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Splicer posted:It's not entirely about focus, it's also about consequences. The consequences of failing to diplomacy good is vague at best. It will usually be a combat encounter or some kind of stealth mission or some cash loss or what have you. The consequence of failing to combat good is well defined: you and your friends lose more hp than you could have, resulting in either not getting to adventure any more today and/or dying horribly. That's the other main way people mean D&D is combat focused. Generally more rules = more dev focus.
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Mar 1, 2016 15:30
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Harvey Mantaco posted:Why? Not captured? Not robbed of their possessions and thrown from the whatever? Not saved at the last moment by the bugbear they let live two rooms ago (who dies in the process, ending that potentially positive arc)? You have more choices than that. Taking feats that affect things besides direct damage numbers have consequences that aren't immediate death, not sure why combat should be immediate death either. I know not everyone plays like this, and it would depend on the group, but we don't kill characters unless the players agree (though we're all story tellers and usually try to one-up each other and amazing deaths) Yea, you can houserule away player death, but as written D&D generally kills you after X number of failed death saves or negative bloodied or whatever.
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Mar 1, 2016 16:11
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Generic Octopus posted:Yea, you can houserule away player death, but as written D&D generally kills you after X number of failed death saves or negative bloodied or whatever. Getting saved by an X or having the whatever use knockout damage instead of lethal (for any number of reasons) or hell yeah just houseruling (it's ok, you won't get in trouble). It's all good. I guess my point wasn't really to houserule away playerdeath completely either, just that having those "fluff" skills affect combat through creativity and having less emphasis on the combat is fine and I think falls pretty well within the rules and intent of the game. It might just be something that has worked well for our group though, honestly haven't played with many other people.
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Mar 1, 2016 16:56
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Gort posted:I dunno, I find that most players aren't taking "flavourful" feats as their second feat, they'll just take something equally boring to Staff Expertise that isn't quite as good as Staff Expertise, like a +damage feat. Well, the reason I brought up that tiefling tail ability thing is I'm thinking of specific examples. In the all-of-two games that started with "Expertise at 5" that I convinced to go to "Expertise at 1", we'd have 1-2 players go from taking an expertise at 1 to some nice little thing I wouldn't expect them to take at all.
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Mar 1, 2016 18:27
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Most editions that have feats need to have feats broken down into categories, so they can be house-rule added in more easily. 5e will never do that, because ~keywords~ IMHO if you were to give out free Racial feats in 4e every 5ish levels it'd be a good thing. Siloing off combat and non-combat feats so they aren't competing for the same lego-bricking resources is what needs to happen, but again, Mearls and Co. don't even understand the concept of siloing Combat/Social/Exploration properly when it comes to class design, so there goes that idea.
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Mar 1, 2016 18:51
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Covok posted:This is meant non-judgemenally and honest curiosity: what do those who like playing 5e like about it? Why do you choose to play it over other titles? I play 5e over other titles because it's what my group has and knows. Before I got into the hobby and began reading tabletop forums, I didn't even know there were alternatives to D&D (other than Pathfinder which is just a fork of D&D, anyway), and I suspect that's a fairly common thing. The guy who invited me into my first group had the playtest rules for this fancy new edition of D&D, so that's what we played. Of my tabletop buddies, only one or two are into it enough that they might be open to learning a second system. I'm happy with how the game plays for the most part. Almost every "can I do this?" roll is d20 + ability score + maybe proficiency bonus, so the math is very easy to remember. Advantage/disadvantage is much easier to keep track of than a slew of +1s and +2s. Character creation is simple enough that I got a complete novice up and running in half an hour, and it would have been even quicker if he wasn't starting at level 4 and didn't insist on multiclassing. There's enough crunch that you feel like you have more control over the outcome of your dice rolls than under a more lightweight system, but unlike previous D&D editions, you don't have to plan out your character from levels 1-20 so as to avoid missing prerequisite feats and whatnot, and there's no need to sift through multiple PHBs and supplemental releases.
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Mar 1, 2016 19:00
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Slippery42 posted:There's enough crunch that you feel like you have more control over the outcome of your dice rolls than under a more lightweight system, but unlike previous D&D editions, you don't have to plan out your character from levels 1-20 so as to avoid missing prerequisite feats and whatnot, and there's no need to sift through multiple PHBs and supplemental releases. This is my biggest concern with 5E, that it will bloat out of control in ways basically every other edition has (as much as I enjoyed playing 4E for the little bit I played it, that edition also had three books called "Player Handbook", and Pathfinder is even worse about it).
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Mar 1, 2016 19:07
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Slippery42 posted:I'm happy with how the game plays for the most part. Almost every "can I do this?" roll is d20 + ability score + maybe proficiency bonus, so the math is very easy to remember. Advantage/disadvantage is much easier to keep track of than a slew of +1s and +2s. Character creation is simple enough that I got a complete novice up and running in half an hour, and it would have been even quicker if he wasn't starting at level 4 and didn't insist on multiclassing. There's enough crunch that you feel like you have more control over the outcome of your dice rolls than under a more lightweight system, but unlike previous D&D editions, you don't have to plan out your character from levels 1-20 so as to avoid missing prerequisite feats and whatnot, and there's no need to sift through multiple PHBs and supplemental releases. You and are on the same page with basically all of this. I would like to add that I often say "if they took 5e's core conceits and stapled it onto a 4e AEDU structure, it would basically be the ideal game for me." 4e is good to play when you limit the scope. When I played tabletop, it was pretty much just PHB + whatever the free version of the offline builder gave you to work with, and we had fun with that just fine. The biggest problems I have with 4e are the bloat, the overbearing char-op, and the classes being so inflexibly structured unless you have this supplement, and/or you spend this feat. Like, making you pay feat taxes to adjust your class just enough to fit a concept that is slightly out of the box that the design crams them in, is the loving worst. That stuff should have just been "replace that Class Feature with this one" without charging you extra currency in the form of feats. The classic example for me being the Tiefling Blackguard CHA-ladin shenanigans.
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Mar 1, 2016 19:09
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Slippery42 posted:unlike previous D&D editions, you don't have to plan out your character from levels 1-20 so as to avoid missing prerequisite feats and whatnot, and there's no need to sift through multiple PHBs and supplemental releases. 4e sorta had this, but it's really only an issue in 3.x/PF. The rest of the D&D editions have nothing like that.
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Mar 1, 2016 19:11
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Slippery42 posted:unlike previous D&D editions, you don't have to plan out your character from levels 1-20
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Mar 1, 2016 19:13
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Technically, 3e and 3.5e are two separate editions and therefore he is not entirely incorrect 
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Mar 1, 2016 21:42
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Generic Octopus posted:The rest of the D&D editions have nothing like that. Try qualifying for bard.
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Mar 1, 2016 21:44
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Yeah, uh, see, the thing that typically happens when you fail the non-combat sequence? Is you end up in combat.
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Mar 1, 2016 22:05
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Tunicate posted:Try qualifying for bard. I mean, that's still not really something you can plan for aside from going "oh hey, I managed to roll these stats that let me Bard later."
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Mar 1, 2016 22:14
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ProfessorCirno posted:Yeah, uh, see, the thing that typically happens when you fail the non-combat sequence? Is you end up in combat.
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Mar 1, 2016 22:21
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Generic Octopus posted:4e sorta had this, but it's really only an issue in 3.x/PF. The rest of the D&D editions have nothing like that. I'm super rusty on 3.x. Did it not have retraining like 4th?
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Mar 1, 2016 22:23
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Generic Octopus posted:I mean, that's still not really something you can plan for aside from going "oh hey, I managed to roll these stats that let me Bard later." Having to preplan three different class changes totally counts.
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Mar 1, 2016 22:29
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AlphaDog posted:I'm super rusty on 3.x. Did it not have retraining like 4th? 3.x has stuff like prestige classes, which could have character level, class level, ability score, feat, skill rank, or item prerequisites, and that's not an exhaustive list. And a lot of those prerequisites aren't really things you'd normally take.
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Mar 1, 2016 22:39
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AlphaDog posted:I'm super rusty on 3.x. Did it not have retraining like 4th? It did not. And retraining was one of the many things that 3.x grogs utterly despised about 4E, because you can't just rewrite your character's abilities and defining traits down the road!!!!
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Mar 1, 2016 22:41
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AlphaDog posted:I'm super rusty on 3.x. Did it not have retraining like 4th? It had suggestions about allowing retraining in PHB2, but they were garbage because they took forever, had pointless-rear end restrictions, and cost EXP+Gold. Or you could use the psychic reformation power. 
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Mar 1, 2016 22:44
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Dick Burglar posted:It did not. And retraining was one of the many things that 3.x grogs utterly despised about 4E, because you can't just rewrite your character's abilities and defining traits down the road!!!! And they're right, since being able to decide that you are suddenly a wizard now (ie, 3.x style multiclassing) contributes to more problems than any other single design choice. I was wondering about retraining in relation to "you have to plan out your character from 1-20", which I really only experienced in 3.x (because 4e has retraining and the 1st ed bard is such an edge case in terms of ability score requirements that I literally never played in a game where it could have come up). Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 23:03 on Mar 1, 2016 |
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Mar 1, 2016 22:59
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NachtSieger posted:It had suggestions about allowing retraining in PHB2, but they were garbage because they took forever, had pointless-rear end restrictions, and cost EXP+Gold. Also Embrace the Dark Chaos and Shun the Dark Chaos, which let you spend XP to change any of your feats, including racial ones.
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Mar 1, 2016 23:02
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Simple version. Someone goes "I'd like to play a cleric of the god/goddess of knowledge", and decide loremaster is a cool thing to do. Congrats, if you want all the levels of loremaster, you need to spend every available feat on prerequisites, and also must be a human or a strongheart halfling. Like, I'm not saying being a loremaster cleric is the best idea, but if you're looking at someone who's thumbing through the SRD and says "I want to play a librarian cleric", then they have to plan out at least until level 10. It also eats 20 skill points, and by level 10, a normal cleric will have 26. I used the cleric loremaster because it's something that you immediately trip on and is freely available, but most classes can be drastically improved by adding prestige classes, and a lot of those classes (especially classes that fully increase spellcaster levels) are significantly more powerful than the feats you spend on them. Like, Archmages, Initiates of the Sevenfold Veil, and Incantatrix...es are all obviously much better than straight wizards. And once you realize that, it's a very small leap to "Ok, I'll be a wizard/archmage/IotSFV/Incantatrix, which means you have to plan to have (most likely) two feats and 20 skillpoints locked in by level 5, five feats and 32 skillpoints locked in by 10, then six more skillpoints and 2 more feats set by level 17. 7 feats by level 17 means that you've got, essentially, 2 "free" feats that aren't prereqs. And that's all because some of the prereqs overlap. And this is a relatively simple comparison.
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Mar 1, 2016 23:03
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To be fair 'librarian cleric' is 100% what an archivist or cloistered cleric does.
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Mar 1, 2016 23:29
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Tunicate posted:To be fair 'librarian cleric' is 100% what an archivist or cloistered cleric does. Yeah just not as mechanical well.
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Mar 2, 2016 00:16
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Dick Burglar posted:It did not. And retraining was one of the many things that 3.x grogs utterly despised about 4E, because you can't just rewrite your character's abilities and defining traits down the road!!!! The funny part is that Pathfinder actually has super-permissive retraining, with no cost beyond a few hundred gp a pop, that lets you swap out basically everything but your race (and you can even swap racial traits), and even explicitly allows you to change 'inherent' abilities (magical bloodlines, etc) with the implication of magical rituals/alchemy like some sort of murderhobo transhumanist.
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Mar 2, 2016 02:00
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Doesn't every game have retraining as long as your GM allows it? 
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Mar 2, 2016 06:46
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Having it explicitly written into the book gives credence to the idea that it should be practiced/allowed. It might even let it occur to people who might otherwise never think of letting it happen.
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Mar 2, 2016 06:55
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Im against it.  Im fine with people making new characters mid-campaign, but Joe the Wizard doesnt forget everything, turn dumb, and suddenly become a rockstar bard over the weekend. Same end result, different mechanism.
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Mar 2, 2016 07:36
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I don't think literally switching classes like from a 10th level thief to a 10th level cleric is what anyone means by "retraining". edit: Except apparently Pathfinder lets you do exactly that? drat. Pretend I wrote "in D&D" at the end of that sentence. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 07:42 on Mar 2, 2016 |
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Mar 2, 2016 07:39
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FRINGE posted:but Joe the Wizard doesnt forget everything, turn dumb, and suddenly become a rockstar bard over the weekend. Uh, yeah he can, because he's a wizard  At least, he was. Like that's a dumb excuse just because in a world with magic that can turn you into a toad it's somehow impossible to magically rewrite a person's psyche.
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Mar 2, 2016 08:29
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Hitlers Gay Secret posted:Uh, yeah he can, because he's a wizard Its the same end result. Also maybe I dont have "psyche re-writing" magic in the world. So there. 
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Mar 2, 2016 08:36
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FRINGE posted:but Joe the Wizard doesnt forget everything, turn dumb, and suddenly become a rockstar bard over the weekend.
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Mar 2, 2016 09:19
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I'm with FRINGE in the sense that when a player in my game asked if he could stop playing his Crusader and reroll into a Binder instead at the same level and wealth, I said yes. It doesn't particularly matter to me if it's "this is the same dude, I just changed all his stats and class and abilities and whatnot to what I want" or if it's "this is a completely different dude, as a new character"
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Mar 2, 2016 09:31
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Roadie posted:And yet you have no problem with Joe the Wizard going from "can shoot a couple fireworks from his fingers" to "can teleport across the universe and stop time" in the course of a couple of weeks of intense adventuring? No see he said there's no "re-write magic" in his games so it forces his player to ask him if it's allowed. Which brings us back to the #1 rule: Ask your DM
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Mar 2, 2016 10:01
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The Adventurers' League rules grant a player a no-strings-attached respec/remake before level 5. They also allowed another one for characters of any level when SCAG came out so players could use those options.
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Mar 2, 2016 13:28
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FRINGE posted:Im against it. Harvey Mantaco posted:Getting saved by an X or having the whatever use knockout damage instead of lethal (for any number of reasons) or hell yeah just houseruling (it's ok, you won't get in trouble). It's all good.
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Mar 2, 2016 17:37
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I swear based on this thread I wonder if half the posters can even round up a group of actual humans that would sit in a room with them long enough to play a game.
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Mar 2, 2016 17:48
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"I want to be the ultimate arcanist! I'm going to cast lots of spells! Hey, it looks like a sorcerer is the way to go!" [five days later] "Here's a wizard build that's just strictly superior to sorcerer when it comes to spellcasting." This guy should probably be able to completely rebuild and keep whatever characterization he has.
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Mar 2, 2016 17:49
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My biggest issue with an entire class rewrite/retrain is how it affects the story. A major plot from my last Payhfinder campaign was with a player's class. He played an Oracle Tiefling who got his powers from his mixed heritage, and learned his father was a devil, and the antagonist. If the player decided to just up and swap classes mid game the story stays the same but takes an abrupt left turn. The Oracle's divination spells have been integral to the plot are now gone. Really, I could find a million ways to hand wave it away story-wise but I just don't like it. If Gimli turned into a wizard half way through LotR I would be pissed. It makes sense if he started practicing magic and learned a few things (multi classed). Edit: to be fair I give free cladd retains early levels. And all feats, spells, and class powers with no plot ties are free game all game as well. I ask myself, "how jarring will this be to the fiction?" Huckabee Sting fucked around with this message at 18:05 on Mar 2, 2016 |
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Mar 2, 2016 17:50
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