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LightWarden
Mar 18, 2007

Lander county's safe as heaven,
despite all the strife and boilin',
Tin Star,
Oh how she's an icon of the eastern west,
But now the time has come to end our song,
of the Tin Star, the Tin Star!

Boing posted:

What was the old killing orc babies?

You are an adventurer! Orcs are ambushing merchants and farmers in the pass and you've been hired to stop them! After several skirmishes with smaller warbands you make your way to the main encampment and successfully wipe out the warriors! But, thing is that for any given number of warriors there's usually an equal or larger number of noncombatants such as cooks or smiths, plus members of the community that are too old or too young to fight- ranging youths who haven't finished basic training all the way down to infants. What do you do?

"Kill everyone" is not an uncommon answer, especially if you subscribe to the idea that orcs are inherently evil and thus any orc babies will thus only grow up into evil orc adults who would then cause more trouble. While alignment is supposed to serve as a way to get past the ethical ramifications of slaughtering everyone you meet by simply stating that they deserved it, some people get really uncomfortable with the idea of exterminating a race down to the last child out of a belief in the worthless nature of the race.

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LightWarden
Mar 18, 2007

Lander county's safe as heaven,
despite all the strife and boilin',
Tin Star,
Oh how she's an icon of the eastern west,
But now the time has come to end our song,
of the Tin Star, the Tin Star!
It's kind of confusing because if you were going to design a pure evil species why would it have an extended infancy stage? Babies are weak and require tons of attention and nurturing- nature has so many other ways to reproduce that don't involve spending years cleaning up after poop.

LightWarden
Mar 18, 2007

Lander county's safe as heaven,
despite all the strife and boilin',
Tin Star,
Oh how she's an icon of the eastern west,
But now the time has come to end our song,
of the Tin Star, the Tin Star!

gradenko_2000 posted:

I couldn't find anything in the PHB about subdual damage, and knocking him unconscious at 0 HP can still cause death if he fails his 3 saving throws

"Knocking a creature out" says that the creature falls unconscious and is stable. Stable creatures don't make death saving throws. A stable creature regains 1 HP after 1d4 hours.

LightWarden
Mar 18, 2007

Lander county's safe as heaven,
despite all the strife and boilin',
Tin Star,
Oh how she's an icon of the eastern west,
But now the time has come to end our song,
of the Tin Star, the Tin Star!
No problem, it's a confusing segment that I had to check a few times.

LightWarden
Mar 18, 2007

Lander county's safe as heaven,
despite all the strife and boilin',
Tin Star,
Oh how she's an icon of the eastern west,
But now the time has come to end our song,
of the Tin Star, the Tin Star!
Fortunately, Bracers of Defense stacks with all of the options that don't involve a shield.

LightWarden
Mar 18, 2007

Lander county's safe as heaven,
despite all the strife and boilin',
Tin Star,
Oh how she's an icon of the eastern west,
But now the time has come to end our song,
of the Tin Star, the Tin Star!

gradenko_2000 posted:

I looked through the 20 different CR4 monsters because I was thinking you could just re-skin one of them as a Greater Gargoyle and the stats are honestly all over the place.

For AC, the Black Pudding is the lowest at 7, then the Helmed Horror has 20, and then the rest are scattered about between 11 to 17 with an average of 13.85

For HP, the Flameskull has 40, then the Weretiger has 120, and the average is about 75

The damage is going to be off because I didn't bother with looking up spells and abilities, but the Succubus/Incubus does the least at 6, while the Ettin tops out at 28 (two strikes of 2d8+5)

I also found the rolled HP to be really weird: one creature uses d4s, most of them use d8s, but there's a few d10s and a single d12, and almost all of them have +x amounts that are worth multiple hit dice, but even those range from +12 to +44

Hit die is based on creature size- tiny is d4, small is d6, medium is d8, large is d10, huge is d12, gargantuan is d20. Bonus HP are equal to your Constitution modifier multiplied by your total number of hit dice. As far as I can tell, a creature's total number of hit dice is entirely arbitrary and seems only designed to boost up HP totals to a broad-but-presently-undefined HP bracket per CR. Proficiency bonus is based on CR, but saves/skills are determined arbitrarily, as are ability scores. Some creatures get to double their proficiency bonus to certain skills because of reasons.

LightWarden
Mar 18, 2007

Lander county's safe as heaven,
despite all the strife and boilin',
Tin Star,
Oh how she's an icon of the eastern west,
But now the time has come to end our song,
of the Tin Star, the Tin Star!

P.d0t posted:

Yeah, basically this. When marked, either you can attack the guy with high AC, or attack someone else at a penalty AND eat a whack. This is why Paladins got the shaft as Defenders in 4e; not only did their mark punishment not stop enemies from moving, the damage didn't scale worth a poo poo (which I guess was "balanced" because it was no-action auto-damage.)

Then mix in feats for polearm hijinx and fighters got better. And then they forgot that you need STR for basic attacks, so they had to make the Melee Training feat.. :negative:

4e Paladins were kinda troubled out of the box but did get significantly better with later support. The damage got better with feats and items to the point where an Str/Cha paladin has some pretty painful (especially with Radiant Vulnerability in play), and then got other support like Bitter Challenge (violating the mark slows the target, which sets up for Proning with World Serpent's Grasp) and Weakening Challenge in Epic (weakens the target during the attack for half damage, which is fantastic), plus multi-marking from Divine Sanction powers.

Most of this would have been nice to have earlier, but that's game design for you. Then they forgot half of this when they designed the cavalier, which has the low damage (not modified by anything else that boosts Divine Challenge/Sanction) and then adds in an opportunity action cost.

LightWarden
Mar 18, 2007

Lander county's safe as heaven,
despite all the strife and boilin',
Tin Star,
Oh how she's an icon of the eastern west,
But now the time has come to end our song,
of the Tin Star, the Tin Star!

Dick Burglar posted:

At least when I was thinking of rolling with an odd CON score it could be put off til a later level (like, say, 12) and still get away with it, but with WIS you'd really want to bring it up as soon as possible, which would mean level 4. Which means you can't double-bump your attack stat, DEX, and you'd be doing less damage and hitting less often from there on. That doesn't really seem like a good trade. And to be fair, it seems like ALL classes get one good and one bad save: STR (8), INT (3), and CHA (14) are all pretty bad in terms of underutilization saves-wise. I guess it's not too important to push for Resilience then.

And Monks honestly don't seem that bad to me. Well, specifically Way of the Shadow Monks. Open Hand and Four Elements are pretty lovely.

Monks get proficiency in all saves at level 14, otherwise the only way to get proficiency in the big 3 (Dex/Con/Wis) is to start as a rogue (Dex/Int) who gets Slippery Mind for Wis Proficiency at level 15, and then burn a feat somewhere to get Con proficiency. Every class has one of the big 3 and one of the lesser ones, it's difficult to cover your bases by design (which is a pretty bad idea in my opinion).

LightWarden
Mar 18, 2007

Lander county's safe as heaven,
despite all the strife and boilin',
Tin Star,
Oh how she's an icon of the eastern west,
But now the time has come to end our song,
of the Tin Star, the Tin Star!

Kitchner posted:

Yeah that's what I'm concerned about. I mean the level 9 assassin thing literally says "no one will suspect you unless you act out of character" so that's pretty clear but it also costs money.

I currently get +6 to deception though, probably +8 after I get more charisma and a better proficiency bonus. To I'm fairly confident I can make a good roll, especially if I get several attempts. What I'm not confident of is like meeting 6 guys who all roll their own checks and one of them rolls a natural 20 or something.

This is exactly the thing that Passive Insight/Perception was created to solve. You make your check for the disguise, and assume that everyone else rolled a 10 when they encounter you. If your check result is enough to beat their passive checks, they won't notice your disguise. If people actively get suspicious and start looking around for infiltrators, that's the point where they start rolling and you start worrying about natural 20s.

LightWarden
Mar 18, 2007

Lander county's safe as heaven,
despite all the strife and boilin',
Tin Star,
Oh how she's an icon of the eastern west,
But now the time has come to end our song,
of the Tin Star, the Tin Star!

AlphaDog posted:

Lords Of Waterdeep is also good fun. The theme is nearly absent*, but sending all the adventurers featureless colored cubes to their demises to advance your position does feel like D&D from the perspective of the quest giver.

"The forest is full of gnolls again and we need it to not be. Run an ad that says something like We need like 5 fighters 2 clerics and a wizard for a short-term contract. We are not expecting to re-employ you at contract's end."






*It's a good fun game, with a D&D logo on it. Not having a single clue what Waterdeep is or indeed what Dungeons & Dragons is will have no effect on your enjoyment of the game.

There's a video of Wil Wheaton, Felicia Day, Patrick Rothfuss and Brandon Laatsch playing the game as part of Wil Wheaton's Tabletop webseries. 35 minute edited version or the 2h20m extended uncut version for those of you who simply can't get enough.

Anyways, this isn't the first time Wizards has tanked books. The most recent one I know of that came this close to publication was the (heroic) character options thing that was supposed to revise the original PHB classes and introduce themes outside of Dark Sun, but that book got scuttled and what we know of the content was then released in Dragon Magazine. A few years back at Gencon there were murmurings of Ravenloft stuff, but nothing concrete ever showed up (perhaps some of it may have been repurposed into Heroes of Shadow's vampire class or something). There's even more dead projects in the vaults we don't know about.

LightWarden fucked around with this message at 06:11 on Jan 21, 2015

LightWarden
Mar 18, 2007

Lander county's safe as heaven,
despite all the strife and boilin',
Tin Star,
Oh how she's an icon of the eastern west,
But now the time has come to end our song,
of the Tin Star, the Tin Star!
Only partly an error, fixed.

Anyways, I went digging, and the canceled 4e book was Player's Option: Champions of the Heroic Tier.

quote:

Player's Option: Champions of the Heroic Tier offers a wide array of new options for all characters. Themes allow characters' pasts to play a role in their future. New backgrounds allow players to create hill dwarves and wood elves. An all new take on rituals makes those magical abilities more useful in the heroic tier of play than ever before.

For wizards, warlocks, and other arcane characters, familiars are useful assistants when exploring ancient dungeons. Clerics and paladins gain access to relics, items imbued with the power of the gods. Professions allow characters to dabble in the more mundane side of adventuring life, while the rules for adventuring companies allow groups of heroes to combine their efforts in new ways.

With option-packed page after page, this book is certain to have something for everyone!

LightWarden
Mar 18, 2007

Lander county's safe as heaven,
despite all the strife and boilin',
Tin Star,
Oh how she's an icon of the eastern west,
But now the time has come to end our song,
of the Tin Star, the Tin Star!

Dick Burglar posted:

Why even skirt around flanking? Wasn't that term in 3.X too?

Allstone posted:

Because you need additional rules for it to exist in theatre of the mind.

More or less.

3.5e Rules Compendium, p. 56 posted:

How We Learned to Flank
In the flagging days of D&D's 2nd Edition, while 3rd Edition was being feverishly designed and tested, I and others were relegated to a back conference room at Wizards, tapped to create a D&D-themed board game. The board game drew on the nascent 3e rules, and thus included wizards, rogues, fighters, clerics, guardian monsters, and treasures to be won. Because we were using unformed rules as the basis for our game, and because we wanted a simplified version of those rules, we felt free to do anything we wanted.

The game's main innovation was that it needed no Dungeon Master. To play our board game, no one would be required to take on the herculean task of mastering all the rules before considering actually playing. Randomly generated quests, tiles, and monsters could stand in for the normally vital roles of storyteller, judge, and facilitator wrapped into a single body. Because our game was to be a board game, we felt we might just be able to get away with our conceit that such a thing as DM-less gaming was possible. In any event, each player had a piece representing a character and tracked that piece on a grid, just as in D&D.

We had a lot of fun running through dozens of iterations and simplifications of fledgling 3e rules for our board game. When we got to the rogue, we wondered how to make it obvious, in a DM-less environment, when the rogue should be able to sneak attack. Someone on our team slowly moved the rogue's figure so a foe stood directly between the rogue and one of the rogue's allies, and said, "How about whenever that happens?"

Thus the concept of flanking was born.

-Bruce R. Cordell, designer

LightWarden
Mar 18, 2007

Lander county's safe as heaven,
despite all the strife and boilin',
Tin Star,
Oh how she's an icon of the eastern west,
But now the time has come to end our song,
of the Tin Star, the Tin Star!

Alhireth-Hotep posted:

It's kind of strange, I associate Law vs Chaos with, like, B/X and BECMI, but then I recently found a copy of Holmes Basic (1977). What do I see?




So it's not the chaotic evil PCs that lead to party conflict; it's those filthy neutrals.

Can't blame AD&D for everything.

Would you be willing to transcribe or photograph the alignment section? I have this alignment comparison/discussion post rolling around in the back of my mind, and part of it is just the sheer absurdity of how alignment definitions change with every single edition published, but Holmes Basic is the one that I don't have access to.

LightWarden
Mar 18, 2007

Lander county's safe as heaven,
despite all the strife and boilin',
Tin Star,
Oh how she's an icon of the eastern west,
But now the time has come to end our song,
of the Tin Star, the Tin Star!
I had to pick between Fighter and Monk, then Wizard and Cleric.

LightWarden
Mar 18, 2007

Lander county's safe as heaven,
despite all the strife and boilin',
Tin Star,
Oh how she's an icon of the eastern west,
But now the time has come to end our song,
of the Tin Star, the Tin Star!
+3

In theory, the selling point of two-handers is that they have a bigger damage die. There are some versatile weapons that get a bigger damage die when you wield them with one hand, but that's a property that's listed on the weapon.

LightWarden
Mar 18, 2007

Lander county's safe as heaven,
despite all the strife and boilin',
Tin Star,
Oh how she's an icon of the eastern west,
But now the time has come to end our song,
of the Tin Star, the Tin Star!
They usually dump employees in December, but it's entirely possible they saved the annual canning until after the holidays. I don't see anyone confirming this though.

LightWarden
Mar 18, 2007

Lander county's safe as heaven,
despite all the strife and boilin',
Tin Star,
Oh how she's an icon of the eastern west,
But now the time has come to end our song,
of the Tin Star, the Tin Star!

Elendil004 posted:

Friend of a friend put together a dark sun book: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7Pb99H6nzr0TnVWM3ljWjV6cjA/view

Some interesting things, and some not so interesting things I think in there.

Why the hell would you allow divine characters if you're only giving them a 16 to 35% chance of their spells working? You're already giving them a 100% chance of everything else working like Channel Divinity or a paladin's smite and auras.

Mul has a random floating +2 to nothing, Half-Giant has a +3 to strength because gently caress racial guidelines. I think the rare races are a bit much (especially since 4e linked the Dragonborn to the Dray). Wasteland Mutant takes all the fun of Gamma World and then ruins it by slapping on actual racial penalties.

LightWarden
Mar 18, 2007

Lander county's safe as heaven,
despite all the strife and boilin',
Tin Star,
Oh how she's an icon of the eastern west,
But now the time has come to end our song,
of the Tin Star, the Tin Star!

gradenko_2000 posted:

Experimental subjective fix: make the character's background matter in determining the quality of the success. Say you're facing down a Mad Wizard who's casting an arcane ritual, and someone makes an INT+Arcana check to find out what the Wizard is trying to cast. The thing about 5E's skill system is that a Rogue that took Arcana as his Expertise skill might have a higher bonus to the check than an actual Wizard. What I propose is that even if the Rogue passes his check, he's never going to get as much information about the Mad Wizard's spell as the Wizard, simply because he's a Rogue and not a Wizard. You'd have to be careful with this though, as it can lead you down to playing favorites or treating the party unfairly if you don't check exactly by how much you're reining in the results of their checks.

Careful with this one. If a player has invested one of a limited amount of character options into being good at something (especially something that requires an unusual investment of abilities), that's usually a flag that the player wants to be good at that thing, and arbitrarily blocking that thing comes across as a dick move. If you have a problem with Expertise being a floating +2 to +6 bonus in a game of flat math than fix Expertise; if you have a problem with characters not being able to do the things their concept says that they're good at then fix that instead.

LightWarden
Mar 18, 2007

Lander county's safe as heaven,
despite all the strife and boilin',
Tin Star,
Oh how she's an icon of the eastern west,
But now the time has come to end our song,
of the Tin Star, the Tin Star!

gradenko_2000 posted:

That's basically Neverwinter Nights, though.

I mean, I suppose I don't entirely disagree with your post, but for a certain scope of game there is a good and justifiable reason to make "a digital D&D so that the computer handles all the rules, while at the same time creating an interface so that a human DM can still create the adventure 5 minutes ahead of what the players discover, as long as the adventure can't be about or handle literally anything/everything"

Yeah, Neverwinter Nights hasn't exactly aged poorly outside of the graphics department. Though the game mechanics deviated from 3e's rules on a number of vectors, there are people making story modules and content for Neverwinter Nights to this day, even if the community is smaller than it was almost 13 years ago. I think the tools were easier to use than they were for Neverwinter Nights 2.

This one is probably going to have even more deviation from the core rules than Neverwinter or the Infinity Engine games did, since most of the non-combat rules (and even some of the combat effects) are vague and rely on the DM to sort it out.

LightWarden
Mar 18, 2007

Lander county's safe as heaven,
despite all the strife and boilin',
Tin Star,
Oh how she's an icon of the eastern west,
But now the time has come to end our song,
of the Tin Star, the Tin Star!
This was a few pages back, but I finally managed to dig up some links. Regarding the big WotC-prompted CharOp discussion of 4e's flaws...

OneThousandMonkeys posted:

Can you link or is it buried in the depths of the WotC forums' re-org from a year or two ago?

Original Thread, but it got stickied as an announcement so non-mods couldn't post in it, prompting this thread with lots of discussion of flaws.

LightWarden
Mar 18, 2007

Lander county's safe as heaven,
despite all the strife and boilin',
Tin Star,
Oh how she's an icon of the eastern west,
But now the time has come to end our song,
of the Tin Star, the Tin Star!

Father Wendigo posted:

1) Has anything interesting been done with Assassins yet? They were the most blatant trap class at the beginning, and I'm curious if they did anything to make it functional or just doubled down on screwing over people who don't know better.

Not really, about the only major gimmick the assassin has is surprise rounds. Normally they're uncommon, but by investing in stealth or something with your expertise bonus you can scout a little bit ahead, shoot a dude to start the surprise round and then use your bonus action + move to hide or dash your way back to the other folks. It's still pretty gimmicky, only works for a round and can go south pretty easily, which is why you want your party some 30 feet back.

LightWarden
Mar 18, 2007

Lander county's safe as heaven,
despite all the strife and boilin',
Tin Star,
Oh how she's an icon of the eastern west,
But now the time has come to end our song,
of the Tin Star, the Tin Star!

PeterWeller posted:

Also, regarding Cirno's mention of Raistlin, dude is literally a PC wizard who ditches his party when he gets powerful enough to no longer need his meat shield brother. He is the embodiment of everything wrong with LFQW design.

One of the funnier things about Raistlin is his name occasionally pops up when people talk about dump stats and how you're a power gamer if your wizard dumps Strength or Charisma, wondering why those munchkins aren't more like Raistlin and put themselves through the actual dangers of playing a low-Constitution/low-health character. DL01- Dragons of Despair has the write-ups for the various protagonists and Raistlin's talks about how he wound up at the towers and passed the tests at a terrible cost to his health. His Constitution is 10.

(as is his Strength and Charisma)

LightWarden
Mar 18, 2007

Lander county's safe as heaven,
despite all the strife and boilin',
Tin Star,
Oh how she's an icon of the eastern west,
But now the time has come to end our song,
of the Tin Star, the Tin Star!

gradenko_2000 posted:

Wasn't Drizzt an actual PC from a campaign that its author was playing, and that he was a good-but-outcast Drow specifically because of the playable-PC clause in the race's description?

The answer is far funnier than that.

R.A. Salvatore, Dark Elf Trilogy Introduction posted:

I knew where Drizzt was conceived, of course: in my office, at my day job. And I knew when he came into being: July 1987, right after my proposal to write The Crystal Shard had been accepted, and right before I actually started writing the book.

It was one of the strangest episodes of my writing career. At the time I began writing the asked-for proposal, the FORGOTTEN REALMS setting was nothing more than a prototype and a single novel, the excellent Darkwalker on Moonshae by Doug Niles. When TSR asked me to write a Realms book they sent me all that they had, which amounted to...Darkwalker on Moonshae. Thus I came to believe that the Moonshae Isles were the FORGOTTEN REALMS setting.

Well, the Moonshaes aren't that large a place. Any epic story taking place in that region at that time would have to at least mention the storyline and characters of Doug's fine book. I was thrilled at the prospect of working with Doug Niles, but I didn't want to steal his characters. I cam up with a compromise that involved Daryth from Doug's book to introduce the hero of my book: Wulfgar, son of Beornegar, of the barbarian tribes of Icewind Dale.

When I later discovered the actual size and scope of the Realms and was told that TSR did not want to share characters (as they did with the DRAGONLANCE saga), I was truly relieved, and that was the end of it--for a time.

Then the proposal got accepted, and when Mary Kirchoff, then senior editor in TSR's book department, told me I'd be writing the second FORGOTTEN REALMS novel, she reminded me that now we had to set the book thousands of miles from Doug's stomping ground, I needed a new sidekick for Wulfgar. I assured her that I'd get right on it and come up with something the following week.

"No, Bob," she responded, words I seem to hear too often from editors. "You don't understand. I'm going into a meeting right now to sell this proposal. I need a sidekick."

"Now?" I, in my never-before-in-the-world-of-publishing naivete, responded.

"Right now," she answered, rather smugly.

And then it happened. I don't know how. I don't know why. I merely said, "A drow."

There came a pause, followed by, in a slightly hesitant tone, "A dark elf?"

"Yeah," I said, growing more confident as the character began to take more definite shape in my mind. "A drow ranger."

The pause was longer this time. Then, in barely a whisper, the tremor of having to go tell this one to the mucky-mucks evident in her tone, she said, "What's his name?"

"Drizzt Do'Urden, of D'aermon N'achezbaeron, Ninth House of Menzoberranzan."

"Oh." Another pause. "Can you spell that?"

"Not a chance."

"A drow ranger?"

"Yup."

"Drizzit?" she asked.

"Drizzt," I corrected, for the first of 7.3 million times.

"Okay," the beleaguered editor agreed, probably thinking she could change my mind later.

But she didn't, of course. This is a testament to Mary Kirchoff: she let the creative person she hired do the creative thing and waited to see the result before taking out the hatchet (which never appeared).

Thus was Drizzt born. Did I ever run him in a game? Nope. Is there anyone I based him on? Nope. He just happened, unexpectedly and with very little forethought. He was suppose to be a sidekick, after all; a curiosity piece with a slightly different twist. You know: like Robin to Batman, or Kato to the Green Hornet.

It didn't work out that way. In the first chapter of The Crystal Shard Drizzt ran across the tundra and got ambushed by a yeti. By page three, I knew.

Drizzt was the star of it all.

LightWarden fucked around with this message at 06:21 on May 7, 2015

LightWarden
Mar 18, 2007

Lander county's safe as heaven,
despite all the strife and boilin',
Tin Star,
Oh how she's an icon of the eastern west,
But now the time has come to end our song,
of the Tin Star, the Tin Star!
On the other hand, the Baldur's Gate novels are indistinguishable from bad fanfiction to the point where I have literally stopped reading it and double-checked to make sure this was a book that was actually published.

LightWarden
Mar 18, 2007

Lander county's safe as heaven,
despite all the strife and boilin',
Tin Star,
Oh how she's an icon of the eastern west,
But now the time has come to end our song,
of the Tin Star, the Tin Star!

ProfessorCirno posted:

The actual problem with "I do a creative thing" is that it's not actually mechanically encouraged at all.

Even 4e's big Page 42 (or whatever page it was) had it's own issues.

The three problems with "just be creative" are that 1) poisonous "simulationist" thinking typically demands dramatically overestimating difficulty of the task 2) the hobby has been drilling into everyone's head that lastability is supremely powerful and useful without ever actually wondering how lastable things actually are, and 3) nobody actually taking time to note how often situations really come up.

Like, take the general easy example. I'm on a balcony. There are baddies across and below. I want to swing on the chandelier then leap down to attack them.

The worst case scenario of course is "roll to leap to the chandelier, roll to swing across it, roll to land, then roll your attack. This takes two rounds." Four chances to fail with little to no benefit and a large drawback. This is the simulationist school of thought: map out the action and every step along the way, then demand checks for each of those steps, with little to no payout. "Because anyone can do it, and you aren't giving up any daily resources!"

Consider the rogue lockpicker vs the wizard Knock caster. Ignore for a moment that so very often people summerized the rogue as "the guy who picks locks," what an exciting class niche. The general argument goes: Yes, knock unlocks a door with no roll needed (a fairly big deal in AD&D), but the rogue can try to pick locks all day! Even 3e when you could just get a magic item to cast Knock for you, that argument survived. It's missing a key question: how many locks are there?

I don't really use modules or adventures so I dunno the answer to this question "officially," but really, how often are locked doors encountered in your games? Speaking in what I've encountered? Maybe one or two.

As part of a thought experiment on the value of Trapfinding (the Rogue's ability to disable magical traps in 3e and Pathfinder) for a future Murphy's Rules thing, I went through various modules and counted the number of times magical traps appeared as opposed to nonmagical ones (anyone with Disable Device can deal with nonmagical traps in Pathfinder). Single digit answers across entire adventure paths were common, which meant that magical traps were pretty easily handled by wands or scrolls that granted you trapfinding for a few minutes. It is a staggeringly over-rated ability, especially when most of the slack can be picked up by any other Dex-heavy character with skill points to spare.

LightWarden
Mar 18, 2007

Lander county's safe as heaven,
despite all the strife and boilin',
Tin Star,
Oh how she's an icon of the eastern west,
But now the time has come to end our song,
of the Tin Star, the Tin Star!

gradenko_2000 posted:

Between full BAB, feat chains, magic items, maneuvers that weren't gated off into 5e feats/abilities and the Fort/Ref/Will save structure, would it be a stretch to say that the 3.PF Fighter is better than the 5e one?

Yes, this is a stretch. Unless you were seriously optimizing and had access to all of the splatbooks a 3.PF fighter was not in a good place either.

Full BAB wasn't that helpful because all your iterative attacks activated on a descending bonus, so you weren't a 20th level fighter making four attacks against a CR 20 opponent, you were' a 20th level fighter making one attack, followed by a 15th level fighter making one attack, followed by a 10th level fighter making one attack followed by a 5th level fighter making one attack. Unless you had a seriously ridiculous attack bonus through spells or the ability to go for touch AC, your last attack often missed.

Feat chains were terrible because they were designed around the idea that fighters had lots of feats, so normal people could only do one thing and even fighters couldn't pick up that many things. Plus you had to plan out your character in advance to get the most out of them.

Maneuvers were gated behind feats in 3.PF just as they are in 5e, just not through the same way. Just because you can use maneuvers without the feat in 3.PF, it doesn't mean that you should.n Using a maneuver without the feat means that you're provoking an AoO, have a smaller bonus in a game where enemy strength/size/CMD bonuses rapidly outstrip your own offense for the maneuver, and many maneuvers are of questionable value against different foes (can't disarm a dragon's teeth, and bull-rushing the dragon 5 ft doesn't mean it's magically out of reach). You could get something out of maneuvers, but it required serious investment and feat synergy.

The Fort/Ref/Will save structure involves fewer weak points than 5e's six saves, but the 3.PF fighter is better than the 5e fighter in the same way that being eaten alive by rats is better than being eaten alive by fire ants. The 3.PF fighter has only one good save that can even hope to keep pace with rising enemy save DCs, but without heavy investment in spells and ability scores you'll probably be outstripped by high level opponents in your best save, and utterly clobbered in your worst, because at high levels the penalties from failing saves get really bad, with stuff like mind control and instant death being flung around left and right. Meanwhile, the 5e fighter's bad saves just straight up do not increase at all, and you have too many bottlenecks in the form of Concentration spells to prevent buff stacking and Attunement to prevent magic item stacking, so your bad saves at 20th level may be almost what they were at 1st level against enemies designed to challenge the good saves at 20th level. Both save systems are total garbage.

Magic items were better for the 3.PF fighter since they were more abundant, but they were far, far, far better for the 3.PF caster, especially the 3.PF caster crafter, who could have whatever was needed for half the market price.

LightWarden
Mar 18, 2007

Lander county's safe as heaven,
despite all the strife and boilin',
Tin Star,
Oh how she's an icon of the eastern west,
But now the time has come to end our song,
of the Tin Star, the Tin Star!

ImpactVector posted:

I know it's just an example, but the DB rangers would probably work. It really only sucks when you don't get a boost to your attack stat, since you're NEED to have that at an 18+, and it's really expensive to get it that high without a racial boost.

In that sense, I think you could mostly salvage the system with a single class-based boost to the attack stat and a choice of two from race. That way even if the race bumps don't line up with anything, you're probably only missing out on a point of damage or a square of forced movement or whatever.

Honestly, I'd just give all player characters of whatever race the ability to add +2 to three different stats and only have racial stats as a suggestion. So a dwarf might favor Str, Con and Wis, and you can alot your stats that way to be MOST DWARF or decide that you really need to go Dex/Int/Cha and be LEAST DWARF or go for whatever other mix of ability scores your class needs. You may be an oddity by the standards of your race, but that's totally fine for player characters and adventurers.

Similarly, instead of +1 to two stats at levels 4/8/14/18/24/28, it'd be +1 to three stats, so you can at least try to keep your stats fairly level while still having some room to explore.

LightWarden
Mar 18, 2007

Lander county's safe as heaven,
despite all the strife and boilin',
Tin Star,
Oh how she's an icon of the eastern west,
But now the time has come to end our song,
of the Tin Star, the Tin Star!
Let me tell you a story about Wound Points!

Wound Points show up in 3e's Unearthed Arcana. Interestingly enough, they were originally designed for the d20 Star Wars RPG as a way to create "a more cinematic method of handling damage than the traditional hit point system." The idea was that your Vitality Points (VP) represented your ability to shrug off near misses, but it was only that last hit that went through the last of your VP or that random critical hit that touched your WP and actually did some serious damage. VP regenerated by your level each hour while WP required days of rest and/or medical treatment, so you could be back in the game quicker if you didn't get tagged with WP damage.

When they updated the rules for Star Wars Saga Edition, the Wound Points system rules were mysteriously absent! They explained their reasoning on the website, but when WotC lost the Star Wars license all of their old articles went missing. Fortunately, lovely nerds have backed up many of the articles WotC kept on their site.

Jedi Counseling 101 posted:


What's Wrong With Vitality Points and Wound Points?


The vitality points and wound points of the Revised Core Rulebook have one primary problem: They're a little too lethal in the long run. Consider that a player character is meant to survive literally hundreds of encounters over the course of his or her career. In contrast, an opponent is usually meant to survive just a few rounds. Any mechanic that is meant to force an opponent to meet with a sudden demise in just a few rounds of combat (such as a critical hit that kills him instantly, or nearly so) will almost certainly come back to haunt the PCs, too. That might not be a problem in Dungeons & Dragons, but death is a lot more permanent in Star Wars.

For example, consider a scoundrel who has a Constitution score of 12. The character doesn't wear armor, and over the course of his career, he's hit by an average of one shot from a blaster rifle per encounter. (Some encounters, particularly at higher levels, might involve more hits, and others might involve less; this is just an average.) Let's take three important factors into account.
1.Assuming that an attacker can hit the scoundrel on a roll of 19, there's a 10% chance that any hit from a blaster rifle is a critical hit.
2.There's about a 2% chance that any critical hit from a blaster rifle kills the scoundrel instantly (that is, a roll of 22 or higher reduces his wound points to –10).
3.The scoundrel faces an average of 13.333 challenging encounters per level.

Therefore, the character has a 39.1% chance of being killed by sheer dumb luck at some point before attaining 20th level. In fact, in a party of four heroes like this, the chance that all of them will reach 20th level without being killed in this manner is less than 14 percent. Worse, if a character has a lower Constitution score, or if he takes more than one hit from a blaster rifle in an average encounter, his chance of instant death can be substantially higher. Consult the table below.



Keep in mind that the table includes only the likelihood of being killed outright by an opponent's lucky roll. Sure, losing your hero to sheer dumb luck when you made all the "right" decisions isn't much fun. But the table doesn't include the chance of being reduced to negative wound points and failing to stabilize, being slowly worn down by repeated hits, taking two critical hits in one fight, or any other source of danger. In other words, this estimate of mortality doesn't include any of the other challenges that we expect heroes to face. When you take those other dangers into account, too, the chance for death rises even more.

Our Alternative: Hit Points
Given all this, we decided to use hit points in Saga Edition. It avoids the "incredibly unlucky instant death" problem described above, it has the advantage of using a single measure for all damage, and it's a simple, familiar standard that is common to many games (including Dungeons & Dragons and Star Wars Miniatures).

What do hit points represent? Here's a quote from Saga Edition:

Hit points (sometimes abbreviated "hp") represent two things in the game world: the ability to take physical punishment and keep going, and the ability to turn a serious blow into a graze or near miss. As you become more experienced, you become more adept at parrying strikes, dodging attacks, and rolling with blows such that you minimize or avoid significant physical trauma, but all this effort slowly wears you down. Rather than trying to keep track of the difference between attacks and how much physical injury you take, hit points are an abstract measure of your total ability to survive damage.

Hit points are not a universal gauge of concrete, physical toughness. If a soldier and a small tank both have 100 hit points, that doesn't mean the soldier is physically as tough as the tank! Hit points are deliberately abstract so that the same measure of damage can be applied to an inanimate object (such as a wall), an animate object (such as a tank), a massive creature (such as a Krayt dragon), or a high-level character. Consider what hit points mean to each of them:

-The high-level character's durability comes mostly from avoiding attacks, rolling with blows, and so forth. Only a fraction of his survival is based on his physical ability to absorb damage.
-The Krayt dragon's hit points include skill and speed, but a much greater portion comes from its sheer size and bulk. In other words, it's hard to hit something that big in a way that will cause critically injuries.
-The tank's hit points are completely physical in nature, but they aren't determined only by its size and mass. They also account for qualities such as the resiliency of the tank's systems, the volatility of its fuel and payload, the number of
redundant and backup systems, and so on.
-The wall's hit points are completely physical and almost entirely determined by simple physical characteristics such as the type of material used to build the wall, the thickness of the wall, and so on.

Over the years, some players have developed a terrible misconception that a character with 100 hit points can be shot almost a dozen times in the chest. Not true! Both a high-level soldier with 100 hit points and astormtrooper with 10 hit points will be grievously injured and possibly killed by a single blaster wound to thechest. However, the high-level soldier will dodge the first nine shots, and the stormtrooper won't. (If it helps, imagine that a high-level hero has a reserve of "virtual hit points" to offset attacks that would otherwise be lethal. Once he has exhausted his reserve, the blow that finally reduces him to 0 hit points will solidly connect and cause serious physical trauma.)

So, the rules designed to make the game feel more cinematic actually wound up making your characters more prone to random chump deaths thanks to crits bypassing your normal defenses and going for your soft and squishy parts when a high level character had 100+ VP but only 10 to 20 WP (also, stun weapons were ridiculously good- fail a save and you were unconscious, succeed and you were merely stunned and unable to do anything as they kept shooting you).

Saga Edition invented the condition track to make injuries more cinematic: Basically if you took damage in excess of a specific value (your Damage Threshold), your condition track was shifted down by one step, applying an increasing level of penalties to your attacks, defenses and skills:

<->
0|-1|-2|-5|-10|Unconscious

Critical hits did high damage and thus had better odds of knocking you down a peg, and there were various ways to increase the number of steps your target shifted, such as by hitting them with stun weapon or sucker-punching them. Thing is they also stacked, so suckerpunching someone or sniping them with a stun weapon could knock an opponent down two, three, even four or more steps while going back up the condition track could take your entire turn just to go one step back, so optimizing around the condition track became the fastest way to one- or two-shot just about any enemy in the game.

There's a reason they didn't bring this system back in 4e outside of the curse/disease tracks, which usually just move you up/down by one step at a time once a day, giving you more opportunities to actually deal with it.

5e's vitality system doesn't quite get to the same one-shot realm as the original Star Wars d20, because even a critical hit needs to do five times your Con modifier in damage in a single blow to completely tank your vitality (while a stock blaster rifle does 3d8 for 13.5 average damage before modifiers are added in and can easily tank a lightly armored Star Wars character who doesn't have much in terms of Con). Single-shot crit damage doesn't really scale all that well over 20 levels since it's just rolling your dice again and most characters don't get all that many dice to roll outside of the odd assassin rogue. That said, 10 points of damage isn't too high of a benchmark to hit for anything with a two-hander and/or a decent ability score, so chipping away at your Vitality isn't too hard, and gets even easier at higher levels when monsters get a wider set of attacks that do more damage per hit. And while your HP count can grow twenty fold over twenty levels, your Vitality is pegged to your Con score, which barely grows at all unless you invest your stat boosts or magic item attunement slots. When you take Vitality damage it also lowers your effective Con score for the purpose of calculating HP, so every one to two points of Vitality damage (easily doable at high levels) also docks your HP count by your level, meaning you need to face high-level threats with low-level HP counts. And while you can take HP and Vitality damage as part of the same attack, you cannot heal HP and Vitality damage as part of the same spell- you need to be at full HP and then have someone heal you 10 points per lost vitality (which is pretty hard at low levels).

This system is pretty much designed to grind down characters, especially high-level ones. And since it's an attrition-based mechanic it means basically nothing to monsters who are only supposed to be in one combat and then die. Given that they figured out the ways this tends to go down ten years ago, I have no idea if they forgot this lesson or know exactly what they're doing, because this system is not designed to counter the problem of "a fighter can survive a fireball, a troll’s rending claws, and a one‐hundred‐foot fall, only to crumple in a heap due to a kobold’s dagger" so much as it's designed to enforce it.

LightWarden
Mar 18, 2007

Lander county's safe as heaven,
despite all the strife and boilin',
Tin Star,
Oh how she's an icon of the eastern west,
But now the time has come to end our song,
of the Tin Star, the Tin Star!

fool_of_sound posted:

4e changed too much too fast for a lot of tabletop players. If they had come out in the opposite order, I bet you wouldn't have seen the giant backlash against 4e. I don't know why, but a ton of tabletop gamers are ridiculously resistant to change.

A surprising number of 4e changes came out in various 3e products if you were seriously into reading everything WotC produced like I was. Reading through the 4e PHB wasn't much of a surprise for me.

LightWarden
Mar 18, 2007

Lander county's safe as heaven,
despite all the strife and boilin',
Tin Star,
Oh how she's an icon of the eastern west,
But now the time has come to end our song,
of the Tin Star, the Tin Star!
Fun flavor stuff in there, it was certainly something to read the description of "fiendish SUV".

Also, I'm impressed they managed to go a whole year before giving the wizard a mechanic that circumvents Concentration (or maybe does nothing at all?).

LightWarden
Mar 18, 2007

Lander county's safe as heaven,
despite all the strife and boilin',
Tin Star,
Oh how she's an icon of the eastern west,
But now the time has come to end our song,
of the Tin Star, the Tin Star!
It's also a paladin spell, but unfortunately they don't get 7th level spells so they can't summon celestial fighter jets. And you need to be a sorcerer if you want the vehicle to last more than 8 hours.

LightWarden
Mar 18, 2007

Lander county's safe as heaven,
despite all the strife and boilin',
Tin Star,
Oh how she's an icon of the eastern west,
But now the time has come to end our song,
of the Tin Star, the Tin Star!
When asked to explain why he regretted returning to work for WotC, his response:

Monte Cook posted:

Basically, I left WotC in 2001 for many reasons, but mainly because it had become very corporate and political. No big grudges or anything--it just wasn't for me. When WotC approached me to come back for 5e in 2011 (as a contractor), I was told everything was different. I was told that the environment was totally free of any of the corporate bs of the past and a great place for creativity. I was told we'd be revitalizing the whole game, and that this included amazingly cool things like bringing back Dragon magazine to print, reestablishing ties with the old guard (Zeb Cook, Tracy Hickman, Jeff Grubb, etc. maybe as consultants), beefing up the in-house staff (primarily with hiring back people with a lot of solid experience), and creating an aggressive initial release schedule with high-quality adventures and other products created by an in-house staff. In short, focusing specifically on the tabletop D&D experience, and not on licensing to video games, movies, and other things.

It was within a year there that I discovered that none of this was actually going to happen. Now, to be clear, I'm not saying I was lied to. I'm a realist and I know plans change. But a complete reversal of that initial plan--that is to say, a focus entirely on licensing the brand and turning D&D from a game and into a property--that wasn't something I wanted to be a part of, particularly in what turned out to be a disappointingly difficult (extraordinarily political) work environment.

Again, no big grudges at the time (other than, as a lifelong fan of the D&D game, I'm deeply saddened by the change of focus... but in retrospect they might have been inevitable). It just wasn't for me.

LightWarden
Mar 18, 2007

Lander county's safe as heaven,
despite all the strife and boilin',
Tin Star,
Oh how she's an icon of the eastern west,
But now the time has come to end our song,
of the Tin Star, the Tin Star!

WotC posted:

Being able to delay your turn can let you wreak havoc on the durations of spells and other effects, particularly any of them that last until your next turn. Simply by changing when your turn happens, you could change the length of certain spells. The way to guard against such abuse would be to create a set of additional rules that would limit your ability to change durations. The net effect? More complexity would be added to the game, and with more complexity, there is greater potential for slower play.

Really?

4e Rules Compendium posted:

Delay
  • Action: Free action. A creature can take this action only when its turn is about to start
  • Delay until Later Initiative: The creature delays its turn until it decides to act later in the initiative order. However, parts of the creature's turn occur in the moment the creature delays, as detailed below.
  • Returning to the Initiative Order: After any turn has been completed, the creature ccan step back into the initiative order and take its turn. The creature's initiative changes to this new position in the initiative order.
  • Start of Turn: The start of the creature's turn occurs when the creature delays, not when it later takes its turn. Thus, effects that are triggered by the start of the turn still take place- they can't be avoided by delaying.
  • End of Turn: The end of the creature's turn gets split in two: One part occurs when the creature delays, and the second part when it later takes its delayed turn. Different things occur at each of those times.
    End of Turn when the creature delays: At the moment the creature delays, any effect that it has been sustaining ends. In addition, effects that last until the end of the creature's turn now end if they are beneficial to it and its allies- they cannot be prolonged by delaying. For instance, if the creature stunned an enemy until the end of its next turn, the stunned condition ends as soon as the creature delays.
    End of Turn after the Creature Acts: After the creature returns to the initiative order and takes its delayed turn, it makes the saving throws it normally makes at the end of its turn. In addition, harmful effects that last until the end of the creature's turn now end- they cannot be avoided by delaying. For instance, if the creature is weakened until the end of its next turn, the weakened condition ends only after it acts.
  • Losing a Delayed Turn: If the creature doesn't take its delayed turn before its initiative comes back up in the order, it loses the delayed turn, and its initiative remains where it was.

LightWarden
Mar 18, 2007

Lander county's safe as heaven,
despite all the strife and boilin',
Tin Star,
Oh how she's an icon of the eastern west,
But now the time has come to end our song,
of the Tin Star, the Tin Star!

Dilb posted:

I like that Orcus can make up to 4 tail attacks per round, despite there being no visible tail in the picture of him. His description is "He has the lower torso of a goat", so I assume he's attacking with a teeny little goat tail.

This is an actual problem faced by Pathfinder's Demon Lord Nocticula.


One of many, in fact

LightWarden
Mar 18, 2007

Lander county's safe as heaven,
despite all the strife and boilin',
Tin Star,
Oh how she's an icon of the eastern west,
But now the time has come to end our song,
of the Tin Star, the Tin Star!
One to three levels of ranger on a rogue might not be terrible if you want to build a sniper.

LightWarden
Mar 18, 2007

Lander county's safe as heaven,
despite all the strife and boilin',
Tin Star,
Oh how she's an icon of the eastern west,
But now the time has come to end our song,
of the Tin Star, the Tin Star!

Generic Octopus posted:

Maybe. Ambuscade/Assassinate gives you advantage for that pseudo-turn, but without actual Surprise you won't crit.

Yeah, but you can get surprise as an assassin just by hiding before the fight starts and then taking the first shot. Since surprise doesn't end until after your first turn in combat and the ranger feature gives you an extra turn (including bonus action and move) you can get up to two turns of surprise bow strikes and the ensuing critical hits, using your bonus actions to either hide or stay hidden.

LightWarden
Mar 18, 2007

Lander county's safe as heaven,
despite all the strife and boilin',
Tin Star,
Oh how she's an icon of the eastern west,
But now the time has come to end our song,
of the Tin Star, the Tin Star!

Generic Octopus posted:

This is pretty table/DM dependent though, at least in my experience.

Well, you could scout 30 to 50 feet ahead of the party since you can put your starting Expertise into Stealth and Perception, and if you've got a longbow you don't actually need to get all that close. If you run into trouble you can use your bonus action to dash/hide and bug back to the rest of the party after taking a shot. Ranger bonus means you have an extra turn buffer to figure out if you screwed up or not.

LightWarden
Mar 18, 2007

Lander county's safe as heaven,
despite all the strife and boilin',
Tin Star,
Oh how she's an icon of the eastern west,
But now the time has come to end our song,
of the Tin Star, the Tin Star!
People have been showing some of the other content in the latest book, such as the Bladesinger as well as half-elf and tiefling racial variants.

LightWarden
Mar 18, 2007

Lander county's safe as heaven,
despite all the strife and boilin',
Tin Star,
Oh how she's an icon of the eastern west,
But now the time has come to end our song,
of the Tin Star, the Tin Star!
They do the same thing for the valor bard as well if you use your magical secrets to poach them. A little better for them because you don't lose any of the extra attacks that a higher level fighter would have.

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LightWarden
Mar 18, 2007

Lander county's safe as heaven,
despite all the strife and boilin',
Tin Star,
Oh how she's an icon of the eastern west,
But now the time has come to end our song,
of the Tin Star, the Tin Star!
Nah, you pretty much have it.

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