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A Rust Monster makes perfect sense in a game where every room has piles of random weapons and chances for good stuff and swapping between weapons is negligible penalties or loss of a small neat benefit. In a game where your character must be built around specific gear and getting new gear is intended to be difficult, its extremely rude. For realism they should introduce a spell slot monster that permanently removes a random spell slot of a random level on touch. It obviously does nothing to martials.
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Apr 11, 2017 21:41
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Halloween Jack posted:I've heard it said that IH was a prototype for 4e even before Tome of Battle, but I don't find that to be true. I don't think Mearls was that involved with the actual mechanical design of 4e, right? And the stuff he spearheaded was universally terrible, like the classes from Heroes of Shadow. Goddamn is the vampire class ever awful.
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Apr 11, 2017 21:45
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Lightning Lord posted:I don't think Mearls was that involved with the actual mechanical design of 4e, right? And the stuff he spearheaded was universally terrible, like the classes from Heroes of Shadow. Goddamn is the vampire class ever awful. Yeah Mearls came in late, he was responsible for the train wreck that is the Essentials classes.
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Apr 11, 2017 21:47
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Evil Mastermind posted:e: It's like with Dark Souls. A lot of people love it for the challenge, which is totally fine for them to do. But then you get the fans who deride anyone who doesn't like the challenge with "GIT GUD", like it's the person's fault they're not meshing with the game or don't want to do something that challenging. Dark Souls is also a game where you can make up lost soul income in, like, 20 minutes, not a game where the loot curve and the experience curve theoretically have to be aligned with each other in order for characters to perform as expected. I mean, in fairness, Rust Monsters and the like have traditionally been a way to reign in players with excessive assets that put them ahead of the curve, but that's a pretty weak alternative to just having rules to avoid that situation in the first place.
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Apr 11, 2017 21:50
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Kwyndig posted:Yeah Mearls came in late, he was responsible for the train wreck that is the Essentials classes. I like Slayer and Thief.
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Apr 11, 2017 21:53
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Barudak posted:A Rust Monster makes perfect sense in a game where every room has piles of random weapons and chances for good stuff and swapping between weapons is negligible penalties or loss of a small neat benefit. In a game where your character must be built around specific gear and getting new gear is intended to be difficult, its extremely rude. Oh, so if you structured a game like Let it Die or other roguelikes with low durability gear. Yeah, a Rust Monster and a 'Mind Scraper' would work perfect for a game where you're expected to use and discard gear almost constantly. Now I kind of want to design a game like that.
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Apr 11, 2017 21:57
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I had an epiphany back in the nineties, when I realized that level drain and its kin were meant to frighten players, and not their characters. It was like the fear and horror checks from 2E boxed Ravenloft, a narrative enforcement mechanism for keeping the players on-narrative. That, besides the godawful hack of undoing a character's level-ups, is what really annoyed me about it.
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Apr 11, 2017 22:05
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What do you all think a good mechanic for representing life force being drained in old school D&D would be, as a replacement for level drain? Putting aside how inherently unfun it is, it's just far too much of a labor intensive hassle to bother with if I'm going to fire up 1e for some dungeon bashing or something.
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Apr 11, 2017 22:10
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Kwyndig posted:Yeah Mearls came in late, he was responsible for the train wreck that is the Essentials classes. I might be misremembering, but wasn't Mearls also responsible for a lot of the 4e PHB2 classes? Like I thought somewhere it was said that he and some others were working on that book, while the "A team" were finishing the PHB and getting the edition out the door.
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Apr 11, 2017 22:10
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Lightning Lord posted:What do you all think a good mechanic for representing life force being drained in old school D&D would be, as a replacement for level drain? Putting aside how inherently unfun it is, it's just far too much of a labor intensive hassle to bother with if I'm going to fire up 1e for some dungeon bashing or something. Unhealable damage / anti-heals. Think Ana's grenade from Overwatch. It's really threatening, but easy to track and temporary.
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Apr 11, 2017 22:13
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That's just aggravated damage fro WoD.
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Apr 11, 2017 22:18
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Lightning Lord posted:What do you all think a good mechanic for representing life force being drained in old school D&D would be, as a replacement for level drain? Putting aside how inherently unfun it is, it's just far too much of a labor intensive hassle to bother with if I'm going to fire up 1e for some dungeon bashing or something. I think the way Pathfinder does it isn't too terrible. You take a penalty to rolls and your max hitpoints go down by five until you get it fixed. You never actually lose a level; if you fail the save, you just need Restoration to cure you (which, granted, is expensive). The major issues I have is that getting restored is more difficult than it needs to be and it hits martials harder than spellcasters. One is easy to fix and the other is a problem with the system in general.
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Apr 11, 2017 22:20
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It would be actually great if there was a Fantasy Heartbreaker that took its gear porn inspiration from Diablo II. You could have a deck of items players got to draw from when they beat encounters, with randomly rolled stats within a set range, like those games do with unique weapons. Thus the Vorpal Sword you found EITHER makes crits more likely (19-20) OR makes crits more powerful (3x instead of 2x). The math here isn't good but that's just an example. The players would get to roll dice for all of their found items at the end of the encounter and you could introduce a mandatory treasure bidding portion at the end of the adventure for players to bid parts of the gold the accumulated to see who got what gear. Maybe it's a game where classes don't even really exist and your character is almost entirely defined by the gear they have? What if weapons gave character at-wills instead of them having those as part of a class? Then you could give them movement-related encounter powers from boots, dailies from rings and amulets....
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Apr 11, 2017 22:34
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Lightning Lord posted:What do you all think a good mechanic for representing life force being drained in old school D&D would be, as a replacement for level drain? Putting aside how inherently unfun it is, it's just far too much of a labor intensive hassle to bother with if I'm going to fire up 1e for some dungeon bashing or something. As others have noted a good replacement for level drain is a minor but noticeable penalty and a temporary loss of HP that can't be recovered with healing spells. If you want to be fair about it, take a spell slot or a few from casters and give a to hit penalty to noncasters (but it should be small, like a -1 or -2 at most). As for recovery from this I'd leave that up to what works for your game. Personally I'd let it fix itself with a few days downtime, much like ability score damage in 3e, with maybe a higher level spell available that would let you shrug it off instantly.
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Apr 11, 2017 22:43
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Pope Guilty posted:I'd like to see surveys correlating this and political beliefs. I feel like this is a pretty dangerous trap to fall into.
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Apr 11, 2017 23:01
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Kwyndig posted:Level drain was a dumbass mechanic even aside from taking away your progress because you had to sit there and rework your character in the middle of combat. There's a reason most RPGs hand out advancement at the end of the session, it's because reworking your character sheet during play grinds the session to a halt. It's just that as D&D got more advanced, even by AD&D2e, it got to the point where removing a level was a colossal hassle. But it was still kept around far too long due to gamer inertia. 
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Apr 11, 2017 23:25
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Pope Guilty posted:I'd like to see surveys correlating this and political beliefs. Can we seriously put to rest the whole "Likes old games = Voted for Trump" thing? Grognards.txt is gone for a reason.
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Apr 11, 2017 23:25
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Impermanent posted:Maybe it's a game where classes don't even really exist and your character is almost entirely defined by the gear they have? What if weapons gave character at-wills instead of them having those as part of a class? Then you could give them movement-related encounter powers from boots, dailies from rings and amulets.... To each his own, but this is like the antithesis of what I want from TTRPGs
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Apr 11, 2017 23:54
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That was sort of how Gamma World worked.
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Apr 12, 2017 00:04
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in my opinion, the rpg system trump would like is clearly
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Apr 12, 2017 00:13
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Lightning Lord posted:Can we seriously put to rest the whole "Likes old games = Voted for Trump" thing? Grognards.txt is gone for a reason. It's not about "old games", it's about gatekeeping and contempt.
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Apr 12, 2017 00:39
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Plutonis posted:I like Slayer and Thief. But they've got no drat dailies!
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Apr 12, 2017 00:49
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Halloween Jack posted:I've heard it said that IH was a prototype for 4e even before Tome of Battle, but I don't find that to be true. The thing about IH is that while it does empower warrior classes, most of their abilities are just static bonuses, or a mechanic where you gain tokens which you spend to get bonuses. There are very few really tactical abilities, so Mearls' poor design sense in 4e and 5e is not really a surprise. P.d0t posted:I might be misremembering, but wasn't Mearls also responsible for a lot of the 4e PHB2 classes? Like I thought somewhere it was said that he and some others were working on that book, while the "A team" were finishing the PHB and getting the edition out the door. I specifically blogged about this, so I should know what I'm talking about : Rob Heinsoo, Andy Collins, and James Wyatt worked on a design document back in May of 2005 that defined the Defender/Striker/Leader/Controller paradigm, the Heroic/Paragon/Epic tiered progression, and some sort of system that allowed all classes to have Powers. By Sep 2005, they had a document called Orcus I that was basically a draft corebook: classes, class powers, rules for play, and monsters. Through Oct 2005 up to Feb 2006, they looked at this Orcus I document and discussed whether it was the way they wanted to go. At this point the answer was yes, and as an experiment, they used the Orcus I mechanics to form the basis for Tome of Battle. This is where Mike Mearls got involved, along with Rich Baker and Mike Donais. Where this diverges is that later in 2006, they junk some (or possibly most) of the Orcus I design because while the Maneuver system from Tome of Battle does provide a framework for everyone to have "powers", there supposedly wasn't enough distinction between reusable powers versus daily powers. And so we end up with the 4th Edition model where a power is either explicitly available all the time, or once per Encounter, or once per Day; as opposed to ToB Maneuvers where you start every encounters with Maneuvers, but Maneuvers are also recoverable within a Maneuver and there is no "daily" limit to Maneuvers. Anyway, the next time Mearls enters the picture is when he gets mentioned as being involved in the development of 4e's PHB 2. Specifically, he was credited with the Barbarian and the Druid. Where the relationship with Tome of Battle comes in is that by the time you get to the Essentials classes, you have the martial classes leaning heavily on Stances as a part of their power set, such as a Knight's Defender aura, a Slayer's Battle Wrath or Berserker's Charge stance, or a Ranger Hunter's choice of Aspects. This is very much in keeping with Stances as they were expressed in Tome of Battle: mutually-exclusive passive bonuses. If we compare it to Stances in pre-Essentials PHBs, those were instead Daily or Utility powers that gave some sort of benefit, but were specifically defined as only lasting until the end of the encounter (or 5 minutes), and since they were Daily powers, they would run out, and you couldn't use them again, so they weren't always available as compared to the Defender Aura or even the Tome of Battle's Thicket of Blades Stance.
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Apr 12, 2017 00:49
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Pope Guilty posted:It's not about "old games", it's about gatekeeping and contempt. I honestly think the whole "gotta earn that fun" deal is basically a handful of crazy bloggers and forum posters at this point. Not really worth the effort posting about all the time. The majority of people who do this do it through bungling and not understanding games, but they don't set out to gatekeep in this fashion. That's usually for social reasons. That's the kind of gatekeeping that needs to be fought. Jokes are fine but legit "let's write a thesis on how liking level drain means you are a libertarian" stuff is pretty wack IMO. Lightning Lord fucked around with this message at 01:07 on Apr 12, 2017 |
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Apr 12, 2017 00:58
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Eh, it's probably more that terrible opinion holders have terrible opinions across the board. As for life-drain, something consuming healing surges was a great way to represent that. The surge mechanic generally made regular damage feel more damaging, since daily HP suddenly became a finite resource instead of the endless healable bounty it had always been. Getting damaged in the potential healing felt like a huge kick in the resources, even if it was only a few dozen HP.
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Apr 12, 2017 01:10
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Does anyone else remember when grogs said that ToB is incoherent because a Warblade power lets you literally snuff out the sun? That's how crazy people are willing to get complaining about a game.
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Apr 12, 2017 01:32
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Halloween Jack posted:Does anyone else remember when grogs said that ToB is incoherent because a Warblade power lets you literally snuff out the sun? That's how crazy people are willing to get complaining about a game. I don't remember anyone seriously using that as an argument (mostly I just saw that one used in silly "what if" and "this is why we needed the ToB errata that never happened" posts), but given the other stupid arguments I've seen it doesn't surprise me that some people did.
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Apr 12, 2017 01:37
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Yeah ToB needed errata or at least clarification on how some of the powers are supposed to work.
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Apr 12, 2017 01:53
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Kwyndig posted:Oh, so if you structured a game like Let it Die or other roguelikes with low durability gear. Yeah, a Rust Monster and a 'Mind Scraper' would work perfect for a game where you're expected to use and discard gear almost constantly. It wouldn't be particularly hard to make. You just create a couple different classes of weapons that all have some minor gimmick like can cleave, can attack from two squares away, etc. and then have each weapon have a "health" pool that is just the number of enemies you're allowed to hurt with it before it breaks. Enemies always drop weapons they wield on death, if they have them, and every room cleared provides some random tabulation of loot that you can slap on your little dude until he bites the big one. It'd need relatively few combat rules so combat is swift and lethal (i.e., no "powers" unless a weapon you lucked into has one) and generating a new PC should be as simple as rolling on a random number chart a couple times and then naming them. If you want to make it slightly more in-depth beyond just "I run my guys through this death gauntlet until our mountain of corpses prevails" give each player/party a gold pool to use boosting stats, purchasing specific gear, and of course paying fresh recruits to send into the dungeon to loot more gold. Then at the end give players a payout divided by four of the remaining loot so they can use it to boost their respective guys they pay for permanently, then run ever increasingly complex dungeons.
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Apr 12, 2017 04:13
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Halloween Jack posted:Does anyone else remember when grogs said that ToB is incoherent because a Warblade power lets you literally snuff out the sun? That's how crazy people are willing to get complaining about a game. We've made made fun of Iron Heart Surge by telling our Warblade player to please turn off the sun every time he uses it, because the Murphy's rule is just that famous, but I don't know that anyone ever took that seriously enough to say "ToB is bad because you can turn off the sun"
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Apr 12, 2017 04:41
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Kwyndig posted:Yeah ToB needed errata or at least clarification on how some of the powers are supposed to work. Hey now, the ToB got errata... for like two paragraphs before they accidentally pasted Complete Mage errata over it 
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Apr 12, 2017 04:47
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Lightning Lord posted:Jokes are fine but legit "let's write a thesis on how liking level drain means you are a libertarian" stuff is pretty wack IMO.
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Apr 12, 2017 06:09
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Halloween Jack posted:Does anyone else remember when grogs said that ToB is incoherent because a Warblade power lets you literally snuff out the sun? That's how crazy people are willing to get complaining about a game. The thing grogs complained about Iron Heart Surge was less that it could snuff out the sun, and more that it let fighters cancel spells cast on them. Completely unrealistic and not part of the genre!
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Apr 12, 2017 06:26
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IHS-the-sun was originally a criticism of how badly it worked with ambient effects and how vaguely worded it was. It didn't properly detail how it interacted with ongoing environmental effects, and that "condition" is extremely vague in 3e. How did IHS interact with Darkness? Obscuring Mist? Being dunked in acid? Being swallowed whole? Drowning? Being dead? Rules-as-written, it didn't work against a ton of stuff it's clearly intended to work against, because it required an action. You can't take an action when stunned, paralyzed, dominated, etc. I don't have a problem with a gently caress-your-spells ability but it wasn't very well written. Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 06:50 on Apr 12, 2017 |
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Apr 12, 2017 06:43
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Kwyndig posted:Some naval warships, if they fire enough cannon at once, can be moved by the recoil. I have no idea if the Missouri was actually one of them, but yeah, that's how you drift a battleship. That movie was loving nuts and to this day I'm still not sure how it got made. Given that the Mighty Mo is one of the Iowa class BBs, it's a 57,000 ton ship. The guns don't recoil -that- hard. Barudak posted:A Rust Monster makes perfect sense in a game where every room has piles of random weapons and chances for good stuff and swapping between weapons is negligible penalties or loss of a small neat benefit. In a game where your character must be built around specific gear and getting new gear is intended to be difficult, its extremely rude. IIRC that used to be a thing Mind Flayers did, back in the day. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 07:16 on Apr 12, 2017 |
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Apr 12, 2017 07:11
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Paolomania posted:The relative jerkiness of rust monsters, level drain, and even character death is also entirely different in a context with disposable characters where "Bob the fighter" is successively replaced by his cousins "Rob", "Hob" and "Nob" like extra lives in Venture. Admittedly, the (ostensible, if not effective) focus of the system from AD&D onwards on generating heroic narratives is what makes such things jerk moves, rather than their simple existence. This guy gets it (  hi Paolo)Barudak posted:A Rust Monster makes perfect sense in a game where every room has piles of random weapons and chances for good stuff and swapping between weapons is negligible penalties or loss of a small neat benefit. In a game where your character must be built around specific gear and getting new gear is intended to be difficult, its extremely rude. Also this. There's the 4e paradigm where your magic weapon +2 has exactly the property that you need to synergize with your powers, and so you take feats that boost that weapon group. To say nothing of the action economy typically involved (particularly while in combat) in switching your weapon loadout from, say, dual-wielding to anything two-handed, or even un-equipping a shield or god forbid changing your armor.
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Apr 12, 2017 07:39
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Please tell me there is some screed out there about how 4e Sleep only causes Slow-save-ends, unless the first save is failed to cause unconsciousness.
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Apr 12, 2017 07:45
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gradenko_2000 posted:Please tell me there is some screed out there about how 4e Sleep only causes Slow-save-ends, unless the first save is failed to cause unconsciousness. Those people didn't actually read 4e closely enough to know what the powers did.
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Apr 12, 2017 07:49
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Paolomania posted:The relative jerkiness of rust monsters, level drain, and even character death is also entirely different in a context with disposable characters where "Bob the fighter" is successively replaced by his cousins "Rob", "Hob" and "Nob" like extra lives in Venture. Admittedly, the (ostensible, if not effective) focus of the system from AD&D onwards on generating heroic narratives is what makes such things jerk moves, rather than their simple existence. I agree with this post. I don't care about criticism of game mechanics, I have zero problems with it. I do it myself. I agree about level drain being unfun (or I wouldn't have asked for an alternative) and people who are super in favor of it are probably not very fun to play D&D with, might even be jerks, yeah. But ultra serious "I can discern someone's political and social stances from their gaming preferences and opinions" posts are tiresome and boneheaded IMO. Lightning Lord fucked around with this message at 09:31 on Apr 12, 2017 |
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Apr 12, 2017 07:51
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ettin please change my name to LaRouchites of the Flame Princess
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Apr 12, 2017 10:18
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