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I have not once read a rule governing roleplay in D&D unless you count awarding inspiration points and bonus xp. Was there some rule about speaking in first person or fake accents that I missed?
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Mar 1, 2015 16:47
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Generic Octopus posted:4e isn't any more or less focused on combat/roleplay than 3.5 or 5e; it just has a really good, well built tactical combat system as its notable feature, so it gets saddled with a reputation for not supporting skills or roleplaying for no real reason. I think there is some weight to the assertion that 4e is worse at roleplaying when you consider what roleplaying means to a lot of grognards - that is to say, casting insanely powerful spells to screw with the DM's plan. A lot of 'we had such fun roleplaying' descriptions I see from 3.5/3/PF are the likes of 'well the boss was in the tower, so we cast stone to mud on the clifftop it was perched on and it fell off the cliff and he died' or scrybombing or whatnot. Spellcasting generally got depowered A LOT in 4e, as part of the whole balance thing, so the sort of 'fun roleplaying' a lot of grogs liked in older editions just went away because the wizard was so much less plot-warpingly powerful. 4e is better at combat as a balanced game element than prior editions, but about the same at out-of-combat, wgiving the impression that combat is more important in 4e. WHen in fact what happened is that out-of-combat improved less, so it looks worse by comparison. Also, I wish that people wouldn't say 'roleplaying' when they mean 'out of combat activity'. Combat IS roleplaying, here defined as 'making in-character decisions about what do do as a result of in-world events'. If what you mean is 'talking' or 'sneaking' or 'everything other than stabbing dudes', loving SAY THAT. Also, side note, the stone to mud example makes me realise that a lot of the 'we had such fun when' roleplaying examples are just loving cheating - the example I'm actually recalling was one where they cast stone to mud on a tower and it collapsed, then they reversed it - which shouldn't have worked; stone to mud doesn't work on worked stone. So quite a lot of it is also 'ah didn't we have such fun when we ignored the game and made poo poo up?'
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Mar 1, 2015 16:56
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Taear posted:I do totally agree with the feat part. That is the strangest decision to me. I've played D&D since 2nd edition and always found that the inclusion of feats in 3rd was one of the best things they did, making them optional seems like such a weird choice. They're a dumping ground for everything from balance fixes, optional class features, basic maneuver fixes (because we can't have martials being competent right out the gate), and trap options (see: Monty Cook's Ivory Tower essay). They're a lazy designer's way of building bloat right into the system (gotta sell those splat books!), and there's no way in hell you can include all that stuff and make them even remotely balanced against each other. Granted, I'd argue that 5e is probably the best implementation of them so far, but they're still crap (  grappler). And we're probably too early in the lifecycle of the edition to be making any real comparisons.Unrelated, I kind of have to laugh when people keep touting "fast combat" as a thing in 5e. It's fast at level 1, which is probably where everyone is making their first impressions. But I'm at 4th level in two separate campaigns and things are starting to slow down to heroic tier 4e speeds. Monsters have a lot more HP, and our damage output isn't really increasing to match.
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Mar 1, 2015 16:57
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Taear posted:Most seem to be specifically enjoying the system. I have friends that exclusively played 3.5 and have now moved to 5th.  Taear posted:I do totally agree with the feat part. That is the strangest decision to me. I've played D&D since 2nd edition and always found that the inclusion of feats in 3rd was one of the best things they did, making them optional seems like such a weird choice. 5E took a step in the right direction of making feats packages of useful stuff instead of piddly once-off bonuses. Then they ran shrieking in the other direction by retaining the combat vs social vs exploration choice and adding "vs ability scores" to the mix. The siloing dev posts' only actual impact on D&D 5E seems to have been providing the terminology to explain how bad D&D is at siloing. Taear posted:In a slight aside it's weird to me that they still use feet and not meters. I know it's an american system but it's so hard for me to envision and all of us are a bit confused at times... Splicer fucked around with this message at 17:12 on Mar 1, 2015 |
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Mar 1, 2015 16:58
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My 4e wizard was able to use rituals, spells, & skill rolls to trick a town's populace into evacuating through a portal to escape the impending demon siege, only to be sold into slavery on the other side (evil tiefling, table had a laugh at the absurdity of the situation); later, he bound the demon that was meant to be the big boss to his will via a geas. Granted this was epic tier so that's kinda expected, but there's no shortage of shenanigans to be had in 4e. And I get what you're saying about "roleplay," it's just my experience that people mean the skill system, or rather, whatever mechanics are in place to govern actions the player's making up (like negotiating with the merchant, tricking the guard, etc.).
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Mar 1, 2015 17:09
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I should have made some sort of note about Epic tier, yeah. When you get to the point where the whole plot IS involving constant movement across planes and loving with gods, there's some legitimacy to everyone starting to get game-warping poo poo, because the enemy will have. The problem is when one class gets it at level 5 and the other at level never, and there's little or no advice to DMs as to how to COPE with this stuff (and yeah, Epic 4e suffered from the lack of an Epic-specific DMG, but then, so has every other edition.
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Mar 1, 2015 17:19
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Splicer posted:5 feet is a bit under 1.5 meters, so you can do a quick and dirty metric conversion by multiplying everything by three and then shifting the decimal point. You'll be overestimating everything by about about 2cm on the meter, but that realistically shouldn't matter outside of "who's the tallest" matches. You can also just use one space = 2m, which is IIRC what the WotC d20 Star Wars game did. It does shift the scale a bit, but not enough that you really care most of the time. (1.5m is closer, though.)
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Mar 1, 2015 18:04
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Prism posted:You can also just use one space = 2m, which is IIRC what the WotC d20 Star Wars game did. It does shift the scale a bit, but not enough that you really care most of the time. (1.5m is closer, though.) Splicer fucked around with this message at 18:36 on Mar 1, 2015 |
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Mar 1, 2015 18:33
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"My create water spell says it creates a 1/13th hogshead of liquid at a range of up to 10 cubits. Can I cast it to drown that Manticore the skeletons have tied up in the basement?" "Uhh... sure?"
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Mar 1, 2015 18:45
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Splicer posted:It's more that if you don't have much real-world experience with the imperial system then a 20 foot x 20 foot room is a lot harder to visualise than a 6 meter x 6 meter one, and vice versa. Similarly "can my 120 foot range spell reach" is harder to quickly adjudicate than 36 meters. Absolutely. I'm in Canada, I'm used to seeing both, but it doesn't really matter which you convert to as long as it's consistent. I just thought I'd point out Saga did do it and it was 2m.
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Mar 1, 2015 19:05
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Taear posted:I've only ever been a DM in real life D&D and with 4th edition I felt like I had to make my player's characters for them if they didn't have access to the rulebook because there were so many variables that you HAD to read the PHB for. But 5e doesn't require any rulebooks to make a character?
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Mar 1, 2015 20:03
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Admittedly I'm a USian so I know the Imperial system better, but Metric has such a modern connotation to it that it would feel jarring to me to use it in an ostensibly Medieval inspired fantasy setting.
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Mar 1, 2015 20:36
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Prison Warden posted:"My create water spell says it creates a 1/13th hogshead of liquid at a range of up to 10 cubits. Can I cast it to drown that Manticore the skeletons have tied up in the basement?" But won't that drown the Elf Noble in the spiked pit behind the secret door?
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Mar 1, 2015 20:46
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Omnicrom posted:But won't that drown the Elf Noble in the spiked pit behind the secret door? In my experiences, telling a party that they're going to inadvertently harm an elf will lead to some vaguely homophobic joke about elves being effeminate and then an execution of whatever their original plan was.
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Mar 1, 2015 20:51
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Omnicrom posted:But won't that drown the Elf Noble in the spiked pit behind the secret door? Elfs are immune to sleep, you fall asleep before you die of drowning, ergo, elfs are immune to drowning. D&D logic at its finest.
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Mar 1, 2015 20:55
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Combat in D&D for such a long time was "boring but mandatory" that people wanted to just get through it as fast as possible (as, again, boring) and "roleplaying" was defined as "what happens between fights." Adventuring was fun, and then you paid your Fight Things taxes. 4e made combat not boring, but for plenty of people roleplaying was still thought of as "what happens between fights," so the idea emerged of "if 4e is more fight-centric, that means it must be less roleplay-centric!" Of course the caster supremecy issue also rears it's head. You make literally any non-essentials non-caster in 4e and I guarantee it'll have more out of combat stuff they can do then they'd have in just about any other edition. Hell, even some of the casters got more utility, not less. But 4e has a robust combat system so IT'S JUST A BOARD GAME. I mean, seriously, compare any non-wizard/sorcerer/bard in 5e to their 4e counterparts, and you'll find that 4e counterpart has far more they can do or choose from when not fighting. I guess the short answer is "Earlier D&D built really bad habits, 4e tried to fix those bad habits, people got angry." Which is just the entire edition war in a nutshell. Taear posted:In a slight aside it's weird to me that they still use feet and not meters. I know it's an american system but it's so hard for me to envision and all of us are a bit confused at times... BatteredFeltFedora posted:Admittedly I'm a USian so I know the Imperial system better, but Metric has such a modern connotation to it that it would feel jarring to me to use it in an ostensibly Medieval inspired fantasy setting. It's this. Metric for sci-fi, imperial for fantasy. Feel free to extrapolate jokes about the US.
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Mar 1, 2015 22:58
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I think there's also a bit of Appeal to Compromise at play. "Okay, so MAYBE 4e is better at combat, but you have to admit that it must have come at a cost to roleplaying because that way our positions are sort-of-balanced and otherwise it's just plain better than the side I've backed and as a person who's made that side a huge part of my identity I can't cope with that with anything resembling dignity."
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Mar 1, 2015 23:07
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thespaceinvader posted:(and yeah, Epic 4e suffered from the lack of an Epic-specific DMG, but then, so has every other edition. Uh?   I'm not even touching on BECMI because I haven't read those books, but I know they had massive rules changes for high levels.
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Mar 2, 2015 00:00
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Serves me right for believing the second hand information provided to me by my grognard friends. But it doesn't change the basic point that the plot-warping spells and come early and more importantly, asymmetrically.
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Mar 2, 2015 00:08
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The I in BECMI stands for Immortal which had rules for becoming a god and planar travel. Someone should come in and give us the rundown on those; I don't have my Rules Cyclopedia anymore.
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Mar 2, 2015 00:22
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Fuschia tude posted:I'm not even touching on BECMI because I haven't read those books, but I know they had massive rules changes for high levels.  I never had it, so dont know how the rules played out. MartianAgitator posted:The I in BECMI stands for Immortal which had rules for becoming a god and planar travel. Someone should come in and give us the rundown on those; I don't have my Rules Cyclopedia anymore.
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Mar 2, 2015 00:25
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Yeah the Cyclopedia has some truncated content about becoming a starchild but not a lot of meat there.
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Mar 2, 2015 00:31
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Stop showing off, Jedi Jesus, gently caress.
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Mar 2, 2015 00:38
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I had the Rules Cyclopedia version: The rules were loving weird. Being a god meant a 1-36 level advancement, which you could do after making it from 1-36 through the mortal levels and finishing an epic quest (like 'found an empire'). This boxed set included a campaign that had an immortal that was actually a dude on a spaceship that crashes into D&D land and the exploding reaction turns him Immortal. He's trapped in a shield or something. Later in the campaign you have to go back to the ship and fight giant killer robots. Old D&D was the best.
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Mar 2, 2015 01:07
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FRINGE posted:It was left out of the Cyclopedia. It was just BECM. Dont know why. Wait, for real? Because that's the only high-level original recipe D&D I ever had contact with and I have clear memories of needing a patron Immortal from a Sphere that matched your aligment, going from a demi-god to god, divine tiers, a bunch of stuff.
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Mar 2, 2015 02:52
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FRINGE posted:"I" is for IMMORTALS! The multiverse stuff was goddamn awesome - including a discussion on dimensions, and the fact that there's entire races of creatures who occupy the third-through-fifth dimensions instead of first-through-third blew my adolescent mind.
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Mar 2, 2015 03:38
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My favorite thing to do in Wrath of the Immortals was spend 3 million xp creating a moon and sending it on a collision course with a planet. It was a good trick to have in your arsenal and you got to be the villain from Might and Magic.
Babylon Astronaut fucked around with this message at 10:14 on Mar 2, 2015 |
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Mar 2, 2015 06:51
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thespaceinvader posted:I think there is some weight to the assertion that 4e is worse at roleplaying when you consider what roleplaying means to a lot of grognards - that is to say, casting insanely powerful spells to screw with the DM's plan. I agree with this sentiment 100%. The dichotomy of combat vs. role-playing needs to die. Hell, some of the best role-playing (in the sense of making tough decisions based on what your character would do and acting upon them) I've seen has happened in the context of combat. However, I do think that the structure of D&D (and most other RPGs for that matter) is what has lead to combat and role-playing being thought of as separate things: basically, in D&D when you're not in combat everything happens in a very unstructured manner. Players just tell the DM what they're doing, the DM has them roll dice, and then the DM describes the effects, but when you get to combat everything suddenly changes: you suddenly have initiative being rolled, and everything starts happening in an orderly, round-by-round fashion, and you even have a completely different set of rules and actions governing combat. The fact is,, combat in D&D takes place in almost an alternate universe to the rest of the action. All you're missing is a Final Fantasy-like fwoosh sound and a change in music as the game transitions to combat to make it even more jarring. As noted, this is not a problem unique to D&D and very few RPGs have successfully dealt with this problem (the only ones that come to mind are PbtA games which have no separation between regular action and combat), but as such it's easy to see where the idea of combat and everything else being separate comes from.
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Mar 2, 2015 09:34
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Ratpick posted:The fact is,, combat in D&D takes place in almost an alternate universe to the rest of the action. All you're missing is a Final Fantasy-like fwoosh sound and a change in music as the game transitions to combat to make it even more jarring. The fwoosh sound for random encounters predates console RPGs! The Colour of Magic posted:There was a faint sound, hardly louder than the noise of the bees in the rosemary by the road. It had a curiously bony quality, as of rolling skulls or a whirling dicebox. Rincewind peered around. There was no-one nearby.
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Mar 2, 2015 09:52
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It makes sense when you consider that D&D's primordial roots are a wargame. The idea of zooming in and focusing on a single collection of individuals as opposed to armies, and then later still paying closer attention to what they get up to when they aren't "campaigning" through a dungeon, is something that just sort of gradually and haphazardly built up and filled in the cracks over time.
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Mar 2, 2015 09:54
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Tunicate posted:The fwoosh sound for random encounters predates console RPGs! You know, it's been a while since I've read the Colour of Magic and I know that Pratchett's earlier writings were full of D&D references, but I had completely missed that bit the first times I read it! Holy poo poo. As a joke I could see doing "random encounters are accompanied by the sound of rolling dice" like once, but no more than that because the joke would run thin really quickly.
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Mar 2, 2015 09:58
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Obviously had broken rules for Spellcasters, but at least all Warriors got Hardiness: Delay spells with harmful effects cast on you for the next five rounds. Sure you explode (or polymorph, age, energy drain etc.) a coupla times after that, but you got your 15 attacks in (or whatever Mastery gives you). And you got it at level 15! You know since save or suck spells are such a problem at lower levels, you could easily reduce the delay and start it from level 1. Or you could make it selective hardiness etc.
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Mar 2, 2015 10:04
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For all D&D grogs whine about some games being too "gamey" or "too much like video games," the millisecond your game introduces a full separate rule system for combat, you get the swoosh, and that's existed in D&D since the dawn of time. As I've said, I think the big problem (at least specifically here) is that D&D has always wanted to be a combat heavy game to some degree, but combat has always kinda sucked, so people grew to both a) expect it, and b) hate it. And of course refuse to budge from that position, because trying to make the combat actually enjoyable is (as we've learned) an unpardonable sin, and trying to reduce the emphasis on combat makes it an evil storygame trying to destroy the hobby. D&D just builds poo poo habits and then people cling to them and assume that's how things MUST go. If combat is so dull that it's something you want to just blaze through to "get to the good stuff," why is it even in the loving game? Asked no non-4e D&D fan, ever.
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Mar 2, 2015 11:37
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Tunicate posted:The fwoosh sound for random encounters predates console RPGs! 
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Mar 2, 2015 11:39
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The Real Foogla posted:Obviously had broken rules for Spellcasters, but at least all Warriors got Hardiness: Delay spells with harmful effects cast on you for the next five rounds. Sure you explode (or polymorph, age, energy drain etc.) a coupla times after that, but you got your 15 attacks in (or whatever Mastery gives you). And you got it at level 15! There was actually one cool thing about Hardiness - you could, before the spell "goes off," give yourself immunity to it. The example called out is an evil priest casting Power Word: Kill on you, and you healing up in the delayed space so it no longer applies. Fighters actually got a few sweet ones. Literally just on seeing them, lesser enemies (4+1 HD or lower) would quake and fall back in terror, and even mightier foes had to make a save not to take a huge penalty for the entire fight unless they retreat. They simply topped giving a gently caress about magical immunities - while wielding any weapon, or just going with good ol' fisticuffs, they would breach any magical defenses and hit as if they were using a magic weapon - and this was explicitly called out as not being a magical effect, and could not be limited in any way. The fighter was just that loving swole that magic stopped holding them back. For all warriors, while Hardiness: Delay was nice, there were a few that were even more iconic. Adaption meant you never took penalties due to your environment. Period. Underwater, in space, fighting while balancing on top of a ladder, gently caress you I'm a warrior. Captivate meant you were so loving rad that literally everyone of your race loved and respected you just on seeing you. You became a global celebrity out of sheer Warrior. Death Blow gave them, you guessed it, a straight up Save or Die. With Frighten/Challenge, non-fighters could get a leser version of that intimidation one...and then all warriors could just call out an oath of battle so strong that any enemy - dragon, other fighter, or wizard - would abandon whatever they were doing and rush forward to attack the fighter. WIzards in turn basically only got higher level spells. They could also answer any question with sage-like intelligence, but that falls a bit flat to the fighter's "LITERALLY EVERYONE LOVES ME." Clerics got one hilarious one - they can call up a Crusade. Rogues sadly got mostly poo poo, which is fitting since AD&D loving hated thieves, but they did get a few flat out NINJA POWERS. They could become so silent and graceful that they could run across water, or sprint from shadow to shadow (and later literally fly while in the darkness). That's kinda cool. Oh, but get this, they could establish a specific trick they know...and make it a per-encounter power. That's right! Encounter Powers, in AD&D!
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Mar 2, 2015 12:01
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ProfessorCirno posted:all warriors could just call out an oath of battle so strong that any enemy - dragon, other fighter, or wizard - would abandon whatever they were doing and rush forward to attack the fighter.
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Mar 2, 2015 12:21
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so I guess Dungeon magazine and Dragon magazine are basically never coming back, huh
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Mar 2, 2015 17:18
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Power Player posted:so I guess Dungeon magazine and Dragon magazine are basically never coming back, huh  Print is dead.
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Mar 2, 2015 17:34
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Quote is not edit.
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Mar 2, 2015 17:35
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Dungeon and Dragon magazine in their most recent incarnations were strictly online ventures with absolutely no advertisements whatsoever so I don't think that applies? Though I don't think they'll be bringing it back because without an online builder the primary benefit of the Mags is lost.
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Mar 2, 2015 17:36
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