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Does anyone remember Mearls going on and on during the development of 5E about the existence of modular rules that your could plug into the "D&D Next" engine to simulate other editions of D&D? Like, there'd be a 4E rulesmod and an OD&D rulesmod and an AD&D2E rulesmod and so on? It was his way of deflecting criticism of what D&D Next was leaving out - oh, no, you 4E players aren't being abandoned, we'll have a reimplementation of the 4E way of doing things as a rulse variant, once we get the core books out the door! Trust me, it will be great! I wonder what happened to those? 
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Jun 29, 2020 00:02
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| # ? May 26, 2024 12:46 |
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e: nm
Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 19:57 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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Jun 29, 2020 00:03
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It's not uniquely bad, because there are several other editions of D&D that are also garbage. It does have the unique distinction of being the sole edition headlined by a man who pals around with a transphobic rapist and an American Nazi hiding in South America, and who actively helped them harass minority voices out of the industry (and worse).
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Jun 29, 2020 00:11
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Absurd Alhazred posted:I don't really see that. It seems like taking 3.5, streamlining it, and adding a few things from 4. That's functionally what ended up happening, but the entirety of the Next "playtest" was filled with poo poo like the fighter getting worse in every iteration because that's what they used to be like. You also had surveys literally asking which spells "feel the most like D&D." It's a hilarious lie to suggest that 5e is any kind of comprehensive edition that unifies each previous one. There was no design goal beyond Mearls wanting forums cred. FMguru posted:I wonder what happened to those? There was also the "no classes left behind" bit, that uh... lol. moths fucked around with this message at 00:14 on Jun 29, 2020 |
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Jun 29, 2020 00:11
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e: nm
Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 19:57 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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Jun 29, 2020 00:14
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Nobody is argueing that, it's literally what Mike Mearls stated his design goal was for 5e. That's why he spent six months getting paid to play every previous edition.
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Jun 29, 2020 00:16
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Absurd Alhazred posted:People can clearly read the previous editions or retroclones of them and see that's not the case. It's baffling to me to think that anyone seriously argues what you're saying. You’d think so but there’s a reason we all post here and not the other spaces on the Internet that think 5e really is the best combination of all D&D ever.
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Jun 29, 2020 00:17
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e: nm
Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 19:57 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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Jun 29, 2020 00:18
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It's frustrating because a better person maybe could have put together an edition that standardized all the D&Ds with the budget and time he was given. But instead he delivered 3x quickstart rules and copied some 4e homework (but changed so teacher couldn't tell.)
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Jun 29, 2020 00:24
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Speaking of 5e, can anyone confirm what I heard about WotC offering stores incentive / pressure to run D&D organized play? I don't want to doxx my source so I'm going to be vague as poo poo and leave it at this. (That's about all I know though.) E: It wasn't just play aids and modules, it's a straight "here is money, push our poo poo in your store." moths fucked around with this message at 00:36 on Jun 29, 2020 |
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Jun 29, 2020 00:32
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I think they had organized play resources of various kinds? I don't know if they applied negative pressure. I remember the Exalted 2E dunk on 3E, though, now. That was hilariously stupid.
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Jun 29, 2020 00:34
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moths posted:It's frustrating because a better person maybe could have put together an edition that standardized all the D&Ds with the budget and time he was given. standardizing every edition of D&D would result in a bad game even if you actually delivered on that premise; it would be a total waste of time you could make a good game by picking exactly one of Basic, 4E, or (with significantly more effort) 3.5 and tightly focusing on the things that distinguished each of them. but that would require prioritizing design over capturing as much of the market as possible
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Jun 29, 2020 00:46
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Nessus posted:I remember the Exalted 2E dunk on 3E, though, now. That was hilariously stupid. How long did that go on? I feel like someone at WW (or was it OP by that time?) realized it was stupid and pulled it. I remember seeing the one ad for a nanosecond on RPGnet and then nothing.
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Jun 29, 2020 00:53
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GreenMetalSun posted:How long did that go on? I feel like someone at WW (or was it OP by that time?) realized it was stupid and pulled it. I remember seeing the one ad for a nanosecond on RPGnet and then nothing.
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Jun 29, 2020 00:57
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Ferrinus posted:I would say it was, actually, but with the underlying assumption that - as proved by Pathfinder's success and the preponderance of online argument - the 3.5E faction was the biggest and most important part of the playerbase and had to determine the baseline of the game, and that people who liked 4E could be satisfied by the inclusion of such things as the Thunderwave spell, the Battlemaster subclass, and slightly-to-moderately cleaned up game math and action economy balance. If you're looking for them you can actually find a ton of nods to 4E throughout 5th edition, but, as I - a genius - predicted years ahead of 5E's release, it's mostly QoL innovations repurposed to benefit spellcasters. Honestly, I think that 3.5 contributed nearly the least to 5e. 5e was an attempt to roll the clock back and produce an alternative to the mostly-forgotten 3.0, and it did it by putting an oD&D magic system on top of an only slightly modified 4e engine with 4e fluff. It uses bounded accuracy (basically in 4e), a 4e like skills system, a 4e like hit point system, spell specialisation in which the benefit of specialising is to be able to go above and beyond with the same abilities rather than easier to learn and getting more of the same, and more. Meanwhile the spells come more from oD&D than 3.X or even 2e. There is for example none of the nonsense in 3.X about fireballs being able to melt soft metals (because they were trying for a physics engine and really screwed it up) or even the 2e nonsense about "a fireball covers this many cubic feet". There's none of the rules-as-physics or even the item creation that so overshadowed 3.X. And there's the sharp change in the casting that is much more oD&D than 3.X. And they both rein in the 3.X buffing play style (with concentration) and do at least some blurring of the muggles/magic users divide as, for example, with the Shadow Monk. My description of 5e is therefore that it's an attempted retroclone of 2e starting by taking oD&D and putting it on to the 4e engine while adding a lot of 4e's fluff. 3.5 fans like it because 3.0 was attempting to put 2e onto an at least vaguely modern engine.
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Jun 29, 2020 01:02
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e: nm
Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 19:58 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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Jun 29, 2020 01:13
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I miss prestige and multicalssing
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Jun 29, 2020 01:24
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4e does not use bounded accuracy: the scaling of 4e works out such that low-level enemies (or even enemies just 2-4 levels lower) are going to be greatly outmatched and will have just about no chance of winning against the higher-level target. Whereas a goblin in 5e is ""always"" going to be dangerous even against a level 15 player, a level 3 goblin in 4e is not a threat just five levels later - they mechanically are not a challenge even "the plot" makes you face one, and if you do have to face one and have them be challenging, the DM would have to create a higher-level, higher-statted "dire goblin" reskin or whatever. 5e also does not necessarily borrow 4e's skill system: 5e's skill system is based on a 3.5e variant rule, and it's far more likely that this was the inspiration, given that we already know that healing hit dice was also lifted from Unearthed Arcana. 5e also does not use 4e's hit points: starting at maximum HP at level was already the standard rule for 3e:  Whereas 4e went even further by adding a flat amount of HP at level 1 specifically to make low-level combat have more of a buffer.
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Jun 29, 2020 01:25
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neonchameleon posted:It uses bounded accuracy (basically in 4e), quote:a 4e like skills system, quote:a 4e like hit point system, quote:spell specialisation in which the benefit of specialising is to be able to go above and beyond with the same abilities rather than easier to learn and getting more of the same quote:a lot of 4e's fluff Are you even serious? The Points of Light setting was tossed bodily out the window. Not a trace of it remains. Literally every 4e FR change was retconned so it didn't happen whether this made sense or not. 4e's fluff has been entirely memory holed. There is not a single trace of it remaining in 5e.
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Jun 29, 2020 01:46
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Neonchameleon is using "bounded accuracy" wrong (it's more like 4e has bounded accuracy within a given level and standardized accuracy growth generally) but I'd stick up for the rest of their post. In particular: * Skills: A simple binary of being trained or not with harder-to-dig-up flat bonuses is more similar to 4e's skill system than 3's * Hit points and healing: You do have a reserve of healing that lets you take more damage in a day than your total hitpoints imply, it just doesn't interact with magic at all for some stupid reason. Also, 5e is pretty good about not allowing you to simply subvert or ignore enemy hit points - lots of spells that used to be save-or-dies are just damage spells in 5e, for instance. Since there's basically nothing else going on in combat, this makes them incredibly boring, but there's a good intention somewhere under there. * Spells: 5e literally has a smattering of 4e spells in and, more importantly, brings forward the "sustain minor" mechanic as the "concentration" system. Many spell mechanics have learned a lot from 4e mechanics, like damaging or debilitating zones that care if you enter or end your turn inside them. Piloting, say, a Flaming Sphere actually involves many of the same considerations that using the spell back in 4e would have - it consumes your "minor action", you want to constantly rub it up against enemies, etc. The problem, of course, is that these are all peripheral elements of 4e. They're ways you could tell 4e was designed well, but not what made 4e good. What made 4e good was exactly the parity between class powers (fighters and wizards both get at-wills, fighters and wizards both get dailies) that 5e explicitly and emphatically repudiated from its very first announcements, long before we'd even seen a hint of its actual rules. This is why 5e is much more a descendant of Pathfinder than it is of 4e, although it's got a bunch of parts of 4e's corpse riveted onto its shell. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 02:07 on Jun 29, 2020 |
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Jun 29, 2020 02:03
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Ferrinus posted:* Skills: A simple binary of being trained or not with harder-to-dig-up flat bonuses is more similar to 4e's skill system than 3's Being "trained" in a skill in 3e means having a bonus equal to your level+3, (or half of that if it's a cross-class skill), and then all your non-trained skills don't get anything besides the ability modifier. Being trained in a skill in 4e means getting a +5 bonus to the skill, and then all your non-trained skills don't get that +5, but all your skills get the Half-Level Bonus. It's an important distinction because 4e's skill system is designed such that everything getting the Half-Level Bonus means that you always have a reasonable chance of passing a skill check, even for an untrained skill, if the ability modifier matches, and if you have some other feat bonus or a Utility power that you're willing to throw at it, whereas the lack of a similar "safety net" for 3e means that untrained skills are largely worthless. And it's this dichotomy that suggests, at least to me, that 5e's skill system is more similar to 3e's, than 4e's.
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Jun 29, 2020 02:19
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gradenko_2000 posted:Being "trained" in a skill in 3e means having a bonus equal to your level+3, (or half of that if it's a cross-class skill), and then all your non-trained skills don't get anything besides the ability modifier. See, I read all of that and come to the opposite conclusion, because while your untrained 5e skills don't get the half-level bonus, neither do your trained skills. Ability scores aside, and before we get into "double your proficiency" shenanigans that only come from specific class features, your 5e skill checks are always going to be within a maximum of +6 of each other - and that's at the high end, because proficiency bonuses start out at +2 or +3. And that's the same situation that existed in 4e: before you started deliberately piling on bonuses that came out of your race and feats and paragon path and items or whatever, you'd have some skills which were +5 compared to other skills (before ability scores came into play) and that was that. The 4e system is itself an obvious refinement/decluttering of the 3e system, because you're right, in 3e a trained skill effect just meant getting the "high" version rather than the "low" total, but the high and low total diverged from each other sharply and they were only most common end result of a tedious point-by-point allocation exercise. So I think there's actually a very clear progression from the lovely skill/good skill tiering of 3e, to the lovely skill/good skill tiering of 4e, to the lovely skill/good skill tiering of 5e, and that that's one of the arenas in which 5e can't be said to have meaningfully hosed up or turned back the clock on a good idea.
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Jun 29, 2020 02:24
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moths posted:Speaking of 5e, can anyone confirm what I heard about WotC offering stores incentive / pressure to run D&D organized play? I certainly haven't gotten any of that, but it could be a WPN Premium thing, and my shop is too small to have a chance at that. My experience has been that D&D is a real afterthought to WOTC when it comes to OP, to such an extent that I don't bother to report my weekly in-store games. It doesn't count towards any useful metrics, and I'd have to run it on AL rules rather than letting the DMs sort it out.
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Jun 29, 2020 03:23
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Well, didn't bother to report weekly games. Obviously it'll be years before it even comes up again here with the pandemic, sigh.
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Jun 29, 2020 03:26
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moths posted:Speaking of 5e, can anyone confirm what I heard about WotC offering stores incentive / pressure to run D&D organized play? That just seems like smart business sense. Unless they are also like saying, you can't sell competing products or something.
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Jun 29, 2020 03:34
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moths posted:Speaking of 5e, can anyone confirm what I heard about WotC offering stores incentive / pressure to run D&D organized play? When I started playing AL in 2015 or early 2016 they sent our store a bunch of nice print materials like faction folders for every faction with tent cards, stickers, and some other poo poo like the modules. I never heard about the store getting paid directly though... The player-facing goods looked like this: https://dungeonsmaster.com/2014/07/dd-encounters-tyranny-of-dragons-kit-preview/
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Jun 29, 2020 03:51
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Oh, I'd also be really surprised if they were doing something like that right now. They've been very good about supporting stores in not running events during the pandemic, and it seems really counter to that to try to bribe them into running stuff, unless it's over Discord or something. Not saying it's impossible, of course; WOTC sometimes seems to work at cross-purposes, but between hearing nothing about it and the ongoing pandemic, I am skeptical without a source. Generally other retailers get super whiny about any kind of benefit that only goes to premium stores.
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Jun 29, 2020 04:46
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FMguru posted:Does anyone remember Mearls going on and on during the development of 5E about the existence of modular rules that your could plug into the "D&D Next" engine to simulate other editions of D&D? Like, there'd be a 4E rulesmod and an OD&D rulesmod and an AD&D2E rulesmod and so on? It was his way of deflecting criticism of what D&D Next was leaving out - oh, no, you 4E players aren't being abandoned, we'll have a reimplementation of the 4E way of doing things as a rulse variant, once we get the core books out the door! Trust me, it will be great!
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Jun 29, 2020 13:02
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Zereth posted:I remember them, but I'm pretty sure they were, if you'll pardon the technical language here, "Lies", and there was no intention of ever following through. Excuse me, this is 5e and we only use natural language round here.
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Jun 29, 2020 13:10
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Man, with all the horrible poo poo that's coming out in the last 2 weeks, I'm expecting whatever happened between Graham and Rob Boyle at Posthuman to come out, and it to be loving horrifying. 
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Jun 29, 2020 16:57
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Arivia posted:Excuse me, this is 5e and we only use natural language round here. They were intentional falsehoods meant to mislead.
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Jun 29, 2020 17:16
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Ennie award nominees and judge's spotlight winners are up: http://www.ennie-awards.com/blog/2020-nominees-and-judges-spotlight-winners/ I'm mostly just salty that there's no award for me.
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Jun 29, 2020 17:18
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Kurieg posted:They were intentional falsehoods meant to mislead. Just the difference between a lie and a Lie action. Simple!
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Jun 29, 2020 17:26
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Glad Lancer got a win, but I'm surprised Comp/Con didn't get win anything. Hard to think of any online resource or accessory that comes even close to it.
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Jun 29, 2020 17:26
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Zereth posted:I remember them, but I'm pretty sure they were, if you'll pardon the technical language here, "Lies", and there was no intention of ever following through. When Mearls was trying to sell his modular rulesets he said, "4e fans will love our strategic module and its facing rules!", suggesting that even if it were not lies he had no idea what 4e fans actually liked and they would have been a disaster. So perhaps in this case "liar" is a better outcome than "incompetent". Not that Mearls isn't both already.
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Jun 29, 2020 17:36
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Kibner posted:Just the difference between a lie and a Lie action. Simple! The "Bonus action" terminology still annoys the hell out of me.
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Jun 29, 2020 17:39
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potatocubed posted:Ennie award nominees and judge's spotlight winners are up: http://www.ennie-awards.com/blog/2020-nominees-and-judges-spotlight-winners/ Ken and Robin Talk about Stuff isn't on the podcast list (wonder if they declined on the 'enough already' principle or fell off naturally.) So we'll finally have something else get gold this year.
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Jun 29, 2020 18:04
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potatocubed posted:Ennie award nominees and judge's spotlight winners are up: http://www.ennie-awards.com/blog/2020-nominees-and-judges-spotlight-winners/ The fact that Lancer didn't get an art nod is shocking.
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Jun 29, 2020 18:22
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Thranguy posted:Ken and Robin Talk about Stuff isn't on the podcast list (wonder if they declined on the 'enough already' principle or fell off naturally.) So we'll finally have something else get gold this year. Ken and Robin are hosting this year, so I suspect they bowed out of being nominees. Great to see Sleepaway up there as a Judges' Spotlight winner, it deserves it.
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Jun 29, 2020 18:26
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potatocubed posted:Ennie award nominees and judge's spotlight winners are up: http://www.ennie-awards.com/blog/2020-nominees-and-judges-spotlight-winners/ No Flying Circus, which is obviously some kind of bias and not just me being salty a game I've worked on isn't a nominee.
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Jun 29, 2020 18:26
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