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M. Night Skymall posted:Do people actually enjoy systems where you level up and like..roll a hit die and adjust your math? Picking things is fun. Customizing your character is fun. Most of the complaints I see about feats in PF2E are centered on the fact that general/skill feats feel completely worthless, or you're picking feats to regain abilities that were baseline in PF1E. Or they've explicitly made a feat to give you an ability that people assumed was baseline (like hitting something when you jump.) But also you get a ton of them, so once you shift your mindset over to just some occasional utility and not a defining feature of my character it's mostly fine. It mainly suffers from the competing design goals of "make every level interesting" and "gotta have 20 levels because that's how many levels there are." Also they decided not to give you all the super cool abilities until level 15, so you need 14 levels worth of feats that are on the power level of "You can hit something when you jump 5* feet into the air." (Pre-req feat to jump 5 feet instead of 3.) No, the complaint specifically with feats in both 3E and 4E is basically what you describe. It sounds like Pathfinder 2 might have avoided part of it by dividing out the really good feats from the rest, but in both 3 and 4 they were a huge mess of mostly minor bonuses, some of which were basically necessary, some of which were effectively useless, and many of which were really difficult to remember you had, because they come up rarely and you get so many. The result being a giant list of stuff to wade through when you’re new that mostly reduces to a checklist of getting the necessary stuff followed by a couple of picks from a very small subset of the list that might actually have some use. Picking powers in 4E (and the similar experience of picking spells in other editions) is fun and interesting, people are not saying “just do number go up,” they are objecting to a system that has generally presented a lot of false choices.
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Mar 25, 2021 16:14
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Ultiville posted:Picking powers in 4E (and the similar experience of picking spells in other editions) is fun and interesting, people are not saying “just do number go up,” they are objecting to a system that has generally presented a lot of false choices. This is why I didn't understand 4E Essentials deciding to "simplify" by cutting out power selection and keeping feat bloat. I mean I do understand it because the real goal was to try and attract grogs instead of making a more user-friendly game, but still.
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Mar 25, 2021 16:41
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whydirt posted:This is why I didn't understand 4E Essentials deciding to "simplify" by cutting out power selection and keeping feat bloat. I mean I do understand it because the real goal was to try and attract grogs instead of making a more user-friendly game, but still. The goal of Essentials was to kill the line. Mike Meals hated 4e and wanted to have carte blanche to make his own edition.
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Mar 25, 2021 16:49
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canepazzo posted:I remember my group (playing together since BECMI) at the time when 3E came out, we got the books and started poring through them; the very first feedback from my DM was "So, how do we get rid of attacks of opportunity? Also, where the gently caress is THAC0?" . I was more open to the changes, but I must admit it felt so weird, after having spent a decade+ learning the "backwards math" of 2E and earlier, to have consistent calculations. By the time 4e came out I was living in a different country and lost contact, but I would have been curious to know how my DM would have reacted to that edition. My group had the opposite reaction (having played mostly 2e). We loved the character options, and were thrilled that our house ruled "reverse THAC0" was now the standard. I knew a few people IRL who were hardcore 2e or even 1e purists, but they were very much the exception. The shift to 4e was fine for us (we're pretty much omnivorous ttrpg players) but keep in mind, WotC had their own people talking fairly negatively about 3e. Granted, it was deserved in most cases (save-or-suck, etc.) but it left a number of people feeling like "their baby" had been attacked. The change to the OSL and (from what I had been told) demands for publishers to stop producing 3e material if they wanted to publish anything 4e was a bad look, as well.
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Mar 25, 2021 17:06
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I wouldn't go as far to say that Mike Mearls was actively trying to kill 4e with Essentials, but WotC's developer churn at the time really made sure that all the designers that knew and understood why 4e was designed the way it was left and gave power to a lot of designers that really wanted a surface-level similarity to previous versions of D&D. Also, as someone who's been reading through Pathfinder 2e lately, I'll give them this much: it definitely feels like they're trying (and sometimes failing) to make each feat an interesting bit of mechanics instead of just making a bunch of boring circumstantial bonuses. I've only looked at the ancestry and class feats so far, so this could change, but their design ethos seems to be pointed in the right direction.
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Mar 25, 2021 17:07
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whydirt posted:This is why I didn't understand 4E Essentials deciding to "simplify" by cutting out power selection and keeping feat bloat. I mean I do understand it because the real goal was to try and attract grogs instead of making a more user-friendly game, but still. What's really sad about it, of course, is that the stated goal was good - 4E is legit overcomplicated. It's just that WOTC decided to listen to and appease the vocal grogs (neglecting a lesson they learned well with MTG) and brought on a team that was never going to consider the actual good way to simplify - targeting feats and ability scores. It's a huge pity, the Encounters program was phenomenally successful at my store and seemed really well-regarded in general, and then they cut it, had this giant content drought, and came out with a product theoretically designed to appeal to newbies, but in fact mostly designed to chase an audience they'd already lost.
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Mar 25, 2021 17:22
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yeah I don't think Mearls was deliberately trying to kill 4e with Essentials: he was just changing it to look more like 3e again to pander to the grogs
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Mar 25, 2021 17:35
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Ultiville posted:What's really sad about it, of course, is that the stated goal was good - 4E is legit overcomplicated. It's just that WOTC decided to listen to and appease the vocal grogs (neglecting a lesson they learned well with MTG) and brought on a team that was never going to consider the actual good way to simplify - targeting feats and ability scores.
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Mar 25, 2021 17:40
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4E has a lot of baggage in: (A) round-to-round bonus tracking (B) Equipment marts, something that plagues almost every d20 game (C) Any magical item that doesn't help your build being near worthless (D) Some broken core math that was "fixed" with feats (E) Far too many feats in particular (F) In general combat takes too long even with experienced groups. Like if I had a week where I didn't have time to plan anything I knew that planning two encounters in a session would take care of that problem. ... Setting aside other random problems that always pop up with games, like X class or power just being comparatively bad. It's not the perfect game, far from it.
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Mar 25, 2021 17:47
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Sampatrick posted:Not really, no. PF2e is just super complicated. I don't really understand the comparison at all. Kurieg posted:PF2e has stolen a lot of little things from 4e, but yes it's hilariously complicated now. Calling it 'hilariously complicated' is a huge stretch. The play experience is much less complicated than PF 1e in a ton of ways (no recalculating ability score effects, only a limited number of bonus types, no tracking what type of action each action is, debuffs use a streamlined set of conditions with distinct and easy-to-apply effects, you don't need to care about what type of action each action is, etc etc), the ancestries are much less complicated than 1e races even after accounting for ancestry feats (no more tracking a laundry list of random dwarf or gnome abilities), and "a feat every level" isn't any different from the net effect of 1e classes like vigilante or magus, since most of what were previously automatic class abilities are now wrapped in feat choices. Roadie fucked around with this message at 17:51 on Mar 25, 2021 |
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Mar 25, 2021 17:48
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Sodomy Hussein posted:4E has a lot of baggage in:
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Mar 25, 2021 17:57
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Terrible Opinions posted:4E's complexity was good though. Ability scores were not good complexity. The interaction of class ability bonuses with the other things done by ability scores was not consistently well-designed, and the way they bridged otherwise separate systems like skills and so forth was not an asset to the game; it just meant that you were mechanically punished for taking skills that were a good fit with your character concept or class but not a good fit with your character's primary attack stat. Everything they accomplished could have been accomplished better in other ways. Feats were terrible complexity. There were a mind-bending number of them most of which were useless, and the mechanical effect of all of them except the obvious math fixes was generally low enough that they weren't all that exciting or memorable, with a few exceptions. The interaction between feats and ability scores was especially egregious, with several interesting feats locked behind strange ability score requirements, making it impossible to take them if you weren't aware you wanted them when you first created the character, or difficult to take based on your class, without any obvious reason this should be so. Ability scores are very close to pointless within the system. At the very least they should have been expressed as the bonuses within the range those exist (-1 to 5 or whatever) instead of "3-18" but really 8-20, but really they should have just been removed. And feats at the least needed to find a clearer home in the system - you can pick out feats that serve multiple competing design goals pretty easily even if you throw out the obvious individual mistakes, like "garbage trap option," skill bonus no one will ever take," and "math fix we should have just bitten the bullet and retrofitted into the base game." Class feats generally are about creating a build, whereas general feats are not, and there's no reason for those to be the same component, really, given how the system works. There are people who will individually like anything, and 4E being a complex system was good. But some of the expressions of 4Es complexity were not good design, being overcomplicated, obtuse, and full of traps for the unwary. 4E also front-loaded a lot of the complexity - a new player has to pick ability scores, race, class, feat(s), and powers, many of which have long-term effects that are not at all obvious when you sit down to create it. You can maintain a complex and mechanically deep system without doing those things.
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Mar 25, 2021 18:42
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Man are we still arguing about 4e? Sheesh.
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Mar 25, 2021 18:47
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Terrible Opinions posted:see aside from (D) and some classes being just bad, I don't really consider any of those problems, and there is a fair subset of the RPG playing community that does enjoy all those things you listed as negatives. After all paradox games have a market. C) is truish, but only due to bad item design. The busted items left the fun items in the dust, so the busted combos were the "standard" E) is true. 4e's feats were garbage nickle and dime bullshit rendered superfluous by other parts of the system. I've said it before but they should have called martial powers "feats" and escaped that way. F) is strongly tied to A.
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Mar 25, 2021 18:51
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Terrible Opinions posted:4E's complexity was good though.
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Mar 25, 2021 18:54
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Splicer posted:Some of it was good, some was bad. Essentials ditched the good and kept the bad. This will forever drive me insane about Essentials. Imagine if they'd made a "simple" Fighter whose feats and items were picked out for you ahead of time so that you could just pick cool powers and drop right into the game!
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Mar 25, 2021 18:57
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I know we don't actually like talking about things that are going on in the industry in this thread but Lancer just opened up not only their rules but also their setting to third party developers, which seems really cool and a different approach than most companies. https://www.lancerrpg.com CitizenKeen fucked around with this message at 20:24 on Mar 25, 2021 |
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Mar 25, 2021 18:59
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Mister Olympus posted:Is there any detail on why this is? Was it just wanting to be the next judge dredd, re social commentary through schlock entertainment? Or an ideological thing? Countblanc posted:I brought this up in the chat thread a while back but I'm always shocked to learn that most people mentally default to "yes obviously we killed those bandits, what else would we have done?" Decades of shounen as my basis for fight scenes have taught me that even the most brutal fights end in scrapes, spitting blood, and changed morals, not dead bodies.
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Mar 25, 2021 19:20
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CitizenKeen posted:I know we don't actually like talking about things that are going on in the industry in this thread but Lancer just opened up not only their rules but also their seeing to third party developers, which seems really cool and a different approach than most companies. I assume you meant their setting? I’ll admit that I am actively not interested in the Lancer setting
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Mar 25, 2021 19:59
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Halloween Jack posted:IMO this happens not because games don't have good rules for what happens at 0 HP, but because they don't have good rules for managing the escalation from harsh words to fighting to lethal combat, nor deescalation in the other direction. In most games combat means that both sides pull out the most dangerous weapons they've got and fight until everyone on one side stops moving. It's not like good rules don't exist (DitV focuses on it) but they're not easy to integrate with a tactical combat system, which is why D&D had its morale rules stripped out. It's a combination of both rules and guidance certainly. There's also the factor that so much of D&D specifically is combat-facing that it struggles for a lot of groups if you go too long without a combat, which means you want to have some combats be relatively straightforward in terms of intro/outro, which can be hard with survivors unless you've specifically set player expectations that survivors running off means "you don't have to worry about them" rather than "you really have to worry about them." It's a particular problem when things like nonlethal/subdual damage are the default nonlethal outcome rather than flight, because prisoners are an incredible complication that you might well not want out of a pacing-based encounter.
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Mar 25, 2021 20:18
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thetoughestbean posted:I assume you meant their setting? Thanks for catching the typo, yeah. Regardless of your interest in the setting, I think it's reasonably unusual for an owner of an IP to just say "feel free to do whatever you want with our proper nouns, as long as you give us credit. Feel free to sell it, just slap this logo and acknowledgement on it."
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Mar 25, 2021 20:30
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CitizenKeen posted:Thanks for catching the typo, yeah. Well, not anything. They're pretty specific that they will not tolerate hatred toward protected groups in products using their setting, which is important. A little narrow for my taste since it implies it's acceptable to use Lancer's rules to create racist properties so long as you don't use their setting, but it's something at least.
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Mar 25, 2021 20:35
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Brb writing up the Book of Erotic Robot Fantasy and you'd better believe it has facing rules
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Mar 25, 2021 21:22
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Ultiville posted:It sounds like Pathfinder 2 might have avoided part of it by dividing out the really good feats from the rest, but in both 3 and 4 they were a huge mess of mostly minor bonuses, some of which were basically necessary, some of which were effectively useless, and many of which were really difficult to remember you had, because they come up rarely and you get so many. Sort of. PF2 has multiple categories of feat where some (Class feats) are generally better than others (Skill feats), but not always. There are far too many classes where the best option is to pick a particular class feat at level 1 and then do nothing but stack bonuses onto it, so that in play you have very few choices - many of the martials have this problem. But the other problem is that it's continuing with the 3e feat bloat where supplements are taking actions that should be relatively mundane and making them into feats, rather than just giving rules or suggested resolution methods for certain actions. I'm guessing this is someone's idea of how to balance things or possibly an effect of overly aggressive writer's guidelines. The worst example is that in PF2e, in order to roll a log (or other uneven surface) you are standing on in order to make someone else who is off-balance on it fall off, you require a specific level 4 feat which in turn requires an Archetype (= prestige class) which requires you to have been taught by a lumberjack - no fighter can teach you this, even if the surface you're rolling isn't a log - and the lumberjack must work in one very specific forest.
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Mar 25, 2021 21:34
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The conversation has kinda moved past this but the guy I learned D&D from had a post-combat phase where he'd declare "I walk around and stab everyone" to make sure they were dead and 13 year old me thought this sounded p. smart but looking back, man. Some years back in 3rd some bandits attacked us and two of them got away and half the group completely abandoned the adventure to make sure they tracked down and killed these motherfuckers. These two faceless losers armed with light crossbows were now a higher priority than the greatest villian for the crime of thinking they could be better than us. That's something I've noticed that motivates a lot of players, that anyone, man or beast, would dare gently caress with them. It causes a lot of problems, mostly revenge based but I've seen whole groups grind themselves to death against impossible odds and then get extremely real life mad that someone have the hubris to be stronger than the PCs.
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Mar 25, 2021 22:16
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hyphz posted:But the other problem is that it's continuing with the 3e feat bloat where supplements are taking actions that should be relatively mundane and making them into feats, rather than just giving rules or suggested resolution methods for certain actions. I'm guessing this is someone's idea of how to balance things or possibly an effect of overly aggressive writer's guidelines. The worst example is that in PF2e, in order to roll a log (or other uneven surface) you are standing on in order to make someone else who is off-balance on it fall off, you require a specific level 4 feat which in turn requires an Archetype (= prestige class) which requires you to have been taught by a lumberjack - no fighter can teach you this, even if the surface you're rolling isn't a log - and the lumberjack must work in one very specific forest. As a Minnesotan this is my heritage so you better have to learn how to do it from a goddamn lumberjack
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Mar 25, 2021 22:24
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Cat Face Joe posted:The conversation has kinda moved past this but the guy I learned D&D from had a post-combat phase where he'd declare "I walk around and stab everyone" to make sure they were dead and 13 year old me thought this sounded p. smart but looking back, man. Some of them may have been taught by bad gms that if they let anyone go they'll have a literal army of people out for revenge against them breathing down their necks the next day, regardless of whether or not that makes sense in the fiction, logistically, or practically.
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Mar 25, 2021 22:37
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hyphz posted:Sort of. PF2 has multiple categories of feat where some (Class feats) are generally better than others (Skill feats), but not always. There are far too many classes where the best option is to pick a particular class feat at level 1 and then do nothing but stack bonuses onto it, so that in play you have very few choices - many of the martials have this problem. It's not a feat bloat thing - Pathfinder 2e is very strongly written as "you can only do the things on your sheet according to the prescribed rules", and your feat choices expand what your sheet allows you to do, even for mundane choices. It's very much not a game for improvising or acting outside of the written rules, and that's honestly fine? It's a game design decision, it doesn't make it bad. If you're not rolling on logs all the time, just don't take the log roll feat. It's genuinely nowhere near as big a deal as you're making it out to be.
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Mar 25, 2021 22:42
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Cat Face Joe posted:The conversation has kinda moved past this but the guy I learned D&D from had a post-combat phase where he'd declare "I walk around and stab everyone" to make sure they were dead and 13 year old me thought this sounded p. smart but looking back, man. That is pretty smart, in isolation, if all the way over into cold-blooded calculus. quote:Some years back in 3rd some bandits attacked us and two of them got away and half the group completely abandoned the adventure to make sure they tracked down and killed these motherfuckers. These two faceless losers armed with light crossbows were now a higher priority than the greatest villian for the crime of thinking they could be better than us. This however is psychotic. quote:That's something I've noticed that motivates a lot of players, that anyone, man or beast, would dare gently caress with them. It causes a lot of problems, mostly revenge based but I've seen whole groups grind themselves to death against impossible odds and then get extremely real life mad that someone have the hubris to be stronger than the PCs. For some people it's a violent power fantasy, especially younger folks. You're not going to talk that out of them, that's a process of maturing and maybe wanting a little more out of a game eventually. D&D's stakes in particular are generally presented as kill-or-be-killed.
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Mar 25, 2021 22:43
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Leraika posted:Some of them may have been taught by bad gms that if they let anyone go they'll have a literal army of people out for revenge against them breathing down their necks the next day, regardless of whether or not that makes sense in the fiction, logistically, or practically. It happens a lot for protagonists in fiction. Someone fails to kill them with their family or make sure they are dead, which results in a vendetta against the antagonist. Which rarely goes well for antagonist. I've heard people justify the behavior as "What if the Stormtroopers had gotten Luke as well as his aunt and uncle". Which is very telling about how they view themselves. But it's still a common backstory for fantasy fiction.
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Mar 25, 2021 22:45
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Thomamelas posted:It happens a lot for protagonists in fiction. Someone fails to kill them with their family or make sure they are dead, which results in a vendetta against the antagonist. Which rarely goes well for antagonist. I've heard people justify the behavior as "What if the Stormtroopers had gotten Luke as well as his aunt and uncle". Which is very telling about how they view themselves. But it's still a common backstory for fantasy fiction. Not to mention tabletop games, like most nerd activities, have the usual contingent of that particular type of nerd who gets really mad at fictional character for not making the "optimal" or "smart" move in every given situation. The interactive, improvisational nature of tabletop games then give this type the means by which to effect this kind of behavior on the narrative. It's always been baffling to me when I encounter players who just casually want to execute enemies the group has taken prisoner. My thinking is always "I'm nominally supposed to be a hero, I'm not going to violate the Geneva convention!"
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Mar 25, 2021 22:52
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KingKalamari posted:Not to mention tabletop games, like most nerd activities, have the usual contingent of that particular type of nerd who gets really mad at fictional character for not making the "optimal" or "smart" move in every given situation. The interactive, improvisational nature of tabletop games then give this type the means by which to effect this kind of behavior on the narrative. Can’t violate the Geneva Convention if there’s no Geneva
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Mar 25, 2021 22:57
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KingKalamari posted:Not to mention tabletop games, like most nerd activities, have the usual contingent of that particular type of nerd who gets really mad at fictional character for not making the "optimal" or "smart" move in every given situation. The interactive, improvisational nature of tabletop games then give this type the means by which to effect this kind of behavior on the narrative. I've had some success talking those people out of it by asking them how we were supposed to build a rep for being badass if we kill everyone. Or if we get a rep as a group who leaves no one alive, how do we talk our way out of situations where we bit off more than we can chew. Sadly what seemed to stick was the idea killing limited options rather than 'dude, maybe we're the bad guys?'.
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Mar 25, 2021 23:05
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Arivia posted:It's not a feat bloat thing - Pathfinder 2e is very strongly written as "you can only do the things on your sheet according to the prescribed rules", and your feat choices expand what your sheet allows you to do, even for mundane choices. It's very much not a game for improvising or acting outside of the written rules, and that's honestly fine? It's a game design decision, it doesn't make it bad.
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Mar 25, 2021 23:57
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thetoughestbean posted:Can’t violate the Geneva Convention if there’s no Geneva 
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Mar 26, 2021 00:14
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Splicer posted:I'll never stop laughing at paizo making the game they/their player base claimed 4e to be "but it's good when we do it". Jason Bulmahn ate crow during the playtest and posted something like “4e was much better than we realized at the time, and we were very shortsighted about it.” Which I’ll give the man credit for, that’s owning your mistake in a big way. I don’t think Paizo staffers “getting” 4e would have really changed what happened - it was a deliberate ad campaign to save Paizo as a company when WotC had told them to get hosed - but it’s good to see nonetheless.
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Mar 26, 2021 00:18
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Arivia posted:It's not a feat bloat thing - Pathfinder 2e is very strongly written as "you can only do the things on your sheet according to the prescribed rules", and your feat choices expand what your sheet allows you to do, even for mundane choices. It's very much not a game for improvising or acting outside of the written rules, and that's honestly fine? It's a game design decision, it doesn't make it bad. It doesn't seem to want to be that way, though - there's a ton of little exceptions and a surprising number of cases where adhering to RAW or even RAI leaves holes in what you can resolve. And your latter one is exactly the point - no PC is likely to be rolling logs enough to ever give up a Class Feat in order to do it. So all the feat does is, by existing, stop a PC doing a once-in-a-particular-adventure-maybe nifty idea that would have had relatively little impact anyway.
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Mar 26, 2021 01:10
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If I take the log rolling feat I am telling my gm that we better be on logs at least half the time
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Mar 26, 2021 01:15
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hyphz posted:It doesn't seem to want to be that way, though - there's a ton of little exceptions and a surprising number of cases where adhering to RAW or even RAI leaves holes in what you can resolve. RAW/RAI is a terrible nonfunctioning way to look at RPG books, please do better than that. And exactly, no one is ever likely going to give up a class feat to do it. So what's the problem? It's an opportunity cost for something where the opportunity is nil. Pathfinder 2e is not about coming up with cool new plans and putting them into play to get an advantage, it's specifically the idea of using your existing proficiencies in the preconstructed set pieces. If you're in a campaign where log-rolling is gonna be a big thing, then there's a bunch of subsystems to promote picking up log rolling. It's not an issue unless you're making it out to be one, which is a common criticism of Pathfinder 2e - "I can't do everything I could in Pathfinder 1e with similar characters", when a big part of Pathfinder 2e's approach to character power and growth is specifically slimming down what characters can do and playing to their strengths as a direct focus.
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Mar 26, 2021 01:20
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hyphz posted:It doesn't seem to want to be that way, though - there's a ton of little exceptions and a surprising number of cases where adhering to RAW or even RAI leaves holes in what you can resolve. Also for the record most feats aren't that situational either. The log rolling feat basically triggers on uneven or narrow ground which is surprisingly more common than log. Abomination Vault has a better example of this where the archetypes in the first and second book are specifically tied to deal with the challenges in the book. EDIT: Yes there's a log rolling feat for the record. I'm not sure if Arivia picked that deliberately. MadScientistWorking fucked around with this message at 01:31 on Mar 26, 2021 |
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Mar 26, 2021 01:26
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