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Warthur posted:Both things can be true! 4E very much presented itself like it thought it was a finely-tuned machine, and I believe it was the designers' intention to make one, but I can 100% see how the execution of it may be shaky, especially at higher levels. (Much easier to playtest lower-tier stuff after all). In retrospect, I think one of the biggest issues with 4e was embedding level 1-30 progression into the core rules. The math starts breaking down in paragon tier and gets pretty rough by the epic tier levels. The bloat of feats and powers keeps swelling up and up, designing 4e style player character classes is already more complex and it needs to be traced out for 30 whole levels compared to the "normal" 20, and there was basically no support in the form of adventures or monsters designed for epic tier compared to heroic or even paragon. I think I prefer how newer games in the vein of D&D cap out a level 10, but maybe that level 20 cap is too sacred for D&D. In any case, it wouldn't be difficult to re-scale things down a bit with that as the cap.
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Feb 5, 2023 20:48
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Nuns with Guns posted:In retrospect, I think one of the biggest issues with 4e was embedding level 1-30 progression into the core rules. The math starts breaking down in paragon tier and gets pretty rough by the epic tier levels. The bloat of feats and powers keeps swelling up and up, designing 4e style player character classes is already more complex and it needs to be traced out for 30 whole levels compared to the "normal" 20, and there was basically no support in the form of adventures or monsters designed for epic tier compared to heroic or even paragon. Honestly? If I could choose between the 1-10 portions of the PHB1 and PHB2, or the full 1-30 span of the PHB1, I actually think the former would be a better launching point. You'd have a wider variety of player options available, could focus system design more tightly on that 1-10 range, and would be able to expand on higher level ranges as they became needed BECMI style. Tuxedo Catfish posted:Daily powers are good, but could use some form of pressure to spread them out, between encounters and between turns. I've been playing with the idea of a system where powerful abilities have to consume a mark / status effect off the target to go off, while the at-will equivalents and maybe some specific limited-use powers apply the mark, although it's probably not a complete solution and it's simultaneously aimed to break up "everyone focusing one target down is always the correct play" a bit. I almost feel like I'd prefer it if you could only use any of your daily abilities once per encounter. That way, you still get your big, cool tide turner, but you literally can't blow it all on one target. It also means you get to bake them into the expected party encounter math a touch more easily, because everyone gets one chance to go nova per fight.
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Feb 5, 2023 20:55
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Judging by the stories people tell of their best times playing 4E, my gut feeling is that if you're trying to do a sequel to that game, trying to get the power framework just right is way secondary to having a robust system for forced movement and terrain effects.
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Feb 5, 2023 21:03
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Yeah personally speaking, the only one of 4e's balance issues that ever really bothered me in practice were accuracy-related ones (which were addressed but also were only something I started noticing at higher levels anyway) and the gulf between an optimized and non-optimized character. People rightfully point out that 4e is still leagues beyond its sister editions in the player balance regard and it's certainly true that there isn't anything as wild as the difference between writing 'cleric' instead of 'fighter' at the top of your sheet in most editions, it still felt like crap when my Epic level "I remember reading I just pick the multiattack powers and am now OP" Ranger was getting regularly trounced on damage by our insanely optimized Fighter on any turn that wasn't the one I used Blade Cascade.
Countblanc fucked around with this message at 21:16 on Feb 5, 2023 |
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Feb 5, 2023 21:14
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Nuns with Guns posted:In retrospect, I think one of the biggest issues with 4e was embedding level 1-30 progression into the core rules. The math starts breaking down in paragon tier and gets pretty rough by the epic tier levels. The bloat of feats and powers keeps swelling up and up, designing 4e style player character classes is already more complex and it needs to be traced out for 30 whole levels compared to the "normal" 20, and there was basically no support in the form of adventures or monsters designed for epic tier compared to heroic or even paragon. It's not so much the number of levels as the amount of variability at the higher levels. But regardless, if flying is going to be a thing at any level it needs to be represented properly in the rules, especially given that it's the point when melee characters are going to start considering solutions like standing on each other's shoulders, attacking in the middle of a jump, grabbing opponents from below to weigh them down, etc which are usually completely neglected in the rules compared to things like tripping people over.
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Feb 5, 2023 21:21
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homullus posted:There definitely are dissociated mechanics in games. And old school gamers really like the idea of "making decisions as if they were their character." But, well, those are the only pieces of solid ground in the whole argument, and on their own they're not useful at all. The rest is denial, wilful obtuseness, and lies. That's true, I should have specified that they were specifically a lie about D&D. There are certainly plenty of games in which you, the player, can declare that your character screws up or runs into their nemesis or whatever in exchange for some kind of currency, and then spend that currency later to declare that your character has a lucky break, but the actual "disassociated (dissociated?) mechanics" essay was about only getting to do Come and Get It 1/encounter.
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Feb 5, 2023 21:24
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The Bee posted:Honestly? If I could choose between the 1-10 portions of the PHB1 and PHB2, or the full 1-30 span of the PHB1, I actually think the former would be a better launching point. You'd have a wider variety of player options available, could focus system design more tightly on that 1-10 range, and would be able to expand on higher level ranges as they became needed BECMI style. I'd support getting levels 1-10 of all the PHB1 and PHB2 classes in one corebook, but I know if something like that happened the discourse would've just shifted from "THEY DUMPED THE BARD, DRUID, BARBARIAN, AND GNOME FROM CORE  !!!!" to "THEY DUMPED THE BACK HALF OF THE GAME OUT OF CORE! WOT₵ IS NICKEL AND DIMING US FOR HALF A GAME'S WORTH OF RULES  !!!! THIS ISN'T HOW D&D EVER WAS!!!"The vision of a 4e D&D to a lot of people was 3.5e again, but with their preferred house rules to fix grapple checks and maybe take a few toys out of the caster classes' big box. That's why Pathfinder 1e rolling in to scratch that itch paid off. I don't know if there was a practical way to manage the inevitable rejection that would come with the big shift in a ton of mechanics and design goals between 3.5e and 4e, really. A lot of the edition jump was mismanaged, but clearly even greater success and corporate attention isn't preventing WotC from making a lot of the same PR and marketing mistakes this time around.
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Feb 5, 2023 21:31
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Traditional Games --> D&D 4e Remembrance Thread Where We Sometimes We Post An Industry Tweet Before Going Back To Eulogizing 4e For Pages At A Time
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Feb 5, 2023 21:36
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Kestral posted:Traditional Games --> D&D 4e Remembrance Thread Where We Sometimes We Post An Industry Tweet Before Going Back To Eulogizing 4e For Pages At A Time You need to find a way to fit "talks for pages about how PBtA is not that complicated, really, if you get to know it" into the thread title character limit, too, if you're going to be a passive aggressive whiner about this.
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Feb 5, 2023 21:42
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Kestral posted:Traditional Games --> D&D 4e Remembrance Thread Where We Sometimes We Post An Industry Tweet Before Going Back To Eulogizing 4e For Pages At A Time You're welcome to post industry news or skip the posts you don't like instead of adding white noise.
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Feb 5, 2023 21:46
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Admiral Joeslop posted:You're welcome to post industry news or skip the posts you don't like instead of adding white noise. Multi-page derails about TG's favorite system are also white noise when they happen in the industry thread, unless there's some industry-related reason for the topic. The thread doesn't have to keep active every day - it's actually more useful for its intended purpose if it goes quiet until there's Industry Discussion. Not that it matters, since the last time we had this argument and Leperflesh put on his mod voice and told everyone in no uncertain terms to take derails like this elsewhere, it just kept going for pages at a time and nothing happened.
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Feb 5, 2023 22:05
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Kestral posted:Multi-page derails about TG's favorite system are also white noise when they happen in the industry thread, unless there's some industry-related reason for the topic. The thread doesn't have to keep active every day - it's actually more useful for its intended purpose if it goes quiet until there's Industry Discussion. Not that it matters, since the last time we had this argument and Leperflesh put on his mod voice and told everyone in no uncertain terms to take derails like this elsewhere, it just kept going for pages at a time and nothing happened. Then report it and move on instead of adding to it.
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Feb 5, 2023 22:07
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Like personally I think it's useful to point out out the reaction to how the significant mechanical revisions in line with 4e's design goals worked against it in a lot of ways, how it and bad PR handling fed into fan backlash and the tone it set for the shift between D&D editions. It's interesting to draw parallels here considering we're seeing a lot of poo poo repeating itself in mismanaged optics and Paizo running in for a free football spike. Especially in light of how Pathfinder handled its own edition shift, where it's clear the designers came to the same conclusions in a lot of cases that the 3.5e devs did. At least as far as systems that need reworking, adjustments that should be made to combat turns and actions, and the design and balance of player classes. Pathfinder 2e is overall better for the changes, and it doesn't appear to have caused nearly as much of a massive fissure in the player base on top of having some fresh, marketable, new rulebooks at just the right time to cash in on a new wave of D&D antipathy. Were there some serious lines that weren't crossed with Pathfinder 2e that helped people accept it better? Was it more of a case of the changeover between 2e D&D and 3e D&D where everyone felt tapped out and ready for a rules refresh that brought new ideas to the table? Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 22:17 on Feb 5, 2023 |
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Feb 5, 2023 22:15
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The Bee posted:Honestly? If I could choose between the 1-10 portions of the PHB1 and PHB2, or the full 1-30 span of the PHB1, I actually think the former would be a better launching point. You'd have a wider variety of player options available, could focus system design more tightly on that 1-10 range, and would be able to expand on higher level ranges as they became needed BECMI style. I really wish rules would go back to adding levels in supplements instead of new classes.
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Feb 5, 2023 22:27
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Nuns with Guns posted:Were there some serious lines that weren't crossed with Pathfinder 2e that helped people accept it better? Was it more of a case of the changeover between 2e D&D and 3e D&D where everyone felt tapped out and ready for a rules refresh that brought new ideas to the table? Pathfinder 1e held on a long time - it was basically a 20 year old ruleset with light refreshes when 2e came out. But although there wasn't the toxicity the sales numbers weren't there.
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Feb 5, 2023 22:56
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Nuns with Guns posted:Were there some serious lines that weren't crossed with Pathfinder 2e that helped people accept it better? Was it more of a case of the changeover between 2e D&D and 3e D&D where everyone felt tapped out and ready for a rules refresh that brought new ideas to the table? A few of what I think are key things, compared to 4e's launch: - There are very obvious asymmetries in building and playing the various CRB classes, so it avoids the casual assessments of being overly homogenized that the original 4e PHB got - Lots of skills and feats actually do things out of combat instead of relying on skill challenges for everything - There are still lots of miscellaneous spells and doodads with no relation to combat - The adventure and campaign material available at launch was merely kind of mechanically janky rather than boring as poo poo
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Feb 5, 2023 23:04
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Countblanc posted:Yeah personally speaking, the only one of 4e's balance issues that ever really bothered me in practice were accuracy-related ones (which were addressed but also were only something I started noticing at higher levels anyway) and the gulf between an optimized and non-optimized character. People rightfully point out that 4e is still leagues beyond its sister editions in the player balance regard and it's certainly true that there isn't anything as wild as the difference between writing 'cleric' instead of 'fighter' at the top of your sheet in most editions, it still felt like crap when my Epic level "I remember reading I just pick the multiattack powers and am now OP" Ranger was getting regularly trounced on damage by our insanely optimized Fighter on any turn that wasn't the one I used Blade Cascade. The more freedom you give players to customise their characters, the more scope they have to optimise absurdly (or, from the other perspective, to go sub-optimal to an extent which is a drag both on them and the whole rest of the party). If you are getting into 4E, you probably want to make tactical combat the centre of play (because if you are being discerning about system, you'll lean on the system's strengths a lot), and if you are putting a lot of emphasis on that there's a stronger than usual incentive to optimisation. And the more emphasis you put on the tactical combat, the stronger that impetus gets - until there's a point where it'd really make more sense for the system not to bother with character customisation at all. Arguably, character customisation also works against the desire to make a really tight set of game mechanics - the more customisation you allow, the more variables there are to keep track of. If you only allow people to pick race and class, and everything else is game mechanically determined from there, then if you have just 6 races and 6 classes, you already have 36 character combinations to balance. Every potential choice you factor in increases the number of potential characters massively. If having the system be tightly balanced and calibrated is of truly overriding performance, an argument can be made that character customisation is directly contradictory to this, unless the customisation relates to factors which simply have no system weight (and therefore are essentially cosmetic choices when it comes to game outcomes).
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Feb 5, 2023 23:45
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Kestral posted:Multi-page derails about TG's favorite system are also white noise when they happen in the industry thread, unless there's some industry-related reason for the topic. The thread doesn't have to keep active every day - it's actually more useful for its intended purpose if it goes quiet until there's Industry Discussion. Not that it matters, since the last time we had this argument and Leperflesh put on his mod voice and told everyone in no uncertain terms to take derails like this elsewhere, it just kept going for pages at a time and nothing happened. Are you sure you didn't mean to post this in the Big Sulky Baby megathread? I think it's in RGD.
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Feb 5, 2023 23:53
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Roadie posted:- There are still lots of miscellaneous spells and doodads with no relation to combat e: You know what, I'll reduce this to the uncontroversial one. Splicer fucked around with this message at 00:17 on Feb 6, 2023 |
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Feb 6, 2023 00:00
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CitizenKeen posted:I really wish rules would go back to adding levels in supplements instead of new classes. That's true actually, it's not even a dead practice. Most MMOs put more work into raising the level caps and giving established classes new things with each expansion, and add 1-2 new classes or races to the mix. I suppose that wouldn't have helped 4e's WoW comparisons at the time, but I wonder why it died off with BECMI in TTRPG spaces? neonchameleon posted:Pathfinder 1e held on a long time - it was basically a 20 year old ruleset with light refreshes when 2e came out. But although there wasn't the toxicity the sales numbers weren't there. So sale numbers for Pathfinder 2e were low at release? I guess that's not surprising if a lot of the foundational player base was built around not wanting to convert to a new game edition and slowly tapering off from there. Looks like they're making up for that now though, at least in the short term. There is definitely something uniquely challenging about edition shifts between TTRPGs that you don't see in version changes in a lot of other spaces. The basic conceit that you have paper books in front of you that do not vanish or auto-update mean that players (or more practically GMs) need some reason to update. In the past, that tended to be interesting new rules supplements or some revision to the basic game rules everyone agreed made the game "better" in some way. But then there are also plenty of publishers out there who kept the rules close enough that the player bases didn't feel like they needed to fully convert to a new core rulebook. Like there's not much difference between the Pendragon or a lot of the Call of Cthulu editions, right? And it sounded like at least some of the older Vampire: The Masqurade editions were close enough that people would pull poo poo out of, say, Revised for a V20 game. By contrast V5 is a much cleaner rules break, and I've seen some people express they don't like "all the changes." Plus the similar division between the big changes in lore and mechanics in the classic WoD game lines and the New/Chronicles of Darkness stuff. For D&D edition shifts, the most successful of the past few ones appear to be when there's some acknowledgement the prior edition is dead or at least tapped out. 2e was all but a smoking crater between the death of TSR and all of the awful cash in products and useless supplements squirted out in a desperate ploy to squeeze more blood from a stone. The shift from 4e to 5e was comparatively smooth, too, and I believe a lot of that was a combination of the low-energy products released in the lead up to the edition change announcement, then releases stopped. And honestly discontinuing all online support of 4e through its character builder and D&D Insider pretty much ensured nobody would loving bother trying to set up a game. If you want to try it now you better know how to download and hack the older offline character builder. How else are you going to juggle all the loving errata, feats, classes, subclasses, and powers they churned out for 4e with any new players? I think WotC wants something like that again. They want to be able to pull the plug on an old D&D edition and have it properly die so that everyone feels obligated to adopt the new system. They resent that under the OGL other companies could raid their cookie jar and keep attention away from their new products. Their first go at it didn't work well this time, but there's no way they're not going back to the drawing board to sketch out a new long-term plan to make edition changes work more like Microsoft OS updates. Where some people will resist the update for a while, but eventually everyone has to switch if they want to work with anything new. Roadie posted:A few of what I think are key things, compared to 4e's launch: Those are all good points, yeah. I think it does draw to mind what people are "expecting" in D&D or a D&D-alike game. Clearly having mechanically distinct classes is a big deal to a lot of people. 4e classes did operate differently, but something about the format or language made it seem less obvious on a skim? Having lot's of bobs and bits that have no or highly situational combat utility, but clever players like toying around with or keeping in their back pockets? Strong, or at least passably usable prefab adventures to get people a taste of how the devs expect the game to play help, too. One thing the OGL blowup did bring to mind for me is that D&D now does appear to exist in a space where there are credible threats to their market share. The brand is unquestionably ubiquitous. Still, there are other respectably large companies producing games that emulate a satisfyingly close-enough experience to D&D that the few remaining trappings locked behind the D&D brand can be easily modded in by fans in a way that's outside WotC's ability to block. A big enough misstep now means a tidy short-term profit and possibly long-term converts to another game company's products because the only practical difference between the two is if they think one company ethically sucks more than the other. And it's a game company that'd be more than happy to roll in and do the Johnny Bravo Dance on WotC's grave because they've already set themselves up as the True Saviors of D&D once and gotten away with it. 
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Feb 6, 2023 00:07
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Splicer posted:These were also true of 4e at launch btw. To the complainers, rituals didn't count.
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Feb 6, 2023 00:28
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Nuns with Guns posted:That's true actually, it's not even a dead practice. Most MMOs put more work into raising the level caps and giving established classes new things with each expansion, and add 1-2 new classes or races to the mix. I suppose that wouldn't have helped 4e's WoW comparisons at the time, but I wonder why it died off with BECMI in TTRPG spaces? It didn’t though. 3.0 had the Epic Level Handbook. Pathfinder 1e had Mythic Adventures. White Wolf was always happy to sell you a supplement on six-dot or higher elders/archmages/idk the werewolf equivalent. 2e had DM’s Option: High-Level Adventures.
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Feb 6, 2023 00:30
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Nuns with Guns posted:In retrospect, I think one of the biggest issues with 4e was embedding level 1-30 progression into the core rules. The math starts breaking down in paragon tier and gets pretty rough by the epic tier levels. The bloat of feats and powers keeps swelling up and up, designing 4e style player character classes is already more complex and it needs to be traced out for 30 whole levels compared to the "normal" 20, and there was basically no support in the form of adventures or monsters designed for epic tier compared to heroic or even paragon. Oh man how great would a 4e-derived game that only had 10 levels be though, right? Especially if it had very little bloat with only two expansions ever released for it? And also you could play as a swarm of tiny yetis?
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Feb 6, 2023 01:08
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theironjef posted:Oh man how great would a 4e-derived game that only had 10 levels be though, right? Especially if it had very little bloat with only two expansions ever released for it? And also you could play as a swarm of tiny yetis? We should get away from the fantasy theme a little bit, though. Post-apocalyptic stuff seems pretty popular right now, maybe go with that.
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Feb 6, 2023 01:18
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:We should get away from the fantasy theme a little bit, though. Post-apocalyptic stuff seems pretty popular right now, maybe go with that. Nah I got it: multiverses! They’re all the rage, we just have to combine all the multiverses at once!
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Feb 6, 2023 01:19
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Arivia posted:It didn’t though. 3.0 had the Epic Level Handbook. Pathfinder 1e had Mythic Adventures. White Wolf was always happy to sell you a supplement on six-dot or higher elders/archmages/idk the werewolf equivalent. 2e had DM’s Option: High-Level Adventures. I guess, yeah, but those always seem like... I don't know "aspirational supplements"? Not the kind of thing built into the core rules because it expects a decent chunk of players to ever advance that far. theironjef posted:Oh man how great would a 4e-derived game that only had 10 levels be though, right? Especially if it had very little bloat with only two expansions ever released for it? And also you could play as a swarm of tiny yetis? I have the Gamma World box because I'd love to play it. The problem is all my gaming is done online now and Gamma World's charming card components are annoying to set up in a digital format.
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Feb 6, 2023 01:21
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Just use the spreadsheet I guess. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LJSnMJPYrhiMeGf43eunqcALfUPqH8o0EXpYTI3HrMs/edit?usp=sharing Roll a d65, "Ooh look what you got! copy and paste that to your character sheet."
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Feb 6, 2023 01:31
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:We should get away from the fantasy theme a little bit, though. Post-apocalyptic stuff seems pretty popular right now, maybe go with that. Fun story, I have actually reskinned/written a full set of 20 "halves" that are just classic D&D monsters so that players can play as the results of the "A wizard must have done it" statement usually applied to questions like "Why do owlbears exist?" in case fantasy was what you were hoping for. While I'm not working on other stuff I'm still slowly going through the process of retheming all the cards. The nice thing is that the archetypes are very slight so it's super easy to design a bunch in a hurry. Here's a link to my work document, it's not files, that's just my website. As of right now the Boons and Blessings roll mentioned in step 8 is just a new term for the game's cards. https://systemmastery.files.wordpress.com/2023/02/starting-20-monsters.pdf
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Feb 6, 2023 01:44
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The Bee posted:Wasn't this back when GNS Theory was a thing people actually listened to? I feel like there were lots of people arguing about how 4E was gamey, unrealistic nonsense, as opposed to the True simulation of fantasy life that 3.5 . . . really, really wasn't, but people were insistent about. "Simulationist" is a misnomer and some of the things people complained about in 4E were silly even if you cared about such things. And you can care about mismatched systems in a game without being a huge jerk who is ignoring that the basic economics of your fantasy RPG simply don't work. For example, to go old-school D&D, if all the ranges change from feet to yards just because you stepped outside. (Spells suddenly tripling in their AoE was particularly jarring.) Or the original hit point mechanic, where your fighter might have 100 hp and suffer 85 damage but still be 100% capable of fighting. "So it's just an abstract way of tracking fatigue, luck, or other sorts of things, not actual physical damage? OK, I go back to town and take a rest day to recover. How many hp do I get back? ONE?! So these are superficial injuries but it still takes magic or 41 days of bedrest for me to recover to full health?" (1E PHB says after resting 30 days you get 5 hp back per day!) The term can also be applied to your expectations that dungeons will have ecologies because the monsters have to eat and drink to survive, versus just saying "it's magic" and forgetting the rest. But things like "shouting an arm back on?" 4E had a very clear (and clever) mechanic with healing surges. These represented a PC ability to get a second wind or otherwise be reinvigorated, and there were mechanisms for a character to trigger their own healing surge, so why in the world couldn't a Warlord do the same thing for someone? And none of the complaining players were playing in games where after suffering X amount of damage you could no longer use two-handed weapons because one of your arms stopped working, so the example didn't apply in terms of either the healing mechanisms or damage. There's plenty of room in the RPG market for systems that just don't care at all and apply the MST rule ("It's just a game; you should really just relax), as well as systems that want to model some aspects of the game world more carefully. Truly simulationist RPGs are arguably the only system that isn't very sustainable (or fun). Anyone want to track food & water in terms of weight, where it is carried, and spoilage? Keep in mind that weather conditions and storage are going to matter. And that first set of rations is going to spoil before the second set does, because you bought the second set recently. But not so for the set you purchased in town yesterday, as they're suffering from a mealworm infestation and you failed your check to determine that when you were negotiating to purchase supplies. Also, while your donkeys are perfectly fine grazing in this part of the country, the local grass is slightly poisonous to horses, so your mounts are going to be making Constitution saves because your ranger botched the Survival check when you set up camp yesterday. The good news is that the orc tribe you were paid to drive away from their homes was almost completely wiped out by botulism last week. The bad news: save vs botulism. You're two weeks away from the nearest city. Let's spend the next hour playing out the healthy PCs providing basic care to the others while you travel.
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Feb 6, 2023 01:55
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Nuns with Guns posted:Were there some serious lines that weren't crossed with Pathfinder 2e that helped people accept it better? Was it more of a case of the changeover between 2e D&D and 3e D&D where everyone felt tapped out and ready for a rules refresh that brought new ideas to the table? One big notable change is that PF2e has "power cards" for skill actions as well - Climb, Survive, Make an Impression, Steal, etc all get cards, which they didn't in 4e.
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Feb 6, 2023 02:05
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Siivola posted:Judging by the stories people tell of their best times playing 4E, my gut feeling is that if you're trying to do a sequel to that game, trying to get the power framework just right is way secondary to having a robust system for forced movement and terrain effects. Easily the most baffling rules decision in 5e and PF2e is that you cant force move people into hazardous terrain. Thats what its FOR what are you talking about.
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Feb 6, 2023 03:05
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Kestral posted:Multi-page derails about TG's favorite system are also white noise when they happen in the industry thread, unless there's some industry-related reason for the topic. The thread doesn't have to keep active every day - it's actually more useful for its intended purpose if it goes quiet until there's Industry Discussion. Not that it matters, since the last time we had this argument and Leperflesh put on his mod voice and told everyone in no uncertain terms to take derails like this elsewhere, it just kept going for pages at a time and nothing happened. After I posted that, there was a discussion - read around this post a couple days later - in which a lot of the folks that use this thread pointed out that first, discussing different editions of D&D is nominally an industry discussion, second that none of the other D&D threads actually allow edition warring in them (not that this is edition warring necessarily), and third, that there are often stretches where there's no big industry news and people just want to chat. My takeaway is that on balance a significant proportion of folks in the Industry thread don't care if it goes off topic for a while. Who am I to try to force things otherwise? 4th edition does seem to engender quite a lot of discussion, almost all of it outside the 4e thread, and I think there's a variety of complicated reasons for that. My gut says that derails can still be a problem and there may be a point where it's necessary to intervene. But in Nov. 2021 I was wrong about how quickly a mod should come in and smash a discussion.
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Feb 6, 2023 03:18
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Ash Rose posted:Easily the most baffling rules decision in 5e and PF2e is that you cant force move people into hazardous terrain. Are you sure that's a rule in 5e? I've never heard of it (though I will admit to not having played much of it), and a quick google search can only find people talking about a lack of such rule. PF2e definitely does, though it's inconsistent about it. Pushes and pulls can put someone into hazardous terrain, and the rules are written to allow other forms to also do it if they explicitly say they can (though I haven't seen any that do yet).
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Feb 6, 2023 04:11
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Most 5e mental control effects have that rule, but it's not a rule on things that externally force people to move. and I'm pretty sure pathfinder is the same. You can do things that push and pull someone into Lava. But like you can't Command or dominate someone into jumping into the lava. edit yeah: PF2E rules quote:If forced movement would move you into a space you can’t occupy—because objects are in the way or because you lack the movement type needed to reach it, for example—you stop moving in the last space you can occupy. Usually the creature or effect forcing the movement chooses the path the victim takes. If you’re pushed or pulled, you can usually be moved through hazardous terrain, pushed off a ledge, or the like. Abilities that reposition you in some other way can’t put you in such dangerous places unless they specify otherwise. In all cases, the GM makes the final call if there’s doubt on where forced movement can move a creature. I get the general idea in games of not letting you charm or control someone into killing themselves lol. But if you are the one who pushes them off the Ledge, then god speed. Dexo fucked around with this message at 04:35 on Feb 6, 2023 |
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Feb 6, 2023 04:33
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Nuns with Guns posted:to "THEY DUMPED THE BACK HALF OF THE GAME OUT OF CORE! WOT₵ IS NICKEL AND DIMING US FOR HALF A GAME'S WORTH OF RULES I just wanted to say WotC already snuck this in. 5e barely works after level 10, and the vast bulk of official modules and content is for levels 1-11. The 5e PHB might as well be 1-10.
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Feb 6, 2023 04:33
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Dexo posted:Most 5e mental control effects have that rule, but it's not a rule on things that externally force people to move. and I'm pretty sure pathfinder is the same. Well yeah, lava is as dense as rock because it's rock. You'd more jump onto lava, then immediately start suffering horrible burns. Am I doing simulationist right?
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Feb 6, 2023 04:39
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Finster Dexter posted:I just wanted to say WotC already snuck this in. 5e barely works after level 10, and the vast bulk of official modules and content is for levels 1-11. The 5e PHB might as well be 1-10. 5e works fine after level 10, there's just no content designed for that level because WOTC has chosen the stupidest possible course of action for 5e releases. Some classes like Monk only start working properly at level 10, because it's only around then that you have enough ki points to do stuff.
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Feb 6, 2023 04:50
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In this rare instance, WOTC isn't stupid. They know full well most campaigns die by level 8, there's less money in making high level adventures. Of course, that means the whole thing is a cycle.
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Feb 6, 2023 05:01
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theironjef posted:In this rare instance, WOTC isn't stupid. They know full well most campaigns die by level 8, there's less money in making high level adventures. People didn't buy the Epic Level Handbook because they were playing lots of high level D&D. They bought it cause it was cool and they aspired to play those levels, but how many campaigns actually got there? The reality is that Wizards could have put out a lot more 5e material, including higher level stuff, and they'd have made a lot more money. But they have been extremely stingy with the content.
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Feb 6, 2023 05:14
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Nuns with Guns posted:So sale numbers for Pathfinder 2e were low at release? I guess that's not surprising if a lot of the foundational player base was built around not wanting to convert to a new game edition and slowly tapering off from there. Looks like they're making up for that now though, at least in the short term. I don't think that the actual sales of PF2e were ever low, even relative to 1e's peak; Paizo has been pretty clear all along that 2e blew away their prior sales expectations, and that several of the years that 2e was out were their highest-earning years ever. If anything was flagging at first, it was the player numbers, though that's almost to be expected given how much of the existing Pathfinder player base engages in the game primarily through long-running adventure paths, which would preclude switching systems for months on end.
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Feb 6, 2023 05:21
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