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It's meaningful, but boring. I'd prefer dealing the same damage, but having more options, over having one option which is slightly better.
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Jul 25, 2014 21:17
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Asymmetrikon posted:I agree, an adaptation of Vlaada Chvatil's Mage Knight board game to an RPG would own. Been thinking that for a while. I'd love an RPG where your character was basically just a deck (or a couple of decks) of cards, and you play out scenes by drawing a hand and seeing what happens.
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Jul 25, 2014 22:07
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Asymmetrikon posted:Another problem with damage bonuses is psychological - if I have to choose between the thing that will give me a slight bonus 100% of the time (a +1 to hit and damage, which affects a hell of a lot of atomic actions in the system) and something with a bigger, more flavorful effect that I can't guarantee will come into play, I'm gonna choose the constant thing. The optimiser in me chooses the +1. The dirty funhaver wishes I didn't feel I had to. If they'd actually done what they could have done, and made interesting magic items without boring plusses, I wouldn't have to worry.
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Jul 25, 2014 23:24
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OtspIII posted:I think a huge part of the fun of roleplaying games is in the swapping fluidly between these two mindsets mid-play. The tension between the two is even more fun than either one of them by themselves. Mm. It's pretty much impossible to keep acting in character first person when you have to call numbers across the table to determine the result of your actions. The characters don't know about the numbers.
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Jul 27, 2014 09:48
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Roleplaying is making decisions for your character. Combat is roleplaying. Which is why it REALLY narks me off when people talk about roleplaying being something done in opposition to combat, rather than being part of it. Arg.
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Jul 27, 2014 15:40
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The big difference, as well, with 4e CharOp is that (with the exception of a few truly broken builds like rebreathers) the highest of high-op, and the lowest of low-op are pretty close together. It's not like 3.5/PF where high-op was a wizard casting six spells with one action and wiping the board, and low-op was a dude, swinging... Everyone shares roughly the same action economy and roughly the same resource economy, which means even the high-op is not ludicrously eclipsing the low-op. (I'd note though, that if someone actively optimises against effectiveness (negative starting mod in primary stat, that sort of bullshit), the gap is wider.) 5e, again, seems to have fallen between two stools on this. There's a lot less to fiddle with than there was in 4e (albeit, only the basic set is out thus far, but having seen the PHB contents... there's around 1/3 the number of feats, no paragon paths, no EDs, and very little to choose in non-spellcasting classes), but at the same time, the optimisation potential of spells seems a little less, and they've corraled the ridiculously broken economy of buffs with concentration mechanics (at least thus far, one thing that really concerns me is how summons will work...). So, there's little there for the mechanics buffs who enjoyed 4e charop to fiddle with and find the fun synergies with, and little there for those who like broken-rear end minmaxing. It tries to masquerade as a quick mechanics-light storygame but has a 400 page rulebook that's 1/4 spell descriptions. It's, basically, almost exactly what I expected it to be, which is unfortunate. It really makes me want to write that 4e heartbreaker. If I'd noticed this month's competition before this weekend, I might actually have done so...
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Jul 27, 2014 19:15
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have it your weigh posted:The Barbarian Preview is out. I like that they used art that doesn't look like the stereotypical Conan type barbarian. It makes me want to play one for the fist time. Looks very similar to the artwork for the 4e Berserker from Heroes of the Feywild, actually, which is good, that was some nice art. Indeed, it's similar enough that I wonder if it's left over from that book... And yeah, basically all the previews of classes thus far have been other websites, not direct from Wizards.
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Jul 30, 2014 18:13
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QuantumNinja posted:Does it bother anyone else that the wizard gets like eight different specializations while the other classes only get three each? Yep. E: it also bothers me that the fighter gets like, 5 pages and the spellcasters get more than a quarter of the book. But then, this edition really isn't FOR me.
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Jul 30, 2014 21:56
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treeboy posted:huh, barbarians are d12 hit dice vs fighter d10. interesting I'm getting the feeling from the previews that the Fighter is all about being middle-ground-y. Tough, but not as tough as the Barbarian, good at crits, but not as much as the Barbarian. Good at self-healing, but not as much as the Paladin. Damaging, but not as much as the Rogue. OK at out of combat stuff but not as much as the Ranger. It feels like a class other classes dip into to improve their features, rather than really being a class in and of itself. Much like the edition, really.
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Jul 30, 2014 22:39
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DalaranJ posted:I wonder what the design rationale behind putting Basic's Weapon Mastery and 4th's Warlord into the same subclass was? I'm sure no one will ever tell us. Fuckwittery, and a desperate desire to backtrack on their early 'pledge' that everything that was ever in a PHB(1) would be in the PHB for 5e. As with so many other things, the Warlord is an example of them desperately trying to please everyone, and actually succeeding in pissing off most of the people, because the people who like the Warlord, don't like the pale and pathetic imitation of it that is 'well, you might be able to spend a maneuver doing warlordy stuff up to 3/enc', and the people who hate it with a disturbing passion hate that it's even included at all. As with so many things, 5e tries to compromise, and compromise pleases no-one.
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Jul 31, 2014 00:20
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Daetrin posted:Heh. It's kind of like this for me too. Most of it doesn't bother me (in much the same way that PF and 3e don't bother me), but speaking as a player who got on board at 4e, and loved it, and generally likes games which are balanced and in which everyone contributes equally... 5e just doesn't seem like it's built with me in mind. I don't want to get to high levels and have the sorts of character I enjoy playing (various variations on 'dude who hits things with other things' usually) to be more or less invalidated by 'I cast Wish/Teleport/Meteor Swarm'. I LIKED the grid, and the relatively simple rules with a lot of emergent complexity that were written (when they were written well) in a comprehensible, systematic shorthand etc etc etc... Basically, there are some things which look fine, and it's mostly inoffensive and I'd probably play it if it was the only game in town, but... ah, what could have been. There's just nothing that grabs me and says 'hey, you want to play this game! I definitely won't be running it though, given what they did to spellcasting monsters, gently caress that. And such is the opinion of everyone else who DMs in my current group, so it looks like I won't be playing anyway. Bring on the retclones of 4e.
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Jul 31, 2014 00:37
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Balance. Fakedit: Damnit someone got in there and broke the chain. Seriously, 4e started something great, but wasn't successful enough, then they brought in a bunch of grogs halfway through to try and reimagine it (i.e. kill all the good stuff about fighters and make them basic-attack monkeys) instead of forging ahead. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy playing both my Slayer and my Knight, but they zigged when they shoudl have carried right on zagging. And yeah, the OGL was just a colossal error for anyone who wanted to keep ownership of their current crowd of people. Shame that 4e isn't so loosely licensed, it means a proper successor is very unlikely... E: gently caress me, I just read the fail forward blog and have JUST NOW realised what OSR means. I just thought it was a company that used to publish D&D. Am I confusing it with TSR?
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Jul 31, 2014 19:51
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Jack the Lad posted:Holy poo poo. I feel like these last few posts have actually been kinda revelatory for me, too. I suspect it's partly that, but partly also 'people are OK with playing a bad system when they know it well', and 'people are OK with playing a bad system when it's the only game in town'.
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Jul 31, 2014 22:01
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Frostcheese was blatantly intentional. a: it was all in the PHB, and b: (IIRC) it was even called out by the designers as being an intentional combo. FWIW, scouring for good combos is one of the funnest things about 4e for me. It's a way to play the game whilst not AT the game. I really enjoy the character building, it's crunchy, and there's a lot of things to fiddle with, with some defined hard limits to effectiveness and clear roles, and it's not as simple as 'just pick *spell* cast it and win. I just wish to gently caress that they had cleaned up some of the cruft. 4e is bloated to gently caress with stuff that is just outright useless, in particular the likes of Barelling Charge, which with the errata to Charge does NOTHING AT ALL. Something like 4e was just begging to be an online living ruleset with a properly curated central database and good APIs, but... you know, I've said that SO many times in Next threads... I think one of the things that doesn't grab me about next is that there really doesn't seem to be much designing to do on the choppy-choppy classes. You pick your class, you get your scores, you pick some level 1 features and a subclass and... that's about it? Feats come in, but they're relatively few and far between, and the game's relatively short so there aren;t many AND you have to pick between them and score boosts, and mechanically score boosts are almost certainly going to win until you've maxed at least your attack stat. Character building just doesn't feel like it has any meat to it. It's all gristle and salad. E: I think feat chains are pretty much fine, as long as each individual element works. They can;t just be 'take a nothing feat in order to qualify for the good feat later, the first one has to DO something. 4e suffered this problem for the longest time when... gently caress I can't even remember the name, that PP that gave you a free MBA when you proned something... was the epitome of optimisation, but required you to take a dead style feat to get it. Still does to some extent; a lot of the style feat PPs are actually pretty good, but most of the style feats themselves are rubbish. thespaceinvader fucked around with this message at 22:48 on Jul 31, 2014 |
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Jul 31, 2014 22:44
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You can still have something relatively weak that leads to something stronger. Just don't have something outright lovely that leads to something brokenly powerful. But yeah, in theory it's all good but in practice I'm now less convinced it actually works in a team game.
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Jul 31, 2014 22:56
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How do you mean? 4e has elements that synergise, but (except for the aforementioned style feats) very few elements where one specific element blocks access to another specific element until you take the first. Also, possibly slightly derailing. E: more preview feats: http://community.wizards.com/forum/product-and-general-dd-discussions/threads/4119501 they do seem to be desperately set on making combat and noncombat take up the same resources. It's like they've learned nothing from prior editions. thespaceinvader fucked around with this message at 23:07 on Jul 31, 2014 |
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Jul 31, 2014 23:03
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Kai Tave posted:What I mean is 4E is built around characters gaining abilities that start out relatively weak and lead to stronger choices as they level up. A level 1 Fighter gets to take, say, Hack and Hew. He can attack two targets with one action! That's pretty rad, for a variety of reasons. A level 7 Fighter can take Come and Get It, which lets him attack a whole bunch of dudes and pull them close so he can lock them down. But... that's just characters improving. It's nothing to do with feat trees? When I said thespaceinvader posted:You can still have something relatively weak that leads to something stronger. I specifically meant a relatively weak option that gatekeeps a relatively strong option, i.e. you can;t take the strong one without having the weak one. And yeah, the 5e feats really are reading as pretty dry and uninteresting so far. They couldn't really have picked a much less interesting page to preview. If that's indicative of the feats in general...
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Jul 31, 2014 23:17
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It allows a bit more specialisation and niche development. but as I said upthread a bit, I've basically over the course of this discussion decided I was being a dumbass and wasn't really right about tree structures working in this context.
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Jul 31, 2014 23:24
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ritorix posted:Oddly specific, and I can't think of them pictured that way with dart tips anywhere. Funny thing is, when I hear 'magic missile' I think Order of the Stick's dotted-line-with-glowing-ball version, which I kind of like.
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Aug 1, 2014 18:49
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mastershakeman posted:Cant we just all agree that gnomes are by far and away the coolest race? Gnomes rule. Leaving them out was an abomination. Yes they are. My Gnomes all wear power armour though. Warforged reskinned.
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Aug 1, 2014 19:43
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Ferrinus posted:There's nothing more boring than canned inanity. "Oh, it's the feather beard. Again. Ho, hum." gently caress, when they previewed that table I just felt like it was the worst possible aspects of the design of every past edition rolled into one giant d%. Lolrandom monkeycheese wackiness, check. Randomly screwing the party, check. One player randomly getting massive buffs or penalties, check. DM-fiat-dependent options, check. Randomly adding monsters to the battlefield under the DM's control, making encounters next to impossible to balance, check. Mixtures of virtually meaningless flavour not necessarily applicable to all characters (dragonborn don't have hair, nor do warforged...) and very impactful mechanics, check. And it has a 1/20 chance to happen EVERY TIME YOU CAST A loving SPELL. And some of the capstone features are just SO lame. Compare the dragonsorc one (spend some points to charm or frighten everything in range) to the wildsorc one (maybe deal a maximum of 12 extra damage when you cast a spell), it's like... balance, what's balance? Maybe if the wildsorc one did proper exploding dice, it would work... Reroll all max results, if you roll more than *proportion (double, half, who knows)* more dice than the power originally rolled, take some backlash damage, for instance. At least they fixed the typos in the numbering on the wild bullshit table. I mean, you don't have to play it, but if someone turned up at the same table as me with that character at an organised play event I'd probably just turn tail and walk away. It's pretty much the antithesis of what I want out of a game of D&D. 4e's wildsorc was a little too pale and wan on its wildness, but sometimes it was good fun. They've got a couple of things pretty right here - exploding dice, random buffs/penalties - but it goes WAAAAY the hel too far the other way. Dragonsorc looks fine, but the whole para about what happens to your clothes when you manifest wings is just... too much detail to bother with. E: also, did you guys miss that one of the options IS summoning a modron? I hope that Flumphs and Modrons are in the PHB somewhere, or that table's going to be really loving irksome until the monster manual comes out...
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Aug 2, 2014 00:13
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petrol blue posted:Mike Mearls. It was loving hideous. It was the teh evolz campaign (infiltrating the gith queen's lair or whatever) and he took a break from wallchat and wis checks to play a PC. Everyone else was at least vaguely serious, and along comes good old Mikey ruining the mood and generally being a douchebag playing the dwarven rapper (fighter class IIRC) in the steel tophat, generally making at twat of himself. Can anyone remember the name of the character, it was MC something or other I think. I think, of anyone I've seen on youtube playing RPGs, Mike Mearls is probably the one I'd least like to have run a game, or play on the same table as me.
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Aug 2, 2014 00:28
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Littlefinger posted:Killzalot, I poo poo you not. Thaaaat was it. *shudder*
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Aug 2, 2014 00:37
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Ratoslov posted:Anyone have a good idea for a mechanic for a Wild Mage that isn't complete poo poo? Basically, the way 4e did it, plus a bit. 4e had a small additional effect on a nat 1 or a nat 20 - the 1 was a little push to all adjacent creatures, the 20 was... something, can't remember offhand - plus powers which had different effects and damage types depending on what you rolled on the attack and damage dice. I'd thing maybe a d10 table of low-impact Bad Stuff that could happen if you roll a nat 1 and a small table of low-impact extra good stuff on a nat 20? Or maybe same table for each you get an extra level of chaos each time *thing* happens, and that increases the die size that you're rolling so you get more high values, and high values are good for you, so if you do wild and chaotic things (I dunno, provoking OAs, casting into melee etc etc) fortune favours you more. Also, I really liked the at-will that shot a magic bolt that bounced to another target if you rolled even. It was great fun. I'd've liked that to happen with some area spells as well - maybe on damage dice. it could combine nicely with an exploding dice system - roll damage dice, and for each die that rolls max, ingnore the total, but the burst gets And, you know, no lolrandom bullshit, no making your cast spells at random that will gently caress up your back line (  ) no crazy-good buffs (regen 5 for a minute in a game with low HP and low healing, say). Things that are on the theme of 'random chaos, fortune favours the bold, your magic is unpredictable' without being 'lol a balor appears you all die'...
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Aug 2, 2014 08:47
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MartianAgitator posted:This was a Wizards employee trying to show off the coolness of the game for advertising and hype. And he just didn't understand the first thing about DMing. It's the one rule of improv EVERYONE knows: always say "Yes, and..." He was so pedantic he couldn't allow a legitimate, unique response. He ran from the actually creative. And this is double-dumb, because the DMG and the rules compendium SPECIFICALLY SAY the DM can allow this kind of thing - because every power, including basic attacks, target creatures, so by that logic you couldn't hit an object with an axe, either.
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Aug 2, 2014 10:09
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Yep, that's where i was going with exploding-dice burst size increases with damage, but I really liked Choas Bolt from 4e as well, which bounced on even rolled hits and kept doing so until it had targeted everything on the board at least once or missed or rolled odd. It was cool.
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Aug 2, 2014 10:23
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ProfessorCirno posted:Yeah, the internet is absolutely filled to the brim with Harry Potter or Nightvale or Doggon RonPaul roleplaying, and so on, and so forth. The thing is, this is absolutely unconnected to D&D. While I think there IS a fairly big untapped market on how to sell these people a product, you will never, ever find it in D&D, or in any sort of "Traditional roleplaying" system, and I can point at one reason why: the DM. Freeform roleplaying does not need a DM and often doesn't want one. The harder D&D clings to the DM, the farther away it falls from this market. I think this is a real point - when i was a kid, I played freeform forum RPGs in a couple of places that basically consisted of 'describe your character, describe what they're doing' with about 6 rules (which were more about when you should post and how you should behave, than about what you should be doing - the only ones about the latter were 'don't play someone else's character', 'no killing someone's character without their say-so', 'no god-mode' (i.e. you have to be flawed and respond to challenges by accepting them, not just outright beating them all the time) and two threads, one for in-character, one for out-of-character. They did tend to have a storyteller who set up what was going on. I'd love to get back into that sort of play sometimes, but finding a space to do so where the people aren't creepy as balls is difficult. But it's difficult as hell to SELL something like that, because it's SO simple and SO low-mechanics. If D&D's going to survive it needs to embrace online play thoroughly. It needs to court and win (not hate and denigrate) the MMORPG market in particular - these are a bunch of people who DO do the sort of chargen and development mechanics D&D is known for (hell, WoW is based on Warcraft, which in turn is based on WarHAMMER, which in turn is based on a melange of D&D and Tolkein) AND the sort of storyline, AND the sort of gameplay. It just needs to make itself appealing enough to that crowd (and to some extent, to their parents) to draw them away from the computer and into rooms with their friends. I've never understood why people in the D&D world hate on WoW so much. It's the single most successful RPG in the world.
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Aug 3, 2014 09:20
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Yeah, a lot of the 'like an MMO' commentary was actually poorly-framed 'different and I don't like it' commentary.
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Aug 3, 2014 10:21
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MalcolmSheppard posted:The thing is, most pros of any worth are interested in a bunch of different games, and can't afford to be dogmatic because it keeps them away from inspirations they can make their own. Hadn't spotted this before, and I think it's a really, really good point. To go off on a slight tangent into board games, probably the single best boardgame designer currently working is Vlaada Chvatil. He's got a magic touch that lets him consistently make absolute hits - but here's the real thing, they're all in TOTALLY different genres. You look at Mage Knight, Dungeon Petz, Tash-Kalar, Space Alert and Galaxy Trucker, you'd never figure they were made by the same guy. What I'm really trying to say: imagine if Vlaada was designing TTRPGs 
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Aug 3, 2014 10:36
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Another thing I've been harping on since day 0 of 5e development is that they could make a LOT of mileage out of a decent digital play platform. Something that does the bookkeeping, at all levels from character and campaign creation to dice rolling and HP management at the table to maps. But again, D&D division has basically no money, and sucks at IT. I wonder if CN:MS is going to be any good. Anyone beta testing?
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Aug 3, 2014 14:04
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treeboy posted:what would people think about a somewhat crunchy 4e styled tactical game, with relatively flat math and simplified 5e styled advantage/disadvantage to speed up combat, that separates out feats from more RP centric "talents" It sounds great, but I think I'd really struggle getting my group actually playing it. We tried Dungeon World once, and intend to try it again, but we're a bit stuck in the mud when it comes to trying indy systems.
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Aug 3, 2014 19:49
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General best guess is 'Hasbro bought WotC because MTG is like printing money, and basically gives not fucks about D&D'.
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Aug 3, 2014 20:13
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Iunno - maybe they think the movie has more legs, or maybe they think making a GOOD movie might bring in a surge of people, but they need to keep the brand limping along until they can relaunch to coincide with a good movie. That would be a pretty solid strategy actually, I think.
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Aug 3, 2014 21:42
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Old Kentucky Shark posted:We're really in an apex of dumb Hollywood cargo cult nostalgia branding, and Hasbro would be stupid not to try and cash in on it again.  I hope they do get the IP back and make a DECENT D&D movie. But I'm not sure what a decent D&D movie would look like - whether it would have some reference to the characters having players in the outside world, or whether it would instead be like the D&D novels - just a fantasy movie with some D&D tropes set in (probably) the Forgotten Realms. Though, if it were set in Eberron, that would own bones.
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Aug 3, 2014 22:10
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Basically, The Raid, or the recent Dredd movie, but with a likeable 4-person team cast, and with orcs.
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Aug 3, 2014 22:41
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zachol posted:I think there's a big unknown about what input they actually even got. I'm sure 4e players who were paying attention and cared were raising a stink, but there were also plenty of people complaining about how it wasn't going far enough the other way. Most of the people who gave a gently caress about good game design gave up very early, because none fo the feedback surveys gave a teeny tiny toss about it. I know I did, for that very reason, and I stuck it longer than most. The surveys and the playtest were a big excercise in getting the feel right and trying to get the grogs back on board. They weren't really a playtest, that all happened in the closed alpha.
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Aug 5, 2014 22:48
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IT BEGINS http://community.wizards.com/forum/product-and-general-dd-discussions/threads/4121401 actual PHB reviews (well, I say reviews, that one doesn't actually seem to mention much about the GAME, just effusively praises the art layout and readability of the book).
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Aug 5, 2014 23:14
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Most of what was good (and bad, lots of bad) in 4e module publishing was in LFR. It has some absolute gems - and some real stinkers too. The early stages of the Epic campaign, particularly in 3-2 and 3-3, are outstanding in showing just how cinematic and evocative good encounter design can be, especially the one with the pyramid getting swamped in mud, the one where you surf down the acid river, and the one where you descend through a spider-web-and-column filled pit whilst the columns domino down around your ears. And, to bring it round to 5e, in all of those cases, I can't see it having been anywhere near as convincing in TotM combat - part of what made it convincing was the way the map changed and advanced before your eyes, and watching death gradually creep up in huge scale on your tiny, innocent minis... TotM can work, but even in the TotMest of games, I still feel the need to draw maps for the players, just to make sure we're all on the same page.
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Aug 5, 2014 23:47
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Lord of Bore posted:Part 2 of the Acts of Geek review is out Well I'm glad the second part went better.
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Aug 6, 2014 18:37
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Here's the thing: I'd be willing to give next a play - and so would most of the people in my group. I''d just NOT be willing to run it, and nor would anyone else in my group, so... it's not going to get played.
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Aug 6, 2014 21:39
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