|
Arivia posted:it took until the 3.5 DMGII for the usual tap Robin D. Laws thing to take place Huh, I went back and checked, and how about that, Robin Laws was a writer for DMG 2. That's kinda neat as far as how I think very highly of the advice in 4th Ed's DMG 2 as well.
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2016 11:19
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 9, 2024 03:58 |
|
|
gradenko_2000 posted:Huh, I went back and checked, and how about that, Robin Laws was a writer for DMG 2. That's kinda neat as far as how I think very highly of the advice in 4th Ed's DMG 2 as well. Yep! I remember when I started getting into D&D around 1998-1999, the very tail end of 2e, Robin Laws was doing GM-focused stuff in Dragon. He used that as a springboard to write and publish Robin's Laws of Good Gamemastering, which was the book to really bring critical thinking about GMing and how to do it into D&D circles. (It wasn't the first book of GM advice, since I think White Wolf had published that incredibly bad patronizing Storyteller's Guide for Vampire by then, and Gary Gygax's Master of the Game predates both of those.) Robin's Laws really codified and publicized a lot of GMing tools that are common today, like classifying players by type and so on. Robin Laws has made a pretty good reputation since as the GM guru of sorts, and he gets called on for GMing books for projects he doesn't have much to do with otherwise (like Pathfinder and 4e.) Also don't discount the 4e DMG1, there's some good stuff in there too. I like those player types the most, for example.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2016 11:56
|
|
|
Kai Tave posted:(Snip Wuxia Weapons "cronk") Wut? So... if I take this, uh, "cronk" then I have to keep a detailed log of exactly when I wielded each weapon in the past? I mean I could wield a certain sword and then leave it home for safekeeping, but now I'm on a 125-day timer and will need to keep track of when I can no longer recall it? Are you loving serious? Are we back to Gygax's "YOU CANNOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT" territory? Also, speaking as a bit of a purist who worked on several wuxia RPGs: the word "wuxia" doesn't refer to types of weapons. It's a type of genre. You might as well call a perfectly ordinary revolver a "spaghetti western weapon" or a typical arming sword a "Tokien fantasy weapon". See how dumb that sounds?
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2016 13:12
|
|
|
Look, it's a Chinese word, therefore it means monks. Never mind that monks are a specific subset of martial heroes of wuxia material rather than a generic term for martial artists, that almost literally every wuxia hero is able to fight unarmed with great skill, generally in addition to using their favored weapon, or that the only effect this E: Frankly the only use I can see for this is as a cost-saving measure whereby you can duplicate one weapon the party has found. I mean, it cancels when an enemy gets the weapon but nothing says you can't attune your fists to the sword and then hand it over to your buddy who actually uses swords. Now you effectively have two swords for the price of one! And a cronk. heeheehee cronk crooooooonk Mors Rattus fucked around with this message at 13:30 on Apr 15, 2016 |
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2016 13:24
|
|
|
One of the big hang-ups of "a dude whose hands are registered deadly weapons" is the idea that the GM can no longer pull off a scenario where the party is disarmed, so designers often put all sorts of convoluted restrictions on them as "balancing payback" It seems like the thought process behind that thing was: 1. Instead of a complicated bunch of rules on how to make Unarmed Attacks into weapons, and running into problems like having to buy an Amulet of Unarmed Attacks +1 (3rd Edition/PF) or a lot of errata (5th Edition), I'm just going to let the Monk superimpose a previously-held weapon's stats into their fists. 2. But if I do that, the Monk might be able to wield too many weapons pseudo-instantaneously by just changing which one was superimposed onto their fists. 3. Therefore, I'm going to place limits on how many weapons can be "retained", and the "time since last held" is going to work as the limiting factor, with higher levels letting you amass a larger and larger "ether arsenal" stored in memory
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2016 13:49
|
|
|
I've never understood that as a major benefit. It's like, oh no, you can never be disarmed! ...how often does disarming even come up? Why not just let the martial artist shine in that rare, rare moment where everyone is thrown in prison and has their poo poo taken away? It's not like it matters much any other time - disarming in combat lasts almost no time at all anyway.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2016 13:54
|
|
|
You're right, but Monks often end up being bad so often because they're often composed of a laundry list of "special abilities" that make you feel like they should be penalized for having them, and then the designer never playtesting them enough to realize the practical implications of those changes.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2016 14:01
|
|
|
It's your typical punishment obsessed gaming outlook. After all, if 
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2016 14:03
|
|
|
It has long been an issue with this entire hobby that "I can fight without a weapon" is grossly overvalued. I think it's a mix of a few things. You have your "BUT REALISM" hitting in there, demanding non-unarmed weapons always be better. You have your "But then they can't be disarmed, that has to be worth a lot!" stepping in with it's misunderstanding of balance. You have some people who just flat out hate the idea of an unarmed fighter being in the game period. Honestly, at the end of the day, the real root of the problem is that unarmed fighting is treated as eternally a backup option for everyone, when in reality it should be treated as a weapon - same as any other weapon. People just don't think about unarmed fighting as a mechanical option, and it suffers because of it. As for Cook, he is in desperate need of a partner or partners to carry the mechanical weight of his ideas - and who can turn down his mechanical ideas if they don't fit. Unfortunately, because of how the industry goes and his vague celebrity status, that is likely never going to happen.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2016 14:04
|
|
|
Pretty sure a monk can be disarmed.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2016 14:05
|
|
|
ManMythLegend posted:Has he actually provided any tangible proof to his backers that he's any closer to being done then when the KS ended so many years ago? Like a pre-printer draft, or an art free rules test, or hell even a quick start demo or something? It's a d20 game with Fate's aspects bolted on. It's taken him almost five years to write a d20 game. Figure that poo poo out.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2016 14:07
|
|
|
gradenko_2000 posted:You're right, but Monks often end up being bad so often because they're often composed of a laundry list of "special abilities" that make you feel like they should be penalized for having them, and then the designer never playtesting them enough to realize the practical implications of those changes. To add to the list of problems I just mentioned above, monks suffer very strongly from, you guessed it, not being examined mechanically. Take the 3.x monk. Lots of vaguely flavorful abilities, right? But there's no synergy between any of them. Monks get super big movement speed, and can only flurry when they full attack - aka when they don't use their movement speed. They have immunity to all mundane diseases and poisons, but already have good fortitude saves. They can speak to any living creature, and have little to no charisma. They get a shittier version of feather fall with way more restrictions. They get immunity to non-magical damage at a level where nothing is non-magical anymore. They can heal themselves, but for so little it's not even worth remembering. All those abilities were made because the devs thought they sounded cool and then proceeded to put absolutely no thought whatsoever in how they'd work, much less how they might work together. Nobody considered the actual, you know, game. It's the same thing that's kinda always plagued tabletop games - actual designers and mechanical thinkers get the gently caress out of the hobby when they can. It's an industry populated entirely by Idea Guys.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2016 14:14
|
|
|
Rand Brittain posted:I have to admit I don't actually give everybody a hire a "Nazi Y/N?" background check. Kai Tave posted:But the development parade of Next, from the meaningless puff piece "does this feel like D&D?" questionnaires to the steady rollback of anything that might give Fighters fun toys over successive iterations to promises they obviously were never going to keep right on up to bringing Tarnowski and Zak S on as credited consultants to court the internet shithead demographic, that all pretty much cemented for me that Mearls isn't just some poor guy struggling under the weight of the crown but actually bad at his job and lazy and maybe kind of an rear end in a top hat himself. Kai Tave posted:One of the most telling Mike Mearls moments I remember was some Rule of Three column where someone basically asked "Hey, the original 4E Assassin class has some mechanical issues, how 'bout that?" and Mearls' response was basically "yeah, we're aware of the issue, I guess you could Ask Your GM™ to houserule it like so," and all I could think at the time was hey Mike, you know you're literally the guy in charge of D&D right? If you know it's broken then how about you fuckin fix it? What do you need, permission? It's an entirely digital class too! Arivia posted:Hey, come on. I don't hold SKR as being that great a designer. However, considering a common problem with a lot of RPGs is the lack of (or lip-service only) playtesting, taking some time isn't a bad thing if he's spending it right. quote:So, yeah, Cook is a good designer - for writing settings, and supplements. Numenera is a great setting, and a terrible rules system, and that's a problem, but not an indictment of him. Not all designers are good at the same things, and that's fine.  ProfessorCirno posted:It has long been an issue with this entire hobby that "I can fight without a weapon" is grossly overvalued. I think it's a mix of a few things. You have your "BUT REALISM" hitting in there, demanding non-unarmed weapons always be better. You have your "But then they can't be disarmed, that has to be worth a lot!" stepping in with it's misunderstanding of balance.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2016 15:12
|
|
|
I just love that SKR probably doesn't like Monks, but feels compelled to put them into his game and put arbitrary restrictions on them because D&D has monks and therefore he must have Monks. Or so no third party can put out non-punished monks for the system. Then again, given that apparently grogs thought 4e was an abomination for not having Gnomes in core, he might have a marketing point here. (Never got that in the slightest- Gnomes are easily the least popular standard D&D race by far from personal experience.)
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2016 17:57
|
|
|
This is now old news, but does the deal with WotC to publish their material under their stewardship include things like classes? Because if that's the case, one could theoretically publish something like "Fighter But Actually Good", right?
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2016 18:09
|
|
|
Yeah someone could publish that, and since it doesn't need to reference FR in any way you can do so under the free license.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2016 18:13
|
|
|
Kai Tave posted:Things to take away from this: Sean, I use repeated use of "crunk" to hide lovely game design: don't steal my word! I will fight you for it. 
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2016 18:20
|
|
|
The important thing here is that SKR has decided to call one category of special abilities in his presumably upcoming game cronks. There are spells, there are stunts, and then there are cronks. Cronks.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2016 18:23
|
|
|
Kai Tave posted:The important thing here is that SKR has decided to call one category of special abilities in his presumably upcoming game cronks. There are spells, there are stunts, and then there are cronks. Also note that spells, stunts, and cronks are all bundled together as Feats: SKR posted:I posted Update #38 to the Kickstarter page, which includes part of the intro to the Feats chapter explaining how you select which feats (cronks, spells, or stunts) you want to be able to use each day. If he was just going to call them Feats, why not just do that from the beginning? 
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2016 18:31
|
|
|
gourdcaptain posted:Then again, given that apparently grogs thought 4e was an abomination for not having Gnomes in core, he might have a marketing point here. (Never got that in the slightest- Gnomes are easily the least popular standard D&D race by far from personal experience.) 
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2016 18:32
|
|
|
Croooooooooooooooooonk.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2016 18:38
|
|
|
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2016 18:45
|
|
|
If I had to guess, "cronk" probably fills the role of "placeholder term I know will not be used elsewhere in the text, therefore making it easy to find/replace with a real term later." That's still a prety silly cronk, though.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2016 19:33
|
|
|
paradoxGentleman posted:This is now old news, but does the deal with WotC to publish their material under their stewardship include things like classes? Because if that's the case, one could theoretically publish something like "Fighter But Actually Good", right? I'm actually amazed I haven't seen any "fighter, but not lovely" classes for 3e or 5e. I mean, I haven't really gone looking, but I would think I'd at least heard of one in passing.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2016 19:45
|
|
|
Evil Mastermind posted:I'm actually amazed I haven't seen any "fighter, but not lovely" classes for 3e or 5e. I mean, I haven't really gone looking, but I would think I'd at least heard of one in passing. There isn't much of a market for one as most people who play 5e think fighters deserve being lovely for being a jock. For 3e, warblade is the official fighter replacement.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2016 19:47
|
|
|
There are dozens of them for 3.X, although I don't know how many people bothered actually publishing them instead of just posting them on various message boards as homebrew.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2016 19:48
|
|
|
gourdcaptain posted:I just love that SKR probably doesn't like Monks, but feels compelled to put them into his game and put arbitrary restrictions on them because D&D has monks and therefore he must have Monks. Or so no third party can put out non-punished monks for the system. Odd, I know people who love gnomes. They fit the semi-magic prankster archetype without being overly hebraic. You CAN code them as Jews but it's not as clear as Dwarves = Scottish.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2016 19:54
|
|
|
Huh, there's a lot of ownership stuff happening this week. Jeff Dee and Jack Herman, the creators of the first ever superhero RPG Villains & Vigilantes, just won a four-and-a-half-year-long legal battle to regain the legal ownership of the line. http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/3749/villains-vigilantes-creators-win quote:On July 27, 2011, Dee and Herman sued Bizar, the publisher of Fantasy Games Unlimited, for copyright infringement, asserting that his contractual right to publish their game had expired many years earlier and he kept this fact from them. The lawsuit began in Florida, moved to Arizona and ultimately reached the U.S. Court of Appeals Ninth Circuit. I covered the case in detail in two posts on this blog: They've already got V&V up on DriveThru and Lulu.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2016 20:01
|
|
|
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2016 20:08
|
|
|
Asimo posted:This isn't really in doubt, no. Heinsoo fought a long and hard battle to keep Wizards from being an invincible god-king class among several other things and he basically got harassed out of the company due to it. Is there any more info about how Heinsoo got cut? I assumed it was typical indiscriminate Hasbro cutting, 4e's critics like to point to his firing as a sign that it was already in trouble before Essentials, and he himself- has been smart and diplomatic and focused on his present gig and I'm not about to badger a guy with "So, how did you get screwed over at your last job?" Like I do sometimes feel like he got stabbed in the back in order to make way for what Mearls and Co. wanted D&D to be, but that also feels like wishful thinking on my part, like "no, 4e would totally have been regarded as a massive commercial success if not for office politics".
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2016 20:13
|
|
|
Golden Bee posted:Odd, I know people who love gnomes. They fit the semi-magic prankster archetype without being overly hebraic. You CAN code them as Jews but it's not as clear as Dwarves = Scottish. Fair enough. The first game I've ever been in for any length of time (over seven years of playing D&D and derivatives off and on) where Gnomes really came up is an Eberon D&D 4e game that started last month where we're playing students at a mercenary school in Zilargo, the gnome country. And even then, none of the players picked gnomes. (We've got two Half Elves, a human, and a Kalashtar.) Although last session did involved a PC getting briefly detained by the Gnome Secret Police for being a suspicious looking foreigner wearing a straw hat unseasonably after in-universe Labor Day equivalent.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2016 21:54
|
|
|
Maxwell Lord posted:Is there any more info about how Heinsoo got cut? We know that there was at least a little friction on the "don't make wizards the objectively best class" front, so I imagine there's probably a lot more unreported instances of him not seeing eye-to-eye with bad design decisions. Then when it's time to make cuts, he was the squeaky wheel.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2016 22:49
|
|
|
Slimnoid posted:Really, the reason he's a raging shitlord is because without it he's nothing. Evil Mastermind posted:Huh, there's a lot of ownership stuff happening this week. Also add me to the list of people who loved Gnomes. The idea of a tiny necromancer always appealed to me, but Dwarves have too much stereotypical baggage to run with. Basically Gnomes served the purpose of letting you be sort of like a Dwarf or Kender without dealing with what people assumed you would be doing with the character. Maybe. Something like that. Though I am still laughing out loud at "they all do that" in the Zogonia comic. gourdcaptain posted:Although last session did involved a PC getting briefly detained by the Gnome Secret Police for being a suspicious looking foreigner wearing a straw hat unseasonably after in-universe Labor Day equivalent.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2016 23:14
|
|
|
For years I saw people suggesting quite earnestly that the whole RPGPundit thing must all be some persona that the guy behind the keyboard was adopting, that it was all just some schtick to drum up pageviews. I think by this point it's pretty clear that whatever the actual details of his existence may be, the RPGPundit is a genuine rear end in a top hat.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2016 23:19
|
|
|
moths posted:We know that there was at least a little friction on the "don't make wizards the objectively best class" front, so I imagine there's probably a lot more unreported instances of him not seeing eye-to-eye with bad design decisions. Kai Tave posted:For years I saw people suggesting quite earnestly that the whole RPGPundit thing must all be some persona that the guy behind the keyboard was adopting, that it was all just some schtick to drum up pageviews. I think by this point it's pretty clear that whatever the actual details of his existence may be, the RPGPundit is a genuine rear end in a top hat. 
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2016 23:51
|
|
|
The whole Scott Bizar/FGU thing is just weird ongoing saga of a dude keeping a game company barely running entirely out of spite.
|
|
#
?
Apr 15, 2016 23:51
|
|
|
Evil Mastermind posted:Huh, there's a lot of ownership stuff happening this week. I unabashedly love V&V (Ever since the insanity that was first edition) and Jeff is a cool dude while Bizar is a slime so this is wonderful news to hear. unseenlibrarian posted:The whole Scott Bizar/FGU thing is just weird ongoing saga of a dude keeping a game company barely running entirely out of spite. It really is. I really do love FGU games even though they have some of the most broken groggy mechanics with proofreading performed by blind manatees, but they were all cool concepts with fantastic art (Check out Psi-World or Flashing Blades sometime) and actually tended to have a lot of support. However the contracts that Bizar made with his designers were loving draconian and even though he wasn't making any money with the products, he made sure that nobody else could either. Humbug Scoolbus fucked around with this message at 01:04 on Apr 16, 2016 |
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2016 00:57
|
|
|
Dr. Quarex posted:I forgot why I was told this was not likely, but why is it again that he cannot just be making up his entire life story? I mean, if you tell me there is "a sophisticated Uruguyan who details which cigars and tobacco varietals he is smoking while endlessly posting screeds against progressive values" I am going to assume, no matter how many times someone tells me otherwise, that this is a bored IT helpdesk guy in New Hampshire faking his IP address and wishing his life were half as interesting as he pretends it is. He's a guy who seems to believe that a conspiracy of Maoist-Gynocrats are coming for his games AND that he can do real spells. Living in Uruguay and smoking mid priced pipe tobacco are the most believable parts of this story.
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2016 01:24
|
|
|
Posthuman Studios posted an article about Eclipse Phase sales rankings on DrivethruRPG http://eclipsephase.com/look-eclipse-phase-and-drivethrurpgs-metal-list
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2016 07:55
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 9, 2024 03:58 |
|
|
ProfessorCirno posted:To add to the list of problems I just mentioned above, monks suffer very strongly from, you guessed it, not being examined mechanically. Take the 3.x monk. Lots of vaguely flavorful abilities, right? But there's no synergy between any of them. Monks get super big movement speed, and can only flurry when they full attack - aka when they don't use their movement speed. They have immunity to all mundane diseases and poisons, but already have good fortitude saves. They can speak to any living creature, and have little to no charisma. They get a shittier version of feather fall with way more restrictions. They get immunity to non-magical damage at a level where nothing is non-magical anymore. They can heal themselves, but for so little it's not even worth remembering. I'm going to have to disagree with you there. Monks were actually designed relatively carefully by E. Gary Gygax in 1e. If you take the 1e Monk and compare it to the 1e Thief then you'll notice that Monks are basically Thieves with a fresh coat of paint. Thieves get thief skills? So do monks - and IIRC as a level higher but with a worse XP track. Thieves get backstab? Monks get flurry. Thieves get d6 as their hit dice? Monks first get an extra d4 - then a little self healing and it comes out in the wash. Thieves get magic armour? Monks can't wear armour so they get an AC bonus. And then there's some weird stuff like the abilty to fake your own death that very seldom comes up. In short 1e monks are 1e thieves with a fresh coat of paint and a little bling in exchang for a slightly worse XP track. And 1e monks are terrible because they are 1e thieves and 1e thieves are terrible. (Those absurd high level abilities? Were over the soft-level-cap at level 9 or 10 and were just Gygax playing around). The 3.0 monk on the other hand is almost a direct port of the 1e monk by people who didn't understand what the 1e monk was - they basically just copied the level and ability list. A 1e monk can sub in for a party as a thief (although both of them are terrible). There's no way a 3.0 monk can sub in for a rogue. It's more cargo-cult design. "We want the Monk and it has the abilities of X at level Y because that's what Gygax gave it".
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2016 13:24
|
|
