|
Bucnasti posted:Conversations with designers who actually worked on it. e: Are you confusing 4E the RPG and the 4E-ish minis skirmish game that used sufficiently different rules that the monster boxes needed to contain different stats for each? Splicer fucked around with this message at 21:02 on Dec 22, 2022 |
#
?
Dec 22, 2022 20:55
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 23, 2024 21:11 |
|
|
There was a 3rd ed adjacent skirmish system that was made as a tie in for blind bag 3.x goblins. Heck it was better designed than base 3.x. 3rd ed also did metaplot stuff with forgotten realms and bad to mediocre tie in novels to try to recapture the sales of AD&Ds FR novels. 4th edition being designed from the ground up to sell minis is dubious, but WotC has been pretty consistently looking for ways to make D&D more profitable. Which didn't really happened until Critical Role and similar free advertisements showed up for them.
|
|
#
?
Dec 22, 2022 21:10
|
|
|
Terrible Opinions posted:There was a 3rd ed adjacent skirmish system that was made as a tie in for blind bag 3.x goblins. Heck it was better designed than base 3.x. I don’t even buy that any of edition of D&D has had a stated design goal that was than followed through on. That alone would be completely unprecedented before we get into this Alex Jones level hypothesis about what the goal was and how it’s supported by “yeah someone told me this, a real person who worked on this, I promise. Also I’m going to immediately change topics right after this.” Yeah, sure thing.
|
|
#
?
Dec 22, 2022 21:18
|
|
|
I don't think it was ever a stated design goal. Just after each edition releases and sales past the core book drop they look for other ways to make money. I don't think it's Alex Jones to say that the miniatures handbook was made to try to get D&D players to pick up the skirmish game, or that every other Forgotten Realms book mentioning the War of the Spider Queen novels was an attempt to sell books.
|
|
#
?
Dec 22, 2022 21:25
|
|
|
PurpleXVI posted:4e impressed me by somehow having worse feats than 3e. In 3e I could more or less always find a feat that sounded cool or mechanically useful(even if only marginally), in 4e I just looked at the list of feats and regularly couldn't think of anything to pick. It was just such an insanely dull list that very rarely ever gave you interesting new options or changed how your class played. It was like they decided that the "get a +1 to a thing"-type of feats from 3e was what everyone wanted more of. Hmm, I agree that 4e feats were "worse" as in worse for the game, but that's because of how much better and more appealing they were to take (and how many of them you got). 3e feats were mostly bad except for the occasional insane no-brainers like Natural Spell or various metamagic, and I guess the super proscribed fighter feat chains. 4e feats had some dull as dishwater math fixes but also a lot of dramatic concept- or build- enabling special qualities like Wintertouched or the Vistani ____ line or what have you. A big pain point of 4e was wanting to grab that cool stuff but having to eat your vegetables and buy Implement Proficiency: Accurate Orb first.
|
|
#
?
Dec 22, 2022 21:30
|
|
|
Terrible Opinions posted:I don't think it was ever a stated design goal. Just after each edition releases and sales past the core book drop they look for other ways to make money. I don't think it's Alex Jones to say that the miniatures handbook was made to try to get D&D players to pick up the skirmish game, or that every other Forgotten Realms book mentioning the War of the Spider Queen novels was an attempt to sell books. Yes it gets much more reasonable when you reverse the causal relationship like a non-crazy person. But then that wouldn’t be what Bucnasti said.
|
|
#
?
Dec 22, 2022 21:32
|
|
|
Splicer posted:I know I keep saying this but they should have called Martial powers "Feats". Martial powers are called "Exploits," in contrast to arcane powers (spells), divine powers (prayers), etc. It's right there in the core, but the flavor of each kind of powers is very loosely sketched outside of the various Power-themed splatbooks, and there's not much mechanical weight to the distinctions in gameplay.
|
|
#
?
Dec 22, 2022 21:41
|
|
|
gtrmp posted:Martial powers are called "Exploits," in contrast to arcane powers (spells), divine powers (prayers), etc. It's right there in the core, but the flavor of each kind of powers is very loosely sketched outside of the various Power-themed splatbooks, and there's not much mechanical weight to the distinctions in gameplay.
|
|
#
?
Dec 22, 2022 22:04
|
|
|
"Ah, 75+ new posts in TG chat overnight - either hyphz posted something, or someone said the words 'Fourth Edition', time to find out which one." TG is the last bastion of 4e love on the internet, I get it, but folks, you've had this exact same conversation every 3 months for the last decade. In an effort to spark discussion about literally anything else and maybe get people to think about a game that isn't 4e for five seconds, here's a thing: someone claims to have done an analysis of every "OSR and OSR-adjacent" game (including all of the editions of D&D) and created a visualization of how their rules relate to one another, forming what they call Rules Families. There's definitely room for refinement in their methodology, but it's interesting to see how the genetics of these games flow into one another. Btw, it's important to read to the very end of that document before forming a hot take, because the author makes two major updates to their methodology and results which get posted at the end.
|
|
#
?
Dec 22, 2022 22:16
|
|
|
My little brother discovered the joke space marine chapter "pretty marines" and asked me to make and paint him some, sounds fun so I want to make it a late christmas present for him. Problem is it looks like pretty marines have pretty anime guy faces, does anyone know where I might find some 28mm pretty anime guy heads? Or an STL file or something? I can't find poo poo.
|
|
#
?
Dec 22, 2022 23:48
|
|
|
Kestral posted:Btw, it's important to read to the very end of that document before forming a hot take, because the author makes two major updates to their methodology and results which get posted at the end. OSR Rules Families posted:Yet something important to keep in mind is that these categories are not ultimately expressive of each individual ruleset. Categories in themselves are abstractions which elide qualities of things not considered by those categories. We have seen how much variation there is within each of these groups, like the splitting of the Modern D&D-Likes or the expansive hacks of Into the Odd. Moreover, the statistical analysis of each of these texts has reduced them into (literally) a bunch of ones and zeroes. This does not tell you anything about how well-written the text is, what varieties of characters exist, or what toys you can play with. Even on a formal level, the data matrix does not and cannot tell you specifically what defines each individual ruleset. When I heard the premise of this post I was expecting something similar to the BRP family tree, actually plotting the line of inspiration the designers followed rather than tabulating mechanical similarities.  Although looking at it now, this approach is also flawed, on some level it has to be based on anecdotes and eyeballed comparisons. For example they list the Delta Green standalone as based on Call of Cthulhu 6e. This is a reasonable assumption since the original Delta Green was a CoC splat, but the DG standalone engine is actually a fork of Mongoose's Legend rules (which you can see a little further down the image).
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2022 00:58
|
|
|
Xiahou Dun posted:O so your source is “trust me, my uncle works for Nintendo”. I dislike namedropping, but since you insist. I was a licensed product developer for Blizzard in 2008-2010, we interviewed Mike Donais, the design lead on the Miniatures game and part of the design team on 4e for a designer position on our team, his brother Jeff was my boss (we got the lesser brother, Mike was a better designer than Jeff was a boss). While in town he ran some 4e for us, showed us all the cool digital GM tools (monster builders, map makers, encounter designers)they developed and lamented about how they'd never see the light of day because WotC couldn't get their poo poo together. Mike eventually went to be the lead designer on the WoW TCG when Cryptozoic took it over. I was on the WoW miniatures game, we had the same problems with cost of materials and the game (and most of the product category) was dead by the time it hit the shelves. Or you know I could be making all this poo poo up and just be a truck driver from Lafayette who's hobby is trolling tabletop nerds on a stupid dead internet forum.
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2022 01:07
|
|
|
Anybody who thinks 4e is like WoW hasn't played either
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2022 01:13
|
|
|
I had an interesting discussion recently about the extent to which 4e does or doesn't allow for creative problem solving and/or furnish you with "real" powers and spells as opposed to abstract combat buttons which not only can not but in fact must not be allowed to have narrative effects extrapolated from their descriptions rather than do exactly what they say on the box and nothing more. A lot of 4e's detractor but also a nonzero number of its fans believe that 4e's combat takes place in a VR world in which everything's a glowing wireframe with no properties except those explicitly coded into it, such that underbrush can't be lit on fire, walls can't be knocked down, etc. So here's the same spell in 4e and 3.5e, with special rules relevant to the 3.5e version included (it's what you get if you follow the "Figment" hyperlink):  What strikes me about these is that the spells are like 98% identical in their actual narrative effect. Obviously they have slightly different sizes and durations, but they have the same basic in-combat and out-of-combat use cases. There's one salient difference in the operation of the magic itself: the 3.5e wall only gives you a will save to disbelieve it if you examine it closely but won't stop you from walking straight through, while the 4e wall gives you a will save to disbelieve once you get sufficiently close but prevents you from walking through until you pass that save. We could imagine a game in which both spells exist side-by-side, with one representing a more complete but "brittle" illusion than the other; the 4e-style wall totally fools your senses and proprioception such that even drumming up the courage to run face-first through the wall (feeling all the while like you're about to just hit your head) is a test of your willpower. Now, it's a fact of life in the RPG business that special powers are often going to have the most exacting rules detail when those powers pertain to combat because combat tends to have the highest stakes; yeah, yeah, it's pretty obvious how a hologram works, but what happens if I conjure one right in front of someone trying to shoot me? But both editions devote most of their spells' wordcount to solving those exact questions. For each power, we're immediately learning casting time down to the atomic game action, maximum dimensions, saving throw/non-AC defense checked, consequences on line of sight, etc. So what is it about the 4e-style wall that made a lot of people feel like they just weren't allowed to deploy it creatively or that somehow wasn't a "real" illusion, if that phrasing makes sense? Part of it's probably because it's missing all the fiddly extra rules about illusion magic generally, the specific properties of "figments", and the general rules for "rolling to disbelieve" that exist elsewhere in the 3.5e book, even though a lot of that stuff is in fact condensed into and implicit within the 4e wall (e.g. like a "figment", it becomes see-through once it fails to overcome your will). But that level of detail isn't actually incompatible with 4e. The only problem is page space. We can imagine a 4th edition in which every power and spell was lovingly detailed with a bunch of hypotheticals and explanations (mention of fireballs igniting combustible material, cones of cold freezing water so that it becomes walkable, warlord oversight accelerating the pace of manual labor, etc) exceeeept that'd cost you page space. If you want to double the text packed into every wizard power on average, what do you cut out1? A 4e that literally only contained Fighter, Rogue, Cleric, and Wizard but that lovingly detailed all the possible use cases and incidental environmental effects of each power those classes had would be an interesting thought experiment but, you know, a lot of people like warlords and warlocks and so on. Another thing is, a lot of games have illusion powers which don't require this level of exacting detail. Like, here's all you need to know if you want to create an illusory wall in Vampire: the Masquerade:  (There's a second power that's like one sentence long that specifies it lets you create an illusion fooling multiple senses - e.g. a wall that feels like brick if you just brush your hand against it) but is still nonsolid) This probably gives you less detail than the 4e version of the power, but I think because there's no background cultural expectation of ruthless, legalistic bean-counting for the sake of ekeing out every tiny advantage, or of adversarial GMing that calls on players to cite chapter and verse to prove that they're allowed to get out of some jam or other, there's no actual reason to go to the trouble. I think one of the problems plaguing D&D specifically is that there's an expected level of antagonistic rules exegesis that you don't see in many other games and that has haunted D&D from edition to edition. Take this example from 3.5E (I've cut the spell level, range, duration, etc. stuff for space but they're all just reflex saves vs. fire damage):  My question to you is: does Scorching Ray set things on fire? Can you burn down a barn with Scorching Ray? It doesn't say it ignites combustibles, while a lot of other fire spells do... maybe it can't, because it's like a high-intensity short-duration laser. But then, it's a fiery ray. But then, the "Flaming Weapon" magic item says that it adds 1d6 fire damage on a hit but also neglects to mention that ignites things, so maybe I can start a campfire with Burning Hands but not with Scorching Ray or my +1 Flaming Longsword? I think in most games this would be a ridiculous question, but in the context of D&D I actually do find myself wondering if maybe, just maybe, there's a real and intended game-mechanical difference between incendiary and non-incendiary fire. And this has carried on all the way to 5th edition, where we're doing Biblical exegesis on whether a Melee Weapon Attack is the same as an Attack with a Melee Weapon. 1. The fighter's and rogue's powers in their entirety, of course! Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 02:51 on Dec 23, 2022 |
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2022 02:49
|
|
|
I mean, the bigger complaint there would be the bit about "it lasts until the end of your next turn". Which makes it useless outside of combat, since a wall lasting for 6 seconds won't make any difference outside of combat timing. This was the bigger complaint - the scaling down of many utility spells in this way.
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2022 03:03
|
|
|
hyphz posted:I mean, the bigger complaint there would be the bit about "it lasts until the end of your next turn". Which makes it useless outside of combat, since a wall lasting for 6 seconds won't make any difference outside of combat timing. This was the bigger complaint - the scaling down of many utility spells in this way. It's Sustain Minor, so as long as you concentrate it'll last... uh, I forget, I think the "encounter" duration might default to 5 or 10 minutes out of combat proper?
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2022 03:05
|
|
|
Runa posted:Anybody who thinks 4e is like WoW hasn't played either  Can't find these last two in a decent resolution  
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2022 03:13
|
|
|
That logo looks like it dates the advertisement to 3e
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2022 03:17
|
|
|
gradenko_2000 posted:That logo looks like it dates the advertisement to 3e I always think of WoW as coming out around 2007 or 8, but it was actually 04.
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2022 03:59
|
|
|
Would "Ma Baker" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8NcQzMQN_U) and her sons be a good concept for the basis of villains in a campaign?
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2022 04:18
|
|
|
hyphz posted:For example, there's a huge range of initial general and ancestry feats you could take, but if there's any optimization going on it's going to be hard to beat taking Adopted Ancestry (Dwarf) and Unburdened Iron. Unburdened Iron lets you wear armor with no decrease to speed, which is a huge deal. It's normally a Dwarf feat, but taking Adopted Ancestry lets you take it as any other Ancestry. And then the GM has to somehow work into the backstory why it is that everyone in the party has adopted Dwarven culture as their own. The optimal PF2e fighter is a human assimilated into Dwarven culture and trained by Gnomes. why trained by gnomes?
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2022 04:18
|
|
|
trapstar posted:Would "Ma Baker" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8NcQzMQN_U) and her sons be a good concept for the basis of villains in a campaign? If you want a good fictional version watch the second season of Justified. But to answer that, yes.
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2022 04:22
|
|
|
Dawgstar posted:If you want a good fictional version watch the second season of Justified. But to answer that, yes. Sounds interesting.
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2022 04:26
|
|
|
thatbastardken posted:why trained by gnomes? It's for the hats.
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2022 04:34
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:It's Sustain Minor, so as long as you concentrate it'll last... uh, I forget, I think the "encounter" duration might default to 5 or 10 minutes out of combat proper? 5 minutes, the end of combat, or whenever it's narratively appropriate for the encounter to end.
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2022 05:00
|
|
|
thatbastardken posted:why trained by gnomes? The existence of the Gnome Flickmace as a weapon in the corebook. As a weapon that's both Advanced and Uncommon, you need a Gnome feat to be able to not just wield it, but easily be able to buy one too. Weapons in PF2e all have a 'critical specialization' effect that occurs on a crit if you have the CritSpec class feature (or a feat that gives you it). The Flail weapon group has one of the best CritSpec effects - it knocks the enemy prone, meaning they both need to spend an action to stand up, and they also count as flat-footed until they're up, lowering their AC for your allies. The Flickmace is a Flail that also has Reach, very useful in general. This makes the flickmace the 'best' melee weapon. In practice, while the reach is good, the critical effect happens rarely enough (crits happen in PF2e both on a natural 20, and also when you beat the difficulty by 10 or more) that it's a nice bonus but hardly something that breaks the game.
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2022 05:03
|
|
|
Not gonna lie, if a player came to me and said "my dude is a human, raised by dwarves, who spent years in Gnometown learning the art of the yo-yo mace," rad, I'm using all of that. If the entire party has that backstory? Congratulations, the campaign is now about saving an embattled svirfneblin community from ravaging duergar pikemen who are ancient enemies of both your adopted clan and of your gnomish martial arts school. Hope you all signed up for gnome wuxia!!
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2022 05:17
|
|
|
Antivehicular posted:Not gonna lie, if a player came to me and said "my dude is a human, raised by dwarves, who spent years in Gnometown learning the art of the yo-yo mace," rad, I'm using all of that. If the entire party has that backstory? Congratulations, the campaign is now about saving an embattled svirfneblin community from ravaging duergar pikemen who are ancient enemies of both your adopted clan and of your gnomish martial arts school. Hope you all signed up for gnome wuxia!!
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2022 05:37
|
|
|
PurpleXVI posted:The land is suffering under the cultural plague of dwarven weebs. Dweebs, one might call them. They insist on digging holes everywhere, wearing long fake beards and filling their rooms with wall scrolls depicting pickaxes and mugs of frothing beer. Don't forget shouting out Rock and Stone at every opportunity
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2022 05:40
|
|
|
drrockso20 posted:Don't forget shouting out Rock and Stone at every opportunity Did I hear a Rock and Stone?
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2022 05:44
|
|
|
PurpleXVI posted:The land is suffering under the cultural plague of dwarven weebs. Dweebs, one might call them. They insist on digging holes everywhere, wearing long fake beards and filling their rooms with wall scrolls depicting pickaxes and mugs of frothing beer. The dwarf is looking at the mugs of frothing beer. The dwarf is screaming.
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2022 06:18
|
|
|
The wallscroll menaces with spikes of dolomite
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2022 11:24
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:It's Sustain Minor, so as long as you concentrate it'll last... uh, I forget, I think the "encounter" duration might default to 5 or 10 minutes out of combat proper? Presumably falling asleep turns them all off.
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2022 11:33
|
|
|
PinheadSlim posted:My little brother discovered the joke space marine chapter "pretty marines" and asked me to make and paint him some, sounds fun so I want to make it a late christmas present for him. Not sure of any downloads but maybe an elf head with the ears sanded down?
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2022 11:56
|
|
|
Wrestlepig posted:Not sure of any downloads but maybe an elf head with the ears sanded down? This is clever! Thanks much. edit : Already found some, they look anime as gently caress. Thanks again! 
Punkinhead fucked around with this message at 13:36 on Dec 23, 2022 |
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2022 13:12
|
|
|
Nice. Gonna post a pic of the finished product?
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2022 13:40
|
|
|
Leraika posted:Nice. Gonna post a pic of the finished product?  Most definitely. Better start practicing my free hand roses
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2022 14:12
|
|
|
PinheadSlim posted:This is clever! Thanks much. lmao holy poo poo the bowl cut elf
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2022 16:17
|
|
|
bewilderment posted:The Flickmace is a Flail that also has Reach, very useful in general. This makes the flickmace the 'best' melee weapon. Hehehe. Hehehehehehehe. Ew boy. Ok, remember the paragon of balance that was the Spiked Chain from 3e? That's the Gnome Flickmace. The key with Reach is that it lets a PC AoO anyone moving to engage you in melee, because they're "leaving" the square 10' away. If you manage to crit, then they're knocked prone and their Move action ends, and they're more or less screwed. If they stand up, they're still out of range, so they either have to disengage or let their turn be Move->Stand->Move (you get 3 general actions in PF2e) with no attack. If they crawl in to attack, they'll get one attack at a penalty. Either way, the PC will respond Attack->Attack->Attack. Giving that to an opponent in PF2e is a baad mistake. And that's without the advantage of knocking an opponent down in regular melee. "But it's only on a crit, right?" I'm sure that's what Paizo were thinking when they came up with these rules, but it ain't so. You can crit by beating the difficulty by 10 or more. The Fighter has an inherent bonus that gives them +2 to attack compared to every other class, even other martials. With three attacks, the chance to crit is much higher. There is a penalty for making multiple attacks in a turn, but Fighters also get Double Slice, which removes that penalty on the second attack. So at the very least they're critting twice as often as typical. Throw in bard songs, other bonus stacking, and ability to get more reactions and thus more AoOs and at the higher levels they can end up with a +10 to the baseline. Of course, there's no sign of a fix. Of course, the wildly varying difficulty levels of APs mean that just banning this ends up with the party feeling ineffective. But there will never not be another AP, so for me this is gaming now.
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2022 17:26
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 23, 2024 21:11 |
|
|
hyphz posted:I mean, the bigger complaint there would be the bit about "it lasts until the end of your next turn". Which makes it useless outside of combat, since a wall lasting for 6 seconds won't make any difference outside of combat timing. This was the bigger complaint - the scaling down of many utility spells in this way. If I wanted to be That Player, I'd argue that it'd last indefinitely, until I got into combat and took a turn.
|
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2022 19:03
|
|
