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Ewen Cluney posted:Oh yeah, Japanese adaptations of Western RPGs (and other tabletop games like Battletech) tend to have pretty impressive new art. (Whereas D&D 3e and 4e were pretty much perfect Japanese-language replicas of the English-language books.) I have pretty western tastes too, but seeing Glorantha depicted in a style similar to the color pages at the beginning of a Berserk collection is pretty great         Ewen Cluney posted:Hilariously the guy who runs the felis.jp blog (@feltk on Twitter) has considerably more Western tastes than I do, though he's a huge fan of PbtA games apparently. It's cool to see a Japanese nerd who loves Western stuff, helps alleviate my 16 year old self's inferiority complex, when wild otaku told me that all of Japan universally hated American nerdery and comics.  Leperflesh posted:But I look at this loving mess and think holy poo poo, why would a player playing a spellcaster, or especially a GM dealing with one, put up with this crap? Ultimate cosmic power, obviously. 
Lightning Lord fucked around with this message at 19:58 on Apr 14, 2017 |
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Apr 14, 2017 19:43
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Leperflesh posted:Actually it's really good to distinguish between combat powers and noncombat powers, because that allows a GM to prepare a good challenge that isn't either deadly (because the players didn't prepare the right spell) or trivial (because they prepared and used a spell in a way the GM didn't anticipate). Man I loving love abstract, constrained minigame combat, don't get it twisted.  My point is just that 4E by necessity had to pick something to be good at and jettison other things, and some of those other things would make a perfectly good framework for a game in their own right. The Rube Goldbergian nonsense you can get up to with the right combination of spells in 3E is fantastic (though rarely optimal), which is why I'm also going to bat for a game that's all about that nonsense (and dividing it up in a more equitable fashion, and giving it a little more of a risk/reward element, etc.)
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Apr 14, 2017 19:45
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Sure, I think we're in agreement there Tux. I don't know the rules for Mage but it sounds like it's doing what you wanted, which is good 
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Apr 14, 2017 20:09
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Mage at least operates on the assumption that all PCs are magic users, so you don't have any BMX bandits getting left behind. Which was the major loving problem with non-fourth editions of D&D, if GMs didn't restrict spell lists it rapidly becomes play a spell caster or GTFO. It's not as bad in 2nd and earlier where the spell lists aren't as broken, but I've seen it happen.
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Apr 14, 2017 20:23
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Kwyndig posted:Mage at least operates on the assumption that all PCs are magic users, so you don't have any BMX bandits getting left behind. It's also worse in 3.x because all the things that made fighters good in earlier editions were taken away, like tons of attacks being baked into the class progression and high saves.
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Apr 14, 2017 20:25
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Lightning Lord posted:It's also worse in 3.x because all the things that made fighters good in earlier editions were taken away, like tons of attacks being baked into the class progression and high saves. Not just that - they also eliminated a lot of the things that kept a lid on casters, like chance to learn spells, balanced saving throws, and casting time, and introduced Concentration mechanics that greatly reduced the chance of a spell fizzling in combat.
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Apr 14, 2017 20:37
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You could argue that the formalization of feats did a lot to erode the general usefulness of a fighter as well since now it's explicitly codified that trying to do anything in combat but basic attacks carries all these penalties UNLESS you have the corresponding feats to alleviate them.
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Apr 14, 2017 21:22
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Neat. Was it any good?
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Apr 14, 2017 21:22
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Leperflesh posted:I'm not attacking you, Sage Genesis, I'm just using this as a case study. I know a lot of the complaints about 4e when it came out were supposedly because it nerfed spellcasters or turned spellcasting into something more like World of Warcraft. But I look at this loving mess and think holy poo poo, why would a player playing a spellcaster, or especially a GM dealing with one, put up with this crap? I certainly did, but only when I didn't know there was a better way. Oh, I don't feel attacked at all. We're both just poking fun at the way D&D handles spells. senrath posted:Actually, the maximum range is the maximum range. Any area of a spell that would extend past the listed max range just doesn't happen. For some strange reason I was thinking of the 5e spell rules.
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Apr 14, 2017 23:17
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There is a perfectly good way to make Mage casting work alongside skill monkeys and that is making the primary casting resource out to be time such that skills always beat magic at the tactical-action and scene-length action (Take-20/short ritual) scales, but the wacky potential is there for long timescale actions (narrative action/long ritual).
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Apr 14, 2017 23:31
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Paolomania posted:There is a perfectly good way to make Mage casting work alongside skill monkeys and that is making the primary casting resource out to be time such that skills always beat magic at the tactical-action and scene-length action (Take-20/short ritual) scales, but the wacky potential is there for long timescale actions (narrative action/long ritual). This is sort of how Predictionism ends up working out in Legends of the Wulin. Every other archetype has options to use their special arts either in combat or on a long term, but relatively limited scale. Scholars can use Predictionism to make broad, sweeping effects across an organization or region but since the whole thing revolves around investing time into some manner of analysis you can't do it quickly enough to ever use the art in a fight.
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Apr 15, 2017 00:02
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Lightning Lord posted:I have pretty western tastes too, but seeing Glorantha depicted in a style similar to the color pages at the beginning of a Berserk collection is pretty great I want all of those along with the Battletech books/boxes that cost $80+. Lightning Lord posted:It's cool to see a Japanese nerd who loves Western stuff, helps alleviate my 16 year old self's inferiority complex, when wild otaku told me that all of Japan universally hated American nerdery and comics. Had they even seen the Daicon videos? Shameful.
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Apr 15, 2017 02:06
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Apparently there is a thing called "text-door neighbor" where you send a text message a stranger with a similar phone number. Me A stranger (in a text message from a phone number one lower) Hey there, do you know what a text-door neighbor is? I didn't, but I figured it out from the context, since it shows your number on the screen Hehe, well that's good, so what's up? Not much is up. I used to live in [area] before I moved, which is why I still have [area code] A [area resident] myself~ Personally, I'm getting ready to play some Dungeons & Dragons tonight Which edition? 5thSo I blocked them
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Apr 15, 2017 03:29
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everyone in the whole theater got up and started clapping
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Apr 15, 2017 03:39
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Hey man that dude could just be lying to lure you into his basement so he could kill or torture you or do worse. Like play D&D 5E.
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Apr 15, 2017 03:46
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and that student's name was Albert Elminster
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Apr 15, 2017 03:50
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Lemon-Lime posted:Neat. Was it any good? I'm reading through it on and off and it's alright so far. Not worse than the d20 version, at least. I'm annoyed the Roamers are still a thing, even if they try to play up the positive stereotypes associated with Romani people and discourage the negative ones. Like, they mention rumors of them kidnapping children, then quickly say they're not true, etc.
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Apr 15, 2017 15:51
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:4E powers are basically moves in a very abstract, constrained game board. 3E spells, on the other hand, are very much intended as things you can use to affect the game world. The delineation between combat and non-combat isn't as strict, and many of them are meant to pull double or triple duty or more -- they're combat powers, they're NPC powers, they're environmental hazards (hi, Permanency), they're large-scale or siege weapons (relevant if you're running Birthright or the like), they're professional tools (hella wizard spells that convert or shape matter in various ways, for instance, and "clerics selling healing in exchange for temple donations" is explicitly called out in the corebooks IIRC) and so on and so on. This isn't really true. Remember, a square is five feet and a short rest is a five minute breather.The ability to freeze everything within 25 feet in front of you or to stop time for around six seconds or to turn into a little flying animal or to miraculously heal someone's wounds without requiring them to have reserves of heroic vigor are all relevant to situations beyond combat and don't even require you to remember that ritual magic exists.
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Apr 15, 2017 16:06
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Nuns with Guns posted:I'm reading through it on and off and it's alright so far. Not worse than the d20 version, at least. I'm annoyed the Roamers are still a thing, even if they try to play up the positive stereotypes associated with Romani people and discourage the negative ones. Like, they mention rumors of them kidnapping children, then quickly say they're not true, etc. From memory overcoming bigotry between cultures is a thing in romantic fantasy, right? Like I swear that's an element of some Tamora Pierce books. That's why this is here, right? It's hard to look into that genre btw, lot of fantasy novels with romance subplots stuff comes up.
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Apr 15, 2017 17:16
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Ferrinus posted:This isn't really true. Remember, a square is five feet and a short rest is a five minute breather.The ability to freeze everything within 25 feet in front of you or to stop time for around six seconds or to turn into a little flying animal or to miraculously heal someone's wounds without requiring them to have reserves of heroic vigor are all relevant to situations beyond combat and don't even require you to remember that ritual magic exists. You can do this and there's no reason you shouldn't be there's still a massive difference in terms of the explicit support you get for it and just the kind of spells that get printed in the first place.
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Apr 15, 2017 17:20
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Leperflesh posted:Like most such theories, GNS is useful in that it successfully identifies some different design goals that RPG writers should be aware of and which affect the feel of the game. But is also a failure, in that it utilizes the same age-old false categorization of human psychology as astrology, and more recently, Meyers-Briggs and the Libertarian freedom/tyranny square chart, to get people to think that they fit within buckets that don't actually exist. I know I'm a couple of days late, but GNS explicitly didn't do that. It was a label for "creative agendas," not a label for players or for games. You could say that some players (but not all) prefer some creative agendas. And some games support one creative agenda far better than the others, and some games support multiple creative agendas, and some games are poo poo and don't support poo poo. GNS is distinct from the "8 kinds of fun" stuff because that theory says that you just need to include the right kinds of things to keep your players with different "fun types" engaged for at least part of the time. GNS says that at any given time, all the players should be acting with the same creative agenda in order for things to go well. A good metaphor is that like a cover band. If one of the musicians thinks that the group's goal during this song is to sound as close to the real band as possible, and one of the other musicians thinks that the goal is to play the real band's songs with their own unique style, then they are not going to get along and it's going to lead to an argument. GNS would say that they need to agree to use one mode for this song, and maybe use the other mode for another song - or they could even play the first half of the song as close to the real band as possible before adding their own unique twists in the second half. So long as everyone is pulling in the same direction at the same time, it's good. If different people are pulling in different directions at the same time, GNS calls that "incoherent," and posits that as a cause of many group conflicts. My group generally likes to be surprised and have an improvisational, unplanned story (narrativism) outside of combat, but play to win by the rules (gamism) during combat. I made Strike! to support that in particular because that's what we wanted out of a game, and the bright line distinction between combat and non-combat mechanics supports that. Games like D&D 3.5 (and PF and 5e) that mix non-combat and combat don't support that style of play at all because of the BS like "using stone-to-mud to obviate an encounter" like you all were talking about that makes playing to win by the rules into a poo poo contest. D&D also doesn't do much to support improvising cool stories out of the box, though that can easily be solved by good DMing that uses cool twists and avoids the egregious poo poo like "welp, you rolled bad, so I guess nothing happens" that the rulebook fails to warn you against.
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Apr 15, 2017 17:43
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:You can do this and there's no reason you shouldn't be there's still a massive difference in terms of the explicit support you get for it and just the kind of spells that get printed in the first place. I'm not sure what you mean by "explicit support" here unless it's just "power". And, like, yeah, the ability of 4E casters to instantly reshape their environment is constrained as compared to that of 3E casters since powers to do that dramatically tend to be A) higher level and B) have cast times measured in minutes or hours rather than seconds. Nevertheless it's wrong to treat this as an absolute difference or removal rather than a balance change.
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Apr 15, 2017 17:45
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Ferrinus posted:I'm not sure what you mean by "explicit support" here unless it's just "power". And, like, yeah, the ability of 4E casters to instantly reshape their environment is constrained as compared to that of 3E casters since powers to do that dramatically tend to be A) higher level and B) have cast times measured in minutes or hours rather than seconds. Nevertheless it's wrong to treat this as an absolute difference or removal rather than a balance change. No, I'm not talking about power at all. I mean that the much-disparaged "rules as physics" allows for a different mode of gameplay, one closer to puzzle-solving than self-expression, compared to "well my character can create a freezing effect that deals 2[W] damage and slows in a six-tile line, therefore obviously I can create an ice bridge across this frozen river." Similarly, it doesn't need to be an "absolute difference" -- very different points along a spectrum is more than enough.
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Apr 15, 2017 17:50
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:No, I'm not talking about power at all. Absolute is your own word! And the thing is, can you actually create an ice bridge across a frozen river in 3E? Possibly there's a literal "bridge of ice" spell that I'm forgetting, but I know that 3e cone of cold just does... 1d6 cold damage/level. It's a less believable ice blast than 4e's got, since the 4e version at least immobilized its victims or petrified them on kill or something. Even "toy" spells like Transmute Rock to Mud are described largely in terms of the damage they deal and the movement speed penalties they inflict within their defined areas. Certainly, the bright colors and strict keywording of 4E tricked a lot of people into thinking that their spells weren't real any more, but that was never actually true. (And, again, requires you to have just forgotten that rituals exist for the express purpose of showing you how your lunchpail 9-to-5 arcanists make their money).
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Apr 15, 2017 17:57
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Jimbozig posted:I know I'm a couple of days late, but GNS explicitly didn't do that. It was a label for "creative agendas," not a label for players or for games. You could say that some players (but not all) prefer some creative agendas. And some games support one creative agenda far better than the others, and some games support multiple creative agendas, and some games are poo poo and don't support poo poo. Are you sure it means that all that and really isn't just a shorthand for "if your favorite RPG is MERP, you're in favor of Planned Parenthood being defunded"?????
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Apr 15, 2017 17:59
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Ferrinus posted:Absolute is your own word! Emphasis, Ferrinus, not quality. 
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Apr 15, 2017 18:00
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I do think it's fair to say that the rules of 4th edition D&D are more focused on creation of an interesting, engaging tactical combat game than in any other specific domain of roleplaying. The other domains are supported as well, but if you don't enjoy the tactical combat game, you will probably not enjoy playing fourth edition D&D. Tuxedo Catfish posted:No, I'm not talking about power at all. Yeah, this is sort of true. In as much as pure-combat spells are described as such, and there's not much in the rulebooks to support GMs adjudicating the use of that kind of spell for problem-solving outside of combat. This is an intentional and very very good design decision because, to beat the dead horse, those tricks in other editions of D&D are more or less entirely reserved for spellcasters. The fighter does not get the opportunity to use his Cleave feat to solve puzzles outside of combat. There are skills, of course, but everyone - including spellcasters - has access to them, and there are pretty much always spells which are flatly better than skills. Even a high-level thief's ability to scale a sheer wall with no good handholds is just crap (because it has a chance of failure) compared to a mage's ability to levitate up the same wall with zero risk. But you may also be overstating things a little. While the rules don't explicitly say that making a wall of ice could be useful outside of combat, it pretty clearly is, and I think most GMs would encourage that sort of creativity.
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Apr 15, 2017 18:04
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Ferrinus posted:Absolute is your own word! http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/wallOfIce.htm e. But more generally, Fly is a level 3 Sor/Wiz, Travel 3 spell in D20. It is just massively useful for getting past and around obstacles that otherwise would require some form of skill check, including swimming, jumping, sneaking, etc. One of the best innovations of 4th edition was to relegate all forms of magic flight to Paragon tier or above. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 18:13 on Apr 15, 2017 |
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Apr 15, 2017 18:08
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Much of this "4e powers can't be used out of combat" stuff comes from Christopher Perkins handling the situation of a player trying to use an equivalent power to faerie fire to defrost a frozen door in an early 4e period PAX D&D stream poorly. It doesn't generate a flame that makes heat, but instead of saying something like that, he just said the door isn't a monster or the like. Between that, the BEAR LORE situation and how boring as gently caress Keep on the Shadowfell was, a lot of people prejudged 4e and "Isn't that the D&D where you can't do anything but fight?" became a kind of meme I guess I'd call it.
Lightning Lord fucked around with this message at 18:32 on Apr 15, 2017 |
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Apr 15, 2017 18:13
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Leperflesh posted:This is an intentional and very very good design decision because, to beat the dead horse, those tricks in other editions of D&D are more or less entirely reserved for spellcasters. The fighter does not get the opportunity to use his Cleave feat to solve puzzles outside of combat. There are skills, of course, but everyone - including spellcasters - has access to them, and there are pretty much always spells which are flatly better than skills. Even a high-level thief's ability to scale a sheer wall with no good handholds is just crap (because it has a chance of failure) compared to a mage's ability to levitate up the same wall with zero risk. Yeah I'm not even remotely interested in defending the division of power or narrative control in 3E, I'm interested in more explicit support for "everyone is wizards and the kind of wizarding they do is specialized so they have to rely on each other." I don't just think that a 3E fighter is unfairly weak, I don't see why anyone would want to play that character even if they were the only kind of character allowed -- not because they're musclemen (who gives a poo poo about the flavor) but because their verbs are so limited. Leperflesh posted:But you may also be overstating things a little. While the rules don't explicitly say that making a wall of ice could be useful outside of combat, it pretty clearly is, and I think most GMs would encourage that sort of creativity. For sure. It's more a question of where and whether creativity blurs into analysis. Neither of those are bad modes of play, but they work differently -- using a limited toolset in structured ways tests a different skill than "come up with the coolest thing you can think of and we have a relatively freeform system to adjudicate what happens next." And, in fairness, my impression of rituals is probably unfairly colored by the core books, because the last time I played any D&D was when 4E was relatively new. The complete list of rituals has a lot more of what Ferrinus aptly describes as "toy" spells.
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Apr 15, 2017 18:14
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Lightning Lord posted:Much of this "4e powers can't be used out of combat" stuff comes from Christopher Perkins handling the situation of a player trying to use an equivalent power to faerie fire to defrost a frozen door in an early 4e period PAX D&D stream poorly. It doesn't generate a flame that makes heat, but instead of saying something like that, he just said the door isn't a monster or the like. Between that, the BEAR LORE situation and how boring as gently caress Keep on the Shadowfell was, a lot of people prejudged 4e and "Isn't that the D&D where you can't do anything but fight?" became a kind if meme I guess I'd call it. Yeah, that's not it. You obviously can, but how is it handled? You can light a bridge on fire in Dungeon World and you can light a bridge on fire in D&D 3.5, and what happens and how it's resolved are not necessarily interchangeable. (It's also kind of funny because I'm totally on board with "a D&D where all you really do is fight," I think that's just fantastic, but that's neither here nor there.)
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Apr 15, 2017 18:19
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I was speaking generally, Tuxedo. 
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Apr 15, 2017 18:26
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Lightning Lord posted:I was speaking generally, Tuxedo. I'm not sure where this is coming from, I was correcting genuine confusion in my other post. hahaha of course there is
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Apr 15, 2017 18:27
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Yeah I'm not even remotely interested in defending the division of power or narrative control in 3E, I'm interested in more explicit support for "everyone is wizards and the kind of wizarding they do is specialized so they have to rely on each other." I don't just think that a 3E fighter is unfairly weak, I don't see why anyone would want to play that character even if they were the only kind of character allowed -- not because they're musclemen (who gives a poo poo about the flavor) but because their verbs are so limited. It's certainly fine for you to prefer a fantasy game where everyone is some kind of wizard, but I think in games that actually support the non-magic person well, the verbs need not be so limited. If I understand correctly what you mean by that. quote:And, in fairness, my impression of rituals is probably unfairly colored by the core books, because the last time I played any D&D was when 4E was relatively new. The complete list of rituals has a lot more of what Ferrinus aptly describes as "toy" spells. Yeah although that list includes a bunch of stuff from Dragon Magazine, which was somewhat notorious for poorly tested and unbalanced stuff. A lot of us had to tell players stuff from Dragon was by GM approval only. 4E had rituals but a lot of players and GMs more or less ignored them because the game was structured around moving from one scene to the next, and each scene was typically combat or a social scene or a puzzle, and in none of these did it really feel natural to get everyone to sit down and draw patterns in the dirt with chalk and light up some candles or whatever. The game absolutely should have put more effort into incorporating rituals into the regular flow of the game, and probably should have combined those mechanics with other non-magical "takes some time to do" stuff like crafting. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 18:30 on Apr 15, 2017 |
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Apr 15, 2017 18:27
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I'm not sure where this is coming from, I was correcting genuine confusion in my other post. I meant I was speaking about the general idea that 4e characters literally can't do anything outside of combat, not specifically responding to what you're talking about.
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Apr 15, 2017 18:29
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Leperflesh posted:http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/wallOfIce.htm There's a Wall of Ice in 4E, although it's higher level. IIRC You can actually fly as early as level 6 in 4E, but 1/day, only for five minutes, and you have to keep spending minor actions to stay aloft.
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Apr 15, 2017 18:30
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Leperflesh posted:It's certainly fine for you to prefer a fantasy game where everyone is some kind of wizard, but I think in games that actually support the non-magic person well, the verbs need not be so limited. If I understand correctly what you mean by that. Yeah, exactly. It's hard to completely divorce flavor from mechanical effects, since the flavor helps supply intuitions about how things work ("jump real good," "flying crane style," "rocket boosters" and "level 3 Fly" all suggest slightly different things mechanically even though they're primarily distinguished by flavor) but ultimately it's the mechanical side -- or maybe more specifically, the other half of the feedback loop, the way mechanics feed back into flavor -- that matters.
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Apr 15, 2017 18:36
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It is a shame that for all the obsession with being a cool wizard, everyone is not playing Ars Magica. It is the only rpg I collect the physical books for, and number two on my list of amazing games to play that will probably never happen right behind Wraith the Oblivion.
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Apr 15, 2017 18:44
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Lord_Hambrose posted:It is a shame that for all the obsession with being a cool wizard, everyone is not playing Ars Magica. It is the only rpg I collect the physical books for, and number two on my list of amazing games to play that will probably never happen right behind Wraith the Oblivion. i looked at the rules for ars magica once, it looked like a really mean-spirited parody of someone arguing the position i am now lol that it's sincere makes it even more amazing
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Apr 15, 2017 18:46
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Lightning Lord posted:"Isn't that the D&D where you can't do anything but fight?" became a kind of meme I guess I'd call it. The impression I've always had of the 4e backlash was that the angry mobs were desperate for some reason to justify their knee-jerk hatred of it, so they latched onto stuff like BEAR LORE and blew it out of all proportion because that way they didn't have to confront the fact that what they really didn't like was change.
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