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Am I missing something? Why does that dragon only have four saves listed?
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Jul 3, 2014 16:37
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LongDarkNight posted:Those are the saves it has proficency in. For STR and INT you'd just use the straight bonus. It's not a great way to present the information. Wow. Back to divining the meaning behind each monster, then.
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Jul 3, 2014 19:32
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Huh. Not only does the Basic wizard have 3.x era Psion mechanics with Overchannel, but it even gives the damage a damage type so the wizard can resist the side effects of using it again.
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Jul 3, 2014 19:46
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dwarf74 posted:Hey it persuaded me not to cancel my pre-orders.  It giveth, it taketh away. (See also Zak S, transphobe extraordinaire, in the credits of the book that has that Sex paragraph in it.)
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Jul 3, 2014 21:39
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sansuki posted:Why is this a thing? I don't mind it, I think its neat, but why did they have to take the time and make this a thing in the book? Why should it not be a thing?
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Jul 4, 2014 01:16
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Yeah, but that still leaves open the question as to why this was such an offense as opposed to the entire half-page dedicated to telling people how awesome spellcasters are for being able to help fighters. It's a game where crystal people, dragon people and element-people have all been written about at length. Real people? Hoo boy, talk about a can o' worms.
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Jul 4, 2014 01:29
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treeboy posted:The offense isn't the subject as much as it is the approach. I'm not going to disagree with any of that, mind you. But I somehow don't think that was the original contention. Oh yeah, this little bit of text is going to dominate a lot of the conversation over the next few days.
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Jul 4, 2014 01:37
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homerlaw posted:For me the phrasing is off, and I say this as a trans woman, there's something about it that seems poorly worded. Examples I've seen mentioned include the older style "trapped" phrasing, the use of "hermaphrodite", and how one of the examples is an old dwarf beard joke while the other is an old lovely elf joke. So, it's an effort. A sort of first-draft effort where no trans people were consulted (and at least one open transphobic stalker was).
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Jul 4, 2014 02:07
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I sort of expected the six saving throws to be closer to the older style saving throw optional rules from Basic/AD&D, where the primary stat for resiting being paralyzed, turned into stone or restrained was Strength because you could just bull your way through bonds, magical or otherwise. Dexterity was for "Dragon breath" (which turned into a reflex save) and constitution was limited largely to poison, hostile transformation and death effects. Wisdom was for confusion/domination and intelligence for illusions, IIRC. How it turned out is just as a sort of three-save system with a couple of sops cast to the others, and not very consistently.
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Jul 4, 2014 02:09
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Brother Entropy posted:I don't think anyone was waiting on Wizard's stamp of approval to be allowed to play a queer character, so that little sidebar feels ultimately pointless even if it had obviously worthwhile intentions behind it. If you've got a bigoted player/DM who'd be an rear end about that kind of thing I doubt being able to point to the Official Rules would change their minds. Well, in a larger sense it's important for people who ARE queer and so on to be openly represented and referenced in the flagship iconic RPG. On a personal and individual game level, maybe not so much, but as a product it's also intended to foster a community and it's interesting to see the overtures towards the kind of community they want to build and the players they want to acknowledge. Plus it might make some bigots angry 
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Jul 4, 2014 02:17
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P.d0t posted:Guys, it's just a BASIC version of the game. Wait for the PHB. Variations of this exact phrase have been written for going on two years now and things didn't really get much better at all.
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Jul 9, 2014 07:07
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Basilisks and the Medusa is why henchmen should still be in the game. That way, the first target of the SOD is always the henchman who dies screaming, thus alerting the party to what kind of danger they're facing and giving them a chance to counter it.
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Jul 9, 2014 22:54
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It's a quote from Gygax, specifically Keep on the Borderlands. And it's still stupidly tone-deaf to use that quote.
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Jul 12, 2014 22:59
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MonsterEnvy posted:But it's fun and that's what matters more. I want a tree to bleed sap on you so you could be preserved forever in amber. They could use you in the future to extract the spirit of Real True Gaming Fandom and open Gygax Park.
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Jul 15, 2014 01:50
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Even the formatting and PDF tech is way substandard on the 5e side. There's no table of contents or index in the Basic doc, there's no internal hyperlinking, and they have some kind of lovely text-layer thing which prevents copying and pasting (from their free PDF file) and messes with eReaders and some tablets.
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Jul 22, 2014 20:49
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I had the chance to buy an entire palette of the Complete Book of Elves for 5 dollars once. That's how worthless a lot of the TSR library really was.
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Jul 23, 2014 00:23
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An hour-long short rest doesn't even have an old school excuse. The Basic set rules in 1981 had short rests be one turn, or ten minutes.
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Jul 23, 2014 14:36
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The really damning thing is that it COULD make sense as a time-sensitive decision making thing where you are in a dungeon and must conserve your resources or ask yourself whether it's time to retreat using your hastily scribbled map, with the possibility of the denizens being more reinforced next time you enter. Nothing whatsoever about 5e's design actually emphasizes any of that as a point of gameplay. D&D hasn't emphasized it since the eighties, and actively moved away from it in the nineties while keeping all of its trappings. If the game were designed for it it would make sense, but as it is it's as much of a useless non-gameplay enabling throwback as Encumbrance was in 4e, and for mostly the same reasons. Nothing about this game is designed with any kind of actual play in mind. There is no heed paid to how people are actually playing the game, and play is treated as more or less a happy accident that sometimes results from D&D rules which of course can be adjusted on the fly because the core game has no idea what the gently caress it's trying to accomplish so you might as well not pretend that any of it is coherent.
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Jul 23, 2014 15:15
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Ferrinus posted:So that magic swords are better than regular swords. They're bad because they're boring and add nothing to gameplay beyond another +1 bonus to track. It's unexciting, it skews the math towards requiring them at X amounts at Y levels instead of anything that feels remotely organic, and they relegate your character's advancement to better gear rather than the character being better. Plus you have to really dig to find meaning in them. Over a large enough amount of rolls a +1 better is better, hooray? That's not something the player is going to care about tracking 99% of the time.
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Jul 25, 2014 22:55
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You could express it both in terms of additional dice and in tricks like rolling an extra W (not that they have those) and taking the highest dice, like Advantage. You could have a magic sword which grants Advantage whenever you attack, or which grants Advantage even if you've cancelled one out with Disadvantage. All of these are more interesting in simple terms of rolling than adding a +1 bonus to X and Y and have a much greater impact in play without skewing the game's limited math progression to a breaking point. It's like how the old weapon master dice worked; you had to choose between doing something interesting, OR doing more damage. And doing more damage was always better. The mere presence of the option to do more damage skewed the entire system to the point where every other option was inferior. A +3 sword will always be the best option in a sea of +2 swords with interesting stuff on them. The +X system is exactly the same deal, writ large.
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Jul 25, 2014 23:10
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FRINGE posted:Ah. I guess I was used to that in the older editions. 3e was a terrible mess to look through though. The other big difference in 4e is that every spell was listed in the monster's statblock, and was statted to be appropriate to a monster using it. You'd never have to know how a player-available spell worked, look anything up or have to worry that really powerful spells in the PHB would randomly end encounters because players didn't have a specific defense against it.
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Jul 31, 2014 02:21
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Here's another article. It names no names, but they're not that hard to puzzle out given the current context. e: although strictly speaking this is venturing away from 5e related stuff, so we can take it to the chat thread from here. Anyway, Zak's a pillock.
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Jul 31, 2014 16:33
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seebs posted:I would prefer not to talk about that in a thread that has an actual topic of interest to discuss. Feel free to yell at me on tumblr or in email if you think I'm an idiot or I've made errors. There are any number of ways in which I've hosed up so far in that drama, and I would rather not inflict them on this thread. But yes, same "seebs". how do you feel about Zak quoting you as evidence of his good character in literally the same post where he holds charity hostage in service to his ego? Do feel free to answer on any of said social media too.
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Aug 11, 2014 02:22
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Jimbozig posted:So stealth rules are hard. They have always been at least a bit poo poo. What would good stealth rules look like in a tactical combat system like D&D's? This is a ridiculously complex question when you sit down to look at it. I still don't have a solution several years after starting. Let's look at the simplest, most traditional method: you try to get a bonus via some form of dice roll (become Hidden/Stealthed), then use your new condition to deliver a special attack (Backstab/Sneak Attack) and lose the condition. That's a D&D-style thing through and through, with AC essentially becoming your stealth-attack-in-the-back static defense (usually with a penalty to the defender or a bonus for the attacker). But it's not a super satisfying abstraction, so in come the opposed checks, where most RPGs poo poo themselves because they're designed for static tasks and not floating pvp resolution. Perception/Notice/See poo poo becomes the new active method of defense against stealth, but the balance between that and allowing the stealth character to be stealthy is basically impossible; either the defender has as good as no chance to spot the incoming attack, or the action is weighed in favor of the stealthy character (you have to spend an action to spot so you lose a turn regardless of success), or stealth becomes impossible because the chances are weighed against you. There's also bullshit like being told to roll perception individually for every single opposing guard, which makes extended stealth basically impossible. All of this is a symptom of trying to design a stealth system on top of something underlying (like D&D's core mechanic of attack VS AC, every monster being statted individually with individual actions, etc) rather than laying out the goals of what the system should do and then accomplishing that. So what do we generally want stealth mechanics to do?
There's all kinds of things you could add to a list like this, but this is a shorthand for designing something quick. So let's address them together within the context of 5e. Let's say there's a Stealthed status players can get. It works essentially in the way we're familiar with; you lose stealth by taking certain actions. Outside of combat, there is no need to roll for a character to achieve stealth. They just prepare for stealth and become stealthed. Similarly, there is no reason to force unalerted or unsuspecting guards in a player's vicinity to ever roll to spot the stealthed character unless the stealthed character takes some kind of risk. If the players are stealthed, they can swim in a moat underneath the guards of a castle and climb up the wall without the guards being allowed to surprise-spot them; if they try to go in through the front door, it's opposed check time. So now our core stealth mechanic isn't "doing a thing and rolling opposed rolls until I inevitably fail", it's "avoid having to roll opposed rolls". Evasion is a huge thematic aspect of stealth, and it's an important thing to design for. Skill checks during stealth can have entirely new failure conditions; instead of just failing the skill check, we apply the notion of failing forward; you succeed and you invoke opposed rolls with passing NPCs (accidentally make a noise, are caught briefly out of position, etc). So now a core feature of stealth isn't just in being stealthy, but in being a professional at your job, which in turn is a big stealth-action trope. In addition, since stealth is easy to achieve, anyone can enter stealth gameplay at zero penalty; it's avoiding the consequences that's hard. For the stealth specialist Rogue, we can create a subset of mechanics on top. Sneak attack mechanics now allow you to attack and dispatch/knock out guards silently without breaking your ongoing stealth status, so long as you're successful; the target is removed quietly. You get Advantage on opposed stealth checks so long as your foe remains unalerted and not suspicious. Little mechanical treats that turn the rogue from the only person who can do the stealthy thing to the master of doing the stealthy thing. The sneak attack bonus can even apply during combat, becoming a tool to let you remain in stealth as well as a straight damage bonus. On top of this it's possible to layer other mechanics. If the group gets discovered, there can be a brief challenge to retain or regain stealthy status; if you do, the location you're stealthing through goes on alert and things get more difficult (possibly rolling skill checks at a disadvantage to see whether someone is alerted by your action, that sort of thing). Equipment like smoke bombs and special Rogue tricks can help with reacquiring stealth for an entire group. So now we have a theoretical game mode where the entire group participates, where evasion is emphasized over confrontation, where failure is a matter of remaining stealthed rather than "you failed roll again", and where the consequences of failure have mitigation possibilities. For combat, things get trickier. Everyone is on alert, looking for attacks from different angles. For this, I'd use the same resolution that combat generally uses, that being skill VS static defense, in this case Stealth VS the highest opposing passive perception. Do this normally at any time with Disadvantage, do it while in cover or in smoke normally, get Advantage if you're a stealthy rogue somehow. Now give the Rogue more options for doing things while stealthed, like using Intimidate (at Advantage) to frighten foes while out of sight, letting you do the Batman thing. Sneak attacking someone to unconsciousness allows you to either hide the body or dispatch it silently, and doesn't break stealth during combat (failing to reveals you as normal). Now the Rogue isn't compressed down to a single trick in a fight, but is given a tool to fight entirely differently from how a Fighter would. What about dealing with stealthed enemies? Obviously, stealth is an advantage you want to strip away, and the benefit of stealth is essentially as good as invulnerability; while you are stealthed, you can't be targeted. Making people lose action after action on trying to spot a foe isn't fun. This is something I don't have an offhand answer for; I've tried things from giving stealthed characters "passive stealth" that spotters roll against to letting attackers make perception checks as part of a different action (disadvantage for splitting their attention), but haven't found anything quite satisfying. I have now put more thought into making stealth gameplay fun than went into 5e. All of it. e: Wow I use semicolons during mechanics chat a lot. Rulebook Heavily fucked around with this message at 17:02 on Sep 19, 2014 |
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Sep 19, 2014 16:57
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In pathfinder only barbarians ever get fatigued as a result of physical activity. Hell, a lot of this thread belongs in Murphy's Rules at this point.
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Sep 19, 2014 18:54
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And all of what Cirno said is why the little sops to 4e (the fuckin' Hit Dice thing for starters) do absolutely nothing for a 4e player. 4e's rules had an internal consistency and logic to them hung on an interlocking framework of mutual interaction (healing surges are a pacing mechanism for adventures, a resource for rituals/spells, a consequence for skill failure, etc etc) whereas 5e rules are included for the sake of there being rules that remind you of X edition or just to be there, so pointless that you can cut away half of them without affecting anything - and that then gets called a feature.
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Sep 22, 2014 21:43
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Even fewer people read, understood and played AD&D by the rules than 3e.
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Sep 23, 2014 02:36
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RIFTS is the purest ideal example of what happens when designers don't think balance exists.
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Oct 10, 2014 05:53
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ascendance posted:Because there is no perfect system. Another game system may do some things better, and another things worse. That is an excuse, not a reason.
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Oct 11, 2014 21:33
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