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Okay, so looking at the ability score generation, is it just me or are they basically throwing a huge "gently caress you!" to anyone who doesn't want to leave their fate up to the dice and just do the sensible thing and generate through point buy? With 4d6, drop lowest, you can have a chance for some pretty swingy stats, but you also have a chance to start with ability scores of 16 or higher BEFORE racial mods. Point buy nets you with a baseline of 8's and nothing can be lower, but the highest you can pay up to is... 15? Really? So I could start with a 17 after racial mods OR probably start with much higher than that? Why are we STILL rolling randomly to generate ability scores when the entire reason it was there in the first place was to generate what class your character could qualify for way back in FIRST EDITION? WHY?
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Jul 3, 2014 22:52
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hito posted:Yeah, I'm sure "outside of your reach" means "outside of a square within your reach". It's just that they wanted it to sound clean and avoid 'squares' and now we have ambiguity. Excited as I am about 5e, it's clearly going need a lot more discretionary reading than 4e... This "Natural Language" bullshit is starting to grate on my nerves. Is it really too much to ask to have a codified set of rules that are as unambiguously written as possible? This is 2014 for Christ's sake. That entire section on Opportunity Attacks could be condensed into as little as one loving paragraph and have its meaning as clear as crystal, but NOPE! Gotta add a bunch of flowery language instead of using clearly defined terms!
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Aug 10, 2014 22:19
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Well I know I'd be doing SOMEthing with it while making GBS threads! Wakka wakka wakka! (Seriously though, reading D&D books while taking a poo poo is actually a guilty pleasure of mine shhh don't tell anybody)
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Aug 11, 2014 00:18
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Is it just me or does the Fighter class actually have some as-of-yet unmentioned things going for it? For all the skeleton horde talk and caster supremacy, there still seems to be a lot of interesting things for the Fighter to do in this edition. Action Surge and Extra Attack specifically seem to work in tandem to give you four attacks in one round, right? The Champion archetype still looks like utter trash though and an ultimate trap option. Battle Master looks like the best of the three Archetypes, but I could see some use for the Eldritch Knight too, namely being able to summon your weapon as a bonus action once a turn, directly to your hand. Doesn't this mean that effectively any weapon you bond with as an Eldritch Knight gets a pseudo Returning property? Throwing a weapon and having it back in your hand without having to go retrieve it as a Level 3 Fighter seems like a pretty sweet deal to me. If you multiclass, Fighter also looks like a pretty potent option to dip into due to Action Surge and Extra Attack, especially if you're a full caster like a Wizard because as long as you are proficient with the armor you're wearing (Which comes with levels in Fighter) you can now stomp around in full plate and cast spells without any downside. You can only cast one spell a round I noticed, but it still makes an Elder Scrolls-esque blaster mage/fighter seem like a viable option: Cast a spell like burning hands, Action Surge to use another attack action, which triggers Extra Attack for flames and two attacks wham bam right after another. Of course, there may be some rule I haven't seen yet that shuts this down, but I've been slowly poring through the PHB over the past few days and it seems legit.
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Aug 22, 2014 17:41
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crime fighting hog posted:Is there no arcane spell casting failure chance with wearing armor anymore? According to page 201, no. As long as you're proficient in the armor, go hog wild with spells. If not, you can't cast spells at all. ^e:fb
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Aug 22, 2014 17:56
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Generic Octopus posted:Being able to call a sword (or whatever) back to your hand is not even remotely close to the poo poo a wizard/cleric/bard can do. Your definition of "a pretty sweet deal" sounds like a pretty poo poo deal to me. You still gotta admit that an ability that basically translates to "You are always holding/wielding your weapon" isn't anything to scoff at on top of the spells you get as an EKnight. No, they still can't hold a candle to full casters, but this is at least a thing you can claim is an actual ability that has no chance of failure, something the Fighter and the other martials are kind of lacking in. The problem with the Fighter is that it starts off with some decent abilities, then peters out at almost exactly Level 5. My point though was that at least these actually ARE abilities as opposed to the half-assed attempt to give martial classes the illusion of "class abilities" in 3E/3.5 through just giving them more of what EVERY class already got (Feats). There's still caster supremacy, but at least at low levels I'm going to feel like I'm actually able to contribute with a Fighter as opposed to twiddling my thumbs wading through dead levels of prerequisite feats to be able to finally do the one thing I wanted my character to do from the start.
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Aug 22, 2014 18:25
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Old Kentucky Shark posted:If you start from a position comparing it to the 3e core, the 5th edition fighter (and the game in general, really) can definitely be viewed as a modest, iterative improvement. A page back, but yes, this is the crux of what I'm getting at. I'm not even comparing 5E to 4E because let's face it, we all kinda knew in advance from all the warning signs that all that was learned about game design during 4E's lifespan was just gonna get thrown under the bus with this edition. I was mostly comparing it to 3E, where it is a definite improvement. Of course, as you say, MANY problems were already addressed and yes, re-inventing the wheel is stupid. It's an improvement I'm both happy and discouraged by: Happy because 5E finally introduces game design improvements that were promised with, but never delivered by 3.5 or Pathfinder, and discouraged because it came ten years too late for me to be truly enthusiastic about it. slydingdoor posted:Anything's an improvised weapon. Weapon bond the golden idol that makes the temple collapse from Raiders of the Lost Ark, walk out of the dungeon, then teleport it to your hand. This is absolutely hysterical and I am definitely doing at least one of these in a game at some point.
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Aug 22, 2014 20:12
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I dunno, "Just make something up" seems to be this edition's design philosophy. I'd ask Mearls is this was the intent but I'm sure he'd just say "I dunno, guess that's for you to decide!"slydingdoor posted:How do you make a game that pleases two types of player: one who wants rules, and one who wants to make their own? What about the third player who wants both at once, room to exploit fun mechanical loopholes and wants to improvise some stuff depending on their whim? But in all seriousness, this is why I enjoy 4E as much as I do. It broke away from the lazy, arbitrary game design of previous editions and dared to give the system structure. I liken 4E to playing with a big bucket of Lego bricks. Each brick is a rule or formula and you can just reach in and grab a bunch to cobble something unique together and not have to worry about it breaking the game. Each brick of rules and formulas is designed to be as transparent as possible. You, the GM and you, the player, understand the inner clockwork of the system because it's all laid out in front of you. Nothing in 4E is arbitrary. The entire system is built on a foundation that is mathematically sound and formulaic. I can't remember the last time I didn't just make something for the 4E games I GM out of wholecloth looking through effects and level appropriate formulas. Even when I use the pre-built monsters I can adjust them to the party's level and know that it will work. I've made custom races, custom powers and class abilities, all without having to make a single house rule, mess with game math or change the way the system itself functions. All this was chucked out the window for 5E and why it is a huge step backwards in game design. If you want to make something unique, you're hard pressed to find a structure behind the system because there isn't any. You HAVE to "just make it up".
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Aug 22, 2014 22:04
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The SAforums are the only place I've found that talk about tabletop games like normal, not-broken people. For the most part. I will never understand the mentality that makes people view D&D as everything under the sun but what it is meant to actually be: A game. I will never understand why these people who complain until they're blue in the face about verisimilitude and realism, these people who house rule the game and ignore the ruleset so much that it hardly even resembles the game it was written as, don't just play a completely different game that caters to what they actually want to play. It absolutely boggles my mind. It's why I stopped playing 3.5 altogether at the beginning of 4E's lifespan: I had been playing the game for 8 years and only a handful of times was it ever the actual loving game. No one ever plays 3E/3.5 RAW. It just doesn't happen. Not that it'd be a good game even if one WERE to play it RAW, but you'd think that somewhere along the line people would have been clued in that they were doing all the drat work and the game they were playing wasn't the game they were playing. The system wasn't working, nor was it very good; Having a game that encourages people who didn't design the game to house rule a bunch of poo poo in a desperate attempt at making it fit whatever little tiny box view they have of how the game should run and "work" should be a big red flag that MAYBE they should look elsewhere. And now it's happening all over again with 5E.  Help. I think that I may be taking Elf Games too seriously.
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Aug 23, 2014 00:50
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Hasn't Passive Perception been a thing since 3E though? While it wasn't necessarily spelled out in black and white, I distinctly remember "Taking 10" was definitely a thing, and if you used a handful of brain cells you could think "Oh yeah, this is fantastic so I don't have to roll Spot/Search/Listen all the time" or, as the GM, you could even use it for Knowledge checks to see if someone just automatically knows stuff. If they didn't, there was always the option to ACTIVELY roll on the part of the player. I'm also hoping that the Dungeon Master's Guide is as well written as the one for 4E. The 4E DMG was one of the best aspects of the system because it gave you actual advice on how to run a game and was an invaluable tool for helping you understand the ins and outs of the system itself. The 3E DMG was a heap of wet garbage because it didn't teach you how to actually run the game, didn't give you any useful advice, and was more or less just the book people pored through to find magic items and prestige classes.
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Aug 25, 2014 17:03
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Oh God, the last thing I want them to do is encourage a return to the idea that PCs and "Monstrous" PCs should be different from one another. You want to know how to make a playable "Monster"? You make it a drat race all to itself like any other race (Elves, Dwarves, Humans, etc) and don't try to marry the CR system into the PC class system at all because it's loving dumb. I want to play a Minotaur from level 1 with a class, not have to wait until the group is Level 5 or whatever just to be horribly underpowered because I have exactly zero class abilities.
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Aug 25, 2014 19:05
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My favorite (Most irritating) aspect of any of Spoony's rants about 4E are about how he complains about poo poo that was standardized in 3E (Sometimes 2E or even as far back as OD&D), carried over into Pathfinder (Which he states is his favorite tabletop system ever) and acts like it was 4E's fault. That and half his arguments betray the fact that he only ever cracked open the first three core 4E books (If not just the PHB) because anyone who has actually played it can prove him wrong in about five seconds flat. The other half of his bad arguments come from a misconception of what D&D is supposed to be, so it makes me wonder if he's ever actually played or ran D&D in his life. One of his videos was a huge rant about how he doesn't understand the mentality that players should have any agency whatsoever, that everything should be left to either the whim of the dice or DM fiat, and how he got banned from organized play for actively changing the rules so that the players purposefully got dicked over.
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Aug 30, 2014 20:04
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Jimbozig posted:I think that rolling for stats is appealing because of the message it sends at the table that the game isn't about balance and numbers. Lots of people don't like optimization and rolling stats tells them in the very first session that optimization is right out. I absolutely despise rolling for stats because it's just too drat swingy and feels like it rewards good luck while penalizing you for rolling poorly. I'm not an "Optimizer" in that I need to have a bunch of high stats to break the game, I'm an "Optimizer" because I like to have a character that is functional within the concept I created for it. Back in 3E days if I wanted to be able to play, say, a Half-Orc Wizard or Sorcerer or Bard or something, the -2 to both INT and CHA meant that in order to actually function as that character, I had to get lucky enough to roll a 17 at MINIMUM on the 4d6. It doesn't take a math genius to realize that the odds of this happening are very very low. This was more of a reflection of the racial modifiers not jiving at all with the loving standard method of rolling for ability scores, but it was still a very real problem. I refuse to roll for ability scores on principle because that's an immediate bit of player agency that is taken from your hands before you even begin playing the game. Thankfully, 5E's racial modifiers don't cripple the random ability score generation as much, but it still does. I'd be more inclined to do it in 5E, but that lack of agency is still present in that you STILL have to hope you roll well enough to stick a high number in your primary ability score. It doesn't matter if the cap is 20 for any ability score, if you didn't get lucky enough to begin play with a 15 or higher in your primary ability score, you're not going to be functioning as a character. Rolling for ability scores is an archaic, outdated monstrosity that I figured at SOME point people would wise up and realize is a really lovely mechanic. It worked in 2E and prior because ability scores didn't mean jack poo poo. From 3E onward they mean EVERYTHING. It's inexcusable.
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Sep 1, 2014 05:06
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I have a legitimate question (concern) for anyone in this thread who is running and/or is playing in a 5E game right now: How "House Rulesy" are your games currently or expected to be in the future? I had a rather distressing thought the other day that, considering how the core 3 haven't all even been released yet, there are already TONS of "How can we house rule this game to make it work better/fine tune it?" posts, and that entire mentality is what made me quit the 3E/3.5/PF scene in the first place. I really don't want a repeat of 3E/PF where not a single table I sit down at is actually playing by the same rules, or even by the rules at all. Over my fourteen year tenure at playing 3E/PF I can maybe count on one hand, out of the hundreds of games I played in with different GMs, the number that played RAW without some inane homebrew rules. From what I've seen I could likely, in good conscience, run 5E RAW and expect everyone at the table to actually have fun as well as enjoy running it myself, but I absolutely do not want to have to deal with having to work so hard for so little payoff to fix problems in the system that should have been addressed long before its launch. Do you think it'll become as bad as what happened with 3E? Please say no.
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Sep 7, 2014 21:57
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I don't suppose incorporating something akin to the way Milestones worked in 4E would help? Like, shorten rests so that Fighters function properly and instead of having rests recharge Warlock and Monk abilities, make it automatic after 2 encounters? Note: The word "Encounter" has never been specifically meant to mean strictly combat encounters, even in 4E.
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Sep 8, 2014 18:51
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Remind me again why anyone cares about what the OSR people think? They already HAVE an edition of D&D that caters to what they want, they should go and play THAT and stop forcing game designers to moonwalk back to the dark ages. 4E alienating the most poisonous of the D&D grognards was the best drat thing to happen to D&D in years and its not like a new edition is going to magically bring them back to the fold when they consistently hate anything that isn't exactly the same as the edition they already play. The entire point of a new edition of D&D is to draw NEW gamers into the hobby. It absolutely baffles me that D&D is this backwards bizarro world in which the most vocal MINORITY holds sway over the entire loving system like a tyrannical dictator.
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Sep 8, 2014 19:17
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It's not even so much that I'm coming from a "This is the way I want my D&D to be" standpoint, it's more I'm coming from a standpoint that doesn't want to see stagnation in the industry. I want honest to God surprises, innovation and forward experimental thinking, for good or for ill. After eight whole years of stagnation and headache dealing with the only game I could get anyone to play (3E/3.5 and anything with the "d20" title) I had pretty much just said "That's it. I give up. I don't want to deal with this anymore". I had somehow managed to dodge every bullet and talking point when it came to 4E, so when it was released I knew exactly NOTHING about it. I bought the 4E books when they hit the shelves expecting another half-assed attempt at making 3E better. What I was graced with was something completely NEW. Nearly everything was different, experimental and progressive. It was the ballsiest move I'd ever seen from D&D in DECADES. It was what new editions should be. New. So far the only new thing 5E really offers us is the Advantage/Disadvantage system. However, there ARE hints at attempted progression throughout the system, but they are mired in this strange amalgamation of grognard appeasement along side half-assed attempts at forward thinking. The Fighter for example has hints of moving in the right direction (Maneuver Dice mechanics) but falls short because resource management was rolled back from being focused on encounter frequency (Five Minute Rests between encounters) in favor of daily frequency (Spell Slots). The finished result is a mechanic that relies on encounter based resource management that isn't present because the rest mechanics do not support it.
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Sep 8, 2014 20:35
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dichloroisocyanuric posted:Is this real? Did they say that? It's beyond stupid. And yet that one guy at Paizo did the same thing when errata'ing weapon cords for Pathfinder. Tried to see how difficult it was to flip something into his hand by danging a computer mouse from his wrist and trying to flip it up into his hand. I can believe it. 3E grogs are a certain kind of special.
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Sep 9, 2014 01:35
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It's amazing to me that the most viable Fighter build is the Arbalist using the Crossbow options. I'm willing to bet dollars to donuts that this was unintentional and there better not be some errata down the pipe that completely destroys this totally awesome build. The fact you can use some pretty choice Battlemaster Maneuvers with ranged weapons leads to some pretty neat results and I can see the grogs frothing at the mouth in anger over them. Double up Distracting Strike with Commanding Strike to both nail a due at range then let the Rogue attempt to Sneak Attack the same dude? Trip or Push at range? Both in the same round? Maneuvering attack at range to let the Rogue get into position for another sneak attack? Don't mind if I do, thanks! There's a lot more Warlord hanging around in this Fighter than I expected, honestly. Just a shame it eats up your Maneuver dice every encounter and short rests are anything but short by default. If and when I run 5E I'm just going to say for Fighters that they regenerate all their dice after ten minutes of rest and be done with it. They are obviously built to eat through their dice every encounter, and there is absolutely no reason mechanically why they shouldn't just gain them all back after a SHORT "short rest".
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Sep 13, 2014 15:36
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The "4E has no options!" argument is a carry over argument from the early days of the edition war. I remember one of the most baffling "criticisms" of 4E was that it had less "options" and those who defended 3E fought tooth and nail in arguing that 3E had somehow MORE options than 4E. Yes, because somehow 4E, which allowed me to create a Minotaur Wizard at Level 1 who was no less functional than any other Wizard, a Fighter/Wizard multiclass that actually functioned, gave martial classes something to do other than say "I attack" every round and classes that gained something unique and new almost every level instead of having heaps of dead levels to slog through, was clearly the system with LESS options. I remember I took up a challenge by one of these people who argued that 4E had less options than 3E. He argued that every Warlock played the same, so I said, "Alright. How about a gentleman's bet? Choose a race and a Pact for the Warlock, and I will make no less than 4 completely different Level 1 characters who will all run differently from each other. In fact, to make this even more of a challenge, I will use no multiclass options and pull only from the PHB" He chose Tiefling and Infernal Pact. I made 5 characters, each able to replicate a classic archetype: A Bard, a Priest, a Thief, a Wizard and a Fighter. Traditional Warlock wasn't even one of them. If you want to see them, click here. He was so set in his ways though, that even when blatantly disproven he argued that because a few of the characters had the same powers that it proved HE was right. He kept denying how wrong he was even after I pointed out that in 3E, every loving wizard takes the same drat spell list. It's just a mindset that completely escapes sanity.
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Sep 15, 2014 15:04
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Jack the Lad posted:Holy smokes that's right. Why did they bring this back? WHY? This was the thing that made me swear to never again run 3E or PF. I hate it hate it hate it. It's just as unintuitive and cumbersome to deal with as it was in 3E. Sorry, this was the deal breaker, I'm not running 5E. I'll gladly play in it, but I will never, ever, take the GM's helm at any point for this edition. I'm not dealing with the headache of trying to figure out the arbitrary nature of setting difficulty for encounters again, only to be proven wrong when they're actually set in motion. You know what would have been better? A loving exp budget that makes sense, based on the party's level, and you can adjust the budget to higher or lower level tiers in order to appropriately gauge an encounter's difficulty relative to party size and level. You know, kind of like how 4E fixed this loving problem Jesus Christ I am angry at elfgames.
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Sep 23, 2014 15:08
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Arivia posted:Just FYI, Pathfinder uses xp budgets for encounter creation. It has a table like the above, but that's just the math already done for you. Encounter creation can still be a little wonky, but that's just monster differences. That didn't make it any less arbitrary or difficult to manage. As a GM I enjoy making my OWN monsters and enemies. I rarely, if ever, take things directly from the books, and when I do I like to modify and change what's there. The CR "system" is an unnecessary level of complexity that makes it that much HARDER to create things out of wholecloth. I like to see the inner workings of the system so that I can create on my own without fear of "breaking" anything. On top of this, as a seasoned GM I know how often you have to make poo poo up on the fly, and I like having a system that allows me to DO this. Even in PF, you STILL have to take the CR "Level * 1.5" bullshit into account when you're doing this, even if its already spelled out for you, and it WILL take a huge chunk of time to do this. OR I could go and run 4E, just kind of give a cursory glance at something and add or subtract things as appropriate in five seconds and know it will work.
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Sep 23, 2014 16:05
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Yikes, it's getting all kinds of helter skelter here in this thread. At least I don't feel so alone anymore in my criticisms of DnD in general. I really do have to wonder though: why is it that here we can all talk and discuss game design in relative civility (Recent pages notwithstanding), yet literally ANYwhere else on the net our criticisms would be considered grounds for war? This has so far been the only place outside of my personal gaming circle where I have been met with any kind of similar thoughts on this stuff. Anywhere else, if I try to criticize 3E/PF or show support of 4E in any way I'm given nasty looks or spoken to like I just shouted "HEIL HITLER!" or something. It just seems odd to me that SO MANY of us all are agreeing and talking and DISCUSSING this poo poo not only on level ground but we're also in major agreement with one another.
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Sep 24, 2014 06:35
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Babylon Astronaut posted:Wouldn't it be much more strange if someone who played lots of 3.X had no complaints about it at all? I think those dudes just read the books to be honest. Out of the literally hundreds of different people I have gamed with, only a handful (Like, maybe 10, tops?) didn't feel like 3E/3.5/PF was God's gift to gaming. This staggeringly large number of people would broach absolutely NO criticism of 3E/3.X/PF like it was some kind of pure anathema to them or something, let alone have positive opinions of 4E. So no, this forum really IS like stepping into the Twilight Zone for me. For the longest time it was because of this mentality that I became absolutely embittered by 3E and its derivatives and refused to run them let alone play them. goldjas posted:Can you think of anyone who actually played 2nd or 3rd edition purely RAW? Anyone at all? Every instance of 2E I have played (Which, granted, isn't nearly as much as 3E or 4E. I have never played anything pre-2E) was always RAW. 3E though? Maybe once have I played a game of 3E era DnD where it was actually RAW. It's kind of funny, actually, that 3E, straight from 2000 was my first real tabletop experience. My friends and I played it together and the thing with the system is that unless you read EVERYthing you're not going to know EVERY rule there is to know. Out of the box we weren't playing RAW because we hadn't learned all of the rules yet. The more we DID learn the rules though, the less we started to like it, and when I started to branch out to other gaming groups I quickly learned that virtually no one was playing the game RAW. I knew this because my friends and I had spent the good portion of an entire school year LEARNING all the rules. So imagine my amazement when I started going to other circles and noticed something not being played by the rules only to have the GM point out that they either A) Didn't know that was a rule or B) had actively changed the rule. And this was in the early years of the 2000's! When 3.5 rolled around I took the time to learn ALL of the changes, and again, despite the major move to 3.5, not many people played RAW. Then Pathfinder entered the picture and I can't even begin to count how many people were still playing by 3.5 rules and didn't even BOTHER to look at what PF changed and continued playing it as they always have. I even recently had an argument with a supposed "seasoned veteran" of all three editions of 3E who believed all sorts of things that were either NEVER in ANY of the rulesets or specifically changed in Pathfinder to be less stupid. They still thought crafting magic items still had an experience cost and had no idea there was an item called a "spell component pouch" and outright refused to believe me when I told him that no, you only need to care about spell components when A) you don't have a spell component pouch and B) when the spell itself lists a monetary cost as a "M" Material component. He didn't even know what the gently caress Combat Manuever Bonuses were for, Christ. The people who defend 3E/3.5/PF the MOST don't even know the rules to their own loving systems. I have such a huge hateboner for anything 3E related and refuse to run OR play in them unless I actually KNOW the people involved aren't mental fucktards. I know this is all really anecdotal, but let's just say when it comes to DnD I must be like the Charlie Brown of the gaming world. AAAAAAUGH! Agent Boogeyman fucked around with this message at 15:58 on Sep 24, 2014 |
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Sep 24, 2014 15:54
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greatn posted:You know how every summer blockbuster now ends in the same set piece of a city being destroyed in a giant battle between the hero and some invading force? That's all theoretically exciting but after Man of Steel, Star Trek Into Dark, Avengers, Tranformers 1-4, and countless others its a little boring and predictable. You just described every edition of DnD there, peanut. Or like, EVERY roleplaying game ever. You cannot have a fullfilling ADVENTURE (Hint, what DnD is ALL ABOUT) without conflict. Conflict usually resolves in a climax. The climax is usually a giant rear end showdown in some fashion between the "protagonists" and the "antagonists". This is the nature of telling an epic story.
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Sep 25, 2014 00:22
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neonchameleon posted:What sort of drat stupid dungeon inhabitants aren't going to pour oil under the door, bar it from the outside, and laugh as you suffer from smoke inhalation? It's like you've never played an RPG, Jesus Christ. It's funny you mention this because my only experience with the original Tomb of Horrors ended with our group just kind of shrugging and giving up. It was actually our introduction to ADnD as well. We had managed to continue past the fake collapse (Spoilered just in case someone hasn't played the original ToH and doesn't want anything spoiled), had no party members die or have anything untoward actually happen to them and after scouring the entire dungeon and mapping it out for a whole in-game day we just... gave up and went home. To this day I have no idea what we missed, but I KNOW there was more to it. Edit: I was also playing the Fighter of the group, and felt like a complete badass because nothing could touch me, magic or otherwise. I loved that in ADnD Fighters were basically immune to magic because their saves were off the charts. Agent Boogeyman fucked around with this message at 00:42 on Sep 25, 2014 |
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Sep 25, 2014 00:37
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Jimbozig posted:Yeah, most of my posts in this thread are about how bad 5e seems, and I do like 4e, I guess. But I also kind of hate 4e. At least I got so frustrated with its flaws that I figured I'd be better off making an entire new game than trying to houserule it into submission. I don't think anyone here is fellating 4e at all. We all wish it had better balance for several badly-implemented classes, that it wasn't so drat bloated, that it wasn't so loving fiddly and poorly supported at high levels, etc. If I had to grade 4e, I'd give it like a C+. I'd fail 5e for being a derivative pile of poor decisions with no understanding of how its predecessors worked. 4E is personally my favorite edition of DnD. It's certainly not perfect, but it's also not terrible. It's an exciting tactics-based roleplaying game that, for once in its life, actually does what DnD is SUPPOSED to do: Be a dungeon crawler adventure game. The nice thing that 4E offers that previous editions don't is system consistency. It has flaws, but these flaws are transparent and you can go about fixing the ones that revolve around math with relative ease. My largest criticism of 4E is that it has a mountain's worth of material that is almost impossible to keep track of, with options for building characters that can span no less than three books. A close second criticism is the baked in reliance on enhancement bonuses and expertise feats, but that one at least is relatively easy to fix.
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Sep 25, 2014 03:01
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The only explanation I can think of for such ludicrous and needlessly overcomplicated encounter building rules is that the developers just don't want anyone to actually use their system to run a game. I was only lukewarm to 5E until the whole CR bullshit reared its ugly head again and now I'm already kind of hating it. I will never even attempt to run 5E unless I feel especially masochistic. It's SO overcomplicated and bullshit that I'm willing to bet hard money that no one will be building encounters properly; Not out of desire to change said rules, but out of ignorance of how the rules actually WORK and being none the wiser about it.
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Oct 5, 2014 16:15
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MonsterEnvy posted:Have you looked at them yourself yet? It's not that complicated if you look at the chart. I hope it changes in the future myself however as it prevents lower level creatures being used with higher level creatures in any decent number. Yes, I have, and it IS unnecessarily complicated and, more irritating to me, founded on nothing concrete. I'm going to break down everything wrong with this approach to encounter building right here and now, and why it infuriates me so much. You have an exp budget that is meaningless in the face of a CR difficulty calculation. As an example, the rules state the general idea that 4 Level 1 PCs = 1 enemy of CR 1 (The "Medium" difficulty). However, 4 Level 1 PCs does NOT equal 4 enemies of CR 1/4, which, for all intents and purposes will give the PCs an exact same reward in exp as if they had fought ONE CR 1 enemy. BUT, in difficulty terms, this set up would be in the "Deadly" category since you multiply the encounter exp by 2 when facing 3-6 enemies... but you don't give the PCs more exp. The party would be effectively fighting an encounter WORTH double the standard exp, but do not actually get rewarded that much exp. Why on earth would you even HAVE this if the PCs are not getting rewarded for overcoming it. What is CR based on? There is no formula that determines challenge rating. The only thing we have to go on is AC, HP, saves and abilities, but NONE of these things are founded on any kind of actual honest to God MATH. Hell, there aren't even any GUIDELINES to how CR is determined, which would still miss the efficiency mark by a hundred yards, but at least it would be SOMEthing. Regardless, every monster we have seen so far has seemingly arbitrarily assigned statistics founded on no concrete math formula to help prospective DMs understand how and why the system works the way it does. Why does the Winter Wolf, with a 14 CON, 13 AC and CR 3 have 75 HP compared to a YETI who has 12 AC and 16 CON, 51 HP and is also a CR 3 monster . The Winter Wolf has nothing but abilities that HELP IT while the Yeti has an ability that gives it disadvantage if it takes fire damage. These two monsters do not make any kind of logical sense why they are BOTH CR 3, and you CANNOT reverse engineer how they were assigned that CR because none of their numbers are even remotely comparable to one another. Hit Die doesn't even factor into it apparently because the Wolf has 10 while the Yeti has 6. So what we have is an encounter building system that: A) has an unnecessary step that dicks players out of experience for overcoming a challenge against multiple enemies that would net them more if they were to have just fought a SINGLE enemy worth the same amount, and B) is founded on a CR system that has no concrete math at all to back it up other than arbitrariness and is completely impossible to reverse engineer. Does ANY of this actually sound like exemplary game design to those who want to run their own drat game? I have been a DnD DM for almost 15 years now, and I can tell you, without a shadow of a doubt, that this makes encounter building a complete crapshoot. Not only that but creating said encounters using this method requires you, the DM, to look CLOSELY at the enemy's actual abilities to determine whether or not the encounter you just made won't just end in a TPK. Last, but certainly not least, this will eat huge chunks of your time when crafting your own game. It is why I no longer run 3E or any of its derivatives, and it is very much so why I will not be running 5E. Building encounters shouldn't be a struggle, it shouldn't take hours to do, and you shouldn't have to double check poo poo the game designers made to make sure they didn't gently caress it up along the way. Edit: ^ Yes, AlphaDog, you demonstrate my second argument better than I did. Agent Boogeyman fucked around with this message at 23:40 on Oct 5, 2014 |
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Oct 5, 2014 23:33
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Glukeose posted:I was going to take issue with your post until I reread and saw "building encounters properly," as in, according to RAW. This is pretty true. I've been really enjoying the 5e campaign I'm Dming thus far, but a large portion of that is because I rarely cleave to RAW in any game I run. I've cobbled together monsters from 4 and 5e, to find monsters that maintain their lethality and squishiness while still having mechanically interesting properties. I'm a firm believer that a system should be able to stand on its own, RAW, without having to resort to house ruling to fix obvious and glaring mistakes or bad game design decisions that should have been weeded out long before it hit publication. Not to say I take umbrage to the idea of house ruling itself, because I have done my fair share of it in the past, but there is a stark difference between making meaningful adjustments to the rules for your game in order to add something to the overall experience (Example: The way 4E handled Dark Sun) compared to having to tear half the book out, then rewrite everything to get the drat thing to function at all (IE: changing rests in 5E to five minutes because mechanically the Fighter does not function properly with rests being an hour long). What I'm saying is that us DMs shouldn't feel like unpaid editors of someone else's fuckups. Fuckups we paid money for, mind you.
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Oct 6, 2014 05:57
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AlphaDog posted:How to award XP isn't actually a written rule yet, but it does specifically say not to award the 'extra' xp you get when multiplying for encounter difficulty. So yeah, I guess you're doing it right. It's kind of implied through a small bit of reverse engineering. A CR 1 monster nets you 200 exp, and the game assumes a Medium difficulty encounter for a four man party is 50 exp. A CR 1 vs. a Four man Level 1 Party is Medium difficulty, so you can see that it's 200 divided by 4 to get 50. However, the "Adventuring Day" baffles me. It mentions an expected adventuring day for a party of Level 1 adventurers will net a single PC 300 exp total, or, 6 encounters of Medium difficulty. This holds water with the previous formula (50 exp for a Medium encounter * 6 encounters of Medium difficulty = 300 total exp to a single PC). BUT, I don't see a party actually being able to fight that many encounters in a single day in 5E. Especially at Level 1. Damage to HP is likely to be too swingy for that to actually be the case. I'd estimate 3-4, tops, before the party has to stop and rest for the night. I mean, you could rarely even swing more than 4 encounters a day in 4E, and the PCs are designed to be more resilient there than in 5E. The only way I can see it is if the Cleric is absolutely nothing but the heal bot, but even they only get 2 spells at first level. This also breaks down how stupid the encounter building system is even further because it doesn't dip into what the expected adventuring day is for any party LESS than 4 PCs. If you follow the CR formula you can kind of gauge it, but it means that parties of less than 4 characters will advance through experience levels SLOWER than those of 4 and above. Which is DUMB. You see, the entire point of having an exp pool is so that you can easily gauge "X Encounters = 1 experience level's worth of exp" and have a party of any size both have the same types of challenges as each other and advance through levels at the same rate. Take, for example, the 4E encounter building rules. It was based entirely upon how many PCs are in the party first and foremost and exp rewarded was directly and proportionally tied to how many enemies the party faced. For a first level party, the exp gained for an encounter of the party's level was 100 exp to each PC regardless of however many PCs were actually in the party. A single Level 1 enemy was worth 100 exp. If you had a four man party in which everyone was Level 1, you fought four enemies, each worth 100 exp, and when the encounter is complete everyone gets 100 exp. If it was a three man party, you faced three enemies instead. Five? Five enemies. In order to advance to Level 2, the PCs need 1000 exp. Therefore, 10 encounters of the party's level equals an entire level's worth of exp. Easy, right? Maybe you want to mix it up and have more or less enemies but have the encounter worth the same exp and thus the same amount of difficulty? That's simple too! There are different "tiers" of same leveled enemies that net you more or less exp because they are either given a slight boost in power over standard enemies (Elites, Solos) or are meant to be large groups of enemies that go down if you so much as breathe on them, but can still be a threat because together they're meant to be as powerful as a standard monster (Minions). A four man Level 1 Party could face a Level 1 Elite (200 exp), a standard Level 1 enemy (100 exp) and four Minions (25 exp each). That's six enemies of varying degrees of difficulty worth the same amount of exp because together their numbers actually mean something. Now compare it to what 5E did. Which seems easier and more logical to work with?
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Oct 6, 2014 15:35
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greatn posted:I think for number of encounters you are neglecting traps and skill based encounters. In my experience it actually has hashed out to about three or four combat encounters expending most party resources, but there also being a trap or two, or a puzzle, or a "skill challenge" for lack of a better term. Yes, it is true I didn't mention story rewards or skill challenge rewards. However, traps in 4E are treated as monsters and have the same rules as monsters when it comes to encounter building. See, you COULD create an encounter that is nothing but traps if you wanted to, and it'd net you the same amount of exp as if you were fighting some dudes. Skill Challenges are somewhat different than combat encounters, though they too have Level based exp gain. They are also generally worth considerably less exp than a combat encounter, so it usually maths out to 4 challenges = 1 combat encounter. Usually. You can manipulate this though the same way you can for combat encounters. The key word is encounters though, as ANYthing that gives you exp in any way shape or form is an "encounter" by 4E standards. You're not expected to actually have to fight 10 combat encounters of party level to gain a level because you're expected to face skill challenges and gain story rewards too, and you are right on the money when you say around 3-4 combat encounters a level is to be expected. Note, too, that in my explanation I was solely focusing on encounters of a party's level, in this case Level 1. The rules for raising or lowering the encounter level, and thus netting you more or less experience are just as easy to deal with though. All it does is increase or decrease the exp pool depending on the level you intend for the encounter. There's nothing stopping you from say, adding a Level 2 enemy in a Level 1 encounter, either. the Level 2 enemy will just take up 125 exp instead of 100. So in my example where we mix an Elite, a Standard and four Minions, you COULD, say, Have a Level 1 Elite (200 exp), a Level 2 Standard (125) and 3 Minions (25 exp each). This would still be a Level 1 Encounter. Say you wanted to make it a Level 3 encounter for a Level 1 party, which is getting pretty up there in terms of difficulty vs. player survivability. For the example's four man party you'd have a 600 exp pool to allocate to enemies. Therefore, you could have them fight three Level 1 Elites alone (200 exp each, 3 * 200 = 600) and it'd turn into a Level 3 encounter. If they beat it, each PC gets 150 exp, which is the same amount of exp they would have gotten had they been 3rd Level and fought four standard Level 3 enemies. The point is that encounter building in 4E is flat across the board with repeatable and reliable results in difficulty that net you proportionate exp gains that only require you to pay attention to the exp pool rather than bend over backwards with some kind of crazy calculus.
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Oct 6, 2014 16:11
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Verklemptomaniac posted:I've been pondering how to bring something along the lines of the 4e minion rules to 5e. The easiest way to do it, given that all monsters now work under bounded accuracy/damage, is to take the enemies you want to make minions, give them 1 HP, and say "BOOM! These are minions!" Seeing as I highly doubt 5E will ever have Minion rules, you don't need to get that elaborate. Just make 1 HP Monsters and nuts to anybody who gets heebie jeebies for mixing a good idea from a previous edition that should have been in the newer edition in the first place. The trick, however, would be to figure out what amount of exp to have these said minions dole out, and to be honest I couldn't really tell you because the CR system is so loving borked.
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Oct 6, 2014 17:27
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Don't forget Wights that had Level drain if they hit you. I think they were also CR3. In fact, anything that had Level drain made CR worthless as a guage because as soon as it took affect, guess what? The encounter is suddenly more dangerous in difficulty! I hated level and ability drain, I haven't noticed, is it gone from 5E like it was in 4E? (My tummy feels tell me "no") Edit: Seriously, Level/Ability drain was worse than SoD effects because one outright kills you and the other makes your character as useful as a sack of bricks while not killing you in the process. Just kill my character so I can roll up a new one, not stick me with Iron Lungs McGee. Agent Boogeyman fucked around with this message at 00:47 on Oct 7, 2014 |
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Oct 7, 2014 00:31
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Reminds me of one instance where I had a player in a 3E game who's Paladin kept dying in really stupid ways almost every adventure. He never made a new character, he just changed the first letter of the character's name and just kept going with this "new" character when he'd rejoin the party. Oh, PC death revolving door, how I missed you... Thank you 5E for bringing back meaningless PC death to the table because that doesn't make investing time into your character a complete waste, no siree.
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Oct 7, 2014 05:34
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30.5 Days posted:The Intellect Devourer is a perfect example of what's wrong with 5E btw. In 4E it'd be a monster that attacked against your Will defense and did psychic damage and stuns, and the tactics would be it goes after the party member with the lowest intellect. And rather than relying on DM fiat to not turn it into a shitshow, it'd be players ganging up to protect the defenders for once, and it'd be an incredible flavor encounter that inverted expectations. In 5E it's this save or die horseshit where we're all supposed to pretend that lions don't attack sick antelopes because how can a lion detect sickness? This really is the best reflection of the mentality that goes into 5E encounter building. Much like 3E, encounters aren't meant to be EXCITING or EPIC. They're meant to be player punishment for loving up. In 4E every encounter is a set piece and all kinds of exciting because the whole thing turns out very cinematic and intricate. I literally, just tonight, ran my weekly Dark Sun game and the players ran into an Ambush Spider encounter. The PCs only had a 25 ft radius torch in a 30 foot radius room full of boxes cleverly designed to block line of sight and provide cover. Every time the spiders attacked, they'd lunge in, make an attack, then skitter away to a blind spot in the room using Stealth checks on the following turn. There were spiderwebs everywhere and they had discovered earlier that the things were highly flammable so it gave the PCs the possibility of causing ongoing fire damage to any spider that was actually using one of the webs to hide in. It was very "Alien" in execution, with the PCs not so much fighting the spiders but waiting for them to pounce with nervous anticipation and then going full war mode when they finally did attack again. It was exciting, but not once did it feel unfair or lethal.
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Oct 7, 2014 06:07
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A note on exp: I actually have a bean counter in my Dark Sun game. He always asks how much exp we got and would feel gypped if I did it the "GM says you level up now" method. I myself enjoy keeping track of exp, actually, but mostly because I like to estimate how far away we are to next level. When you're in the GM chair you can chuck exp out the window though, and none would notice... except for those people who would notice. However, there's a catch. You see, this too is a reflection on how well constructed a game's encounter building rules are! In 4E, the exp guidelines are streamlined and built into the encounters themselves. So you, the GM, ALREADY KNOW how many encounters it would take to level the party. You can go ahead and stop tracking exp because guess what? You already have it written down before you even place your first monster on the board! Basically, I already know when the players will level up and I've been noting exp to the players simply as a formality and so that the one player feels like he accomplished something. You can certainly do the same for 5E, as that too is already built into encounter design and the Adventuring Day, but this is where it catches a snag and you realise just how slowly players are expected to level up in 5E. It flat out tells you that approximately 1/3 of the level experience is an expected Adventuring Day... which is 6 encounters. Therefore, you can say "Okay, so basically 18 encounters of the party's level nets them a level". But... That's ridiculous. 18? Really? And as far as I can tell the only way you're expected to dole out exp in 5E is through combat encounters. This means the party is expected, RAW, to fight 18 sets of dudes before they can level up. Now, sure, you can give story rewards, and I'm sure they'll have rules for that in the published DMG because I'm hoping the designers aren't THAT stupid, but still. That means maybe, what, an entire adventuring day's worth of exp (6 encounters) is ad hoc? Why have the exp system at all if it's going to be that loosey goosey?
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Oct 7, 2014 15:52
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Bhaal posted:
This right here is the correct answer. Find out what your group wants and expects. It's not going to really inconvenience you that much because you're the GM, after all, and in a well designed system tracking exp shouldn't even BE any trouble for you or your players.
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Oct 7, 2014 19:26
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I think a lot of bitterness comes from how almost exactly the same the finished product is compared to when it was in the "play tests" phase. They had how many years and how much feedback to listen to in order to iron this poo poo out? I'm kind of irritated that it was basically just another publicity stunt like what Paizo pulled with Pathfinder. They never intended to take our feedback seriously at all, and in many cases took steps to make problem areas worse. Case in point: Changing short rests to an HOUR because people were enjoying Fighters being useful too much.dwarf74 posted:e: I mean, we gripe in the 4e thread, but it's mostly constructive about how to fix it. There's less of that here for whatever reason - maybe because nobody has enough experience to fix the poo poo that's wrong with it. The reason behind this is because a lot of the problems we're addressing are problems that are actually difficult TO fix without just re-writing the whole drat system from the floor up. There's no formula to anything, it's just arbitrary mish-mash half the time, so any attempts to solve it amass to just... kinda making poo poo up. It's not like some kind of global, quantifiable problem where you can look at it and go, "Ah! Here's the problem! Here's how to fix it!". There's no simple fix for such complicated problems. For instance, my major issue is how unfriendly 5E is to new GMs, as discussed in how poorly constructed 5E's encounter building vs. reward system is. How CAN you fix that without cutting that entire section out and replacing it with something better?
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Oct 8, 2014 22:16
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Generic Octopus posted:Don't. Bard does the same thing but better. EKnight spellcasting only goes to 4 and even then that only happens at high levels. It's pbad. I'm still not quite sold on the idea that the EK is completely terrible. The Bard is definitely better in terms of spellcasting because they may as well be considered a full caster, but every time I look at the Fighter, their action economy keeps luring me back in. Despite the caster supremacy, they STILL look fun to play because they STILL get to DO things (Sans Champion. Champion is just an absolute insult to anyone with any sense for good game design). The Fighter's biggest problem though is that they peak at Level 5 and then start really falling behind the casters more than they already did. They don't seem worth staying true to the class past that point, and you're better off multiclassing into something else. That's 15 dead Levels and that's just unacceptable. But this does keep bringing to my mind one of the things I think 5E does well: Multiclassing. It's rewarding to multiclass in 5E because there's absolutely no downside to doing so, and some classes just seem like they could make some fun combinations when used together. A Fighter/Wizard has never been more viable because there's no longer any punishment for wearing armor while casting spells. I've said it before, but I would definitely consider playing an E.Knight/Bard or E.Knight/Wizard combination because I would love to be the badass in full plate electrocuting people to death like Emperor Palpatine. If you're going to multiclass, Fighters with their extra actions that they get at relatively low levels definitely seem like the class to step into. It's bad game design to have 15 levels of dead weight on a single class, but this is one of the few instances where I can make it work and still have fun with it. Basically, in short, you'll probably have more fun dabbling between various classes than just sticking to one class your entire career. Doesn't necessarily excuse the bad game design, but at least there's a silver lining this time.
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Oct 9, 2014 20:29
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