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90s Cringe Rock posted:Wasn't Mearls the guy who definitely said "he is the moon"? no, that was a joke about Monte Cook taking the 3.x skill check rules to their logical conclusion that if you rolled a high enough Bluff you could convince someone that you were the moon. _______ anyway, the thing about Mearls in connection with Iron Heroes is that he recycles a lot of his ideas: since IH did not have healing spells, the idea to grant people healing was Reserve Points - you had a number of Reserve Points equal to your total HP, and whenever you had some time to rest (insofar as "Short Rest" was not a technical term in IH), you could convert Reserve Points into HP. Then, a "Long Rest" would restore both regular HP and Reserve Points. the concept of Reserve Points itself came from 3.5's Unearthed Arcana [page 119], published in Feb 2004, with Iron Heroes coming out over a year later. To be clear, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with taking that idea and putting it into your other game - recombining extant design concepts is part of game design, but by the time we get to D&D 5e, where Reserve Points have been converted into Hit Dice healing, the latter is worse. It's clunkier and it's imprecise and the only reason to do it that way is because it creates this feeling of "oh! I'm rolling dice!", so Mearls's contribution to the design was a net negative (IMO) Tuxedo Catfish posted:Iron Heroes absolutely sucks rear end, by the way. Like it's exactly what you'd expect from "3.5E except only Fighter variants," complete with a Defender-analogue that has literally no way to compel or even devil's choice enemies into attacking them. not exactly. The Armiger does have abilities that can compel enemies into attacking them: Combat Magnet literally lets the Armiger force an enemy's melee attack against an adjacent friendly to be resolved against the Armiger instead. The Armiger's problem is that the tokens it needs to activate its abilities are earned by having their armor absorb damage, but the Armiger starts a fight at zero tokens, so there's no way for them to earn the tokens if they're not being attacked. Moreover, while absorbing 10 damage from DR earns one token, a complete miss does nothing, so extra Defense (IH distinguishes between damage reduction and attack rolls versus Defense/AC) actually harms the Armiger. when I ran a game of this so many years ago, I had to implement a houserule that missing the Armiger granted a single token, straight up, and that they began a fight with already one token in the tank (something that all IH classes benefit from, really)
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Dec 14, 2023 03:21
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Kestral posted:I mean, yeah, they're completely right. Look at the people who are getting fawned over by D&D twitter right now. "No one, and I mean no one, designs, narrates, and creates the way Dan Dillon does. An absolute legend in the industry and beyond" - Trys, I love you, but really? Dan Dillon is an an incomparable industry legend? gently caress. 
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Dec 14, 2023 04:29
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gradenko_2000 posted:no, that was a joke about Monte Cook taking the 3.x skill check rules to their logical conclusion that if you rolled a high enough Bluff you could convince someone that you were the moon. Calling them "Hit Dice" was such a weird thing to make it to print. A term that means nothing and only has value as a reference to old-school D&D, and both the original meaning of the term and the term outside of context have nothing to do with their 5E mechanic.
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Dec 14, 2023 04:34
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admanb posted:Calling them "Hit Dice" was such a weird thing to make it to print. A term that means nothing and only has value as a reference to old-school D&D, and both the original meaning of the term and the term outside of context have nothing to do with their 5E mechanic. "See? We are taking some of 4e's best ideas! We swear!"
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Dec 14, 2023 04:53
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gradenko_2000 posted:no, that was a joke about Monte Cook taking the 3.x skill check rules to their logical conclusion that if you rolled a high enough Bluff you could convince someone that you were the moon.
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Dec 14, 2023 07:43
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gradenko_2000 posted:no, that was a joke about Monte Cook taking the 3.x skill check rules to their logical conclusion that if you rolled a high enough Bluff you could convince someone that you were the moon. Giving everybody one token at the start fixes most of the problems, and giving the Armiger a token every other miss fixes some more.
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Dec 14, 2023 07:44
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https://twitter.com/CHofferCBus/status/1734947730491932929 one lay off that caught me was Bree Heiss you gotta have some art direction, and also I thought her work was fine?
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Dec 14, 2023 07:55
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my read on the situation is that the higher ups don't really know, understand, or care what people do in their jobs. they just looked at like the top half of salaries or whatever and fired all of those people. if those positions need to be filled, they can consolidate the work with two or three other jobs and pay the new hire less than any of them. that's just how these things work https://fxtwitter.com/LarAtLarian/status/1735131917543002479 based on this they fired nearly everyone who worked on baldur's gate 3 from the wotc side, which isn't something you do if you want to reward good performance, but is something you'd do if all the bg3 people were more senior with better salaries and could get put on an important project because of it
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Dec 14, 2023 08:58
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Mister Olympus posted:my read on the situation is that the higher ups don't really know, understand, or care what people do in their jobs. they just looked at like the top half of salaries or whatever and fired all of those people. if those positions need to be filled, they can consolidate the work with two or three other jobs and pay the new hire less than any of them. that's just how these things work I've found for the executive class to function and justify itself as a wealth black hole entity, it needs to believe workers below the C-Suite are easily disposable cogs that can be replaced by someone cheaper. And are then bewildered when profits go down. Nelson Mandingo fucked around with this message at 09:39 on Dec 14, 2023 |
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Dec 14, 2023 09:36
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Firing Mike Mearls seems to be basically doing the right thing entirely by accident.
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Dec 14, 2023 10:30
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Looks like Rob Sather's position as "art manager" was straight up eliminated. I guess 6e is goimg to use AI generated slop eh
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Dec 14, 2023 11:49
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Firing Mike Mearls seems to be basically doing the right thing entirely by accident. I meant yeah, if you hack half a tree down, you're bound to get some dead limbs just by accident.
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Dec 14, 2023 13:56
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Mister Olympus posted:based on this they fired nearly everyone who worked on baldur's gate 3 from the wotc side, which isn't something you do if you want to reward good performance, but is something you'd do if all the bg3 people were more senior with better salaries and could get put on an important project because of it
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Dec 14, 2023 15:25
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bewilderment posted:The super short version is that she had a publishing deal with Eos Press based in China including stuff like Nobilis 3e and Chuubo's. There were plans for Nobilis TTRPG maid cafes! Nobilis 3e got released (but had to massively re-do the art since one highly-used artist plagiarised and traced a lot), but Eos just plain took most of the money and ran with regards to the Chuubo's kickstarter and went dark as a company.
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Dec 14, 2023 15:55
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Goa Tse-tung posted:https://twitter.com/CHofferCBus/status/1734947730491932929 Having survived layoffs once before, my guess is that someone cheaper will serve in the role of art direction without being paid for the position. "Here's 10k more to do your boss's job. Please don't leave."
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Dec 14, 2023 16:08
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Why are we paying for new art when we own like fifty years of it?
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Dec 14, 2023 16:13
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Didn't Mearls pretty much sabotage/ratfuck 4e, or at least made sure that the transition to 5e would learn as little as possible from its improvements?
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Dec 14, 2023 16:26
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Yes. 4e Transitioned to Essentials when he took over which was when martials got incredibly simplified and Wizards got at least one new subclass per book.
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Dec 14, 2023 16:42
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Markovnikov posted:Didn't Mearls pretty much sabotage/ratfuck 4e, or at least made sure that the transition to 5e would learn as little as possible from its improvements? Unless somebody writes a big steamy tell-all it's impossible to say what the internal politics going on during that period were like. So many hosed up things were happening at the time (Atari squatting on the D&D video game rights and forcing WotC to sue them, which is why we never got a 4E video game, the murder/suicide that shuttered development of the digital tools they were working on, chain bookstores closing around the nation and cutting off that avenue of shelf-space, etc) that it's kind of hard to lay things at the feet of one guy. From the outside looking in, the D&D division went through several years of layoffs following 4E's release which saw more and more people gone except for Mearls who remained, the quality of the material being published had some notable declines (the adventures being put out around that time were weirdly pretty good, but all the other stuff was mediocre-to-bad), and Mearls began publicly courting the angry edition warrior demographic, parroting their jokes and reaching out to guys like RPGpundit to be "consultants." Is this evidence of some sort of malicious masterplan to bury his predecessors' work under his own? It's not like this never happens (television production is/was apparently pretty infamous for the new boss coming in and cancelling all the old boss' projects) but nobody has ever come out and stated as much.
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Dec 14, 2023 16:43
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I certainly don't think he deliberately sabotaged it to drive down sales, but he immediately made it very clear that he doesn't understand why anybody liked 4th edition (which was echoed by at least one other person on the design team), he doesn't care for its innovations, and he doesn't know how to design for it (Heroes of Shadow wasn't great). His big idea for 4th edition was to make it more like 3rd edition, with simpler martial classes and making wizards more like they were in previous editions. He went way too far in marketing the 5th edition as a return to Good Ol' D&D, though mechanically it was very much a return to 3e. That seems to be his personal preference: 3rd edition rules with a lot of nostalgia for AD&D. And he tied himself into knots trying to rationalize his preferences as both what most of the fandom wanted, and as the most flexible version of D&D for new players to get into and do different things with. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 17:01 on Dec 14, 2023 |
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Dec 14, 2023 16:47
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The thing that often seems to get forgotten about 5E's development days was just how much was promised that never materialized. There was supposed to be an entire enhanced tactical combat module to appeal to 4E fans which got trotted out for a few articles and then never mentioned again. All sorts of stuff about 5E was supposed to have modules and levers you could adjust to make things more like this or that edition, focus more on exploration rather than combat, etc. It wasn't so much directly pitched as a "return to traditional D&D values" though there was a lot of that you could see between the lines with polls about "does this feel like D&D to you?"
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Dec 14, 2023 16:50
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I feel like nearly everything 5e promised already existed in 4e to some degree. When Monte Cook presents: passive perception dropped, I honestly thought they were loving with us.
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Dec 14, 2023 17:03
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Yeah, like even if the only thing you cared about was snidely and bitterly rejecting 4e's design principles, Mearls had already done that in Essentials. (Not that there wasn't anything good about Essentials.)Kai Tave posted:The thing that often seems to get forgotten about 5E's development days was just how much was promised that never materialized. There was supposed to be an entire enhanced tactical combat module to appeal to 4E fans which got trotted out for a few articles and then never mentioned again. All sorts of stuff about 5E was supposed to have modules and levers you could adjust to make things more like this or that edition, focus more on exploration rather than combat, etc. It wasn't so much directly pitched as a "return to traditional D&D values" though there was a lot of that you could see between the lines with polls about "does this feel like D&D to you?" But the subject matter just isn't that interesting, and finding all those articles via Wayback Machine would be a pain in the rear end, so gently caress it.
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Dec 14, 2023 17:06
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and ANOTHER THING what about the WARLORD
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Dec 14, 2023 17:22
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As somebody who loved 4e, I actually liked Essentials. A bit weird when kixed in with the full 4e classes, but fine if playing with other essentials. Then again I'm no game designer and my IRL games never ran for too long so feel free to tell me how kuch they sucked.Kai Tave posted:(Atari squatting on the D&D video game rights and forcing WotC to sue them, which is why we never got a 4E video game, Still very much mad that we never got that 4e game. Kai Tave posted:the murder/suicide that shuttered development of the digital tools they were working on The gently caress I know they had been promising a Virtual Tabletop since 3e. 4e had the character builder, which was pretty good with the "after market" mods.
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Dec 14, 2023 17:31
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Markovnikov posted:Still very much mad that we never got that 4e game. there’s that Neverwinter MMO!
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Dec 14, 2023 17:35
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Markovnikov posted:As somebody who loved 4e, I actually liked Essentials. A bit weird when kixed in with the full 4e classes, but fine if playing with other essentials. Then again I'm no game designer and my IRL games never ran for too long so feel free to tell me how kuch they sucked. There was definitely some cool stuff in Essentials. The problem was just how many things were D&D callbacks that ignored all of 4e's good base principles. Every attack needs to involve an attack roll because spells need to work the same as everything else, but Magic Missile needs to be a special little boy that always hits even though the old version was fine and at-will automatic damage is weird in this system. Healing surges being a limit to the amount of meaningful healing is a key part of the system, but healing potions need to be special so now they circumvent the whole system and make it worse. And the whole overdiscussed "Essentials fighters are generic auto-attack builds, Essentials wizards are just base wizards with different default spells" thing where it's technically balanced but goes against all of 4e's big fundamental changes, and it doesn't even reduce the pointless complexity of 4e. It's just an annoying series of books. quote:The gently caress If it helps, if I remember correctly people online consistently get the timeline wrong and the project's scope was already being wound back behind the scenes when the murder/suicide happened. (I mostly remember that because I also consistently get the timeline wrong and assume the murder led to the project closing.)
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Dec 14, 2023 17:47
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Markovnikov posted:I know they had been promising a Virtual Tabletop since 3e. 4e had the character builder, which was pretty good with the "after market" mods. Hell, I remember one of my 3e books having a character builder on a cd-rom in the back of the book.
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Dec 14, 2023 17:54
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Lurks With Wolves posted:
Yeah I wasn't doubting the timeline, just very surprised at the murder/suicide thing, and trying to remember all the failed digital WotC ventures.
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Dec 14, 2023 17:56
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Lurks With Wolves posted:If it helps, if I remember correctly people online consistently get the timeline wrong and the project's scope was already being wound back behind the scenes when the murder/suicide happened. (I mostly remember that because I also consistently get the timeline wrong and assume the murder led to the project closing.)
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Dec 14, 2023 19:18
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Goa Tse-tung posted:https://twitter.com/CHofferCBus/status/1734947730491932929 Was Schuh in charge of licensing at the start of the year? If so that could be a head rolling for the OGL fuckup.
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Dec 14, 2023 19:19
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Markovnikov posted:As somebody who loved 4e, I actually liked Essentials. A bit weird when kixed in with the full 4e classes, but fine if playing with other essentials. The problem was, like you said, it was rough around the edges--the Thief was basically a solved class and there were a lot of Essentials/4th Edition Basic Set interactions that worked too well or not at all. I really liked the Hexblade, but it didn't work right in the character builder because it wasn't built for "you conjure an item that clones the stats of another item." The single best innovation I can think of was letting people use one of their at-wills in place of a basic attack. In one of the Sane Timelines, that was eventually incorporated into 5th edition.
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Dec 14, 2023 19:29
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Hexblade was interesting but it wasn't very mechanically powerful compared to baseline warlock unless you were doing radiant damage cheese in which case yeah buddy get out of the way. The stuff in Heroes of the Feywild and Elemental Chaos was okay because it seemed to move away from the "only at wills with an encounter booster" design except for the Elemental Sorcerer which actually did that whole thing well.
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Dec 14, 2023 19:49
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Lurks With Wolves posted:Healing surges being a limit to the amount of meaningful healing is a key part of the system, but healing potions need to be special so now they circumvent the whole system and make it worse. Didn't Cure Wounds function without burning surges from the start? I thought the idea was that some healing, specifically Divine healing, would be special and not bound by surges.
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Dec 14, 2023 20:03
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PeterWeller posted:Didn't Cure Wounds function without burning surges from the start? I thought the idea was that some healing, specifically Divine healing, would be special and not bound by surges.
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Dec 14, 2023 20:06
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PeterWeller posted:Didn't Cure Wounds function without burning surges from the start? I thought the idea was that some healing, specifically Divine healing, would be special and not bound by surges. You are correct that Cure Light Wounds would heal an amount equivalent to the character's surge value without burning a surge, but CLW in 4e was a Daily power.
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Dec 14, 2023 20:11
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Kurieg posted:Hexblade was interesting but it wasn't very mechanically powerful compared to baseline warlock unless you were doing radiant damage cheese in which case yeah buddy get out of the way.
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Dec 14, 2023 20:17
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PeterWeller posted:Didn't Cure Wounds function without burning surges from the start? I thought the idea was that some healing, specifically Divine healing, would be special and not bound by surges. Like everyone else said, it did but it was a daily. Other forms of non-surge healing from powers were similarly rare and usually in smaller chunks. Healing potions being surgeless circumvents the whole system and means you can convert gold into health and it just takes an elegant system and makes it much more janky.
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Dec 14, 2023 20:32
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Halloween Jack posted:One of the issues with running 4e was dividing classes into Good and Not So Good and thus rationing who could buy Frostcheese and gatekeeping who's allowed to join the Radiant Mafia. The star pact hexblade at will dealt radiant damage and there was a Star pact warlock paragon path that gave all your radiant powers a crit range of 18-20 and let you add your con modifier to damage twice or something silly like that.
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Dec 14, 2023 20:52
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:Looks like Rob Sather's position as "art manager" was straight up eliminated. I guess 6e is goimg to use AI generated slop eh This seems unlikely after they recently put in anti AI art rules in, and got a bigger art budget. Heck the one book AI modified art from one artist had snuck in, it was all removed once it was pointed out.
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Dec 14, 2023 21:13
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