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Caveat: I stopped reading the playtest packets ages ago. Reading through the freeware packet I had some initial thoughts. On the good side - this game looks like it'll be pretty fun at low level. Particularly for a quick, light-hearted murderhobo sort of game. If I wanted to actually run dragons re/dungeons this would be a pretty decent choice, provided I wasn't interested in any more modern sensibilities. Like, that is, if I wanted a game full of deadly traps and easy-come-easy-go dead characters, I think this would be fun, and I would totally run it in that context. Of course, as always, Wizard Edition looks like it'll kick in around level 6 or 7. The limited spell slots and the concentration mechanics will probably reign in Wizards for a few additional levels than we expected to see in 3.x but I'm sure they'll take off into the horizon eventually. On the whole not awful and potentially really cool. I dunno, would play, not particularly impressed or surprised, but I think there's potential and the devil is in the details.
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Jul 3, 2014 20:01
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lord_daeloth posted:Hmmm... I think I'm actually okay with opportunity attacks being a reaction. It'd be kinda neat to be able to actually overwhelm someone. I mean, if you are standing there surrounded its going to be difficult to divide your attention to multiple opponents, plus all the other things you could do with your reaction. I hope, though, that there are eventually options to add more reactions. If not, that'd be something easy to house-rule. Would be cool to grow into some multi-opponent master. I suppose your extreme example is possible, but then you just call your DM a dick (or congratulate their cleverness in luring you into that situation) and move on. Plus, in theory, it means having multiple martials might actually be a good thing!
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Jul 3, 2014 20:05
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Not that I think any edition of DnD has ever had particularly well-described mechanics for Wandering Monsters (well, 2e had a very well described system, it was dull) but I gotta defend the mechanics. I don't think it has a place in every game since it can add unplanned, long combat encounters to a game that's not about long combats, but it's very much at the heart of the Original DnD Experience(TM). The entire point is to put constant resource pressure on the PCs and discourage the resource-recharge minigame. A lot of people no longer use DnD for dungeon-delve-resource-management-extravaganza, and that's fine, but it's important to remember that it had a place and the vestiges of oldschool still in the game reflect that.
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Jul 4, 2014 18:13
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OtspIII posted:It works really well with systems with short combat times, attrition, and a sandboxy dungeon-crawl focus. Wandering monsters are basically the answer to the whole 'spending a literal hour discussing how to open a door' problem with dungeon crawls--it makes it so that unfun and slow 'safe' behavior ends up being less safe than just playing in a more daring and fun way. I would never roll a wandering monster check in 4e and would only maybe think of it in 3e under level 6, but they're great for Basic and AD&D and so on. This is perfect, yes. If you use Wandering Monsters tables (or Random Encounters) in your game of political intrigue or nation-running, then it's going to grind poo poo to a halt. If, however, your game is about delving into dungeons and fighting the occasional dragon, they're good. It's weird that DnD hasn't always been designed for that, given what's on the tin, but here we are.
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Jul 4, 2014 20:35
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LongDarkNight posted:Good news! "Okay wait... my attack goes down, and my damage, and my strength save, and I don't qualify for my feats anymore..." EDIT: Less glib: how much stuff changes when you lose an Ability Score now? Mendrian fucked around with this message at 02:58 on Jul 8, 2014 |
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Jul 8, 2014 02:55
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Thalantos posted:A medusa does need to petrify to feel like a medusa. That's like, it's defining characteristic. I think people have long derided combat balance without a clear understanding of what balance even is. Balanced monster design just means that when I'm the DM I know roughly how much threat I can spend to make an encounter easy, challenging, or deadly with regard to the pcs. It is perfectly possible to run a deadly game with balanced mechanics, but the opposite results in many accidental TPKs.
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Jul 9, 2014 21:43
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'Boss' fights have always been a problem. Even 4e had problems with it, though it was admittedly far less egregious. The source of the problem is mostly about action economy. When you have one enemy who is supposed to carry all of the drama and action of a scene anything the invalidates their ability to take actions will basically make the whole scene into a parody of itself. In 4e we had this problem with alpha striking and hard control. Late-game editions did curb that somewhat (variable resistance and off-turn saves frex) but it was still basically the same problem. Oh sure, typically you'd need to actually play out the whole fight since there's no SoD in 4e, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking that Dominating an enemy off a cliff or forcing a dragon to punch itself is somehow 'epic storytelling' or anything. Gods and poo poo high-paragon and up were mostly fixed late into the game line, but down at heroic it was much the same problem as always. The problem is primarily with the dissonance between the way DnD paces its encounters and traditional storytelling. Next is a step back in the way boss-fights are handled but it's still perfectly in line with DnD's sheer lack of drama surrounding such things. The coolest abilities are the ones that 'solve' enemies and the coolest encounters are the ones with one combatant.
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Jul 19, 2014 22:16
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Thoughts on leaked pages. Pros: Actually looks really gorgeous. Cons: The resemblance to the 3E PhB is goddamned uncanny.
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Jul 25, 2014 19:38
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Huh. Okay. Paladin-Avenger option. That sounds intriguing. Any info on that?
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Jul 28, 2014 15:25
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Peas and Rice posted:Generally that there's one "right" way to build a highly specialized character that does one or two things really well, and you need to plan for it, and there isn't a lot of room for flavor options that either don't go towards building the "best" character or even hamper building that "best" character. You're talking about the accumulation of mechanical boni that add up to a super-powerful one-or-two-trick pony. Okay. I can see that. I guess more generally you're talking about ignoring the fluff layer so you can drill down deep into the mechanics layer, instead of doing it the other way around. Given that you apply that complaint equally to both 3.X and 4e, I don't think anybody would disagree with you. There's an optimization gap between players who wring the system for all it's worth and those who dabble in the fun stuff, for sure. I think the common argument is that the gap is smaller in 4e than you'd expect in 3.X, primarily because a character of 'middling optimization' (e.g., suggested starting packages and a handful of flavor feats) still contributes heavily within his or her role. We can argue that the gap is infinitely small though and you can still validly take issue with its existence. Attorney at Funk posted:I think part of it is presentation. I think specifically what it laid bare was the system. You weren't 'encasing an enemy in ice' any longer, you were 'stunning' them and tacking on the 'cold keyword'. Those are status effects! Status effects are like in them there Furnal Fanterseas! We aren't just defining effects and poo poo willy nilly based on each and every individual spell, we've got keywords and uniform design and congruence across all the various systems. Basically the part that is like a videogame is the part where the system behaves like a designed system instead of a bunch of quirky stuff. Except the quirky stuff also describes a designed system if you look hard enough at it, but that always seems to be lost in translation. Mendrian fucked around with this message at 21:16 on Jul 31, 2014 |
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Jul 31, 2014 21:13
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It seems like the idea is to create tension with the DM. Like he wants you to roll because it might gently caress you over, but he doesn't want you to regen tides. I'm not sure that's good but I think that's how it's meant to play with incentives.
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Aug 2, 2014 05:43
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Recycle Bin posted:5e emphasizes role playing in the sense that it doesn't emphasize combat. When I talk about role playing, I just mean the player's capacity to affect the world and story outside of physical combat. That doesn't mean there has to be a chart to consult for every NPC interaction. I like that 5e turns character backgrounds in to a semi mechanic and stresses the importance of bonds, flaws and ideals instead of just alignment. I know it's not what you mean, but this almost sounds like one of those bullshit job interview answers. "My one flaw? I'm too dedicated to results." "4e's combat is just too good, we need a mediocre combat engine so people will stop interacting with it so much." 4e's combat mechanics were perhaps too involved and I definitely think a lot of people here would agree with that. Even after years of playing 4e, mid-level combat can take up to an hour to run effectively and an hour of combat is an hour people can't spend talking or investigating or traveling, and I think that's fair. In fact, that's what I wish they had iterated on. That's pretty much the only source of aggravation in 5e for me. They could have just tuned encounters to be even faster but instead they just went full 3.75. It is faster, of course - but they threw out a lot of babies to accomplish it. You don't have to have a sub-par combat system to use less of it. It just needs to take less time. Mearls made a post pretty early in the L&L cycle where he talked about how combat in previous editions had been really fast, and that was good, because it meant it was over with quicker and you could move on to 'the good stuff'. I think the thing about that attitude that rubs people the wrong way is that 80-90% of character resources are all about interacting with combat. D&D has always been awful for this. "Our game is a Game of Thrones inspired political drama." "Okay, how do you model all the stuff that isn't combat?" "Freeform roleplay, occasional Charisma check."
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Aug 5, 2014 19:12
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seebs posted:For as long as I can remember, the consensus has been that if you thought a rule worked differently, you generally get to pick actions that conform to the new rule. So, for instance, if you thought you didn't need to have a guard, but you do, you get to replan your rest arrangement. While I'm not one to claim Next has a tight rule set, this stuff is true. In my years of running games, blind siding a player with a ruling typically means ruling in the player's favor. This will happen in any system. Next's designed ambiguity certainly doesn't help but there's always gonna be rules arguments, most people sort them out by handing credence to the most generous or assumed interpretation.
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Aug 8, 2014 05:16
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5e is in a weird place, I won't lie, and the grid/gridless thing is probably the weirdess place of all. Like you can play 5e on a grid and you'll probably be able to puzzle it out. 4e for the most part described most of the answers you could ever have questions within the space. It wouldn't be hard to invent some kind of whacky edgecase for which there was no official 4e ruling but there's typically enough precedent to figure it out even in the most unusual cases. ((EG: "How do I describe the shape of a lightning bolt under water? If an effect requires an object to move in a straight line, how does that interact with diagonals? How do I map this completely bizarre architectural interior? There's usually some answer close enough to interpret confidently.)) I don't think a lack of rules is inherently bad design. Seeing a game as a series of design questions meant to prompt the DM into creative-problem-solving is a valid approach to design, it's just not really in agreement with D&D's statement, which is rules-heavy to begin with (even a 'rules-lite' 5e is still pretty rules heavy.) The lack of grid OR true TotM rules is like a poster-child for lookwarm design, and is like a shining example of how Nexts' 'fans' are mostly angry that the game didn't really innovate enough in any particular direction. As an aside, I think the elf-trance thing is not a good point to keep harping on. 5e has enough weirdo problems without using Mearls' offhand bathroom posting as canon.
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Aug 8, 2014 09:48
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A Catastrophe posted:It's a perfect example because clarifying it in the book would be so trivial, and the only reason not to is because it would shatter the innocence of some hothouse flower grog who will immediately be Fired As A Player if the book says elves sleep a way contrary to the way he thinks Garry said they do. Come on man, neither one of us can possibly know this. I get where you're coming from and agree that the flaws run deeper than many other systems but let's not project motivation onto a thing that some poor writer probably thought was cool and clear enough.
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Aug 9, 2014 05:06
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A Catastrophe posted:Again, I have to clarify. I'm not just talking about problems in the text when I talk about for instance, the Trance example. But I the case of recent tweets rewrites aren't an option if he wants parity with the print version. And they've already said they want to minimize errats.
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Aug 9, 2014 05:36
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I think it's worthwhile to mention that 'fail forward' isn't necessarily a new thing. Guys were doing that back in the 90's when I started playing DnD and I'm sure there were people doing it earlier too. What I'm trying to figure out is how "fail nowhere" or "stall backward" style play ever got popularized in the first place.
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Aug 11, 2014 08:45
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Kai Tave posted:Nah, it's pretty unambiguously progress for RPGs to emphasize that the GM is, in fact, one single person out of a group and that RPGs, being a cooperative experience, rely on that group working together towards the mutual goal of having a good time because that is the actual factual truth and almost every story you hear about GMs taking hardline "I'm the GM and I wear the viking hat!" stances are purestrain catpiss. I think a connected concept here is "fun as goal" vs "GM vision as goal." By elevating one player's status you are implicitly declaring his fun having needs more important. If adversarial stuff is fun, then the players have elected it. If the GM needs this fight to be deadly because his story demands it, you've got a recipe for catpiss.
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Aug 11, 2014 09:12
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So I had a crazy idea: Given that the core ideas behind Next aren't totally stupid, but mostly the class implementation that leaves a lot to be desired... how hard would it be to just sort of... come up with a bunch of SA-approved home-cooked classes for Next? I realize that's a lot more work that most of the negative people are willing to put in, but what do you think would need the most work? Fighter is clearly dull as hell and needs some actual class features. The Wizard subclasses are all broken as poo poo. I think they should be broken out into their own thing and made into their own classes, and Wizards should probably just be banned. Any other navel-gazing thoughts? I'm really tempted to do some rewrites.
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Aug 11, 2014 21:49
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treeboy posted:Or the dragon uses it's 90' long lightning breath and fries everything in the corridor leading up to its inner sanctum as soon as they open the door with a readied action because an Army of skeletons has been running amok in its lair. I agree that's a likely solution but it just illustrates the kind of all-or-nothing, bullshit-PC-problem-meets-equally-bullshit-DM-solution stuff that high level magic entails. It is not a coincidence that the answer you came up with to the issue of a bunch of skeletons instantly slaying a dragon was to wholly and immediately remove the player's whole strategy. It's a lose lose situation and it satisfies nobody.
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Aug 12, 2014 01:43
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I don't think I've ever played with a group that would have difficulty finding a copious number of skeletons. I've had groups with no ability to do anything whatsoever with bones collect the bones of their enemies for fun. Consider that the average encounter with Goblins at like... level 1 probably has 3+ Goblins. I'm a Wizard. I buy a cart. We will never want for skeletons.
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Aug 12, 2014 06:44
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seebs posted:I am not entirely sure I comprehend the question. If it's not impossible, why is it magic? Okay. Here we go. Time to retread this path again. First of all a lot of this boils down to a groggy and illiterate definition of Magic. Magic is clearly 'impossible' in the real world - it is literally defined as things happening without apparent or appropriate causation. Magic also comes with a bunch of literary and cultural baggage that mostly involves chanting and old men and sacrifices, but pretty much all cultures tag their magic differently. Magic is stuff that it's impossible, but it isn't the summation of all things that are impossible. Take Superman. Superman isn't magic. His power is magic as far as we in the real world are concerned, because he has powers that offer no apparent causation, but in his universe he operates off of some bullshit science analog. It isn't magic because it isn't arcane - it's inherent, it follows laws separate from what DC considers 'magic' and is some kind of super-humanity thing that makes him inherently awesome. It is a kind of Impossible that is not Magic. Take Hercules. He exists in a universe with people who can do literal magic. He is not Hermes. He is not Apollo, but his strength would be considered Impossible but it is not Arcane, it does not require ritual or utterance to use, nor does it require any special effort of Will to use. It is an inherent part of his demigod status. Take Beowulf. He's a lot like the above examples except there's not even an attempt to explain the source of his power - it's just sorta of there, an innate part of him being a Hero. Ancient Heroes were often just normal people who were so awesome that what they did was clearly Impossible. But it is not Magic, it is not Arcane. A further problem exists wherein people assume that since Wizards are Magic and can do the Impossible, they can therefore do Anything. That is not necessarily a clear line of thinking. The writers of the DnD universe have license to define the rules and limitations of magic - it isn't just a box that says, "All the poo poo that's Impossible". Magic in DnD is basically a very specific kind of science. There's really no reason all the Impossible poo poo needs to be Magic. Which brings us back to the Fighter. I think part of the problem is this inherent need to source where all power comes from. I don't see any reason why you couldn't give Fighters a few background/origin things to explain why they're so awesome, if that's what people need so badly. Mendrian fucked around with this message at 08:23 on Aug 12, 2014 |
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Aug 12, 2014 08:20
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seebs posted:It's not that it's "more fantastic". It's that it contradicts things we know, rather than obviously being completely outside our experience. We know how "throwing objects" works. We have no idea at all how magic works. So the suspension of disbelief is harder; we have to simultaneously think about things we know about how physical objects work and completely disregard them. But this makes for terribly boring gameplay and is incredibly unimaginative. Consider for a moment that because we have no idea how magic works, we can make it do anything we want (as designers). That's how you bring magic down to a point where we have buy-in to this fictional world. Magic does the impossible, but it conforms to rules and we can understand those rules. Martials, on the other hand, conform to our expectations about what is possible in the real world. Of course much of what we (nerds) know about real world combat is based on movies, videogames, books, and (to a lesser extent) sports, so it's not really based on anything 'real' to begin with. We 'know' that a person cannot jump 30 feet into the air, but not how high a person can jump. We know a person cannot kill 30 men with one swing, but we don't know how many is reasonable, and so forth. So as others have said, the real trick is to create a framework for what is way too much for Magic to do and loving stick to it. Or make Fighters as crazy as Wizards currently are, but having them exist in two completely different worlds ("anything is possible" and "I'm pretty sure I have a good feel for exactly what a person is capable of") at the same table is stupid.
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Aug 12, 2014 09:01
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Tendales posted:"Oh, where did this flaming gauntlet come from? Well, a red dragon tried to breath fire on me while I had my arm down its throat choking the life out of it from the inside and, you know, these things happen." I actually really like Heroics as a source of legendary power. I mean I can already hear the grog reaction of, "Nuh-uh, being super heroic won't make you any stronger" while simultaneously studying Crowley to gain Real Ultimate Power, but you know, whatever. I suppose the other possible objection is that sounds a lot like 'superhero' and you know how much grogs hate that.
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Aug 12, 2014 09:05
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Tendales posted:The party has to cross a raging river; the fighter insults the river's mother until the living incarnation of the river itself manifests to throw down. The fighter wrestles the river into submission; once it's calmed down the refugees the party's escorting can safely cross. Afterwards, the fighter and the river go out for drinks. They still keep in touch. The river is getting help for its anger issues. I may have wandered afield from my original point, but I 100% want this scenario to just be poo poo Fighters Do. I mean I'm fine with people who want their Fighters to be grounded in less esoteric poo poo. I can totally get it if somebody doesn't want to take 'can wrestle anything' that literally, but Fighters should have that level of agency, yes. EDIT: I am aware this was a joke.
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Aug 12, 2014 09:14
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seebs posted:I guess I've usually interpreted stories like that as being in the same genre as Paul Bunyan; not actual claims about what people could do. I'm really confused about this claim. I get that you want a classification for "good, but plausible"; but the stupid thing is that box is where we always put the Fighter and never put the Wizard. I've already explained a bunch of times that letting magic be the catchall box for 'poo poo that is Impossible" is a mistake. There are a variety of good ways you can bring a Wizard closer to the 'plausible' characters, there are a great many ways to justify an 'impossible' Fighter and you shouldn't have them both at the same table if you're going to take both of those stances very literally. Zombies' Downfall posted:Honestly the real problem with running low fantasy D&D is that there aren't enough limits on what a caster can do or in what context they can do it. You can retain the "mundane fighter" and have him be comparatively cooler without making him hew mountains if that's what you prefer. There are a dozen ways to do this: hack off the top 4 or 5 levels of spells so nobody has Greater Teleport or Time Stop, make things like focuses and components meaningful to the point where Johnny Wizard has to spend every dime he earns on dragon poo poo and unicorn balls instead of being able to buy or make the same magic items and wands and poo poo anyone else has, have some sort of consequence on over-reliance on magic besides running out of magical gas (like in WFRP, where every time you channel a meaningfully powerful spell there's a chance a demon will coming tearing through space right behind you or your legs will give out). I've been saying this for loving ever. Since magic doesn't have to worry about physics and poo poo it literally has whatever bizarro rules we want to give it. Why DnD has consistently said, "gently caress it, give the Wizard everything you can possibly imagine" I'll never know.
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Aug 12, 2014 09:52
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seebs posted:Gosh, I never knew before that tall tales and fantasy novels were the exact same genre and had the exact same narrative conventions and structures. Learn something new every day, I guess. Beowulf is not a 'tall tale' any more than Lord of the Rings is. It is certainly not Fantasy as we understand it but that's because it literally predates genre. If you're saying mythology and fantasy is not the same genre than that's valid but I mean you have to admit there's some loving similarity there.
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Aug 12, 2014 10:04
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Recycle Bin posted:Are you guys still talking about skeletons? DnD 5e: Still Talking About Skeletons
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Aug 12, 2014 22:59
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Man I'm actually sort of excited about Next, despite knowing it's not a great system. My problem is that I really wish people could talk about how much they like 5th without immediately talking about how 4e was a lovely MMO for babies. There's a couple of local (normally reputable) stores in my area that have made blog posts about how glad they are that 4e the lovely MMO edition is dead. I feel like I'm going to be fighitng the 4e edition war well into 7th edition.
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Aug 19, 2014 03:08
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I think it's disingenuous to accuse OSR players of wanting to put their players in their 'place' and I think it's probably not even true in a majority of cases. True, there are a lot of people cheesed off that the DM had his power 'taken away' during the 3.X/4e era but I think a lot of what we see on grogs.txt and poo poo is weirdos and outlyers, people who feel so disempowered (sic) that they take to the internet to proclaim their superiority. There's a not-insignificant number of people in the 'Ask your DM' camp that just think that style of play is simpler. And I mean, they're right. Leaving it up to the DM to decide what is both fun and sensible is a lot easier then memorizing a bunch of rules. 'Seat of your pants' play just hums along, especially if the DM makes convincing rulings on the fly. I'm not saying it's better because there are a hell of a lot of potholes with that, and anyway without proper DMing advice it's all so much wasted breath, but I think it's important to remember most people who play TTRPGs do it because they think it's just normal, meat-and-potatoes fun and not because they're closeted sadists.
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Aug 26, 2014 20:30
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So like, how do we rectify the fun-havers and the rules-quantifiers? Like, I agree that fun is a bad metric for game design, and I agree that Next is full of obnoxious holes that even prior (non-4e!) editions have managed to solve. But at the same time I feel like we're sort of putting off a lot of goons by demanding that they justify why they like a game. I mean every positive conversation about 5 has gone like this: GoonA: I like 5e. GoonB: But why? GoonA: I dunno I had fun I guess. GoonB: That's not an argument! GoonA: Okay, I liked this and this about it. GoonB: Pfft, the first one isn't real and the second one is dismissable. The issue isn't that Goon A or Goon B is wrong; it's that they want to have entirely different conversations. Not everybody wants to debate the minutae of why (or more and more frequently exactly how much) the game's design is moronic. Likewise, it's not really okay to take an objective mathematical statement and try to say it's not real or that it doesn't matter, because for the person talking about the design, that's literally what they are talking about, so of course it matters to them. I'm not entreating for sanity, I'm legitimately curious how to proceed. Also, it is ironic that this is the edition that is supposed to bring us closer together.
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Sep 1, 2014 08:28
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quote:Instead, I'm going to say again that if people would support their arguments instead of making unsupported (or demonstrably wrong) statements and then defending them because they feel right, we could discuss this game instead of arguing about it. You are presenting yourself as a rationalist who is trying to stem the tide of all these ignorant posters ('people') who are making unfounded suppositions about 5e ('game is enjoyable, I dunno I just had fun') and if people are not doing their best to persuade you that the game is good in a formal capacity, they aren't participating in the thread 'properly.' And I mean like, Alpha, you're easily one of the nicest posters in this thread. We also have poo poo like, "Lol 5e fans are grogs trying to defend their lovely game with tummyfeels, lol, where's the logic?' and that's not really going to engender a fantastic discussion either. There's a lot of projection going on here - I'm not just talking about onto MonsterEnvy either. If somebody says, "hey, this bit was fun', there's a backlash against it that includes all sorts of dredged up Edition Warrior rhetoric that nobody loving wanted to talk about in the first place. For example. I loved 4e. I think 4e is a better designed game than 5e. I think that that 4e is definitely Dungeons and Dragons, and I think that people who argue otherwise are pretty dumb. I also acknowledge there is a massive problem with the Fighter, that Wizard-Edition is back in full force, and that there clearly wasn't very close attention paid to the numbers. Ergo, I will never persuade you that these things are other than they are because I do not believe that anyway - I can't persuade you with supported arguments because I don't really stand behind the arguments in the first place. I can still want to play the game, and therefore this thread could be a useful place for that kind of discussion - and indeed, we see bit of it, houserules and optimization guidelines, and poo poo like that. Basically I don't take umbrage with the criticism because I think the critics are right. I take umbrage with the fact that people who come here looking to just talk about the game are asked to defend why they want to talk about it in anything other than a critical capacity. Also MonsterEnvy is doing a very poor job of defending his position. EDIT: I apologize if, in the quote I made of you, you ware talking specifically of MonsterEnvy because he is clearly unable to support his rules assumptions with text. I thought 'people' was code for 'people who are for some reason supporting 5e'.
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Sep 5, 2014 06:17
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I seem to recall a very early play test packet did have a drunk condition. I want to say it gave some kind of DR in exchange for Disadvantage on like... everything. I'll go look for it. Edit: here we go. quote:Intoxicated Mendrian fucked around with this message at 20:02 on Sep 5, 2014 |
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Sep 5, 2014 19:54
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So I noticed there were a couple of people posting some neat ideas about how to improve Fighters. Was anybody interested in collaborating on that (in the interest of maybe 'finishing' a few of the subclasses)? I don't have a lot of spare time but I can probably try to toss out a few ideas here or there. Maybe we can even throw it in the OP eventually.
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Sep 10, 2014 05:10
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I think it's silly to assume Rust Monsters and the like exist to 'balance' Fighters. I know it's a commonly held belief that every rule that makes Fighters suck a little more was installed by the gently caress Fighters Wizards Rule Cabal, but that's not really the case. Most information from Gygax's table is anecdotal but it sounds like most monsters were either created whole-cloth from some weird fever dream the guy had or it was created in response to a boring, repetitive task one of his players had gotten into the habit of doing. "I hit is with my sword" is pretty dull, and trying to scramble for a sharp stick or a club and trying to keep some distance from the thing is actually kind of neat. I'm not defending DnD's design, of course, because that's not very good design. At the very least I'd like to see a monster that eats spell levels or something. NorgLyle posted:Yes, fighters used to be amazing. It's hard to even describe how thoroughly the 3rd edition changes (not just to wizards but to thieves as well) wrecked the... I won't call it balance but wrecked the way the game used to work. Fighters, at one point, were the primary source of enemy removal; they did the most damage of any class including dedicated blaster spellcasters (who could deal greater damage in area effect attacks), they were the most resilient characters (by a stupid degree if they had a high constitution to go along with their strength), they had, for the most part, the best set of saving throws and they were the only class who could easily achieve an AC that actually needed to be rolled against by higher level enemies. Wizard's spellbooks used to be somewhat justified simply because they were so dramatically inferior in combat encounters to fighters; Clerics in pre-2nd edition were generally pretty okay but never had enough spell slots to go insane with the buffs the way they could later on; Thieves were the odd man out -- if you could get them in situations where they could use their class abilities they were great but 'you open the door and see seven bugbears, roll for initiative' was usually pretty bad for them, backstab was not as functional as sneak attack. Also this. Plus Rogues leveled so much quicker than everybody else that it almost didn't matter that they were strictly an inferior option - they pulled ahead in hit dice after a while even if they lacked a good-sized die.
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Sep 17, 2014 04:41
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Kai Tave posted:I'm not even just saying this to keep heaping onto the dogpile but the two halfway decent ideas anybody can point to that come from Next are: Concentration would have been a good idea (in a game with Defending anyway) but it seems pretty easy to ignore it.
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Sep 20, 2014 18:04
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"Everybody else hates 4e, get with the times grognards" is a sentiment that has so many beautiful shades of irony woven into it that it is like a rainbow of frustration.
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Sep 23, 2014 18:29
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I think the irony of 4e 'all classes are the same' stuff is that it's just reductionist. "In 3.X all classes are the same. You gain levels and unlock class features." Anybody who was a fan of 3.X would then look very sternly at me and say something like ,'really? You can't tell the difference between a wizard and a warrior'? and I would just smile to myself as I am a flower who that converts smug and irony into sugar.
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Sep 24, 2014 02:48
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spider wisdom posted:After years of playing PC D&D games, I finally broke down and bought the 5e starter set. Now I need to find actual irl nerds to teach me how to do this poo poo. Nah just run it for the nerds in question. It's surprisingly easy to learn how to run a game, and I'm sure most people here can give you some blanket advice to get you started.
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Oct 2, 2014 05:51
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Stepping aside from the ME pig-pile, or really, alongside it, I am more scared of seeing what the system in the DMG looks like than if there were really no system at all. Like think about it - what if they did cobble together something comprehensive? What if the occulted 'math team' has actually been hard at work reverse engineering forumlae from the MM? I haven't taken calculus in a while, but I'm pretty sure you'll have to use derivatives and let CR approach infinity or something to backsolve for AC. Also algebra, I'm sure there will be algebra. Maybe that's how we bring in the AD&D crowd?
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Oct 6, 2014 09:03
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