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remusclaw posted:It would make it a different game for sure. But downplaying traps and dungeon delving and such already did that. I don't like meaningless violence, I want it to be consequential and important if it's going to take up time and effort. I am aware that it means that classic D&D is not necessarily what I want out of a game any more. Right, which isn't really a failing of D&D, it's just that you don't really want to play the game D&D.
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Jan 27, 2019 20:03
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It might be a good idea to make a game where there are explicit rules for when and how to use theater of mind combat while reserving full tactical grid for boss fights. I can think of a few games that sort of make noises in that direction (Chronicles of Darkness and Fragged Empire, for instance) but they lean a little too heavily on "small fights just don't matter, use this to effectively skip them" rather than "these are faster, simplified rules that still test most of the same skills that the big fights use." However, one thing in particular that would be lost by doing this is the ability for small fights to introduce the players to the mechanics they're going to encounter when they fight the boss. If the two modes use different systems -- even ones keying off the same values and powers -- it becomes very hard to achieve this.
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Jan 27, 2019 20:03
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Leperflesh posted:I thought about maybe Fate Accelerated, but my gut tells me it's a little less introductory... I'm not sure I can articulate why. I think the issue, for me, is that whilst it's dressed up like an introductory game - it's a slim little pamphlet, the artwork is a bit more cartoony and unthreatening than the FATE Core art, etc., etc. - it isn't actually written like an introductory game. Fate relies an awful lot on a bunch of concepts which FATE Accelerated simply doesn't have the word count to properly explain. There's some ideas out there which lend themselves to brief, terse explanations, and some ideas which really need to be talked through properly with ample examples to allow people to get a handle on them, and Fate's key ideas tend to land in the latter pot. At least, in my personal anecdotal evidence, I know numerous people who found Fate Accelerated incomprehensible until they read FATE Core (or looked up some other source of clear explanations, or had it explained to them by people with more FATE experience) and then it clicked with them. If I had to hand a total beginner a book and expect them to be able to use it to run a fun game for their friends, I'd go with FATE Core over FATE Accelerated every time. LatwPIAT posted:The "glory days" of 3e were also the days of GURPS: Vehicles 2nd edition, which fifteen years after a new edition still haunts the game. The current 4e line spans the range from Action to Technical Grappling. Dungeon Fantasy is probably the most popular sub-game of GURPS and was also popular enough to be released as a game of its own that cuts away the detailed rules of GURPS. I'd say GURPS has never been as diverse and tooled towards low-crunch play as it currently is. That said, that probably points to one of the strengths of the 3rd Edition days: if you wanted to ignore a great swathe of the supplements and just run with Basic Set, plus setting book, plus maybe the first Compendium for character gen bits not reprinted in your setting book, you absolutely could, whereas in this 4th Edition era... quote:They do need more setting/genre books though, that I agree with. The hurdles you have to go through to use GURPS for a simple science fiction game can be downright ridiculous: Basic Set + Space + Ultra Tech + Spaceships is the bare minimum for your standard sci-fi setting, and that's four books and a PDF-only supplement. Sampatrick posted:The only RPGs that ever reached people who hadn't already played D&D is D&D and World of Darkness For the UK market I'd also nominate WFRP, back when it was still being put out by Games Workshop themselves. CitizenKeen posted:That was what damned 4E for me. It was a perfectly serviceable RPG and I welcomed innovation in D&D, but I never felt like we got very much done relative to other RPGs, in a three or four hour session. Admittedly, we were playing before the maths behind the monsters got comprehensively changed, which I understand helped, along with a lot of other errata. (Did they ever get skill challenges to a place they were happy with?) But you don't get a second chance to make a first impression, and I'd much rather play a game which works broadly as the designers intended out of the box because I have 24 hours in my day of only 60 minutes each and don't really fancy sacrificing any of those for the sake of integrating errata releases into a tabletop RPG system. gently caress the MMORPG comparison, that was obvious nonsense; it's the way that 4E got patched like a videogame multiple times after its release which stopped be re-engaging with it in its later phases. I don't mind patches in videogames because my computer implements them for me; they bug the poo poo out of me in tabletop games because I have to implement them by hand and fuuuuck thaaaaat.
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Jan 27, 2019 20:21
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Sampatrick posted:The reason why there isn't a 4e Pathfinder is because it would be a ton of work and who knows how popular it would even be. 13th Age is nothing like 4E and isn't a good game. 4E really needed a new edition that built off its core but streamlined the game and replaced feats with something not garbage and didn't have bloat, and it's sad it will never get that. 
Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 20:31 on Jan 27, 2019 |
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Jan 27, 2019 20:28
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remusclaw posted:One of the big things 4e got wrong by my reckoning was that it didn't throw away the idea that an adventure should be made up of a bunch of little encounters. Encounters take a lot of time in that game and because of that, they should all be meaningful. 4 fights per full rest sounds alright in the abstract, but in play those 4 fights might take four sessions to get through, and most of them are going to be trash fights. One of the design constraints for Ironclaw was that small fights should end very quickly, so that neither players nor hosts consider them more trouble than they're worth. If trash fights take a full session then your ruleset is not doing its job. The problem isn't the 'bunch of little encounters' paradigm, it's that 4e couldn't deliver it because it didn't know how to make an encounter 'little'.
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Jan 27, 2019 20:32
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4e actually works just fine for popcorn fights - a few years ago I played a month-long weekly game of 4e that largely involved going theough an as-written 3e dungeon and it was a lot of fun. You open up a door, there’s three kobolds behind it, you crush em in a couple combat rounds and roll right along. The challenge was using your encounter and utility powers to ablate, block or dodge every hit and thus win without losing any hp, since any hits the popcorn got on you would eat into your surge reserves. You can seriously just do 3.5 with 4e and it’s fine. In fact, it’s better! Getting ritual components as loot or houseruling a daily stockpile of “mana” for use on rituals is a good idea, though.
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Jan 27, 2019 20:34
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The core issue is that 4e required a lot of work to design for, perhaps more than almost any other game. Granted, the work shows, but it also means any attempt at a clone has a mammoth amount of work. Doing it doesn't seem hard (any attempt at rebalancing and streamlining would be, mind), but it's a lot of potential work.
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Jan 27, 2019 20:35
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Alien Rope Burn posted:The core issue is that 4e required a lot of work to design for, perhaps more than almost any other game. Granted, the work shows, but it also means any attempt at a clone has a mammoth amount of work. This is super true. My love letter to 4e is exceptionally cut down, and I'm still looking at 70 combat powers and 15 non-combat powers across four species, classes, and backgrounds. And that's with a conscious decision to jettison the feat and item treadmills.
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Jan 27, 2019 20:46
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Which is probably fine if abilities are well-balanced, although that might be just as much work or more. Literally every 4E charop guide I've ever seen has pages of "never take this on any character" and "this is good on this one gimmick build and nowhere else but if you want to be the best hybrid class lightning tickler the world has ever seen go ahead."
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Jan 27, 2019 20:50
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Ferrinus posted:4e actually works just fine for popcorn fights - a few years ago I played a month-long weekly game of 4e that largely involved going theough an as-written 3e dungeon and it was a lot of fun. You open up a door, there’s three kobolds behind it, you crush em in a couple combat rounds and roll right along. The challenge was using your encounter and utility powers to ablate, block or dodge every hit and thus win without losing any hp, since any hits the popcorn got on you would eat into your surge reserves. Yeah, I figured out really late in the game's lifespan that an encounter designed by the rules didn't have to be one single room -- you can put that much challenge into a series of smaller fights and it works out just fine as long as you're not doling out rests after every fight. Maybe up the monster count a bit to account for the lack of focused fire. Someone online pointed this out and I started running that way in my Greyhawk and it made my dungeon crawls much more fluid.
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Jan 27, 2019 21:11
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Wasn't FASA the #2 next to TSR for a significant period? And some people must have been introduced through Palladium given that they were advertising in all the Marvel comics I read growing up.
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Jan 27, 2019 21:13
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remusclaw posted:One of the big things 4e got wrong by my reckoning was that it didn't throw away the idea that an adventure should be made up of a bunch of little encounters. Encounters take a lot of time in that game and because of that, they should all be meaningful. 4 fights per full rest sounds alright in the abstract, but in play those 4 fights might take four sessions to get through, and most of them are going to be trash fights. Shining Force was my favorite video game when I was a kid, and my ideal 4th edition steals from that I think, fights should be big, and they should matter, and they should only happen when it is appropriate, rather than because there has to be a fight every couple rooms or so. I've got a book somewhere around here of a bunch of dungeons for just that. It was put out to promote the dungeon tiles and presents them as "mini-dungeons" but it's a bunch of "2 encounters then a boss"-style delves where each encounter has their own feel and things to make it interesting. Nothing is just 4 orcs in a room, it's things like an ancient tomb where the guardians know the timing of the traps and try to push players in the way, so they have to either figure it out (by for example watching where the enemies avoid and working out the pattern) or get to the mechanism to disable it or just power through. Not everything is a big elaborate boss monster, but there's a lot of using monsters that play off each other and what else is in the room to make things interesting and memorable. Of course, that does still mean it's based around time-consuming encounters, but at least going through them isn't boring.
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Jan 27, 2019 21:20
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Which is probably fine if abilities are well-balanced, although that might be just as much work or more. Literally every 4E charop guide I've ever seen has pages of "never take this on any character" and "this is good on this one gimmick build and nowhere else but if you want to be the best hybrid class lightning tickler the world has ever seen go ahead." There's part of me that really likes having feats that are super bad in general but can be very good if you Timmy it together with a couple other feats
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Jan 27, 2019 21:44
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Lemon-Lime posted:13th Age is nothing like 4E and isn't a good game. I really, seriously feel that a 4.5 could've used Gamma World as a base and hit that sweet spot of "quick and easy character creation" and "fun grid-based combat." There's just so much stripped out of Gamma World that ends up as a benefit for it and makes it play a hell of a lot smoother as a result.
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Jan 27, 2019 21:53
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Right, but remember that a design goal for every edition post-AD&D1e was Don't Make Baby Cry. In order to get a game that is just good design without caring if Baby cries, you have to go to a game that doesn't say Dungeons & Dragons on the cover--whether that's a non-D&D TSR game, or an indie game.
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Jan 27, 2019 21:57
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Bruceski posted:I've got a book somewhere around here of a bunch of dungeons for just that. It was put out to promote the dungeon tiles and presents them as "mini-dungeons" but it's a bunch of "2 encounters then a boss"-style delves where each encounter has their own feel and things to make it interesting. Nothing is just 4 orcs in a room, it's things like an ancient tomb where the guardians know the timing of the traps and try to push players in the way, so they have to either figure it out (by for example watching where the enemies avoid and working out the pattern) or get to the mechanism to disable it or just power through. Not everything is a big elaborate boss monster, but there's a lot of using monsters that play off each other and what else is in the room to make things interesting and memorable. Of course, that does still mean it's based around time-consuming encounters, but at least going through them isn't boring. If you can find the title of that, I'd love to see it. The game I run is a bi-weekly short session game that's usually two or three encounters that I try to make interesting with gimmicks and fun monsters to fight. Instead of big sprawling dungeons, we do small dungeons with a few rooms. I'd love to have a resource for a few more of those when I don't want to design everything from scratch.
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Jan 27, 2019 21:57
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Ironclaw is actually a surprisingly good role playing game. I pretty much ignore the setting but otherwise very fast and easy system. For my D&D flavored needs I pretty much exclusively use Dungeon World these days. As an adult with a job and other hobbies, I just can't imagine doing the level of prep required to run a really good Dungeon crawl experience. It was a blast in high school and college, but story games all the way now.
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Jan 27, 2019 22:01
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Enola Gay-For-Pay posted:If you can find the title of that, I'd love to see it. The game I run is a bi-weekly short session game that's usually two or three encounters that I try to make interesting with gimmicks and fun monsters to fight. Instead of big sprawling dungeons, we do small dungeons with a few rooms. I'd love to have a resource for a few more of those when I don't want to design everything from scratch. Found it. https://www.amazon.com/Dungeon-Delve-4th-Supplement-Adventure/dp/0786951397 Flipping through, not everything's as flashy as the example I gave, but there's still 90 different encounters to poke at for ideas.
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Jan 27, 2019 22:17
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Bruceski posted:Found it. https://www.amazon.com/Dungeon-Delve-4th-Supplement-Adventure/dp/0786951397 Flipping through, not everything's as flashy as the example I gave, but there's still 90 different encounters to poke at for ideas. It’s not for 4e specifically but the annual one-page dungeon compilations would be great for this. Also look at Johnn Four’s extended work on the five-room dungeon, which he actually wrote up for the 4e DMG.
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Jan 27, 2019 22:24
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remusclaw posted:I think I had the same thing going on in my head to a degree. The Ninja Turtles game had way too much space put aside for making lame original characters when I thought it should have been full of more Turtles Characters, like Bebop and Rocksteady, and I know that they didn't exist when the game came out but they did by the time I got a hold of it, so I wanted them moire than I wanted some Terror Bears or whatever Your general point is spot on to how I felt about it at the time but let's stipulate for the record that the Terror Bears own.
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Jan 27, 2019 22:46
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remusclaw posted:I think I had the same thing going on in my head to a degree. The Ninja Turtles game had way too much space put aside for making lame original characters when I thought it should have been full of more Turtles Characters, like Bebop and Rocksteady, and I know that they didn't exist when the game came out but they did by the time I got a hold of it, so I wanted them moire than I wanted some Terror Bears or whatever In general, it's worth mentioning that Palladium had no idea how to cope with the sudden popularity of the Turtles. "Hey, it's popular amongst kids." never became "Hey, let's make a kids' game.", but instead just reselling the original until sales dribbled down to nothing. As mentioned above, when given the opportunity to make a game based on the new kids' TMNT cartoon, they balked. The notion of doing anything based on the cartoon has seemingly never been something Palladium took seriously.
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Jan 27, 2019 22:53
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Mind you, that's not to say that I wasn't intrigued by what was in the book. April looked way different than I was used to, and yes, in hindsight the Terror Bears did rule. At some point I recognized that it resembled the first movie a good deal, and the Turtles on the cover of the first NES game as well, but even then was quite different. The alignment system in it baffled me. Palladium alignment still baffles me.
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Jan 27, 2019 22:58
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remusclaw posted:Mind you, that's not to say that I wasn't intrigued by what was in the book. April looked way different than I was used to, and yes, in hindsight the Terror Bears did rule. At some point I recognized that it resembled the first movie a good deal, and the Turtles on the cover of the first NES game as well, but even then was quite different. The alignment system in it baffled me. Palladium alignment still baffles me. Palladium games definitely have their... Issues. Have you ever become so scared your mind shattered... Making you a dreaded homosexual? Yikes.
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Jan 27, 2019 23:30
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Alien Rope Burn posted:In general, it's worth mentioning that Palladium had no idea how to cope with the sudden popularity of the Turtles. "Hey, it's popular amongst kids." never became "Hey, let's make a kids' game.", but instead just reselling the original until sales dribbled down to nothing. As mentioned above, when given the opportunity to make a game based on the new kids' TMNT cartoon, they balked. I wonder if Kevin knew how many comic shops also had either an RPG section or in some cases (like my own town) had a comic shop with an attached RPG/mniatures store.
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Jan 27, 2019 23:51
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Thanlis posted:Yeah, I figured out really late in the game's lifespan that an encounter designed by the rules didn't have to be one single room -- you can put that much challenge into a series of smaller fights and it works out just fine as long as you're not doling out rests after every fight. Maybe up the monster count a bit to account for the lack of focused fire. Someone online pointed this out and I started running that way in my Greyhawk and it made my dungeon crawls much more fluid. Ironically, a trickle of low-population “trash” encounters is probably also where the original way-high health totals of MM1 monsters shine. Means everyone gets a couple crack at the pair of orcs or whatever it is.
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Jan 28, 2019 00:02
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Lord_Hambrose posted:Ironclaw is actually a surprisingly good role playing game. I pretty much ignore the setting but otherwise very fast and easy system. Do you mean the Legacy edition of Ironclaw, or the new edition Omnibus?
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Jan 28, 2019 00:06
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Dawgstar posted:I wonder if Kevin knew how many comic shops also had either an RPG section or in some cases (like my own town) had a comic shop with an attached RPG/mniatures store. I can't imagine he didn't, I get the impression Palladium just didn't want to do *kid stuff*. They only do serious, thinking man's games.
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Jan 28, 2019 00:42
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Sampatrick posted:There's part of me that really likes having feats that are super bad in general but can be very good if you Timmy it together with a couple other feats If it *did* signpost that poo poo, though, then I'd be much happier with it. Out of all the glut of 3.X OGL products, one thing which was badly missing - and, so far as I can tell, would have been entirely legal - was a book which just reprinted the Players Handbook minus the bits you weren't allowed to touch and added in a commentary giving pointers on the effective use of the feats and skills and general character design advice.
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Jan 28, 2019 01:48
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Warthur posted:Those bug the poo poo out of me unless it's really clearly signposted in the rules that this is the case. Sure, that short-circuits the whole "developing system mastery" thing, but I increasingly feel that "You've got to spend the time to develop system mastery" is an attitude which doesn't value the time of participants. Pathfinder has a book like this and it's a boring stinky egg that no one ever actually bought. It's a hardcover, it's like a complete waste and it only uses stuff from the Core Rulebook, so it's painfully boring.
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Jan 28, 2019 01:53
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Agent Rush posted:Do you mean the Legacy edition of Ironclaw, or the new edition Omnibus? The new one.
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Jan 28, 2019 02:24
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Ferrinus posted:4e actually works just fine for popcorn fights - a few years ago I played a month-long weekly game of 4e that largely involved going theough an as-written 3e dungeon and it was a lot of fun. You open up a door, there’s three kobolds behind it, you crush em in a couple combat rounds and roll right along. The challenge was using your encounter and utility powers to ablate, block or dodge every hit and thus win without losing any hp, since any hits the popcorn got on you would eat into your surge reserves. IME, 4e works best if you mash all of the popcorn fights into a Dungeon Delve style super encounter. Basically, after steamrolling the three kobolds or whatever, you just keep going. Roll a bunch of rooms all together into a single encounter, instead of setting up the battle map over and over again.
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Jan 28, 2019 02:34
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Warthur posted:Those bug the poo poo out of me unless it's really clearly signposted in the rules that this is the case. Sure, that short-circuits the whole "developing system mastery" thing, but I increasingly feel that "You've got to spend the time to develop system mastery" is an attitude which doesn't value the time of participants.
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Jan 28, 2019 03:00
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FWIW, I ran Keep on the Shadowfell, the first third of the Scales of War adventure path, and the 4e remake of the Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan linked together as a campaign, and with the exception of "boss" fights, I never felt that the combats "dragged" or that we weren't making a lot of progress for every 2 hour session. I suppose one of the things to keep in mind is that unless you're engineering situations and outcomes that skip combat entirely, other versions of D&D don't really have shorter fights.
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Jan 28, 2019 03:08
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D&D 4e is about the combats. You can avoid combats that drag by having interesting, diverse characters, and interesting, diverse fights. A key here is to *not* do what the intro module does, which is introduce the (bullshit and terrible to be the first thing you discover in a game when you're learning the rules) kobolds and their gimmick, and then make the players do a half dozen more fights with just a few variants on kobolds. I ran a pretty successful PbP D&D4e game on these forums using only Primals characters at 1st level to start, and a key to keeping the game going and fun was that every encounter was different in terms of enemy abilities, number (lots of minions, no minions, etc.), terrain variety, and so on. The players could engage with their own character abilities and with the unique encounter and solve the puzzle (usually one with multiple possible solutions) of "how do we beat this encounter well." I'd say if you're not happy with most of your D&D 4e play time being a bunch of fights, most of which aren't "boss" fights, then either A) poor adventure design, or B) D&D 4e isn't your game.
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Jan 28, 2019 03:52
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There's nothing wrong with 4e that can't be fixed by adapting it into a video game (with a short, curated list of meaningful feats).
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Jan 28, 2019 03:55
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Tendales posted:IME, 4e works best if you mash all of the popcorn fights into a Dungeon Delve style super encounter. Basically, after steamrolling the three kobolds or whatever, you just keep going. Roll a bunch of rooms all together into a single encounter, instead of setting up the battle map over and over again. This was a maptool game, so we were all moving around one big map that the DM would just reveal sectors of and then plop tokens down onto. We were free to short rest or whatever between fights, for the most part, so it wasn't one giant endurance test or something. It was just regular old dungeon crawling. Sadly, removing fog of war from a big pre-existing map is trickier in real life, but I could see just having a white board with grid squares on it that you quickly draw on with erasable marker.
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Jan 28, 2019 06:44
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slap me and kiss me posted:This is super true. My love letter to 4e is exceptionally cut down, and I'm still looking at 70 combat powers and 15 non-combat powers across four species, classes, and backgrounds. And that's with a conscious decision to jettison the feat and item treadmills. This makes me want to look back at the Log Horizon TTRPG which seemed to draw heavily from 4e in terms of character mechanics and categorization of the classes but was obviously built for more limited arcs or one-shots rather than more extended campaigns. Also, it was a game that allowed multiple regular sized characters share spaces including enemies. I did an F&F years and years ago. https://projects.inklesspen.com/fatal-and-friends/xelkelvos/log-horizon/
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Jan 28, 2019 21:12
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I make art for tabletop games and I'm launching a crowdfunding campaign where I'll be selling pre-made art, stock art and various bits and pieces. Is there a good thread to post this in? The TG Kickstarter thread doesn't feel right.
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Jan 29, 2019 00:33
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ravenkult posted:I make art for tabletop games and I'm launching a crowdfunding campaign where I'll be selling pre-made art, stock art and various bits and pieces. Is there a good thread to post this in? The TG Kickstarter thread doesn't feel right. If it's TG related it can go in the KS thread, don't worry about it!
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Jan 29, 2019 01:01
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https://twitter.com/mikemearls/status/1089998298377707521 are you kidding me how is this real
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Jan 29, 2019 09:30
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