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I mean, I can see it from a standpoint of "I'm okay with X in this game, but the focus means it'll be a lot more powerful than normal, so I'm making it more expensive." I'm just not sure why it needs to be codified as a rule itself.
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Aug 5, 2015 18:49
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Well, like, telepathy in an otherwise non-psi powered game can be okay from a campaign frame point of view, but it's still more powerful than telepathy in a powers-common setting would be, since there are no others, no countermeasures, nothing but your own power limits. So it might be good for it to cost a bit more. The GM can also say 'telepathy is available but costs X more than normal' and it's basically identical to that. Of course, Unusual Background can also easily be used as a fun-ruining grogmallet though I haven't run into personally. GURPS traits and skills have other huge problems with costs and effects though, it really needs a Steveless 5th edition and will never get one.
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Aug 5, 2015 19:16
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Wait, why is Steve Jackson to blame, exactly? And what is the problem with costs? Oh wait, this is about the ability difficulties, isn't it. About why Chemistry costs four times as much as Brawling.
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Aug 5, 2015 20:24
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Steve is very attached to certain ideas in GURPS and in web design and in other areas--basically he's a stubborn micromanager of a boss. All that's okay enough; he's still got enough business sense that SJG exists. But yeah, skills you will rarely or never use cost an insane amount and the sciences are divided into multiple sub-disciplines while you can just take 'rifle' or 'pistol' and be pretty set. 4th has rules for bang skills but that is not Tradition and they are absurdly expensive. Steve is not solely responsible for the state of skills costs, Sean Punch is a physics guy and reportedly felt this was more accurate, but it is something GURPS has always had. There are also various cost problems with advantates/disadvantages, things like combat reflexes being underpriced versus buying the traits as separate effects for instance. The disads list can very easily end up a game of trying to emotionally cripple your character in ways that will come up as rarely as possible for maximum points, even with players who want to be better because the power boosts are way too much to pass up. Skills are priced for their supposed difficulty to learn, advantages/disadvantages are priced for how useful/bad they supposedly are, and attributes are way, way too cheap since Dex and Int basically do everything--still.
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Aug 6, 2015 01:14
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occamsnailfile posted:since Dex and Int basically do everything--still. This is a an issue in a whole lot of elf games for some reason.
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Aug 6, 2015 01:29
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Plague of Hats posted:Just, wow, a stunning lack of creativity. Jesus. why is it such a thing that people absolutely *refuse* to consider that OSR stuff could have been improved? Heart Attacks fucked around with this message at 01:40 on Aug 6, 2015 |
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Aug 6, 2015 01:36
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occamsnailfile posted:Dex and Int basically do everything--still. Ronwayne posted:This is a an issue in a whole lot of elf games for some reason. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 01:41 on Aug 6, 2015 |
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Aug 6, 2015 01:36
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occamsnailfile posted:Steve is very attached to certain ideas in GURPS and in web design and in other areas--basically he's a stubborn micromanager of a boss. All that's okay enough; he's still got enough business sense that SJG exists.
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Aug 6, 2015 01:40
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Dex and int are the best fleshed out ones, so they're going to get a lot more things given to them. Strength and constitution are the same, nobody knows what charisma is supposed to be and wisdom is stuff the player handles better.
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Aug 6, 2015 01:40
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Ronwayne posted:This is a an issue in a whole lot of elf games for some reason. Because being strong makes you muscle bound!    
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Aug 6, 2015 01:46
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I remember how originally Strength determined your fatigue points (used for many things, but perhaps most notably, majikk spellz) and Health determined your HP (which, to be fair, was explicitly labelled as "your meaty integrity," and which came with a number of supplementary rules and so forth letting you avoid being hurt). It was suggested that you could swap these as an alternate rule, on the theory that your muscle mass was probably a better general metric of how many axe wounds you could survive, while Health better reflected cardiovascular fitness... and in turn I think this may now be official rules. I think the real root of GURPS is that it was built out of a tactical simulator of low-tech fantasy combat, and that engine has been used for tons of other things which were well beyond the original intent.
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Aug 6, 2015 03:25
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MadScientistWorking posted:Wait do you know anyone whose worked at SJG as a web designer because I do too and the words "most psychologically abusive job" ever was the phrase used? I know like, three people who have worked as web designers for SJG and while they didn't use that exact phrasing, they might nod their heads in agreement while staring into the distance.
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Aug 6, 2015 04:28
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Nessus posted:I think the real root of GURPS is that it was built out of a tactical simulator of low-tech fantasy combat, and that engine has been used for tons of other things which were well beyond the original intent. So when it came time to write the follow-up game to TFT, SJ split ST into two stats - Strength and Health. Which led to GURPS horrifically gimping physical/melee characters and the rise of IQ and DX as god-stats. It's less egregious in 4E but it's still there.
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Aug 6, 2015 04:38
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Plague of Hats posted:"Dead Levels" and powerz Some of what these grogs are saying is that if only you were ~creative~ enough, you wouldn't need the game to have rules-codified abilities for you to learn as you reach certain levels, because you would just make something up on the fly, as especially that that something would be related to the things the character did in-universe. I can't really say I agree with that though because it forces the GM to play armchair game designer to come up with a thing that's appropriate for the player to have earned while also staying within the mechanical framework of the game. More importantly, the presence/lack and nature of the codified abilities sets the tone for what characters are assumed to be capable of. You can't just say a warrior eventually becomes as powerful as Cu Chulainn if you don't back up that statement with things they can actually do per the rules and without the GM having to do any houseruling.
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Aug 6, 2015 06:16
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The best part is that Wizards themselves acknowledged that dead levels were a bad thing and that getting something, even if it's lovely, is better than getting nothing at all. I seriously wish we could go back to the late-stage 3.5 early-mid 4e dev team again, back when they knew that there were problems inherent in the system but were struggling with how to fix them. Rather than passing the buck to the DM as some kind of empowerment tool.
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Aug 6, 2015 06:22
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But most importantly — what does that Pundit character have to say on the "Zak saved D&D" matter?quote:Last year, at Gencon, someone else made a shirt that said "Zak S and the RPGPundit made D&D better". I'm guessing that's what inspired this. It's the first I heard about this, since I took Zak off my G+ list. (source: http://www.tenkarstavern.com/2015/07/zak-s-saved-d-dont-believe-it-zak-zak.html , comments section.) Nancy_Noxious fucked around with this message at 14:49 on Aug 6, 2015 |
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Aug 6, 2015 14:47
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Nancy_Noxious posted:But most importantly — what does that Pundit character have to say on the "Zak saved D&D" matter? I'm reasonably certain his ego is visible from orbit at this point.
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Aug 6, 2015 14:51
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Nancy_Noxious posted:But most importantly — what does that Pundit character have to say on the "Zak saved D&D" matter? Could he be more self-congratulatory? Is it physically possible at this point?
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Aug 6, 2015 14:54
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chaos rhames posted:Dex and int are the best fleshed out ones, so they're going to get a lot more things given to them. Strength and constitution are the same, nobody knows what charisma is supposed to be and wisdom is stuff the player handles better. I've thought some more about this (and have thought about it off-and-on for a long time) and I think the simple answer is that a lot of games imitate D&D, often without realizing it--they're just just going off D&D's assumptions about how stats should be partitioned. It goes pretty far beyond the specific case of GURPS being built on TFT which was an early not-D&D. Strength is a very narrow ability in D&D; it just measures your ability to push, pull, lift, hit, and hit hard. But that's really important in early versions of the game where hitting in combat and kicking doors open are key activities in a game that's 100% a dungeoncrawl. Whereas Dex and Int were originally not that important but became moreso as skills, feats, and more class abilities were introduced. Some games wisely try to balance things by combining STR and CON into one stat. You can argue that it's not realistic, but then it's not realistic for DEX to be a single attribute, either. Some games (like Masterbook) fix that by dividing DEX into Dexterity and Agility, but these same games usually don't get around the problem of having made STR useless. You can also use combat mechanics which combine STR and DEX to give you your to-hit chance, but if you've made a system where you have a lot of discrete attributes which you then recombine to get effective values, you're likely running a really tedious system.
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Aug 6, 2015 14:55
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"Ron Edwards is a loser, and so are all the Forgist Swine. The OSR is the classiest, most luxurious RPG community ever because it comes the yoojest game, which is D&D. Everyone else is just jealous" ~ Donald TRPGpundit, maybe
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Aug 6, 2015 14:59
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Serf posted:Could he be more self-congratulatory? Is it physically possible at this point? He's not just self-congratulatory, he's trying to take more credit for his involvement in 5e. " I suspect I cared more too," " I think I probably spent more time involved with the Consulting than Zak did," "but for me, it mattered because it was both the culmination of a childhood dream and the final step in a crusade I'd been undertaking for my entire blogging career." Get the gently caress off Tarnowski.
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Aug 6, 2015 15:02
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gradenko_2000 posted:"Ron Edwards is a loser, and so are all the Forgist Swine. The OSR is the classiest, most luxurious RPG community ever because it comes the yoojest game, which is D&D. Everyone else is just jealous" Currently smoking: my own terrible hair piece.
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Aug 6, 2015 15:03
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Nancy_Noxious posted:But most importantly — what does that Pundit character have to say on the "Zak saved D&D" matter?
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Aug 6, 2015 15:30
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Maybe this will cause them to go at each other's throats and they will mutually destroy each other. ... One can dream.
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Aug 6, 2015 15:30
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Zereth posted:... Aren't there literally zero D&D 5e supplements that haven't been farmed out to a first party currently in the works? That does not sound like a game that was "saved" to me. No, don't you see, 5E is so good it doesn't even need supplements! Three books and done, all you will ever need. That's the D&D way! It is 
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Aug 6, 2015 15:33
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Zereth posted:... Aren't there literally zero D&D 5e supplements that haven't been farmed out to a first party currently in the works? That does not sound like a game that was "saved" to me. You act like he cares. He took the slightest admission from Mearls that he had a good idea as a sweeping endorsement of each and every one of his personal viewpoints. And thus he has personally 'saved' dungeons and dragons. If they do stupid poo poo now that he's no longer involved is just further proof that he and only he is the true steward of gygax.
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Aug 6, 2015 15:40
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After having read the PHB and skimmed the other books, and reading the DDN thread here on the forums, I love that this edition retains tons of poo poo from The Wicked Un-D&D of 4E but just executes them worse and obfuscates them behind ~natural language~ while burying what good ideas there are under copy-paste garbage from 3.5 (and other games) which the OSR also doesn't really love. But, nah, it's totally old school because it's full of gut-based balancing and they put the flumph back in the first Monster Manual of the line. The art direction was so good, too. 
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Aug 6, 2015 15:47
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D&D sexism talk pretty inevitably leads to talk about Olympic weight-lifting records. Which is hilarious because, apparently, the lifting tables from older editions of D&D top out way below records for both men and women…quote:Olympic sports has been plagued with enhancing drugs and hormones, and drugs hiding the drug taken for years. Using her as an example isn't really a good idea. A "normal" person wouldn't be able to lift this easily without the use of drugs, me included at 6'5" 253 pounds. …unnatural women, filled with testosterone and steroids. Physics!
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Aug 6, 2015 16:08
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I guess that fuckin' imbecile doesn't realize that the Olympic athletes get tested for everything, including abnormal levels of testosterone. If they win a medal they get tested even harder. Sexist idiot.
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Aug 6, 2015 16:14
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quote:me included at 6'5" 253 pounds.  This motherfucker.
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Aug 6, 2015 16:16
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Why would you ever willingly admit that you're 253 pounds in a discussion about physical fitness.
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Aug 6, 2015 16:22
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It's all muscle no really
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Aug 6, 2015 16:23
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Please tell me he gave an example of what "normal" weightlifting ability is.
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Aug 6, 2015 16:25
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Ettin saved RPGNet. There, I said it. Anyways, that Dead Level Grog. Maybe it's because we're all kids and babbies these days and we need our constant rewards, but eliminating dead levels is Good Design (tm). Eliminating levels is probably Better Design altogether though.
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Aug 6, 2015 16:25
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Plague of Hats posted:D&D sexism talk pretty inevitably leads to talk about Olympic weight-lifting records. Which is hilarious because, apparently, the lifting tables from older editions of D&D top out way below records for both men and women…
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Aug 6, 2015 16:26
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Luminous Obscurity posted:Please tell me he gave an example of what "normal" weightlifting ability is. I'm sure he's a beefy studster who can casually lift a 40 lbs. bag of quikrete all the way to the register at Lowe's, so he's sure to have informed opinions about fantasy protagonists hefting a portcullis. (He got chased off by the mods for that post.)
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Aug 6, 2015 16:31
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Masculinity is so fragile that if nerds don't see a strength cap for female characters they proceed to have 10+ page debates on just how much weaker women are than men.
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Aug 6, 2015 16:32
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Plague of Hats posted:D&D sexism talk pretty inevitably leads to talk about Olympic weight-lifting records. Which is hilarious because, apparently, the lifting tables from older editions of D&D top out way below records for both men and women… Whoa for a sec I thought I was in the GBS thread about fit women where someone pops in to call all of them unnatural testosterone monsters every few pages.
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Aug 6, 2015 16:33
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LuiCypher posted:Ettin saved RPGNet. Having explicit levels has a place in the same way that having codified abilities has its place. It's a marker for the table to know what the players should be capable of by now.
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Aug 6, 2015 16:33
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Someone drop this in that thread: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5MmTk2Gbl2E Also I'd mega lol if there's a similar vid of Rousey being interviewed about D&D (fighters).
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Aug 6, 2015 16:36
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