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ProfessorCirno posted:Take how much pride people had - and still loving have - in THAC0. "It kept the unwanted DUMB players out of the hobby!" No, you dumbfuck, it's not that they couldn't understand it, it's that they didn't give enough of a poo poo to bother! Oh goodness yes. People, he's not making this one up. I have genuinely see people claim that obtuse and complicated rules were great because they'd keep the idiots out of our hobby. (This was said in relation to the 2e-3e edition wars.)
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Dec 20, 2014 03:14
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Sage Genesis posted:Oh goodness yes. People, he's not making this one up. I have genuinely see people claim that obtuse and complicated rules were great because they'd keep the idiots out of our hobby. (This was said in relation to the 2e-3e edition wars.) ...and the 1e/2e arguments, although I guess this sort of stuff was less obvious before the internet. e: Although I'm not old enough to have seen it personally when it would have been relevant, a similar mindset does exist over the B/x > BECMI progression. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 03:31 on Dec 20, 2014 |
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Dec 20, 2014 03:28
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I've said it time and time again, but THAC0 is not difficult. It's lovely, slow, and obsolete, but not difficult.
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Dec 20, 2014 04:12
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Babylon Astronaut posted:I've said it time and time again, but THAC0 is not difficult. It's lovely, slow, and obsolete, but not difficult. Yeah, anyone who thinks subtraction is difficult probably shouldn't be bragging about that fact. I mean, I like messing around with fiddly system bits, but I sorta stopped doing that once I helped put together Pun Pun. After you've won, no need to keep playing that game.
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Dec 20, 2014 04:34
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Babylon Astronaut posted:I've said it time and time again, but THAC0 is not difficult. It's lovely, slow, and obsolete, but not difficult. Right, that's the point. A lot of those people would talk up themselves as if they were briliant ubermensch for figuring out THAC0, and how it made them the ELITE FEW who were smart enough to play D&D. Meanwhile in the real world, it was just a pain in the rear end, not some super difficult math problem, so most people just made a wank off motion and left them to their dumb subtraction games.
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Dec 20, 2014 04:36
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No man, don't you see? Those BECMI scrubs needed a table. I learned the formula for that table. 
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Dec 20, 2014 04:45
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Babylon Astronaut posted:I've said it time and time again, but THAC0 is not difficult. It's lovely, slow, and obsolete, but not difficult. Psst, if it's lovely and slow, it's difficult.
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Dec 20, 2014 04:50
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:Psst, if it's lovely and slow, it's difficult. Count backwards from 1000 by 13s. Like, most people don't consider tedious makework to be 'difficult', just 'tedious makework'. Bleu fucked around with this message at 05:07 on Dec 20, 2014 |
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Dec 20, 2014 05:03
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In hindsight THAC0 isn't even all that great an alternative compared to "write your target roll for a given AC on an index card, Dan, it's not like you're going to need more than 2-3" or the addition-only Target-20 system.
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Dec 20, 2014 05:13
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Anything major or important happen with regard to next the last 4 months?
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Dec 20, 2014 05:27
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gradenko_2000 posted:In hindsight THAC0 isn't even all that great an alternative compared to "write your target roll for a given AC on an index card, Dan, it's not like you're going to need more than 2-3" or the addition-only Target-20 system. Most people in my old 2e group had a little table showing the die roll and AC hit for each of their weapons. They'd update it every time their Thac0 changed or they got a bonus.
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Dec 20, 2014 05:32
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Babylon Astronaut posted:I've said it time and time again, but THAC0 is not difficult. It's lovely, slow, and obsolete, but not difficult. 5+3 = 3+5 5-3 =/= 3-5 Subtraction is bad for easy math. e: Target 20 is the best way to OSR.
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Dec 20, 2014 05:50
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Kylra posted:Anything major or important happen with regard to next the last 4 months?
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Dec 20, 2014 05:53
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dwarf74 posted:It's objectively more difficult than BAB, though, because subtraction is not commutative.
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Dec 20, 2014 07:08
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Sage Genesis posted:Oh goodness yes. People, he's not making this one up. I have genuinely see people claim that obtuse and complicated rules were great because they'd keep the idiots out of our hobby. (This was said in relation to the 2e-3e edition wars.) Maybe not necessarily "idiots", but those filthy casuals. Can't have any of this "growing the hobby" poo poo happening. Like, really, if you get new people into the game, they might point out the lovely parts and be otherwise critical of it. AIN'T NOBODY GOT TIME FO' THAT. blah blah, Nerd Identity and Tribal Signalling, etc. Fourth Edition sorta laid the mechanics bare for anyone who bothered to spend time searching The Internet (and maybe the pervasiveness of the internet is the variable that's not applicable to earlier editions) and that resulted in the cardinal sin of also laying bare how bullshit all of the legacy mechanics are. "We want your riders to be 2 or 3ish... we'll make that CON for this class, because [REASONS] or [TRADITION] and your attack/damage mod will be a different ability, also because" The filthy casuals came to 4th Edition with nothing (but their free offline character builder)... and they FLOURISHED. Is it any wonder Mearls wanted to walk that poo poo back so vehemently?
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Dec 20, 2014 07:58
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PeterWeller posted:No man, don't you see? Those BECMI scrubs needed a table. I learned the formula for that table. I feel morally obligated to say: Pretty much no-one will give a poo poo about a formula.
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Dec 20, 2014 10:43
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Difficult in the same sense that it's difficult to drink spoiled milk.
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Dec 20, 2014 15:14
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Guy I work with is a big dork like me, and we chat about the games we're running. He said he loves Next a lot, and makes a tsk tsk sound when I tell him my group plays 4e. I'm used to this reaction though, so I just brush it aside instead of argue. But I had to ask what it is about 5 that he likes so much, and he said "Because it ports 3.5 and 2nd edition so well" Uh. Does it? He has a bunch of homebrew stuff he uses, and has said he likes the feeeeel of the new rules. So I guess it's mission accomplished then.
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Dec 20, 2014 15:26
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crime fighting hog posted:Uh. Does it? Short answer: not really. Long answer: check his kool-aid, it might be spiked.
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Dec 20, 2014 15:33
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Laphroaig posted:Adventurer's League will have rulings, not rules, so that your local Adventurer's League will be unique! It will be YOUR D&D, not the D&D some corporate guy at "Wi$$ard$ of the Coa$t" is trying to sell you.
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Dec 20, 2014 16:02
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Kylra posted:Anything major or important happen with regard to next the last 4 months? The DMG is out. It's better than the other two books but did not magically make the other two books better. Magic items are some groggy poo poo. Encounter math is still hosed, etc. etc. etc.
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Dec 20, 2014 17:11
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30.5 Days posted:The DMG is out. It's better than the other two books but did not magically make the other two books better. Magic items are some groggy poo poo. Encounter math is still hosed, etc. etc. etc. For some reason I've seen lots of people elsewhere say that the 5e DMG is the best one yet. I'll admit that I haven't read through it in great depth (a friend of mine has the 5e core set and I sometimes browse through them) but I haven't seen anything particularly great so far. The numbers for the encounter guidelines seem off, the treasure is as unremarkable as ever, the advice seems decent but standard, and some of the "rules" are actually laughable - their guidelines on PC race construction are so brief they are practically nonexistent.
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Dec 20, 2014 17:40
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Sage Genesis posted:For some reason I've seen lots of people elsewhere say that the 5e DMG is the best one yet. The reason is that RC didn't need one, 1e was a nightmare of charts, nobody remembers 2e as well as they think they do, and they are deliberately ignoring 4e. You should read "5e is the best DMG!" as "it's slightly better than 3x."
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Dec 20, 2014 17:55
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30.5 Days posted:The DMG is out. It's better than the other two books but did not magically make the other two books better. Magic items are some groggy poo poo. Encounter math is still hosed, etc. etc. etc. Is there any word on when the basic pdf will be updated to contain DMG content?
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Dec 20, 2014 17:57
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moths posted:The reason is that RC didn't need one, 1e was a nightmare of charts, nobody remembers 2e as well as they think they do, and they are deliberately ignoring 4e. You should read "5e is the best DMG!" as "it's slightly better than 3x."
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Dec 20, 2014 18:22
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ascendance posted:The 5e DMG has all the procedural campaign generation stuff that was absent from 3e and 4e, and a pile of variant rules and other ideas for customizing your game. The 5e is a strong product. I'm not sure what stuff is absent from 3e and 4e that 5e does include. Can you give some examples, preferably with a chapter or page number or something?
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Dec 20, 2014 18:29
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Sage Genesis posted:I'm not sure what stuff is absent from 3e and 4e that 5e does include. Can you give some examples, preferably with a chapter or page number or something? The ability to generate an entire campaign world with dice. It's not useful for anything but I guess some people like knowing it's there.
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Dec 20, 2014 18:31
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30.5 Days posted:The ability to generate an entire campaign world with dice. That sounds like it could generate some hilarious crap.
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Dec 20, 2014 18:43
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moths posted:The reason is that RC didn't need one, 1e was a nightmare of charts, nobody remembers 2e as well as they think they do, and they are deliberately ignoring 4e. You should read "5e is the best DMG!" as "it's slightly better than 3x."
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Dec 20, 2014 18:44
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Thanks for the responses guys; as someone who hasn't played D&D before, i simply don't understand some of the hate fifth edition has in the thread.
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Dec 20, 2014 19:07
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Chipp Zanuff posted:Thanks for the responses guys; as someone who hasn't played D&D before, i simply don't understand some of the hate fifth edition has in the thread. 5th edition would be pretty alright if this was the year 2004, perhaps. However, a decade of better poo poo came out in the meantime, and this more or less ignores that, to pick amongst the rubble as it goes for what mechanics it likes. It covers the tummyfeels just fine, though, so if you wanted it to try to eat Pathfinder's lunch, mission accomplished. It's like saying, "Hey lets try to go to the moon again, but ignore literally anything we learned after 1962, and poorly reinvent the wheel as we go."
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Dec 20, 2014 19:24
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Chipp Zanuff posted:Thanks for the responses guys; as someone who hasn't played D&D before, i simply don't understand some of the hate fifth edition has in the thread. Honestly. most of us don't hate it. We don't love it. We thoroughly meh it. Which is what's so disappointing about it. It's a massively wasted opportunity that should have been *better*. We dislike it not for what it is, but for what it could have been.
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Dec 20, 2014 19:51
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Sage Genesis posted:For some reason I've seen lots of people elsewhere say that the 5e DMG is the best one yet. I'll admit that I haven't read through it in great depth (a friend of mine has the 5e core set and I sometimes browse through them) but I haven't seen anything particularly great so far. The numbers for the encounter guidelines seem off, the treasure is as unremarkable as ever, the advice seems decent but standard, and some of the "rules" are actually laughable - their guidelines on PC race construction are so brief they are practically nonexistent. 5e DMG has to be the best for the same reason 4e has to have sold poorly.
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Dec 20, 2014 20:36
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I tried to make a list of "sections of the 4E DMG that are also in the 5E DMG" and I had to stop after hitting a dozen because I was barely 20 pages in. If you cut out all of the mechanically-specific discussions, it's all there and it's all been written before. And I mean that literally. Page 8 of the 4E DMG, The Players, notes down the different Player Motivations: An Actor, an Explorer, an Instigator, a Power Gamer, a Slayer, a Story Teller, a Thinker and a Watcher Page 6 of the 5E DMG, Know Your Players, classifies the player types as Acting, Exploring, Instigating, Fighting, Optimizing, Problem Solving, and Storytelling Page 18 of the 5E DMG has a d100 rollable table of forms of government, page 154 of the 4E DMG just talks about the forms of government (although as I had posted before, most of the discussion paragraphs in the 5E DMG were outright copy-pasted from the 4E section) They both have sections on Gods, Planes, Factions, Treasure, How to run a Campaign, and on and on. 30.5 Days is correct in that 5E does have a bunch of tables to randomly determine things like "World Shaking Events" on a d10, or "Leader Types" on a d6, but if you look closely the same material is there in 4E, it's just in paragraph form or on a roll-less list. The only other significant difference I can see is that 4E's section on variant rules is 1 page long: Why you should make them and how, and the best examples they can come up with are "Fumble" and "Critical Success/Failure on a Natural 20/1"
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Dec 20, 2014 20:42
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gradenko_2000 posted:The only other significant difference I can see is that 4E's section on variant rules is 1 page long: Why you should make them and how, and the best examples they can come up with are "Fumble" and "Critical Success/Failure on a Natural 20/1"
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Dec 20, 2014 20:44
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Chipp Zanuff posted:Thanks for the responses guys; as someone who hasn't played D&D before, i simply don't understand some of the hate fifth edition has in the thread. If the RPG market was a menu, 5e would be twice warmed over ham. It tastes fine and won't make you sick, but also on the menu are a slew of other new and fresh dishes.
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Dec 20, 2014 20:45
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FMguru posted:Wow, straight of an issue of The Dragon from 1979! And to be fair building the book for new players who have never read a word of it matters too, but, when chunks are literally passed down over the decades verbatim, THAT is where I have issues. I mean, it's not as if anything has changed in the last 35 years or so, right? 
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Dec 20, 2014 20:56
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FMguru posted:Wow, straight of an issue of The Dragon from 1979! My point was more that apparently the writers of the 4E DMG were confident enough of the model of their game that they didn't think the game needed a lot of additional variant rules, although of course history bears out the Inherent Bonuses needed to be a thing anyway. Moinkmaster posted:And to be fair building the book for new players who have never read a word of it matters too, but, when chunks are literally passed down over the decades verbatim, THAT is where I have issues. I mean, it's not as if anything has changed in the last 35 years or so, right? I thought that 5E talking about "success at a cost" and "degrees of failure" was rather progressive, but quote:If the characters fail the challenge, the story still has to move forward, but in a different direction and possibly by a longer, more dangerous route. You can think of it like a room in a dungeon. If the characters can’t defeat the dragon in that room, they don’t get the experience for killing it or the treasure it guards, and they can’t go through the door on the opposite side of the room. They might still be able to get to the chamber behind the door, but by taking a different and more arduous path. In the same way, failure in a skill challenge should send the characters down a different route in the adventure, but not derail them entirely. That was still already mostly there by 2008
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Dec 20, 2014 21:14
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gradenko_2000 posted:My point was more that apparently the writers of the 4E DMG were confident enough of the model of their game that they didn't think the game needed a lot of additional variant rules, although of course history bears out the Inherent Bonuses needed to be a thing anyway. At that time, the designers still had no idea what kind of game they were making, so there's all kinds of artifacts of when one designer or another thought the game was still supposed to be a simulation.
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Dec 20, 2014 22:48
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Sage Genesis posted:I'm not sure what stuff is absent from 3e and 4e that 5e does include. Can you give some examples, preferably with a chapter or page number or something? All the stuff from pg. 254 onwards. The random dungeon generation stuff is better than done before. Lots of flavorful set dressing. The stuff between 93 and 121. Random tables and stuff for different environments. All the downtime stuff.
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Dec 20, 2014 23:20
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