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A well done reverse engineered 4e game with support for firefights would scratch a lot of people's itches. I was really excited to see the x-com-ish game in July's contest for that reason. So my first thought is go for it! I wouldn't worry too much about class representing an archetype. D&D is actually pretty bad at representing fantasy archetypes. In mythology for example, wizards are mysterious mentors and quest givers, not really PC material. D&D isn't much better in terms of representing fantasy fiction. How could you make a workable Harry Potter game, I think you'd go cross eyed trying to assign classes to everyone in The Game of Thrones. So I feel that a character's class is mostly how they fight in rules terms with only the barest of fiction layered on top. So to me, a 'fighter' is mostly a defender that has a lot of ability to control movement and is most effective up close, rather than a guy with a sword and armor who is dangerous to ignore in combat (and is therefore a defender). I feel that class defining both combat role and out of combat role is one of those sacred cows that should be slaughtered. What you replace it seems like it would depend on: 1) What are you going to do with Abilities? As constituted in d&d, they say a lot about what a character can do inside and outside of combat. 4e d&d (sorta)requires you to have a decent strength to be good in melee, which precludes you from being a wizened old kungfu master. Either dropping ability scores or making them not affect combat largely fixes that issue. Two basic approaches seem to be: pick 1 combat class from column A and 1 noncom class from column B or ditch skills entirely and just roll using ability scores. 2) What is the style and fluff of the game. What do you expect characters to do? If everyone is imagined to be a military character, your skill set would be what you did before, basic universal military knowledge, and your special training. You'd want that reflected in character creation, with the specifics dictated by 1.
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Aug 17, 2014 16:45
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My personal solution to still wanting ability scores, but wanting characters to be good at things besides whatever their fighting stat is, is to just have stats like "Shooting" and "Fighting" in addition to the normal ones. Why is this guy good at fighting, that's up to you! He could be strong, or quick, or have years of experience; your normal ability scores or your fluff can tell you the specifics as to why. Wizened unarmed guy can have a high wisdom, or dexterity, or hell strength even, all that would matter is that he's got lots of "Fighting" that is what makes him good at fighting in melee. But that does add stuff. And each time you add stuff to a project like this it tends to become a little more unwieldy. Another option might be to alter the math such that your attack mod is 1/2 level + enhancement + feats and such, and then just leave out ability scores from the to hit and damage portions of powers. Maybe give powers riders based on your ability mods to create class subtypes and differentiation.
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Aug 17, 2014 20:57
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P.dot: The solution I had to skills was (basically) have training in a skill grant you advantage on rolls related to that skill, and the exact nature of the task determine the stat that got rolled. So someone trained in smithing could roll Int or Wis to check the craftsmanship on a sword, or roll charisma to see if he knew a smithing related contact. It allowed multiple characters to both be good in the same domain but not necessarily in the same way. Actually, looking at the longer version you posted its pretty close to what I just proposed, so I guess what I'd ask is what do you hope to do by keeping the sub-skills? If the game is a 4e-alike, I'd actually be a bit more curious what you plan to do with all those juicy skill utility powers that were written but never used since they conflicted with your staying alive and winning fights utility slots. Does anyone know of a good collection of iconic, noteworthy, or powerful 4e builds? For my purposes, they can be iconic either because they were especially cool and fun or because they granted a useful mechanical advantage. It seems like if you wanted to trim down the feat/item selection/power picking minigame looking at common and noteworthy builds would be a good start.
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Aug 19, 2014 20:41
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Three unrelated thoughts: Prison Warden:I think I took that idea from OWoD. They had a sidebar in one of the vampire books explaining that even though they just spent a chapter telling you the expected combinations of Ability + Skill to roll in various situations, you could just add them together willy nilly. Realizing you could roll Strength + Athletics to do push ups, but roll Intelligence + Athletics to recall sports trivia blew my teenage mind. TheSpookyDanger: Despite some heavy eye bleeding caused by the semi-formatted mess that is the WOTC forums, I managed to find a really handy collection of builds that are focused on actual play rather than insane number crunching: http://community.wizards.com/content/forum-topic/3524576 I'm sifting through builds not just to figure out what abilities are needed or expected in different character types, but also getting a sense of when combos and game changing abilities start kicking in. There is a lot to go through, but I'm starting to see patterns. Fluff! The world building fluff in 4e is, I think, one of its most under appreciated assets. But I'd argue that character powers (power broadly defined not a 4e power)aren't usually written in such a way to spark the imagination. Take the Stormwarden PP in the PHB. Its level 16 feature is: "As long as you are armed with a melee weapon and are capable of making an opportunity attack, two adjacent enemies (your choice) take lightning damage equal to your Dexterity modifier at the end of your turn." I get that rules need to be clear and concise. But I think having a greybox of text right above that clear and concise rule that explains what is going on in the fictional world would help with some of the bad listed in the OP. I think rituals were a missed opportunity in this area. Compare the incantations from 3.5 and pretty much any ritual in 4e. Compare this incantaion: quote:Hrothgar’s journey is an incantation based on the tale of Hrothgar, a powerful barbarian hero from ages past. When the poetic epic of Hrothgar is recited in the stifling heat of a sweat lodge during the winter solstice, the orator and his listeners receive the same final reward that Hrothgar did: a one-way trip to Ysgard’s plain of Ida, where they can drink and make merry with the greatest warriors of myth. To cast the incantation, the caster must construct a small, windowless hut in the middle of the forest, then build a bonfire in the hut’s center. At least four and up to twelve others accompany the caster into the hut. Then the flames are lit and the telling of the tale of Hrothgar begins. quote:This ritual works the same as Linked Portal, except that you can use it to travel to other planes. As with Linked Portal, your planar destination must have a permanent teleportation circle whose sigil sequence you have memorized. As I work on my own clone, how much should I worry about fluff in the early stages? How important is fluff in gaining interest and feedback from strangers on the internet? I'd guess it's pretty important but it also seems like the games that get the most attention and feedback, SBBQ and Trifold, are both fairly sparse on that front.
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Aug 20, 2014 17:33
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That's actually really awesome. I've been relying on the online tools for content for a while now, so I've only ever seen the essentials stuff outside of their book form.
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Aug 20, 2014 19:35
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Ergonomix posted:So, I took awhile off from working on my 4e-based video game. I've gotten back into it, but I'm considering a change that would require some fairly big reworking. Basically, I'm thinking of abandoning the grid and going to a zone based map, like FATE (and Dungeon World to some degree). This was prompted by a combination of difficulty with making an AI in the grid system and not being satisfied with how the grid works from a game design point. Having the grid gives the player dozens of options for movement every turn, yet only a couple of them are actually viable so why not just condense that decision down to the options that matter? My 2 cents is that the grid is a large part of 4e's 4e-ness, specifically because it helped enable forced movement, zones, and terrain effects. Off the top of my head, the grid and powers based around the grid let characters I've ran: teleport enemies into a damaging zone I had setup, forcibly cluster targets so another player could hit more targets with a powerful area attack, push enemies off of cliffs (or into grinding gears), and keeping a target stuck to me while an ally used a reach weapon to attack them with impunity. Part of the reason these were all fun experiences is that I wasn't told how to do them. I was just given the rules and a scenario, and figured out the interactions myself. I'd also caution against making too many choices for the player. There is a subtle but important difference between seeing columns on the map, and knowing that being behind stuff gives you cover, and that therefore you can get behind columns to get cover versus simply being told to stand here to get cover. It seems something akin to playing a FPS versus playing a railshooter. But that's a tough question to answer in a vacuum. Partially, its a question of how closely you want to mirror the 4e experience vs take your favorite bits from 4e. It's also a question of which system lets you generate the coolest maps and combat set pieces. If all the combat grids are just empty 8x8 planes, then yeah, the grid isn't doing anything for the game. Likewise, if most fights take place in 4 zones, but 1 of them is tagged with "Roll strength to make a rail kill," then I'm not sure zones are doing all that much good either. Edit: My personal dream for a 4e computer game has been something that worked like the first X-Com game, with a big emphasis on terrain destruction and interaction. wallawallawingwang fucked around with this message at 02:30 on Nov 20, 2014 |
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Nov 20, 2014 02:21
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You definitely want to follow 4e's example and make sure that every action feels like a character is doing something awesome in its own right. A standard action heal almost never just heals, it always does damage and heals, a lot of heals only use a minor action. For star ships battles, I'd want to know how characters are distinguished by the game's skill system and then map those skill specialties to combat roles. If you have a tech specialty (comprised of however many skills), you could map that to repairing the ship, which seems fairly leader-y. I'd also want to point out that starship battle rules could actually get mapped to general army vs army battle rules pretty easily so long as you think of an army as a single unit. I don't really have a conclusion to this thought, but I keep thinking that in real life most full fledged battles have goals beyond "Kill all the other guys," and that taking skirmish combat and just scaling it up in size doesn't add that dimension to a battle. Maybe instead of winning by reducing the other side's HP to 0, you win by scoring a set amount of victory points in a set amount of time, or keeping the other side from scoring a given amount of VP over a certain number of rounds. You could score VP by damaging the other side, but also bu forcing them outside of certain zones, or by keeping yourself in a given zone. There is this well thought out design for combat and I keep thinking the game could benefit if the skills system worked more like the combat system and large scale battles seem like a good place to start bridging that gap.
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Jan 28, 2015 00:45
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Iny posted:Thoughts? Am I full of poo poo? Is this all super ill-conceived or really superfluous or overambitious or, I dunno, something else? It seems like skills are where you have the most unknowns, which makes sense, that was the area 4e probably fell down the most. General skill thoughts:
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Feb 13, 2015 22:40
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gradenko_2000 posted:That's what I was saying: I did compare the average damage from these die expressions against the HP levels of a monster constructed from the MM3-on-a-business-card guidelines, and the result was always somewhere between 3 to 4 hits-to-a-kill. I was inquiring as to how well does W scale under 'normal' rules to get some perspective. I don't think the normal rules scale quite as well. MM3 math assumes PC damage goes up about 2 points of DPR each level. If you look at it from enough distance that might be true. I'm sure level 30s can pull off 70 points of DPR. But I don't think most of that growth in DPR comes in smoothly. It seems like its a lot of levels of nothing or +1 and then a sudden +5, followed by more nothing. More importantly, its harder for characters to do that level of damage using their at-wills, or without using combos of feats, items, encounters and dailies. So that level of damage isn't very consistent.
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Feb 14, 2015 20:52
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gradenko_2000 posted:What's the mathematical progression of monster damage versus player HP? Is there an established monster-hits-before-player-hits-0-HP ratio? I need it for uh, research. Just keep this followup in mind. Four hits to kill an equal level character is how it works at 1st level, but it becomes increasingly less true as you level up. Whether or not that is a good idea is another matter.
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Feb 16, 2015 23:26
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I just finished up with grad school, so I can switch my rpg tinkering from thing I do to procrastinate to normal person hobby. So, sorta? One of the big strengths of the OSR is, despite there being about million rules sets, they are largely compatible. Adventures, monsters, and rules modules from all different lines and the originals can all cross pollinate or at the very least provide a bigger pool of content to work with. I was wondering if that is worth trying to replicate in a 4e retroclone? Pros:
Thoughts?
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May 20, 2015 21:13
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Maxwell Lord posted:Trying to think of some good class features for the Gunner. I'm thinking of grouping them together under the heading "Heavy Weapon Mastery", and I can think of one that gives a +1 accuracy bonus, but not quite sure what else. The question of how to embody a particular role via class features is one of the areas that retroclones could and should make some solid contributions to. Like some others have mentioned, some of the roles are just a mess. But I don't think that means you need to carry over 4e's rough edges. What do YOU want the roles to do is a perfectly valid question for a retroclone. So giving that question some thought might help out both this class and any others that are a little stuck. Strike!, for example, has a different take on the roles, creating a blaster role that focuses on area attacks while keeping a controller role that just focuses on debuffs. My own take on this question has been to begin by looking at what I think of as the two basic economies in 4e combat: the action economy and the HP economy. By action and HP economy I mean that putting yourself in a situation where you can take a meaningful turn against an enemy almost always puts them in a position to take a turn against you, the thing you do with that turn is to try and make them run out of HP before you do; but of course, not every turn or every point of damage is equal. Doing 20 points of damage to a monster and bloodying it will always be worse than doing a single point of damage to an equivalent monster that brings it to 0 HP. Doing a double move and then spending an AP to Second Wind is a terrible use of a turn. Hence the economies: you're trying to get the best damage-bang for your exposure-to-risk-buck. So I see the function of the roles as to either make team PC's side of an exchange better, or to make the NPC's side worse. Leaders are about making sure that PC's get the best bang for their buck when they spend a turn, whereas Controllers are about making sure NPCs get as little as possible for spending a turn. Strikers are about making sure damage goes to where it will hurt the monsters the most and Defenders are about making sure that the NPC's damage output goes where it will hurt the party the least. There will be some overlap in the roles since these two economies are linked and there are only so many rules building blocks that a game can reasonably use, but what matters to me is the intended interactions with other class features and powers. Pushing a monster in between two other players so that its flanked can be a leadery sort of thing since you probably follow that up with a granted attack. Pushing a monster so that it can no longer target a squishy PC can be a defendery thing to do since you've also marked it and locked it from closing on anyone else. Pushing a monster so that you are flanking it can be a strikery thing since you will follow up the push with a sneak attack (and also are encouraging your flanking buddy to put their damage on the now wounded monster). Pushing a monster so that it has to waste its turn getting back into position can be a controllery thing to do since you've probably also knocked it prone or slowed it. Even though all of these hypothetical attacks are pushes the other rules surrounding the push are what reinforce roles. Some of this shows up in 4E's design, just not always very strongly. Most people would say that a striker's job is to do lots of damage and the rules certainly bear that assertion out. But if that's all Strikers have, then its a poor design choice, since everyone should be trying to do as much damage as possible. Fortunately strikers also have the most mobility and usually the longest attack range, which gives them the ability to put that damage where its most needed. Healing from Leader classes only really helps the teams turn efficiency because spending a minor to heal is way way better than spending a standard to do it. Really in my model, healing is almost like retroactive controlling, since it lets you undo some of the effects of a monster's turn after the fact. But then I think putting healing and buffing into the same class is really just an artifact of how D&D used to do it, not something inherent to how 4E has to work; Gamma World for example, had Second Wind be a minor that restored your bloodied value.
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Aug 10, 2015 23:31
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Two high stats works OK if you do the 16/16 pre-racial stat spread and then are lucky enough to have a race that gets +2s in both of the stats you dropped the 16s in. But it's ability to work well really depends on getting your initial 2 +2s into the right spots.
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Sep 2, 2015 21:26
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The ranger fix I had been toying around with would have removed hunter's quarry, and changed Twin Strike into a class feature that would grant a 1/round at-will minor along the lines of "STR/DEX VS AC for [W]+STR/DEX." Had three goals there: getting rid of the trap option, give the ranger a unique striker shtick, and encourage more at-will diversity. But I suspect in the end it would be more trouble that its worth. Thespaceinvader is right about getting rid of rolled damage being the best fix.
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Oct 20, 2015 21:08
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The only thing that might become a problem if you take away ability scores from damage is that as character's level up that +3 grows to +7 or so. I wanna say that most character's static damage improves at a rate of about 1/2 a level between ability score bumps, magic items, and feats.
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Oct 30, 2015 20:10
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I'm spinning my wheels on a numbers issue. I'm approaching my game from an inspired by 4e angle, which means I need to work out new damage and HP numbers. Basically, I can come up with a set of numbers that I like for a given level, and I've even been able to come up with a set of numbers that account for characters leveling up. But when I try and turn these abstract numbers into character options I keep hitting a wall. I just don't like my options or I'm missing something obvious. Here is what I'm working with:
Aside from the first two points, I'm not firmly married to any of this. Especially if dropping or changing an idea lets me do something cool. The system I've been working with the longest , that I'd like to replace, works more or less like this:
What I don't like about this setup is:
One thing I know I can do is make up a set of damage and HP options that create acceptable values, and then just drop the idea of showing character progression via bigger numbers. That means I'd need to show progress some other way, like increasing the number of encounter attacks, or increasing the number of targets for attacks, or just piling more feats and perks onto stuff. But I don't like that option because, frankly, I've got no idea how to begin balancing that and it seems like it would lead towards the bad old days of winging it encounter planning. The second option I've got that I'm lukewarm on is to just sort of mandate the numbers. EG, your HP is 16, 20, or 24 times your level and you can pick powers that do 4, 5, or 6 times your level in damage. The simplicity would be nice, but that also seems kinda... flat? I guess is the word I'd use. These specific numbers also might quickly become unmanageablely large. Any thoughts?
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Feb 11, 2016 01:32
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Thanks for the feedback guys! I know one reason for DTAS comes from real differences in game design philosophy, stuff like how simulationist to be. I can also see specific problems and issues that arise from how 4e used and implemented ability scores, but I also feel like there are fixes or simple workarounds for most, maybe all, of these problems. But I'd like to read the argument that ability scores are irredeemable in a D&D context. (I hope I'm not coming off as combative or ungrateful. I'm legit interested in the broader reasoning for DTAS and willing to change my mind.) The process of forcing myself to write out the problem has given me a little bit of a different view on it. Namely I realize that some of my wants, at least as I've been thinking about them, are contradictory. I was leery of using a system where damage and HP get figured out at level 1 and stay the same throughout levels, but I also wanted a system where the relative weight and value of attacks stay the same throughout the levels. It seems obvious in retrospect, but a system that works to maintain damage percentages across levels is just an obfuscated non-increasing system, so using one doesn't really fix anything. What I'm really interested in showing is not absolute differences in power but relative differences.
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Feb 12, 2016 23:08
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Just to be sure I've got it... (based on what I've read in this thread and a few other places) In D&D style games ability scores have both descriptive and prescriptive roles. They tell you what something is like (how strong you are) and they also inform the game's rules (how many points of damage you do when you punch something). This turns out to be a problem because the scope of the descriptions frequently doesn't match the scope of the prescriptions. One example of this is the strength ability score. It basically describes you how much a character can deadlift, but not how many sets they can do which is covered by constitution, how flexible these deadlifts have made them which dexterity covers, or how your fitness effects your attractiveness which charisma sorta kinda almost sometimes covers. But on the prescriptive rules side of things a character's strength score is usually the biggest determinant of how good they are in a melee, which the game assumes to be a big deal. This is exacerbated because fighting in melee could also be effected by all sorts of other things like your situational awareness which is usually represented by wisdom, or your hand eye coordination which is dexterity. On top of that, the ratio of description to prescription in ability scores isn't consistent. For a lot of classes intelligence has the opposite problem as strength. Intelligence represents nearly every facet of mental power: memory, creativity, logic and reasoning, and education. It depends a bit on the edition but all of that mental power does nearly bubkis in the rules, unless you're a wizard in which case it does everything but only if you phrase your action in the form of a spell. Taken all together it means that a fair number of archetypes can't be represented by the rules very well, and that characters frequently have oddball skill sets and an inability to do tasks that they clearly ought to be able to. There are ton of solutions and workarounds to these problems, each with its own pros and cons. Here are a few of the more common ones: Exceptions! Create a specific rule to account for the biggest mismatches between what the ability scores mean and what they actually do in the rules. Rogue powers let you make melee attacks with dexterity and shirtless barbarians can add their constitution to their AC, that sort of thing. 4e did this, but probably not to the extent that it could or should have. This option gives you a healthy sized dose of simulation without drowning you in synergy bonuses and the like. For good or ill, it also only lets you support the archetypes that you specifically make room for, so you could make exceptions just for combat but leave ability score-skill stuff in place. You could also easily miss something important, like basic attacks. If you’re generous enough with the exceptions it becomes fair to ask why even use ability scores in the first place. Split ‘Em! Keep ability scores as a way to describe what a character is like but make them have zero effect on combat. The math will just work, and players can apply whatever fluff they’d like onto a mechanically solid chassis without having to square circles. You can even get character differentiation because a strong fighter is going to be good at different skills than a smart fighter. On the other hand, it has the potential to create its own oddball representational issues too. Like, why is my muscle wizard so bad at fistfights? The only real answer is because he’s a wizard and so he doesn’t have very many hit points and no good melee attacks. The degree to which you’ll like this option seems to depend on which question you think is worse: “Why can’t I play a muscle wizard” or “Why does my muscle wizard play like a creampuff.” Eliminate Choice! You’d just grant every character of a particular class the ability scores they need to do well and to make the math work. This is more of a sub option since you can mix and match it with the others. Players can differentiate characters a little bit by varying their non-primary ability scores without risking the chance of making a trap option character. The flip side is that characters are going to be reverse pigeon holed, the choice to make a wizard with average intelligence is taken away from you. Besides if you’re going to go ahead and just mandate level appropriate numbers, why take the extra step of running them though ability scores first. Death to Ability Scores! Fix the problem by getting rid of the idea all together. Everything that is customarily handled by or affected by ability scores gets offloaded onto something else: class, skills, feats. Strike! did this and Strike! is really good. Of course, a fair number of players really enjoy the character building mini game and this option seems like it will inevitably slim down that piece of the game. It also has some of the same issues of representation that splitting ability scores from combat does. Comedy option: Double Down! Just go full elf simulator and make the rules account for every weird edge case. I really want to write something snarkier here, but to be fair 3.X and pathfinder are perceived to have done this and they’re really popular. This is the absolute least 4e-esque way of handling the problem and will make your rules set a giant tangled morass. Does that about sum it up?
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Feb 14, 2016 02:08
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