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Throwing Turtles posted:All of the 3.5 and earlier players I know disliked 4th because in the early store games they played it was a lot harder to do stupid goofy poo poo, generally met with a "there's no rule for that." That coupled with the later focus on showing up, running a few encounters, and calling it a day, left it feeling like a very different game. I'm not going to call it a worse game, because from my perspective they aren't really comparable. there are more rules for doing "goofy poo poo" in 4e than any other edition Edit: also hoooly poo poo 4e is not that different from 3.5. like all they did was make class abilities into powers and cleaned up the formating and instead of putting points into skills you just choose the skills you want to have maxed Elfgames fucked around with this message at 19:42 on Dec 18, 2017 |
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Dec 18, 2017 19:35
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Throwing Turtles posted:I find that being that guy is almost always when to say gently caress it to a rule, when to bring it back for a single encounter for fun and the ability to make it work. The further back in time you go the more likely you are to develop these improvisational skills because quite frankly large segments of the rules were awkward and unworkable. Occasionally which rules were awkward and unworkable varied by group, which is kind of a neat trick. Uh what system was supposed to be playable on a computer back in 2001? 4e wasn't even begun at that point, 3.5 might not have even been in development yet. Also that comment of but there isn't a rule for it seems like stupid bullshit, wouldn't surprise me that it was said but still, because of Page 42 I believe. Also because the previous editions would often not have had a rule for that. Also for someone's earlier message about 4e being boardgamey I don't see it, at least no more than the other editions of D&D. 4e didn't really change all that much, it just codified things and put all the classes on a more equal footing. It just read differently, and of course put classes on an equal footing, this last is a cardinal sin for some people.
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Dec 18, 2017 19:41
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MonsterEnvy posted:I think 4e is fine as a game. The D&D title just caused it some issues. It was simply too different from the versions of the game that came before it. Which alienated the people not fond of the big changes. A bigger issue is that 3.5->4e happened during a golden age for internet forums. Nothing good can come from that.
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Dec 18, 2017 19:45
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Admiral Joeslop posted:"They ripped off WoW." This one is particularly funny because if you were playing elfgames and raiding in WoW at the time it was obvious that 3.5 was the more WoW-like of the two if you replaced "Get in position and start your rotation." With "Get in position and full attack." The argument 100% comes from "The Fighter has buttons"
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Dec 18, 2017 20:02
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The Crotch posted:The jump from 2e to 3e was way bigger than the jump from 3.5 to 4e, though. 2e to 3e does not look like a bigger jump to me. I can perfectly see how 2e went to 3e. Lots of stuff was still kept the same and there is a lot of the same systems. 3e to 4e to me feels like going to a different type of game. Setting, Combat, Monsters, skills. Saving throws. All of that was quite different. (Not bad however) Also it would have been really nice if 4e had gotten the Digital platform that was planned for it back when it came out. Man that game could be slow sometimes. Automation helps a ton. MonsterEnvy fucked around with this message at 20:16 on Dec 18, 2017 |
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Dec 18, 2017 20:14
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MonsterEnvy posted:2e to 3e does not look like a bigger jump to me. I can perfectly see how 2e went to 3e. Lots of stuff was still kept the same and there is a lot of the same systems. 3e to 4e to me feels like going to a different type of game. You obviously didn’t play 2e or before. 3e was a HUGE overhaul to literally every part of the game.
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Dec 18, 2017 20:16
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Arivia posted:You obviously didn’t play 2e or before. 3e was a HUGE overhaul to literally every part of the game. Oh yeah it was a big overhaul. But I can see a lot of the similarities and things and how one thing became another. While I can't see that quite as well with 4e. I have played 2e but I have not played anything before that.
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Dec 18, 2017 20:24
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MonsterEnvy posted:Oh yeah it was a big overhaul. But I can see a lot of the similarities and things and how one thing became another. While I can't see that quite as well with 4e. the game changed from being fluid to turn based in 2 to 3e, which changes the entire mechanical underpinnings of everything. the change from 3e to 4e was making resource management going from daily/campaign pacing based to encounter based , as well as toning down casters. 2 to 3 was absolutely a bigger overall jump but since a ton of people played 2 wrong (I.e. turn based) they never realized it
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Dec 18, 2017 20:28
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MonsterEnvy posted:Oh yeah it was a big overhaul. But I can see a lot of the similarities and things and how one thing became another. While I can't see that quite as well with 4e. Looking at 2e after the fact is very different from experiencing the edition change when it happened. 3e was a completely transformational change; 4e is evolutionary (as 1e to 2e and 3.0 to 3.5 were). You’re just flat out wrong; we both know how bad you are at analyzing rules so just stop.
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Dec 18, 2017 20:28
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Homebrewing a Psionic class for a player of mine and I'm kicking around ideas for spell casting. Someone tell me anything immediately bad that jumps out at them about this skeleton of a system: Psions can cast any spell they know at will as many times as they want. Each time they cast a spell they gain exertion points equal to the spells level. Whenever they reach their exertion cap (SC Ability Modifier + Prof), they gain a level of mental exhaustion. Exertion points and one level of mental exhaustion fall off on short rest, all fall off on long rest. This comes with a fairly limited spell pool as well as very few spells learned
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Dec 18, 2017 20:45
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CubeTheory posted:Homebrewing a Psionic class for a player of mine and I'm kicking around ideas for spell casting. Someone tell me anything immediately bad that jumps out at them about this skeleton of a system: It seems interesting. Out of curiosity have you checked out the currently being tested Mystic Psion.
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Dec 18, 2017 20:51
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MonsterEnvy posted:It seems interesting. I actually didn't look up anything purposefully, I wanted to challenge myself.
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Dec 18, 2017 20:53
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Elfgames posted:there are more rules for doing "goofy poo poo" in 4e than any other edition 4e was an obvious continuation of what 3.5 was trying to do. Just because 3e's tactical combat rules were shittier, doesn't mean it wasn't a tactical miniatures game.
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Dec 18, 2017 21:45
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Babylon Astronaut posted:What turned me off of 4e is that I do not enjoy the d20 system. Let that sink in. D&D has literally always been a tactical miniatures game though. If you don't like tactical miniatures, you should play a different game.
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Dec 18, 2017 21:47
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Elfgames posted:there are more rules for doing "goofy poo poo" in 4e than any other edition Everybody I know who tried out 4th edition when it came out had this same complaint. There were other ones, but those can be ignored because they are mostly a matter of taste. And honestly it was never a matter of balance. Now this could be a matter of the people running the demos in the stores we tried it out on being bad, or maybe it got better as it got fleshed out. But it was enough to make us say it wasn't worth it. Ryuujin posted:Uh what system was supposed to be playable on a computer back in 2001? 4e wasn't even begun at that point, 3.5 might not have even been in development yet. It was at a SDCC around that time. Wizards had a panel talking about all the exciting things they had planned for the future. They talked about mechanics which was forgettable, but they also spent a lot of time talking about now that the internet was a thing they wanted to the next edition that came out to be fully playable online out of the box. To be honest everybody in the room was pretty excited about it. Any game built to run like that is going to have a strict rule set and going to look a lot more like a board game. As an aside 3rd was a lot more board game then first or second. So 4th being more so isn't that noteworthy. WotC still publishes those giant box board games that as far as I can tell use some version of 4th edition. And honestly, the first 15 years of D&D supported 2 different game lines. They managed to do that when role playing games were just not that popular. Advanced D&D and boxed set D&D. 4th and 3rd/5th are different enough with big enough fan bases to support keeping both lines going the same way because honestly they are different enough to be treated as different games.
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Dec 18, 2017 21:49
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Arivia posted:D&D has literally always been a tactical miniatures game though. If you don't like tactical miniatures, you should play a different game. Babylon Astronaut fucked around with this message at 22:07 on Dec 18, 2017 |
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Dec 18, 2017 22:01
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MonsterEnvy posted:2e to 3e does not look like a bigger jump to me. I can perfectly see how 2e went to 3e. Lots of stuff was still kept the same and there is a lot of the same systems. 3e to 4e to me feels like going to a different type of game. Setting, Combat, Monsters, skills. Saving throws. All of that was quite different. (Not bad however)
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Dec 18, 2017 22:13
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Everyone stop yelling at MonsterEnvy amd help me figure out stacking effects for mental exhaustion. So far I think the first level will be: Whenever you would roll a die to deal damage, roll a die one size smaller, to a minimum of d4. Additionally, your spell save dc is reduced by your spell casting ability.
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Dec 18, 2017 22:22
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CubeTheory posted:Everyone stop yelling at MonsterEnvy amd help me figure out stacking effects for mental exhaustion. So far I think the first level will be: Exhaustion as a resource is bad. An iteration on the same ideas seems bad. D&D is a game about resource management and every other class operates on the idea that the cost of using your abilities is you don't have them later. As the adventuring day wears on characters get worse because they have fewer powerful abilities to rely on, but there's still a floor where they have some useful stuff. Using an exhaustion mechanics essentially means the psionist has the same limitation of getting weaker as the day wears on but you're dropping that floor so eventually you get a point where the character is baseline crippled, but doing another powerful thing is too dangerous to contemplate, and the party is basically handicapped carrying a useless character. You could build an entire game/system around this kind of mechanics but slotting that in to a D&D party seems a good way to ruin everyone's fun.
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Dec 18, 2017 22:46
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2e to 3e is almost a total rewrite of the rules. Ascending AC, ability modifiers, saving throws, the entire d20 system of the d20 roll + mod vs DC, ala carte classes, THAC0, skills, how initiative works. It's probably the biggest departure in the history of the game, barring maybe the basic/advanced split.
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Dec 18, 2017 22:47
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A lot of those were still pretty mechanical transformations - you took most of the same ideas and unified the vocabulary/math to remove table lookups and lower the mental load in general. The way the math works isn't really very different between BAB/ascending AC/stat modifiers and thaco/descending AC/stat tables. I think most of those things you listed are actually pretty small changes in terms of what new ideas they represent - it's more like a clean repackaging of a lot of the old stuff. How combat proceeds is the part which was vastly different.
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Dec 18, 2017 22:56
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XP needed to level varying by class was also a huge difference and was a solution to imbalances like having someone playing a firbolg or whatever
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Dec 18, 2017 22:58
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Admiral Joeslop posted:4e codified and balanced the game in a way it had never been before. You could be reasonably assured that if you took a class, you would be just as powerful or useful as any other class. The designers took the core mechanics of the game (combat, as every DnD has been) and made them amazing. It had some missteps (skill challenges, length of combat) but the key thing that detractors latched onto was the combat. It is the most genuinely hilarious thing to me. I hear these exact same criticisms from people at my LGS, who then play Adventurer's League as basically nothing but combat with minimal to no roleplaying. The irony never crosses their mind for an instant. They're already playing D&D as a mostly combat game, and D&D is always a mostly combat game to varying degrees, they're just not playing a very good one.
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Dec 18, 2017 23:00
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MonsterEnvy posted:They changed this however. Rat Swarms replaced the 20 Rats. With only one big Giant Rat. Problem is, the Giant Rat still has the exact same ability as the Cave Rats did from the Caves of Chaos adventure; it has advantage on attacks if there's an ally adjacent to its target. Given that "Giant" Rats are still just small size and people only get one opportunity attack per round, a pack of 18 Giant Rats still performs exactly the same as they did in that playtest adventure. Which people called out. In May 2012.
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Dec 18, 2017 23:13
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mastershakeman posted:XP needed to level varying by class was also a huge difference and was a solution to imbalances like having someone playing a firbolg or whatever It was actually tried in 3.0 too - adjusting experience by level adjustment instead of using level adjustment as a component of effective character level. The 3e FRCS had a complete overhaul of 3.0’s experience system in it in order to use level adjustment in that way.
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Dec 18, 2017 23:16
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Sage Genesis posted:Problem is, the Giant Rat still has the exact same ability as the Cave Rats did from the Caves of Chaos adventure; it has advantage on attacks if there's an ally adjacent to its target. Given that "Giant" Rats are still just small size and people only get one opportunity attack per round, a pack of 18 Giant Rats still performs exactly the same as they did in that playtest adventure. Which people called out. In May 2012.
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Dec 18, 2017 23:18
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Splicer posted:On the other hand without 18d20 rats I wouldn't have my avatar so I'm conflicted. You caused wotc to have a panic attack and ban online play of the playtest so I think in the end it all worked out lol
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Dec 18, 2017 23:21
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Sage Genesis posted:Problem is, the Giant Rat still has the exact same ability as the Cave Rats did from the Caves of Chaos adventure; it has advantage on attacks if there's an ally adjacent to its target. Given that "Giant" Rats are still just small size and people only get one opportunity attack per round, a pack of 18 Giant Rats still performs exactly the same as they did in that playtest adventure. Which people called out. In May 2012. So do Kobolds. Pack tactics is not a big deal. It's a decent ability in fact. The issue was fighting 20 rats with the ability. If you cut down the number it's manageable. Which is what they did replacing the regular Rats with couple rat swarms. It's pretty much don't have 20 Giant Rats if you are not ok with rolling a lot of dice. 20 Giant Rats would kill most parties. It does not stop being a deadly fight until level 5.
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Dec 18, 2017 23:22
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MonsterEnvy posted:So do Kobolds. Pack tactics is not a big deal. It's a decent ability in fact. The issue was fighting 20 rats with the ability. If you cut down the number it's manageable. Which is what they did replacing the regular Rats with couple rat swarms. I agree that the ability only becomes bothersome if the monsters appear in large numbers. Note how both Giant Rats and Kobolds are both low xp value monsters which appear in a game which promoted itself as keeping low xp value monsters relevant for more levels, by deploying them in large groups.
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Dec 18, 2017 23:29
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Banning discussion of a feedback loop is also something you don't take from a first year game design student, let alone a 30 year brand that is considered to be THE name in tabletop RPGs.
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Dec 18, 2017 23:31
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I'd just like to talk about a couple that joined my in person 4th edition game recently. They had never played 4e before, having only had experienced 5e in a store that was a further drive for them than my venue was. After the first session, the guy (Dwarf Fighter) and the Girl (Tiefling Warlock) were gushing about how much stuff they could do, and the fighter especially couldn't believe that at level 1 he had more to do than his level 5 Fighter in 5e. They then vowed to never play 5e again. That's my 5e story, thanks for listening.
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Dec 18, 2017 23:33
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5th edition is too boardgamey but in a videogamey kind of way. This is because it's the first edition that was designed to be played entirely online. Also there are no rules for roleplaying in it, also because it is a computer game. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 23:39 on Dec 18, 2017 |
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Dec 18, 2017 23:37
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Razorwired posted:Banning discussion of a feedback loop is also something you don't take from a first year game design student, let alone a 30 year brand that is considered to be THE name in tabletop RPGs. Removing larger crit dice just made the stronger crit weapons strictly worse than the higher damaging weapons with lower crit damage tipped me off that they weren't putting much thought into designing the game. They gimped critical hits, and didn't consider the fact that they made entire classes of weapons worthless. 5e is overwatch the board game, because it copied heroes with different powers that work together to fight the bad guys.
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Dec 18, 2017 23:38
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If WotC bugfixed and made balance changes like Blizzard does for Overwatch, 5e might actually be a good game by now
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Dec 19, 2017 00:10
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Nihilarian posted:If WotC bugfixed and made balance changes like Blizzard does for Overwatch, 5e might actually be a good game by now This would require Mearls and Company to actually admit they have made any mistakes with 5th Edition. Which, as we all know, is completely impossible because they receive positive feedback from the internet. From the internet, you guys!
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Dec 19, 2017 00:24
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Splicer posted:Pleaae list some of the differences between 2e to 3e and 3e to 4e. Like, say how it was in one edition, then the other. I am genuinely curious how your brain perceives these things so that you can say this with a presumably straight face. I would also very much like to see these fever-addled ramblings. I was a loving hardcore edition warrior when 3e came out (I was like 12 at the time), and I can tell you that they are so massively different. Ironically, a lot of poo poo, e.g. multi-classing, is waaaaaaay more like 4e than 3e. Remember certain races being unable to be some classes? Kits? Non-weapon proficiencies? The complete lack of anything even vaguely like a skill system and it was just Calvinball outside of combat? What does that sound like? I stand firm in my belief that anyone decrying 4e has never really played anything besides 3X. They might have done like a session of 2e or Basic or something, but anyone arguing 4e was somehow unprecedented is just ignorant and working towards preconceived conclusions. This is ignoring the fact that they generally have never played anything besides D&D and have been shoving that square peg in a round hole so hard their hands are rigid claws.
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Dec 19, 2017 00:27
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Xiahou Dun posted:I would also very much like to see these fever-addled ramblings. My favourite weird complaint will always be people losing it over multiclassing not really being a thing in 4e. As multiclassing is at the heart of D&D. Nobody remembers the weird xp curve thing that happened for the very rare characters playing a multiclass in 2e and how incredibly limited the multiclass packages were in 2e. Of the options, the only ones that were remotely useful were Fighter/Wizard or maybe Thief/Fighter or Thief/Wizard if you were playing a higher level game. kingcom fucked around with this message at 01:07 on Dec 19, 2017 |
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Dec 19, 2017 00:37
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The Gate posted:This would require Mearls and Company to actually admit they have made any mistakes with 5th Edition. Which, as we all know, is completely impossible because they receive positive feedback from the internet. From the internet, you guys! They actually have admitted they have made mistakes and there are things they would change. The issue is that they are reluctant to patch the game because it's selling well and is well received.
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Dec 19, 2017 00:40
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Serf posted:d&d has always been a game centered around combat with skills as a method for getting you to the next combat. makes sense that the version that did combat well would be popular It wasn't, sadly. SettingSun posted:Yes. "Points of Light" felt hollow and too make-your-own-fun. Could not disagree more. Reading about lore in Eberron, Dark Sun and especially Forgotten Realms felt like taking a particularly dull college class. The default 4e setting felt fresh and interesting, bringing classical concepts and creatures into simple adventures without all the goddamn lore baggage of the older settings. And I laughed really hard when they literally blew up the Forgotten Realms. Talk about a thesis statement. Lurdiak fucked around with this message at 00:57 on Dec 19, 2017 |
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Dec 19, 2017 00:54
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I mean wasn't 4e the top rpg in book sales except for like one month it went to PF? And thats before you count the fact that most people were buying DDI subs instead of physical books. And as someone who absolutely loves Points of Light it really is an excellent example of the hate boner for what 4e was attempting. It was really fun and had good points for making the world uours. But that kind of stuff is absolute poison for the Read D&D on the toilet crowd.
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