat encounters for the way the game handles (ie. action economy is so. loving. important.) it can be a really satisfying and gritty romp.
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Oct 16, 2014 08:00
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