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Sure there's an industry, though in my experience it's way better if you stay away from anything that thinks of itself as in the industry. Like look, I wrote a book with 5e rules in it! But I wrote it for Simon & Schuster so I got an advance and a royalty structure and so on instead of three cents a word working for a future milkshake duck or something.
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May 2, 2024 00:47
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theironjef posted:Fine, but I'm just gonna harp on it having one of those "super realistic" character creation processes that makes no sense and takes three hours, plus stealing art from Frazetta. I think there's a copy in my stuff somewhere.  I just have one! Be sure not to miss the parts of character generation where you could get super strength, the power to talk to birds, or shape-changing! 
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May 2, 2024 00:50
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Shawn Tomkin posted:Author in question here. Finally ponying up for that SA tax after lurking for a decade or three. Hey Shawn, welcome, and as the person who brought this discussion to the forums, I'm sorry this had to be the thing that took you out of lurking mode. If I'd realized this was going to contribute to the stresses you've been under, I would never have posted it. Your work is genuinely really, really impressive. Ironsworn and its successors are a sea-change in game design, and it's going to be in Actual History Books some day. You're responsible for popularizing what is essentially a whole new branch of the RPG Tree of Life! And on a more personal note, Ironsworn was the thing that kept my home RPG group together during the pandemic, and Ironsworn/Starforged solo play were an enormous help to me personally during a trying time. I know imposter syndrome can make it difficult to take praise when it comes, but for my money you're already one of the great designers of the canon. If you want to chat about stuff, we have a solo RPGs thread too that is pretty chill! Your work created a lot of fans of solo RPGs and is basically the reason the thread was posted iirc, though it now covers the whole thriving genre.
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May 2, 2024 00:52
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Farg posted:why does some Twitter rando posting like a penny arcade blog post about an indie game even rate as discussion material It’s like 3x more relevant than a rehash of how 4E was good and WotC did it dirty.
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May 2, 2024 01:47
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Shawn Tomkin posted:Author in question here. Finally ponying up for that SA tax after lurking for a decade or three. Hi Shawn! Great to have you here! I was just reading Starforged on a long plane ride this past week, and enjoyed it very much. I hope you'll post more here in the future - based on your work, I think you could contribute a lot to our discussions.
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May 2, 2024 03:45
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CitizenKeen posted:It’s like 3x more relevant than a rehash of how 4E was good and WotC did it dirty. Aw but don't you miss it? I know I miss a whole thread of people breathlessly waiting for that one troll blogger that always noted what pipe tobacco he was smoking to say another samey stupid thing. Those were the days.
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May 2, 2024 03:54
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Kestral posted:If you want to chat about stuff, we have a solo RPGs thread too that is pretty chill! Your work created a lot of fans of solo RPGs and is basically the reason the thread was posted iirc, though it now covers the whole thriving genre. The exact thread I occasionally lurk in. And thanks for the kind words! No worries on sharing the low-key drama. Criticism is to be expected. I just found it weird and discouraging to see a screencap of something I wrote suddenly populating my twitter feed, when most of those people were piling on about three steps removed from any actual context. But that's twitter.
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May 2, 2024 03:55
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"if you don't like it, change it" stuff in RPGs is often bad for some combination of three reasons: 1) Overuse can be cloying and irritating in the same way any sort of language that seems overly focused on being deferential to its audience is. I haven't read the book in question so I can't say whether it does this. 2) It's often a lazy substitute for actually useful text that explains why one might feel the need to include, remove or change a mechanic. As we've seen, the book in fact does explain why! 3) It's part of a mess of fights and arguments in contemporary RPG culture, both as a way of ignoring criticism against big games (particularly 5e), but also certain weird corners of the indie scene that hate the very idea of mechanical frameworks as more than a bare minimum necessary evil. I know that Lu is immersed in these particular arguments and it's very likely that it's why that section caused such a response.
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May 2, 2024 04:59
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Saguaro PI posted:2) It's often a lazy substitute for actually useful text that explains why one might feel the need to include, remove or change a mechanic. As we've seen, the book in fact does explain why! I think this sets off so many people specifically because so many TRPGs can't actually explain why they include many mechanics and features in the first place, aside from the idea that you simply have to have them because that's what TRPGs need to have. People feel threatened and are set off by actual game design because they might have to actually know what they're doing.
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May 2, 2024 05:17
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CitizenKeen posted:It’s like 3x more relevant than a rehash of how 4E was good and WotC did it dirty. i mean 5e is 3x better than 4e but no one is ready to discuss that because its the backbone of 80% of all ttrpg discussion
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May 2, 2024 05:34
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Leperflesh posted:somewhat prominent game critic yeah twitter rando. thats what i said
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May 2, 2024 05:35
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Farg posted:i mean 5e is 3x better than 4e but no one is ready to discuss that because its the backbone of 80% of all ttrpg discussion I think people here can be too defensive of 4e, but it did at least have a clear vision, actual thought/effort into balance between classes, and actual thought/effort put into it in general. 5e is just sloppily designed, a stripped-down version of core 3e (ignoring the better-designed late-3.5 material) with superficial bits of TSR D&D tacked on. Inasmuch at it makes deliberate design choices, they seem oriented towards simplifying things for players by increasing the complexity for the GM, which is a nasty trick that leads to GM burnout. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 05:52 on May 2, 2024 |
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May 2, 2024 05:48
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Farg posted:i mean 5e is 3x better than 4e but no one is ready to discuss that because its the backbone of 80% of all ttrpg discussion Hell yeah way to throw the grenade.
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May 2, 2024 06:08
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Farg posted:why does some Twitter rando posting like a penny arcade blog post about an indie game even rate as discussion material I mean it ignited a big "rule 0 is bad" vs "rule 0 is good" discussion here so clearly it's relevant to a big rift in the industry and how people play and perceive games. My personal position is that you can judge the quality of a GM by whether they know when to ignore the letter of the rules, but you can judge the quality of a ruleset by how frequently it forces the GM into making that decision. Carrying capacity in D&D is a good example - the rulebooks waste loads of ink on listing the weight of everything you could conceivably carry only for it not to really matter and for most GMs to ignore it. Rules that have to be actively ignored all the time to make the game better aren't just a waste of paper, they're also a waste of the GM's attention span and effort which is probably the most precious currency in the RPG community right now. Rules where it's not clear if you have to actively ignore them because the only guidance you've got to go on is a Rule 0 disclaimer at the start of the book are even worse. But rules where the reasoning behind them, and why you might or might not want to ignore them, is made clear in the text aren't really what I'd call rule 0.
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May 2, 2024 07:26
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carrying capacity is an interesting facet of the issue because insofar as it's true that people disregard it a lot of the time, it's also one of those things that could really use an explanatory sidebar for "Designer's Intent" that is, carrying capacity began its life as a reflection of dungeoneering as raids or expeditions: you enter a dungeon, and you have a limited amount of time/resources with which to explore it and extract treasure from it, and the more currency (not even necessarily gold) you can carry out, the more successful the expedition was. Indeed, the weights of everything in early D&D was measured in coin-equivalents, so a party could more easily decide whether any given item was worth trying to carry off relative to everything else they could be carrying in its place. Moreover, that XP was based on how much gold could be recovered from the dungeon was itself a tremendous influence on the system - players would be incentivized to min-max their carrying capacity in terms of treasure because that was literally how their characters would progress not only has the direct design of D&D moved away from this, but the way [at least some] people play the game has also shifted. There are plots to be resolved, of which dungeons might not be included in, treasure might be created or invented and awarded directly instead of randomly generated and having to be picked up from chests, and character progression is awarded through means besides gold-acquisition (even if in terms of XP-for-killing-monsters as the alternative) if your game is like that, then it does make sense to ditch tracking carrying capacity tightly, but that such different modes of play exist at all, and represent a choice as to which rules can or should be followed, is the kind of thing that could be useful as table-level guidance, as opposed to the current state where it may well come down to "carrying capacity is your STR score * 10 pounds, as a simplification" with little further elaboration
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May 2, 2024 07:51
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Kestral posted:
Honestly, the Bakers have kind of gone the same way with Under Hollow Hills. It's a game heavy on interpersonal drama with big emotional swings, and one of the things they've said about running it is that at some point you might want to grab your safety tool of choice and say "hey, I'm about to do something that the rules say could go way wrong but I can't deal with that on top of all this, can we just treat it like I got an 8/a 10?" and that's a perfectly fine ask. I guess maybe a number 3 that also includes that sentiment in it could go something like: "BUT if you feel like the world owes you a big win right now: gently caress all that, stack 'em to the heavens. You'll know when. "
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May 2, 2024 08:24
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I think there are a couple of interesting aspects to Rule 0 talk. Anyone who knows RPGs knows this is a thing you can do, but this raises the question of "What if this is someone's first game?" Now for at least 90% of players their first game will be some form of D&D, and D&D has been keen to stress in its last few editions that you can do this. (I think it was 3e where it actually was "Rule 0".) There are RPGs which aren't even trying to be anyone's first but I think most of the time you give newbies the rundown and you say "look the goal of this is to facilitate your playing out a scenario in a way you find entertaining", blah blah listen to your group and so on. Of course in this particular case we're looking at something closer to a full blown designer note, saying "This rule works this way and it acts kinda funny if you do it this other way so I wouldn't recommend it." These are always good to have, if you can afford the space and the time. D&D's not been great about this even at the best of times. 3.x had a lot of "You can alter this rule but it will disrupt the delicate balance", which was sort of true even if it wasn't balanced much at all. There were a lot of knock-on effects. 4e does have a balance going, it's transparent enough that you *can* work out what changes will do but it could absolutely have used some more extensive notes to say "We're building this around the assumption that the players have this at this level, so if you want to speed things up..." etc. Maybe a DMG3 woulda done it. There's a lot of interesting things you find if you dig into the mechanics- I very briefly blogged about this- but they never come out and say "So we figured a PC hits a monster of their level about this often, meaning a roll of 10 or better will usually be a hit..." 13th Age has a lot of sidebars explaining why things are the way they are and also "here's some other stuff we tried" and I think that's one of the reasons I like it.
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May 2, 2024 09:44
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Maxwell Lord posted:13th Age has a lot of sidebars explaining why things are the way they are and also "here's some other stuff we tried" and I think that's one of the reasons I like it. I remember reading Gaslands and the there's a rule like "When you begin your turn in contact with an obstacle in Gear 1, you can ignore that obstacles during this move." There's a side bar that says something like "This isn't very realistic, but it's more fun than actually backing up and all that."
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May 2, 2024 09:58
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theironjef posted:Aw but don't you miss it? I know I miss a whole thread of people breathlessly waiting for that one troll blogger that always noted what pipe tobacco he was smoking to say another samey stupid thing. Those were the days. The halcyon time when "disassociated mechanics" was never far from people's lips.
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May 2, 2024 12:48
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Dawgstar posted:The halcyon time when "disassociated mechanics" was never far from people's lips. Disassociated mechanics. Combat as sport. Shouting wounds closed. GNS Theory. Skill challenges. What alignment is Batman. MMO on paper.
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May 2, 2024 15:14
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Ettin posted:Disassociated mechanics. Combat as sport. Shouting wounds closed. GNS Theory. Skill challenges. What alignment is Batman. MMO on paper. If you stare into a mirror chant that three times quickly and spin around a Forum Warrior from 2008 will appear behind you
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May 2, 2024 15:20
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theironjef posted:Hell yeah way to throw the grenade. This is probably a bad idea, but I'll add a grenade of my own that I've been genuinely wondering for a bit: what's the backstory behind this set of takes on 5e? Terrible Opinions posted:"You can change the rules" good Is this in response to high-level stuff like feats being optional and variant race options, or are there more specific mid-play mechanics that people are responding to with all this? I'm not a big fan of 5e (it's solidly the third-best D&D edition) and have only played it a few times, but my general impression of it is that it actually did a pretty tight job of removing ambiguity from the moment to moment mechanics. 5e does a pretty bad job of telling you how to run it, and in general suffers from trying to support too many playstyles simultaneously, but I don't really associate its mechanics with vagueness. Then again, I haven't looked at most of the non-core books too closely, so maybe I'm missing something? (Sorry if this is the wrong thread, but I'm responding off of stuff people said yesterday--I'm glad to move it if needed)
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May 2, 2024 15:38
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OtspIII posted:This is probably a bad idea, but I'll add a grenade of my own that I've been genuinely wondering for a bit: what's the backstory behind this set of takes on 5e? It's leftover edition war ordinance. In the transition from 4e (which has fairly rigorous and mechanically relevant structural stuff) to 5e (which didn't for some reason), a lot of rulings that used to be clear were suddenly terminating in a shrug and an "ask your DM." There's like a whole thing about people now having to get their ruling answers by tweeting directly at the game designers, who would give half-assed capricious answers that made things work about as often as they made things better. Normally you don't see this sort of thing in game edition changes, and it was coming around right as the edition war poo poo was heating up, so you had people defining it as both a glorious return to the murky olden days of DMs having full power at the table, and also a failure as the game designers tried to sell us half a horse. I don't even remember if the whole "Power to DMs" thing was part of 5e's marketing or just something cooked up on a forum as ammo.
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May 2, 2024 15:58
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theironjef posted:It's leftover edition war ordinance. In the transition from 4e (which has fairly rigorous and mechanically relevant structural stuff) to 5e (which didn't for some reason), a lot of rulings that used to be clear were suddenly terminating in a shrug and an "ask your DM." Like what
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May 2, 2024 15:58
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OtspIII posted:
it did not. the main complaint people outside of the dndsphere have with 5e is that its overreliance on natural language is ultimately a detriment, as any given feature or ability is ambiguous and forces the GM to either make a player mad by denying their weird interpretation, or have to come up with their own on the spot. for a tactical combat game, the math is all over the place and there's no actual guideline for aspects of number progression like magic items. and hell, for a tactical combat game, it gives the players so few effective options that there's no real room to develop interesting encounters. you can just run your optimal play for your class every turn. it also walked back the whole narrative power disparity thing between wizards and everyone else, where a party that can fly, teleport, scry, etc. will simply break plots in half if the plots are not written around such Mister Olympus fucked around with this message at 16:02 on May 2, 2024 |
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May 2, 2024 15:59
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YggdrasilTM posted:Like what I'm probably not the right guy to ask, I've got a memory like a steel sieve. My understanding is it's largely been cleaned up at this point but in the early days stuff like the differences between various types of actions (especially what does or doesn't constitute a bonus action) was a big one. People who were more invested in trying to make 5e work around that time can probably do a better job than me.
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May 2, 2024 16:01
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Mister Olympus posted:it did not. the main complaint people outside of the dndsphere have with 5e is that its overreliance on natural language is ultimately a detriment, as any given feature or ability is ambiguous and forces the GM to either make a player mad by denying their weird interpretation, or have to come up with their own on the spot.
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May 2, 2024 16:03
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A lot of DMs thrive on being asked, so to them 5e is a flawless edition.
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May 2, 2024 16:03
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YggdrasilTM posted:Ok like what. I always see this complain and never got an example. explain the difference between a melee attack, a melee weapon attack, and an attack with a weapon. these are distinct things that do not apply consistently between instances, and are not codified in all functions also how does mounted combat work Mister Olympus fucked around with this message at 16:11 on May 2, 2024 |
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May 2, 2024 16:05
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"There are three nearly insurmountable challenges every RPG group must face: 1. Scheduling and commitments. 2. Disagreements we refuse to solve with adult conversations. 3. Monk unarmed attacks not being removable from a captured monk." I'm joking but I've watched a lot of apparently otherwise sensible people go cuckoo over the last one.
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May 2, 2024 16:11
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the phrasing on the spell friends says that once they no longer feel the effect of the cantrip friends they hate you. To what degree that pisses them off varies but it's something that doesn't have a lot to go on. that's the first one off the dome, but I dm 5e every Tuesday and there's always a weird ruling that has to be made around spell effects. There's also a general lack of structure for dcs for skills (3.5e and 4e had handy little charts with pretty okay math) and the big one that gets me is money being not useful for anything. edit: i play dm a 5e game and play in one every week with my Warlock who serves the deep dank ocean gods I get a free tentacle to whap things with. it doesn't say what happens if someone whaps the tentacle or what its AC or health would be. this has come up a lot Ominous Jazz fucked around with this message at 16:14 on May 2, 2024 |
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May 2, 2024 16:12
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Mister Olympus posted:explain the difference between a melee attack, a melee weapon attack, and an attack with a weapon. these are distinct things that do not apply consistently between instances, and are not codified in all functions a "melee attack" is any attack made in melee (so usually 5 ft., or more if you are using a melee weapon with reach). a "melee weapon attack" is an attack in melee that is made by a weapon or unarmed strike (it's included as special exception in this category). an "attack with a weapon" is an attack with a weapon (so any attack with any weapon, melee or ranged, but not unarmed strike).
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May 2, 2024 16:16
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Mending fixes a single break or tear in an object. There are no rules for individual breaks or tears in items, items have hp. How much if any hp mending can fix in an object is not defined. Though this is from a game I haven't played or run since 2015.
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May 2, 2024 16:16
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Mister Olympus posted:explain the difference between a melee attack, a melee weapon attack, and an attack with a weapon. these are distinct things that do not apply consistently between instances, and are not codified in all functions If your fighter has Shield Master can they use the bonus action shield slam to prone their enemy before their regular swings, after all their regular swings, or only after at least one of their regular swings but at least before the others (if they are at least level 5)? This has been answered at various times by various sources in all three ways. See, out of context this stuff isn't that big of a deal. Some games are big and have a lot of moving parts. It was just all coming up in a time where everyone was all keyed up on internet fight juice, so every possible answer was super divisive.
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May 2, 2024 16:16
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YggdrasilTM posted:a "melee attack" is any attack made in melee (so usually 5 ft., or more if you are using a melee weapon with reach). so why is it, then, that a paladin can smite with a natural attack but not apply improved smite from level 11 to that same attack, because that requires a melee weapon? what's the rationale, the balance, the intent? or is it just putting words down? why is a claw a melee weapon, but attacking with a claw not a melee weapon attack? unarmed/natural attacks in general blow holes in this apparently simple classification because they always have something fucky and unclear with all other use cases, like how a dhampir's bite uses con instead of str, so can a dhampir monk use dex or con, or does monk's str-to-dex for unarmed not apply because str has been replaced? and besides harping on natural language, i could again ask you to answer why CR is still an incoherent measure of difficulty and why there aren't rules for when you should get a +1 weapon, whether it breaks the math to do that too early or too late, and what 5e's allergy is to giving interesting options for movement, positioning, and status effects beyond save-or-lose spells that you can only use one of per fight, for a game that wants you to get in a fight every session. ever notice that everyone loves BG3 combat because it does stuff with height and terrain and hazards and obstacles, not because of how engaging the base rules system is? if a game is going to spend the majority of its page space and dice rolls on fighting, it should make it so the fighting parts are at all differentiated between encounters. if it wants to be a game about fictional positioning and shifting control of the narrative, and not sword dudes on a map, then it should make its mechanics about that. 5e, more so than any other dnd edition (though this has been a problem with dnd before), presents itself as being the latter but maintains support only for the former Mister Olympus fucked around with this message at 16:29 on May 2, 2024 |
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May 2, 2024 16:20
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Mister Olympus posted:so why is it, then, that a paladin can smite with a natural attack but not apply improved smite from level 11 to that same attack, because that requires a melee weapon? what's the rationale, the balance, the intent? or is it just putting words down? why is a claw a melee weapon, but attacking with a claw not a melee weapon attack? Paladin's can't smite with a natural(assuming you meant unarmed with that) attack.
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May 2, 2024 16:30
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Dexo posted:Paladin's can't smite with a natural(assuming you meant unarmed with that) attack. https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/sac/sage-advice-compendium#SA262 this seems to imply that they can, that there is a difference between "natural" and "unarmed" attacks, and most posts on the subject seem to agree that a paladin that has a claw, bite, horn or w/e can smite with it. except maybe not, sometimes, depending on the reading of the specific ability. why does every instance of this concept function differently? why is a claw attack not just an identical "claw" weapon that functions like any given sword does? isn't that easier? it is, except for the person who wants to only read the specific things on their sheet and not any other part of the rules Mister Olympus fucked around with this message at 16:36 on May 2, 2024 |
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May 2, 2024 16:32
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Mister Olympus posted:and besides harping on natural language, i could again ask you to answer why CR is still an incoherent measure of difficulty and why there aren't rules for when you should get a +1 weapon, whether it breaks the math to do that too early or too late, and what 5e's allergy is to giving interesting options for movement, positioning, and status effects beyond save-or-lose spells that you can only use one of per fight, for a game that wants you to get in a fight every session. ever notice that everyone loves BG3 combat because it does stuff with height and terrain and hazards and obstacles, not because of how engaging the base rules system is? i run into these issues every session and have had to homebrew the heck out of some magic items and effects as a result. I know it's popular with podcasts, but theater of the mind is not the way to play this game.
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May 2, 2024 16:35
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Eh, I don't want to get bogged down in specific edition fight trash. To the original question, the argument that will consume the next page or two is why "Ask your DM" is a big ol' 5e meme and somehow the best and worst thing about it.
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May 2, 2024 16:36
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Mister Olympus posted:explain the difference between a melee attack, a melee weapon attack, and an attack with a weapon. these are distinct things that do not apply consistently between instances, and are not codified in all functions Oh, I have this one! The one part of 5e I know pretty well is monster statblocks The confusing one is 'melee weapon attack', but it's confusing precisely because 5e tried to over-systematize itself. The 'weapon' in 'melee weapon attack' just means it's not ignored by targets immune to spells, right? It's a mechanical keyword. I think I get what people mean, now, although I'm not entirely sure what the better solution is. To me, it feels like the core problem is that trying to fully systematize a RPG (with both mechanical and narrative sides) is just inherently impossible? Like, I get the problem, and I agree that it sucks, but it feels to me like that's a symptom of WotC trying to create a tight system, not them abdicating responsibility. Ominous Jazz posted:the phrasing on the spell friends says that once they no longer feel the effect of the cantrip friends they hate you. To what degree that pisses them off varies but it's something that doesn't have a lot to go on. Like, I guess they could add all these extra rules, but would that game be better? Do we want to return to the days of rulesets that try to explicitly spell out every edge case scenario with more mechanics? I lived through those days and they were not actually very playable. At some point adding rules to handle situations to come up are adding more pain to needing to memorize crunch than they are removing pain in needing to make snap decisions, and my personal take is that the scale for that tips surprisingly quickly
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May 2, 2024 16:37
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