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Oct 19, 2018 21:57
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NinjaDebugger posted:On top of this, the fighter they're balancing against tops out at 13th level at 5/2 attacks (and only with a specialized weapon), alternating 3 and 2 attacks, which means that it looks even loving worse for the 2e fighter. And yet for literally every boost you gave fighters and nerf you gave casters there was one the other way you gave casters a boost and fighters a nerf. Anything from more spells for casters to casters being able to pick their saves to savage armour check penalties to the complete overhaul of the magic item system that turned casters up to about 15 while shredding fighter power.
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Dec 22, 2018 18:55
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Dawgstar posted:How was the Eberron 4E book(s)? It basically took the best of Eberron's 3.5 implementation and edited it into two books that weren't overrun with prestige classes and actually fit better with Eberron's themes than 3e. In other words if you're system-agnostic, 4e Eberron's the best Eberron, but if you're either a 3.X fan or already have a collection of Eberron's sourcebooks it's not really worth getting.
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Dec 31, 2018 18:03
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MonsterEnvy posted:Why do people keep saying this, when it's been explicitly stated earlier in the thread that the money WotC would be getting from the bundle is going to RAINN As far as I can tell almost none of the products in that bundle were created by WotC - so the amount of money they are missing out on is, I think, fairly trivial.
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Feb 20, 2019 02:21
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slap me and kiss me posted:If us nerds were willing to pay more than $9.99 for a pdf, profitability wouldn't be such a problem. That's only one of the two problems. The other problem is that RPGs cost next to nothing anyway. With one copy of Apocalypse World ($28 print/$15 pdf) I have enough material to run a dozen session campaign for half a dozen people repeatedly. My RPG shelf is way past the point where I won't even play half those games. D&D is in its way worse because the campaign will last possibly for years. I'm not sure there's any potential for the RPG industry to ever be more than a cottage industry given how cheap it is to play. Which doesn't mean that professional RPGs doing professional stuff shouldn't pay professional wages and be able to support that.
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Feb 24, 2019 04:55
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Arivia posted:D&D is a fine game to play, it's just that 5e is a bad edition of the game. Jeez, don't treat people who just want to stab orcs with their friends as less than. 5e isn't the best edition - but I think it's better for almost everything than 1e, 2e, 3.0. 3.5 (and Pathfinder). Which is a lot of the best known editions - and 5e does some things better than the rest.
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Jun 23, 2019 20:36
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Arivia posted:christ what The games I've listed are all car-crashes from a design perspective and one thing 5e does better than than either edition of AD&D or any of the 3.X family is that it is easier to learn to play due to things like ascending AC, a lack of nonsense like non-weapon proficiencies, saving throws not being disconnected from almost everything else (easier to learn, not better when it compares to classic saving throws), and more. This is not a high bar - but you're I think forgetting just how fiddly and awkward 3.X is and how say what you like about THAC0 being rear end-backwards it was actually an improvement in speed and comprehensibility over the 1e look up tables. Also when it comes to being inherently evil, the whole purpose behind 1e was to screw Arneson out of royalties - and Gygax did it by adding in awkward and poorly thought out house rules and claiming it was an entirely different game. Meanwhile 3.5 is the shameless cash grab edition, intended to break backwards compatibility after a mere 2.5 years. I'm not remotely defending 5e as good, unlike BECMI/the Rules Cyclopaedia, or 4e. Where 5e does things better than those editions it's because they aren't trying to do those things at all - and in almost all the cases where 5e does something better than the Rules Cyclopaedia 4e does it far better - and vise-versa. I'm just pointing out that with 5e as the current edition it's easy to forget the problems with older ones.
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Jun 24, 2019 00:10
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Terrible Opinions posted:It's the whole people are brain damaged weirdos for liking game I don't like thing. Especially when the game in question is something fairly mainstream. That was Ron Edwards back in 2006. And I don't think anyone defends Ron Edwards using brain damage as a description for classic RPG design assumptions. (For anyone interested here's Ron Edwards forgetting the first rule of holes in expanding his original statement about brain damage).
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Jun 24, 2019 00:27
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Nuns with Guns posted:If the term is indefensible, then I don't see why people were just reusing it again? It was brought up in the past few pages by Terrible Opinions saying he didn't like it. Plutonis pointed out that almost all the mentions in the past few years had been against the use of the term. But some people still think a statement made thirteen years ago on another forum is worth bringing up, I guess?
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Jun 24, 2019 01:06
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Kai Tave posted:Honestly I'm in the same boat. I don't care for either but I can at least understand why someone might have fun dicking with 3.X's insane number of classes and spells and spellcaster classes and Double Classes and feats etc. while 5e is both dull as well as bad. 5e's main point is, so far as I can tell, to be bland as a pile of plain white rice so you can drift it as far as possible and there will be just a little in the game to support anything. For whatever you are trying to do it's a mediocre system but there's just not enough in there to find any reason to hate it. Of course it fails at that fairly miserably thanks to things like hit points and Vancian casting being pretty strong flavours in their own right. Nuns with Guns posted:Terrible Opinions brought it up specifically because Liquid Communism just said this: Ah, missed that, thanks. There is something to be said but brain damaged and brain-sick are not it. I am however reminded of the anti-Last Jedi crowd that have pretty clearly missed a lot that was actually in the film (and about Rey in particular). Film studies would call this film-literacy. But that's not the term we want at all.
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Jun 24, 2019 01:28
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Arivia posted:So how is it better than other editions? You didn't argue that it was mediocre, you said it was better than 1e/2e/3e. I specifically said it was easier to learn any any of the above and gave reasons why. And I disagree that 2e is better at being a narrative theatre of the mind game than 5e let alone being an "actual narrative theatre of the mind game" in any way, shape, or form. Edit: Don't forget Call of Cthulhu
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Jun 24, 2019 02:08
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Arivia posted:So your grand assertion is ultimately “5e is easier to learn because it has a combination of general mechanics that I find easy to grasp?” That doesn’t correspond to being easy to learn. That means you have found the mechanics to your liking. If you’d like to elaborate on 5e being specifically well introduced (you might want to compare to the guided play introduction of the mid-90s introductory D&D box set), go ahead. I'm trying to work out whether you simply aren't aware of the actual 2e rules or whether you've just repressed them. 2e is the edition that somehow manages to give distances in exact feet and yards (ranges on the first page of spells include 5 yards/level, 10 yards, and 10 feet) and still doesn't have a grid system. Which means that to actually play 2e by the rules you have to use a tape measure. But it gets worse than having distances in feet and yards without even using a grid system to make that something people can easily know and work out. For that matter it even has opportunity attack rules (DMG page 84 to flee from combat). 2e fireball spell posted:The fireball fills an area equal to its normal spherical volume (roughly 33,000 cubic feet - thirty-three 10' X 10' X 10' cubes). Saying 2e is a theatre of the mind system that doesn't need a grid is like saying 1e is easier and faster than 2e because it doesn't have THAC0 when it has (almost) exactly the same mechanics but forces you to use a lookup table.
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Jun 26, 2019 00:42
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Arivia posted:None of those references to the 2e rules necessitate a grid, though. They give you measurements in commonly understood units and tell you that you can strike freely at retreating opponents. 5e still discusses everything in terms of 5 foot squares, it just puts the actual note that 5 feet equals a square in a sidebar and marks it optional to pretend that it is otherwise. 5e may not be as grid-dependent as 3e or 4e, but it is still grid dependent. Neither 2e nor 5e is as easy to run as say 13th Age or FATE is in terms of theatre of the mind, but 2e contains no actual references to grid-based combat in the core rulebooks and is written to allow you to run it freely without one. 5e is merely pretending. 2e is absolutely and categorically position dependent. All a grid is is a simple way of marking position on a map and fast way of dealing with distances. So 2e has actively more complexity regarding the positional rules than 5e - it just does not give you a simple way of handling them. quote:Using feet and yards may be complicated, and yes you can do better from a complexity standpoint, but comparing the two editions of the D&D rules, solely as provided textually, 2e is the theater of the mind gridless combat RPG that 5e pretends it was. On the contrary. Using the actual rules provided 5e is the game of relatively woolly distances and not actively having that much to work out that 2e merely pretended it was by leaving out the simplest way of actively handling those positions while having more intricate positioning rules even than 3.X. When you talk about "solely as provided textually" you are talking about reading the game without actually trying even to use example situations. We're into Pathfinder adventure path levels of "This looks good when read on the loo but doesn't work in play" for 2e's half-assed attempts at theatre of the mind that simply consist of not including rules that would make using the rules the game does present simpler. That said, talking about old saving throws, the TSR ones were better than the WotC ones. Fighters only had the best saves at high level when they needed them - but the saving throws are good. The ones I remember (there were several tweaks) were in order: Save vs death, poison, paralysis/Save vs Rod Staff or Wand/ Save vs Petrification or Polymorph/Save vs Breath Weapon/Save vs Spell or in English Save or die /Save vs Spell in a Can/Save vs lose and survive/Save vs Physical/Save vs Magic One of the tweaks made over time was that paralysis was initially grouped with Petrification and Polymorph as in the character would be out of the fight but could be recovered, but was moved across to the Save or Die category because Hold Person and the like were always and inevitably followed by coup de grace, while people didn't break statues so much and frogs could hop away. One odd thing was that Save vs Spell in a Can was always 1 point easier to save against than save vs spell - but frequently had more of a chance of getting through than the petrification or polymorph save or lose group making for some interesting tweaks in item balancing. I'm not sure how intentional this was. Wizards of course were the best at saving against spells (including spells in a can) and priests the best at saving against death.
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Jun 26, 2019 02:09
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I've dropped my only open pledge down to $1 and plan to keep any future backing at this level and handle things in e.g. backerkit or getting pdfs when they release.
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Sep 29, 2019 01:09
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JMBosch posted:What makes it a thornier issue is that, if there's something you would otherwise back if Kickstarter weren't anti-union assholes, then only 5% of withholding your pledge hurts Kickstarter, and about 90% of withholding your pledge hurts the creators. That depends on how the creator handles things. I mean, I'm planning on only backing the Reaper Bones 5 kickstarter to the tune of $1 (i.e. the minimum possible) - and then spending about $150 on the pledge manager for the core set and shipping - which I assume Kickstarter doesn't get a cut of.
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Sep 30, 2019 03:37
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Jimbozig posted:Laws recommended a simple fighter class that you can hand to your kid brother. Having a simple "I hit it" fighter and having one opens up the game to people who don't want to deal with complex mechanics and this is a good thing. The problem comes when you don't have an equivalent "I burn it" elementalist that's just as easy to play, locking the people who like simple classes out of magic. (Warlocks are trying to cover that mechanical niche, but they have huge amounts of baggage themselves).
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Oct 7, 2019 23:05
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Ferrinus posted:No, I don't agree. At level 17 an elementalist is looking at something like eleven options each turn - three at-wills, those three at-wills again but with escalation this time, and something like five utility powers. A regular sorcerer replaces the three dual-mode at-wills with two at-wills, four encounters, and three dailies, and their soul of magic may or may not be more fiddly interactive (dragon soul gives you less to remember overall than your elementalist resistances do, wild soul demands your attention constantly but you knew what you were signing up for). Elemental escalation has enough effects and subclauses that planning out its use resolving it on top of one of your regular at-wills is probably more complicated on average than firing and forgetting a given sorcerer encounter spell. You're welcome to your theoretical opinion. I on the other hand have seen the impact switching over to scouts and elementalists had on a couple of players who'd been playing since 2008 - it completely freed them up. Your mistake is to look at the entire option space to try to find the best move rather than to try to find an effective enough move to be able to pull their weight. I literally don't think the Slayer ever changed stances when we used one, and that really didn't matter because a flat +1 to hit (or a flat damage bonus) is always a good stance. Could someone good at tactics have got 10% more damage out of the slayer? Possibly, but they didn't really care and nor did the rest of the table. The point is the choices are all so simple they can be handled in a split second and there really isn't much to remember (even if the Slayer is using Rain of Blows). Neither Slayer, Scout, nor Elementalist ever causes analysis paralysis in my experience Slayer decision path:
In short every question the slayer asks other than "Who do I hit?" is trivial - and most players can answer that. Meanwhile even the simple twin-striker has all those encounter and daily powers they have to decide they are using at the same time they decide who to attack. Likewise elementalists - deciding whether to make a ranged burst or a ranged single target attack is not a complex decision. Just look at the battle map, and you do not get the analysis paralysis. Either people are standing close enough together you bring down the AoE or they aren't and you bring down the single target zap. These are very distinct choices and there aren't many of them. The math may be more complicated for the combined attack but you do not get analysis paralysis among a significant subset of players. And analysis paralysis is what really slows things down. Edit: Making the simple classes engage with the mess that was the feats system (more feats in 4e than 3.5 by the end) - but that wasn't such an issue as they could be guided there outside play and some feats are more active than others. Tuxedo Catfish posted:you wouldn't put a lone playbook in a PbtA game that has D&D-level system mastery requirements and gets to be stronger than everyone else in exchange, because that would be horrible for everyone else at the table, and you wouldn't put the same playbook in and make them do all that work just to keep up with the status quo either, because that's obviously pointless and awful for the person who thought that playbook sounded cool So you're saying that the Gunlugger has just as much to juggle as the Hardholder, and if the Hardholder manages to bring their entire resources to bear the Gunlugger, powerful as it is, is just as powerful. Right. As a friend of mine summarised it "Apocalypse world works on the 'Mo' people, mo' problems' scale." Yes, you don't have D&D-esque system mastery but you certainly have more to juggle. Kai Tave posted:I mean, I get where Tuxedo Catfish is coming from, the whole "we need to make a thing that's for the Kid Brother of the group" narrative really only ever seems to surround roleplaying games, nobody ever really tries to say that board games have to accommodate a variety of desires for complexity and engagement all within the same game, if someone at the table brings out Gloomhaven or Kemet or Millennium Blades then there's a certain expected minimum amount of engagement required to participate and if that's not for you that's cool, but there isn't an option for someone to play one of those games with a pared-down set of rules/choices just for the sake of being there, and if those games tried to do that it would be to their detriment. One huge difference is that a game of Kemet or Millennium Blades is over in an evening. A game of D&D can run once a week for literally years. Gloomhaven is more D&D-like in terms of length as well as everything else - and some classes are absolutely simpler than others in play. neonchameleon fucked around with this message at 01:31 on Oct 10, 2019 |
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Oct 10, 2019 01:29
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When we are talking about D&D and the limited number of games like it the major advantage of it being a class based system is that the player interacts with the gameworld through the class. This gives me a huge scope to tailor my classes to the wishes of different players by pointing them at different classes. Not designing classes that work differently and that are designed for different people with different tastes is a failure of the game designer - and I'm almost unable to comprehend in what way anyone could consider designing a game which can cover a huge range of tastes shows I lack self respect if I've already paid the price for that by making it a class based game. And I don't care e.g. that Ferinus doesn't find scout and slayer to be simpler than the classic AEDU classes. He doesn't have to play them - but when he says that they aren't simpler for a significant group of player that find AEDU leads to analysis paralysis he's talking about him. I'll never play a 4e Slayer - I think in some ways like Ferrinus. But unlike Ferrinus I'm pleased when my friends have fun alongside me even if they are handling things differently. Finally having a range of complexities also aids roleplaying. The clearest example here is comparing Iron Man to The Hulk in Marvel Heroic Roleplaying. If I'm playing Tony Stark I'm almost continually playing dice manipulation games as I adjust the power levels in various parts of the Iron Man suit - and that feels like adjusting the power levels. Meanwhile if I'm playing the Hulk? Hulk Smash! Big dice, few tricks. Both feel good in part because they feel like the character. And before someone says "But fighters should be simple by this rule" no they shouldn't unless they are demigods. An archetypal fighter without superpowers who takes on dragon level foes should be more Batman than the Hulk; Hulk plays in that league while bulling his way through because he's got superpowers.
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Oct 11, 2019 02:11
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Halloween Jack posted:City-State of the Invincible Overlord was a hugely influential product. The Wilderlands of High Fantasy was one of the first "campaign settings," and the eponymous book was released before World of Greyhawk and a decade before the Forgotten Realms Campaign Set. drat. Possibly the best (as opposed to the oldest) work Judge's Guild ever did and two of the best D&D modules ever, were Dark Tower and Caverns of Thracia by Jennell Jacquays. She is decidedly not a Nazi, so I checked her Facebook. She has a statement - and apparently it's all work for hire Jennell's Facebook posted:I'm aware of the drama shitstorm surrounding Judges Guild right now.
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Feb 11, 2020 22:46
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JohnnyCanuck posted:Isn't the latest version of the story that he barely had anything to do with the Escapist, honest? The current attitude of the people with the rights to The Escapist (or at least the Youtube part) is, so far as I can tell "Thank gently caress that rear end in a top hat ran The Escapist into the ground so we were able to buy the rights to all the content we created before he fired us and replaced us with Gators at a bargain price. And we hope he absolutely hates what we're doing with the brand." Or possibly that's just Bob Chipman's attitude.
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Feb 13, 2020 04:44
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90s Cringe Rock posted:Goodman Games: "but we believe the nazi may, in time, be redeemed, by us continuing to work with him" I think you missed a nuance there. That was Jennell Jacquays who wrote most of Judge's Guild's best stuff back in the day (Dark Tower and Caverns of Thracia being the obvious ones) under her deadname. She understandably wants to write about this stuff and knows a lot more about it than the Nazi failson. This means (a) wants to write about work she did and is still justifiably proud of and (b) wants to not give money to Nazis (she calls herself an SJW). She has got both parts she wants - and the only way she is likely to work with Judge's Guild again or give them money is if they give her a chance to buy back the work for hire she did for the company that belonged to the father (I don't know if she would - but see no other conditions) Meanwhile Judge's Guild wants people to continue to work with them and to be rehabilitated. So giving away royalties is a small price to pay if it works. I don't think we've seen Goodman Games say what they are going to do going forward and whether they are ever going to start new projects with Judge's Guild or publish anything where JG would get royalties?
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Feb 18, 2020 01:24
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potatocubed posted:My understanding is that in Canada something being true isn't a defence against libel, which makes it very easy to sue people to shut them up. Truth and fair comment are both defences under UK libel law - you don't have to prove something to be true, merely to prove that something is something a reasonable person could believe. You don't actually need to be right, just to have supporting evidence. English Libel Law also got cleaned up massively at the start of the decade in two ways - first by Mr. Justice Eady (who was the chief judge on most English Libel cases in the 00s) stepping back from being in charge of most of the most important cases, and the second being the Defamation Act of 2013. So it deserved its reputation and that got fixed.
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Mar 5, 2020 04:39
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I'm currently writing a Warhammer Fantasy-inspired RPG - and I'm wondering what people make of the following approach (wording not finalised): There are no stat modifiers in Raven's Beak for your race, and as should be obvious races map onto something approaching nationalities. In the world we live in we expect to be able to communicate with people from anywhere and most of us realise they are all human. The world of Raven's Beak on the other hand lacks mass communication so people from far away are expected to be less like us. To represent this no matter where the game is set that culture calls itself human - and has as wide a range of human ethnicities as the real world. Across the border the country with a history of raiding and counter raiding are orcs - which applies no matter which setting the country is. This also enables people to play what they wish - if someone wants the aesthetic of a cat-person I might not have included any, but in a world without mass communication who genuinely knows what people look like on the far side of the world? Except those who live there of course.
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Jun 28, 2020 00:15
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Ferrinus posted:I would say it was, actually, but with the underlying assumption that - as proved by Pathfinder's success and the preponderance of online argument - the 3.5E faction was the biggest and most important part of the playerbase and had to determine the baseline of the game, and that people who liked 4E could be satisfied by the inclusion of such things as the Thunderwave spell, the Battlemaster subclass, and slightly-to-moderately cleaned up game math and action economy balance. If you're looking for them you can actually find a ton of nods to 4E throughout 5th edition, but, as I - a genius - predicted years ahead of 5E's release, it's mostly QoL innovations repurposed to benefit spellcasters. Honestly, I think that 3.5 contributed nearly the least to 5e. 5e was an attempt to roll the clock back and produce an alternative to the mostly-forgotten 3.0, and it did it by putting an oD&D magic system on top of an only slightly modified 4e engine with 4e fluff. It uses bounded accuracy (basically in 4e), a 4e like skills system, a 4e like hit point system, spell specialisation in which the benefit of specialising is to be able to go above and beyond with the same abilities rather than easier to learn and getting more of the same, and more. Meanwhile the spells come more from oD&D than 3.X or even 2e. There is for example none of the nonsense in 3.X about fireballs being able to melt soft metals (because they were trying for a physics engine and really screwed it up) or even the 2e nonsense about "a fireball covers this many cubic feet". There's none of the rules-as-physics or even the item creation that so overshadowed 3.X. And there's the sharp change in the casting that is much more oD&D than 3.X. And they both rein in the 3.X buffing play style (with concentration) and do at least some blurring of the muggles/magic users divide as, for example, with the Shadow Monk. My description of 5e is therefore that it's an attempted retroclone of 2e starting by taking oD&D and putting it on to the 4e engine while adding a lot of 4e's fluff. 3.5 fans like it because 3.0 was attempting to put 2e onto an at least vaguely modern engine.
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Jun 29, 2020 01:02
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TheArchimage posted:Wrong. 4e has a bonus treadmill system, rather the opposite of bounded accuracy. It depends which part of bounded accuracy. 4e has level scaling but keeps the characters within the same range. Yes, I was overstating things here. quote:In a very vague sense. 4e's system is itself based heavioy on 3.x's; the math is the same based on a 3.x character putting their max starting ranks into class skills and increasing them every level. It's one of the most conservative changes in the entire edition. 3e has an absurd clunky system where you get a ridonculous number of skill points with >30 defined skills with your Int modifier adding to the number of skills with the fighter and cleric starting off with enough points to train two skills. 4e and 5e have a trained/untrained binary and about seventeen skills with most starting characters starting with four trained skills. And then there's the nature of the skills; 4e and 5e share pretty light skill systems whereas 3.5 has a skill system so tightly defined that you get the D&D standard tree (DC 15 to climb). quote:Staggeringly wrong, 4e frontloads a character's HP so a 1st level character won't be taken out in one hit. 5e explicitly runs you straight up to level 3 ridiculously fast and treats levels 1 and 2 as training levels that go by in the blink of an eye (you should by the incredibly silly guidelines be able to level out of 1st and 2nd in a working day each). The other thing about hp is that by rounding up from average 5e encourages you not to roll and makes rolling hit points effectively vestigial in a way rounding down doesn't. quote:It also has basically no way to subvert the damage system First, Intimidate - OK, so that very quickly got houseruled out of 4e. Second 5e has oD&D magic. I have never said it didn't have oD&D magic. But it's pared back oD&D magic, not ridiculously detailed 3.5 magic. quote:Healing Surges allow for healing spells and abilities to stay relevant throughout a character's career and also serves as a pacing mechanism for the adventuring day; Hit Dice do neither of these despite looking vaguely similar if you look at them through a drinking glass and squint. Hit dice do help be a pacing mechanism. They are watered down. quote:Are you even serious? The Points of Light setting was tossed bodily out the window. Not a trace of it remains. Literally every 4e FR change was retconned so it didn't happen whether this made sense or not. 4e's fluff has been entirely memory holed. There is not a single trace of it remaining in 5e. I'm talking about the fluff that's part of the game rather than the optional setting that does not appear in e.g. homebrew games. I'm talking about things like the Warlock pacts (taken straight from 4e and nowhere near the 3e warlock), Sorcerer bloodlines, Paladins that don't require a specific God. I'm talking about thieves that can go above and beyond, filching something as a minor action because they are a thief and have that utility power rather than because they are a really high level thief who took -20 on their check. I'm talking about specialist wizards whose specialism makes them better at the individual spells of their specialist school rather than just getting more spells. I'm talking about actual wire-fu monks that work. I'm talking about goblins that slip out of combat easily rather than simply are a line of numbers that are different from orcs only in what they add to d20 rolls and kobolds that get a bonus for actively swarming their foes. I'm talking about succubi that have their own mechanics for seduction rather than being wizards with prosthetic foreheads. I'm talking about dragons that get to act at multiple points within the turn including interrupting with a tail whip rather than a silly claw/claw/bite/wing buffet/wing buffet/tail slap attack routine or behaving as a sorcerer. It's watered down 4e - but it's far more 4e than literally anything else, especially 3.X with its ubiquitous and uniform detailed blandness and prosthetic forehead wizards. The only parts I actually see 3.X in rather than oD&D magic and a 4e engine is the setting - and arguably the saving throws. The part that is trivially removable. Is it pure 4e? No. But I'm trying to find any parts that are characteristic of 3.X and not shared with either (a) 4e or (b) pre-WotC D&D.
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Jun 29, 2020 22:25
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Not sure whether this is the right thread - but there's been some relatively decent news from the other giant in the fantasy tabletop games world - Games Workshop. About a month ago they made a public statement saying "We will never accept any form of prejudice, hatred, or discrimination in our company or in the Warhammer community" and ending up quite literally saying "If you feel the same way wherever and whoever you are we're glad to have you as part of the Warhammer community. And if not you will not be missed." It sounds like empty words even if the obvious targets threw their toys out of the pram. But it looks as if they meant it. About two weeks later the Indomitus box reveal showed one of the Ultramarine sergeants (the troopers all having helmets) to not have white skin. Actual diversity, this time in the default human faction and poster child for Space Marines - right in the new 40k starter. Needless to say people tried scraping the bottom of the barrel to claim it conflicted with the lore because geneseed turns marines into clones of their primarch (something that has never been true). And in the last few days there's been the minor saga about the youtuber formerly known as Arch Warhammer - who may be the worst Warhammer chud on Youtube (as low a bar as that is). It came out yesterday that GW have banned anyone they work with from working with Arch; we found out because World of Warships messed up in their collaboration with GW and made a public apology to both GW and the Warhammer community for it. And I say the youtuber formerly known as Arch Warhammer because GW got annoyed with him to the point of saying "Warhammer is our trademark and calling yourself Arch Warhammer and making Warhammer lore videos you're both running the risk of being seen official, causing confusion, and your content causes harm to our brand. Change your name or we send the lawyers." Chuds claim that this means GW think they own the word "warhammer", completely ducking trademark issues. And the youtuber formerly known as Arch Warhammer is now known as Arch. Looks as if GW is cleaning house.
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Jul 4, 2020 21:15
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MadScientistWorking posted:Paizo has its issues but unlike D&D it generally tends to be trending towards being a better game than D&D. Now if only management could be complete replaced. I couldn't disagree more. WotC's current D&D may have all the delicacy and nutritional value of a happy meal. But Paizo have looked at D&D 3.X and decided what it needs is more feats and to make them more fiddly and less powerful. The feats are obnoxious to the point that you literally can't use the Intimidate skill on someone without talking without a feat; messily chop someone in half then draw your thumb across your throat and point to someone else and you don't have the Intimidating Glare feat you don't even get to roll to try to Demoralise them.
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Jul 8, 2020 19:19
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:honestly, while D&D has a lot of momentum behind it and that does account for a lot of its success, i think there's a deeper problem This. D&D 5e is to tabletop roleplaying what a Happy Meal is to food or a Bud Light is to beer. It's not good but there's a reason it sells.
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Jul 14, 2020 04:22
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Kaiju15 posted:Is there a good deep dive on what makes the design of 5e so... meh? Ideally audio so that I can listen to someone complain about elf games while I work. OK. I'll give a quick summary. 5e is meh at combat and tactics for two reasons - that positioning doesn't really matter, and bullet-sponge design. The first leads to incredibly shallow combat, and the second leads to combat that takes a long time; the combination of the two is exceedingly meh. In 5e positioning doesn't really matter because the only real impact of positioning is how you can focus fire. There are, in most versions of D&D, two types of people who don't want to be in combat; spellcasters and archers. The penalty for both groups for being in melee is simple (other than letting the enemy get at you) - you take disadvantage on your attack rolls. This sounds like just what you want - archers and casters should actively avoid melee but it doesn't work that way in practice. Oh, and to add insult to injury they got rid of flanking, again weakening the impact of positioning. Unfortunately the majority of spellcaster combat spells don't make attack rolls but instead force saving throws. This means that a wizard who's stuck in melee can use the majority of their spells while stuck in melee combat with no penalty at all. They don't particularly want to be there but that's due to being fairly squishy and not wanting to take focus fire but they are still able to do almost everything offensively they could do if they weren't in melee unless specifically designed to not. Meanwhile they made a good choice for player characters in allowing finesse melee weapons (like daggers, shortswords, and rapiers) to use Dex for melee attack and damage rolls while thrown weapons use the same stat they use in melee. This is great for PCs because it both opens up agile rogues and rapier wielders in melee, and if your barbarian gets their feat glued to the ground their turn isn't entirely wasted by throwing a javelin. However this also means that when an enemy bowman is forced into melee and draws their shortsword they have the same attack roll and their damage roll drops from 1d8+dex damage to 1d6+dex damage. W00t! (In 3.5, for example, the attack roll would swap from the Dex of the agile archer to their Str, and probably lose the benefit of any feats). Meanwhile if you glue an orc's feet to the floor they pull out their javelin and throw it at you; a morningstar will use Str for attack rolls and do 1d8+str modifier damage. Their javelin has the same attack roll and does 1d6+Str modifier damage. Again W00t! It's technically better than nothing, but about as little better than nothing as it's possible to be - and therefore is not worth taking any risk at all of being focus fired. (There are precisely two exceptions I've found here - the Sentinel feat gives some measure of lockdown, and a monk with Stunning Fist forcing a Con save or lose on the next turn is normally well worth the risk). 5e has bullet sponge design. This applies across all of the WotC editions, with escalating attack rolls and hit points compared to TSR editions while the target numbers provided by your armour class remain more or less constant. In AD&D an ogre hits someone wearing full plate armour and carrying a shield on a 17, has an AC equivalent of 15, and has 4d8+1 (average 19) hit points. Meanwhile in 5e an ogre hits someone wearing full plate armour with a shield (AC20) on a 14, has an AC of 11, and has 59 hit points. They're meant to be about equally dangerous, but the AD&D fight against the ogre risks a dice spike while the fight against the 5e ogre is a very predictable fight of whittling away against the ogre's hit points until it drops. This bullet sponge design makes it slow. A game where positioning doesn't really matter (like Tunnels and Trolls) is fine - it enables you to do combat fast with more or less a single roll-off and a combat involving the entire party can be over in a couple of minutes. A game where there is bullet sponge design is fine when you've got a tense and tactical game where you're fighting for advantages; the combats may be long but they can be epic (4e springs to mind). But the combination of the two leads to combat that isn't fast, isn't tense, and isn't tactically interesting. The 5e skill system gives almost nothing. It's about as meh as it's possible to get. It's a simple "Roll 1d20, add your skill, and compare to the DM's target number measured on a simple pass/fail scale". The d20 is far, far too much variance for the range of skill levels on offer. But more importantly it's a simple pass/fail system with no success-with-consequences option and no scene framing mechanics (meaning that it's about as bland as it's possible to get). Finally due to the advantage/disadvantage system replacing modifiers the skill system actively prevents working out how to stack small advantages and modifiers to work out how to overcome actually hard single skill challenges. Except by magic of course. So it's about as bland as a skill system can be. The magic system is aggressively bland. Your magic has a huge impact on your setting. D&D 5e magic always works, and works reliably. There's never a drawback to casting spells other than that you might not have them available later that day (and it's a quasi spell point system so it's not about that specific spell). There's no hard choice to be made, for example by risking summoning something from the Dungeon Dimensions, there's no cost, and so the only hard choice you're ever making is resource management. Oh, and spells don't dramatically fail - they are always successfully cast. Like the skill system it's just fairly bland - but it also overwhelms the skill system by occasionally throwing round +10s and frequently making more mundane skill redundant (no need to be good at climbing if you can levitate). And that's basically it. Combat, skills, spells. There really isn't anything else to D&D. For example there are no hireling or domain management rules. There's no success with consequences. There's no social climbing. There's nothing in the way of incentivised interactions. The exploration rules are paper-thin. There's a very light virtues/flaws system. What it does right is that meh isn't a strong negative reaction and there's a lot that means anyone who wants something D&D flavoured gets something vaguely like what they want despite the fact they may have wildly different ideas of D&D.
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Jul 15, 2020 01:09
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Piell posted:Short story is 5e wasn't primarily designed to be good, it was primarily designed to "feel like D&D" (3.x in particular). The focus wasn't on making a good game. I strongly disagree with this. 5e does not feel remotely like 3.X to me. That's because when I bite into 3.5 I get one sensation above all others. Crunch. And lots of fiddly details. D&D's three main feelings are crunch, fiddly details, and having to plan out your builds. It also doesn't feel like 2e because when I bite into that I get THAC0 and NWPs as some of the things that make 2e distinctive. What "feels like D&D" means is taking 2e, 3.X, and even 4e, straining out all the parts that stood out from the other versions, and then running the whole thing through a blender. 4e fans like it the least because 4e fans like what made 4e stand out while the previous editions tried to work round it. Even if there's a surprising amount of 4e in there.
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Jul 15, 2020 01:57
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Terrible Opinions posted:I can kinda understand it for a video game, but I have a really hard time understanding a headspace where I'd want to watch non-interactive entertainment with an unsalted ricecracker as the protagonist. Harem anime starts out as a bad genre translation and the anime industry being frequently as risk averse as Hollywood while wanting to produce episodes like a 90s tv show looking for syndication. Start with a visual novel - essentially an electronic choose your own adventure starring a character who starts out as a barely salted ricecracker and some slightly mobile illustrations. We're going to instead use Mass Effect because more people have heard of it and because Commander Shepherd is a lightly salted ricecracker. Your personal Shepherd may have had a decent character because of their choices - but Shep as written needs to be able to cope with every possible choice. First our cheap anime studio is delighted to get the license to a moderately successful visual novel. That novel has fans that will watch for no other reason than they are fans, and the writing is at least not too cringeworthy and can get an audience. This, of course, is the same reason Hollywood is so keen on adaptions and remakes - there's a known market, lowering the risk that the thing will get no traction at all.Then come two different problems which have the same bad solution. The first is that in a visual novel you make choices, and in particular romance choices make your character yours and give them some personality - and no one wants the adaption to be a completely different character than theirs. The second is these anime studios are cheap and want to produce a lot of content for the cost. The simple way is that you write all the options. Yes, all of them. So in the anime adaptation of Mass Effect Shepherd would have romanced Liara, Ashley, Tali, Miranda, Jack, Samara, Kelly, Diana Allers, and probably Morinth and some version of Thane that's been made female. I mean you've got all the dialogue already written, which gives you more content. You've also managed to avoid disappointing anyone who wanted to see their favourite romance in full anime rather than simply static images. And ... you've turned your protagonist into someone who because they make all decisions doesn't really make any decision and certainly doesn't really have a type. And that's how you end up with an unsalted ricecracker of a protagonist. And then you let it go on long enough and this entire mess becomes its own genre.
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Jul 23, 2020 00:18
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Arivia posted:Why wouldn’t you like an entire movie of the dark apocalypse future from the previous Terminator films? Robots got punched, including Arnie, time shenanigans happened. I’m not sure what else you expect from that franchise? I guess it was missing some one-liners? Terminator Salvation went wrong when they let Christian Bale play John Connor. Casting 2009 Christian Bale in Terminator Salvation was the right decision - but he should have been playing the Terminator, and playing the Terminator as close to "Evil superstrong Batman" as possible. Complete with Batman-style growl. Cast Batman as John Connor and the tension is nowhere near the same.
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Jul 24, 2020 03:14
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Kai Tave posted:I've heard this particular argument so many times for actual decades now and I can honestly say the vast majority of people who earnestly buy into this are also the same people who most often play Wizards and other similarly complex classes, it's never really Fighter enthusiasts going "I'd like less options and abilities please." This is one of those situations where there is one part truth, one part deception. There are a significant number of players who want simple to play classes, a relatively low proportion of which post on message boards. In pre-4e D&D basically the only option these players were offered was fighters or barbarians; in my experience with late 4e there is a significant desire for the simple spellcaster that just points at things and burns them and it's come from both habitual fighter players who want simplicity and like breaking out of the mold and habitual wizard players who are glad to now have a simple to play wizard. Simple is wanted. Simple Fighter/Complex Wizard as a single axis on the other hand is an artifact created by D&D.
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Aug 18, 2020 20:06
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KingKalamari posted:Can we just all take a minute to appreciate how lovely Gygax's fantasy biological determinism worldview was? It's worse than that. You don't need races of inherently evil monsters to slay; you can use wild animals for that. You need races of inherently evil monsters to take their stuff. 80% of XP in oD&D came from loot, not from killing. And this is related to another issue. oD&D was a fantasy Western in the worst possible ways.
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Oct 16, 2020 00:11
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Libertad! posted:I see the whole "Hickman's Mormonism inspired him to create Kender" but I never see any primary sources, so I chalk it up more to scuttlebutt than more blatant inferences such as Goldmoon's hair and skin color. Yes I know that Christianity says that theft is wrong, but in terms of sinning in fiction doesn't rate that much worse than other non-sexual crimes in Dragonlance and Mormon fiction to the point that they'd censor it like they do mentions of sex. It may very easily be just Hickman's personal reservations on the issue, religion or no. Like how some people may view drug-dealing as a greater evil than murder and theft, or infidelity to be as bad as murder, and some may be less willing to occupy the headspace of such a character in an elfgame. I wouldn't know Mormon theology if I fell over it - but Kender more strike me as a case of bad RP sucking than anything specifically to do with the Mormons. They're absolutely tailor made for that jerk who thinks that it's funny to steal from the party to be given excuses for doing so - and to such a precise level that I don't think there can be a second motivation.
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Oct 26, 2020 11:02
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Halloween Jack posted:You answered your own question! If I knew there were kender around, I'd put some traps out. And the only chance a kender survives in a party I'm in is if we're using them to detect traps. If they spot the trap before triggering it that just means they are reusable.
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Oct 26, 2020 23:13
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Tendales posted:The trouble with that theory, I think, is that success actually hurts them worse than it helps them. If they establish a precedent that you can buy a contract without its liabilities, every single license holder is going to do a corporate shuffle and stop paying Disney their licensing tithes. Contract lawyers are already lining up, knives out. Even success for Disney makes no sense given the legal fees likely to be involved.
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Nov 25, 2020 02:18
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Bruceski posted:It was N. The language for the others was intentionally dismissive. This is not how I remember it. Or more accurately the message round G was "stop dumping on the people you call Rollplayers. What they do is actually pretty cool and should be thought of more". It came out of a 90s White Wolf mindset with screeds about "Roleplaying not Rollplaying" used as part of the game to justify lovely rules, and Ron Edwards was trying to rehabilitate G.
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Nov 30, 2020 04:26
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Tibalt posted:I think it's because WOTC did want an unquestionable evil enemy to fight, like Nazis and Zombies. I think it's better than half measures ("All Gnolls are Nazis! Wait, poo poo-") but it's still stupid. The thing is you do not need to tie an unquestionable evil to a race. If you want to tell me the Order of Tiamat are Nazis, fine. Just don't make them a species. And if you want to make an evil species make them demons trying to invade and set up in the Prime Material. And sending small numbers that warp the land around them, claim land, and make sure ordinary people can't survive on territory they've claimed. (Any comparison to demonic homesteaders is entirely intentional).
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Mar 23, 2021 20:18
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theironjef posted:This goalpost shift has been tried and it just results in people going to bat for demons not being monolithic either. The answer is twofold. The Nazis weren't monolithic either - they were a bunch of backstabbing megalomaniac pricks - but they were still Nazis. Them not being a monolith adds far more hooks but they are still Nazis. The second part is I don't care whether someone is kind to animals. If they are trying to terraform our planet into something we can't live on again it doesn't really matter whether they are monolithic, they are inimical to our life. "Not a monolith" doesn't mean something shouldn't be fought.
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Mar 23, 2021 23:21
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