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Warthur posted:The problem with the shade CR is that CR tries to present a mathematical assessment of danger, but the incorporeality aspect of shades in 3.0 (I can only find this aspect of them in the 3.0 SRD, not the 3.5 one) is not easy to numerically weigh because it depends a lot on party makeup and magic items obtained, the former of which is theoretically for the players to choose and the latter of which is random. Yeah the thing is I don't even think the Shade is well balanced if you only take PC parties into account, ignoring stuff like shadepocalypse speculation. Another example of this is 5E's Intellect Devourer which I'm sure plenty of people argue is well balanced when going up against player characters and not random peasant NPCs except it sure doesn't seem to be judging by the number of "yeah I got instantly killed by an Intellect Devourer with an effect that requires high-level magic to fix" stories out there.
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Jan 26, 2021 12:05
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:i'm a little more lenient about CR than 3.5's other various design failures because, like, i can think of maybe one or two TTRPGs literally ever that get encounter budgeting right and aren't direct descendants or retroclones of D&D 4E the problem with CR is precisely that there are a number of effects in the game that cannot be expressed as pure math a long time ago I tried to create baseline/templated monster stats against PCs, and I figured that the most mathematically predictable PC type was a Champion Fighter, so I went with that, and if all you're measuring is the PC's attack roll bonus, damage rolls, AC, and health, it's very easy to reverse engineer what the monster's AC "should" be as it's being attacked by the Fighter, and what the monster's HP "should" be so that it dies in four (or five or six) hits, and what the monster's own attack and damage should be relative to what you can expect a PC to have, and so on. and you can do this for every level of the PC, since you also know exactly what a PC is gaining every time they level up the problem is that a level 10, or 15, or 20 Fighter's capabilities are so much more predictable than a level 10, or 15, or 20 Wizard's capabilities, and if the latter is capable of [waves hands at the entire spellcasting chapter], how do you quantify that?
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Jan 26, 2021 12:25
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I'm not sure if this belongs in the 40K thread, this thread, or the scam thread. This escalated quickly: tl;dr: Scammer tries to scam ranking points(!) and maybe prizes from Australia ITC. Yells racism when caught. quote:Aushammer - Australian Wargaming
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Jan 26, 2021 13:04
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Warthur posted:The problem with the shade CR is that CR tries to present a mathematical assessment of danger, but the incorporeality aspect of shades in 3.0 (I can only find this aspect of them in the 3.0 SRD, not the 3.5 one) is not easy to numerically weigh because it depends a lot on party makeup and magic items obtained, the former of which is theoretically for the players to choose and the latter of which is random. https://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/shadow.htm It's in the subtypes and the special qualities (from the subtype) Also they're not shades, shades are a spell/a specific FR monster in 3e.
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Jan 26, 2021 20:12
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Arivia posted:https://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/shadow.htm But that's not really what we're talking about : You can get information on everything a monster can do by looking at its stat block, but we're talking about the CR system, which is supposed to be a quick, at-a-glance indicator of how challenging a monster is in battle. You're supposed to be able to look at the CR and get an idea of how tough a fight this monster will be without looking at its stat block. And, of course, that doesn't solve the problem gradenko brought up that monster design in most editions of D&D (Especially 3rd) is a weird mixture of mechanical and narrative abilities that aren't always in sync
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Jan 26, 2021 21:42
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Pathfinder 2e does relatively well at the CR thing (barring janky stuff in the first adventure books finished before they finalized the core rules) by doing basically the same thing D&D 4e did, where creature level determines the acceptable range for its stats and bonuses to things, rather than the D&D 3.x and 5e 'come up with a monster and then try to eyeball a CR for it'.
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Jan 26, 2021 22:07
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KingKalamari posted:But that's not really what we're talking about : You can get information on everything a monster can do by looking at its stat block, but we're talking about the CR system, which is supposed to be a quick, at-a-glance indicator of how challenging a monster is in battle. You're supposed to be able to look at the CR and get an idea of how tough a fight this monster will be without looking at its stat block. And, of course, that doesn't solve the problem gradenko brought up that monster design in most editions of D&D (Especially 3rd) is a weird mixture of mechanical and narrative abilities that aren't always in sync I was just responding to the specific quoted comment where Warthur said they couldn't find the 3.5 shadow listed as incorporeal. I linked their stat block and explained where incorporeal is mentioned in it, and also noted that a shade is a different monster with different statistics in 3e, which is what is being discussed. I'm not defending CR at all.
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Jan 26, 2021 22:43
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Roadie posted:Pathfinder 2e does relatively well at the CR thing (barring janky stuff in the first adventure books finished before they finalized the core rules) by doing basically the same thing D&D 4e did, where creature level determines the acceptable range for its stats and bonuses to things, rather than the D&D 3.x and 5e 'come up with a monster and then try to eyeball a CR for it'. 13th Age also does CR well with a similar approach. The system also tacks on some other nuances with the monster type and optimal moves. In the end, it's still a Bull poo poo approximation for new monsters. But I can articulate the bull poo poo better.
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Jan 27, 2021 05:56
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I can deal with a system whose encounter math is basically the shrug emoji, I grew up with 2e D&D’s tummy-feels and wing it. But if you’re going to give me a number I want it to relate to something, anything, and not be like dress sizes where it’s a 3 ??? (kilojoules? acres? hands? nanometers per second? pounds sterling?).
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Jan 27, 2021 07:27
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The problem, with 5e reintroduced, is "tradition" requires these monsters have abilities that don't fit on any scale and can just instantly neutralize a PC or require some special weapon/defense and it only works if you put them in the right context and give the players some way of anticipating that there's gonna be a medusa ahead, etc. 4e only made it work because they made sure those abilities were scaled, there was no "you need a +1 weapon or better" bullshit, etc.
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Jan 27, 2021 07:56
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Maxwell Lord posted:The problem, with 5e reintroduced, is "tradition" requires these monsters have abilities that don't fit on any scale and can just instantly neutralize a PC or require some special weapon/defense and it only works if you put them in the right context and give the players some way of anticipating that there's gonna be a medusa ahead, etc. I once saw the suggestion that you could make those abilities work like Dark Souls status effects - they build up a meter which ends with the status effect, so you can have a weak gorgon that petrifies much less efficiently than a powerful one. It'll never happen but it's a cool solution!
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Jan 27, 2021 08:20
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Maxwell Lord posted:The problem, with 5e reintroduced, is "tradition" requires these monsters have abilities that don't fit on any scale and can just instantly neutralize a PC or require some special weapon/defense and it only works if you put them in the right context and give the players some way of anticipating that there's gonna be a medusa ahead, etc. By which you mean 4e vaguely flirted with good game-design, maybe they made out at a party once. I love 4e, with all it's feat-bloated warts, but it god drat tried so I want to give it credit for that. I will never not get angry at someone trying to sell me a book and then I'm the bad guy cause I remember middle school math and can snap it over my knee. I'm not being some weirdo number-wonk! I'm using the same basic math and critical thinking I use every day! If a crunchy RPG that could bother to make it so I can't make something loving broken at character creation came out, I'd be so down. But until then I'll just do narrative systems cause gently caress that.
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Jan 27, 2021 08:34
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Joe Slowboat posted:I once saw the suggestion that you could make those abilities work like Dark Souls status effects - they build up a meter which ends with the status effect, so you can have a weak gorgon that petrifies much less efficiently than a powerful one. PF 2e does a thing here that plays into its multiple degrees of success, where any "Incapacitation"-trait ability used against a creature of the same level or higher has the end result downgraded by one step. This works fairly well to let casters dunk on minions while preventing instant loss both ways with equal-level midboss enemies. It still leaves the hole for higher-level enemies to screw with PCs, but it's also very up front that even a single level+1 creature is boss fight territory. Xiahou Dun posted:If a crunchy RPG that could bother to make it so I can't make something loving broken at character creation came out, I'd be so down. But until then I'll just do narrative systems cause gently caress that. I'll mention PF 2e here again. The closest thing to 'broken' at the moment is the gnome flickmace fighter meme build, and even that about maxes out at triplocking a single enemy at a time. It's even avoided the need for math fix feat taxes aside from the somewhat undertuned alchemist class, which already got some aggressive errata rewriting on that front. Roadie fucked around with this message at 08:56 on Jan 27, 2021 |
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Jan 27, 2021 08:54
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Xiahou Dun posted:If a crunchy RPG that could bother to make it so I can't make something loving broken at character creation came out, I'd be so down. But until then I'll just do narrative systems cause gently caress that. Extend that to encounter creation and it'd be a game I would run forever.
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Jan 27, 2021 08:55
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I weren't speaking to a game in specific just the community as a whole and I get real mad at the idea I'm some kind of power gamer who's looking for secret hacks by knowing how addition works.
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Jan 27, 2021 08:57
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Xiahou Dun posted:I weren't speaking to a game in specific just the community as a whole and I get real mad at the idea I'm some kind of power gamer who's looking for secret hacks by knowing how addition works. You should have seen how mad the Exalted community got at Jon Chung, for years, for pointing out that the Exalted 2e system as written would eventually instantly kill most PCs who didn't have a specific defensive build.
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Jan 27, 2021 09:00
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Joe Slowboat posted:I once saw the suggestion that you could make those abilities work like Dark Souls status effects - they build up a meter which ends with the status effect, so you can have a weak gorgon that petrifies much less efficiently than a powerful one. This is pretty much how 4E did it, except using saving throws against progressively worse conditions (slowed, immobilised, petrified) instead of a numerical meter. It even modelled how strong the effect was by the use of different condition progressions. A basilisk made you go through a progression of conditions as you failed saves, whereas a medusa petrified you straight away and the saves were used to see if the effect became permanent.
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Jan 27, 2021 09:01
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Xiahou Dun posted:I can deal with a system whose encounter math is basically the shrug emoji, I grew up with 2e D&D’s tummy-feels and wing it. But if you’re going to give me a number I want it to relate to something, anything, and not be like dress sizes where it’s a 3 ??? (kilojoules? acres? hands? nanometers per second? pounds sterling?). That’s the exact problem though. 3.5’s CR does actually have a meaning - it’s roughly a classification of Hit Dice and special abilities to level of difficulty. The tough thing is that it doesn’t have a check for how good those special abilities are or a great sense of them correlating to average party level. It’s halfway there? Until very late in 3e (the PHB2? Definitely the Magic Item Compendium) you don’t have a list of what a character should have in terms of magic items at a given level (a prescriptive one that says you get a +1 weapon now). There are ways for lower level or same level parties to destroy shadows but they aren’t guaranteed to be something every party does have (magic missile, turn undead, healing spells). And there’s not a specific cut out in 3.5’s monster math saying incorporeal monsters are 1 CR higher, only appear at level 5+, etc. The shadow is the specific meme example of this system not working, same as intellect devourers are in 5e. But it does at least have a system in the first place. CR does mean something in 3.5 but it’s solely just a formula based off of Hit Dice and creature type. It’s the other parts you still need to look at, which mean you can’t just drop it in for nothing.
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Jan 27, 2021 09:09
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So it's a made up garbage number that has the exact same success. And I'd least like to not be lied to. If the number doesn't actually help me run a game, then it's a bullshit number and I don't care. If you want to give thirty dollars a month I can give you a random dice. I'll even do it from literally any computer that will try to spit out a random time.
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Jan 27, 2021 09:59
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Xiahou Dun posted:By which you mean 4e vaguely flirted with good game-design, maybe they made out at a party once. I mean on this score they succeeded pretty well- there's nothing in the Monster Manuals that's way over-levelled or under-levelled because even the pre-MM3 monsters are built on a scale. The problem was with specific numbers, HP, defenses, etc.
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Jan 28, 2021 01:05
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Roadie posted:You should have seen how mad the Exalted community got at Jon Chung, for years, for pointing out that the Exalted 2e system as written would eventually instantly kill most PCs who didn't have a specific defensive build. To be fair, this logic also got extended to NPCs in the name of simulationism - and you only really needed a 'paranoia combo' against someone else with a paranoia combo (or similar multi-filter instant death weapons). Now, that didn't mean the system was fine, it was riddled with holes you could drive a yeddim through, but the way Paranoia Combat caught on was not improving the game or helping make homebrew fixes, just using the broken system to make ever more broken builds. The initial discovery of paranoia combos should have inspired everyone to go 'well that's hosed, we need to change how this works' instead of variously denying it was real or finding a way to exploit it to the utmost. E: The real issue that Chung identified in the previous edition of Exalted was simple: If your attack costs more to launch than to instantly and flawlessly cancel it, the attack loses ground. So you want to get perfect defenses and a weapon that will likely kill anyone you hit with it, and then do boring standard attacks and protect yourself with perfect defenses. Once you do that, you start building a 'paranoia combo' that builds from there which make the whole scenario more efficient and make it even more true that doing anything flashy was a bad idea. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 04:43 on Jan 28, 2021 |
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Jan 28, 2021 04:33
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dwarf74 posted:Well you see 7th Sea 2e - uhm 7th Sea 2e was a failure on so many levels. It didn't even produce a playable game, although I'm rather selfishly glad to have gotten PDF copies of all my old 1e books for cheap.
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Jan 28, 2021 06:02
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Liquid Communism posted:7th Sea 2e was a failure on so many levels. I did like a lot of the fluff writing and the setting and appreciated that it's inclusive as all get out. But the system is just a trash fire and I don't know how they thought they were gonna make money with that business plan.
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Jan 28, 2021 07:29
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Xiahou Dun posted:I did like a lot of the fluff writing and the setting and appreciated that it's inclusive as all get out. What happened with 7th Sea 2e's business model? And what was up with the system?
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Jan 28, 2021 07:34
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Omnicrom posted:What happened with 7th Sea 2e's business model? And what was up with the system? I’d have to refresh my knowledge to explain in full, but the Kickstarter basically was pay X once and get infinite books. Which leads to great initial hype but tanks revenue long term. (Possibly loving that up but it’s the gist to my knowledge.) And the system was Shadowrun 6 levels of not even functioning at all ever. I wanted to like it but at no point did it ever work even a bit. It’s straight up unplayable.
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Jan 28, 2021 08:11
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7th Sea 2 sold their books for super cheap but the books themselves were poo poo so it was a scenario where nobody won. Unless you like 7th Sea lore I guess.
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Jan 28, 2021 08:16
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Xiahou Dun posted:I’d have to refresh my knowledge to explain in full, but the Kickstarter basically was pay X once and get infinite books. Which leads to great initial hype but tanks revenue long term. (Possibly loving that up but it’s the gist to my knowledge.) The pledge that broke them was this: Kickstarter posted:Pledge US$ 40 or more That's the main book and all the splatbook PDFs generated by the KS for $40, plus all the 1e pdfs. Yeah. Duelists are the big thing for me. You know, the iconic thing in a swashbuckling game. They made them use an entirely different combat system that plays resource management games with turns, and ends up in a situation where if you lose the first round of a duel you inevitably death spiral. While still being exponentially more efficient at combat than a non-duelist. Meanwhile a couple of non-duelists with a brace of pistols each can just x out a major villain in a round. Laying out all the math on it is exhausting, but there's a good rundown here: https://www.7thsea2e.com/port/forum/duelists-problems-and-solutions
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Jan 28, 2021 10:40
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Has John Wick ever created a functional game on his lonesome? I remember getting frustrated at a number of points of utter incoherence in Houses of the Blooded and eventually just walking away from a game mid-campaign. He seems to just view games rules as "good enough" when they work in his head and then never examines or stress tests them in any meaningful way. Which is fine if you're writing games for yourself and your friends, but not a great idea when you're putting yourself up as a game auteur who putting out products for sale.
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Jan 28, 2021 11:27
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Made worse in this case that he rushed to print to hit GenCon for no particular reason, so didn't playtest -anything- and was missing basic rules for this sort of game like 'how do ships work'.
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Jan 28, 2021 12:06
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Joe Slowboat posted:To be fair, this logic also got extended to NPCs in the name of simulationism - and you only really needed a 'paranoia combo' against someone else with a paranoia combo (or similar multi-filter instant death weapons).
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Jan 28, 2021 12:43
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I mean, even to get to problems with duelists, the rest of 7s2e needs to be playable or make any sense at all. It doesn't even get that far, imo
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Jan 28, 2021 14:24
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I played 7th Sea 2nd edition for about a year and a half, and while the system wasn't great it was pretty interesting. Combat works a lot better if you just use the same system as all the other systems in the game. Not great, but better. As someone who played a fun game of 7th Sea don't play 7th Sea. Hacking out the combat system in a game of swashbuckling adventure is peak  Honestly, good on John Wick for totally bamboozling Chaosium into taking on the insane burden of finishing the 7th Sea books they don't have money for, as well as an entire other game line set in Not Asia. All while all the biggest fans have already payed for all of it as well as abandoning the game totally. Even at its initial wave of hype on release before reality set in the game didn't have any interest beyond backers.
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Jan 28, 2021 14:49
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Liquid Communism posted:The pledge that broke them was this: Ah, but you see a competent crowdfunder will know when to ignore pledges as written.
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Jan 28, 2021 14:56
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Lord_Hambrose posted:I played 7th Sea 2nd edition for about a year and a half, and while the system wasn't great it was pretty interesting. Combat works a lot better if you just use the same system as all the other systems in the game. Not great, but better. As someone who played a fun game of 7th Sea don't play 7th Sea. My quick and dirty "fix" for 7th Sea 2E is as follows:
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Jan 28, 2021 15:20
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Zereth posted:To my understanding, part of the issue was "a weapon that will likely kill anyone you hit with it" was actually pretty easy to get, since you started with the same old seven Storyteller System health levels, and scaling that up was a big investment that took away from "actually doing things" and had lovely returns. Pretty much any artifact weapon would instantly turn a PC into hamburger if a hit connected. They're very easy to access at character creation. Another part of the issue was that it's not like this is some pun-pun esoteric build that grabs thing piecemeal from dozens of different supplements and involves abstract, high-level understanding of the system or loose interpretations of the rules. This is a a starting character literally looking at the source material and corebook being like, 'Cool! I want to be an Invincible Sword Princess!' and/or the GM being like, 'The other character attacks you with his magical sword'. 'It's easier to defend than attack, so turtle while throwing out as many lethal attacks as possible' is not a super hard concept to grasp. 3E sorta tried to fix this by making your initiative your hit points, but I admit I haven't run it, it seems like a nightmare to track.
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Jan 28, 2021 16:53
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Zereth posted:To my understanding, part of the issue was "a weapon that will likely kill anyone you hit with it" was actually pretty easy to get, since you started with the same old seven Storyteller System health levels, and scaling that up was a big investment that took away from "actually doing things" and had lovely returns. It was a horribly multifaceted problem. Firstly, the fiction of Exalted meant that it was presented as likely that player characters would run into, with some frequency, enemies like Dragonblooded Exalted armed with Grand Goremauls. Which was an enemy-weapon combination that could kill a standard PC in one blow - and if the blow connected but didn’t kill, chances were the PC would end up with a nasty penalty to their defenses, greatly increasing the chance of being turned to a thin paste the next time the enemy NPC attacks. Additionally, poisoned weapons—a thing in the setting’s fiction that a PC could reasonably be expected to encounter—were likewise so deadly that even being nicked by a weak weapon could be a serious threat to a standard PC. There was also something about rapidly stacking multi-defense penalties that meant facing multiple enemies at once was really, really nasty. This meant that for a PC to have a reasonable chance of survival in an encounter with enemies the fiction presented as what you should be doing, you needed a way to just no-sell any attack aimed at you. Importantly, you needed to be able to no-sell all of them, because if you met anyone with a powerful attack, or a poisoned weapon, or the ability to gang up on you, there was a serious chance any attack they made would cut you into thin strips of Exalt-kebab. On top of this, surprise attacks could bypass your ability to activate your no-sell ability at all, so if, in a setting inspired by fantasy novels where assassins can be hired off any street corner, your ST found it reasonable to have you encounter an assassin, rogue, or even an unexpected brigand losing arrows from behind a bush, you could be turned into a very dead pincushion in an instant. Luckily, there was a thing termed a “surprise negator”, which allowed you to never be weak to suprises. So what you had to do to have a better than 50/50 chance of not dying in a combat encounter the fiction of Exalted expected you to have was to, every turn of combat, activate a surprise-negator and a no-sell defense. This combination was called a “paranoia combo”. This was expensive, and could only be done/could be done cheapest by spending Willpower points, which was also the currency you used to activate your other cool abilities. Which resulted in a tension where, in an incredibly deadly game, using cool abilities cut deeply into your not-dying-reserves. Houseruling the problems away was, of course, also a solution—but houseruling away a multifaceted problem like this is pretty difficult, and the simple solution (enemies don’t gang up, don’t ambush, don’t use poison, and only have weak attacks that can’t kill you in a single hit) was rarely going to be satisfying because of how much of the setting’s fiction it invalidates.
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Jan 28, 2021 18:07
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Liquid Communism posted:Meanwhile a couple of non-duelists with a brace of pistols each can just x out a major villain in a round.
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Jan 28, 2021 18:21
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Liquid Communism posted:That's the main book and all the splatbook PDFs generated by the KS for $40, plus all the 1e pdfs. $310 worth of product* for free. This is why I didn't balk when TORG Eternity's all PDF level went to $80. *Not, you know, good product but product. And the art was top notch and couldn't have been cheap.
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Jan 28, 2021 18:44
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LatwPIAT posted:Houseruling the problems away was, of course, also a solution—but houseruling away a multifaceted problem like this is pretty difficult, and the simple solution (enemies don’t gang up, don’t ambush, don’t use poison, and only have weak attacks that can’t kill you in a single hit) was rarely going to be satisfying because of how much of the setting’s fiction it invalidates. There was the additional problem that houseruling itself was deeply difficult, with the obvious, simple houserules inevitably breaking things elsewhere. "Don't touch perfects until you address lethality" was a catchphrase on the Exalted forum for most of 2e.
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Jan 28, 2021 18:56
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LatwPIAT posted:It was a horribly multifaceted problem. There were so many levels to it too! Exalted basically has five character classes, Fighter, Cleric, Wizard, Rogue, and Diplomat, and each class sort of has it's own special thing. In particular, the Wizard 'special thing' was a shield you activate to negate damage. It actually makes perfect sense from a thematic point of view, since taking damage would interrupt spellcasting, but because of the way the shield interacted with the rules, it was better to allow weak enemies to hit you, negate the damage, then turn on one of your various 'fueled by pain' powers to recoup resources for your 'not-dying' combo. ...which had the net effect of making it so that if you wanted to be the best fighter, you played a wizard.
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Jan 28, 2021 19:29
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