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I mean they only worked well enough to be the dominant ranged weapon from the 1500's to the modern day so clearly they must be highly over-rated. Please tell me more of your well researched history knowledge. How many tests with a super soaker on a mouse cord did you do to gain such insights?
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Jul 15, 2017 18:26
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jfc mastershakeman you wanna start implementing durability rules on swords too while you're at it? Because gatekeeping guns under the guise of realism flies in the face of all the other poo poo that the game ignores for the sake of playability
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Jul 15, 2017 18:32
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gradenko_2000 posted:jfc mastershakeman you wanna start implementing durability rules on swords too while you're at it? hell no, I also don't want to get into rules about taking armor on/off and how long you can actually wear it. My issue is definitely more setting based , because of all the technology needed for , say, a six shooter would impact the rest of the world heavily. And even where it'd be fine like on a one shot or frontier campaign, I also have an issue with the guy wanting an entire class for it because that smells wrong and bad; if he just asked that guns be available that do the same damage as whatever else it wouldn't be so blatantly obvious what the dude is trying to accomplish. Remember that I think wizards and everything else need to be massively changed too , but it's one thing to go well just use the rules as written, and another to ask for a revamp of a ton of stuff just for you and you alone.
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Jul 15, 2017 18:41
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GUNS ARE TOO STRONG IN MY FANTASY LAND WHERE DRAGONS SHOOT FIRE OUT THEY MOUTHS AND FLOATING EYEBALLS PETRIFY PEOPLE RTATAGHHGHG
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Jul 15, 2017 18:53
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mastershakeman posted:hell no, I also don't want to get into rules about taking armor on/off and how long you can actually wear it. Just say the gun tech is actually magic-based and you're fine then
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Jul 15, 2017 19:00
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Andrast posted:Just say the gun tech is actually magic-based and you're fine then I've seen that and yeah it pretty much does. the race using it ended up conquering the world. Also the university of Chicago just sent me a letter they're interviewing my household about issues facing the world and by god 2nd amendment rights in eberron are going to be raised same with roe v Wade's dicta regarding fetuses being valid spell targets
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Jul 15, 2017 19:24
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What would happen if you shot a wizard out of a cannon at a dragon?
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Jul 15, 2017 19:42
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The weapon/armor arms race of the middle ages is actually a lot more complicated than a straight line, though. Guns didn't obsolete armor - the longbow did that because it was able to punch right through those fuckers without any problem. What guns did was reduce the training required to turn somebody from a peasant into a soldier, but the expense held it back while. Also the back and forth about armor throughout Europe was that every time somebody invented a new armor, somebody invented a new weapon that could make it gently caress right off. The maul, the pick, the mace - all of these things were devised in response to armor, some from peasant tools and some from whole cloth. This made using armor less important, but if you stopped wearing armor it made you susceptible to things like rocks, knives and other poor people weapons. Then there's the fact that inventions don't go straight from 'it exists' to 'the world responds to it' in one go. The Romans invented a steam engine but was so cost prohibitive next to slave labor that nobody found anything to do with it other than vanity poo poo. Which is completely meaningless next to the role these things play in your game. We aren't trying to recreate fantasy Europe (at least, I think we're not); we're trying to create or recreate our own fantasy stories. I love world-building and I got tired of bog-standard fantasy in the 90's; but I mean, if you love it, more power to you. If you decide not to include an option - anything from guns all the way down to something as 'fundamental' as elves - that's fine, I don't think anyone is going to come to your table and tell you that you're an idiot or that you have to use those excluded elements. If you're going to come to the board and say, "don't use guns, guns don't belong in D&D", that's something else entirely. Personally I think every time you exclude an option from your world because it gets in the way of your storytelling, that's your purgative but you're taking some grain of agency away from your own players. And it must be something they're asking for because if you were going to include it, you would have already, so that's what prompts you to make those kinds of choices. If you can look at that and say with confidence, "I don't want to tell that story, because X element runs contrary to the kind of story I want to tell" that's perfectly acceptable but there's a kind of cost/benefit analysis that goes on with regards to your story and the players' stories. What personally drives me nuts is when people come to the board and say, "Well, D&D can't include X because it would cause Y and Z and the whole setting would fall apart!", or the opposite, "Well, X makes perfect sense because of Y and Z" as if D&D fantasy was a real thing and WotC has a magic spyglass that can see into the dragon-dimension. But D&D isn't perfect, it's a construct that tells stories in a particular way and attempts to explain its reasoning in vague strokes to keep things malleable. I could include guns along side magic and plate mail and give you a reasonable explanation for why it works. I could exclude clerics from my setting and give you a reasonable explanation as to how that works. If you won't make something work, that's your privilege as a DM (and a player) in your game. If you can't make something work, then check the batteries on your imagination because they might be running low.
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Jul 15, 2017 20:14
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Nickoten posted:This is a good comparison because it shows that Tome of Battle didn't actually increase DPR even compared to an unoptimized PHB Fighter, so it doesn't really change the nature of a particular game damage-wise if the Swordsage or Warblade or whatever is just dropped in to replace the Fighter. That said, it's even more ridiculous that people say Tome of Battle is overpowered in general, because a Fighter that actually makes use of the post-PHB, pre-Tome of Battle martial fixes does insane damage compared to a ToB martial: The main "argument" against that is "warblades can also do that." But like...ok. Tome of Battle had three "problems," and I use scare quotes because they were only problems to grogs and idiots, who tend to be the same people. The problems largely revolve around weird cultural hold backs in D&D that are never stated outright but fanatically believed by parts of the industry. 1) Too flashy. Like I said, this isn't a mechanical issue, it's a psychological one. A fighter who splits their damage up over four attacks and a warblade who lands it all in one attack are not in of themselves unbalanced. You could make the argument that the warblade has it better due to the way iterative attacks work with smaller and smaller bonuses because 3.x actually outright despised non-casters, and that would be true, but it's not an actual big enough difference to change the balance between them in of itself. What it is, is way, way flashier. And flashy is bad, because only spells are supposed to be flashy. That's one of those weird cultural hold backs that appeared in D&D and never went away; remember, it wasn't until late 2e that you started to actually see "critical attacks." For a long time, ye olde fighting-man class and subclasses were workhorses. Nothing flashy or special, but they hacked away at baddies and got the job done. I mentioned it previously, but in 2e, fighters could actually get pretty scary against big monsters, but again, they were scary when you looked at what they did over the whole course of their turn, not over one action, which is super easy to miss. As such, for said long time in D&D, flashy poo poo happened when a spell was thrown out. When fireball scorched a whole nest of baddies (because damage spells were GREAT in AD&D with monsters' higher saves and lower HP) that was effective, but more to the point, it was sweet as hell. Even low level spells could be moments of cool, like throwing Enlarge Person on your fighter so they can take up the whole goddamn corridor and murder everything that tries to pass. But...again, it was the SPELL that was flashy. Tome of Battle let fighters be flashy, and by howdy did poo poo nerds not like that. You'd think "now all classes can stand out and be cool" would be a good thing, but remember, these are the people who side with the literal man-child villain of the Incredibles. If these MARTIALS are flashy and cool, my wizard doesn't stand out as much! 2) Too fun to play That's a complaint? Welcome to D&D. Tome of Battle characters had abilities and could use them, which in D&D up until that point was 90% a spellcasters' thing. Remember, martial classes are supposed to be mules, doing their job and supporting the party but rarely if ever standing out. 3) It was intended to be better. That's the point! Fighters don't work! I mean, yes. The warblade was a straight up upgrade compared to the fighter. You could do all that stuff with a warblade, after all, and ALSO still have your maneuvers. I mean, you'd do better with a multiclass monstrosity built explicitly around charge and pounce in a sorta but not really Final Fantasy Dragoon kinda way, but we aren't worried about that. The point is, the 3.x fighter was loving garbo, and plenty of 3.x fans refused to acknowledge or understand that. They STILL do so. And because they were willfully ignorant of any flaws the fighter had - and all the class had WAS flaws - that the warblade has to be "overpowered." After all, if you think the original class is perfectly fine, then an upgrade to it is "OP." It's not as if this is limited to tabletop games, of course. Anyone who's played any kind of online game that gets patched for balance has seen the screams of woe it inevitably creates. But where most online game communities rally around their specific class they prefer to play, the 3.x fandom rallies around the game itself. The idea of a balance patch existing PERIOD is anathema to them, because it implies that their game was flawed. This is an actual thing. One of the praises for 5e I've seen is "there isn't that much errata," which would be cool if it meant "the game barely needs any patching at all," but it actually means "the devs don't try to make us think the game has flaws." It's hilarious, in a kinda dark sense; these people legitimately think that finding bugs or mistakes actually causes them to spontaniously begin existing. They're babies playing peekaboo. So long as you never move your hands and show them that the flaws are there, they literally and physically do not exist! But now Tome of Battle shows up and spits in their face. It happily broadcasts "no actually monks and ninjas and paladins and fighters and barbarians and all that poo poo doesn't actually work in the slightest so here, something that DOES work." And if you're a developer - or capable of maintaining coherent thoughts - you knew they were right. But so many of 3.x's fans aren't capable, and threw a hissy fit so hard it's still going on more then a decade later. Point is...3e tends to be called "caster edition" for a reason, and it warped the gently caress out of D&D's culture in a lot of ways. Tome of Battle tried to change that, and you know how much nerds like change. Also, the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles. ~*~ The hate for guns continues to be the funniest thing because, as mentioned, guns didn't completely change the world and alter warfare permanently and bring about an end of the AGE OF CHIVALRY. Most of that poo poo was already going by the time guns happen, courtesy of economics. And D&D...already has tech that happened after guns, and because of guns! Like, the funniest thing about this argument was that mastershakeman - who, remember, is always wrong - literally mentioned metallurgy, which is what D&D already has! It already has advanced metallurgy that would exist past the medieval time period! And it's not as if we don't have a plethora of cool fantasy characters who have a gun at this point. Maybe in bumsfuckville 1970's you didn't have rad fantasy characters with guns, but that was also forty motherfucking years ago. We have a lot more now! From Warcraft to Final Fantasy to Darkest Dungeon to Pirates of the Caribbean to Dishonored to the magnificent if unfinished trilogy of music videos by one Chris Dane Owens.
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Jul 15, 2017 20:54
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Yeah D&D weapons lists and casually picking things of them by stat or style are far more implausible than guns really. I think it'd be interesting to have a system where weapon stats varied - rather than D&D's attempt to go well spears and crossbows are bad, but swords and warhammers and bows are all the best weapon, you could just bucket weapons by current relative tech and fighting style quality. Right now for our campaign, spears are where the technological and counterplay of war has ended up on top - spears do 1d8/1d10, longswords and axes do 1d6. Then you could have a culture shift thing going on where outsiders invent morning star fighting techniques that are better than spears, and re-adjust all the damage rolls again as it spreads. It's all abstraction anyway - wargamers love arguing over which historical weapons were better and I would bet that half the reason D&D had weapons lists is to get the last word from a bunch of Gygax pub arguments.
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Jul 15, 2017 20:56
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ProfessorCirno posted:It already has advanced metallurgy that would exist past the medieval time period! What do Forgotten Realms / Greyhawk have in the way of advanced metallurgy? Especially for humans.
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Jul 15, 2017 21:55
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mastershakeman posted:What do Forgotten Realms / Greyhawk have in the way of advanced metallurgy? Especially for humans. Read the loving thread before you ask questions that have already been answered like five times.
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Jul 15, 2017 22:00
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They have literal magic loving swords, my dude. They have more advanced metallurgy than we do, you dingus.
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Jul 15, 2017 22:34
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Literally any single spell above first level would alter the entire course of our history considerably more than better guns 200 years earlier or whatever. People would literally never bother to use swords and bows if you could spend a few years to learn how to shoot lightning from your hands. The idea that "the people with the guns would take over the world" is ridiculous since it ignore spellcasters: "yeah being able to hurt people at a distance is just way to powerful compared to a loving spell list". The whole "it's medieval Europe except there's magic and monsters and no Catholic Church" is so hilarious is you know even the bare minimum about actual history and aren't just imposing your own unimaginative perspective on what poo poo must've been like.
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Jul 15, 2017 23:04
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mastershakeman posted:What do Forgotten Realms / Greyhawk have in the way of advanced metallurgy? Especially for humans.
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Jul 15, 2017 23:10
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I can't wait for the 5e supplement that makes Fighters fun and good!
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Jul 15, 2017 23:17
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Scyther posted:I can't wait for the 5e supplement that makes Fighters fun and good! This is like a divide by zero error.
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Jul 15, 2017 23:21
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mastershakeman posted:hell no, I also don't want to get into rules about taking armor on/off and how long you can actually wear it. hell no, I also don't want to get into rules about taking armor on/off and how long you can actually wear it. My issue is definitely more setting based , because of all the wizardry needed for , say, flaming finger lasers would impact the rest of the world heavily. And even where it'd be fine like on a one shot or frontier campaign, I also have an issue with the guy wanting an entire class for it because that smells wrong and bad; if he just asked that wizardry be available that do the same damage as whatever else it wouldn't be so blatantly obvious what the dude is trying to accomplish. Remember that I think gunslingers and everything else need to be massively changed too , but it's one thing to go well just use the rules as written, and another to ask for a revamp of a ton of stuff just for you and you alone.
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Jul 15, 2017 23:42
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It falls into the issue of magic in general for me: if the average peasant can't benefit from magic use in their daily lives in most settings of D&D, I highly doubt the fine craftsmanship of a gun is going to make waves. Dwarves mine the poo poo out of Mithral, large cities have individuals that can turn out cheap wands and scrolls, weapon and armor is readily available if you have coin to all walks of life, and monsters on the frontier have proven resilient to even the most potent of spells, and yet even basic noblemen don't have access to anything past masterwork swords and basic armor. Large armies could outfit themselves with guns, even six shooters, but you can easily handle that with several spells (edition pending of course) they just outright stop ranged attacks or drop so many penalties that it's useless. Unless a kingdom has enough gold on hand to outfit everyone with magical guns and cannons, they would be better off applying that money to magic where you could just drop all sorts of nasty poo poo onto the enemy by hiring a bunch of casters and having them turn invisible/fly/summon/teleport all over the place.
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Jul 16, 2017 00:06
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An entire army of peasants with firearms is nothing to a couple Wizards with Meteor Swarm or even just Fireball.
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Jul 16, 2017 00:11
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Engineering metallurgy meets magic metallurgy in a DnD type world engineering battle: https://www.amazon.com/Guardians-Flame-Joel-Rosenberg/dp/0743435893 (That happens after the first story anyway.)
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Jul 16, 2017 01:44
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FRINGE posted:Engineering metallurgy meets magic metallurgy in a DnD type world engineering battle: As an aside, leave it to Baen to come up with the shittiest possible cover for an omnibus collection. I mean, the original cover for The Sleeping Dragon wasn't exactly mind blowing, but come the gently caress on with this floating head least effort bullshit. As for the topic: I've run SpellJammer and Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. Guns, space lasers, knights, brain eating aliens from the future, magic, psionics, muscle wizards dragging the sun back over the horizon by flexing really hard, elves, and any other gonzo poo poo you can think of always have had and always will have a place in Dungeons and motherfucking Dragons.
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Jul 16, 2017 02:40
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Green Ronin is publishing a campaign setting book for Tal'Dorei, the world being played out by Matt Mercer in Critical Role.quote:Critical Role has taken the roleplaying world by storm. Now, you can join the adventure! Until now, the wondrous and dangerous lands of Tal’Dorei have been the sole stomping grounds of the show’s adventuring company, Vox Machina. But now, you can explore these realms in a tome from the pen of Game Master Matt Mercer himself! https://twitter.com/GreenRoninPub/status/885923618193981440
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Jul 16, 2017 02:49
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They can make axes that cut ghosts in half, but clearly containing heat, a thing my high end cookware can do, is the stuff of miracles and would dramatically change the subtle world-building of the universe with immortal pointy-eared people naturally good at altering reality to their whims of Dungeons and Dragons. Yup. This makes sense. And totally reinforces my made up bullshit version of history that I gleaned from other D&D supplements. Because gently caress even browsing wikipedia to learn I'm an rear end in a top hat.
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Jul 16, 2017 04:08
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8one6 posted:As an aside, leave it to Baen to come up with the shittiest possible cover for an omnibus collection. I mean, the original cover for The Sleeping Dragon wasn't exactly mind blowing, but come the gently caress on with this floating head least effort bullshit. I dug up my old 3.0 DMG because I could've sworn I remembered something in there about firearms and this is what I found:    
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Jul 16, 2017 04:44
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Serf posted:I dug up my old 3.0 DMG because I could've sworn I remembered something in there about firearms and this is what I found: gently caress yes, I remember that. This entire debate reminded me of an article from the last print issue of Dragon magazine. I present Meepo's pump-action Mossburg 
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Jul 16, 2017 04:58
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Dragon #321 also expanded on that DMG material:    
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Jul 16, 2017 05:07
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Xiahou Dun posted:They have literal magic loving swords, my dude. if that's your definition of advanced metallurgy it's entirely worthless. I figured you were going with the mithril or elven chain angles which still aren't really applicable the clockwork traps is a good point though, I have no answers for that right now vvv I wasn't being pedantic about the word literal if that's what you thought, just taking issue about magical vs not mastershakeman fucked around with this message at 05:25 on Jul 16, 2017 |
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Jul 16, 2017 05:15
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O no I picked the wrong kind of literal magic. You're an idiot.
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Jul 16, 2017 05:18
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8one6 posted:gently caress yes, I remember that. This entire debate reminded me of an article from the last print issue of Dragon magazine. I present Meepo's pump-action Mossburg Holy poo poo that owns
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Jul 16, 2017 05:20
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8one6 posted:gently caress yes, I remember that. This entire debate reminded me of an article from the last print issue of Dragon magazine. I present Meepo's pump-action Mossburg I still own all of the d20 Modern books, and that kobold showed up in Urban Arcana, and he still rules.
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Jul 16, 2017 05:22
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I've got to stat up a fresh level 1 character for an Adventurer's League table. I really want to play an archer for thematic reasons, but god drat are all of my options terrible. I'm used to playing spellcasters, and, well... drat. Does anyone have any ideas as to what I could do that gives me more control over an encounter besides "me do damage lots"? Closest I'm seeing is a Battlemaster Fighter (with a side of Rogue for Cunning Action) but since all of the cool maneuvers require both a to-hit roll AND a saving throw which is a big RNG sink, I'm open to other suggestions. (There are no other suggestions, are there...)
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Jul 16, 2017 05:41
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blastron posted:(There are no other suggestions, are there...) Welcome to martials. Your way to control encounters is to kill things really fast. Incidentally, Battle Master is good not for their gimmicky effect maneuvers, but because they can at will add an extra die to a miss to turn it into a hit, or extra damage to a hit/crit.
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Jul 16, 2017 05:49
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If you're fighting something that actually stands a chance of failing the strength save, trip attack is a good opener for its ability to give followup attacks free advantage.
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Jul 16, 2017 05:54
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Elvish wizard, use a longbow and also spells, reflavour spells to be different arrow attacks.
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Jul 16, 2017 05:55
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Serf posted:I still own all of the d20 Modern books, and that kobold showed up in Urban Arcana, and he still rules. Actully Meepo did slightly more for the Dragon. In that he also had to hold it's leash. So it hated him.
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Jul 16, 2017 06:05
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In a world where Wish and Raise Dead exist, how do monarchies ever change hands? This is just one question among thousands about how the internal logic of D&D is not nearly as consistent as nerds want it to be. I mean, yes, I can gin up a bunch of justifications for why that particular issue hasn't as matter of fact insulated royal lines for thousands of years but taken in the context of other 'setting implications' that people never explore it's kind of the tip of the iceberg. My point isn't that D&D is stupid, or rather, I think it is stupid but I think it's fun-stupid; but more that worrying about something or other shattering your verisimilitude is sort of silly when it hasn't been shattered already. I still maintain the only reason to refuse something like firearms (just as an example really) is because you think the consequences of including it outweigh the consequences of telling your player 'no'; and since it won't really do bupkis to the setting as we've already established, the only reason to worry about it is if you just don't like the image in your game so much that you've exiled it. Which is fine but turning it back around to how much something would ruin the setting is pretty weird considering how many things in D&D would ruin the setting all on their own if you think about it.
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Jul 16, 2017 06:34
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mastershakeman posted:if that's your definition of advanced metallurgy it's entirely worthless. I figured you were going with the mithril or elven chain angles which still aren't really applicable If you're gonna bitch about advanced metallurgy I really hope you're consistently running your games where people have to replace their swords every few fights because the nicks and dings and straight up chunks taken out of their unadvanced metallurgy weapons can't be fixed with even with a grindstone, let alone the genre standard whetstone at the edge of a fire, and even if they could it'd leave a pencil-thin dagger attached to a giant hilt. edit: also man I hope all the armor in games you're in is consistent for whatever period from a metallurgic standpoint otherwise hooo boy you don't seem to have much of an argument Darwinism fucked around with this message at 06:53 on Jul 16, 2017 |
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Jul 16, 2017 06:47
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Mendrian posted:In a world where Wish and Raise Dead exist, how do monarchies ever change hands? Cormyr in the FR actully outlawed raising their kings with punishment by death. The raised Noble being castrated and exiled. They felt this was the best way to avoid the issue of succession issues.
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Jul 16, 2017 06:50
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MonsterEnvy posted:Cormyr in the FR actully outlawed raising their kings with punishment by death. The raised Noble being castrated and exiled. They felt this was the best way to avoid the issue of succession issues. Yes and this is a reverse-hoc explanation that justifies how this one specific culture doesn't let this loophole get away from them. I can come up with a similar justification for any setting problem we come up with. That's kind of my point.
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Jul 16, 2017 07:05
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