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AlphaDog posted:Let me think a bit about how my free exploration hexcrawl stuff could work with an a-b journey. I know it wouldn't work as usual, and I suspect it'd feel a bit railroady to have a "get to this hex and you win" and also have them interact with stuff along the way, but I'm sure I can come up with something. OK, so what I'd usually do is make up a map and a bunch of monster/baddie encounters, a bunch of locations, and a bunch of clues towards other related encounters, then as the characters wander around, I'd check for "random" encounters and when one came up, I'd randomly select from those, and they'd find the <opponents> in the <location> who would yield the <information/clue/item> when defeated. "Information" is varying forms of "<distance> to the <direction> from <here/feature> you will find <clue/item> in a <location> guarded by <monsters>". One or more of the thing/place/guard categories might be missing from the info or the encounter. "Item" is something that you need to collect to do GOAL. "Clue" is information about how to achieve GOAL. Importantly, you place none of these things before you start play, it's entirely dependent on the PCs wandering into things at the start, which they definitely will because you're reducing the "no encounter" part of the random encounter check every time there's no encounter. So for example, after the first encounter they have the information "Five miles to the north of the rock spire, there's a treasure behind a waterfall, watch out for the goblins!" So I place the waterfall, treasure, goblins five miles to the north of the rock spire. Where's that? gently caress knows, I haven't placed it yet. They can't find the treasure/waterfall/goblins until they find the spire, so they're gonna have to wander around a bit more. Four encounters later, I random pull a fight with Wolves at the Rock Spire yielding an Item, but because I know that ROCK SPIRE is already linked to GOBLINS, I use a goblin encounter instead, and decide to switch out "item" for nothing because this is the first time they've been able to follow gathered information so it already feels special. Thus they gradually build towards having enough locational clues, enough items, and enough other information to find the goal location, which is usually a dungeon to be looted. The fun for the players is in exploring an unknown wilderness, lots of the fun for me is in playing to find out what happens, because the story that we're going to end up with is emergent even though lots of the significant the pieces might be pre-made (a lot of that in terms of "we're too far out and oops poo poo we can't eat gps and gems". It also ties in really well with doing a base level of planning, then keeping on top of it by only developing ideas that the players are interested in. Like, if they don't give a poo poo about bandits, I'll stop including those and half the time they'll remember that as "we got rid of all the bandits!" and the other half they won't notice or care. -- I'm really not sure that'd work in what's supposed to be an A-B journey, but I guess you could do the same thing and have each clue/info piece move them further along toward the end? It just won't look or feel random that way even if you're pulling random location/monster/loot combos, because everything obviously progresses along toward the goal location. I think you might be better served planning it out as a sequence, sorry. e: Wait, nope, I've got it! The Feywild's loving weird, right? Who's to say space is constant there? A journey for a mortal there might not be "walk the quickest route from A to B" but "Walk into the primordial forest. You will have an Adventure. If you are worthy, you will walk back out again at your destination", with the quickest route and the adventuriest adventure being equivalent. E2: and the residents have trouble explaining it because to them it's 100% normal, like you'd expect some low level Red Riding Hood vs Big Bad Wolf shenanigans at minimum every time you move between non-primordial-forest areas. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 03:32 on Dec 21, 2018 |
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Dec 21, 2018 03:19
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It is weird that the complaint for 4e is "the players had to pay attention during the game" Yo if your players are just zoning out during combat, D&D is probably not the right game for your group. But then, we've always known that. Insert my loving repetitive bullshit about D&D naturally becoming freeform here.
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Dec 21, 2018 06:05
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Yeah like...Pacho posted:I loved 4E but my players quickly grew bored of it. I believe that it kinda forced them to engage tactically during combat while 3.x felt much more free form. Two of my hard-roleplayer friends easily endured 3.x combat because it was a nasty, bruttish affair carried on by the optimizers but they got extremely bored during 4E because every combat played out like a boardgame within a roleplaying game. ...perfectly encapsulates why "have you tried not playing D&D" is unironically really great advice. Also reminds me of the argument against freeform initiative being "but then the players will argue over who goes first!"
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Dec 21, 2018 06:20
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It's weird how they basically had very similar combat systems with squares and shifts and D20 rolls and you need a map and everything but one of them was apparently easier to ignore. And that was the good one? Like, that seems to be the universal standard, people saying "I had an easier time pretending all the poo poo in 3.x wasn't there and I am mad at 4e for having that same poo poo in it, which I could not ignore because."
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Dec 21, 2018 06:32
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I don't think the tabletop is a particularly good venue for grid combat - if your grid combat system is halfway interesting than its always going to be faster and better to do it with a computer. Contrariwise, I think it's kinda valid to just make the combat a brutal bullshit 80s game designed to punish players for not using lateral thinking to solve the fight before initiative is rolled. I think if I run D&D again I'll stick to B/X and tell the players explicitly that entering combat unprepared means they hosed up. Like 4e is a miles-better grid combat game but, having played D&D for 2 years now, my conclusion is kinda that I'm not that interested in deep tactical grid combat being the centerpiece of games I run. It's just slow and not that engaging and would be much better served by a genuine computer implementation. (To compare apples to apple pie, I think gloomhaven runs circles around 4e in terms of interesting grid combat in a vacuum.) Obviously this doesn't make it worse than 5e or 3.5e - 4e does one thing well. Jeffrey of YOSPOS fucked around with this message at 07:00 on Dec 21, 2018 |
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Dec 21, 2018 06:54
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I just find 4e combat takes too long, and is both overly finicky (track ALL the 1-round buffs! Some end at the beginning of the turn, some end at the end!) and got repetitive real quick in the one campaign I played (I cast ray of frost again and curse the HP inflation). There's a lot that 4e got wrong (massive piles of errata, HP inflation, weird race/class determinism, arbitrarium NPCs) which is obfuscated by "da WOW" and "muh D&D".
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Dec 21, 2018 07:48
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4e combat took loving ages. I loved how basic the ability descriptions were and how clear combat was so you could reflavour everything because it was so loving vague. In 5e they wanted to make poo poo simple and gently caress I can't deny the combat is much faster and as such I enjoy it a lot more.
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Dec 21, 2018 09:27
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:I just find 4e combat takes too long, and is both overly finicky (track ALL the 1-round buffs! Some end at the beginning of the turn, some end at the end!) and got repetitive real quick in the one campaign I played (I cast ray of frost again and curse the HP inflation). The greatest tragedy of 5E is that it's not a refined version of 4E. Also feats, and Fighters still getting poo poo for skills unless you've got the system mastery to shore it up, and even then the good skills never key off of strength. 4E's best achievement was admitting that D&D is about all these classes playing together and then making them play together pretty drat well.
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Dec 21, 2018 09:30
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Remember 5e and 3.x aren't actually any faster than 4e. Except when a spellcaster decides to simply end an encounter because they are broken powerful and have that option.
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Dec 21, 2018 09:31
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4e fights taking longer than they could have because the math was busted until later revisions is a legitimate point, but preferring 5e (or 3e) just because there's less for the player to do goes back to the whole "if you don't want to engage that much with the rules, you should probably play something else" because when you do get to play 3e with a party composed of a Psion, a Warlock, a Crusader, and a Druid, and when you're going up against higher-CR enemies, almost all of which have their own spells or spell-like abilities, the amount of time combat takes isn't that much less. Hell, even in 5e you still want your martial character's Bonus Actions to become extra attacks or have riders as much as possible, and then everyone else is a caster, so really the only way it's faster is if you're blowing up the encounter with singularly powerful spells anyway
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Dec 21, 2018 09:48
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gradenko_2000 posted:because when you do get to play 3e with a party composed of a Psion, a Warlock, a Crusader, and a Druid, and when you're going up against higher-CR enemies, almost all of which have their own spells or spell-like abilities, the amount of time combat takes isn't that much less. Ditto second ed. I mean, yeah, it's very quick rounds with a party that's a fighter who's attacking because they're a fighter, a thief who's attacking because as if they're gonna get to backstab, a cleric who's used their cure light wounds and is thus attacking, and a wizard who might cast their magic missile next round but is currently attacking. But go play the kobold fights in Dragon Mountain with a 6 player group that knows what they're doing. Limit them to just core books and complete splats and no 2.5 stuff to keep it "simple". >60 minute rounds, easy. A bit less once the DM produces a macro'd spreadsheet that automates his side of the accounting and rolling. Very very much more once the casters realise that the surest (if slowest) way to deal with a horde isn't to chuck fireballs and cloudkills, but to summon their own horde.
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Dec 21, 2018 10:04
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Ryuujin posted:Remember 5e and 3.x aren't actually any faster than 4e. Except when a spellcaster decides to simply end an encounter because they are broken powerful and have that option. Quoted for truth. I've played in a couple of 5e campaigns now, and combats always are either: * Pretty long, certainly about as long as 4e (post math fixes). * Over so quick it genuinely took less time than rolling initiative and working out the sequence. I mean why even bother then? It just never, ever seems to hit the sweet spot. No matter which adventure, or which DM, or which party composition, it just never gets to the Goldilocks zone.
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Dec 21, 2018 11:57
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:I don't think the tabletop is a particularly good venue for grid combat - if your grid combat system is halfway interesting than its always going to be faster and better to do it with a computer. Contrariwise, I think it's kinda valid to just make the combat a brutal bullshit 80s game designed to punish players for not using lateral thinking to solve the fight before initiative is rolled. I think if I run D&D again I'll stick to B/X and tell the players explicitly that entering combat unprepared means they hosed up. for sale: combat rules, never used
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Dec 21, 2018 12:01
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Combat length in D&D is roughly where it's been for 20+ years unless a) you're in the first few levels and not comparing to the first few levels of the other version, b) you're ignoring rules and not ignoring similar amounts of rules in the other version, or c) you're being intentionally disingenuous (eg, by comparing your 20-hours-a-week-for-a-year tool-assisted online game group with someone who's trying to run another version for the first time with a group of newbies using pen, paper, and dice). This was noticable in the playtest when people starting at level 1 were going "woooooooooah this is soooo fast!" but they were coming off high level 4th ed play or infinite ladders 3e charop games and half the class abilities and nearly all the movement/action rules weren't in yet. No poo poo it's going fast, you're used to going through 30 different books looking for edge cases to exploit and now you're looking at something that's only as complex as mentzer basic (and plays about as quick!) Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 12:51 on Dec 21, 2018 |
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Dec 21, 2018 12:39
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What I always said in regards to this is that splatbooks are the worst. 4e and 5e without splatbooks are pretty simple. Not so sure about 3 but then again the last time I've played vanilla was like 15 years ago so who knows.
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Dec 21, 2018 13:13
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dex_sda posted:What I always said in regards to this is that splatbooks are the worst. In 3e, the core book is already deceptively heavy. I recently joined a new 3e game and one player got stuck with playing the Cleric, and I get the feeling that it's a nightmare for her. You know all spells, plus Domain spells which you auto-prepare but can't prepare separately if they're not on the Cleric list, skill synergy bonuses, the cascading effects of Enlarge Person, it's all pretty heavy for a silly little elf-pretend game after dinner. Ironically, if you play 3e then the game generally improves if you ban the core classes and only allow splatbook classes.
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Dec 21, 2018 13:24
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Did anyone ITT play the Dungeons & Dragons Miniatures wargame? I was always curious about it but never bought the minis. I played 40k for years before starting D&D and I always found it funny when people wanted strong grid-based combat rules but had never tried any wargame (not that most are grid-based, per se.)
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Dec 21, 2018 13:54
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Ok so simulacrum is really really good for my divination wizard.
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Dec 21, 2018 13:55
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kidkissinger posted:Ok so simulacrum is really really good for my divination wizard.
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Dec 21, 2018 14:12
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kidkissinger posted:Ok so simulacrum is really really good for my divination wizard. If you ever need a new one quick or have a day off, cast wish->simulacrum to avoid the material cost and time requirement.
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Dec 21, 2018 14:14
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Kaysette posted:If you ever need a new one quick or have a day off, cast wish->simulacrum to avoid the material cost and time requirement. I think 13 is the last level we get. We're finishing up ToA and we just entered the room with the giant baby tube. I figure we knock this down and then fight Acererak, which might not be completely impossible now that we have two diviner's who can effectively force Acererak to fail four rolls of my choice, plus we now have a shitload of counterspells. Having my spell list duplicated is insane.
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Dec 21, 2018 14:26
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Does my simulacrum have all it's spell slots when it's created? It's ambiguous as written.
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Dec 21, 2018 15:52
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kidkissinger posted:Does my simulacrum have all it's spell slots when it's created? It's ambiguous as written. It has all spell slots you had at the time, except the one you used to create it.
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Dec 21, 2018 15:59
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gradenko_2000 posted:4e fights taking longer than they could have because the math was busted until later revisions is a legitimate point, but preferring 5e (or 3e) just because there's less for the player to do goes back to the whole "if you don't want to engage that much with the rules, you should probably play something else" I find my 5e games I actually have more to do than in 4e. 4e you have 3 daily abilities and 3 encounter abilities. Usually get into 2-3 fights per session. 5e a good amount of abilities recharge on a short rest and spell slots go up and up. Not to mention you can have more spells prepared, usually, and they do neater things than 4e beyond just combat. So honestly in my experience 5e is bother generally faster and I have more to do. And I just play a BM Fighter
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Dec 21, 2018 17:37
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Nehru the Damaja posted:I know in large part the lack of books everywhere is good for the game but it bums me out that there's this big sale on D&D poo poo and I can't take advantage of it as I already have every book I want and have no interest in DMing a module. Buy some books for friends. Tis the season.
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Dec 21, 2018 18:37
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I will say that a 3.X fight feels much more consequential to me than a 4e fight, as ordering your skeletal hydra into combat/high level mage fights are more interesting to me than pretty much every 4e power in the book. That said, 3rd edition is flawed as hell and I completely understand why people hate it, so  Really, the problem is less the edition and more that the same band of isolated people hiding in the EnWorld bubble had no idea what they were doing, and that reflects in 5e. It's all the same issues as the constitutional compromises, where no one has actually come up with what a high level fighter is supposed to look like or what abilities are supposed to be available to high level characters, so they just go back to not making those decisions and then wondering why the fighter sucks and no one wants to play him. There are some fairly major undocumented changes (like not using level draining monsters to avoid high level characters) but really it's all just the same pile of avoiding decisions.
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Dec 21, 2018 18:55
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doctor 7 posted:I find my 5e games I actually have more to do than in 4e. 4e you have 3 daily abilities and 3 encounter abilities. Usually get into 2-3 fights per session. If you're a caster you probably will have more options than a basic 4E character.... maybe. A 4E Fighter will have Dailies, Encounters, Utilities, and At-Will in addition to anything gained via feat, item, etc. Maybe you picked up Ritual Caster and now have that entire list to choose from, as well. Honestly the problem with most 4E characters was that at a certain point you had way, way too many abilities to easily sort through quickly. 5E is good at giving the illusion of options but, honestly, there's just less there. That's actually a big benefit in some regards, but 5E definitely hasn't given me more options and when more than one full caster is involved the gameplay is just as slow - even slower, sometimes, because at least 4E sheets included power descriptions rather than making us reference the book every time an ability was used.
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Dec 21, 2018 18:58
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doctor 7 posted:I find my 5e games I actually have more to do than in 4e. 4e you have 3 daily abilities and 3 encounter abilities. Usually get into 2-3 fights per session. But a BM fighter has no abilities that work out of combat. Aside from the "I've literally never used this" ability that involves sizing up your enemy and takes a minute.
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Dec 21, 2018 19:05
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doctor 7 posted:So honestly in my experience 5e is bother generally faster and I have more to do. And I just play a BM Fighter Nooo way. A battlemaster fighter is basically a 4e fighter, except your at-wills are per-encounter and you have no actual encounter or daily powers. I guess you have a single utility that you didn't get to pick?
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Dec 21, 2018 19:06
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doctor 7 posted:I find my 5e games I actually have more to do than in 4e. 4e you have 3 daily abilities and 3 encounter abilities. Usually get into 2-3 fights per session. Darwinism posted:If you're a caster you probably will have more options than a basic 4E character.... maybe. A 4E Fighter will have Dailies, Encounters, Utilities, and At-Will in addition to anything gained via feat, item, etc. Maybe you picked up Ritual Caster and now have that entire list to choose from, as well. These both sound like caster descriptions. And since we're sharing anecdotes, I played a bard from about 3 to 6 and never felt like I had more than maybe one meaningful thing and a couple of basic things to allocate per encounter, which more or less lines up to low level 4e, except that any given encounter power I've ever used in 4e still felt more meaningful than "also I guess I'll give the barbarian a d8." And bard is on the high end of moving parts, as I read it. Caphi fucked around with this message at 19:26 on Dec 21, 2018 |
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Dec 21, 2018 19:12
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There's total options and meaningful options.
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Dec 21, 2018 19:22
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Are you people really stupid enough to think that your poo poo posting is going to be what drives all the Edition Heretics to their knees to repent and confess their wrong think? It's time to take the version war to it's own thread. Where I'm sure there will be a final resolution to who has The Correct Opinion and not an infinite slap fight.
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Dec 21, 2018 19:51
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let's face it we're all just screaming into the void as the world burns around us
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Dec 21, 2018 19:56
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Version warring can produce some interesting conversations if everyone involved can refrain from building hyperbole laced strawmen to attack in an attempt to make a point and avoid deliberate misconstruing of peoples' points as they try to NBA JAM freestyle dunk on the other side and poo poo post all over the place, drawing out their one point over multiple useless posts. Which basically means that it is impossible to have the actual full and good conversation as inevitably anything promising is drowned out in a sea of poo poo.
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Dec 21, 2018 20:03
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No version warring can never produce interesting conversations. It is a blight. There is stuff wrong with every edition of D&D, and stuff that is good. But people keep claiming certain things are a problem with only a specific edition when it is a common problem.
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Dec 21, 2018 20:11
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There is no good version of D&D, because all versions of D&D were produced under capitalism.
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Dec 21, 2018 20:15
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Ryuujin posted:No version warring can never produce interesting conversations. It is a blight. There is stuff wrong with every edition of D&D, and stuff that is good. But people keep claiming certain things are a problem with only a specific edition when it is a common problem. https://twitter.com/dril/status/1071519723605520384
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Dec 21, 2018 20:26
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Ryuujin posted:No version warring can never produce interesting conversations. It is a blight. There is stuff wrong with every edition of D&D, and stuff that is good. But people keep claiming certain things are a problem with only a specific edition when it is a common problem. https://twitter.com/dril/status/473265809079693312?s=19
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Dec 21, 2018 20:44
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Ryuujin posted:No version warring can never produce interesting conversations. It is a blight. There is stuff wrong with every edition of D&D, and stuff that is good. But people keep claiming certain things are a problem with only a specific edition when it is a common problem. I'm having fun playing 5th edition with my friends, but most of my friends also liked 4th ed and miss things it gave you. Even mister "But Meteor doesn't get a stat mod to damage!" Their general shared grievance is "Man, if we can have fun with editions 'before' and 'after' 4th edition, why can't people stop making GBS threads themselves over 4th ed and anything that reminds them of 4th ed, (except when only casters get it)" So the whole Edition War angle has always felt like people feeling they don't have quite a big enough soap box against people saying "But we DON'T hate your edition! Hell, we still play it regularly!" by chanting EDITION WAR! EDITION WAR! over and over until it tricks a moderator or GM into letting them  'win the argument' by default. Though that's basically been my personal experience outside this thread, so I'm biased by "...Wait, people REALLY talk poo poo about Warlord healing? I thought that was an exaggeration to villainize older edition players-oh I'm causing an edition war, apparently." moments. Section Z fucked around with this message at 21:03 on Dec 21, 2018 |
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Dec 21, 2018 20:49
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| # ? Apr 28, 2024 22:52 |
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The thing with the edition wars is that it's not a rules conflict, it's an identity conflict. Half the people bitching about Fighter Magic didn't have anything against Book of Nine Swords, but the edition war escalated into a bunch of personal stuff and disingenuous arguments on both sides. I'm not going into this any further because it sounds like all the 4e fans in this thread are still super sensitive about it, and I don't blame them at all.
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Dec 21, 2018 21:50
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