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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Laws actively categorizes certain players as Watcher types who just want to be at the table and hang out socially and don't particularly want to participate actively in the game. In a different game, I played a librarian wizard out raising funds for the library. He was the puzzle-solver in a party of thump-it types, but wasn't risking his neck if there was no benefit to the library in it. (Or so he said. In practice? Support mage.) I followed along, only coming to the fore if there was an ancient machine that needed figuring out or whatever. I'm perfectly happy with that, just like I'm perfectly happy with sub-par builds, as long as I get to hang out, make jokes, eat some snacks and support the shinier characters.
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Oct 9, 2019 19:46
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Tutorializing shouldn't occupy the same design space as playstyle, period. This isn't about tutorials. It's about giving players a range of simple vs difficult characters. This is good, so long as they are balanced... about as well as possible. Having more flexibility is inherently more powerful, so it's a tough act, but it's possible. What's unfortunate imo, and what we've beaten to death here (repeatedly) is that "simple character" should not mean "fighty person what fights with sword" 4e did a pretty good job of this, actually. Not necessarily with, like, the Slayer, but with the Elementalist.
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Oct 9, 2019 19:51
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Yeah, Elementalist was a really good design. you got 3~ish powers, one of which was a generic ranged nuke, and a few you picked, presumably one was an AOE and another was a defensive. You got to use them at need, and occasionally buff them with your encounter resource. You're doing COOL MAGIC THING and it doesn't take much mental bandwidth to work out your turn. Slayer is just not good. You have basic attack and stances, and your encounter attack buff. I don't think they even got utilities, which Elementalist did.
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Oct 9, 2019 20:09
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homullus posted:I don't think this is quite right. There should be martial and magical classes that have a simple way of doing cool things. "I hit it" will never compete with "I burn it" because burning has out-of-combat applications in the theater of the mind. This is one of the problems with how D&D has moved on: if you go back to Basic, both the Fighter and the Thief have important out-of-combat applications of their abilities that have been lost. The choice between lockpicking or bashing down a door was very important, and back then a lot of doors were just plain old stuck and needed to be wrenched open. "I hit it" used to actually mean a lot in the game's narrative.
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Oct 9, 2019 20:13
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I don't actually think the Essentials classes were meaningfully simpler or easier to play than the real classes. Even Elementalist - the actual execution of your per encounter bonus thing was actually really fiddly and had you, like, adding specific squares to your aoe burst templates and resolving slides for multiple enemies at once or whatever. You didn't have dailies to track, but you did have an increasing list of often-situational passive bonuses and the actual horrible, grindy, and offputtingly complex parts of 4e - items and feats - were still there in full force.
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Oct 9, 2019 20:15
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LuiCypher posted:And when you complain about that to someone who plays nothing but D&D, they always insist that it's 'balanced' because "you can keep trying with physicality, but you actually expend a resource with magic" while forgetting that the way D&D handles rests and spells consistently allows these characters to completely negate the consumption of that resource. A lot of that comes from the feeling of playing your very first wizard. Back in 3.0/3.5 before at wills were introduced , you start your day, pop off a few spells ( poorly chosen because of a lack of system mastery), miss because you have no BaB or Dex, then if you hit the enemy, they get a chance to save. once you've blown your few spells for the day you just kinda feel useless, untill you learn enough to just pick save or die, save or suck, or spell with straight up no save, because it's not very fun to run around with a useless crossbow trying to protect your 1D4 hitpoints. it's very dissatisfying. I always hear people complain about those gamers, and i've seen some in the wild, but i never play with them because i know our styles are usually so different one side is just not going to really enjoy the game. it's rough because i know some OK guys, i just don't like their style of game.
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Oct 9, 2019 20:19
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dwarf74 posted:What? No, that's not what this is about. I think the bigger issue isn't so much "games should/shouldn't have simpler classes" so much as "games shouldn't designate an entire playstyle/fantasy as The Simple Zone" which is more or less what most versions of D&D do, i.e. there are 80 pages of sickass spells for wizards and then fighters get like two pages of anemic maneuvers. This would apply even if the roles were reversed and fighters had 80 pages of stuff and wizards had two, it's not a matter of which particular player fantasy gets the short end of the stick, nobody should be getting the short end by default in a well-designed game.
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Oct 9, 2019 20:28
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Ferrinus posted:I don't actually think the Essentials classes were meaningfully simpler or easier to play than the real classes. Even Elementalist - the actual execution of your per encounter bonus thing was actually really fiddly and had you, like, adding specific squares to your aoe burst templates and resolving slides for multiple enemies at once or whatever. You didn't have dailies to track, but you did have an increasing list of often-situational passive bonuses and the actual horrible, grindy, and offputtingly complex parts of 4e - items and feats - were still there in full force. Yes, the bad parts of 4e character generation were still absolutely an issue. But in-play, it worked as designed for that niche. Kai Tave posted:I think the bigger issue isn't so much "games should/shouldn't have simpler classes" so much as "games shouldn't designate an entire playstyle/fantasy as The Simple Zone" which is more or less what most versions of D&D do, i.e. there are 80 pages of sickass spells for wizards and then fighters get like two pages of anemic maneuvers. This would apply even if the roles were reversed and fighters had 80 pages of stuff and wizards had two, it's not a matter of which particular player fantasy gets the short end of the stick, nobody should be getting the short end by default in a well-designed game. 
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Oct 9, 2019 20:34
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I'm straight-up saying simpler classes shouldn't be a thing. Either make a game where everyone's mechanical decisions matter and significantly affect the outcome of contests, or make one where nobody's do. Either is perfectly fine -- not every game needs to be a test of skill in the first place -- but if you try to mix and match you end up invalidating the effort that goes into good play.
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Oct 9, 2019 20:47
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I'm straight-up saying simpler classes shouldn't be a thing. Either make a game where everyone's mechanical decisions matter and significantly affect the outcome of contests, or make one where nobody's do. Either is perfectly fine -- not every game needs to be a test of skill in the first place -- but if you try to mix and match you end up invalidating the effort that goes into good play.
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Oct 9, 2019 20:56
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like one of the huge fundamental problems with D&D in general is this assumption that it needs to be the one game for all tables and all people at those tables, which just leads to horrendously muddled design, watering down the things it actually does best, and (in some editions, at least) tons of fiddly little subsystems for things it didn't really need to simulate in the first place you wouldn't put a lone playbook in a PbtA game that has D&D-level system mastery requirements and gets to be stronger than everyone else in exchange, because that would be horrible for everyone else at the table, and you wouldn't put the same playbook in and make them do all that work just to keep up with the status quo either, because that's obviously pointless and awful for the person who thought that playbook sounded cool
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Oct 9, 2019 20:57
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I'm straight-up saying simpler classes shouldn't be a thing. Either make a game where everyone's mechanical decisions matter and significantly affect the outcome of contests, or make one where nobody's do. Either is perfectly fine -- not every game needs to be a test of skill in the first place -- but if you try to mix and match you end up invalidating the effort that goes into good play. I don't understand your argument; complexity isn't the same thing as "everyone's mechanical decisions matter and significantly affect the outcome of contests". You can make a class with significant choices (both during character building and encounters) and a lot of impact on encounters with a single page of powers, and a useless class where nothing you do matters that has 100 pages of dumb, needlessly-specific, mostly fluffy spells. There's no reason you can't mix simple classes and complicated ones and still achieve a semblance of balance, while making people who both like and don't like 100 page spell lists happy. The problem is that it's a lot of work to get right, and contingent on all the designers being on the same page (rather than say, half of them thinking you should reward system mastery with fun gameplay). 3E had the latter problem with loving Monte making significant choices, 5E has the former one with a small, lazy devteam outsourcing large chunks of their development process to basically focus groups, and 4E decided not to try (and just made every class, at least for most of its lifespan/prior to Essentials, fit a single design template). The reason that edition of D&D doesn't exist is that nobody's really tried to make it, not that it's impossible.
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Oct 9, 2019 20:59
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I dont care if there's a little brother class but it should be identifiable and expected to exist in the same design space. And it shouldn't he the loving Fighter, that's part of the core trinity. It's iconic. Just add a class called the Minimalist and let them roll a D20 every round and do damage to whatever target. If they were at range it must have been a ranged attack! Opportunity attacks are something you should give a poo poo about only if you give a poo poo about character stuff anyway. They get an encounter power called "Attack and Stuff" which is the same as the base attack but they also get to add an extra sentence about what happens when the attack hits, and a daily power called "More D20s" where they roll 4 d20s and can do the damage to four targets or the same target four times or whatever. Done. Honestly my problem with the kid brother class has always been that it's infantilizing and part of the gatekeeping nerd narrative. Everyone who ever proposes one figured out how to play D&D just fine without one, and people aren't getting dumber, you're just getting crankier. theironjef fucked around with this message at 21:06 on Oct 9, 2019 |
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Oct 9, 2019 21:02
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No. 1 Apartheid Fan posted:I don't understand your argument; complexity isn't the same thing as "everyone's mechanical decisions matter and significantly affect the outcome of contests". You can make a class with significant choices (both during character building and encounters) and a lot of impact on encounters with a single page of powers, and a useless class where nothing you do matters that has 100 pages of dumb, needlessly-specific, mostly fluffy spells. "Make a class for your little brother / drunk friend who is unwilling and possibly unable to engage with the game's mechanics" isn't a statement about avoiding complexity, it's a statement about avoiding depth. I don't really care about or want 100 pages of unnecessary fluff spells, and making system mastery hinge on build decisions rather than play decisions has always been a dubious way to make a deep game anyways. I do care if you make a class that contributes as much as anyone else without ever having to make a decision, or -- equally bad! -- that never gets to make a decision, but then to compensate never gets to make an impact. theironjef posted:Honestly my problem with the kid brother class has always been that it's infantilizing and part of the gatekeeping nerd narrative. Everyone who ever proposes one figured out how to play D&D just fine without one, and people aren't getting dumber, you're just getting crankier. It's nerd social fallacies either way. You can just play other games (or do some other activity altogether!) with someone who has no interest in the one your group is playing and who just wants to hang out.
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Oct 9, 2019 21:07
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:It's nerd social fallacies either way. You can just play other games (or do some other activity altogether!) with someone who has no interest in the one your group is playing and who just wants to hang out. Well that and it's pretty rare that there's actually anyone that wants the little brother class for themself. It's always someone going all theoretical helicopter parent. And there's a tone of patronization to it. All "Well if these dumb new generations of podcast likers and females are going to play this game, we better put a bunch of safety railings and training wheels all over it. Otherwise they'll get hysterics!" theironjef fucked around with this message at 21:22 on Oct 9, 2019 |
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Oct 9, 2019 21:08
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I mean, I get where Tuxedo Catfish is coming from, the whole "we need to make a thing that's for the Kid Brother of the group" narrative really only ever seems to surround roleplaying games, nobody ever really tries to say that board games have to accommodate a variety of desires for complexity and engagement all within the same game, if someone at the table brings out Gloomhaven or Kemet or Millennium Blades then there's a certain expected minimum amount of engagement required to participate and if that's not for you that's cool, but there isn't an option for someone to play one of those games with a pared-down set of rules/choices just for the sake of being there, and if those games tried to do that it would be to their detriment.
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Oct 9, 2019 21:19
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dwarf74 posted:I think you're confusing simplicity of play with simplicity of build. In play, even a 17th-level Elementalist (played by a very casual player) had pretty simple and extremely effective turns. No, I don't agree. At level 17 an elementalist is looking at something like eleven options each turn - three at-wills, those three at-wills again but with escalation this time, and something like five utility powers. A regular sorcerer replaces the three dual-mode at-wills with two at-wills, four encounters, and three dailies, and their soul of magic may or may not be more fiddly interactive (dragon soul gives you less to remember overall than your elementalist resistances do, wild soul demands your attention constantly but you knew what you were signing up for). Elemental escalation has enough effects and subclauses that planning out its use resolving it on top of one of your regular at-wills is probably more complicated on average than firing and forgetting a given sorcerer encounter spell. Now, all of this in mind, I would still say that both sorcerers can take extremely simple and effective turns. ...................exceeeeeept that we suddenly have to factor feats, items, allies and enemies into account, and that poo poo's all there whether you have one power or twenty. Feats and items and paragon path passives and allied bonuses and enemy auras and whatever all combine to turn any high-level 4e combat into a labyrinth of unclear optimizations and game-mechanics interactions pretty much regardless of how many powers are written down on your character sheet. Even when I was playing a wizard whose spellbook was about twice the size it should have been, and who had the power to hot-swap like four or five spells per adventuring day, I took very simple and effective turns... after accounting for the fact that this enemy explodes on death and this other enemy has a vulnerability to damage for the next turn and this zone over here is heavily obscured and deals damage if you end your turn in it and whatever the hell else. This will all absolutely still happen to a 17th level elementalist unless the other players + DM are taking care to make sure that the entire game, not just the one character class handed off to the new player, has been smoothed down and purged of all but a few fiddly tactical considerations. In practice what actually happens is that the more engaged players end up making sincere, heartfelt suggestions as to how the elementalist should spend their turn. My takeaway has always been that the actual way to streamline 4e combat and make it inviting to new players is to dramatically down on feats and items, especially the ability of feats and items to produce circumstantial bonuses or rules exceptions. This is why the Essentials classes represented such enormous missteps - imagine if the Slayer or Elementalist did get Dailies, but didn't get feats (or maybe got one feat per tier or something), instead simply getting a bunch of baked-in numbers bonuses that obviated the need to take any feats. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 21:28 on Oct 9, 2019 |
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Oct 9, 2019 21:21
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I totally agree with Tuxedo Catfish here on the general problem with having a simple class for the unengaged player, incidentally. I think it has bad knock-on effects both on your kid brother and on the more engaged and committed players. Like, okay, I've picked all my feats and powers and am carefully using them together in roughly the intended way and therefore eking out, for simplicity's sake, 50 damage per round on average. You show up with your champion fighter equivalent which just makes one attack each round for 50 damage. What the hell did I go to all that trouble for? What am I, an rear end in a top hat? And there's no good way to square this circle. Maybe I deal 55 damage on average as a reward for my effort. Well, that's unfair to my kid brother. Maybe I deal 50 damage per round but have more options which means that I'm also able to deal 25 damage to two targets or take a gamble to maybe deal 100 damage in one round and 0 in the next but therefore take down an enemy before they can launch their superattack right after my turn - well, that's still unfair to my kid brother, because I've got versatility he doesn't. Maybe I have that versatility but am only dealing 40 damage per round on average, in which case we're back to me and my brother being basically balanced except I'm having to do vastly more work for some reason. Not good, folks!
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Oct 9, 2019 21:26
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theironjef posted:Honestly my problem with the kid brother class has always been that it's infantilizing and part of the gatekeeping nerd narrative. Everyone who ever proposes one figured out how to play D&D just fine without one, and people aren't getting dumber, you're just getting crankier. The phrase "kid brother class" is infantilizing, but differentiating the complexity of classes isn't. I can play every edition of D&D just fine - I've spent years GMing and playing all of them starting with 2E - but I don't like Wizards because taking advantage of their strengths requires a lot of bookkeeping, and I don't feel like keeping up with a big spellbook and bringing a stack of paper to the game, tracking what I'm memorizing every day, etc. Some people do like doing that stuff, and absolutely love collecting spell scrolls like Pokemon and organizing an index card for all the ones they know. Nobody has to be or feel dumb about it. The one of those guys in my group doesn't think I'm dumb, I don't think he's weird or a mutant for wanting to do that stuff, and at the end of the day we can both have fun in 4E (where I can just sort of pick poo poo and go when I level and function fine) or 5E (where some of the other classes are basically as powerful and fun to play than Wizards, with less bookkeeping). In an ideal world, we'd all be playing the RPG we want to play most with people who are equally happy with it. In the real one, many people have a choice of one or two popular games their whole group knows, or not roleplaying with their friends at all. I can't "fix" the heroic fantasy grognards I'm friends with, and I'd rather play a game I don't like very much (5E D&D) with them than not play at all, or deal with the problems that come from finding a group of strangers and hoping that (even if their taste in games is similar) they aren't unreliable, bigoted, or just lovely nerds with annoying personalities. Ferrinus posted:I totally agree with Tuxedo Catfish here on the general problem with having a simple class for the unengaged player, incidentally. I think it has bad knock-on effects both on your kid brother and on the more engaged and committed players. This does make some sense, tho, and I'm not suggesting that I have some oracle's insight into the issue, only that it's slightly more complicated than "just find the game that's actually perfect for your group and play it/find the group that's actually perfect for how you want to roleplay", both of which are incredibly difficult and sometimes impossible Baku fucked around with this message at 21:30 on Oct 9, 2019 |
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Oct 9, 2019 21:27
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Kai Tave posted:I mean, I get where Tuxedo Catfish is coming from, the whole "we need to make a thing that's for the Kid Brother of the group" narrative really only ever seems to surround roleplaying games, nobody ever really tries to say that board games have to accommodate a variety of desires for complexity and engagement all within the same game, if someone at the table brings out Gloomhaven or Kemet or Millennium Blades then there's a certain expected minimum amount of engagement required to participate and if that's not for you that's cool, but there isn't an option for someone to play one of those games with a pared-down set of rules/choices just for the sake of being there, and if those games tried to do that it would be to their detriment. It's a lesson that took me a really long time to learn, so some of my vitriol here is self-directed.  Like I used to constantly drag my casual gamer friends into competitive PvP stuff, people with less free time than me into trying out new MMOs, etc. It was stupid and selfish -- and way more likely to be on my initiative than theirs, because in reality, most people don't actually go around thinking "I would like to participate in this thing that I don't like or care about at all just because my friends are" unless they're insecure teenagers or something, in which case it would probably be better to tell them it's okay not to like something than silently encourage thinking that way. theironjef posted:Well that and it's pretty rare that there's actually anyone that wants the little brother class for themself. It's always someone going all theoretical helicopter parent. And there's a tone of patronization to it. All "Well if these dumb new generations of podcast likers and females are going to play this game, we better put a bunch of safety railings and training wheels all over it. Otherwise they'll get hysterics!" Absolutely.
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Oct 9, 2019 21:29
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Ferrinus posted:And there's no good way to square this circle. Maybe I deal 55 damage on average as a reward for my effort. Well, that's unfair to my kid brother. Maybe I deal 50 damage per round but have more options which means that I'm also able to deal 25 damage to two targets or take a gamble to maybe deal 100 damage in one round and 0 in the next but therefore take down an enemy before they can launch their superattack right after my turn - well, that's still unfair to my kid brother, because I've got versatility he doesn't. Maybe I have that versatility but am only dealing 40 damage per round on average, in which case we're back to me and my brother being basically balanced except I'm having to do vastly more work for some reason. Not good, folks! You can dampen the problem a little bit by having extremely strict role preservation (e.g. only one class can provide healing, only one class can draw aggro, only one class has truly significant burst damage, to use one example that I'm not fond of but which everyone here has probably experienced). There's less stepping on toes if nobody is doing the same task. However, then you're right back at the problem of certain aesthetics (cleric vs. fighter) or play styles (support vs. DPS) being set aside for the incapable or disinterested, despite the fact that those things can be appealing in themselves for people who want to engage with the main premise of the game. It also causes balance issues; an extremely "flat" class provides the same contribution whether everyone in the group is a newcomer (just because you're motivated doesn't mean you've already mastered it, after all) or everyone in the group is an expert. So you have a situation where in the newbie group the simplified class is an unstoppable powerhouse, but in the experienced group they lag behind as everyone else is optimized to the gills, coordinating power usage, using limited resources at exactly the right time, etc. Keeping balance "bounded" so the game doesn't completely fall apart at either low- or high-level play is already difficult, but if every class -- let's say "responds to mastery" -- in a comparable way, then it's at least theoretically possible to achieve balance at all levels of play. If some classes do and others don't, it becomes literally impossible, and you have to pick a particular skill level where things will work right and abandon the others. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 21:47 on Oct 9, 2019 |
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Oct 9, 2019 21:40
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This even goes beyond responsiveness to mastery. Generally speaking I think it's okay for some classes or options to be fiddlier than others in various ways - like, in Vampire: the Requiem 1e, if I start with Vigor 3 and can just give myself +3 Strength, and you pick Animalism 3 and get three different rolled, activated powers for interacting with animals, that's fine. It might be cool, but isn't necessary, for each of us to have the exact same number of buttons with the exact same usage limitations on our character sheets. However, we should both be engaging with some kind of shared pacing/rationing/decision-making mechanism so that we can be counted on to be tested, exhausted, or rewarded in broadly parallel ways and all care about navigating the same basic kind of conflict. In Vampire, we've both got health tracks and blood pools and ultimately both have to decide whether to hoard or spend our vitae, and on what. In D&D, the universal timer/rationing mechanism/source of challenge are the combat encounter and the adventuring day. Everyone's got hitpoints which deplete with danger and are restored by the day, but if not everyone's got powers which are also depleted in response to challenge and restored by the encounter or by the day you start to run into both mastery and timing issues.
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Oct 9, 2019 21:50
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Anyways, my preferred solution is: 1. don't make simple classes 2. include pregen builds as part of your product, with explanations of how to play them and why you might want to. let players ease into fiddly customization at their own speed, especially if your game is also complicated to play during the session. 3. if you are going to have build-based system mastery, at least try to eliminate choices that are always wrong 4. consider not having build-based system mastery, especially in games that resemble modern D&D where you're likely to play one character for a very long time. any skill that a game tests should give you prompt, regular feedback on what you're doing right or wrong and numerous chances to correct it. 4a. the shorter the delay between action and feedback, the better 4b. the clearer the positive or negative outcome, the better 4c. the sooner you can put what you learned into action, the better. this allows you to have really deep, skillful games without making the learning process itself an unapproachable nightmare 5. foster a culture of mentoring and encouragement (and, especially, emphasize how this differs from backseat driving)
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Oct 9, 2019 21:55
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The correlary to part 2 is that the pregens need to be good to inform your decision making process. How many 3.5e pregens have trap feats and middling stat spreads?
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Oct 9, 2019 22:01
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Kurieg posted:The correlary to part 2 is that the pregens need to be good to inform your decision making process. even just pregens that are equally naive and comparable in power level is better than none or in other words, you don't need to necessarily have discovered every broken interaction in your game and built them into the pregens, but they should at least be characters that people actually ran in playtests
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Oct 9, 2019 22:05
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Ideally the "simple" class would be the first one you design, since it's baseline. If you're designing a game and want characters doing X damage as a baseline, have a character that consistently does exactly X damage. Suppose you want a game where killing a 100HP bear should take one person four rounds. Start with a guy who can deal 25 damage 100% of the time. Then maybe have a class who does 50 damage half the time and a wizard who can dispel bears (but it takes four turns.) But leave your baseline in for people who don't especially want to engage with combat. I mean this is a huge simplification (and mostly the germ of an idea,) but if you start with outlining what you want classes to be generally capable of, you can use exactly that for ground floor easy access.
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Oct 9, 2019 22:10
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Kurieg posted:The correlary to part 2 is that the pregens need to be good to inform your decision making process. I want to say literally all of the ones that appeared in official products.
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Oct 9, 2019 22:11
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Kai Tave posted:I mean, I get where Tuxedo Catfish is coming from, the whole "we need to make a thing that's for the Kid Brother of the group" narrative really only ever seems to surround roleplaying games, nobody ever really tries to say that board games have to accommodate a variety of desires for complexity and engagement all within the same game, if someone at the table brings out Gloomhaven or Kemet or Millennium Blades then there's a certain expected minimum amount of engagement required to participate and if that's not for you that's cool, but there isn't an option for someone to play one of those games with a pared-down set of rules/choices just for the sake of being there, and if those games tried to do that it would be to their detriment.
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Oct 9, 2019 22:52
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why not just provide for each class a 'default route' of highlighted powers that provided a simple, straightforward playstyle.
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Oct 9, 2019 22:54
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Impermanent posted:why not just provide for each class a 'default route' of highlighted powers that provided a simple, straightforward playstyle. This and pregens are both extremely good ideas if done well, but you have to be wanting to make a game that doesn't remake D&D's many missteps enshrined as sacred cows, and it turns out a bunch of people think that lopsided class design is more of a feature than a bug.
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Oct 9, 2019 23:04
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Impermanent posted:why not just provide for each class a 'default route' of highlighted powers that provided a simple, straightforward playstyle. Also to re-emphasize this point, every time I've encountered someone who just wants to play a 'simple' class and not think about it, they pick a wizard or something and just want to shoot fireballs and dump magic.
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Oct 9, 2019 23:42
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Yeah the punchline is that it was perfectly possible to make a simple "I hit it with my sword" fighter straight out of core PHB1 4e if you really wanted that, or a twin blades spamming ranger, or a blaster wizard, and it didn't necessitate the existence of some Essentials-esque simplified classes to do so.
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Oct 9, 2019 23:51
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I wrote an entire new class for myself in 13th Age because I wanted to play a mage without having to deal with spell lists and fiddly build decisions.
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Oct 10, 2019 00:10
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there's no need for a simple class if you want to play a "simple" wizard make a wizard then just make dx+int basic attacks all day No. 1 Apartheid Fan posted:The phrase "kid brother class" is infantilizing, but differentiating the complexity of classes isn't. I can play every edition of D&D just fine - I've spent years GMing and playing all of them starting with 2E - but I don't like Wizards because taking advantage of their strengths requires a lot of bookkeeping, and I don't feel like keeping up with a big spellbook and bringing a stack of paper to the game, tracking what I'm memorizing every day, etc. then don't. bring 2 spells that you memorize in every slot and go to town. forcing simple classes creates an extra layer of design dificulty for 0 benifit
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Oct 10, 2019 00:38
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Isn't the simple version of the wizard just the sorcerer? Back in college I was the only one who ever picked Wiz over Sorc, cause no one wanted the extra book keeping of choosing spells daily. I loved the fiddly stuff though, I was the guy who Artificers were made for.
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Oct 10, 2019 00:47
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WaywardWoodwose posted:Isn't the simple version of the wizard just the sorcerer? Back in college I was the only one who ever picked Wiz over Sorc, cause no one wanted the extra book keeping of choosing spells daily. I loved the fiddly stuff though, I was the guy who Artificers were made for. An actual "simple wizard" on par with something like the fighter would be something more like the warlock whose magic was mainly "a big ol doombolt" that got progressively bigger as you leveled up, sorcerers don't have the whole memorization thing going on but the abilities they have at their disposal still have vastly more juice under the hood than a fighter that has been built by the game designers themselves to be as stifled as possible and whose input into things largely boils down to spamming a particular thing (full attacks, tripping people, charging people and then full attacking them) over and over again as their one and only answer to everything.
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Oct 10, 2019 01:06
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Impermanent posted:why not just provide for each class a 'default route' of highlighted powers that provided a simple, straightforward playstyle. Just wanted to chime in that one of the big problems with the Essentials classes was that for all of the "locked-in" character progression that it gave you, it still expected you to choose from 4e feats anyway with very little guidance.
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Oct 10, 2019 01:24
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Ferrinus posted:No, I don't agree. At level 17 an elementalist is looking at something like eleven options each turn - three at-wills, those three at-wills again but with escalation this time, and something like five utility powers. A regular sorcerer replaces the three dual-mode at-wills with two at-wills, four encounters, and three dailies, and their soul of magic may or may not be more fiddly interactive (dragon soul gives you less to remember overall than your elementalist resistances do, wild soul demands your attention constantly but you knew what you were signing up for). Elemental escalation has enough effects and subclauses that planning out its use resolving it on top of one of your regular at-wills is probably more complicated on average than firing and forgetting a given sorcerer encounter spell. You're welcome to your theoretical opinion. I on the other hand have seen the impact switching over to scouts and elementalists had on a couple of players who'd been playing since 2008 - it completely freed them up. Your mistake is to look at the entire option space to try to find the best move rather than to try to find an effective enough move to be able to pull their weight. I literally don't think the Slayer ever changed stances when we used one, and that really didn't matter because a flat +1 to hit (or a flat damage bonus) is always a good stance. Could someone good at tactics have got 10% more damage out of the slayer? Possibly, but they didn't really care and nor did the rest of the table. The point is the choices are all so simple they can be handled in a split second and there really isn't much to remember (even if the Slayer is using Rain of Blows). Neither Slayer, Scout, nor Elementalist ever causes analysis paralysis in my experience Slayer decision path:
In short every question the slayer asks other than "Who do I hit?" is trivial - and most players can answer that. Meanwhile even the simple twin-striker has all those encounter and daily powers they have to decide they are using at the same time they decide who to attack. Likewise elementalists - deciding whether to make a ranged burst or a ranged single target attack is not a complex decision. Just look at the battle map, and you do not get the analysis paralysis. Either people are standing close enough together you bring down the AoE or they aren't and you bring down the single target zap. These are very distinct choices and there aren't many of them. The math may be more complicated for the combined attack but you do not get analysis paralysis among a significant subset of players. And analysis paralysis is what really slows things down. Edit: Making the simple classes engage with the mess that was the feats system (more feats in 4e than 3.5 by the end) - but that wasn't such an issue as they could be guided there outside play and some feats are more active than others. Tuxedo Catfish posted:you wouldn't put a lone playbook in a PbtA game that has D&D-level system mastery requirements and gets to be stronger than everyone else in exchange, because that would be horrible for everyone else at the table, and you wouldn't put the same playbook in and make them do all that work just to keep up with the status quo either, because that's obviously pointless and awful for the person who thought that playbook sounded cool So you're saying that the Gunlugger has just as much to juggle as the Hardholder, and if the Hardholder manages to bring their entire resources to bear the Gunlugger, powerful as it is, is just as powerful. Right. As a friend of mine summarised it "Apocalypse world works on the 'Mo' people, mo' problems' scale." Yes, you don't have D&D-esque system mastery but you certainly have more to juggle. Kai Tave posted:I mean, I get where Tuxedo Catfish is coming from, the whole "we need to make a thing that's for the Kid Brother of the group" narrative really only ever seems to surround roleplaying games, nobody ever really tries to say that board games have to accommodate a variety of desires for complexity and engagement all within the same game, if someone at the table brings out Gloomhaven or Kemet or Millennium Blades then there's a certain expected minimum amount of engagement required to participate and if that's not for you that's cool, but there isn't an option for someone to play one of those games with a pared-down set of rules/choices just for the sake of being there, and if those games tried to do that it would be to their detriment. One huge difference is that a game of Kemet or Millennium Blades is over in an evening. A game of D&D can run once a week for literally years. Gloomhaven is more D&D-like in terms of length as well as everything else - and some classes are absolutely simpler than others in play. neonchameleon fucked around with this message at 01:31 on Oct 10, 2019 |
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Oct 10, 2019 01:29
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neonchameleon posted:One huge difference is that a game of Kemet or Millennium Blades is over in an evening. A game of D&D can run once a week for literally years. Gloomhaven is more D&D-like in terms of length as well as everything else - and some classes are absolutely simpler than others in play. I think that deliberately simple classes would end up being more of a straitjacket than a benefit specifically because of this. I imagine someone playing this consistently for this long would quickly learn the game and become comfortable with the standard complexity level of the game, so it'd be better to start players in this position off with expandable classes with "complexity tracks" (like optional rules you can take into account for more flexibility) or suggested progression paths or power picks that would suit different playstyles or levels of experience, rather than separating the simple class variations out from the complex ones.
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Oct 10, 2019 01:37
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neonchameleon posted:You're welcome to your theoretical opinion. I on the other hand have seen the impact switching over to scouts and elementalists had on a couple of players who'd been playing since 2008 - it completely freed them up. If you simply want to make an effective enough move to pull your weight, you can do that on a regular fighter (ranger, I guess, if we’re strikers) or a regular sorcerer who just picks the [W] expression with the biggest number on all their powers and fires them off in sequence. I think the Slayer genuinely brought something new to the table by letting players burn their per-encounter resources after rather than before confirming a hit, but the decisions an elementalist is making can easily be the same decisions a dragon sorcerer is making with the exact same flowchart - one or many? Okay, hit ‘em with the biggest number I still got in the tank - with the exception that they now get to decide something is worth a daily rather than just an encounter attack. Like, I’ve had the opposite experience - I played a high level Scout for a bit and it had an incredibly complicated set of moving parts once my items, feats, and paragon path were all factored in. A regular rear end ranger would have been much more straightforward - but in either case, simply picking a thing off the list and pressing the attack button would have constituted an effective enough move because, assuming someone’s done your feats and gear up properly, 4e’s math is pretty tight. Put another way, Essentials classes were presentation wins, not design wins, and their innovations should have been added to real character classes that could use daily attack powers - even if it was an option for every single daily to just be HONOR STRIKE (Free Action, Daily) Add 3d10 + 1d10 per six character levels to the damage one target takes when you hit them.
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Oct 10, 2019 01:49
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