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Its core mechanics are pretty well streamlined, the Charms that go on top of those mechanics aren't that great and like to break their own streamlining rules. Not super appealing as a whole package as opposed to regular 3E, not really possible to patch piecemeal into 3E (except for a couple small but cool systems) because its mechanics are different enough that 3E's existing Charms barely apply. I wish they'd just sat down and made a proper 3.5th or 4th edition rather than made Essence, but I guess it satisfies somebody.
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Jun 25, 2021 00:00
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D&D 5e, 13th Age, and Pathfinder 2e are basically the same game with varying levels of care applied to different elements that happened to interest the designers.
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Sep 28, 2021 05:33
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fool of sound posted:I'm curious as to what elements you think were a product of designer care in 5e? A lot of stuff, actually, like action economy and bonus stacking, along with a deliberately minimalistic approach to character building (i.e. you pick a single subclass rather than a dozen modular class feats). Mearls claimed that 5e was taking a lot from 4e and wasn't lying - a lot of decision streamlining and QoL carried over, albeit deliberately obfuscated under extremely legalistic "natural language" rules.
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Sep 28, 2021 05:38
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The purest distillation of 13th Age being like that for me is a sidebar somewhere that's like "you should sometimes contrive situations so your 1d12 greataxe barbarian has to use a 1d4 dagger instead, for no particular reason".
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Dec 2, 2021 05:34
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potatocubed posted:I sympathise with this point of view because nothing in the game is real* until it enters the 'shared imagination space', to use a term that makes me cringe. If a thing about your character only exists in your head, then it might as well not exist at all. Like, the purpose of e.g. a dark secret is to be revealed, not to give your character a reason to act in a secretive manner. Well, here's the text from the book: Situational Weapon Use Our basic weapon dice rules support the traditional idea that bigger weapons deal more damage. But we’ve moved away from that a touch with characters like the rogue, and Rob thinks there are other situations when it is fun to go ahead and flip the dice you get from your weapons. When the action in the story backs it up, Rob sometimes flips the dice you can get from a weapon, saying “This is a job for daggers” and letting the character roll the same damage dice as their sword or axe normally uses, while ruling that the axe and sword are too big for the situation and will use smaller dice like those of a dagger. Examples include being grabbed by a monster, or fighting in a tight pit in the darkness, or cutting your way out of a monster’s stomach. In each of these situations, the visuals of the story suggest that the best thing to do would be to draw a dagger or small weapon and fight or cut your way out. It feels cool. It makes sense from the story. And if you use this optional rule in memorable situations, you’ll have players who get interested in having magic daggers available to complement their normal weapons. And magic daggers? They’re quirky little bastards. I never let players get out of a jam this easily. Being forced to use a small-dice weapon every once in a while keeps the brawny barbarian from taking their big axe for granted. We agree that’s it’s a good thing to tell characters they should be using their daggers at times instead of their other weapons. And I see Jonathan’s point, lodged ever so lightly in the players’ backs. Maybe I’ll do it his way sometimes.
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Dec 3, 2021 10:00
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My absolute favorite piece of writing in WTF, and possibly in any RPG sourcebook ever, is as follows:W, T, F posted:Strong Mechanical Support. A Gift with "strong" mechanical support, on the
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Jan 14, 2022 06:49
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Rolling to just check if something happens or not without immediately being on the hook to complicate the results is perfectly fine. I like being able to ask for a skill check to just see if a player knows a guy or can get around an obstacle the easy way or whatever.
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May 4, 2022 20:37
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Splicer posted:A properly designed "fiddly" system has an easy fallback for when you just don't feel like coming up with something, e.g. the modiphius systems have "Grab a <particular release's name for threat> for use later", and the FFG funny dice has "Take some stress". That's specifically the poo poo I don't like because it turns routine exercise/acknowledgment of a given character's skills into a threat and therefore makes me think twice before asking for so much as a knowledge check. I can understand making every roll really count in strategic terms as a goal but I extremely don't share it. Now, "skill challenge" situations in which each PC can do one thing of consequence a week and they have three weeks to prep for the enemy army, or something, sure, but as an indelible aspect of the dice themselves?
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May 4, 2022 21:23
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CitizenKeen posted:Once I started treating binary rolls not as "pass/fail", but as "succeed/succeed with cost", where a player was guaranteed to do whatever they wanted and were just rolling to see if they could do it without things getting wild, I started calling for rolls a lot more. I do that some of the time (like, a roll to see if some basically-trivial task is completed quickly enough, or if someone can get by some obstacle without being injured by it) but I'd be pretty exasperated if that was just how stat or skill checks all had to work. Sometimes "you fail" is a perfectly fine twist on its own!
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May 5, 2022 01:35
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Even if you never roll in the 8-10 range, just seeing that someone else has +5 to your +2, whether it's turning up in the Roll20 chatlog or being announced as people do mental math at the table, is going to have an impact.
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May 5, 2022 06:06
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The 2E nWoD games are regrettably often sidegrades because while they expand and refine the setting in cool ways and fix a lot of longstanding problems they often can't help but loading down the base supernatural templates themselves with like a dozen-odd weird powers and rules exceptions that all have their own bespoke resolution systems and get dumped into your lap before you've put a single dot in a Discipline. Werewolf: the Forsaken 2E is probably the worst for this; I think a freshly-made werewolf PC has more to remember about their own special capabilities than a freshly-made Solar Exalt, and that's before you give the werewolf any Gifts. That said the nWoD is simply my favorite setting to play in and the rules are basically fine, like you can either use group beats or ignore beats entirely and make a few changes to how some values are calculated and you're basically in business. A lot of systems that look too fiddly at a glance end up pretty rewarding to fiddle with in play, especially Mage 2E's spellcasting rules.
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May 5, 2022 20:32
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I never got to play Weapons of the Gods but I thought it was pretty cool when I read it. IIRC the basic "Strike" stat that governed accuracy/defense was too strong or easy to get or something in the corebook, but supplements tuned it down not by changing the rules per se but adding fairly common effects that could flatten/even out/negate it in various contests.
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May 9, 2022 20:30
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Nobilis is very slick, but I wish that your miraculous action's base "strength" for the purpose of overcoming opposition wasn't also how flexible the trait generating the action could be. In a weird repetition of, like, classic White Wolf dot-based chargen, starting with 4/0 or 0/4 is just much more appealing than starting with 2/2 because in either case you're going to have the same sized menu of options to apply to narrative situations, but in the former case your action is much more likely to win out in a conflict than the latter. I want Nobilis 3E but it's got, like, something sliiightly more rigorous than "flurries" for adjudicating how often a given action takes effect/a given character can affect things, and a flatter or totally flat power curve such that a properly-worded Domain 1 miracle can and will stalemate with a Domain 5 miracle until and unless one character buys more Strike than the other.
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May 14, 2022 17:01
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MonsieurChoc posted:I remember when they were doing the previews for Mummy, theys aid they were brinking back powers that changed the dice Tn and I went "...why?" In fact we know why: it was to make a rhetorical splash.
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Jun 19, 2022 05:57
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The Lore "introduce a fact" action in Exalted 3e is extremely strange since nothing else in the game works like that and determining whether you're allowed to introduce a given fact at all and what the difficulty of introducing that fact should be basically comes down to the book making jazz hands at the storyteller. Finally, there is a separate action called "challenge a fact" which has nothing to do with the narrative editing roll and is just about checking to see if your character realizes something someone else is telling them is wrong or not. I would have much preferred that Lore just work like the other skills where you'd roll it to see if you succeeded at an appropriate challenge, or failing that for narrative editing to be baked into the game at a deeper level such that you could use Larceny to know a local fence or War to determine that the neighboring nation is very bad at dealing with cavalry charges or similar.
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Aug 20, 2022 03:48
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Solasta is a charming little game that I haven't had time to finish but whose implementation really impresses me. Besides fiddly inventory stuff like having a free hand for somatic components it also pays a lot of attention to elevation and lighting, such that you really start caring about having torches or environmental light sources going to stop all your attacks from having disadvantage. I think Solasta actually stands as proof that 5e IS written with a lot of rigor, because while they've had to invent their own subclasses they haven't had to invent their own combat rules in pretty much any case. The actual problems with the game are matters of ideology more so than craft.
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Sep 1, 2022 17:18
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ninjoatse.cx posted:Only play Dwarves. All problems solved I think I ended up with like half-elf, halfling (the subrace with darkvision), elf (wisdom), elf (int) for this reason. But there's that big fight that gives you some human NPCs to control alongside your party so you gotta have a care anyway.
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Sep 1, 2022 17:40
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Good-Evil is pretty easy to define and apply consistently, as it broadly refers to whether you'll go out of your way to aid others, go along to get along, or harm others for your own gain. Law-Chaos is totally incoherent, which is good insofar as alignment restrictions with mechanical weight exist but bad insofar as people want to have conversations rather than sing songs in which words have tonality but not meaning.
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Sep 3, 2022 18:19
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Doctor Zaius posted:I'd argue that Law-Chaos is coherent, but only in the context of the old Moorcock one-axis stuff. Of course, it was in service of 'lawful civilization is the only bastion of goodness against the chaotic hordes of the Other' but it was coherent. That's true, the original Law/Chaos is plenty consistent so long as we correctly understand "lawful" to have the same meaning as "white". Most of my criticism is for the horizontal axis of the classic 3x3, where there's supposedly a difference between being Lawfully and Chaotically Good or whatever.
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Sep 4, 2022 16:57
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Tulip posted:Yeah I think this is largely correct and if anything feeds into me and Tuxedo Catfish treating the alignments as fundamentally alien to any actual, meaningful ethics. I don't know that I'd want to play such a game, I'm not sure I've got players that would be in a place for it, but I could imagine writing a pretty decent book that treats that more explicitly, that the Elemental Plane of Law is ruled by frankly racist pieces of poo poo and the existence of Lawful Good Angels at all is kind of a problem. To clarify: In the original D&D in which law and chaos were the only alignments, they were a pretty clear proxy for the battle lines drawn in the course of colonial conquest. In any modern or even semi-modern version of D&D that features the full 3x3 grid, law/chaos is completely void of any philosophical or ethical content. It kind of has an aesthetic resonance where it's like monochrome vs. rainbow, geometric vs. wavy, etc, but that's it. Best simply ignored and/or removed.
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Sep 4, 2022 18:10
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Anyway, the only good version of "law" vs. "chaos" was of course in the 4th edition of D&D, in which the big metaphysical dipole was between the abstraction of the astral sea on one hand and the raw materiality of the elemental chaos on the other.
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Sep 4, 2022 18:24
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Broadly I would expect increased fiddliness and possibility-of-failure to, as a reward, offer increased versatility or adaptability to changing circumstances rather than raw numerical throughput or power. Like, your guy can do good single target or good AoE but certain behind-the-scenes things have to line up to let you make the transition smoothly or you might end up doing either worse or at greater cost than if you'd specialized properly. But, there should be a certain baseline of complexity and resource expenditure that everyone buys into akin to blood points in a vampire game or rechargeable powers in D&D.
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Sep 22, 2022 20:52
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What if it was an exactly 9 player game so that each player could be a different alignment and it was a big social experiment?
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Oct 1, 2022 18:45
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Xiahou Dun posted:Is the experiment to see when the first real-world fistfight happens or…? After the game you ask an impartial observer if they can figure out even one player's alignment from that character's in-game dialogue and actions.
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Oct 1, 2022 19:14
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Better than its reputation and primarily dragged down by bad actors? Sure, that sounds like 4E. Absolutely, yes. Like 4E, the prequels were the only logical development of the series given what had come before, and their actual flaws were largely incidental to the highly ideological attacks against them. Eventually, an attempt was made to appease the audience launching those ideological attacks, and - surprise! - the result was just utter dreck.
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Dec 17, 2022 03:13
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neonchameleon posted:"The only logical development" is utter nonsense. Before they came out I assumed that the Clone Wars were about clones of Jedi. Which was part of why the Jedi were driven into hiding. The only prequel film that was close to the OT was Revenge of the Sith; Anakin had to be a war hero, to have twins, to be corrupted to the dark side by Palpatine, and to be left for dead. (But he didn't have to become a school shooter). The only logical development was to depict the Old Republic as a slave state that fell to its own internal contradictions and the Jedi as complicit.
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Dec 17, 2022 04:58
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Terrible Opinions posted:I don't think that's why most people didn't like the prequels though. Ah, but did "most people" not like them? Or was the supposed controversy actually localized to a contingent of reactionary superfans? OSCAR ISAAC: "Somehow, caster supremacy returned."
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Dec 17, 2022 07:30
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They're mostly memeable because they're good. All the Plinkett stuff is just the equivalent of those inane but enduring WoW comparisons.
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Dec 17, 2022 21:01
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Tulip posted:Please, please have higher standards for movies. There are good movies out there. You don't have to live like this. I have pretty high standards for games, too, and there's a ton of metrics on which 4e falls short or just fails when it comes to slow resolution, tedious accountancy, poor monster balance, feat and item bloat, etcetera. Years down the line we can look back and enumerate flaw after flaw. Nevertheless, it was good, and I stand by the originals->prequels/pre-4e->4e comparison. There was simply no logical other place to go, and we're all better off for having journeyed there.
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Dec 17, 2022 22:01
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It's just a little tiresome to roll up to the box office and see that they're now screening Iron Man 27, yet another paean about the essential goodness of the CIA.
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Dec 17, 2022 22:20
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Tulip posted:I mean my stance on 4e is that it's the best DnD, which still makes it a C- game at best. I've played a lot more 2nd & 3rd than 4th DnD and the idea that 2nd & 3rd offered any particular insight, vision, or interest that was lost in 4th seems absurd to me. 4th preserved all of that, but with a much greater degree of clarity and legibility. What was lost was not anything in 3rd ed, but the illusion that there was something going on. I broadly agree with you on this, and it's where I'm coming from re: Star Wars. In both cases an increasingly inflated perception of the importance of, basically, wizards was getting in the way of what the piece of media was actually about or worth paying attention to for.
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Dec 18, 2022 00:20
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In the films, (almost) no one cares about slavery but it comes up constantly. Critics and fans alike pick up on it; if you listen to the We Hate Movies review of TPM you'll hear them be like "why the gently caress does slavery keep coming up??" as a common refrain. Why do they? Well, it was there from the very first movie. Luke meets Obi-Wan in the course of chasing down an escaped slave. So in fact the prequels are a return to form, a corrective.
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Dec 18, 2022 19:20
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Terrible Opinions posted:I know this point has already been argued to death but 4e's grid dependence and pretty strict turn based setup would translate really badly to mmo mechanics. It should have been adapted into several final fantasy tactics alikes, but sadly there was just one not especially great psp game. This is completely accurate, but I gotta say the 4e-based MMO they put together was pretty good. I understand it's a pay-to-win nightmare now but I had fun leveling a control wizard years ago.
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Dec 22, 2022 00:02
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It'd cut down on both mechanical customization and roleplaying dramatically, but you could just cut the Gordian Knot and run 4e as-is except there are no feats at all and no magic items at all. You'd have to bundle in a few inherent bonus-style rules to make up for enhancement bonuses and expertise feats and so on, and characters on the whole would be much weaker, but that second bit's not really a problem since well-played 4e characters tend to punch above their weight class by default.
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Dec 22, 2022 06:07
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My main worry would actually be for out-of-combat roleplaying, since feats are often the mechanism by which you access stuff like ritual magic, telepathy, frequently-useless-but-thematically-appropriate damage resistances, etc. You'd either have to just write that stuff off along with the potential to build a radiant mafia, or start working out tolerance levels of handing out trinket feats or just handwaving narrative stuff "One Unique Thing" style, and either way you're falling into the trap of actually having to roll up your sleeves and do game design rather than just sweep away some clutter and go for it.
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Dec 22, 2022 06:13
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PurpleXVI posted:4e impressed me by somehow having worse feats than 3e. In 3e I could more or less always find a feat that sounded cool or mechanically useful(even if only marginally), in 4e I just looked at the list of feats and regularly couldn't think of anything to pick. It was just such an insanely dull list that very rarely ever gave you interesting new options or changed how your class played. It was like they decided that the "get a +1 to a thing"-type of feats from 3e was what everyone wanted more of. Hmm, I agree that 4e feats were "worse" as in worse for the game, but that's because of how much better and more appealing they were to take (and how many of them you got). 3e feats were mostly bad except for the occasional insane no-brainers like Natural Spell or various metamagic, and I guess the super proscribed fighter feat chains. 4e feats had some dull as dishwater math fixes but also a lot of dramatic concept- or build- enabling special qualities like Wintertouched or the Vistani ____ line or what have you. A big pain point of 4e was wanting to grab that cool stuff but having to eat your vegetables and buy Implement Proficiency: Accurate Orb first.
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Dec 22, 2022 21:30
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I had an interesting discussion recently about the extent to which 4e does or doesn't allow for creative problem solving and/or furnish you with "real" powers and spells as opposed to abstract combat buttons which not only can not but in fact must not be allowed to have narrative effects extrapolated from their descriptions rather than do exactly what they say on the box and nothing more. A lot of 4e's detractor but also a nonzero number of its fans believe that 4e's combat takes place in a VR world in which everything's a glowing wireframe with no properties except those explicitly coded into it, such that underbrush can't be lit on fire, walls can't be knocked down, etc. So here's the same spell in 4e and 3.5e, with special rules relevant to the 3.5e version included (it's what you get if you follow the "Figment" hyperlink):  What strikes me about these is that the spells are like 98% identical in their actual narrative effect. Obviously they have slightly different sizes and durations, but they have the same basic in-combat and out-of-combat use cases. There's one salient difference in the operation of the magic itself: the 3.5e wall only gives you a will save to disbelieve it if you examine it closely but won't stop you from walking straight through, while the 4e wall gives you a will save to disbelieve once you get sufficiently close but prevents you from walking through until you pass that save. We could imagine a game in which both spells exist side-by-side, with one representing a more complete but "brittle" illusion than the other; the 4e-style wall totally fools your senses and proprioception such that even drumming up the courage to run face-first through the wall (feeling all the while like you're about to just hit your head) is a test of your willpower. Now, it's a fact of life in the RPG business that special powers are often going to have the most exacting rules detail when those powers pertain to combat because combat tends to have the highest stakes; yeah, yeah, it's pretty obvious how a hologram works, but what happens if I conjure one right in front of someone trying to shoot me? But both editions devote most of their spells' wordcount to solving those exact questions. For each power, we're immediately learning casting time down to the atomic game action, maximum dimensions, saving throw/non-AC defense checked, consequences on line of sight, etc. So what is it about the 4e-style wall that made a lot of people feel like they just weren't allowed to deploy it creatively or that somehow wasn't a "real" illusion, if that phrasing makes sense? Part of it's probably because it's missing all the fiddly extra rules about illusion magic generally, the specific properties of "figments", and the general rules for "rolling to disbelieve" that exist elsewhere in the 3.5e book, even though a lot of that stuff is in fact condensed into and implicit within the 4e wall (e.g. like a "figment", it becomes see-through once it fails to overcome your will). But that level of detail isn't actually incompatible with 4e. The only problem is page space. We can imagine a 4th edition in which every power and spell was lovingly detailed with a bunch of hypotheticals and explanations (mention of fireballs igniting combustible material, cones of cold freezing water so that it becomes walkable, warlord oversight accelerating the pace of manual labor, etc) exceeeept that'd cost you page space. If you want to double the text packed into every wizard power on average, what do you cut out1? A 4e that literally only contained Fighter, Rogue, Cleric, and Wizard but that lovingly detailed all the possible use cases and incidental environmental effects of each power those classes had would be an interesting thought experiment but, you know, a lot of people like warlords and warlocks and so on. Another thing is, a lot of games have illusion powers which don't require this level of exacting detail. Like, here's all you need to know if you want to create an illusory wall in Vampire: the Masquerade:  (There's a second power that's like one sentence long that specifies it lets you create an illusion fooling multiple senses - e.g. a wall that feels like brick if you just brush your hand against it) but is still nonsolid) This probably gives you less detail than the 4e version of the power, but I think because there's no background cultural expectation of ruthless, legalistic bean-counting for the sake of ekeing out every tiny advantage, or of adversarial GMing that calls on players to cite chapter and verse to prove that they're allowed to get out of some jam or other, there's no actual reason to go to the trouble. I think one of the problems plaguing D&D specifically is that there's an expected level of antagonistic rules exegesis that you don't see in many other games and that has haunted D&D from edition to edition. Take this example from 3.5E (I've cut the spell level, range, duration, etc. stuff for space but they're all just reflex saves vs. fire damage):  My question to you is: does Scorching Ray set things on fire? Can you burn down a barn with Scorching Ray? It doesn't say it ignites combustibles, while a lot of other fire spells do... maybe it can't, because it's like a high-intensity short-duration laser. But then, it's a fiery ray. But then, the "Flaming Weapon" magic item says that it adds 1d6 fire damage on a hit but also neglects to mention that ignites things, so maybe I can start a campfire with Burning Hands but not with Scorching Ray or my +1 Flaming Longsword? I think in most games this would be a ridiculous question, but in the context of D&D I actually do find myself wondering if maybe, just maybe, there's a real and intended game-mechanical difference between incendiary and non-incendiary fire. And this has carried on all the way to 5th edition, where we're doing Biblical exegesis on whether a Melee Weapon Attack is the same as an Attack with a Melee Weapon. 1. The fighter's and rogue's powers in their entirety, of course! Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 02:51 on Dec 23, 2022 |
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Dec 23, 2022 02:49
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hyphz posted:I mean, the bigger complaint there would be the bit about "it lasts until the end of your next turn". Which makes it useless outside of combat, since a wall lasting for 6 seconds won't make any difference outside of combat timing. This was the bigger complaint - the scaling down of many utility spells in this way. It's Sustain Minor, so as long as you concentrate it'll last... uh, I forget, I think the "encounter" duration might default to 5 or 10 minutes out of combat proper?
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Dec 23, 2022 03:05
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Splicer posted:Encounter is purely how long until you can cast it again, it isn't a duration except for things that say "last until the end of the encounter". That wall will last until you stop sustaining it, and after 5 minutes you can pop up another wall and sustain it with a crunched move action, and 5 minutes later a third wall sustained with your crunched action. No, this is a daily power that says you can sustain it until the end of the encounter, so I'm pretty sure you can concentrate it for up to 5 minutes and then it vanishes. I don't think your plan works for a sustainable encounter power, either, because it's not clear to me that taking a "sustain" action is compatible with taking a short rest.
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Dec 23, 2022 19:41
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Splicer posted:yes but have you considered that I can't read I couldn't tell if you were joking and thought I was walking into a trap by writing that response! Nickoten posted:Honestly that does strike me as a legitimate example of a 4e spell having less problem-solving and I don't think inferring things not in the book really helps. That said, that is still a really good comparison to look at because clearly the duration is doing a lot of work there, much moreso than 3.5e's verbose rules writing style. What do you mean by "less problem-solving", though? The wall's temporary rather than indefinite, but at that point you're just haggling, right? It'd be more convenient if it was longer lasting, and also more convenient if it was per encounter, or whatever, but likewise the 3e spell could be level 2 or 3 instead of 4, or rewrite the memories of onlookers. And there are indefinite illusions in 4e, they just have ritual cast times. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 20:24 on Dec 23, 2022 |
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Dec 23, 2022 20:22
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