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Kestral posted:If you'd like to actually do that, maybe in the chat thread, I'd love to read it. I might have overstated my expertise, haha, people here are talking about late cycle splatbooks, I was just going to make a bunch of jokes about racial level caps, class restrictions, the prevalence of cursed items and random treasure tables, and the fact that killing a Demilich basically requires you to cosplay as Aragorn.
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Apr 4, 2017 18:58
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Halloween Jack posted:So another thing w/r/t 2e: in my experience, the fiercest edition wars concerning it have happened in retrospect. It's something you only see in particularly crusty forums, but some people resent what they see as TSR "chasing" White Wolf and their ilk with a new emphasis on "story" in the PHB rules and in the campaign settings they published. Also, people just hate Lorraine Williams for a lot of reasons both real and imagined. My first D&D was BECMI and to this day AD&D players confuse me.
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Apr 4, 2017 22:14
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Falstaff posted:The Essentials line complicates a hypothetical 4E reprint though, since it's the most recent version. Essentials was a mistake and should be treated as such.
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Apr 5, 2017 01:10
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Yeah, you'll get no argument from me.
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Apr 5, 2017 01:28
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Fuego Fish posted:Essentials was a mistake and should be treated as such. I love hexblades. Expertise feats that give a playstyle-related bonus in addition to the bland +1 to hit was a good idea. Giving everyone a good basic attack (so opportunity attacks aren't a total waste for a monk) was a good idea. palecur posted:My first D&D was BECMI and to this day AD&D players confuse me.
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Apr 5, 2017 01:29
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I feel like it's useful and important to separate "Essentials the consolidated and revised rules, including revised Monster Manual math" from "Essentials the design philosophy that gave us the return of W+M1 Fighters alongside a plethora of Wizard variants and the thoroughly underwhelming squandering of concepts like the Vampire class." Essentials was absolutely a directionless, ill-conceived maneuver that stank of office politics and nerd infighting but the line isn't completely without merit.
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Apr 5, 2017 01:33
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Kai Tave posted:I feel like it's useful and important to separate "Essentials the consolidated and revised rules, including revised Monster Manual math" from "Essentials the design philosophy that gave us the return of W+M1 Fighters alongside a plethora of Wizard variants and the thoroughly underwhelming squandering of concepts like the Vampire class." Essentials was absolutely a directionless, ill-conceived maneuver that stank of office politics and nerd infighting but the line isn't completely without merit. Plus we somehow got Heroes of the Feywild out of it, which has two of my favorite (if a bit flawed) classes in 4e: The Berserker and the Skald. Go figure.
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Apr 5, 2017 01:49
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Even the Slayer Fighter had some interesting design concepts underlying it. I know we mock the idea that fighters should be the "easy" class, but there was a real niche in 4E for a couple simple-to-play classes. Choice paralysis was a common problem with a lot of new players I taught the game to. In theory the Essentials Fighter could have worked well for this. An effective and cool default action (I charge in and attack!) with the option to increase complexity as the game goes on, since it has access to other fighter powers and features. In practice? You ended up with a class that was if anything overpowered in Heroic but fell behind fast after that. It wasn't properly balanced against the existing strikers, and they made no allowance for the fact that you were selecting cross-role when taking other fighter powers - because they didn't actually want people to do that. The simplification process was even less well executed with the other classes, ranging from so-so to terrible, and the fact that they made the wizard even more complicated really tipped their hand. The saddest part is that it could have been so much better. Besides what Halloween Jack brought up and the Slayer's unrealized potential, you have things like the Hexblade and Berseker, two classes exploring design space that had existed from day one but left largely untouched. And from a design standpoint, the Skald might be the most interesting class in all of 4E.
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Apr 5, 2017 02:03
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My impression is that Essentials was the kind of product you get when the direction and design at the very top is incoherent and directionless, but the implementation is performed by a combination of genuinely competent and talented people, and maybe some people who are just phoning it in. E.g., it's kind of a history of D&D in a nutshell.
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Apr 5, 2017 02:11
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Comrade Gorbash posted:Even the Slayer Fighter had some interesting design concepts underlying it. I know we mock the idea that fighters should be the "easy" class, but there was a real niche in 4E for a couple simple-to-play classes. Choice paralysis was a common problem with a lot of new players I taught the game to. The Essentialized Assassin may legitimately be one of the most thoroughly boring 4E play experiences I've ever had. On paper it seems like it should be cool, you get to play a sneaky, acrobatic assassin who can choose to drop a big spike of damage on people and your daily power analogues are exotic poisons that can be used in combat or have alternative out-of-combat applications. In practice you spam the same at-wills over and over crossing your fingers for a crit so you don't squander your 1/encounter extra damage adder...and by 1/encounter I mean you never ever gained another use of it as you leveled up, not ever unlike the Slayer...and the poisons were all thoroughly underwhelming, anemic bullshit. Oh wow I can add slow to my at-wills? Oh dang, +3 whole damage and a 1 round daze? Even for a level 1 daily that's bad. I stuck with that character through one and a half mini-campaigns out of inertia but it pretty much demonstrated to me that however interesting and potentially useful a slate of simplified 4E characters might have been, the actual execution was hot fuckin garbage. If they really wanted to excise choice paralysis in some hypothetical 4.5E what they should have done was fire feats out of a cannon into the sun. People talk about how 4E has too many powers but I'm pretty sure there are quite literally 4-5 times as many feats as powers throughout 4E's design history and 99% of them are worthless filler that did nothing but intimidate people when it came time to choose them.
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Apr 5, 2017 02:14
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Worst thing about the Hexblade was that the character builder was really not set up to handle items that clone the properties of other items. (That is, your summoned magical sword that clones the item bonus and powers of your implement.)
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Apr 5, 2017 02:23
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The thing I'll always remember about the Hexblade is that when it was first released there was a Hexblade Multiclass feat (because this was how 4E handled multiclassing, you took a feat which gave you some minor ability from the other class and a new skill, and let you qualify as being that class for further prerequisites like feats, paragon paths, etc, it wasn't really like "mash two classes together" multiclassing) that gave you the magic sword. That is to say, for the low price of a feat you could get the only thing about the Hexblade anybody actually cared about, which was starting out with a sweet magic lightsaber. They then had to errata the feat out of existence because keeping it around would have completely invalidated the new class they were trying to hype.
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Apr 5, 2017 02:35
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Kai Tave posted:The thing I'll always remember about the Hexblade is that when it was first released there was a Hexblade Multiclass feat (because this was how 4E handled multiclassing, you took a feat which gave you some minor ability from the other class and a new skill, and let you qualify as being that class for further prerequisites like feats, paragon paths, etc, it wasn't really like "mash two classes together" multiclassing) that gave you the magic sword. That is to say, for the low price of a feat you could get the only thing about the Hexblade anybody actually cared about, which was starting out with a sweet magic lightsaber. They then had to errata the feat out of existence because keeping it around would have completely invalidated the new class they were trying to hype. If I recall it actually gave you the Sword and the associated At-Will, as an At-Will.
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Apr 5, 2017 03:39
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UrbanLabyrinth posted:If I recall it actually gave you the Sword and the associated At-Will, as an At-Will. Wait, didn't cross class feats usually give you As as Es instead? edit: vvvvvv Wow that's dumb then. Kwyndig fucked around with this message at 04:08 on Apr 5, 2017 |
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Apr 5, 2017 03:48
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Every single one of them except for that feat.
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Apr 5, 2017 03:59
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It's actually not a multiclass feat at all. It just straight-up gives you the hexblade class's core feature for a feat. (This can be tricky to work out because WotC didn't try to rebalance it, they just cut it out of the character builder completely, and I've heard this was just blanked out of the Dragon PDF as well.)
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Apr 5, 2017 04:14
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The idea of a 4e class wherein your powers are preselected for you according to particular theme has some merit, in order to reduce analysis paralysis and make character creation easier to jump into. "I want to make a tanky Fighter" "Okay, here's a power list from 1 to 30. Follow it." The problem was that: 1. it was done at the same time that the martial classes were simplified to poo poo 2. the caster classes weren't actually all that simplified, since an Essentials Wizard now had to pick and choose their 3. the preselected progression did not include feats, which is probably a bigger issue of difficult choices more than powers are Kwyndig posted:Honestly I want somebody to take 4e, fix the math, remove the feats/feat taxes, and rerelease it, but I know that's not going to happen. The closest I've gotten was this thing to remove the gear treadmill (even harder/faster than the inherent bonuses) and to bake-in the feat taxes. You could probably combine it with these DTAS rules to also remove ability scores as well and simplify character creation even more.
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Apr 5, 2017 07:11
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Halloween Jack posted:They thought that people played 4e because they liked (...) playing with character creation as a game unto itself. It's just also true for 3e and 5e and any game more complicated than FATE or something, though. palecur posted:My first D&D was BECMI and to this day AD&D players confuse me. Fuego Fish posted:Essentials was a mistake and should be treated as such.
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Apr 5, 2017 07:55
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Kwyndig posted:Honestly I want somebody to take 4e, fix the math, remove the feats/feat taxes, and rerelease it, but I know that's not going to happen. I mean, I don't need to tell Kwyndig this, but at any given time there are a handful of goons working on various 4e retroclones -- never mind non-goons. It's really just a matter of what "4e, but..." looks like to 'you'; some people fix the math by getting rid of it entirely, others keep it and actually fix it, etc.
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Apr 5, 2017 08:10
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Asimo posted:In fairness this part is absolutely true. Ehhhhhhhhhhhhh... I actually appreciated 4E for the reason that if I didn't feel like caring about delving deep into chargen-as-a-minigame that I didn't really have to and barring rare outliers I was still probably going to wind up with something useful, effective, and with potential to do cool things when I wanted them done. Compare this to 3E and deciding to roll a Monk because hey wow, this seems fun, I'll just pick whatever seems cool. Fighter? Yeah I'll just wing it, pick up whatever sounds good at the time. I could engage or not with the character creation game as I felt like it instead of feeling like I was actively punished for declining to do so.
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Apr 5, 2017 08:15
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Kai Tave posted:Ehhhhhhhhhhhhh...  I actually prefer starting at level 1 (or some other setup where you don't start with magic items) because I hate having to go through and pick that poo poo.
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Apr 5, 2017 08:53
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Kai Tave posted:Ehhhhhhhhhhhhh... The problem with Mearls is he saw that and decided that it was a minigame that someone should be able to win. That's where he and his team failed to understand the player base and the philosophy of the game they were designing for.
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Apr 5, 2017 13:49
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LatwPIAT posted:"I was a 3e playtester, and this is almost entirely true. Playtesting was strongly focused on problems the players saw in 2e, and in 2e, the big thing was damage spells and stuff like Stoneskin. Worse, like 95% of the playtesting corps was drawn from Living City, and in Living City, everybody had simply accepted that caster supremacy was the way things were and should be. The campaign was something like 45% wizards, 45% clerics, 9% other casters, and 1% noncasters. If you were playing a fighter or thief, people would just ask you when you intended to dual class, not if you were going to. It was a given, because no matter what people like to say about fighters having a niche in 2e, it simply wasn't true in practice, especially once splats started coming into it. This was me, and I stand by my words 100%. One of the feats we kept from going to print was Devotee of Corellon, a forgotten realms feat that gave +1 Dex, +1 Int, and +1 Cha. No, really. They thought that was fine. Half the loving playtesters complained more about Devotee of Helm, a feat that gave +4 Spot and Listen and gave you the elf's 4 hour trance ability. Also, the reason for the 8 hour rule on spell prep in 3e was because one of the #1 broke as gently caress things in AD&D 2e was the Tome of Magic spell Nap, a level 2 cleric spell that let casters re-prep spells after an hour long power nap. It was every single bit as broken as it sounds. NinjaDebugger fucked around with this message at 14:01 on Apr 5, 2017 |
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Apr 5, 2017 13:57
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NinjaDebugger posted:This was me, and I stand by my words 100%. One of the feats we kept from going to print was Devotee of Corellon, a forgotten realms feat that gave +1 Dex, +1 Int, and +1 Cha. No, really. They thought that was fine. Half the loving playtesters complained more about Devotee of Helm, a feat that gave +4 Spot and Listen and gave you the elf's 4 hour trance ability. Wasn't Sean K Reynolds one of the mechanical design writers on those early 3e Forgotten Realms books?
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Apr 5, 2017 15:29
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Wasn't Sean K Reynolds one of the mechanical design writers on those early 3e Forgotten Realms books? I believe so.
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Apr 5, 2017 15:51
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Wasn't Sean K Reynolds one of the mechanical design writers on those early 3e Forgotten Realms books? He's credited in The Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, Champions of Valor, Lords of Darkness, Magic of Faerun, Mysteries of the Moonsea, and Unapproachable East.
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Apr 5, 2017 15:51
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Asimo posted:In fairness this part is absolutely true. Comrade Gorbash posted:There's pretty clear evidence that a lot of 4E players did enjoy the character creation minigame. I swore off 3e forever because I realized that every time our DM announced a new game, my choices were to play a primary spellcaster, or resolve myself to slog through sourcebooks and forums looking for "builds" that could actually contribute to the game. What was the point of all those choices if choosing a premade build was practically mandatory? And why was I doing all this work? The things 4e players hate about 4e are the same things we hated about 3e. The crappy thing about 4e is that Dragon magazine and the Character Builder were the perfect platform to tweak anything as needed. Instead, much of the time, they published more lovely Dragon Magazine Feats & Powers that no one used outside niche one-trick-pony builds, and that clog up the screen when you're trying to build characters. Kai Tave posted:I actually appreciated 4E for the reason that if I didn't feel like caring about delving deep into chargen-as-a-minigame that I didn't really have to and barring rare outliers I was still probably going to wind up with something useful, effective, and with potential to do cool things when I wanted them done. quote:The problem with Mearls is he saw that and decided that it was a minigame that someone should be able to win. That's where he and his team failed to understand the player base and the philosophy of the game they were designing for. quote:The single most telling thing about Essentials is that there wasn't a Warlord variant in it. That one admission says volumes about how completely Mearls misunderstood the game and its audience.
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Apr 5, 2017 15:53
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I pushed back because the fact that character creation was robust is definitely a reason people play 4E, and removing that aspect would make it less attractive to a significant number of players - myself included. The fact that it was hard to make a useless character is a plus in this regards. The 3.x character creation minigame is boring because its trivial. You can faff about with a lot of theorycrafting but its all in the shadow of wizards being obviously best. 4E lets you actually play around. But the real point is that 4E is so good because, when it was at its best, it accommodated a variety of player preferences without preferring one. It's a lot like the long praised Tammy/Spike/Johnny concept the MtG design team hit on. I can delve deep into character creation without having to worry that I'm screwing things up for the rest of the group, because the power difference between max charop and an average build was in reality quite small. The player who prefers the big, "I did 100 damage on a crit!" flashy powers and classes is no better than and potentially just as effective as the fiddliest forced movement and soft-control build. And that works in reverse too. (Minor tangent - A big part of that is due to 4E being the only edition to really treat the party as a cohesive entity, which you'd think is an obvious idea but has virtually no actual rule support in other editions.) That you don't have to participate in the character creation minigame to be effective is a fantastic aspect of 4E, but it doesn't mean the assessment that it contributed to 4E's popularity is wrong. The thing about Mearls and his team is so often they're standing neck deep in the river but can't figure out how to drink. Essential's and even Next's conceptual bases where often spot on. But it all got filtered through Mearls' nostalgia boner and alpha nerd nonsense, and well.
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Apr 5, 2017 18:50
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Case in point, the Thief in Essentials was a "solved class." To get max DPR, you just used this one weird fighter multiclass build that allowed you to trip'n'stab people all day long.
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Apr 5, 2017 19:22
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Comrade Gorbash posted:But the real point is that 4E is so good because, when it was at its best, it accommodated a variety of player preferences without preferring one. It's a lot like the long praised Tammy/Spike/Johnny concept the MtG design team hit on. ... except that Tommy / Spike / Johnny is the exact opposite of that, because it's explicitly about how only one kind of player actually cares about optimization and everyone else can, and should, be happy being poo poo as long as they're playing the type of card / deck they like.
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Apr 5, 2017 20:08
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I mean I understand what you're aiming at, I'm just triggered by anyone suggesting that MTG design theory is good, rather than a miserable cauldron of excuses for printing garbage to make good cards more desirable and thereby fluff the same pleasure centers of the brain that gambling does. 
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Apr 5, 2017 20:15
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:... except that Tommy / Spike / Johnny is the exact opposite of that, because it's explicitly about how only one kind of player actually cares about optimization and everyone else can, and should, be happy being poo poo as long as they're playing the type of card / deck they like. Nice erasure. Have you considered that you can be a Spike... of setting lore???
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Apr 5, 2017 20:16
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As an aside, I think there's actually a legitimate argument for competitive charop, just not for a) the existence of waste-of-space classes that bring nothing to the table or do-everything classes that, ironically, make charop too easy because playing them is a no-brainer and b) a game built on this shouldn't pretend that it's really about sit-down improv theater with your friends. So much of D&D could be salvaged if it were consciously designed and marketed as an asymmetric co-op wargame.
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Apr 5, 2017 20:25
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Just out of curiousity, how much money did you spend on cardboard crack before you managed to break the habit?
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Apr 5, 2017 20:28
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Siivola posted:Just out of curiousity, how much money did you lose before you managed to break the habit? I actually broke even getting out of Magic -- thanks to a combination of downright predatory trading with other kids, plus I played Legacy where cards rarely depreciate, plus getting out at the right time. So in other words, only because I was a lucky rear end in a top hat.
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Apr 5, 2017 20:29
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Halloween Jack posted:
By willingly playing it, mainly.
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Apr 5, 2017 20:38
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:As an aside, I think there's actually a legitimate argument for competitive charop, just not for a) the existence of waste-of-space classes that bring nothing to the table or do-everything classes that, ironically, make charop too easy because playing them is a no-brainer and b) a game built on this shouldn't pretend that it's really about sit-down improv theater with your friends. So much of D&D could be salvaged if it were consciously designed and marketed as an asymmetric co-op wargame. How about an asymmentric co-op character generation wargame, where you collaborate and compete with your fellow characters during character generation, and then when the party is fully built, you can immediately declare whether the exercise was successful (the party won) and, optionally, an individual winner (whoever had the best character at the end)?
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Apr 5, 2017 20:39
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Leperflesh posted:How about an asymmentric co-op character generation wargame, where you collaborate and compete with your fellow characters during character generation, and then when the party is fully built, you can immediately declare whether the exercise was successful (the party won) and, optionally, an individual winner (whoever had the best character at the end)? A design contest with no practical test of the design would probably put both too much power and too much work on the referee.
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Apr 5, 2017 20:42
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I actually broke even getting out of Magic -- thanks to a combination of downright predatory trading with other kids, plus I played Legacy where cards rarely depreciate, plus getting out at the right time. So in other words, only because I was a lucky rear end in a top hat. I'm actually about to buy into the game with Amonkhet, so I'm obviously much more forgiving towards the design. I can still pretend I'll just play a prerelease and maybe a couple of drafts, and never get hooked on constructed.
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Apr 5, 2017 20:44
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palecur posted:By willingly playing it, mainly. I started with red box D&D when I was around 12. Not too long after, I started accumulating AD&D books. They were absolutely amazing to delve into and read, for me as a kid. I didn't actually play either game all that often - I didn't have many friends who were interested in it, and more importantly, I was in a joint custody situation where I was with my mom in a different city on the weekends and summers so doing something on a weekend with school friends was usually not possible. Anyway point is, the basic D&D system was easy to pick up and play, and in my later teen years, I used it to introduce friends to D&D. But I didn't get the drive to just sit in my room and pore over the Expert rules, while spending an evening flipping around in the Manual of the Planes, Wilderness Survival Guide, or Unearthed Arcana was just an excellent time. When it came to actual playing, AD&D was... well, I played a few random adventuers with various groups during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and each experience was wildly different, because we'd be using different books and options, the DM would have wildly different styles of running the game, and most importantly, at no point did any of us fully memorize the rules so we were constantly getting things wrong and then just handwaving poo poo to make it work anyway. Now, looking back with an eye to things like game design, complexity, balance, etc., BECMI is unquestionably the better ruleset. But back then, before the Web, the idea of evaluating a game's rules and being critical of them just hadn't occurred to us.
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Apr 5, 2017 20:46
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