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Everybody celebrate. http://www.enworld.org/forum/content.php?2580-Sean-K-Reynolds-just-rehired-by-WotC
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May 5, 2015 03:30
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On what basis was he hired, his design work or his (It's probably the latter, of course.)
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May 5, 2015 03:54
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dwarf74 posted:Everybody celebrate. Finally, someone who can and will take on the heavy weight of dialing back the obscene power of rogues.
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May 5, 2015 03:55
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Him leaving was the best thing to happen to Pathfinder. It's good to see that WotC is replicating literally everything bad about the 3.5 era and everything bad about the 2n edition era. Let me guess soon we'll hear about fifty spin off games produced in numbers equal to a MtG release, and eight campaign settings.
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May 5, 2015 04:02
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At least Dancey has somewhere to go after Goblinworks.
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May 5, 2015 04:05
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Morrus posted:Please don't take this as an opportunity to slam him, or the work he's done. I'm amused that it's taken as an assumption even at ENWorld that the mere mention of Sean will result in a tremendous dump being taken on the boards. Alien Rope Burn fucked around with this message at 04:50 on May 5, 2015 |
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May 5, 2015 04:17
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Nuns with Guns posted:Finally, someone who can and will take on the heavy weight of dialing back the obscene power of
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May 5, 2015 04:26
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quote:I'm glad a d20 expert is back into the mix. Not only to avoid the excesses of 4e design, but just as importantly of 3e's. Being intimately familiar with the mistakes of the past two generations of D&D is a terrific thing in a hire for 5e.
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May 5, 2015 13:41
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I wonder how this is going to affect the 3.x heartbreaker he kickstarted last year.
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May 5, 2015 14:34
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Evil Mastermind posted:I wonder how this is going to affect the 3.x heartbreaker he kickstarted last year. Apparently the move to Washington means the game will be delayed. There's also a pretty hilarious looking preliminary sketch of a "corrupted unicorn" in that update. quote:you'll be happy to know that magic items are mostly going to have cosmetic or utilitarian effects (like a cloak that lets you Feather Fall) instead of boring plusses. I'll need to have a careful look at the stats math during and after the playtest, but I definitely do not want a situation where your character is ineffective if you don't have the "default" magic items that just give boring plusses. loving seriously. See ya later, Pathfinder! That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 14:39 on May 5, 2015 |
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May 5, 2015 14:36
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The whole Five Moons thing made me legit angry because it was the ultimate "hey guys I'm fixing all the problems with D&D by using solutions other people came up with a decade ago" style heartbreaker, but because it's Reynolds people were just eating it up.
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May 5, 2015 14:42
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 After the way he designed and acted on Pathfinder, which remained one of the most popular games in the industry, it's so unsurprising I can't muster more than my constant low-level annoyance at the entire hobby.Maybe he'll use this game as another opportunity to poo poo on people who want guns in their fantasy mishmash?
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May 5, 2015 14:50
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I look at his Kickstarter and see something that, while far from original, seems intent on fixing things that are well-known issues in D&D. You could argue that it would be better to just ditch D&D as a frame of reference altogether, but I don't see anything outright wrong with what I read in there; so I imagine that whatever has earned him this degree of ire, on top of this:Alien Rope Burn posted:I'm amused that it's taken as an assumption even at ENWorld that the mere mention of Sean will result in a tremendous dump being taken on the boards.
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May 5, 2015 14:58
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He was lead rules guy for Pathfinder, and he's not good at rules. This wouldn't be much of a remarkable crime in the RPG industry—even if he was in charge of developing one of its most popular properties—except he was also a big rear end about it. He got into flame wars with fans on the forum over how he put a bunch of gun stuff in the game, but he made it just absolutely suck all the balls. He was the kind of guy who seriously busted out ~verisimilitude~ when he shat on fighters, and "Well, it's fantasy!" when fellating wizards. Even in the context of "D&D3 with the serial numbers filed off" his rules could be pretty bad. Help me out here, fellow bitter goons: Was it him or someone else who tied a computer mouse to their hand and hosed around with it for an afternoon to determine how chained weapons rules should work?
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May 5, 2015 15:14
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He's also the guy who deliberately made 3.Path monks terrible because he, personally, doesn't like the class.
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May 5, 2015 15:20
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SKR is basically a complete moron when it comes to game design. The only thing you need to know is that he wrote this, where he claimed that Toughness (the 3.5 version, that gave 3 HP) was a stronger feat than Natural Spell.Plague of Hats posted:Help me out here, fellow bitter goons: Was it him or someone else who tied a computer mouse to their hand and hosed around with it for an afternoon to determine how chained weapons rules should work? No, that was Jason Bulmahn, who is also dumb Piell fucked around with this message at 15:25 on May 5, 2015 |
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May 5, 2015 15:22
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Was Reynolds the one who "fixed" the completely useless Prone Shooter feat by making it more useless?
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May 5, 2015 15:27
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Piell posted:SKR is basically a complete moron when it comes to game design. The only thing you need to know is that he wrote this, where he claimed that Toughness (the 3.5 version, that gave 3 HP) was a stronger feat than Natural Spell. Holy poo poo. code:quote:No, that was Jason Bulmahn, who is also dumb Ah yes, thanks.
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May 5, 2015 15:38
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Prone Shooter was eventually errata'd to do something but not really enough to be worthwhile. I don't know who was responsible. It's also a bit telling the book to fix monks and rogues only came out a year after he left.
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May 5, 2015 15:38
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Plague of Hats posted:How does he not see what he's doing? Because it's 3.Path heartbreaker thinkin'. If there's a problem with a mechanic, you don't back up and fix the core problem, you bolt another mechanic onto it. Then when that one doesn't work, you don't go back and see why, you bolt another mechanic onto that one, and so on and so on. I mean, he starts with the right observation ("there are a lot of useless feats"), but instead of backing up and fixing the core problem (get rid of the feats) he bolts another system onto it and just ends up making it worse.
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May 5, 2015 15:45
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Evil Mastermind posted:Because it's 3.Path heartbreaker thinkin'. If there's a problem with a mechanic, you don't back up and fix the core problem, you bolt another mechanic onto it. Then when that one doesn't work, you don't go back and see why, you bolt another mechanic onto that one, and so on and so on. Sure, but I mean, goddamn, +2 to Animal Handling, +5hp and creating wands that cast fireball 25 times all being valued the same is just so loving in-your-face.
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May 5, 2015 15:51
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Really, "WotC hires idiot who can't design but is popular for working on a knockoff of a lovely game" just about sums up everything you could expect about 5e. 
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May 5, 2015 15:57
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Evil Mastermind posted:I wonder how this is going to affect the 3.x heartbreaker he kickstarted last year. To be honest, I can't help but wonder how much of this ends up being "SKR realized designing his own system was way harder then he imagined" and that the kickstarter will end up pulling a Far East. Plague of Hats posted:He was lead rules guy for Pathfinder, and he's not good at rules. This wouldn't be much of a remarkable crime in the RPG industry—even if he was in charge of developing one of its most popular properties—except he was also a big rear end about it. He got into flame wars with fans on the forum over how he put a bunch of gun stuff in the game, but he made it just absolutely suck all the balls. He was the kind of guy who seriously busted out ~verisimilitude~ when he shat on fighters, and "Well, it's fantasy!" when fellating wizards. Funny enough, as a former massive Pathfinder fan, I was one of the people he got into a big flame war over! Twice, even! The first over his insistence that clerics need to be able to replace fighters (pay no attention that his main go-to class was a cleric, surely that had no effect on this), the second over his insistence on putting in trap options that sound cool explicitly so players can make themselves suck. His "I hate this so it will be weak / I like this so it will be strong" bent comes out basically nonstop. He hated the idea of monster PCs, and what do you know, Savage Species is a terrible book. He hated the fluff for one of the cleric ideas he had in PF so he bragged about making it weak on the message boards, then immediately stated right after that balance is an ~*~illusion~*~ and is impossible to track. He's the very definition of "I have one specific playstyle I want to encourage, and anything outside of that must be punished." He is, in short, maybe one of the worst designers that has ever touched D&D. He belongs in 5e.
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May 5, 2015 22:34
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Lemon Curdistan posted:Really, "WotC hires idiot who can't design but is popular for working on a knockoff of a lovely game" just about sums up everything you could expect about 5e.
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May 5, 2015 22:50
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Plague of Hats posted:Sure, but I mean, goddamn, +2 to Animal Handling, +5hp and creating wands that cast fireball 25 times all being valued the same is just so loving in-your-face. Hey now, only 25 times? I get that +2 bonus to Animal Handling constantly. Why would I want to throw flaming balls of death for a little bit when I can gently caress the dog all day?
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May 5, 2015 23:18
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Littlefinger posted:Well, putting it that way makes their getting rid of Monte Cook even weirder. Didn't Monte Cook repent of some of his past transgressions in that "Ivory Tower Game Design" article, and also advocate a 4e-ism ("what I like to call 'passive perception'")? Obviously he was a poor fit for the 5e team.
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May 5, 2015 23:46
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ProfessorCirno posted:His "I hate this so it will be weak / I like this so it will be strong" bent comes out basically nonstop. He hated the idea of monster PCs, and what do you know, Savage Species is a terrible book.
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May 5, 2015 23:49
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Saguaro PI posted:Why would I want to throw flaming balls of death for a little bit when I can gently caress the dog all day?  You even took the appropriate feat!
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May 6, 2015 00:05
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Littlefinger posted:Well, putting it that way makes their getting rid of Monte Cook even weirder. Cook was absolutely pushed out by Mearls.
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May 6, 2015 00:05
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Which was some cold poo poo because Cook published a bunch of Mearls stuff under really generous terms (Iron Heroes).
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May 6, 2015 00:48
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ProfessorCirno posted:Cook was absolutely pushed out by Mearls. What was his motivation?
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May 6, 2015 00:50
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ProfessorCirno posted:Cook was absolutely pushed out by Mearls. I dunno if I buy that. I'm still pretty sure it was a dust-up about OGL (and how 5e won't have one.)
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May 6, 2015 01:06
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Fsmhunk posted:What was his motivation? 
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May 6, 2015 01:07
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How did they think the OGL was a good idea in the first place? It wouldn't make them a cent.
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May 6, 2015 01:09
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I'm pretty sure their business plan was literally... 1. Release the OGL 2. 3. PROFIT!
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May 6, 2015 01:18
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I think the idea was that people would buy the 3.x core books in order to use all the third party content. That, and it was supposed to prevent WotC from spending money on things like modules, which generally didn't make money.
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May 6, 2015 01:26
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Okay, so basically they never knew what they were doing, has D&D ever been handled by a competent business?
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May 6, 2015 01:28
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WotC during the 3e era. Their marketing director at the time (Lisa Stevens) now runs Paizo, and 3e's success and continued customer loyalty has everything to do with marketing. Other than that, nah.
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May 6, 2015 01:33
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TSR at the height of redbox basic D&D was doing pretty drat good. Those red boxes were sold at Toys R Us and Sears, they sold multiple millions of copies, and introduced D&D to a generation. The franchise is still reaping the rewards of that campaign today. The very idea of making a basic, introductory verison of your RPG, accessible to a younger crowd, that came with the dice in the box, and was sold at mainstream stores, was a major innovation. TSR's downfall came later, as the success of those earlier products spawned all kinds of dumb ideas and massive waste on unsellable products and warehoused unsellable inventory.
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May 6, 2015 02:22
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dwarf74 posted:I dunno if I buy that. I'm still pretty sure it was a dust-up about OGL (and how 5e won't have one.) Mearls' silence following the abuse Pundit lathered onto Cook, followed by Cook not being put into the book credits at all, speaks volumes.
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May 6, 2015 03:04
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