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What about charisma?
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Dec 14, 2014 19:15
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Rannos22 posted:What about charisma? Charisma is a muddled stat that means vastly different things in every game. Arguably, your charisma is a mental thing and can be handled by a mental ability score. Arguably, it's purely physical appearance, but that's usually not good enough to describe how ugly or terrifying things can be charismatic (which they often are), so other ability scores start taking over what Charisma was originally thought to do, like strength, or again mental scores. Arguably, it's the indelible power of your soul, which is how D&D has long handled it but still made it the basis of your social skills and maybe added in subscores like Comeliness. In all of these cases it's clear that we could actually do without Charisma.
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Dec 14, 2014 19:29
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Fable had it down with might, guile and will if you ask me
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Dec 14, 2014 19:40
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:Charisma is a muddled stat that means vastly different things in every game. Arguably, your charisma is a mental thing and can be handled by a mental ability score. Arguably, it's purely physical appearance, but that's usually not good enough to describe how ugly or terrifying things can be charismatic (which they often are), so other ability scores start taking over what Charisma was originally thought to do, like strength, or again mental scores. Arguably, it's the indelible power of your soul, which is how D&D has long handled it but still made it the basis of your social skills and maybe added in subscores like Comeliness. It's useful to have some sort of thing to help people who are reserved or shy in real life portray great leaders of people or whatever, but I don't think Charisma is it. Hell, even something like Dungeon Crawl Classics dispenses with Charisma, replacing it with Personality. ascendance posted:Dragon Mountain specifically told DMs to not use the sweeping rule. Because invincible kobolds. Wow, the dude who designed A Line In the Sand really hated children and loved kobolds. I wonder if this is the first place kobolds were associated with dragons... Lightning Lord fucked around with this message at 20:01 on Dec 14, 2014 |
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Dec 14, 2014 19:44
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It always confused me that Intelligence is the "Accumulated Knowledge" stat while Wisdom is the "Innate Acuity" stat when the definitions mean the opposite.
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Dec 14, 2014 19:59
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mango sentinel posted:It always confused me that Intelligence is the "Accumulated Knowledge" stat while Wisdom is the "Innate Acuity" stat when the definitions mean the opposite. Suddenly my inability to differentiate between wisdom and intelligence in dnd makes total sense.
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Dec 14, 2014 20:06
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The problem becomes even bigger when you realize they bundle Willpower and Perception into Wisdom, so a really old person has better eyesight and hearing than someone young.
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Dec 14, 2014 20:18
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It seems to me that Wisdom would be better served if it was called something like Intuition
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Dec 14, 2014 21:43
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Charisma is ostensibly a stat to give players who aren't that charismatic a chance to play a character who is a smooth talker or a strong leader. Every DM I've played with except someone running the official encounters group has basically house ruled that if you can't somehow do the speech your character is doing, you get negatives to the roll or just completely fail. gently caress you, kid who has a speech impediment. On the other hand, even the most pedantic dms I've ever had hardly cared about verbal/somatic/material components. Personally, I prefer a system that has less stats(3 sounds good) and then skills or traits that modify the stats when in certain situations. Warrior, Rogue, Mage does that pretty well. That being said, I think DnD is still a good introduction for new players because it introduces concepts that some other games are specifically built around improving on. One of the biggest things in my regular group is that the expert thief seems to always roll a 1 when he's invisible and sneaking around doing things. It's funny but it also begs the question "if we are so great, why is there always a chance of absolute failure?" A good dm would probably explain the bad roll as an unfortunate coincidence or just not force a roll in certain situations but the other thing I've noticed is even if a dm is pretty lenient in other games, DnD seems to bring out the adversarial nature of dms for some reason.
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Dec 14, 2014 22:11
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jodai posted:Charisma is ostensibly a stat to give players who aren't that charismatic a chance to play a character who is a smooth talker or a strong leader. Every DM I've played with except someone running the official encounters group has basically house ruled that if you can't somehow do the speech your character is doing, you get negatives to the roll or just completely fail. gently caress you, kid who has a speech impediment. On the other hand, even the most pedantic dms I've ever had hardly cared about verbal/somatic/material components. This just goes along with grogs subconsciously believing that spellcasters can do anything because magic, and non-spellcasters can't do anything because realism. Charisma plus anything less than a Churchill-grade speech: failure Charm person plus a sentence: success
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Dec 14, 2014 22:26
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jodai posted:Charisma is ostensibly a stat to give players who aren't that charismatic a chance to play a character who is a smooth talker or a strong leader. Every DM I've played with except someone running the official encounters group has basically house ruled that if you can't somehow do the speech your character is doing, you get negatives to the roll or just completely fail. gently caress you, kid who has a speech impediment. On the other hand, even the most pedantic dms I've ever had hardly cared about verbal/somatic/material components. That sounds like the worst possible use of any kind of talky stat. Isn't the whole point of the stat to replace the need for the player to have the character's ability? I'm pretty sure we've had this conversation though. Anyway the most important part of what stats to have in your game is to make sure each of them get used appropriately for the game system itself. If its something that is general enough to come up often then it should be considered as part of a stat. D&D has this issue where it doesn't really consider how many of its stats are actually relevant to its own game. Most of the time half the stats are completely ignored by certain classes which makes them pretty redundant to 'core' parts of the game. Nobody but a skillmonkey/wizard uses int, nobody but a talky character uses Cha, nobody but a melee character uses Str. It makes these stats largely irrelevant as they will virtually never come up. Star Wars Edge of the Empire sets itself up pretty well: Brawn (health,melee,damage reduction), Agility (shooting,piloting, acrobatics/sneaky), Intellect(knowledge, medicine, tech) , Cunning (skullduggery stuff, lies, perception), Willpower (initiative, fatigue, resisting the force, intimidation), Presence (leadership, all talky, initiative) Given the list of stuff Willpower is probably the least actively useful stat and doesn't fit as well as the rest but thats purely dependent on how much the force shows up in your game. Every character is going to be making use of everything in that list. Intellect can probably be ignored by a lot of players since its going to be someone one character can specialise in. kingcom fucked around with this message at 23:29 on Dec 14, 2014 |
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Dec 14, 2014 23:26
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jodai posted:One of the biggest things in my regular group is that the expert thief seems to always roll a 1 when he's invisible and sneaking around doing things. It's funny but it also begs the question "if we are so great, why is there always a chance of absolute failure?" A good dm would probably explain the bad roll as an unfortunate coincidence or just not force a roll in certain situations but the other thing I've noticed is even if a dm is pretty lenient in other games, DnD seems to bring out the adversarial nature of dms for some reason. I think part of it is the perception that any failure on the roll has to be something that the character did, as well as the binary resolution of a d20 pass/fail check, so you end up in these situations where the DM thinks that not only is a Thief going to fail at being sneaky 5% of the time, he's also going to fail at it because he still trips over his own feet. It took me a while to realize that when evaluating ability checks, I shouldn't always project failures onto the character's competence, and that a failed check can sometimes just mean that the character doesn't get exactly what they want - there's a complication, but the door still gets unlocked, especially if it's something that'd be in the character's wheelhouse (in Dungeon World terms, being 'skilled' in a thing means a 6 or less is automatically converted into a 7-9)
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Dec 14, 2014 23:30
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jodai posted:Charisma is ostensibly a stat to give players who aren't that charismatic a chance to play a character who is a smooth talker or a strong leader. Every DM I've played with except someone running the official encounters group has basically house ruled that if you can't somehow do the speech your character is doing, you get negatives to the roll or just completely fail. gently caress you, kid who has a speech impediment. On the other hand, even the most pedantic dms I've ever had hardly cared about verbal/somatic/material components. I would not be surprised at all if you told me that these DMs also punished the players of low inteliigence characters if they came up with really creative solutions to problems because they were meta gaming.
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Dec 15, 2014 00:17
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Lightning Lord posted:It's useful to have some sort of thing to help people who are reserved or shy in real life portray great leaders of people or whatever, but I don't think Charisma is it. Hell, even something like Dungeon Crawl Classics dispenses with Charisma, replacing it with Personality. Well my argument is essentially that you don't need Charisma, you can handle everything Charisma supposedly does with Might, Agility, and Wit (or whatever you want to call them).
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Dec 15, 2014 00:21
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DerVerrater posted:Fable had it down with might, guile and will if you ask me Yeah, when I was toying with a 4e heartbreaker, I looked to Fable 2 and the three iconic characters that represented the three atrributes and called my three Might, Skill and Wisdom. Might was Str+Con. Basic brawn and general health/fitness. Skill covered Dex+Cha, with the parts of Int that covered mental reflexes in 4e and general knowledge skills. Wisdom was, well, Wis and the parts of Int that pertained to magical ability. Also covered more esoteric skills like Arcana. It never got past scribbles on the back of napkins, though 
Mewnie fucked around with this message at 02:31 on Dec 15, 2014 |
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Dec 15, 2014 02:29
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Mewnie posted:Yeah, when I was toying with a 4e heartbreaker, I looked to Fable 2 and the three iconic characters that represented the three atrributes and called my three Might, Skill and Wisdom. You should check out Stargazer Games The flag ship game is Warrior Rogue Mage, which is basically DnD reimagined. The stats are Warrior, Rogue and Mage. There's a few supplements and the core pdf has several options for running different types of games. Since that game, the writer has experimented with the formula in different ways(Arcane Heroes is inspired by Fable) All the games are free and they are at least interesting reads. My favorite is probably the magic supplement because he had so many different ways to run magic from really loose freeform to lists of spells for schools of magic. Out of all the changes in 5th, I was really hoping the magic system would be reworked to be shorter and more innovative. They made some interesting changes but I think they could have pushed it a lot more.
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Dec 15, 2014 06:03
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Continuing my look at Next's math, the next thing I looked at was DPR compared to monster HP. I know Jack the Lad did this before, but that was using the Basic Rules and supplemental monsters. I wanted to look at what it'd be like with the monster HP in the DMG's stats by CR table: Assuming a Fighter (but without any other class features except extra attacks) with a 2d6 Maul:  What I can see is that during the first 3-4 levels, when the Fighter has pretty much 0 options besides "I attack", the number of rounds to kill a monster just keeps going up steadily until you're looking at almost 20 rounds of "I attack". Once you hit level 5 and the second attack kicks in, it goes back down to 11 and averages to about 13-14 rounds to a kill the rest of the way. The next extra attack always kicks in before the rounds-to-a-kill starts heading back into how bad it was during the shitfarmer phase. Abilities and feats will alleviate this somewhat, of course, but that's still a rather long time. I wanted to do a comparison with casters, but I'm not sure how to run those numbers since spell slots are limited and I don't think there's a baseline expectation for how often a monster should make its save.
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Dec 15, 2014 06:15
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Is there anything in the optional rules/modules that says "when you regain HP from a spell, you can also spend one Hit Die to regain additional HP"? Cuz that seems like it might be a handy houserule to slap on.
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Dec 15, 2014 09:16
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Stupid point idea.
Lawrence Edward fucked around with this message at 21:22 on Dec 16, 2014 |
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Dec 15, 2014 09:24
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Not that I've found - they have rules for: 1. Can't spend Hit Dice during short rests unless you have someone skilled in using the Healer's Kit and expends uses of it 2. "Healing Surges" is a once per Short Rest, Normal Action that you can use mid-combat to heal yourself by expending Hit Dice that you still have (capped at half your maximum) 3. Long Rests don't restore HP - they only restore half your maximum Hit Dice, then you can spend those Hit Dice to heal. This is one of the worst variant rules in the book. Your idea is really good though and that might be worth a try.
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Dec 15, 2014 09:28
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So hey, I'm about to play in a 5E game for the first time ever and I'm super hyped but I want to be sure that I understand how reach works. I'm playing a paladin with a halberd and want to eventually get the polearm feat that will hopefully give me a solid opportunity attack against enemies approaching nearby party members. In the meantime, I need to know whether I can attack adjacent enemies with it during my turn and, either way, whether or not moving from 10ft away to adjacent gives me an opportunity attack. From reading the rules in the PHB, it sounds like I can attack anyone adjacent or within 10ft, but that I only get an attack of opportunity against enemies who leave my 10ft radius, not move further into it. Is that right?
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Dec 15, 2014 09:31
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Using a "Reach" weapon, by itself, means you can attack enemies that are 10 feet/2 squares away. It does nothing for your Opportunity Attack, since the definition of a Reach weapon is that you only get the extra 5 feet of range whenever you attack. The Polearm Master feat says that creatures will now also provoke Opportunity Attacks whenever they enter your Reach, on top of the baseline behavior of whenever they leave your Reach. However, since again the definition of Reach is that your reach is only 10 feet during your use of the Attack action, then this when a creature that's 10 feet away steps up to within 5 feet of you, but remember that since your Reach is 5 feet whenever it's not your turn (since you aren't attacking), then when that creature was 15 feet away and moved to within 10 feet of you, it did NOT provoke an Opportunity Attack.
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Dec 15, 2014 09:47
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Pharmaskittle posted:From reading the rules in the PHB, it sounds like I can attack anyone adjacent or within 10ft, but that I only get an attack of opportunity against enemies who leave my 10ft radius, not move further into it. Is that right? You can make one OA per round, yes. OA triggers when an opponent leaves your reach. So no using it as they approach you (unless you get the feat). Reach says that "This weapon adds 5 feet to your reach when you attack with it". That implies that you only get the extra 5' reach when you're making an attack, and that when you're not making an attack (eg, when your enemy is moving), your reach is still only 5'.
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Dec 15, 2014 09:48
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Rannos22 posted:I would not be surprised at all if you told me that these DMs also punished the players of low inteliigence characters if they came up with really creative solutions to problems because they were meta gaming. My solution to that is figuring out the answer to things then telling that to someone playing a high int or wis character. You can't just say "my int is high so I solve the puzzle" so might as well use out of character advice.
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Dec 15, 2014 11:33
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Pharmaskittle posted:So hey, I'm about to play in a 5E game for the first time ever and I'm super hyped but I want to be sure that I understand how reach works. I'm playing a paladin with a halberd and want to eventually get the polearm feat that will hopefully give me a solid opportunity attack against enemies approaching nearby party members. In addition to what others have said I'd recommend reading back a few pages as there was a massive discussion about this very issue
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Dec 15, 2014 11:51
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Mr Beens posted:In addition to what others have said I'd recommend reading back a few pages as there was a massive discussion about this very issue ...and apparently I edited out the link I posted to that while I was trying to make my previous post as clear as possible. mastershakeman posted:My solution to that is figuring out the answer to things then telling that to someone playing a high int or wis character. You can't just say "my int is high so I solve the puzzle" so might as well use out of character advice. I'm not sure what you mean here. Do you mean a low-int character is unlikely to succeed in their Int check to solve a puzzle, or that nobody can make an Int check to solve a puzzle?
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Dec 15, 2014 13:14
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gradenko_2000 posted:3. Long Rests don't restore HP - they only restore half your maximum Hit Dice, then you can spend those Hit Dice to heal. This is one of the worst variant rules in the book.
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Dec 15, 2014 14:14
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gradenko_2000 posted:Using a "Reach" weapon, by itself, means you can attack enemies that are 10 feet/2 squares away. It does nothing for your Opportunity Attack, since the definition of a Reach weapon is that you only get the extra 5 feet of range whenever you attack. AlphaDog posted:You can make one OA per round, yes.
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Dec 15, 2014 15:51
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LFK posted:It's such a strange and convoluted way to accomplish the stated goal. If you want a "slow heal" variant why not strip HD out entirely and limit HP from a Long Rest to your Con bonus? It's not like Hit Dice are a critical, core source of healing. The variant rules are only minor number tweaks or additions. You will see them scaling numbers. You will see them add rules to handle things like squares or hexes. But removing a part of their rules? I think they're not too keen on that.
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Dec 15, 2014 17:10
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mastershakeman posted:My solution to that is figuring out the answer to things then telling that to someone playing a high int or wis character. You can't just say "my int is high so I solve the puzzle" so might as well use out of character advice. This is a solution to a problem that should not exist.
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Dec 15, 2014 17:21
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mastershakeman posted:My solution to that is figuring out the answer to things then telling that to someone playing a high int or wis character. You can't just say "my int is high so I solve the puzzle" so might as well use out of character advice. Why not, "my str is high so I lift the rock" works just fine.
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Dec 15, 2014 17:33
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Jackard posted:Overall, you should probably trick/persuade your DM into a better reading. Agreed. I personally would just use the OA definition of 4E
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Dec 15, 2014 17:45
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Piell posted:Why not, "my str is high so I lift the rock" works just fine. 
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Dec 15, 2014 18:29
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Piell posted:Why not, "my str is high so I lift the rock" works just fine. Wait, you guys just make an int roll to see if you figure out a puzzle or have the dm provide a plan of action or something else?
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Dec 15, 2014 21:21
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mastershakeman posted:Wait, you guys just make an int roll to see if you figure out a puzzle or have the dm provide a plan of action or something else? If everyone is stumped by the puzzle usually one rolls something to either get a hint or just solve and move on, yeah. What kinda sociopath DMs have you had that just let the party run around in circles like a headless chicken?
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Dec 15, 2014 21:38
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Rannos22 posted:If everyone is stumped by the puzzle usually one rolls something to either get a hint or just solve and move on, yeah. What kinda sociopath DMs have you had that just let the party run around in circles like a headless chicken? The same one who enforces spell components, spell memorization times, spell interrupting, and quest failures due to untimeliness.
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Dec 15, 2014 21:41
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mastershakeman posted:The same one who enforces spell components, spell memorization times, spell interrupting, and quest failures due to untimeliness. Three out of four of those is actually really good and I would encourage that person to continue making GBS threads on the bourgeois wizard master race whenever possible
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Dec 15, 2014 21:44
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mastershakeman posted:The same one who enforces spell components, spell memorization times, spell interrupting, and quest failures due to untimeliness. This reminds me of a nightmare I'm glad I avoided back in the day by witnessing a guy's absolutely unimaginable GM style before joining one of his games. First of all, he was a "pay to play" GM, which is a completely different can of worms that I won't go into right now (He charged 7 bucks a session for his ultra-hard custom made Pathfinder game that you likely wouldn't see past the first night). Anyway, he invited me to sit in and watch one of his games to let me decide whether or not I felt it was worth paying him to run a game. The session went on for seven hours and all the group did was debate on how to beat a loving puzzle he had put in their way before just deciding to end for the God damned night because no one was getting anywhere. I'm not even joking and I really wish I was. The group spent an entire night from dusk to dawn in real time, trying to figure out a God damned word puzzle, and I watched as he shot down every possible game mechanic that could aid them along. Divination magic? They discovered that trying to use any spell at all to solve the puzzle made lightning fry their brains. Brute force? Unpickable locks and unbreakable stonework. Skills? Impossibly high DCs and him just flat out saying "That skill won't help you here". He fully expected the group to try and figure out his stupid lovely puzzle and do it verbatim how he had planned it to be solved. At the end of the night, he expressed how discouraged he was that no one could figure out the puzzle (that, mind you, was necessary to advance the loving plot) and actually asked for my input on how to do it. I immediately said, "Let the players use Knowledge checks or INT checks or SOME kind of insight-like or hint check because Jesus that was painful to watch. That's what they're THERE for. USE THEM". His reply? "That's cheating". Cue another hour of very angry arguing with him about how loving STUPID he was for thinking that using the mechanics of the God damned game to HELP YOU IN THE GAME is cheating. The worst part about it? His players were on HIS SIDE of the loving argument! Grognards are really loving broken, but this is taking it to whole new levels of "What the loving Christ?" because there was actual money involved. Needless to say I would never ever have joined ANY of his games after that night, even if they were free. You have no idea how badly I want to namedrop him right now just to warn everyone here about him (He frequents gaming forums all over the net advertising his games every couple of months so some of you might even unfortunately know who I'm talking about), but I don't think anyone here is groggy or dumb enough to fall for such a scam so I'm not worried.
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Dec 15, 2014 22:34
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Puzzles are a fun gameplay element and can add a lot to a campaign when used right, so it's a shame to reduce them to 'roll int'. I can see the logic behind it, as in the couch deadlift argument, but there has to be a line there, else you'd have people saying "my intelligent character figures out the optimal thing to do in this situation" instead of choosing to attack or cast a spell or whatever. If you totally mechanise the effects of every stat then you're not playing the game anymore. Roleplay carries an implicit assumption that you're projecting some decisions onto the character regardless of that character's ability to make those decisions themselves. That said, knowledge or int checks are a good idea when the puzzle stops being fun, as in the case of bad DMs who expect you to figure out their word puzzle verbatim, but the problem with bad DMs is very likely that they don't understand the concept of fun.
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Dec 15, 2014 22:56
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mastershakeman posted:The same one who enforces spell components, spell memorization times, spell interrupting, and quest failures due to untimeliness.
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Dec 15, 2014 23:39
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