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Sodomy Hussein posted:It's very funny the first time a controller shuts down a fight completely and everyone just circles the downed enemy and kicks them. Then you realize that this is going to happen in just about every fight, especially as the controller levels. I mean that's never happened in any of my games. hahaha haha ha. KILL ME MY PLAYERS WON'T LET ME PLAY THE GAME.
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Sep 24, 2021 03:27
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There's a reason that it's the Holy Trinity and not the Holy Rectangle that shows up constantly in games.
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Sep 24, 2021 03:38
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Warlock and Bard are my go-tos when I can't decide what to play (he said as if playing regularly  ), they're guaranteed to be fun and they have a good bit of variety to them.
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Sep 24, 2021 08:18
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dwarf74 posted:The argument is more that controllers are the anti-fun. They make the game slower, less dangerous, and just altogether more boring. The answer to this is to make the fights so dangerous at baseline that you need control, which is how countless games have solved this issue. Assume a percentage of monsters is going to get shut down, then go from there. It really isn't a complicated concept to solve. You have to shut down X amount of mobs, then reroute and contain Y amount, and then kill a chunk of the remainder to not lose. There's no real difficulty to understanding this paradigm, or even mathing it out so it can be consistently applied. The only difficulty with it is that it's a challenge-gamer setup, which makes fights where clean play isn't needed kinda boring.
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Sep 24, 2021 09:16
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If there was a single class or concept I'd destroy from D&D, it's the wizard. "All magic except healing for some reason" is not a good niche - the D&D wizard power list is a thematic mess, with psychic powers, illusions, fireballs, fart clouds, webs and astral projection just thrown into a big bucket. And if you kill the wizard, you can make firebenders and enchanters and Iceman and Magneto and Orpheus and all sorts of other kinds of wizard classes without them just being one fragment of what the wizard class can do.
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Sep 24, 2021 10:20
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Completely agree. If you have Fighters and Rogues and Rangers and, whatever, Swashbucklers and Assassins all as their own class, you can have Illusionists and Elementalists and Necromancers and Diviners. Incidentally I've been idly thinking about how Necromancers should be leaders. Knit bones and living flesh back together, strengthen your allies' muscles and sinews with spells, obviously bring them back into battle once defeated, summon skeletal minions to distract and flank enemies, all with an eye on utility foremost and very little concern for your subjects' comfort, for comedy. Kind of like this:  Secondary controller (weakening spells) or defender (one buff minion) I suppose.
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Sep 24, 2021 10:47
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Mage attempts to make the Wizard more specialist, I remember having fun with the one Pyromancer I played.
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Sep 24, 2021 11:47
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Transient People posted:The answer to this is to make the fights so dangerous at baseline that you need control, which is how countless games have solved this issue. Assume a percentage of monsters is going to get shut down, then go from there. It really isn't a complicated concept to solve. You have to shut down X amount of mobs, then reroute and contain Y amount, and then kill a chunk of the remainder to not lose. There's no real difficulty to understanding this paradigm, or even mathing it out so it can be consistently applied. The only difficulty with it is that it's a challenge-gamer setup, which makes fights where clean play isn't needed kinda boring.
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Sep 24, 2021 16:46
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i adore CC and the feeling of telling your opponent "no" when they try to do something but it's a mode of play that requires a lot of system-level scaffolding, mechanics that CC interacts with that allow it to be mitigated or worked around, that make it less absolute and binary, and 4E doesn't really have those. it's possible for the GM to step in and painstakingly design every encounter to accommodate it, but the degree of effort it takes, the consequences if you gently caress it up, and the specific restrictions it requires you put on encounter design are way out of line compared to the other PC roles all of which is to say: it breaks my heart to remove Controllers; i would be thrilled to play a game that included more robust system-level support for them; removing them from a direct clone of D&D 4E is still the right call
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Sep 24, 2021 17:26
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dwarf74 posted:That's an illustration of the issue, not a solution for it. How exactly is creating a mode of play where good target assessment, careful application of your mitigative resources, and understanding of when to allow yourself to take damage and when to take whatever steps you must to deny or delay it is a bad thing? It's niche, as I said, because it's challenge gaming, but there's no particular reason it's an issue if you're interested in designing towards that. If what you're trying to say is that controllers only being required for truly difficult fights is a problem, I would point out that the same goes for healers or defenders, depending on your setup, which leads to the larger underlying issue of extremely unbounded damage per turn numbers and how you can only generate specific non-wincon-advancing roles if you control how strong the role whose job is fast wincon advancement is.
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Sep 24, 2021 17:40
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Transient People posted:... which leads to the larger underlying issue of extremely unbounded damage per turn numbers and how you can only generate specific non-wincon-advancing roles if you control how strong the role whose job is fast wincon advancement is. this is true but at that point you're basically pointing out that the Holy Trinity is an inherently flawed concept for role division, which imo is one of the great unsolved problems of RPG design
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Sep 24, 2021 17:42
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:this is true but at that point you're basically pointing out that the Holy Trinity is an inherently flawed concept for role division, which imo is one of the great unsolved problems of RPG design It's moreso an indication that the fact I could kill a Solo from full last time I played this game without burning all my daily resources indicated that maybe the math got too wild. You can't have a system where any semi-standardized role division works if some of the players can absolutely disproportionately affect how hard the fight is depending on how well they built their characters. THIS is the problem with Controllers, to be clear (that and the lack of Solo protection mechanics for big showpiece bosses, but it's a comparably simpler fix than what I'm about to discuss): 'Does control' is almost always attached to 'does a stupidly wide aoe attack' because of legacy baggage, such that instead of say, your e23 power being 'stun one dude', similar to how a lot of e23 striker powers are 'delete one dude', you get 'stun literally the entire arena'. The solution to this problem is to make Controllers work off a similar single-target paradigm as almost everyone else does. Defenders mostly actively defend against one target at a time, Strikers delete one foe, Leaders empower one friend. AoE does not really belong at the encounter power level, when it comes to CC effects, because its effect is not gradual enough, granular enough, like damage is (there's ways to make it so, like spreading attack penalties up to your stat mod across enemies in an arrangement of your choice, instead of hitting them all with say, -INT to attack, but that's beyond the purview of a straight clone). If you want balanced controllers, just give them strictly ST encounter powers and leave their big AoE powers to dailies. That by itself would significantly alleviate a lot of the issues with them.
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Sep 24, 2021 17:53
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The best designed controller is the Warlock, who gets a wide array of interesting control powers that are generally limited in scope. Witchfire for a giant accuracy penalty for a turn. Decree of Khirad to shove a lot of dudes and force them to all hit each other. Lure of Gibbeth to get to jerk somebody around with a minor action for the rest of the fight. Grasp of the Iron Tower to prevent an enemy from moving towards you until the end of your next turn. Lots of stuff like that, which is far more interesting and involved than the controller standby of "just poo poo daze effects in a burst 2+", and they involve a lot more group interaction to get the most out of them. That aside, the big problem with controllers is that defenders already do their same job in a way that's more interesting and interactive. They restrict movements and actions and control the pace of the fight, and they do it from melee instead of standing off and blasting away with status effects at things that are already tied up with other people.
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Sep 25, 2021 00:19
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Converting one or two Controllers to Defenders is actually a pretty good idea. Wouldn't take that much work, really.
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Sep 25, 2021 00:22
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Hmm, what about a "controller" that locks down enemies at range but opens themselves up to counterattack? Like a "ranged defender," for example inflicting a psychic stun, or summoning vines, where the targets can react with some kind of harmful feedback. A psychic ranged defender's targets can try to overpower the connection, a nature ranged defender feels pain if the choking vines are torn up, etc. Targets inflict hp damage back on the ranged defender, but hp is explicitly not meat points, it can represent stress, slipping control over magic, an attack on their connection to nature, etc, where the feedback or counterattack on the defender deals hp damage that in no way resembles meat point damage. Ranged defenders could also be minion summoners, with their hp pool getting shared among minions and again representing magical power and stamina.
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Sep 25, 2021 00:32
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Khizan posted:The best designed controller is the Warlock, who gets a wide array of interesting control powers that are generally limited in scope. Witchfire for a giant accuracy penalty for a turn. Decree of Khirad to shove a lot of dudes and force them to all hit each other. Lure of Gibbeth to get to jerk somebody around with a minor action for the rest of the fight. Grasp of the Iron Tower to prevent an enemy from moving towards you until the end of your next turn. You're right Defenders do some of that, but something like say...Gravity of Moment, isn't really a Defender power. That's Controllerism 101. I do think the Warlock is a great basis to readd Controllers to the game from, though. They're pretty close to what I was saying about how you CAN have fun and entertaining control, even hard control, if it's mostly ST focused. Remove the damage and give them a couple more options from their class features and you can really start cookin' imo.
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Sep 25, 2021 02:10
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The thing is, you can build control as a build option into strikers instead of making it a strict role though. Warlocks have cool-rear end control spells, but they still are fundamentally a striker at the end of the day. Their job is to generally deal damage, but they can spec into way to apply more debuffs to enemies. You could do the same thing with enchanter/illusionist wizards and just straight up rip off the mesmer from guild wars 1/2. Take all the controllers and make them one of the other three roles instead. Druids can become defenders where you summon/transform into a beast and tank the enemies, Invokers and wizards can become strikers with options to add more control tools to their kit. The rest of the controllers you can delete, because they're just variants on different classes anyway or are just straight up forgettable garbage.
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Sep 25, 2021 02:46
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berenzen posted:The thing is, you can build control as a build option into strikers instead of making it a strict role though. Warlocks have cool-rear end control spells, but they still are fundamentally a striker at the end of the day. Their job is to generally deal damage, but they can spec into way to apply more debuffs to enemies. You could do the same thing with enchanter/illusionist wizards and just straight up rip off the mesmer from guild wars 1/2. Take all the controllers and make them one of the other three roles instead. Druids can become defenders where you summon/transform into a beast and tank the enemies, Invokers and wizards can become strikers with options to add more control tools to their kit. The rest of the controllers you can delete, because they're just variants on different classes anyway or are just straight up forgettable garbage. OK, let's play this game then. Suppose we set aside ping pong damage strats for a second (because they're asinine as hell). What do you call an ex-controller heavily centered on manipulating enemy positioning? A defender, when they don't have any of the tools of defenders, or their fundamental ability to be the anvil of a battle strategy? Or something else?
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Sep 25, 2021 03:34
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Once their given striker features or defender features? A striker or defender. A storm sorcerer is still a striker, as is a feylock, even if a lot of the powers they have feature control effects.
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Sep 25, 2021 05:18
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Transient People posted:I do think the Warlock is a great basis to readd Controllers to the game from, though. They're pretty close to what I was saying about how you CAN have fun and entertaining control, even hard control, if it's mostly ST focused. Remove the damage and give them a couple more options from their class features and you can really start cookin' imo. Why would you remove the damage? What does that bring to the table that makes them better? Warlocks are good controllers precisely because they're not pure controllers.
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Sep 25, 2021 05:29
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Transient People posted:What do you call an ex-controller heavily centered on manipulating enemy positioning? A defender, when they don't have any of the tools of defenders, or their fundamental ability to be the anvil of a battle strategy? Or something else? They're a Defender without Defender role traits, because you're moving them out of the Controller role (which doesn't have well-defined features in the first place). You then need to create Defender features for them (marking and punishing) so they can function as a proper Defender. Alternatively, you remove most of their control abilities and make them a Striker with a small handful of powers that hinder enemies (which is already what Striker/Controllers like the Warlock are). The issue isn't "some classes have some hindering abilities," it's the idea of Controller as an entire role on its own, because it's poorly defined (Leaders debuff, Defenders control, and killing minions was never a role) and degenerate from an encounter design perspective.
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Sep 25, 2021 10:58
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Lemon-Lime posted:They're a Defender without Defender role traits, because you're moving them out of the Controller role (which doesn't have well-defined features in the first place). You then need to create Defender features for them (marking and punishing) so they can function as a proper Defender. ..Which ignores the issue of how just slapping 'defender traits' (that is to say, high HP, high amount of healing surges, and generic marking) just makes them absurdly degenerate. You literally don't even need punishes to make a hypothetical ranged defender toxic and much more broken than the controllers you hate so much. Consider for a second that you can make Marks (again, generic marks) apply -3 or even -4 penalties. Now consider how you can staple generic attack roll penalties to powers through feats and items (for example, Psychic Lock). Thus, a ranged defender can fire off an At-Will attack targeting a few enemies that marks them (and nothing else) and slap down -6 penalties to attack rolls if the enemy doesn't attack them, and specifically them. They're ranged, though, so they can simply step out of dodge, go to the back of the party, and let the enemies try to hit their allies and fail because they're debuffed to poo poo. You see now how the problem isn't the controller role, but rather the geometric scaling of range and multitargeting on any kind of debuff? This thought experiment is very easy to turn practical (there's more than one Swordmage build that actively forsakes fighting in the frontline precisely to troll like this), and demonstrates how all the talking points against Controllers are actually misaimed. As I said before, there is a very obvious, very significant difference in characters who specialize in debuffing and characters who specialize in area control, and by and large Defenders do not and cannot do the former consistently (exceptions like the plays-nothing-like-what-was-intended swordmage aside), and to a man excel at the latter and are built from the ground up for it. Both roles are good, both appeal to different players, and the game is poorer for not having one. Khizan posted:Why would you remove the damage? What does that bring to the table that makes them better? Warlocks are good controllers precisely because they're not pure controllers. Because Warlock damage is boring, unidimensional and actively precludes taking the control powers when it's actually competitive with other Strikers, for the most part. Barring Touch of Domination and maybe like one other effect, by and large what you do if you want to do damage as a warlock is use Eldritch Strike or Hellish Rebuke for significant on-turn damage and then just rely on off-turn damage instances like immediate interrupts and such. You don't get to do both if you want to be competitive at the high end. Thus it makes more sense to split them up to let the unique effects shine by not putting them in a competition with the damage dealing ones.
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Sep 25, 2021 21:03
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Five sessions in, I finally put everyone's characters in the Character Builder and discover they've been getting bodied in every session because we all misread the HP calculation and were doing "X + Con Mod) instead of "X + Con Score". Also discovered that "insubstantial" is a hell of an ability that makes various ghosts punch higher than you might expect from a quick glsnce at their stats.
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Oct 1, 2021 07:20
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No one can blame you, it's the only instance where the straight score is factored into something the way mods usually are, and certainly the first such instance most 3.5 players would have encountered at all. Do you have a fighter and if yes have you already marked the difference between Combat Challenge and Combat Superiority or whatever the two extremely similar features are
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Oct 1, 2021 08:24
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It's worth noting the rule for stats and mods, which is that the fully-written-out stat is the full score, and the three letter abbreviation is the mod. i.e. HP is written as X + Constitution and not X + Con, because those are two very different numbers.
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Oct 1, 2021 09:37
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My Lovely Horse posted:No one can blame you, it's the only instance where the straight score is factored into something the way mods usually are, and certainly the first such instance most 3.5 players would have encountered at all. Nah, we've got a Swordmage, Rogue, Wizard, Warlord, and Avenger. Party works well except Avengers are wonky. It's like they went out of their way to make it as hard as possible for them to do Striker damage. Devorum fucked around with this message at 16:40 on Oct 1, 2021 |
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Oct 1, 2021 16:30
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I have a question from one of my players: is there a good reason why he shouldn't be allowed to dual-wield Greataxes, as a Battlemind so without any powers that allow off-hand attacks? To be perfectly honest, I can't think of one, but if anyone else has thoughts then I'd be happy to be told I'm wrong. If it was fine, it would cost him a feat to do (which I think is reasonable) - am I crazy for considering this?
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Oct 2, 2021 17:14
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If there's no mechanical benefit from it, let em do it, no feat required.
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Oct 2, 2021 17:23
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My rule is if it's pure flavor and isn't obnoxious, it's fine. If it's to try to flex some janky poo poo then no.
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Oct 2, 2021 20:57
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Aston posted:I have a question from one of my players: is there a good reason why he shouldn't be allowed to dual-wield Greataxes, as a Battlemind so without any powers that allow off-hand attacks? To be perfectly honest, I can't think of one, but if anyone else has thoughts then I'd be happy to be told I'm wrong. Mechanical benefits-wise you'd giving them access to the Two-Weapon [Fighting/Defense/Opening/Maybe others?] line of feats, since those don't require anything but holding a weapon in both hands. Probably some others too worded in the same vein. I imagine there's some weapon enchantments too that offer passive bonuses, and you'd be making additional encounter/daily powers available to them via weapon 2. If they just want two axes to be cool just say mechanically they're holding one, but let them flavor their attacks as two. If they're looking to do like damage optimization via stacking feats and stuff then yeah a feat as an entry point is probably fair, but may have unintended consequences as more feats get piled up, haha.
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Oct 2, 2021 21:25
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A greataxe is a martial 2h weapon with +2 proficiency, 1d12 damage, high crit, axe family. A waraxe is a superior 1h weapon with +2 proficiency, 1d12 damage, versatile, axe family. I'd probably say to just take weapon prof waraxe and just describe them as greataxes, just because it has virtually the same effect and it's within RAW, but as long as he's not doing multiattack critfishing stuff the power upgrade is probably negligible over the course of the average campaign. They both have the same one feat buy-in cost in this situation, and while greataxes would be more powerful I don't think it would make a real difference unless he's specifically trying to cheese it. Khizan fucked around with this message at 21:50 on Oct 2, 2021 |
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Oct 2, 2021 21:46
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Thanks for the responses everyone, I'm going to look forward to having a minotaur with two giant axes mowing down all my monsters in the near future!
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Oct 2, 2021 23:16
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The most basic issue is that as a two-handed weapon he or anyone else simply can't wield a greataxe in each hand and must use two hands for one. (Implied but not stated: he would have two improvised weapons, which have abysmal stats.) If it's just for the looks of it I'd therefore recommend you introduce the Minotaur Paired Axe: mechanically a single weapon that has exactly the same stats as a greataxe but flavourwise consists of two separate axes. They are balanced against each other in exactly such a way that you absolutely must wield both, and that no one could wield only one effectively even if they were using two hands. Why any society would invent and traditionalize such a cumbersome and befuddling instrument has baffled everyone but the minotaurs for ages, but we're talking about a people that consider it perfectly natural to live in labyrinths.
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Oct 3, 2021 11:04
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Hot take: controllers are cool and good.
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Oct 3, 2021 11:49
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turboraton posted:Hot take: controllers are cool and good. that's not a hot take this is a hot take: an ideal game that built on and expanded the good work that 4E did would eliminate Strikers, not Controllers
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Oct 3, 2021 20:07
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:that's not a hot take Agreed. Since everything runs on damage and damage is ultimately what ends fights, "the damage guy" kind of sticks out and could be replaced on the general principle that every class becomes the damage guy if the conditions they're looking for are met. For instance, Defenders deal striker-level damage if you try to ignore them, Controllers ("Blasters"?) deal striker-level damage but spread out across multiple foes, etc.
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Oct 3, 2021 20:54
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Ferrinus posted:Agreed. Since everything runs on damage and damage is ultimately what ends fights, "the damage guy" kind of sticks out and could be replaced on the general principle that every class becomes the damage guy if the conditions they're looking for are met. For instance, Defenders deal striker-level damage if you try to ignore them, Controllers ("Blasters"?) deal striker-level damage but spread out across multiple foes, etc.  e: more generally, "advancing the win condition" should be perpendicular to role assignment; it's everyone's job, especially since that's one of the best and easiest ways to create difficult decisions about how to spend your turn. so potentially rather than being the damage guy when you're pursuing your role, you could also have the option of being the damage guy at the expense of fulfilling your role, which isn't possible if your role is "the damage guy" Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 21:07 on Oct 3, 2021 |
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Oct 3, 2021 21:04
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But some players enjoy specifically being the damage guy.
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Oct 3, 2021 21:27
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My Lovely Horse posted:But some players enjoy specifically being the damage guy. i mean i enjoy being the controller and still acknowledge that in 4E as-is the game would be better off without them. sometimes eliminating perverse incentives or design decisions that are badly constraining your game's potential means killing your darlings yet another alternative would be changing the default win condition so that "the damage guy" is perpendicular to, like, "run the ball into the endzone" or "rescue the hostage" or whatever. but that starts getting difficult to reconcile with the fiction unless you either change what that part of the game is about, or else make the combat minigame increasingly abstract and unrelated to what it narratively represents it's all trade-offs, basically
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Oct 3, 2021 21:32
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One way to model a "Striker" here would be leaning a little more into the glass cannon thing - a defender gets to deal big damage if enemies try to ignore them, a striker gets to deal big damage if enemies do ignore them because they're otherwise easier to kill or disrupt.
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Oct 3, 2021 22:03
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