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So there's another DMG preview about custom races/subraces! Sounds awesome I bet this is gonna be full of detailed... wait what just steal traits from other races and guesstimate it? Why is this book worth money, exactly? edit: Late to the party, but goddamn these 'rules' Darwinism fucked around with this message at 22:22 on Nov 11, 2014 |
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Nov 11, 2014 22:18
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thespaceinvader posted:In the Strike! thread: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=0&threadid=3656713 My favorite part is that the race they chose to represent creating a whole new race? Aasimar. And they specifically state that they're just gonna try and mirror the tiefling abilities. 
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Nov 12, 2014 20:18
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Jimbozig posted:Would turning the water into steam to spin a turbine be more efficient than just pouring the water on a turbine to spin it? Paging an engineer to the 5e thread! If it's contained steam? Yeah, since steam expands. I'm not even an engineer!
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Nov 13, 2014 20:16
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Of course, no one has ever thought of this before in-setting. Man a campaign where the party started the magic industrial revolution could be pretty great actually. edit: Though the jar presented in the preview would be useless for that, and pretty useless in general since it seems that it can only ever produce one type listed per day as it is written. Does 5E not believe in editors? This sentence bothers me so much. "Once the jug starts producing a liquid, it can't produce a different one, or more of one that has reached its maximum, until the next dawn." Darwinism fucked around with this message at 05:52 on Nov 14, 2014 |
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Nov 14, 2014 05:45
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Why do these things have to be presented as tables you roll on rather than just a list of rooms that you assign in a way that makes sense, goddamn right there on the first page it says rolling randomly is probably a dumb idea
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Nov 14, 2014 21:25
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And everyone knows that tradition for the sake of tradition is the most important thing, that's why 3E barely resembled 2E AD&D
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Nov 15, 2014 01:16
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ProfessorCirno posted:I made a drow rogue in 4e based around poison damage (if not actual poisons) v I had a friend that could, and did, poison rocks to death, thanks to the Assassin (IIRC) having a feat that let you ignore poison immunity.
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Nov 22, 2014 10:39
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thespaceinvader posted:A Paragon Path IIRC. Yeah, 4E is pretty drat inflexible when it comes to pure damage optimization, it's far from a perfect game - utility powers are another gripe of mine for that system. I had such high hopes at the beginning that 5E would build on the stuff that made 4E good. 
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Nov 22, 2014 17:16
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Oh my god there is a literal 'roll to see if I'm getting drunk' table
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Nov 25, 2014 19:34
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Jackard posted:Carousing is like the most boring table ever. 60-70% chance of nothing happening aside from Gold going slightly up or down. The first thing that popped into my mind was the Dead Alewives skit, which I always thought was a joke but nope
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Nov 26, 2014 03:24
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Is it just me or do those HP totals seem incredibly high?
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Nov 27, 2014 22:52
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I just can't get over the fact that this is what a group of professional game designers thought was a good idea to release, I have seen games designed by a single person working from their house that are designed more coherently
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Nov 28, 2014 02:06
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ascendance posted:The monster chart is well and truly messed up. 93 HP for a 2nd level party to whack through? Thats just going to be a drag. 23 damage average is also more than enough to kill a level 2 character in one round. The problem is that the legible text says something like "If all you need are simple stats for a monster of a particular challenge rating, follow the steps here." edit: I mean, we're missing the whole thing for sure, but from what we can tell? This is the actual Create-A-Monstar table. edit2: It seems like the CR stuff may be more flexible, reading the parts that I can read. It may be the case that for a really damaging monster you'd use the high damage CR but lower CR HP and defenses and stuff? Do we actually know the table goes through 1/8th CR and such? Because 0/1/2/3 etc would make a lot more sense lastedit: ...but only for HP... what the hell is going on here? Darwinism fucked around with this message at 07:17 on Nov 28, 2014 |
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Nov 28, 2014 07:02
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Gerdalti posted:Here's the full monster chart for you guys, hopefully that'll help. So you use the chart to determine the stats for a monster of a certain CR to challenge your party, then just ehhhh mess with them, then you go back to the chart to find out what messing with them did to the actual CR and hope that it's still within the range that you want? Why are there multiple steps involved to get to the same drat place as "Step 1: Just find the numbers you want and average the CR for them, you're done." And then, at the end, they admit that these rules are pretty much pointless and that you need to playtest it to have any idea if it's balanced or fun! I just can't help but compare it to  Also: "Round the average up or down to the nearest challenge rating to determine your monster's final challenge rating. For example, if your creature's defense challenge rating is 2 and its offensive rating is 3, its final rating is 3." Why? Why wouldn't the rating be 2? edit: Beaten but holy poo poo this bears repeating, this is just so incredibly bad
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Nov 28, 2014 20:04
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Outside of gimmick builds, bards were still pretty drat bad. But still better than fighters!
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Nov 29, 2014 21:29
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Azran posted:Has a crunchy RPG really managed to make a jack-of-all-trades class properly without it just being worse in both aspects and not being incredibly redundant? Can't think of a D&D example - I'd say Warcaster for the Iron Kingdoms RPG, but it's a niche that I personally enjoy but gets incredibly neglected. 4E Bard with the Bard of All Trades feat
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Nov 29, 2014 22:23
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CaptainPsyko posted:The basic rule, per-PHB on loot is that monsters will have whatever weapons and armor make sense or are on their statblock or whatever, but that those items are too crude/beat up/low quality to be worth anything at market. If one of your players needs/wants to/can actually use a basic goblin shortsword for some reason, just give it to them, but otherwise don't sweat loot unless it's supposed to advance your narrative. Save the good stuff for capital-T-Treasure hoards, and just up the quantity to reflect the sort of challenges your players have overcome since their last big haul. This kind of loot reward system has always bothered me, from a ~verisimilitude~ standpoint. Who's gathering all this stuff, and why isn't it used to, you know, fight off the murderhobos slaughtering your tribe of orcs or whatever?
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Dec 2, 2014 20:27
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BashfulBanana posted:I'm currently running a campaign with the party as a crew of corsairs, and I've been working on some ship rules to use in it. This is the fourth major revision of the rules which is actually playable, so I'm looking for anyone interested in building or battling some ships. This is supposed to be sailing era, with airships levitating due to magical artifacts. The biggest problem I've run into with running PC-crewed ships is giving people things to do that aren't, "And then I repeat the action I did last round." Having multiple types of movement and attack actions can help with this, rather than a catchall, "Describe what you want to do and then the GM arbitrates." Things like a movement action that enhances your attacks, or a gunnery action that forces an enemy penalty of movement, and on. Every PC having something to contribute may also be a problem, though I suppose there's nothing saying the Surgeon can't be manning a ballista and using his awesome Cannoneer bud's great advice to get the good attack bonuses. The space rules are sort of weird, too - a slip's size is given as 20x40ft, but room sizes are given in cubic feet? Is stacking rooms just fine, and if so how many can you stack? Why does a cabin that has 225 square feet (assuming a 7.5 foot ceiling) house 8 people uncomfortably? By traditional naval standards having 225 square feet between 8 people would mean you're the Richie Riches of the sailing world, not that you're uncomfortable. Also, do thrust items just use the weight given regardless of material? I like the Skies of Arcadia-esque queue system, though, and the whole concept is pretty well put together, it just seems like it needs testing and tweaking. Darwinism fucked around with this message at 20:46 on Dec 6, 2014 |
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Dec 6, 2014 20:43
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Unless you were a wizard sub-class, in which case you stay every bit as complex.
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Dec 27, 2014 03:21
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Well naturally we can't write up coherent rules that follow our own published book's standards for making monsters because ~creativity~
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Dec 27, 2014 22:25
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Not to mention that, if you make gathering rare components a thing, it just further emphasizes that the game's about the casters. People, generally speaking, are going to go for the options that result in perceived advantages, so a game where you need to sidequest for the good spells is just going to turn into Let's Make The Wizard Happy - The Game.
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Dec 30, 2014 05:01
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AD&D, at least 2E AD&D, still had caster supremacy, though admittedly you had to survive several levels of being easier to kill than a quadriplegic, leprous kobold. It's a dumb system and the 'fiddly bits' didn't balance the class very well at all later on. Adding unfun mechanics to 'balance' narrative control is dumb and bad design. That's all there is to it. edit: Just saw this mastershakeman posted:There isn't too much difference in doing a quest to get the materials for a magic item and getting the materials for a magic spell. I really disagree; unless you're somehow making sure that your caster only ever uses the component once every few levels, you're going to be doing a shitload more, "Well, guys, I used up my Stoneskin/Cloudkill/Polymorph Other/Whatever materials, if we wanna be at full potential (which of course we loving do we're murderhobos) we gotta find the materials again," than, "The ancestral sword of my family has been found in the Evil Baron's castle," type quests. The key difference is that a magic item that someone really wants usually isn't something that you're going to use once and then go on another quest for - the game design itself would encourage the party to do this because chances are that spell just made surviving easier or even possible, meaning of course the group is gonna get behind having that resource available again. Darwinism fucked around with this message at 17:49 on Dec 30, 2014 |
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Dec 30, 2014 17:39
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mastershakeman posted:HP is a limited resource for everyone, assuming the DM isn't pulling punches and only attacking the martials. Especially with ranged enemies - if casters stroll up behind fighters in robes and start chanting, they should expect to get a half dozen goblin/kobold/whatever else arrows in the chest right away. If you're ever playing the enemies as entirely composed of perfectly rational tacticians who know exactly who to target for the most damage... you're probably going to be wiping parties a lot. You're also probably a bad DM, because enemies should probably play to their IC knowledge, so why does everyone know to go for the dude in bathrobes wiggling his fingers while their friends are being sliced apart by the frontliners?
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Dec 30, 2014 19:39
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moths posted:This argument always comes up as a soft-tanking mechanism. That roleplay will take up the slack for lovely/absent threat mechanics. Why? Adventurers are things unto themselves, unless these kobolds have met adventuring wizards before (in which case why are they alive), how do they know this? The assumed world knowledge thing baffles me when adventurers are explicitly not representative of the world.
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Dec 30, 2014 20:21
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Rannos22 posted:At the very least as soon as the guy in the bathrobes blows up a couple dudes with a fireball he should be the center of everyone's attention. Definitely! Before that, though, you'd think most things that haven't seen adventurer-type casters would respect the huge guy in plate mashing faces with a hammer more. deadly_pudding posted:This hinges on spellcasters being incredibly rare in the setting, though. If you're running a setting where the PC wizard is one of 20 arcane casters on the whole planet, then this makes sense. If it's Greyhawk D&D, though, or especially Planescape D&D, then one of those dirt bandits, at least one of the top-poo poo ones back at the hideout, is probably a wizard or sorcerer themselves. Possible, but unless you're making enemies with the PC generation rules their casters likely aren't anywhere near as scary as yours unless they're major villains. Darwinism fucked around with this message at 20:29 on Dec 30, 2014 |
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Dec 30, 2014 20:26
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S.J. posted:Adventurers and wizards and such are all over the place in most D&D settings. Not really? Forgotten Realms is really the only major setting that's seemingly populated entirely by adventurers, though a ton of people conflate FR with D&D in general. S.J. posted:Not really, there's a good chance he's just missing and not doing much. So what you're saying is that a guy in a dress doing nothing in the back row is just as scary as a guy in a mass of metal attacking your friends
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Dec 30, 2014 20:31
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Mendrian posted:Okay but which hypothetical version of DnD are we playing now? I've lost track of it. Also the whole point of "dirt bandits probably have wizards" was that they probably understand that robes = wizards. Considering that even first level spells can cause serious problems for a party, and 5th Ed is almost certainly going to refer back to the PHB for spells, even ones built on different rules than PCs, I think it's pretty reasonable that to assume at least some intelligent humanoid enemies will want to target the caster. That's why fiat tanking is bad. You already have to do that for pretty much every class, because if you're running enemies as having knowledge of the mechanics you're always going to simply ignore the Fighter to murder the poo poo out of the easier-to-kill people like Rogues and Wizards because it's the smart thing to do.
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Dec 30, 2014 20:37
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:Yes I'm sure in Dark Sun, ruled by sorcerer kings and laid waste by magic, no one knows what a wizard is. This is a really dumb argument only made worse by people pretending that D&D is in any way a gritty or low-magic setting. But wizards are explicitly rare in Dark Sun and most people only ever see the quasi-divine Templar magic granted by the sorcerer kings? Like, Defilers and Preservers are things, but they're really not common in-setting. But this is a pretty dumb argument; my point is that if you have everyone acting on the metagame knowledge that casters are the most powerful and such you're going to have a really un-fun game where enemies focus-fire the squishy casters and rogues while ignoring the fighters because that's just good tactics if you have assumed world knowledge.
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Dec 30, 2014 21:39
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S.J. posted:The assumption that people don't automatically know what wizards are in a variety of worlds that are shaped by wizards and magic is kind of a silly argument in and of itself. The word wizard in this conversation means more than just the character class 'wizard,' just like in every other D&D conversation we have in this forum. They don't have to be commonplace for them to be common knowledge. The assumption that every wizard is a godlike being capable of putting an end to the battle is where I think you're going wrong, though. Sure, okay, if every wizard is going around doing that they're gonna be priority targets, but that's a weird assumption to make. Is every wizard in the setting a battlemage? Mendrian posted:But that's just it, this isn't some Order of the Stick bullshit. You don't need knowledge of the mechanics to target the wizard. You only need knowledge of the setting. We can argue about how common wizards are and how much dirt farmers know about them but old wizened dudes with magic staves wearing robes are a trope in almost every fantasy setting I'm aware of. Elves are pretty and in tune with nature, dwarves love gold and mining, wizards lean on staves and speak in riddles. I would argue if anything the average wizard probably has a harder time concealing his class than the average cleric, unless he goes out of the way to do it. Why? I mean we throw around the 'in robes' stuff tons but.... what's stopping the Wizard from just dressing like a regular 'adventurer' sans heavy plates everywhere?
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Dec 30, 2014 22:27
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goatface posted:If your wizard is that special, why isn't your fighter? Why should the fighter be an ignorable option? Laphroaig posted:Man if only there were a class of PCs who would defend those people, maybe called Defenders with explicit mechanics that made the whole 'metagame knowledge' thing completely pointless... Yeah, I like how 4E actually gave pretty good reasons for things to attack defenders because otherwise a 'smart' group of enemies is just naturally going to attack the soft targets because class roles are still a thing, even if you don't highlight that.
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Dec 30, 2014 22:33
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S.J. posted:Presumably if they're going out of their way to get into fights, sure. In the same way that a fighter isn't just a town guard, an adventuring wizardy dude isn't just a scribe. There's some weird stuff going on here - they know the wizard's dangerous because they know wizards are dangerous, but you admit that not all wizards are dangerous? How would they know the difference at first? edit: I'm not saying that everything is ignorant, but I am saying that it's pretty implausible for most creatures (especially pretty ignorant monsters) to realize that this dude in the back should be a priority target precisely because wizards exist and he must be a wizard because he's doesn't fit another classes' archetypical appearance Darwinism fucked around with this message at 22:39 on Dec 30, 2014 |
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Dec 30, 2014 22:36
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S.J. posted:People who go out of their way to get into bad situations probably know how to get out of them? Or at least, that's a safe assumption when they're trying to kill you/they're out and about intentionally in dangerous places. That's kind of a thing regardless of whether we're talking about fighters or wizards. How is this at all complicated? You seem to have misread my post completely. So the guy avoiding the fight and not wearing much armor must know how to defend himself and end a fight because... he's in the back not wearing armor.
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Dec 30, 2014 22:41
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S.J. posted:Here, let me help, I agree entirely with this point Iny posted:If you think in any way like an actual human being, you don't need a loving wizard census to come to the conclusion that the wizard over there might be physically fragile but scary and dangerous if not murdered first; you need literally one story about one physically-fragile wizard who had once used a scary and dangerous spell or who had once mentioned having the capability to use a scary and dangerous spell. If we're continuing with this, though, why do you think that that dude is definitely more scary than the people engaging on the frontlines? What makes you willing to not attack them and attack this guy because you heard a story once, woops there goes Ugluk's head better kill the dude in regular clothes and not the metal-covered man who ganked your friend. Darwinism fucked around with this message at 22:48 on Dec 30, 2014 |
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Dec 30, 2014 22:45
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S.J. posted:D&D would be pretty great if it wasn't for D&D Truer words, etc. Though I feel 4E made the best steps in the right direction, but unfortunately it did so in a way that terrified/angered a bunch of vocal nerds so it must never be spoken of again. Also it's very worthwhile for wizards in 5E to start as Fighters or Clerics IIRC for those sweet sweet armor profs. I haven't messed with the multiclassing at all.
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Dec 30, 2014 22:59
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AlphaDog posted:It's very definitely not true in 2e, AD&D, or BECMI. I don't recall it in 4e either. It's definitely possible in 4E but the feats, and stats required for the feats, required mean that you can either be a wizard who specializes in wearing plate or you can be a wizard with a bunch of feats that're actually good for your class.
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Dec 30, 2014 23:03
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Jimbozig posted:In Glen Cook's books you can be watching your buddies get slaughtered by guys with swords, and when you see the weirdo in the robes waving his hands half a kilometer away, you absolutely poo poo yourself. Glen Cook's wizards, at least in the Black Company series, are also a gaggle of freaks that wear whatever their little black hearts desire. Though, amusingly, their power level in relation to martials is similar to 3E's...
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Dec 31, 2014 01:11
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SwitchbladeKult posted:Seriously, the game is not flawed because of a lack of hard tanking mechanics to force monsters to hit the character with the highest AC and HP. Those kinds of mechanics are lazy, letting players and DMs off the hook for actually knowing how to play wisely. Why are mechanics that provide incentives (or disincentives, for defender mechanics) 'lazy,' exactly? Like, 4E has defender marks, but they don't force any action to be taken except in the sense that you have to deal with the consequences of violating those marks.
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Dec 31, 2014 01:31
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SwitchbladeKult posted:They are lazy. Instead of coming up with a clever plan to prevent the monsters from murdering your wizard you just walk up and poke it your stick. You don't have to worry about positioning, cover, etc. Basically, you shouldn't need them because you already have all the tools you need in order to control the flow of battle if you just stop being a bum and use them. Ignoring all the other responses, why should a fighter (or defender of any sort really) rely solely on position, clever tactics, etc when the wizard, by your own admission, has this bevy of powers that influence the battlefield so immensely?
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Dec 31, 2014 01:47
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SwitchbladeKult posted:The original argument was whether or not D&D is poo poo because either the DM has to ignore the "obvious" or metagame and use the tactic of kill the caster first. That's a dumb way to frame it. The game is not a void where monsters can just freely run up to the caster and murder them. It's not the case that the DM has to play dumb or murder your wizard. If that is the case either your players are asking for it or the DM sucks at building interesting and fun encounters for the players. Sorry that didn't come across the first time. The problem is that mechanics shape gameplay; in an absence of solid mechanics for preventing something, how should gameplay turn out? No matter how clever you are, in an absence of mechanics it's nothing but a gentlemen's agreement that allows fighters to function as defenders.
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Dec 31, 2014 02:11
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Bob Quixote posted:What's wrong with agreeing to reasonably run the encounters when setting out to run an elfgame? Because if classes have mechanics that support their intended styles of play it is immensely easier for the DM to actually make encounters that are exciting challenges.
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Dec 31, 2014 02:22
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