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It's always "fun" watching more people have to deal with Ferrinus for the first time.
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Mar 18, 2017 06:17
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Ferrinus posted:I think this kind of relentless focus on equivalence is at best distracting and at worst damaging. Like, really, not teleporting has to be exactly as good as teleporting? The advantages my enemies gained by preparing for an extra month were precisely (or at least nearly) negated by the encounters my party had along the way?? I suppose waiting a month and then taking a one month trip would've given us even greater commensurate benefits? So, to use the C&C: Red Alert design terminology, you're trying to "balance high" instead of "balance low." Cool. Sort of like how Linguist is just as good as Polearm Master?
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Mar 18, 2017 08:16
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P.d0t posted:So, to use the C&C: Red Alert design terminology, you're trying to "balance high" instead of "balance low." Cool. This doesn't appear to follow or mean anything, please expound.
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Mar 18, 2017 09:07
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ProfessorCirno posted:It's always "fun" watching more people have to deal with Ferrinus for the first time. Spiteski posted:That page is the best/worst. If you miss the old grognards.txt thread and want to laugh at people getting lovely about elf games then that thread is for you.
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Mar 18, 2017 09:57
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Splicer posted:Oh my god it's still going. The one I found is a group with like 70k members, I dunno if Sniteski means something else. They did ask me if I'd read the rules, and if I plan to abide by them, as well as what my favourite class was (I answered Wizard, but I did consider dropping a Warlord reference  ), so that's a good start.
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Mar 18, 2017 10:34
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Ferrinus posted:This doesn't appear to follow or mean anything, please expound. Soviets get one naval unit (submarine) and the Allies get three (PT boat, Missile Destroyer, Cruiser) Soviets get three air units (Yak, Mig, Hind) and the Allies get one (Longbow Apache)
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Mar 18, 2017 12:16
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Just give Fighters a bonus damage equivalent of what the Wizard does throwing Fireballs every round, with half damage on a miss, bam balance. Wizard doesn't want to throw Fireballs? Too bad nerd, you're now inefficient. There I just solved every problem with DnD you're welcome. Ask your DM.
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Mar 18, 2017 12:49
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ProfessorCirno posted:It's always "fun" watching more people have to deal with Ferrinus for the first time. I think it's interesting, in a pretty bizarre way. Ferrinus is arguing with about 7 people about a point he almost entirely agrees with, and has been doing so for about two pages. I'm pretty sure that: He agrees that noncasters have too little going for them, he agrees that the game would be better off with characters all having a more similar resource system, he agrees that casters need increased limitations. The actual discussion looks like it should be "Is it better to outright remove certain spells [videogame method], give spellcasters limited access to plot-changing spells [specializations], or allow access to plot changing spells but the spells themselves have more limitations [Ferrinus's teleportation restrictions]?" Which, like, really could be a good discussion. Ferrinus posted:As long as both characters have daily powers, and those daily powers are of equal consequence in the contexts they're designed for, it's okay if one character can cause things to happen in the narrative that the other can't This is, as far as I can tell, literally what people are saying. The main argument, in the beginning, was that wizards have comparatively so many options that are so comparatively powerful and have so few comparative restrictions that it's unlikely to impossible to find something for a fighter to do that would be equivalent in the context they're designed for as 5e is currently implemented. So, without excluding the very real need to increase the narrative power of noncasters, they were discussing ways to increase restrictions on wizards, which, as noted above, is a thing you seem to be literally supporting... and this point that they agree on derailed the thread for two pages. Splicer posted:Oh my god it's still going. edit: Like literally, if two pages ago Ferrinus had gone "Well, what if we just add more restrictions to certain spells, like increased costs/casting times/whatever?" then this things might've gone really smoothly. Gharbad the Weak fucked around with this message at 17:04 on Mar 18, 2017 |
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Mar 18, 2017 16:25
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So I'm thinking that a mining cart with Animate Object on it (plus Permanency) and a collection of buttons that trigger Magic Mouth spells for "forward", "backward" and "stop" should effectively make an automated rail car? I'm planning on giving a few to some goblins so they can transport trash away from their cave. The dwarves that lived there died or moved or I haven't yet figured out why they left behind their subway system. I also anticipate the PCs travelling up the rail line to get to that cave because it will be the easiest way for them to get there. If you're gonna railroad, you may as well do it literally.
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Mar 18, 2017 17:37
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If the DM is making set pieces, they Just Work (tm). You probably don't need to think about the exact PC spells needed to make it, in my opinion. Hell, even make it fully mechanical, goblins and dwarves are crafty. That said, yes your idea sounds like it'd totally work, and having a loud dwarfy voice shouting the directions sounds like it'd be fun.
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Mar 18, 2017 17:45
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E: quote is not edit
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Mar 18, 2017 17:46
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Antifreeze Head posted:So I'm thinking that a mining cart with Animate Object on it (plus Permanency) and a collection of buttons that trigger Magic Mouth spells for "forward", "backward" and "stop" should effectively make an automated rail car? Removing a railway system would be a lot of work, so unless there's some ancient dwarven secret that's imperative to keep out of enemy hands, why not leave it there? And the railway could be used for a lot more than trash removal: it could allow for quick travel between multiple cave entrances, giving the goblins an artificially large territory for... doin' goblin stuff. Either way, underground railway systems are extremely cool, and there should be at least one good jousting challenge when the goblins discover the PCs are riding the railway.
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Mar 18, 2017 18:02
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Wouldn't a fairly simple way to limit the really powerful magic just be to make it extremely difficult for wizards and company to learn it? Priests get their power from the gods but the arcane casters need to learn it and put it in their book, correct?
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Mar 18, 2017 18:06
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Trast posted:Wouldn't a fairly simple way to limit the really powerful magic just be to make it extremely difficult for wizards and company to learn it? Priests get their power from the gods but the arcane casters need to learn it and put it in their book, correct? RAW all casters just get to pick the spells they learn every level, no prerequisites.
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Mar 18, 2017 18:36
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I'm not sure balancing things by making it so you can still do cool things on a level the fighter can't, but it's frustrating to do, is the way to go. You'll just get wizard players trying to derail the adventure to go do yet more wizard-centric stuff to find Ye Olde Tome of Meteors, instead of meaningfully bringing martials up to the same level. The Tome of Battle classes/whatever the Pathfinder ones were seem like the best example done yet of what I'm talking about.
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Mar 18, 2017 18:50
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Gharbad the Weak posted:edit: Like literally, if two pages ago Ferrinus had gone "Well, what if we just add more restrictions to certain spells, like increased costs/casting times/whatever?" then this things might've gone really smoothly. Ferrinus doesn't agree with this as a premise and is holding up 4E as a counterexample as he is claiming there's no narrative imbalance between 4E classes, and just lol to that. It's a huge step up from 3.X or 5E but yeah, it's there. By comparison, "Pyromancer manipulates Fire" is more narratively compatible with "Rogue is Sneaky", and gives you an actual framework to start tweaking toward equivalent narrative weight (note that this does not need to mean direct ability-for-ability parity). Ferrinus doesn't agree with this as a solution because, on top of not agreeing with the problem existing in the first place, he seems to be insisting that wizards have to be able to do anything because ???. I could be wrong on this though. There's another problem with "Wizard does Magic" in that once you've defined how Wizard works all Magic is now heavily implied to fall within that framework. You can have stuff that doesn't, but again the onus is on explaining why this is different. "Pyromancer manipulates Flame" makes no calls on how Teleport works because they're entirely unrelated. e: and you can easily have someone else do a fire thing the Pyromancer can't because "Goblin Thermomancer manipulates Flame differently". Splicer fucked around with this message at 19:05 on Mar 18, 2017 |
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Mar 18, 2017 18:58
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I tried. Maybe I'll jump more into this later. Anyway, Tome of Battle was a great book. I haven't looked at the Pathfinder Equivalent, but I bet if you mixed that with the 6th level progression spellcasters (like the Inquisitor), you'd actually have a pretty cool game going. I always liked the crusader.
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Mar 18, 2017 19:20
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To keep up this conversation, there's a lot you can do within 5es rules to diminish the desire to play casters , just from a role-playing perspective. It wouldn't work well with the official adventures, but anyone playing their own setting could use a trick my dm used ages ago- all non priest magic (wizard, warlock, etc) is evil and you go to hell-equivalent when you eventually die, no way around it. So the social setting makes mages et al outcasts, even though they're objectively still the most powerful mechanically. You can even be a good mage but have to deal with that issue constantly. For warlocks it makes a huge amount of sense, for mages it's a stretch but gently caress it. I'm sure there's plenty of other routes to this - dark sun being the obvious one. Wizards ripped out the life force of the planet and everyone hates them.
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Mar 18, 2017 19:25
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I'm also a fan in other systems of arcane magic being a risk/reward proposition. Using health as a casting resource, fireball blows up centered on you if you gently caress up, etc. Wild Magic does this halfheartedly but you could really introduce some checks and balances to caster power by raising the stakes for failing a spell. Non-casters would be consistently good at what they do, while mages would a much riskier thing to include in a party. The trick for this is to not just tie the bad result to rolling a 1. The risk of a certain gambit must be somewhat understood by the player and align with the power of what they're trying to accomplish. You could build off something like the "Teleport" mishap table on p. 281 of the PHB.
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Mar 18, 2017 20:02
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Kaysette posted:I'm also a fan in other systems of arcane magic being a risk/reward proposition. Using health as a casting resource, fireball blows up centered on you if you gently caress up, etc. Wild Magic does this halfheartedly but you could really introduce some checks and balances to caster power by raising the stakes for failing a spell. Non-casters would be consistently good at what they do, while mages would a much riskier thing to include in a party.
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Mar 18, 2017 20:17
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Gharbad the Weak posted:I tried. Maybe I'll jump more into this later. It was very good. My martial character couldn't do some non-combat things like succeed at perception checks or persuade/diplomacy someone (and the DM fell into the trap that intimidation = threats), but I could actually keep up with damage and utility in combat. Things like bursting enemies down, marking enemies so they had lovely to-hit chances, shutting casters down and being nigh unkillable made him far more fun to play than a regular fighter. I actually had poo poo to DO in combat, instead of move, hit, end turn. Battle masters in 5e are definitely weaker than ToB's design, but I think it isn't so bad, since ToB was trying to keep up with Patherfinder casters, which was impossible.
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Mar 18, 2017 21:08
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Let me tell you about Sacred Geometry. Now THERE'S a feat that 5e needs.
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Mar 18, 2017 21:18
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gradenko_2000 posted:Soviets get one naval unit (submarine) and the Allies get three (PT boat, Missile Destroyer, Cruiser) Zerg get both sunken colonies and spore colonies, while protoss only get photon cannons, but this isn't really an arena in which the protoss are disadvantaged by their lack of options. Gharbad the Weak posted:I think it's interesting, in a pretty bizarre way. I just think there's no need to split the wizard (and presumably cleric and druid) classes five different ways, such that the "pyromancer" and "necromancer" archetypes are allowed but the "loremaster" archetype isn't. The problem is you've got this rogues' gallery of weirdos to whom my posting in a thread is the equivalent of Godzilla rising from the deeps to exact his revenge.
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Mar 18, 2017 21:36
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Ferrinus posted:The problem is you've got this rogues' gallery of weirdos to whom my posting in a thread is the equivalent of Godzilla rising from the deeps to exact his revenge. The important thing is: who's with me on making Sacred Geometry a 5e feat somehow
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Mar 18, 2017 21:40
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Only if you also add Arithmancy and whatever the other one was.
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Mar 18, 2017 21:55
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Oh my god arithmancy is a completely necessary feat, thank you for showing me the light Let me know if you remember what the other one is
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Mar 18, 2017 22:04
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I think Sacred Geometry IS the other one I had in mind, sorry to get your hopes up.
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Mar 18, 2017 22:10
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Gharbad the Weak posted:Oh my god arithmancy is a completely necessary feat, thank you for showing me the light Calculating Mind?
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Mar 18, 2017 22:22
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CT5 Holy?
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Mar 18, 2017 23:50
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Trast posted:Wouldn't a fairly simple way to limit the really powerful magic just be to make it extremely difficult for wizards and company to learn it? Priests get their power from the gods but the arcane casters need to learn it and put it in their book, correct? That's sort of how AD&D did it: you only ever got what the DM deigned to give you as scrolls or let you quest for to obtain a scroll or an NPC Magic-User that would teach you the spell. The narrative problem is that it makes Wizards more of a focal point of the story if the party has to go off on all sorts of side-quests just so their Wizard can cast Fireball, and even then the Wizard gets their powerful spell anyway and welp. Alternatively, you could just say "nope, can't ever learn this spell, sorry", I guess that sort of works, but again you're doing a lot of work as a DM culling the spell list by yourself just for the sake of "balancing" the game, and you need buy-in from the player that they'll trust you with what you're doing. User0015 posted:It was very good. My martial character couldn't do some non-combat things like succeed at perception checks or persuade/diplomacy someone (and the DM fell into the trap that intimidation = threats), but I could actually keep up with damage and utility in combat. Things like bursting enemies down, marking enemies so they had lovely to-hit chances, shutting casters down and being nigh unkillable made him far more fun to play than a regular fighter. I actually had poo poo to DO in combat, instead of move, hit, end turn. Battle masters in 5e are definitely weaker than ToB's design, but I think it isn't so bad, since ToB was trying to keep up with Patherfinder casters, which was impossible. One of the big problems with the Battlemaster's design is that there's no scaling to it. Yes the Superiority Dice get bigger, but all the Maneuvers don't. You basically just take the best ones (read: Precision Strike) at level 3 and then you start getting worse ones as you level-up, which is completely rear end-backwards. ToB using a 9-level tiering similar to spells made it more similar to spellcasters in that you first start with [everyone that Charges while they're near you gets a damage bonus equal to your level] followed by [you make a Charge that draws no AOOs and adds 10 damage] followed by [you make a Charge that draws no AOOs and adds 35 damage] and finally [you make a Charge that draws no AOOs and adds 50 damage, and everyone else near you can also charge at the same time you do, and you cannot block each other, and the Charges of your allies deal an extra 25 damage, and all your Charges gain a cumulative +2 attack bonus for every succeeding Charge, and any target hit by at least two of these Charges is stunned for 1 round]
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Mar 19, 2017 03:01
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gradenko_2000 posted:That's sort of how AD&D did it: you only ever got what the DM deigned to give you as scrolls or let you quest for to obtain a scroll or an NPC Magic-User that would teach you the spell. The B/X solution was that the DM just assigned the spells because that is what the magic-user's teacher wanted them to have. Some would do that randomly, so enjoy heading out on a dungeon crawl with only Detect Magic and Read Languages in your spell book and the ability to only memorize and cast one of those each day. No cantrips! Hope you sharpened your dagger!
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Mar 19, 2017 03:40
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In my own personal experience you don't see pure casters a lot at the local game store. Mostly melee or priests.
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Mar 19, 2017 04:03
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I jusy play dnd assuming everyone is a magic class or some kind so I have a party of Tank Wizard, Heal Wizard, Trickery Wizard, and Wizard Wizard. Tends to be pretty balanced and fun all told.
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Mar 19, 2017 04:55
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mastershakeman posted:To keep up this conversation, there's a lot you can do within 5es rules to diminish the desire to play casters , just from a role-playing perspective. It wouldn't work well with the official adventures, but anyone playing their own setting could use a trick my dm used ages ago- all non priest magic (wizard, warlock, etc) is evil and you go to hell-equivalent when you eventually die, no way around it. So the social setting makes mages et al outcasts, even though they're objectively still the most powerful mechanically. You can even be a good mage but have to deal with that issue constantly. For warlocks it makes a huge amount of sense, for mages it's a stretch but gently caress it. My self, and a DM i play with use something similar. If a caster is constantly throwing around big displays of power creatures/entities/NPCs are going to search that player out for good and for ill. It makes sense that a wizard eventually would want to create a tower filled with traps and hazards because he is constantly being pursued by things that want to enslave his power. In my DMs game the players "won" at the end of a campaign and were allowed to write up some rules from the universe that would apply in the next campaign. One rule was no spells over 5th level. Now if you play a wizard you have to make a decision in the game: to sign the hawk Accord and follow the 5th level spell rule, or to ignore the Hawk Accord and be free to cast stuff but Mechanus gets to hunt you down if you start playing with things you shouldn't. It's move convoluted than that but that is the general gist of it.
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Mar 19, 2017 08:39
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Huckabee Sting posted:In my DMs game the players "won" at the end of a campaign and were allowed to write up some rules from the universe that would apply in the next campaign. One rule was no spells over 5th level. Now if you play a wizard you have to make a decision in the game: to sign the hawk Accord and follow the 5th level spell rule, or to ignore the Hawk Accord and be free to cast stuff but Mechanus gets to hunt you down if you start playing with things you shouldn't. It's move convoluted than that but that is the general gist of it. Doesn't that mean that a wizard who doesn't sign both gets powerful spells and is the centre of a cool ongoing storyline?
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Mar 19, 2017 08:44
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Subjunctive posted:Doesn't that mean that a wizard who doesn't sign both gets powerful spells and is the centre of a cool ongoing storyline? Oddly, in the 4 year long campaign we played with the Hawke Accord in effect we never once really had to deal with that issue. The party wizard never signed the contract, but spent his characters career finding ways to subvert and find loop holes in the rule. It was his characters personal story line so it never felt like he got extra story we didn't, as each character had a really in-depth personal story line/quest we all helped each other accomplish.
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Mar 19, 2017 09:09
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ProfessorCirno posted:It's always "fun" watching more people have to deal with Ferrinus for the first time. it's not like this isn't endlessly rehashed from around the time sword and fist came out and everyone realized that no, this wasn't going to get fixed
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Mar 19, 2017 10:07
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Solving spellcasting requires a change in tone. Trying to make non-spellcasting classes as 'narratively functional' ends up turning D&D into more of a super hero game, but I think many of the people who want to 'solve' caster superiority want exactly the opposite--they already find the tone too fantastic. They should just play a different roleplaying game, or never level past level 3. Speaking of which, I wouldn't mind seeing an Arcana Unearthed style revamp that rejiggers classes and races more completely. That game seemed to allow for a lot of standard D&D tropes but in fresh ways. Never got to see it in action for more than a session though.
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Mar 19, 2017 11:35
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Conan-inspired retroclone Crypts & Things does this thing where magic is divided up into White, Grey, and Black magic, and casting Black magic will force a Sanity check on the part of the spellcaster. The "problem" with this from a design perspective in the vein of the current discussion is that the divisions are more about what the magics thematically do, rather than being leveraged as a gameplay-balancing mechanic. That is, White magic has heals and buffs and whatnot because it's "helpful" magic, whereas Black magic has stuff like direct damage because it's "evil", but in the context of D&D, trying to categorize spells in this fashion would simply fall into a CoDzilla-type scenario where Clerics and Druids are powerful because of their buffs, while at the same time you can't cast Fireball without it possibly costing you Sanity despite the fact that direct-damage is often one of the weaker ways to play a powerful Wizard. Further, the Sanity cost itself is played up to be far more permanent to be useful as a limiter on a spellcaster's spells. On further reflection, there's also the case of Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed/Evolved, in which spells were segregated into Simple, Complex, and Exotic types. Simple ones could be learned as part of the standard d20 level-up process, while Complex spells needed more effort to acquire, and Exotic spells were powerful enough that you straight-up needed to give up a feat to learn one. But the only reason this works is because by this time Cook had a couple solid years of 3rd Edition to figure out which spells were powerful enough to demand the Exotic tag, if they were to show up in the game at all. And then there was also the Fighter-oriented Book of Experimental Might 2, wherein he experimented with feats that gave you a benefit that you could only use so many times per day (usually three), such as "as a free action, disrupt the spellcasting of a caster you are adjacent to", or "your attack counts as a touch attack". And then the martial characters would also something he called Feat Boosts where you could "tap" an otherwise completely passive feat, so if you had Improved Trip, you could Boost it to reroll the Strength check for the trip attempt, or if you had Improved Critical, you could Boost it to automatically succeed at a critical threat. And then you'd recover all your Boosts after a day's rest. Taken together, this sounded might I say dangerously like spell slots and Tome of Battle for someone of normally so conservative design as Cook.
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Mar 19, 2017 11:50
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piL posted:Solving spellcasting requires a change in tone. Trying to make non-spellcasting classes as 'narratively functional' ends up turning D&D into more of a super hero game, but I think many of the people who want to 'solve' caster superiority want exactly the opposite--they already find the tone too fantastic. They should just play a different roleplaying game, or never level past level 3. 3e-alikes (and d&d in general, really) have the conflicting goals of "everyone in the party has more or less and equal share of work to do", "some people get superpowers and some do not", and "most if not all character development decisions are conceptually made by characters, not players exerting narrative control over the game". compromise the first and you have ars magica. compromise the second and you have all-magic d&d and the genre-shift you describe to fantasy-tinged superhero games - or on the other end, extremely low-level d&d and the sort of d&d where the spellcasters sandbag themselves to keep from overwhelming the game. compromise the third and you have pbta. gradenko_2000 posted:And then there was also the Fighter-oriented Book of Experimental Might 2, wherein he experimented with feats that gave you a benefit that you could only use so many times per day (usually three), such as "as a free action, disrupt the spellcasting of a caster you are adjacent to", or "your attack counts as a touch attack". And then the martial characters would also something he called Feat Boosts where you could "tap" an otherwise completely passive feat, so if you had Improved Trip, you could Boost it to reroll the Strength check for the trip attempt, or if you had Improved Critical, you could Boost it to automatically succeed at a critical threat. And then you'd recover all your Boosts after a day's rest. this is baffling because it's all the energy-expenditure-tracking that signifies "magic" in 3e-alikes, but none of the narrative breadth that goes with it. it's just "hit a dude but harder X/day". you've killed the sacred cow but you haven't solved the problem the cow was blocking.
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Mar 19, 2017 12:31
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