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So if your spells are going to break the world and setting than just don't include them. Telling people they can't learn abilities in a tabletop RPG because that magic is for cutscenes is just stupid. I'm fine with NPCs not having all the moving parts that PCs do, but people will want to play dark mages and whatnot and explaining that this is a JRPG cutscene because we can't figure out how to balance teleportation magic is just idiotic.
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Oct 21, 2018 19:49
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Andrast posted:Expecting every single piece of magic in the world to be a spell the players can learn seems pretty dumb I'm not expecting to learn a mind flayer's mind blast, but if a human wizard shows up with a spell I don't have and I'm a human wizard I'd expect to be able to learn it.
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Oct 21, 2018 20:03
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Sodomy Hussein posted:Monsters need to be designed for efficiency, because the average monster is going to exist in-game for about three rounds and maybe twenty minutes of real time. Their stat block should be easily readable and, outside of flavor text describing what they're about, be absolutely concise. Why are function calls bad? Standardizing PC/monster abilities so you don't have to deal with special snowflake exceptions everywhere isn't a bad thing. If the terror of looking up fireball is really what's keeping the monsters down, you can reprint it if worst comes to worst. There is absolutely no reason a player fireball and enemy dark wizard fireball needs to work differently at all, and it's easier to adjudicate when they do the same thing. But to answer section z's post, I will be up front that I absolutely hate "that's not for you, player! Go sit in the corner!" with the burning hate of a thousand suns. I suspect the "good dms" who explain that actually you need to get another wizard to teleport you to wizard school for 15 years (despite the fact that you already went to wizard school for 15 years to get the first level, and that's explicitly not how wizardry works) are probably not going to be happy when the player decides to ignore all the plot hooks to go follow the suggestion to track down another NPC wizard to learn Curse of the Black Flame or whatever. Now you can totally have NPC wizards that just know fireball, magic missile, and lightning bolt to simplify combat rather than having a full PC spell list and reprint the spells there. That satisfies the endless complaints about the tyranny of looking things up in the rulebook AND simplifying NPCs. Yet no one ever seems to suggest this...
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Oct 21, 2018 22:40
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Sage Genesis posted:Yeah but the problem is, you've already decided that the enemy dark wizard is explicitly casting "Fireball". What if it's a necromancer who wants to cast "The Final Pyre", or a demon who calls for the "Brimstone Rain", or a fire giant king invokes "Blood of Ymir" or whatever? Why are they the exact same thing? The problem with making monster/npc magic the same as pc-magic is that it discourages creativity. Every special ability gets translated through the same lens over and over, whether it's in Monster Manual 1 or Monster Manual 5 (or whatever 5e calls their next couple of monster books). Refluffing is literally the solution for all of that. Ignoring the fact that you can be a PC necromancer but not a demon or fire giant, you can seriously just say the necromancer's fireball looks like a flaming skull or whatever and that the demon's fireball manifests as a rain of fire. It's not even hard. Ultimately, the game needs to be parsed by humans, and having 5 different fireballs with various piddly bonuses/alterations is in no way conducive to that. As a player I don't particularly care that the incoming fire AoE is 10 feet wider vs inflicting a -2 penalty to attack, I'm just going to visualize a fiery explosion - and if it's actually different enough that I care, make it a new spell. Sodomy Hussein posted:The description for Fireball is 135 words, five stat lines, and two paragraphs, much of which conveys information a player needs and a monster doesn't, and the rest of which is again a disaster as far as conciseness and readability goes. Fifty percent of this is that the D&D designers are bad at writing concise descriptions and the other 50 is that this stuff might actually come up for a monster. Spell components come up if you attempt to silence, restrain, or sunder the enemy (component pouches), fireballs igniting the wooden barriers may come up especially as part of encounter design, and it wouldn't be hard to imagine a monster needing to scale their spells up.
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Oct 21, 2018 23:16
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Sage Genesis posted:Refluffing is not the solution for that, because I want all of those abilities to be different. Actually, mechanically, meaningfully different. And you really exaggerate how hard it would be to parse for a human, you can literally condense the effects down to one or two lines in a stat block, as Sodomy Hussein showed. No DM will ever read two lines of Brimstone Rain and then suddenly get the vapors because he thinks Fireball looks kind of similar if you squint. If I need to remember 5 different fireball effects with trivial differences I will probably get annoyed, especially as modern RPG books come in at hundreds of pages anyway. I am perfectly happy abstracting all this crap to one function call, because at its core most of this stuff is AoE fire damage and adding some pointless little status effect isn't going to make that much difference. You already have hundreds of pages of crap to remember like combat rules, skill rules, various status effects - the more you can abstract and reduce to basic principles, the better. quote:(Also, if the DM starts to tell you brimstone rains down at a demon's command, do you actually, genuinely imagine a fiery explosion? Why would you even do that?) Because it's area of effect fire damage and in that context there is no meaningful difference? Yes, if you really wanted to you could add a DoT to brimstone rain and bonus damage to bloodied creatures to Final Pyre and pretend people give a crap enough to make two different abilities, but most of the time that's just padding and it's a rider on two spells that share much the same tactical use (fire damage over an area). There is a reason the meme "[2W] damage and slide the target 1 square" became a thing and it wasn't to applaud the diversity of powers.
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Oct 21, 2018 23:46
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Sage Genesis posted:You keep saying you have to remember things. Why? I said you could put it in the stat block itself. Unless you mean to tell me that you memorize all stat blocks and don't reference them when running the game? I mean, hats off to you if you can do that, but that's not really standard I think. I wouldn't necessarily memorize them all, but I would want them to be close enough that I wouldn't have to continually have to go back and reference to see what special exception we have here. To go back to your example, it would be thematic to put the necromancer and the demon in the same encounter, and I wouldn't want to have to flip between the two of them to determine which fireball we're using. You'll probably still have to check back for numbers, but giving the necromancer and the demon fireball - a common, well known ability - means that you can throw it out instantaneously without having to go back and see which rider effect it has. I'd also expect monsters to share abilities as well, so if the DM goes "brimstone's raining down again" the cleric can prepare to dispel DoTs rather than making sure people are above 50% health. After all, it's not unreasonable for a lich to use Final Pyre as well, or for a fiend pact warlock to use Brimstone Rain. Even if we accept that some of these are NPC only you are probably going to want to have NPCs that share abilities. I'm not objecting to different fire abilities, I'm objecting to everyone having a special fire ability that follows no known pattern and is completely unique to it. quote:You misunderstand my question. If the DM says, "brimstone rains down", why would you visualize an explosion instead? That's literally not what he said is happening. If the DM says you encounter an orc, do you picture them all as gnolls in your mind's eye as well or something? My apologies, I assumed you were being condescending with the brimstone thing and replied in kind. (For reference, my picture of a fire rain is something like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1lRseegK_E, where everything IS exploding). The 2[W] and slide people 1 square is the caricature people made of 4e powers because they considered them uninteresting, and part of my point is that there's only so much you can do to distinguish between area fire blasts before they become something else. Yea, mechanically maybe Final Pyre does half necrotic and half fire, but that's just such an uninteresting effect in game it doesn't justify a whole new ability. Sodomy Hussein posted:I feel like I've got the horse to the pond but it just won't drink the water yet. We agree in principle that the descriptions are terrible. We agree that you can refluff and be creative. We can't agree that you shouldn't have to pull from another book to read a stat block? I mean, when I say function call you're literally doing it by having tags that provoke and components like "spell". If I have the spell tag and provoke defined in the PHB for player abilities or say "weakened" I have to go out to the PHB ANYWAY when the monster ability says it weakens. I don't know why that is superior to having "fireball" be the cue to look up and have that composed of the various known elements rather than having to flip through the PHB for spell tags and status effects. Splicer posted:There's stuff that's suitable as something a monster, or indeed a player, does once in one fight to make the fight cool that might be completely unsuitable for a player to be able to repeat on command. Like let's say I want an enemy orc fire wizard to have a spell that causes you to involuntarily vomit fire. Why? Because I think it would be fun to have an encounter where the players are encouraged to spread themselves far apart so they don't vomit fire on each other. And then avoid the flammable parts of the terrain. And then escape after the entire building catches fire. This is kind of the don't put teleportation in the setting if you don't want people teleporting into bank vaults and stealing stuff problem. You can either give the ability to something obviously inhuman the players can't duplicate (mind flayer blasts, dragon fire breath), or come up with some variant that's not crazy, but in the above example you're gonna get the problem where people want to take the vomiting fire spell and you have to explain that this spell is basically like video game teleportation. You're not allowed to have it because it would break event flags. That's not really a satisfying conversation for anybody on any side of the table IMO, and if you make an ability that's evocative enough people are going to want to use it.
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Oct 22, 2018 00:50
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Sodomy Hussein posted:Oh. That's because you know what Weakened, Dazed, and Spell mean because they have essentially one-line effect definitions, hence you don't have to write out the effect definition every time. Or do you really think the book should call out exactly what Weakened or Fireball mean every single time they are used? Be honest now. I don't, but I would argue most of the D&D spells could be condensed to a single line and called along the same vein. Fireball is fairly memorable as Xd6 in 20-foot radius, spell to the point that it's just as easy to put in a statblock as "weakened". Yes, you do need to look up corner behavior but that's not too much different than looking up how stun in 3.5 is an auto-disarm.
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Oct 22, 2018 02:53
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AlphaDog posted:It sounds like you want what I want - A standard list of effects that abilities can call. Sure. I'm also saying there should be a common list of abilities that are called in statblocks rather than composing them of AoEsphere Spell Fire in the statblock. Thus enemy melees would have Rain of Steel in their statblock and that would just be the double attack. Fighters get it, high level paladins get it, giant demons get it, etc.
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Oct 22, 2018 03:26
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Splicer posted:Also by extension why can't a fighter or a rogue learn pack tactics. That's a good point, I'd forgotten all the NPCs with NPC-only bullshit fighting styles you can't learn. Should be able to do that honestly. However, "this one orc" is not a character class. Sure your wizard can't learn the druid spell, but Jenny's druid could.
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Oct 23, 2018 03:09
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Kaysette posted:That’s actually extremely 5e. Quoted for truth.
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Oct 25, 2018 02:30
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Sion posted:I am playing in a series of one shots that will take us from level 1 to level 10. We have access to the PHB and Zanathar's. What can people recommend as a fun/weird build? I was going to recommend drow/half-drow for first guy but I see you've got bard levels. SLAs might help you at lower levels though.
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Oct 27, 2018 06:10
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What's the verdict on the mtg crossover book?
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Dec 9, 2018 07:43
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What, did they add a bunch of spell DC boosters?
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Dec 10, 2018 01:14
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Per day resources really should just go die in a fire, but Mike Mearls.
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Dec 11, 2018 00:49
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Really I don't understand why Mearls is stupid enough to get into this fight, as he was the guy responsible for throwing out Orcus (also known as Tome of Battle) to ensure we had crap like daily abilities to half-rear end attrition. The man designed enough of 4e that turning around and presenting himself as the guardian of real D&D is extremely disingenuous (some of us remember the many failed skill challenge erratas, Mike!) while also explaining that 4th edition had trouble because it was a perfectly balanced game. This is the same guy who is basically writing "rulings not rules" as by his own admission it's just too hard to balance classes. The man has nothing worthwhile to say, so don't bring him up. Simple.
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Dec 20, 2018 06:31
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I just find 4e combat takes too long, and is both overly finicky (track ALL the 1-round buffs! Some end at the beginning of the turn, some end at the end!) and got repetitive real quick in the one campaign I played (I cast ray of frost again and curse the HP inflation). There's a lot that 4e got wrong (massive piles of errata, HP inflation, weird race/class determinism, arbitrarium NPCs) which is obfuscated by "da WOW" and "muh D&D".
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Dec 21, 2018 07:48
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I will say that a 3.X fight feels much more consequential to me than a 4e fight, as ordering your skeletal hydra into combat/high level mage fights are more interesting to me than pretty much every 4e power in the book. That said, 3rd edition is flawed as hell and I completely understand why people hate it, so  Really, the problem is less the edition and more that the same band of isolated people hiding in the EnWorld bubble had no idea what they were doing, and that reflects in 5e. It's all the same issues as the constitutional compromises, where no one has actually come up with what a high level fighter is supposed to look like or what abilities are supposed to be available to high level characters, so they just go back to not making those decisions and then wondering why the fighter sucks and no one wants to play him. There are some fairly major undocumented changes (like not using level draining monsters to avoid high level characters) but really it's all just the same pile of avoiding decisions.
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Dec 21, 2018 18:55
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The thing with the edition wars is that it's not a rules conflict, it's an identity conflict. Half the people bitching about Fighter Magic didn't have anything against Book of Nine Swords, but the edition war escalated into a bunch of personal stuff and disingenuous arguments on both sides. I'm not going into this any further because it sounds like all the 4e fans in this thread are still super sensitive about it, and I don't blame them at all.
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Dec 21, 2018 21:50
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Paizo distinguishes itself on the strength of the art department, and not being 4e. I am a pretty vocal 3.X grognard*, and I cannot stand Paizo because they managed to take 3.5 and make it more broken by doing less analysis. The complaints about 4e resource management schemes (that aren't stupid) boil down to: -I don't understand why Fighters have per day use limits, that doesn't make sense to me -I don't understand why if all these characters are supposed to have different powersources, that the promotional material is selling as being different, why the arcane powers function identically to martial powers as far as resource management goes. If you look at 3.5 a Warlock plays very differently than a Warblade, because 1 is spamming the same move over and over again because he put all his resources into it to make it kinda not suck, and the other is on a cooldown rotation cycle where he has to basic attack to recover his maneuver hand. To my (admittedly limited) knowledge, 4e didn't hit that point until psions and essentials. Now, you can make the absolutely valid point that the developers at Wizards are far too incompetent to balance these correctly (see: Warlock, Complete Arcane) but it does make the characters leap out as "different" in a way that 4e powers don't really manage. As far as 5e goes, I don't even know what we're supposed to be discussing because Mearls is terrified of his barely functional sandcastle collapsing and doesn't want to release more books. It's very silly. *IMO, it's the best of the bad. It still kinda has massive, gaping problems, but so do the rest of them.
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Dec 22, 2018 01:55
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