Kai Tave posted:

That kind of sounds like the dragons are working against their own interests there.

senrath posted:

Libertad! posted:

It seems that I'm becoming the Goon to Dragonlance what Arivia is to Forgotten Realms.

Basically there are ten tribes of dragonkind in the setting, one for each of the chromatic and metallic branches. As the eldest mortal race dragons have acted more or less as exemplars of the gods, Paladine (Bahamut) and Takhisis (Tiamat) who were the head of their respective pantheons.

The metallic dragons realize that they have a lot of power, and so they take a hands-off approach to affairs of the shorter-lived races of goblins, humans, etc and primarily live on the Dragon Isles. They usually intervene when bad poo poo happens, but otherwise try to keep out of politicking.

Takhisis and the metallic dragons, however, seek to rule all of Krynn. This manifested as a series of three major wars throughout the ages, and during the Third Dragonwar Takhisis' forces were all but victorious and even the metallic dragons were nearly gone. The Dragonlances were forged as a sort of desperation measure by the forces of Good.

And Dragonlances don't just deal extra damage to dragons. They sap away their very life force, so even a grazing blow can end up deleterious. In 3rd Edition this manifested as permanent Constitution loss with every hit.

Also, a variety of factors in the current ages when the Chronicles and major books are set (the 4th and 5th Ages) means that the metallic dragon's numbers are very low. So when push comes to shove, the Dragonlances were primarily meant to be used against Takhisis' loyalists.

I konw that Dragonlance gets a rap for a lot of hackneyed and cliche fantasy things, but some of their world-building ideas have deeper stuff to them.

Edit: and now I noticed that an earlier poster explained quite a bit of this by homullus.

On a semi-related note, I'm kind of surprised that given their increased focus on secondary media for 5th that we haven't heard anything Dragonlance-related in the works. Sure the time they made a movie was super-crappy, but the books still sell if written by Weis, Hickman, or another established author.

Bieeardo posted:

What makes me shake my head, is that I know I saw this kind of poo poo in the later 3.x monster manuals. A friend who runs Pathfinder has complained about players turning their characters into part-time sages to suck those statblock bits dry at their first encounter. This is by no means A 4E Thing.

Bieeardo posted:

What makes me shake my head, is that I know I saw this kind of poo poo in the later 3.x monster manuals. A friend who runs Pathfinder has complained about players turning their characters into part-time sages to suck those statblock bits dry at their first encounter. This is by no means A 4E Thing.

gradenko_2000 posted:

I've had two different player groups ask me "what are Orcs like in your setting?" and "what are dinosaurs like in your setting?"

It's not outside of the realm of possibility that the bears in your setting not terrestrial bears, AND the players don't automatically know about them unless they pass a skill check to establish that they do.

So again it's more to do with the fact that that Bear Lore snippet was made fun of in a vacuum, and that people had a pre-existing axe to grind with 4e to begin with.

senrath posted:

It was 100% a thing in 3.5, starting with MMIV. But since there aren't really any player focused rules in there, you can bet the number of people who complained that had even glanced at those books approached 0.

Terrible Opinions posted:

What about grogs makes you think they wouldn't complain. MM4 an MM5 were roundly roast for those very sections, having a bunch of monsters that were just prestated NPCs, poor art, really terrible ideas for new monsters, and the ever wonderful "rules bloat" complaint that issued from every grog every time a new book came off the line for 3.5.

gradenko_2000 posted:

MM4 I thought was a well-written book because instead of just giving you "an Orc", it gave you multiple Orcs, Orc hierarchies, and Orc groupings, so that if you ever wanted to raid an Orc camp, you'd know how many plain Orcs there were, plus their Sergeants, and then their Captains, and then their Colonels, and then their General. It harkened back to the days of "there is a level 5 Fighter for every 30 Bandits"

Which Paizo then cribbed via their Monster Codex.

The Crotch posted:

Forgotten Realms, due south of Neverwinter. That strip of shoreline has been the main setting of pretty much every god drat Forgotten Realms computer game.



Really getting the most out of that setting, huh?

homullus posted:

This also doesn't include Pool of Radiance et cetera. There was a whole other generation of FR computer games.

Halloween Jack posted:

In fact, the Pool of Radiance trilogy and Hillsfar take place in the Moonsea region, and Eye of the Beholder is set around Waterdeep, so almost every Forgotten Realms video game happens in the northwest part of that map

Halloween Jack posted:

In fact, the Pool of Radiance trilogy and Hillsfar take place in the Moonsea region, and Eye of the Beholder is set around Waterdeep, so almost every Forgotten Realms video game happens in the northwest part of that map

Terrible Opinions posted:

What about grogs makes you think they wouldn't complain. MM4 an MM5 were roundly roast for those very sections, having a bunch of monsters that were just prestated NPCs, poor art, really terrible ideas for new monsters, and the ever wonderful "rules bloat" complaint that issued from every grog every time a new book came off the line for 3.5.

Nuns with Guns posted:

The 3.5 MM5 is really cool, actually. It's the first (and last) one to offer detailed options on campaign-spanning monster pitches: the Dragons of the Great Game and the Mindflayers of Thoon. The dragons were interesting because they were all about scoring points on one another and provided great adventure hooks for PCs. As part of engaging in the Great Game they also had to give up their spellcasting powers, which put them more in line with being actual monsters instead of scaly big wizards. The Mindflayers of Thoon provided a nice overview of an otherworldly threat to build an adventure around and let you spin mindflayers as an actual alien threat instead of random... cave... things?

Terrible Opinions posted:

The MM5 really felt like a missed opportunity; like they were trying to shove several ideas into the monster manual format that didn't fit. A 64-128 page book on Thoon and how to integrate it into your game would have been better than several monster manual entries and same thing for the Great Game.

Dr. Quarex posted:

Yeah and back then I had never seen a map of the whole Forgotten Realms, so I remember being impressed that the entire game of Hillsfar took place in such a tiny corner of the map in Curse of the Azure Bonds, and then of course my mind was blown by Secret of the Silver Blades' map... ... and now looking at this map, it is like "can you not see the Southeastern quadrant is clearly the most topographically interesting? Why did you people fixate on the most mundane section of the map? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU"

The only thing I know about the rest of the map not covered by one of those games is about Rashemen because I was a Minsc fanboy.

Also this is important http://forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/Sjorl

Dr. Quarex posted:

"can you not see the Southeastern quadrant is clearly the most topographically interesting? Why did you people fixate on the most mundane section of the map? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU"

Nuns with Guns posted:

People that complained about how dull 4e's flavor was should be completely ignored, if only because large sections of those critics also hated the 3e rules that tried to have any distinctive lore to them. Aka the Tome of Battle fighters, Psionics, Incarnum, and Tome of Magic casters. Even ignoring that the Psionics had a bad habit of fishing from the Wizard/Sorcerer spell list and stapling "Psionic" at the start of the power's name, and the general weakness of the Shadowcaster and completely broken (in the nonfunctional sense) Truenamer, you'd see people wondering why DMs didn't integrate them in their campaigns more. The response was always along the lines of "it just doesn't feel D&D enough."

gradenko_2000 posted:

This is a very salient point and I'll try to keep it in mind.

Kavak posted:

You should've seen video games in that awesome giant rift and such, but WOTC spent the prime time for that suing Atari over bullshit.

ProfessorCirno posted:

Because mundane and boring is what they want. There are I poo poo you not 5e fans who are still salty about dragonborn being in the 5e PHB even after it was regulated to a "these races are super rare and you need DM permission to play them" because they're too exotic. They don't want fantastic. They want familiar.

Asimo posted:

Unless it's new spells and powers to make their wizard more badass, of course. It's still hilarious that the few things 5e actually took from 4e (like at-will power) were only given to spellcasters.

Kavak posted:

Is it too out of bounds to say that I was not at all surprised that Mike Mearls kept the parts of 4th that helped the nerd wish fulfillment class after just seeing a picture of him?

Asimo posted:

Trust me, for WotC's faults this was entirely Atari being incompetent fucks. Hell, it was far from the only property or subsidiary they shat on in this time period.

Kai Tave posted:

Yeah, it's worth noting that even for diehard 3.X fans it isn't just a matter of "3.X = better than 4E because it's 3.X" across the board, Tome of Battle got roundly poo poo on for being too anime and unrealistic and dumb, various other books like the ones listed were frequently ignored and set aside in favor of more "traditional" material, Eberron got sideways looks for being "too steampunk" even though it's nothing even like steampunk, etc. A fair bit of 3.X stuff published during the WotC days doesn't pass muster for a certain segment of the player base. And even with Paizo you see this, the Gunslinger class they came out with generated plenty of Not In My Campaign even though under the hood it isn't even that great.

Dr. Quarex posted:

This reminds me of when my fellow Goon Captain Rat came back from Gen-Con excitedly with Iron Heroes about a decade ago, and passed it around our usual gaming table for everyone to peruse. The guy who typically GMs for us got, like, visually angry about the entire concept of a game that functionally eschews magic in a D&D-mechanical setting, and refused to ever play it. This is the same guy who hates 4th Edition for the usual reasons, and yet at least in the case of 4th Edition he played it a few times before deciding he hated it...whereas he would literally not even deign to spend a moment playing Iron Heroes because it so opposed his vision of what D&D is supposed to be. People have some very strong feelings about this for reasons I cannot begin to fathom.

Although...now I see that Mike Mearls made Iron Heroes, so I just do not know what to think about who has done what bad thing in this hobby.

Dr. Quarex posted:

This reminds me of when my fellow Goon Captain Rat came back from Gen-Con excitedly with Iron Heroes about a decade ago, and passed it around our usual gaming table for everyone to peruse. The guy who typically GMs for us got, like, visually angry about the entire concept of a game that functionally eschews magic in a D&D-mechanical setting, and refused to ever play it. This is the same guy who hates 4th Edition for the usual reasons, and yet at least in the case of 4th Edition he played it a few times before deciding he hated it...whereas he would literally not even deign to spend a moment playing Iron Heroes because it so opposed his vision of what D&D is supposed to be. People have some very strong feelings about this for reasons I cannot begin to fathom.

Although...now I see that Mike Mearls made Iron Heroes, so I just do not know what to think about who has done what bad thing in this hobby.

Nuns with Guns posted:

The 3.5 MM5 is really cool, actually. It's the first (and last) one to offer detailed options on campaign-spanning monster pitches: the Dragons of the Great Game and the Mindflayers of Thoon. The dragons were interesting because they were all about scoring points on one another and provided great adventure hooks for PCs. As part of engaging in the Great Game they also had to give up their spellcasting powers, which put them more in line with being actual monsters instead of scaly big wizards. The Mindflayers of Thoon provided a nice overview of an otherworldly threat to build an adventure around and let you spin mindflayers as an actual alien threat instead of random... cave... things?

gradenko_2000 posted:

Joke's on him, Mearls couldn't commit to the idea 100% and there's still an Arcanist class in the corebook and a Spiritualist class in the Player's Companion.

JackMann posted:

The other really cool thing the MMV did was look at how monster battles actually worked. In particular, a boss monster is likely to last about five rounds in 3.5 in an average game. So, very few monsters in MMV are full spell casters with long lists of spells they can cast. Instead, they have a few cool big abilities, and sometimes things to let them act more than once on their initiative order, in order to get the most out of that monster. That's why dragons of the great game lose their spellcasting. This was something you saw a lot in 4e, where solo monsters were designed to have four or five cool things they could do, and generally do more than one thing in a round.

Lemniscate Blue posted:

I knew about Atari sitting with their thumb up their rear end with the D&D license, but what else got shafted?

Sage Genesis posted:

But "it eschews magic so it must suck"? Wow. Just... wow.

Kai Tave posted:

Your GM sounds like an idiot, sorry. And Iron Heroes isn't even GREAT, the concept is way better than the execution, but still.

Sage Genesis posted:

A weird trend I noticed even as a green gamer back in the 90s without internet is that you had these game lines with their own cosmologies and they all tried to establish their own supremacy over the others.

...

It all feels a bit like petty office politics, different cliques trying to one-up each other over the lowest, most imaginary stakes of all time.

Leperflesh posted:

But, apparently, TTRPG writers who simply aren't temperamentally suited to direct criticism of their work - even on the level of dispassionate, technical review - aren't just common, they're the norm. Even among some of the biggest names in the industry. When I hear that the D&D team were not only not interested in hearing that something in their playtest didn't work right, but that they went out of their way to delete comments pointing out that kind of problem, it's boggling. I mean, gently caress, good competent review usually costs a pile of money. Here the D&D guys are in the extremely enviable position of having a legion of highly experienced experts who are climbing over one another to QA your work for free, and you're actively censoring their feedback?

I think it goes beyond just a cycle of players traumatized by poor writing not realizing that poor writing isn't actually inevitable. They're not even aware that they're documenting a technical system, and there are bugs in both the system and in their documentation of it, and that they can only benefit by having those bugs identified and reported. Instead, they're Artists, and few artists love a critic.

Kai Tave posted:

In the case of D&D specifically the sudden upswell in importance of "natural language" can be directly traced back to 4E's attempt to cut away a lot of the extraneous language and filler text and consolidating things with a keyword system. People complained every which way about this, ranging from "it's too boring and dull and doesn't excite my imaginative juices like Gygaxian prose" to "ugh thanks 4E, now fireballs and swords are exactly the same thing."

Asimo posted:

I can sort of understand the complaints about 4e's power blocks being dry. The trouble is that, yeah, most of the nerds whining about it complained about the wrong part (the clear, concise, usefully presented mechanical language) and not the actual issue (the flavor text for the powers being brief and dry).

Asimo posted:

This is a bit harsher than I would have phrased it, but yeah this is something I sort of slowly realized a few years ago and why I mentioned the bathroom reader aspect. This biggest thing really is that it's hardly unique to D&D (I suspect Exalted for example has hit a lot of the same notes for people, if in slightly different manners) but 3e is definitely the perfect example of it.

Sage Genesis posted:

One thing I've noticed over the years is that 3e was made with the assistance of witchcraft. Because for some reason it managed to convince people that things had always been this way. I can't even begin to count the number of times someone said "4e changed this thing which all previous editions had", where all "all editions" of course actually means "only 3e".

It's not just people who can't know any better either. I play a bit of 5e every now and then (mostly an excuse to hang with my friends, not my system of choice) and they keep making mistakes like that. If the monster does X thing here then that will do Y and.... no, that was 3e. 5e doesn't work that way.

It goes the other way as well. A year or two ago we took a trip down nostalgia lane and played some 2e... and they still kept making those mistakes. Skill checks work like this, yes? Rogues can backstab if they flank, yes? This is done with an opposed strength check, yes? What do you mean monsters don't have strength scores?

Kai Tave posted:

Moths is right, Mike Mearls and the 5E team delivered the game that people vocally petitioned for.

Slimnoid posted:

Not only did 5e players get the game that they wanted, Mearls got to make the game he wanted. At no point during the playtest was any of the feedback given any serious consideration; right from the get-go, Mearls wanted to make HIS edition, HIS Dungeons and Dragons, to make is definitive mark on a decades-old system. Hell, you can tell he wanted it back in 4e, when he released the abortive Essentials line, and how that tried to regress a number of mechanical decisions* made prior. Some say he actively sabotaged 4e at this point, so that he could get full creative control over D&D. I'm willing to believe that, because right after that the game tanked and never really recovered.

There was no way Mike "40d20 rats" Mearls was going to let anyone ruin his D&D. Not players, not WotC, not Penny Arcade; nobody was going to stop him from releasing the exact game he wanted, come hell or high water. 5e is a purely ego-driven product, coated with a fine layer of tummy-feels mechanics, where nothing new or exciting is presented and everything is exactly as you remember it before Big Bad 4th Edition came by and kicked sand in your face. It's all regressive, from the presentation to the math, and 5e seems to actively fight against anything progressive or interesting from tainting their hallowed pages. In the hands of a good editor and competent playtesting you might have gotten something if not good, then at least functional, but nothing in 5e works; it's got all the same warts as 3e and then some, because as others have said it's actively done away with improvements from past editions and just vomits out what people feel the game should act like, rather than how it should act like.

Halloween Jack posted:

Case in point, Mearls said on Twitter that "HPs are defined in a campaign-dependent manner. Martial healing messes that up. For instance - HP in a Game of Thrones campaign are much different than in a Harry Potter one." That's the closest thing to an official reason for the lack of a real 5e Warlord: They can't include anything in the game that some fraction of players would find immersion-breaking. Think about that: the head designer of the best-known RPG is disclaiming responsibility for defining key concepts--something previous editions had no problem doing--and I would bet money it was partially a response to forum arguments about "meat points" and "shouting limbs back on."

Kurieg posted:

I was saying more as opposed to 3.5 or 4e where there was just a generic setting and FR was an expansion laid on top of that (It would even mean they get to sell an extra book! Wowee!) I understand why FR would be the first setting released though.

Kurieg posted:

I was saying more as opposed to 3.5 or 4e where there was just a generic setting and FR was an expansion laid on top of that (It would even mean they get to sell an extra book! Wowee!) I understand why FR would be the first setting released though.