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I've tried to do some searching, and while Inherent Bonuses (from DMG2/Dark Sun) can cover for items, I don't know how I can move past Feats. Googling for "4E without feats" just came up with the suggestion that you simply increase the wealth-by-level or Inherent Bonus level: a level 1 character will be getting items/Inherent Bonuses for level 2 characters, a level 5 will get level 7 stuff, a level 10 will get level 13 stuff, and so on. To steer this back towards Next, I suppose I could just ban the offending spells and leave the classes with mostly offensive and buffing/debuffing spells.
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Dec 13, 2014 15:12
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AlphaDog posted:Here's a weapons and armour module right here. I am stealing this to run in 13A. You might want to give Light weapons an Accurate tag, a +2 to Attack Roll, otherwise they really just get ignored.
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Dec 13, 2014 18:28
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I am not good at math. When people say bounded accuracy are they talking about advantage?
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Dec 13, 2014 18:45
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No, they're talking about smaller to-hit values and lower progression. Bounded accuracy means that Orc can still hit and damage a level 17 fighter, just not very much. But it also means that that Intellect Devourer can still hit and brain-eat the 17th level fighter, so it's really easy for it to mess with the curve.
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Dec 13, 2014 18:55
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Azran posted:I am not good at math. When people say bounded accuracy are they talking about advantage? No. In a game like 2e, your THAC0 might improve from 20 all the way to 1 as you level up. In 3e, your Base Attack Bonus might improve from +1 to +20. But in 5e it improves from +2 to +6. So only a difference of 4 points. The to-hit bonus, the accuracy, changes very little over the course of your campaign.
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Dec 13, 2014 18:57
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Alright. Yes, that sounds much better.
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Dec 13, 2014 19:01
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Azran posted:I am not good at math. When people say bounded accuracy are they talking about advantage? It means the Fighter starts with +2 attack from STR and +2 attack from Proficiency at level 1, and that only goes up to +5 attack from STR and +6 attack from Proficiency by level 17-20, but that's okay because even the worst monsters ever are only going to have maybe 19 AC, which means you still have a 65% chance of hitting them even before any other bonuses you can dig out from your items and abilities. quote:It'd be easier and faster to port paired down combat and bounded accuracy to 4e. I started delving down the path of first understanding 4E's math: Monster AC starts at 15 and increases by 1 per level. Player to-hit starts at around +7 for a 70% chance to hit, with a gain of +1 every other level, and another +2 from attribute score increases. So the Expertise Feats and Enhancement Bonuses from items (or Inherent Bonuses) is all just to catch up with the fact that a monster increases AC by 1 per level, but a player doesn't increase to-hit by 1 per level. Why not just reduce it to "roll 1d20, a 7 or better will hit"  If this is getting too deraily I'm sorry and I'll drop it or take it to another thread. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 20:42 on Dec 13, 2014 |
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Dec 13, 2014 19:03
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gradenko_2000 posted:I started delving down the path of first understanding 4E's math: Monster AC starts at 15 and increases by 1 per level. Player to-hit starts at around +7 for a 70% chance to hit, with a gain of +1 every other level, and another +2 from attribute score increases. So the Expertise Feats and Enhancement Bonuses from items (or Inherent Bonuses) is all just to catch up with the fact that a monster increases AC by 1 per level, but a player doesn't increase to-hit by 1 per level. Why not just reduce it to "roll 1d20, a 7 or better will hit" Mostly so it becomes easier to hit lower level enemies and harder for lower level enemies to hit you. 4e does the opposite of bounded accuracy by making lower level stuff irrelevent to higher level characters.
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Dec 14, 2014 03:52
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kingcom posted:Mostly so it becomes easier to hit lower level enemies and harder for lower level enemies to hit you. 4e does the opposite of bounded accuracy by making lower level stuff irrelevent to higher level characters. OK but why? No, really. Stronger creatures have more hit points and are more evasive/ablative. HP and AC totals have the same effect: extending combat length (or at least the time spent fighting any given creature). Isn't that redundant? Offense, too: stronger creatures are more accurate and more damaging. Both to-hit and damage have the same effect: reducing combat length. Isn't that triply redundant? Couldn't you just roll a single die, modified by level difference if you really want to model that level disparity for some reason? How central is the action of beating up hordes of goblinapes to the feel of high-level D&D, anyway?
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Dec 14, 2014 04:57
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kingcom posted:Mostly so it becomes easier to hit lower level enemies and harder for lower level enemies to hit you. 4e does the opposite of bounded accuracy by making lower level stuff irrelevent to higher level characters. Oh, right, of course! I was all inside my head about monsters almost always being the same level as the characters, so I completely missed that. In any case, looking at how Bounded Accuracy works in Next: 1. Players will generally have a 60% chance to hit a monster, just from the increases of their Proficiency Bonus and their Ability Score Modifier. although there's some wonkiness in the math in the mid-teens that ends up turning this to 65%. Assuming you don't implement monsters that need magic weapons to be hit, you shouldn't need the attack bonus from magic weapons to keep up with monster AC scaling  2. Monsters will generally have a 40% chance to hit a character in Heavy Armor, or 18 AC. Medium Armor goes up to 17 AC at max, same with Light Armor if your final DEX is 20(+5), so those classes can be hit 5% more often. Shields with +2 AC will reduce chance to hit by another 10% This is where "you don't need magic items" will seemingly break down: since there's no level-based/Proficiency bonus to AC, but monster attack will keep increasing as CR goes up, a PC will slowly start getting hit more and more often, about 5% more every 3 levels, such that a CR 20 monster has a 65% chance of hitting a Fighter without a shield.  You'd need something like 4 or 6 additional AC from magic items by the end of the game to make up the difference  By my reckoning, 4E works about the same: PCs will hit monsters 60% of the time while Monsters will hit PCs 40% of the time, although: In Next, a CR 1 monster with +3 attack will have a 30% chance of hitting a level 20 Fighter with 18 AC, and it still has a 5% chance to hit even if the Fighter has 23 AC to keep up with the scaling of a CR 20 monster. In 4E, a level 1 monster would be unable to hit a PC by as early as level 11, give or take. In Next, a level 17-20 Fighter with +11 attack (+6 Proficiency, +5 STR modifier) will just exactly hit a CR 1 with 13 AC 100% of the time In 4E, a PC would start hitting level 1 monsters 100% of the time by around level 10, give or take.
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Dec 14, 2014 04:58
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Fuschia tude posted:OK but why? Yeah, there are many different ways you can reflect being able to fight lots of stuff thats weaker than you . I'm not going to say 4e is a perfect solution I was just pointing out why you have an advancing number as you get higher level because it was asked? I don't think the scenario of fighting lots of things that are weaker than you individually is a particularly D&D thing. That just tends to be a scenario that comes up in all sorts of action/adventure stories.
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Dec 14, 2014 05:29
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kingcom posted:I don't think the scenario of fighting lots of things that are weaker than you individually is a particularly D&D thing. That just tends to be a scenario that comes up in all sorts of action/adventure stories. It's never been the prime focus of the game, at least in my experience. AD&D does kinda cater to it, for sufficiently weak things. Then there are swarm rules in various editions. Both Spelljammer and Birthright have different sets of fairly crap rules for dealing with it. Then there's the part of 2e Dragon Mountain where you're expected to fight hundreds of kobolds using the standard combat rules  (We did make it through that part after a 9 hour combat.)
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Dec 14, 2014 06:20
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AlphaDog posted:It's never been the prime focus of the game, at least in my experience. AD&D does kinda cater to it, for sufficiently weak things. Then there are swarm rules in various editions. Both Spelljammer and Birthright have different sets of fairly crap rules for dealing with it. Then there's the part of 2e Dragon Mountain where you're expected to fight hundreds of kobolds using the standard combat rules That sounds hilarious, I've always just preferred games to have some kind of horde/swarm rule for stuff like that but in D&D it seems to just end up becoming wizard uses an aoe spell on target, it dies.
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Dec 14, 2014 06:24
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From memory (this was the late 90s) the problem was just that there were too loving many enemies. I assume it was meant to show you that kobolds are still a threat when you're level 14, but gently caress that. I guess in an action/adventure story, this sort of thing is narrated as "Conan placed his back to the wall, and the bodies piled waist-deep around him before they brought him down" or however that quote goes, and then the story moves on. e: It's “I never saw a man fight as Conan fought. He put his back to the courtyard wall, and before they overpowered him the dead men were strewn in heaps thigh-deep about him. But at last they dragged him down, a hundred against one.” Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 06:39 on Dec 14, 2014 |
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Dec 14, 2014 06:37
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Kobolds aren't even really that interesting at level 1, do they really need to still be used at level 14? See also: other low level generic fantasy monsters you've fought in every RPG ever: Orcs, Goblins, etc.
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Dec 14, 2014 07:23
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Didn't some version of Fighters have an ability to attack multiple times if they were attacking 1 HD monsters? Not sure if that was ADnD 2E.
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Dec 14, 2014 07:26
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goldjas posted:Kobolds aren't even really that interesting at level 1, do they really need to still be used at level 14? 4e dealt with that with a variety of enemy variations, already templated racial abilities that tend to retain their usefulness, and easy ways to make swarms. It's nice to be able to level up your enemies and give them new stuff to a degree, and it's also fun to run through swarms of the stuff that used to really give you problems though. Both of these things can help give a sense of progression of both your characters as they rise to new but familiar challenges before tipping over the edge and getting to the point where they can see how much more powerful they are than they used to be. gradenko_2000 posted:Didn't some version of Fighters have an ability to attack multiple times if they were attacking 1 HD monsters? Not sure if that was ADnD 2E. Don't remember the version, but I believe it was 1 attack per round per monster.
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Dec 14, 2014 07:32
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AlphaDog posted:It's never been the prime focus of the game, at least in my experience. AD&D does kinda cater to it, for sufficiently weak things. Then there are swarm rules in various editions. Both Spelljammer and Birthright have different sets of fairly crap rules for dealing with it. Then there's the part of 2e Dragon Mountain where you're expected to fight hundreds of kobolds using the standard combat rules We say this stuff can just be handwaved away, or a smart DM would avoid or alter it, or that these products are best used as frames to hang your own ideas on, whatever... but think of the children, especially in the wilderness of the pre-internet RPG hobby who didn't realize this. To me, that's often why system matters. The children. gradenko_2000 posted:Didn't some version of Fighters have an ability to attack multiple times if they were attacking 1 HD monsters? Not sure if that was ADnD 2E. Yes, it's called Sweeping. It was originally in AD&D 1E and it's actually restricted to monsters below 1HD. So rats, basic goblins, etc. Also it can only be done to monsters near the character.
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Dec 14, 2014 07:33
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Lightning Lord posted:Yes, it's called Sweeping. It was originally in AD&D 1E and it's actually restricted to monsters below 1HD. So rats, basic goblins, etc. Also it can only be done to monsters near the character. The only place I ever found anything about this is on the very bottom of page 25 of the AD&D PHB, in a "note" on the attacks/round table. The note says: quote:This excludes melee combat with monsters (q.v.) of less than one hit die (d8) and non-exceptional (0-level) humans and semi-humans, i.e. all creatures with less than one eight-sided hit die. All these creatures entitle a fighter to attack once for each of his or her experience levels (See Combat). As far as I can tell, there's nothing in the PHB or DMG combat sections that deal with this. Given the layout and organistation of AD&D, that doesn't mean it's not there, just that I haven't found it over the last ~23 years.
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Dec 14, 2014 08:20
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AlphaDog posted:I really want to just yell Turn this the other way around: what if you split DEX up? Like, DEX always seemed like a manual thing to me, and agility more of a bodily thing (although your average dictionary would probably disagree, but whatever). Make DEX do weapon stuff and sleight of hand and thievery, make Agility do Acrobatics and Initiative and Armor bonuses and poo poo. Not saying you can't combine STR+CON, but..
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Dec 14, 2014 10:41
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AlphaDog posted:The only place I ever found anything about this is on the very bottom of page 25 of the AD&D PHB, in a "note" on the attacks/round table. The note says: Yep, that's where it comes from. There's also a chart or something in 2E. BTW, I might be conflating some of this with how sweeping worked in the Gold Box computer games.
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Dec 14, 2014 10:42
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P.d0t posted:Turn this the other way around: what if you split DEX up? Like, DEX always seemed like a manual thing to me, and agility more of a bodily thing (although your average dictionary would probably disagree, but whatever). I'm not sure more ability scores is the best way to go about anything, but if we're renaming and rearranging things... why not both? Might: Hit things real hard, lift things over your head, resist damage/poison/pushback/etc (regular weapon hit/damage, HP bonus, Con save type stuff, skills like Athletics) Agility: Dodge things, run across planks, swing from chandeliers etc (AC bonus, Init bonus, Dex save type stuff, skills like Acrobatics) Cunning Dexterity?: Precise stabbing and shooting, manipulating objects like traps and other people's pockets (finesse/missile +hit/dam, skills like Sleight of Hand) (e: that doesn't fix the "martials need 3 stats" thing though). Lightning Lord posted:Yep, that's where it comes from. There's also a chart or something in 2E. BTW, I might be conflating some of this with how sweeping worked in the Gold Box computer games. Yeah, it's not called "Sweeping" in the AD&D core books. I've heard it referred to as that online though. I never played the gold box games even though I'm the exact right age/demographic. It's not in 2e core at all (fighter multiattack is, but not sweeping). I'm not saying it's not in one of the Complete Books or in 2.5 -it probably is- but it's not in the core. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 11:11 on Dec 14, 2014 |
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Dec 14, 2014 11:02
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AlphaDog posted:Yeah, it's not called "Sweeping" in the AD&D core books. I've heard it referred to as that online though. I never played the gold box games even though I'm the exact right age/demographic. It's referred to as sweeping in the Gold Box games:  I guess it's fan slang that got into the video games. I'm certain it became more of a concrete rule in 2E, but it might not have been called "sweeping" then either. EDIT: Google says that it was an optional rule in the 2E DMG called "Heroic Fray" Lightning Lord fucked around with this message at 11:19 on Dec 14, 2014 |
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Dec 14, 2014 11:13
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I meant that there is no such rule in the original 2e PHB and DMG. Fighters, Paladins, and Rangers get multiple attacks/round. Fighters can get weapon specialisation which gives them more attacks/round, but there's no extra rule about hitting many <1hd monsters. I haven't read literally every single supplement for 2e, and I never really got into the 2.5 skills/power combat/tactics books, so I'm not doubting it makes an appearance somewhere. e: Responding to your edit: Got a page reference? Because if it's in the core 2e DMG (the edition I played most of) and I missed it, I'll feel really stupid. e2: Holy poo poo, it's there, in an blue "optional rule" box in the parts about initiative, page 57. It's easily missable given where it's positioned (the rear end end of the convoluted optional initiative sytems), but holy loving poo poo. I'm calling up my 1997 Dragon Mountain DM and demanding a do-over  . e3: 
Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 11:41 on Dec 14, 2014 |
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Dec 14, 2014 11:22
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AlphaDog posted:e2: Holy poo poo, it's there, in an blue "optional rule" box in the parts about initiative, page 57. It's easily missable given where it's positioned (the rear end end of the convoluted optional initiative sytems), but holy loving poo poo. I'm calling up my 1997 Dragon Mountain DM and demanding a do-over I'm sorry, friend. See what I mean about the children?
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Dec 14, 2014 11:33
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AlphaDog posted:I'm not sure more ability scores is the best way to go about anything, but if we're renaming and rearranging things... why not both? Might, Agility, Wit. Wit handling everything related to mental anything.
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Dec 14, 2014 11:35
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Lightning Lord posted:I'm sorry, friend. See what I mean about the children? Yes, although nobody in that group was "children" at the time. Yes, we should have known better. OneThousandMonkeys posted:Might, Agility, Wit. Wit handling everything related to mental anything. Go with this, this is good.
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Dec 14, 2014 11:44
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Is it just me or are zombies in 5e vulnerable to mind control and other such effects?. I had a brief look at the monster guide in the store today because my group wants me to run a WoW themed game in 5e so playable undead are a must and it seems by the rules of 5e they would be much less of a pain in the rear end to deal with than 3.5s immunity to everything.
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Dec 14, 2014 13:20
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DerVerrater posted:Is it just me or are zombies in 5e vulnerable to mind control and other such effects?. On the one hand, yes 5e zombies are vulnerable to mind control. To a certain extent. A spell like Dominate Person can't affect them but Dominate Monster can, as they are undead rather than humanoids. So there's some hidden immunities going on. That said, if you can affect them, it works pretty well. On the other hand... if it's about playing Forsaken, why do you even care about how zombies work? They're more like Revenants - who ironically enough do have mental immunities. But that aside, why care about how a monster works? Make a custom PC race from scratch to emulate the Forsaken, it doesn't even matter what the Monster Manual says.
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Dec 14, 2014 14:12
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Sage Genesis posted:On the one hand, yes 5e zombies are vulnerable to mind control. To a certain extent. A spell like Dominate Person can't affect them but Dominate Monster can, as they are undead rather than humanoids. So there's some hidden immunities going on. That said, if you can affect them, it works pretty well. I had always considered them more as zombies hence why thats the section i swung to, I was glancing at it for some inspiration, i was hoping to avoid the nightmare that is dealing with a d12+cha caster immune to near everything again like they where in 3.5
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Dec 14, 2014 14:25
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Avoid the nightmare of trying to shoehorn a MM monster into a PC race by not doing that. You're not making zombies a playable race. You're not making anything from D&D a playable race. Just make up a new race, Forsaken. Don't look in the MM for inspiration, look at the video game you're emulating. Then look at the PC races in the PHB and make something roughly in line with those. Here's an off-the-top-of-my-head version. Ability Score Increase: Your Constitution increases by 2. Dead folk are harder to kill. One other ability score increases by 1. Age: You will remain at the age you were when you died. Alignment: Whatever. Size: M Speed: 30 feet like a human. Languages: Common and one extra language of your choice. Do Forsaken have a language? You get that. Touch of the Grave / Cannibalize: Drain 1d4 (1d6? 2d4? Double your level?) hp from a target you hit in combat. Gain the same amount of hp back. You can't use this ability again until you take a short rest. Will of the Forsaken: Gain advantage on saving throws against <sleep, charm, mind control, etc> (you'll need to figure out the spells, I'm not gonna do it). No Rest For The Angry Dead: You don't need to eat, or drink. You don't need to sleep, but you do need to lie down for a few hours a night. Various RP stuff: Just like in WoW. e: I haven't played WoW since a month after Cataclysm released. I probably missed an ability or added one or something. But really, just look at the races in the PHB and make up something like that, they're not super complicated or super balanced and you can always change it later (if you don't want to "just change" it there's plenty of in-fiction WoW stuff that fucks with the undead). Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 14:55 on Dec 14, 2014 |
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Dec 14, 2014 14:45
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AlphaDog posted:e2: Holy poo poo, it's there, in an blue "optional rule" box in the parts about initiative, page 57. It's easily missable given where it's positioned (the rear end end of the convoluted optional initiative sytems), but holy loving poo poo. I'm calling up my 1997 Dragon Mountain DM and demanding a do-over
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Dec 14, 2014 15:17
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Looking at the current Forsaken racials, I'd treat Touch of the Grave as a small life-drain that coincides with dealing critical damage, Cannibalize would let you eat a humanoid or undead corpse to regain a surge/ HD/ whatever. Will of the Forsaken should let you auto-save one ongoing psychological effect (fear, sleep, charm), and Shadow Resistance is probably best ignored. They used to have Water Breathing, which I think would be a more practical substitution for a tabletop game. One good thing I'll say for Next is that you can't gently caress up any balance or overlapping mechanics by just making poo poo up and seeing how it plays out. Back to bounded accuracy, why isn't BA completely at odds with the concept of leveling? Games like Call of Cthulhu and Vampire don't have levels, and a Deep One or arsonist at noon is still going to wreck an experienced character as much as a fresh one. Is that what they wanted?
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Dec 14, 2014 15:30
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P.d0t posted:Turn this the other way around: what if you split DEX up? Like, DEX always seemed like a manual thing to me, and agility more of a bodily thing (although your average dictionary would probably disagree, but whatever). Combine Strength and Agility making it all about general athletics
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Dec 14, 2014 16:01
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Fuschia tude posted:OK but why? You're definitely right that it's redundant though. And they still got it pretty wrong in some cases (requiring math fix feats and at high levels your bad NADs are basically auto hits even with fixes).
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Dec 14, 2014 16:09
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:Might, Agility, Wit. Wit handling everything related to mental anything. Microlite20 uses Strength, Dexterity and Mind and it seems to work fairly well as a replacement for the original 6 DTAS
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Dec 14, 2014 16:46
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Fuschia tude posted:OK but why? Or you could accept a lower level of power disparity, which is what 5e does, but that has its own pitfalls; with bounded accuracy, large numbers of low level enemies are much more powerful than I think most starting DM's intuitively realize, which is what lead to measuring monster threat levels in number of skeletons, and the title of this thread. There's not really a single right way to do it, just different approaches with different side effects handled with varying levels of competency.
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Dec 14, 2014 17:03
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Lightning Lord posted:I'm sorry, friend. See what I mean about the children? 
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Dec 14, 2014 17:26
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Fuschia tude posted:OK but why? This is an oversimplified model of the situation. First of all, you also have to consider other sources of harm. Poison, falling, fire, and of course many spells don't use attack rolls. A lot of damage is unconnected to attack rolls. And a lot of attack rolls can be unconnected to damage (shove, trip, grapple, stuff like that). So they have separate mechanics. This makes perfect sense. Then you also have to consider the alternatives. In the new World of Darkness, there was only one single combat roll instead of separated to hit and damage rolls. The result was that chainsaws were highly accurate weapons but rapiers weren't, because their potential to devastate was different. Translate that now to D&D and the question becomes, how do we separate the nimble but fragile Rogue from the lightly-armored Barbarian with a truckload of hit points? If it all boils down to one roll, you lose this type of distinction. And combine that with, say, falling damage and you'll end up with two classes who previously performed differently but now are the same. This isn't necessarily a bad thing but it's not the way D&D works. For other games this could work fine. Finally, despite the rhetorical question at the end of your post, that type of action is actually quite central to D&D. Sweep/Heroic Fray actions were made for a reason. You will want to have a type of opponent who is unlikely to ever hit but can still deal measurable damage when he does. On the flipside, you can also make dumb brutes who are unlikely to hit but crush every bone in your body if they do connect. Your proposed model wouldn't let you distinguish very well.
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Dec 14, 2014 17:31
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I liked the way the new Star wars rpg handled attributes. Brawn is Str + Con, Agility is Agility, Intellect is inteligence but then you get Cunning, Willpower and Presence. Or just do what that rpgnet guy in grognards.txt did and have 15 different attrivutes with no skills 
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Dec 14, 2014 18:47
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