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ProfessorCirno posted:You could...if you didn't already have too many. There was a limit to how many spells you could have learned based on your intelligence. This is why one of my first characters in Baldur's Gate was an Elf with a natural 18 in intelligence. After character creation, this ended up being 19 thanks to the ElfBonus, so the limit for spells ended up so high there weren't enough spells in the game to fill it up. Later I used magic books to raise the intelligence to 21, I think that would have been plenty for all the spells ever made
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Dec 2, 2015 16:27
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Huh? Elves in BG games didn't get any kind of bonus to Intelligence, just a +1 maximum to Dexterity. Gnomes got a bonus to Intelligence, but they were restricted to being Illusionists, no other kind of Magic-User.
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Dec 2, 2015 20:41
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gradenko_2000 posted:Cantrips didn't exist until very recently though, and there's no way you guess at what spell level corresponds to a caster's character level unless you had it memorized by rote. You gain a spell level at every odd class level. Spell levels aren't very hard if you just know that pattern and if you take it one at a time. Spell slots are more involved, though. It's not a huge issue, but that poo poo was kind of easier to track in the d20 games.
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Dec 2, 2015 21:25
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AlphaDog posted:** There's no in-built way to increase your stats in 2e. You'd have to get Wishes (which have diminishing returns past (I think) 16) or magic items. Or drink from a magic fountain or something in a module, permanent stat points increases were actually more common in 2e than 3e because of how much poo poo there was in modules.
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Dec 2, 2015 21:30
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GrizzlyCow posted:You gain a spell level at every odd class level. Spell levels aren't very hard if you just know that pattern and if you take it one at a time. Spell slots are more involved, though. It's not a huge issue, but that poo poo was kind of easier to track in the d20 games. You can also think of it as half of your spellcaster level, rounded up.
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Dec 2, 2015 22:33
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There's loads of nice patterns that it could scale with, but they've shown they don't want that by the way spell slots increase on the current wizard.
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Dec 3, 2015 00:18
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goatface posted:There's loads of nice patterns that it could scale with, but they've shown they don't want that by the way spell slots increase on the current wizard. The point isn't that you can't figure it out. The problem is that it's needlessly complicated. It's symptomatic of the larger problem, not the problem itself.
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Dec 3, 2015 00:59
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Tunicate posted:Or drink from a magic fountain or something in a module, permanent stat points increases were actually more common in 2e than 3e because of how much poo poo there was in modules. What 2nd ed modules have non-item non-wish stat gains available? I'm not saying there aren't any, but I remember that being way more of a 1st ed thing.
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Dec 3, 2015 01:53
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AlphaDog posted:I wasn't knocking the idea. mastershakeman posted:You end up having to carry around adventuring spellbooks with fewer spells and leaving your full ones in a safe place.
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Dec 3, 2015 04:00
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FRINGE posted:We used this, and protecting those books was a party-wide endeavor! D&D works best when it's a game of "the wizard and his entourage" so basically, Baldur's Gate.
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Dec 3, 2015 07:08
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P.d0t posted:D&D works best when it's a game of "the wizard and his entourage" so basically, Baldur's Gate. Many of your DnD posts are about how its terrible and you dont like it. Why even spend effort on it? (Like youre playing in several games here right now right? Or maybe I confused you with someone else. I cant even keep track any more.  )
FRINGE fucked around with this message at 08:58 on Dec 3, 2015 |
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Dec 3, 2015 08:54
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P.d0t posted:D&D works best when it's a game of "the wizard and his entourage" so basically, Baldur's Gate. I get what you're saying, sorta. My experience with AD&D and 2nd ed (and I hope this has been reflected in my posts) is that the magic-user / mage rules as written isn't actually a very good class until fairly high levels, but also that a lot of people didn't actually use those rules and ended up with something closer to the 3.x wizard. I can't think of anyone that I know who would want to be a 2nd ed mage if the game was starting before about 8th-10th level, and even then they'd want to discuss a lot of optional/houserule stuff like getting to pick their own spells. As for keeping spellbooks safe being a party wide activity... I mean, I can't speak for anyone else, but the way we played involved everyone having a hand in safeguarding everyone else's valuables. At higher levels this usually involved the Fighter fortifying it in their castle, which would suit everyone just fine - I mean having a genuine, occupied wizard tower is as essential to the proper running of your domain as having a fancy cathedral and a properly organised legitimate-businessman's guild, right?
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Dec 3, 2015 09:32
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AlphaDog posted:I can't think of anyone that I know who would want to be a 2nd ed mage if the game was starting before about 8th-10th level, and even then they'd want to discuss a lot of optional/houserule stuff like getting to pick their own spells. I can sort of speak to the same: the couple of times I ran Basic D&D I always threw in a bunch of houserules to make the low-level Magic-User more playable at low levels, like at-will "Force Bolts" or perhaps a sling attack that dealt a flat 1d4 damage with INT modifier added to the d20 attack roll, stuff like that. And that's with B/X being much more liberal when it comes to spellcasting. I've skimmed the AD&D rules and those ones are so much more restrictive. One thing I do want to bring up though, which is sort of related to both this and the previous discussion on "adventuring days", is this short passage within the Moldvay Basic set: quote:Most adventures should not take more than a few hours of game time. If, however, an adventure lasts longer than a day, a character may re-memorize "erased" spells (spells already cast) once a day. First the character must be well-rested, usually an uninterrupted full night's sleep. Then by spending an hour of "character time" undisturbed, a spell caster of levels 1-3 may memorize all of his or her "erased" spells. Emphasis mine. This seems to heavily imply that "ok, we've done 3 rooms of this dungeon, time to bug out and come back after a night's rest" wasn't really expected of the players. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 09:53 on Dec 3, 2015 |
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Dec 3, 2015 09:49
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gradenko_2000 posted:I can sort of speak to the same: the couple of times I ran Basic D&D I always threw in a bunch of houserules to make the low-level Magic-User more playable at low levels Having to decide what was in your "traveling books" as opposed to your home library helped with this. (This also meant that getting a book damaged was not the end of the characters career. The group just needed to strategize how to get the wizard back in the game, similar to how they might have to if the fighter lost their gear. Not that either was (or should be) a common thing.)
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Dec 3, 2015 10:08
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AlphaDog posted:I get what you're saying, sorta. My experience with AD&D and 2nd ed (and I hope this has been reflected in my posts) is that the magic-user / mage rules as written isn't actually a very good class until fairly high levels, but also that a lot of people didn't actually use those rules and ended up with something closer to the 3.x wizard. I can't think of anyone that I know who would want to be a 2nd ed mage if the game was starting before about 8th-10th level, and even then they'd want to discuss a lot of optional/houserule stuff like getting to pick their own spells. This is my experience too. When I used to play 2E, it was mostly new players who wanted to be wizards. More experienced players gravitated to what we would call martial characters now -- fighters, rangers, even thieves. Low-level 2E Wizards are too fragile, don't have enough magic to do, and are restricted by the various rules folks have already discussed in this thread. It's worth remembering that just as 4E was designed in response to various mechanical problems that folks had with 3E, 3E was itself designed in response to mechanical issues that folks had with 2E. 5E, as best I can tell, is more reactionary and was designed less to address 4E's mechanical shortcomings but more to address grouchy fantasies and misconceptions held by people who did not really play 4E. Which is a bummer, because I like 4E, but I'm also getting tired of its shortcomings.
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Dec 3, 2015 16:20
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TheAwfulWaffle posted:It's worth remembering that just as 4E was designed in response to various mechanical problems that folks had with 3E, 3E was itself designed in response to mechanical issues that folks had with 2E. Yeah, 3e gets a lot of flak for being broken, and there's some of it that was "outright bad idea" rather than "good idea poorly implemented", but when I was reading through the AD&D Combat & Tactics book it struck me as the rough equivalent of the later 3.5e books like Tome of Battle and Complete Arcane as far as "experimental ideas that would later be fully fleshed out in the new edition" Certainly 3e is the first of the modern-readable books, and then we take a step back with 5e where it doesn't even bother to call Standard Actions, Standard Actions. Just "actions"!
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Dec 3, 2015 16:42
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See, I'm good with things like giving wizards unlimited cantrips that are actually useful. Because the answer to wizards being overpowered at high levels is not solved by making them suck at low levels. These are unrelated problems. The idea that it's okay for a character class to suck at one level because they're good at another is bullshit. A class should be useful from level 1 to level 20. The idea of "dynamic unbalance," where the fighter is great at first, but gets less useful, or the wizard starts off crap but becomes godly, just means that there's always a level where someone is not having that much fun. You get this idea that the wizard player has somehow "earned" his fun, or the fighter player didn't pay his dues, so now he has to play henchman to the party members who can actually contribute. 4e fixed this, but don't expect to see it again anytime soon. You'd have to either leash the high-level wizard or give fighters nice things, and they've shown they're not willing to do that.
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Dec 3, 2015 16:48
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Allstone posted:If there's literally no urgency for your thief to pick a lock, probably just tell them they do or don't pick the lock. If they succeed the roll they do it fast if they don't then they take long enough that it inconveniences them somehow or expends some of their resources. This also has verisimilitude on its side, if you care about that. Useful mechanical locks didn't really appear in real life until the 1770s, when precision manufacturing was good enough to make very small and complicated internal mechanisms. Ancient and medieval clocks were extremely easy to defeat even with only a minimal knowledge of how they worked, which is why serious security measures involved people and dogs instead. A thief character should pretty much automatically beat any mechanical lock, unless it is magic or a freakishly advanced one-off device--that is, a lock he's not meant to bypass for plot reasons. Like, I don't know, the evil wizard took a portal to Mechanus and bought a pin-and-tumblr padlock from a Modron, and the thief doesn't even know where to start.
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Dec 3, 2015 17:05
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The lock is a tiny Modron. I can't think of anywhere to go from that thought that isn't a terrible fetish.
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Dec 3, 2015 17:16
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Lock picking in games is neither interesting nor fun.
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Dec 3, 2015 20:02
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Bar Crow posted:Lock picking in games is neither interesting nor fun. Agreed. At least in TTRPG's.* I appreciate that Knock is an easy example of a spell that completely stomps on another class's schtick, but I wonder how many people really enjoy picking locks in D&D. In 1E and 2E, picking a lock is a single dice roll. It takes less than a minute to resolve, and the thief can't try again if things don't work. In 3E and its successors, the thief doesn't even need to roll a die. They just take 20 or take 10 and either auto succeed or autofail. Why is it fun? *I mostly enjoy the little lockpicking mini-games in video games.
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Dec 3, 2015 20:10
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TheAwfulWaffle posted:Agreed. At least in TTRPG's.* Picking locks isn't actually all that fun, but I think the problem here is that Knock is just often called out to represent a whole gestalt issue, which is that everything a rogue does, a wizard can do only better, not just pick locks. Like just think about rogue core identity. Does damage, wizard can do bigger damage or just forgo damage for save or suck stuff. Picks locks, Knock. Climbs walls, Spider Climb, Fly. Moves silently and stealths and hides, Silence, Invisibility, etc. About the only rogue thing wizards can't traditionally do is detect traps, but don't worry because clerics can, and if the traps are magical, then wizards can just bullshit their way through a good old fashioned casting of Detect Magic anyway. Granted no one ever builds a wizard to just be a better thief, but the options are all there and it's silly. Imagine one of the great fictional accounts of wizard/rogue interaction through this lens. Gandalf hires Bilbo, for no reason whatsoever, since as a wizard he's all set for everything Bilbo can do.
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Dec 3, 2015 21:32
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TheAwfulWaffle posted:Agreed. At least in TTRPG's.* There, a locked door is an opportunity for more treasure. If you don't open it, then you don't get what's beyond it. That's it. You either move on to the next thing, spend a valuable resource (a spell), or risk rolls on the random monster table by breaking it down or resting to get more spells.
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Dec 3, 2015 22:11
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gradenko_2000 posted:Emphasis mine. This seems to heavily imply that "ok, we've done 3 rooms of this dungeon, time to bug out and come back after a night's rest" wasn't really expected of the players. I know it's not actually a thing, but my younger self thought it was pretty obvious that your were supposed to be level 2 before you went down to level 2, so I alsways read that bit as advice not to make your dungeon levels too big. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 02:32 on Dec 4, 2015 |
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Dec 3, 2015 22:59
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ImpactVector posted:The way D&D handle obstacles like locks is pure cargo cult design from back in the days when dungeon delving was a game of risk/reward to see who could beat a module with the most treasure without dying. Or in a lot of modules, if you don't pick the lock/solve the puzzle/pixel hunt out the button you don't get any further in the dungeon 
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Dec 4, 2015 00:05
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Ideally, lock-picking serves the same purpose as most other skills, providing a slightly different twist on achieving the group's objective. You could interrogate a guard to find out where the shipment is headed or you could try to decipher the encoded message or you could pick open a strongbox and read the shipping manifest. The annoying thing is when the purpose of skills is to avoid combat. The character has a reason to avoid fights, but I don't. I like them, they're fun.
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Dec 4, 2015 00:28
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AlphaDog posted:I know it's not actually a thing, but my younger self thought it was pretty obvious that your were supposed to be level 2 before you went down to level 2, so I alsways rewad that bit as advice not to make your dungeon levels too big. Back in the day, dungeon levels served as a rough sort of difficulty slider: the farther you went down, the tougher the monsters but the bigger the rewards, so the players could choose how risky they wanted to go. This is also why you sometimes see "traps" like elevator rooms or sloping passages in early adventures, as ways to force or trick the PCs into going down into more difficult levels whether they wanted to or not.
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Dec 4, 2015 01:50
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Selachian posted:Back in the day, dungeon levels served as a rough sort of difficulty slider: the farther you went down, the tougher the monsters but the bigger the rewards, so the players could choose how risky they wanted to go. This is also why you sometimes see "traps" like elevator rooms or sloping passages in early adventures, as ways to force or trick the PCs into going down into more difficult levels whether they wanted to or not. I meant that "be the character level of the dungeon level you want to raid" is something I stuck quite closely to when making dungeons, whereas the books imply that pitching 1st level PCs into a 3rd or 4th level area they don't know the way out of is something that you should do from time to time.
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Dec 4, 2015 02:31
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TheAwfulWaffle posted:This is my experience too. When I used to play 2E, it was mostly new players who wanted to be wizards. More experienced players gravitated to what we would call martial characters now -- fighters, rangers, even thieves. Low-level 2E Wizards are too fragile, don't have enough magic to do, and are restricted by the various rules folks have already discussed in this thread. If you want to play a wizard in 2e, you play a bard. Better than the mage at every level (well, xp total) except a weird window between like 8-10.
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Dec 4, 2015 16:16
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Mr Beens posted:Or in a lot of modules, if you don't pick the lock/solve the puzzle/pixel hunt out the button you don't get any further in the dungeon
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Dec 4, 2015 16:52
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The fact that it's carried over into modern, non-dungeon crawl RPGs is an artifact of carco cult design. It worked that way in Gygax's games, so it should work that way in every game, with no thought to why it worked that way and whether or not it would work in a different context.
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Dec 4, 2015 17:10
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I think I've mentioned this before in this thread but man, I really really like most of the art in this edition.
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Dec 4, 2015 18:25
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Ryoshi posted:I think I've mentioned this before in this thread but man, I really really like most of the art in this edition. A LOT of it isn't original to this edition, they re-used a tonne of older art assets.
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Dec 4, 2015 18:35
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thespaceinvader posted:A LOT of it isn't original to this edition, they re-used a tonne of older art assets. Off the top of my head/just flipping through the PHB:
pages 55, 69, 87 were in 4e Heroes of the Feywild page 116 (and 118?) was in 4e Heroes of Shadow
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Dec 4, 2015 19:59
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Art on 61 is 100% from 4E, because I remember it being a portrait option, but I don't know where exactly it comes from. Surprise surprise, the book was done on the cheap. 5E.
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Dec 4, 2015 20:24
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thespaceinvader posted:A LOT of it isn't original to this edition, they re-used a tonne of older art assets. True, but I agree it is good. The new stuff is good and they also get to pick and choose the best of the old stuff to re-use. Art is one area where lazily copy-pasting the things they liked from older books works fine.
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Dec 4, 2015 20:27
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P.d0t posted:Off the top of my head/just flipping through the PHB: Page 48 is also from Feywild - even the exact same page number in both books, funnily enough. Several pieces of art from the Elemental Evil Player's Companion is also recycled from Heroes of the Elemental Chaos. We're talking about a free pdf so it's not quite as bad I guess, but overall the "great 5e art" is somewhat of a bitter joke.
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Dec 4, 2015 20:30
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Sage Genesis posted:Page 48 is also from Feywild - even the exact same page number in both books, funnily enough. Ah yeah, missed that one but I remember it, too. Recycling art is fine, I guess, but did 4e do that much/at all? I feel like the entire PHB was new, if not the vast majority of the edition..?
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Dec 4, 2015 20:32
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I've never played an edition before this one, so the art has been all fresh to me, as it would for anyone else just joining DnD with 5E. Just because it's been used before doesn't make it bad art, especially in a series of games. If it was ripping art off of some other IP then I'd see reason to be mad, but why be salty about good art being carried through multiple generations, rather than left to waste?
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Dec 4, 2015 20:35
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Spiteski posted:I've never played an edition before this one, so the art has been all fresh to me, as it would for anyone else just joining DnD with 5E. Just because it's been used before doesn't make it bad art, especially in a series of games. If it was ripping art off of some other IP then I'd see reason to be mad, but why be salty about good art being carried through multiple generations, rather than left to waste? I think it has more to do with people who skipped 4e being like "wow this great art!" ..that was already in 4e. It's not a "feature" of 5e (or in any way makes it better than 4e) if it was a feature of 4e.
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Dec 4, 2015 20:37
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