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kingcom posted:Yep, it was worked out earlier in the thread that bards are the far superior grapplers.
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Mar 26, 2015 23:48
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ImpactVector posted:Did that comparisson include barbarians? The advantage on STR checks when raging seems to work out pretty well for grappling from what I've seen. 1. The Bard can still gain advantage from other sources. 2. Advantage provides a roughly 3-point increase to the average expected value of the roll, which is less than a +6 bonus provides (which is the max of double proficiency). 3. Advantage doesn't increase your minimum and maximum possible results because it's not an improvement, only a factor of reliability. So, yes, the Bard still makes for the better grappler. It's probably not as it should be, but... well, there's a reason this thread has so much bitching about 5e. The math simply doesn't add up.
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Mar 26, 2015 23:56
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ImpactVector posted:Did that comparisson include barbarians? The advantage on STR checks when raging seems to work out pretty well for grappling from what I've seen. Bards just get way bigger +s on the skill checks and have a bunch of extra stuff to add to dice rolls.
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Mar 26, 2015 23:58
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kingcom posted:Yep, it was worked out earlier in the thread that bards are the far superior grapplers. This sounds like the setup for D&D pro-wrestling, the best grapplers are performers, not warriors.
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Mar 27, 2015 00:27
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Dragon ate my  , D&D finally made profitable.
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Mar 27, 2015 00:52
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goatface posted:I'd say you do. If you're good at TWF (i.e. get the abilities) you can add your ability mod. So spending a feat for 1d4+Str (which is presumably un-magic-weaponable)? Sure, why not. 7 or 8 more damage ain't going to make much of a difference. If you couple it with the Great Weapon Master feat as a Paladin it can become a whole lot more than 7 or 8 damage. Level 11 Paladin's Improved Divine Smite grants +1d8 radiant damage to all of your attacks, and GWM allows you to make a pseudo-power attack, taking -5 attack (which is less of an issue for Vengeance Paladins due to them being able to get advantage on a target once per short rest from channel divinity) to deal +10 damage. You can end up doing 1d4+5(STR)+1d8(imp divine smite)+10(power attack) damage, so anywhere from 17 to 27 damage per round. Admittedly you likely won't hit every single round even with advantage, but still. And I imagine that it would count as magical if the weapon you're wielding counts as magical. The rules never state only the blade of a polearm is the "magical" part, after all.
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Mar 27, 2015 00:55
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kingcom posted:Yep, it was worked out earlier in the thread that bards are the far superior grapplers.
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Mar 27, 2015 02:31
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Being able to strangle a guy to death was always so much better than lovely grappling rules. If I don't get a save or die fort save or something, it's not worth it.
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Mar 27, 2015 06:53
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Who else feels Pillars of Eternity is the 4e video game we never got?
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Mar 27, 2015 14:45
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I'm putting the monster squad up against my players. So I'm going to use a vampire spawn, a mummy, a flesh golem, a KuoToa, a werewolf, and maybe an invisible stalker in there somewhere. Some gargoyles with a hunchback berserker, but I'd also like to throw in a Dr. Jekyll type character as the flesh golem's creator with a Mr. Hyde form. What's the best monster for a Mr. Hyde? Looking through the book the best I could find as a basis was probably a yeti. Any other suggestions?
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Mar 27, 2015 14:45
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ascendance posted:Who else feels Pillars of Eternity is the 4e video game we never got? The lack of a grid makes it not-quite 4e, but so far so good. The classes feel balanced so far, which is nice.
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Mar 27, 2015 14:57
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ascendance posted:Who else feels Pillars of Eternity is the 4e video game we never got? There was never anything wrong with X-COM.
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Mar 27, 2015 15:07
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Gort posted:There was never anything wrong with X-COM. I would have wanted more forced-movement powers to make X-COM more 4e-y.
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Mar 27, 2015 15:08
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So Pillars of Eternity is good? I felt a little burned by Wasteland 2 and also expected Torment Numenera to suck based on the F&F review of the tabletop version, so I kind of just forgot that I backed that other game.
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Mar 27, 2015 15:20
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gradenko_2000 posted:So Pillars of Eternity is good? I felt a little burned by Wasteland 2 and also expected Torment Numenera to suck based on the F&F review of the tabletop version, so I kind of just forgot that I backed that other game. It's not very good, honestly. See, it tries to copy the Infinity Engine atmosphere, but they never bothered to clear out any of the warts that the Infinity Engine games had(aside from the crashes). The move to their own system rather than D&D also, somehow, made the mechanics LESS comprehensible. Good luck figuring out what half the status effects you can inflict do until you see them visited against yourself. The fights are also really unsatisfying, the balance is wonky as poo poo... It feels like it direly needs a good three or four months of testing(or devs who actually listen to the testers, maybe)... or maybe just realizing that the Infinity Engine games actually had really terrible combat and just to take some cues from Divinity: Original Sin instead. Writing's reasonably solid, but if you've been keeping up with Black Isle and Obsidian's games in general, you're going to start feeling like you've read half this story before.
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Mar 27, 2015 15:46
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PurpleXVI posted:It's not very good, honestly. Interesting, the thread on it is singing its praises pretty well and it has a metacritic rating of 93%
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Mar 27, 2015 15:50
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PurpleXVI posted:It's not very good, honestly. The main balance issue I've found is that some classes will struggle until you have a full complement of characters in the party, while you could possibly solo the game as a rogue.
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Mar 27, 2015 16:46
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Gort posted:Interesting, the thread on it is singing its praises pretty well and it has a metacritic rating of 93% Here's a thought: the game is being graded on how well it captures the feel of the general mechanics of the Black Isle games from yesteryear. Whether it's actually mechanically good is tertiary. Oh and also how good the writing is (both plot, and in general description) because every review mentions that the game has a LOT of text.
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Mar 27, 2015 17:03
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Gort posted:Interesting, the thread on it is singing its praises pretty well and it has a metacritic rating of 93% Ignoring for a moment that metacritic reviews of games are completely worthless, it's also important to note that most of the people who currently own it actually kicked in money to the Kickstarter, so their minds were likely made up before they even got their hands on the game. For most people, it was going to get a good review so long as it was anything like what was promised (a game that feels like Baldur's Gate) It's a project that is fueled entirely on nostalgia, and I'm saying that as one of the people who actually donated to the Kickstarter
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Mar 27, 2015 19:12
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QuarkJets posted:Ignoring for a moment that metacritic reviews of games are completely worthless, it's also important to note that most of the people who currently own it actually kicked in money to the Kickstarter, so their minds were likely made up before they even got their hands on the game. For most people, it was going to get a good review so long as it was anything like what was promised (a game that feels like Baldur's Gate) For the sake of disclosure, I was also a Kickstarter backer for Pillars of Eternity.
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Mar 27, 2015 20:05
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PurpleXVI posted:It's not very good, honestly. Check your Journal, go to Cyclopedia, and then the "Afflictions and Injuries" section. The debuff list there is pretty comprehensive, from what I can tell. Granted, you can't get access to it until you've created your character, so you may need to make a throwaway character so you can access the Cyclopedia to look up debuffs. It's inconvenient as all hell, but it's all there. I've found combat pretty easy for the most part, once you've spent an hour or two poking at the system. I'll agree that there are balance issues - there's a definite order of importance of defenses from what I can see: CC is the most important, followed by debuffs/defenses, followed by healing. Theoretically interrupts are somewhere in there, but they haven't really come up for me, yet. What mechanics are you having trouble comprehending?
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Mar 27, 2015 20:47
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Allow me to disagree. I'm finding the game to more or less be "like the infinity engine but better in basically every way." Tooltips tell you what very ability does, and if you right click to bring the window up, it turns every keyword into another tooltip that tells you what it means, so the idea of "you don't know what your status effects do" isn't really true - just click on them! I've found hard difficulty is well named; I've absolutely had to run the gently caress away from some fights, and play extra nasty with others. In the first town you can hire on new adventurers that you create, so you're also never really hurting for "I need this one class..." I've been playing a rogue and I generally have to plan most of my fights out; my general strat is to have the rogue scout ahead and head in first to "backstab" someone with my giant loving rifle at near point blank range, then run back to the party if there's more then one enemy; fighter advances to grab the enemies as they rush in, then the rogue helps slip around into flanking position and begins attacking. Wizard plays crowd control if there's too many baddies to immediately handle, chanter buffs everyone and summons skeletons if the fight lasts long enough, priest is in the middle with quarterstaff and heals when needed, but otherwise gives more potent defensive buffs then the chanter. If that sounds like 4e then, well, yeah. The main difference is that PoE is focused less on forced movement over grid and more on status effects and manipulating enemy placement. The only serious issues I've seen so far are that 1) needing to enter THIEFIN' MODE to see hidden things a'la Baldur's Gate is still obnoxious, and 2) the NPC companions are built pretty shoddily and end up far weaker then they should.
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Mar 27, 2015 20:53
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moebius2778 posted:What mechanics are you having trouble comprehending? Less that I have trouble comprehending specific mechanics, more that things sometimes just seem to happen. I'm in a fight with a cleric, and out of the blue, BAM, an attack that rakes 80% HP off all of my characters, obviously causing a reload in short order. He doesn't use it the second time, nor have any of his ninety identical cousins ever used the attack. Was it a critical? A spell they just rarely use? Some rare failed save? Is it anything I can do anything about? Something I just have to respond to with a quickload? I literally could never figure it out. Sometimes it's hard to tell if a fight's outcome is due to random chance, enemies being weak to a certain approach, enemy AI bugging out(hilarious when half of them somehow get stuck one one of their friends trying to pursue one of my characters and the remainder can just rail them down. Great AI, there.) or what. Occasionally a spell takes half the fight to get off, in other cases it goes off instantly, etc. etc. etc. It just feels like all of the worst elements of the Infinity Engine games to me: A combat system that's hugely reliant on random chance and where the elements you have the most control over are the AI's predictable terribleness and lovely pathfinding, so winning big fights tends to be more about positioning yourself in a way that makes the bad AI do dumb things, than it does clever use of abilities, since it's pretty much just about getting them into a chokepoint and then piling everything on. A lot of the spells also feel like knockoffs of D&D spells, right down to the part where half of them don't really work well in Infinity Engine games because they're made for a turn-based game where enemies stand-still while you target them. Also some baffling decisions: Why even stick with the pseudo-Vancian casting if you're not doing D&D, especially since casters ALSO have per-encounter abilities and some classes run off various types of mana? Why even do the "limited camping supplies"-thing when as far as I can tell you can, if you want, basically always backtrack to a store and buy more? Pretty much everything that's meant to be an Infinity Engine throwback/D&D knockoff feels badly designed. Unfortunately that's 90% of the mechanics.
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Mar 27, 2015 21:10
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I mean there's literally a combat log that tells you everything that's happening, and hovering over any given entry will outright tell you the rolls that went down.
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Mar 27, 2015 21:12
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ProfessorCirno posted:I mean there's literally a combat log that tells you everything that's happening, and hovering over any given entry will outright tell you the rolls that went down. Where I started being disappointed in the game was when they gave you a dungeon right there and then balanced it for a full party, which you won't have the moment you stride into town. I mostly felt the combat was unbalanced when I didn't have a full party, otherwise it more or less feels reasonable. Overall the game is fine though, it's just that if nothing else it can't measure up to its own hype. There are lots of niggles, like, why do they have vancian anything when the adventuring day metering mechanic is health and the encounter metering mechanic is endurance. You don't need another adventuring day metering mechanic. Still I haven't felt that anything was actually broken or unfair yet, other than some classes just being stronger than others in what I've played so far.
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Mar 27, 2015 21:38
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PurpleXVI posted:Less that I have trouble comprehending specific mechanics, more that things sometimes just seem to happen. I'm in a fight with a cleric, and out of the blue, BAM, an attack that rakes 80% HP off all of my characters, obviously causing a reload in short order. He doesn't use it the second time, nor have any of his ninety identical cousins ever used the attack. Was it a critical? A spell they just rarely use? Some rare failed save? Is it anything I can do anything about? Something I just have to respond to with a quickload? I literally could never figure it out. The first case is most likely a critical - check the combat log. Criticals are preventable with deflection, but ... I dislike relying on it. Hmm. I think we may have a different ... approach/attitude towards randomness - I'm okay with randomness, as long as I've got tools to determine what happened. Which means going over the combat log when things go wrong. Then again, my preferred strategy currently is to keep everything CCed so they can't do anything, which tends to cut down on the randomness. PurpleXVI posted:Occasionally a spell takes half the fight to get off, in other cases it goes off instantly, etc. etc. etc. That's probably the interrupt system, but there's a number of factors that go into determining how long it'll take for something to go off. My understanding of the timing is, a character selects an action to perform (be it use a special ability or even just a normal attack) - this will take an amount of time based on the action and modified by anything that modifies attack speed. During this time, any time the character is hit, they can be interrupted, which can delay the action. After the action is finished, the character has to recover, which will take an amount of time based on the action and modified by anything that modifies recovery time (basically this is only armor). Recovery time can also be slowed by moving. Also CC appears to prevent recovery, as well. So if a character is taking a long time to do something, there's a number of things that can affect that - what did the character just do? They may be recovering, and if they're in heavier armor and moving, that'll slow things down. Is their attack speed debuffed, because that'll mean actually performing the action takes longer. Are they getting hit, because they might potentially be interrupted, delaying their action. PurpleXVI posted:It just feels like all of the worst elements of the Infinity Engine games to me: A combat system that's hugely reliant on random chance and where the elements you have the most control over are the AI's predictable terribleness and lovely pathfinding, so winning big fights tends to be more about positioning yourself in a way that makes the bad AI do dumb things, than it does clever use of abilities, since it's pretty much just about getting them into a chokepoint and then piling everything on. A lot of the spells also feel like knockoffs of D&D spells, right down to the part where half of them don't really work well in Infinity Engine games because they're made for a turn-based game where enemies stand-still while you target them. I actually find that randomness is pretty mitigated in this case. Due to the way hit rolls are calculated, stuff tends to hit. It can get mitigated a lot, but I've found actions to be pretty reliable (unless I'm facing something that's debuffed my accuracy/has stupidly high defenses for my level). For spell positioning - the AoE targeting should consist of two parts: a red section and a white section. Anything in the red section gets hit. Only enemies in the white section get hit (although this will include your characters if they charmed/dominated). I've found that helps when you want to target a bunch of enemies attacking one of your friendlies. That said, I think there is an issue of the fact that you choose where to cast when you select the action - if you've got a long recovery period going on, even good positioning of the AoEs may not help, and as far as I can tell, there's no way to set things up so that it pauses when a character is ready to act again. PurpleXVI posted:Also some baffling decisions: Why even stick with the pseudo-Vancian casting if you're not doing D&D, especially since casters ALSO have per-encounter abilities and some classes run off various types of mana? Why even do the "limited camping supplies"-thing when as far as I can tell you can, if you want, basically always backtrack to a store and buy more? I think the resource mechanics are a function of two competing ideologies - 1) that resources be limited - so you're pushed to rest because some powers are per-rest and it's very hard to restore health outside of resting, and then they limit the amount that you can rest via camping supplies, and 2) you shouldn't be able to put the game into a dead person walking state - so you can't completely limit the player's ability to get more resting opportunities, otherwise they can end up in a situation where to get to the point where they can rest again, they'll need more resources than they have. I guess they could've gone for a respawn when you leave the map to deal with that, but, well, they didn't. As for mana - mana's really more at a per-encounter level, than a per-rest level. They're constrained by how the combat goes - you either have to make combat last longer to get more mana (which, probably is a bad idea) or take more damage to get more mana (which is really a bad idea). So it's more of a resource that you have available if you need it (assuming things haven't gone completely wrong while you were building up your mana), but you should avoid trying to get it if you can.
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Mar 27, 2015 22:04
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Following my previous post I bought PoE and it owns
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Mar 27, 2015 23:46
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moebius2778 posted:The first case is most likely a critical - check the combat log. Criticals are preventable with deflection, but ... I dislike relying on it. I don't mind randomness as such, but the odds should either be very obvious prior to taking an action, and a crit, if that's what it was, that basically kills my entire party in one go isn't fun randomness. The fun kind of randomness is the sort of thing that throws a curveball and forces me to approach a situation differently, not the kind of randomness that just forces me to reload because it fucks everything in a way that it's literally impossible to deal with.
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Mar 27, 2015 23:56
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Vancian casting makes sense if it's a computer game and you can really take advantage of the resource management aspect by strictly enforcing limited resting. It gets stupid when you're at the tabletop and you're playing DM-may-I to squeeze out as many rests as you can find a rationalization for. EDIT: Acknowledging that in the Infinity Engine games it was still sometimes possible to cheese the resource management by just bugging out of the dungeon and taking a rest one encounter at a time. ==== Sly Flourish put up a blog post about encounter building in 5e. It basically tells us at least what this thread already knew that 1:1 / man-to-man encounter numbers would just use CR-4 monsters to skip most of the encounter building math, although that still does leave the players with the problem of the actual monsters (and/or the quick stats table) being not so well designed in the first place. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 01:10 on Mar 28, 2015 |
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Mar 28, 2015 00:42
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Parts One -Three of Hawk and Moor, an unnoficial history of D&D appear to be free on Kindle* right now. It's pretty interesting. It also has this snippet: the book posted:Don asked Gary about TSR’s financial prospects if Brian’s contributed funds were to be considered toward the immediate publication of Dungeons & Dragons. Gary went over the previous estimates’ figures again for Brian’s benefits, and then explained that D&D would be sold to the public for $10 a set. This is a rather grim figure; in 2014 dollars, it would equate to over $53! $53 for all the books you'd need to play? Ridiculous! *I'm in NZ, might be a region based thing
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Mar 28, 2015 02:34
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Of course back then there was this thing called a "middle class" that could buy things.
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Mar 28, 2015 02:53
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Gort posted:There was never anything wrong with X-COM. I was always half tempted to learn how to code in Unity so I could make a X-COM like version of Gamma World.
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Mar 28, 2015 14:01
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gradenko_2000 posted:EDIT: Acknowledging that in the Infinity Engine games it was still sometimes possible to cheese the resource management by just bugging out of the dungeon and taking a rest one encounter And I don't know. I think the expectation is that you are going to do that on the higher difficulty levels.
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Mar 28, 2015 17:37
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I'm a page late on this but I think the official developer ruling (or Mearls-ruling anyway) on reach and Polearm Master is that your opportunity attack range turns into a ten-foot bubble around you rather than being adjacent, which makes it safe to dance around you at a range of ten feet or less. I had the same question coming into this thread. But DnD5e, so ask your DM and try to convince them to interpret it the way that's most beneficial for you (and hope that other enemies don't use reach as much as you do). Also apparently War Caster isn't supposed to interact with Polearm Master or reach in general. Pillars of Eternity is a cool game and it does feel a lot like they tried to take some bits of 4e and apply it to an Infinity Engine style game, although the availability of abilities makes it closer to 5e, as well as in power level.
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Mar 30, 2015 01:09
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The first time I read that I read Pokemon master. And I loving want that book.
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Mar 30, 2015 01:21
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bewilderment posted:...your opportunity attack range turns into a ten-foot bubble around you rather than being adjacent... Unsurprisingly, these two rulings are contradictory.
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Mar 30, 2015 01:33
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bewilderment posted:I'm a page late on this but I think the official developer ruling (or Mearls-ruling anyway) on reach and Polearm Master is that your opportunity attack range turns into a ten-foot bubble around you rather than being adjacent, which makes it safe to dance around you at a range of ten feet or less. Do you have a source for this? I wouldn't be surprised if it's just one interpretation of a vaguely worded "answer".
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Mar 30, 2015 02:03
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AlphaDog posted:Unsurprisingly, these two rulings are contradictory. Yeah. I guess the reasoning of it is "if you're using polearm master for opportunity attacks then you can only use it with polearms". Source is in this list . As for how reach works with opportunity attacks, Mearls says it all happens at 10 feet here and here, but Crawford disagrees here. War Caster interaction is additionally mentioned here. For what it's worth I think the actual best interpretation of reach is 'when you make an Attack action, your reach is 10 feet' and it has no effect in any other sense, including opportunity attacks, but I'm happy to use what Mearls says when I'm the polearm user in the party. I'd probably be grumpier if it was being used against me. edit: Interestingly, Crawford's answer on War Caster (the last link in my post) implies that he agrees with Mearls on where OAs are triggered, if you feel like overanalysing the fact that he didn't mention the range on that trigger. bewilderment fucked around with this message at 04:04 on Mar 30, 2015 |
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Mar 30, 2015 04:01
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bewilderment posted:...I think the actual best interpretation... There's a couple of obviously better ways to interpret the rules than "as written in the rulebook" or "as explained by the lead designer", yes. I'm pretty sure we hashed this particular instance out in detail previously in the thread, too.
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Mar 30, 2015 04:22
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AlphaDog posted:There's a couple of obviously better ways to interpret the rules than "as written in the rulebook" or "as explained by the lead designer", yes. I'm pretty sure we hashed this particular instance out in detail previously in the thread, too. Yeah, I literally asked the exact same thing about two weeks ago, minus War Caster. That's why I had the link collection.
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Mar 30, 2015 05:11
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