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Bhaal posted:6 attacks before round 1 at level 7: "Rngr5/Ftr2:Ambuscade atk, 2 normal atks, bonus action atk via TWF or Polearm Master, then Action Surge for 2 more atks" I'm not seeing how this is 6 attacks and not 5. Doesn't Ambuscade just allow you to take the attack action, so that's 2 attacks, plus another from dual wield bonus action for 3 attacks, then Action Surge for 2 more for 5 total?
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Sep 9, 2015 21:25
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Take a level dip into ranger followed by three levels of assassin rogue, ambush the target and roll well on initiative to get 2 critical sneak attacks and insta-gib the boss. Meanwhile, pure ranger becomes slightly more boring in combat because they lost spells and animal companions, so every turn is "move and attack". I feel like I'd be better off writing my own system, because this is an absolute mess. Vanguard Warden fucked around with this message at 21:48 on Sep 9, 2015 |
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Sep 9, 2015 21:28
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GaryLeeLoveBuckets posted:I'm not seeing how this is 6 attacks and not 5. Doesn't Ambuscade just allow you to take the attack action, so that's 2 attacks, plus another from dual wield bonus action for 3 attacks, then Action Surge for 2 more for 5 total? I'm at the point where I'm going to chuck 5e on a shelf (I can't in good faith re-sell the books, lest some teenagers starting out get their hands on it), I'm just not sure where to turn to. My gaming group did some Zombie World (which I think was made by a goon) and they work great for us as one-shots but I think *World is not quite detailed/crunchy enough for what my group prefers. I'm going to have to look closer at 13th age or have a talk about trying out 4e again (our party size is 6-7, and last time we tried it we ran into the "combat takes forever" problem quite a bit, so we'd need to come up with our own adjustments to try that again) Where do people go to keep an ear to the ground on newer or less mainstream systems?
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Sep 9, 2015 21:42
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Bhaal posted:I'm at the point where I'm going to chuck 5e on a shelf (I can't in good faith re-sell the books, lest some teenagers starting out get their hands on it), I'm just not sure where to turn to. My gaming group did some Zombie World (which I think was made by a goon) and they work great for us as one-shots but I think *World is not quite detailed/crunchy enough for what my group prefers. I'm going to have to look closer at 13th age or have a talk about trying out 4e again (our party size is 6-7, and last time we tried it we ran into the "combat takes forever" problem quite a bit, so we'd need to come up with our own adjustments to try that again) For what it's worth, my friends and I liked DW a lot but some also struggled a bit with the lack of hard, game-y crunch. 13A strikes a happy medium between DW & 4e for us. It's not perfect and some classes aren't very good but it's a better 5e than 5e imo.
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Sep 9, 2015 21:47
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Bhaal posted:Yeah I think you're right, I was wondering as well if those feats only gave 1 attack, but really can't remember their specifics. I figured the guy asking Mearls who clocked it as 6 had worked it all out, and it got a "Yes" response, so maybe they all overlooked it. To be fair, with a party of 6-7 a vast majority of systems are going to take a while when it comes to anything turn based.
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Sep 9, 2015 21:52
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I know the dead horse is pretty much atomized by this point, but they really don't have any loving idea what they're doing, do they?
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Sep 9, 2015 21:57
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gradenko_2000 posted:The Unearthed Arcana article is finally out, featuring a rebuilt Ranger because the original one suuuuuucks I don't know what bugs me more, that they just smooshed the Ranger and the 4e Shaman together in a pretty half-assed way, or that it's really obvious that the main reason the World Speaker Shaman didn't get an equivalent class build in this is because they didn't have a premade monster there to represent some kind of nature elemental the way they had monsters handy for "spirit bear" and "spirit eagle".
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Sep 9, 2015 22:22
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Bhaal posted:Yeah I think you're right, I was wondering as well if those feats only gave 1 attack, but really can't remember their specifics. I figured the guy asking Mearls who clocked it as 6 had worked it all out, and it got a "Yes" response, so maybe they all overlooked it.
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Sep 9, 2015 22:26
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I'm going to revel in the hilarity that they go "whoah, gotta watch the balance" when it comes to letting a pet dog attack simultaneously, but are just fine with "Spellcasting: this class casts spells" as a feature.
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Sep 9, 2015 22:35
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This is incredible half-assed.
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Sep 9, 2015 23:00
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Here's a thought I just had about 5e, tell me if I'm being dumb: A few weeks back in this thread, someone posted a link to a stickied Reddit post on "What edition should I use?" that tried to take a balanced perspective on each. The cons it listed for 3.5 were the usual - caster supremacy and the like - but the strengths were what interested me more: "Huge variety of spells", "Wide range of character builds", "Lots of monsters", stuff like that. They pretty much all boiled down to "this game has a lot of splatbooks". That's completely accurate, far as I can tell, but the key here is that it's not as damning-with-faint-praise as it initially seems. Whenever folks who I generally respect and who like 3.5 talk about why they do, they tend to give examples of using a spell or a magic item in some goofy lateral thinking way to solve a problem unconventionally. That itself has some problems with casters (and folks rich enough to pretend to be casters) having agency vs. non-casters having DM-may-I, but I think it's a legitimate strength of the system that it has just so much material out there and thus enumerates such a huge possibility space. It's a sandbox full of classes or races or spells or feats or items that, even if a mere 1% make a player go "Holy poo poo, I want to make a character with THAT!", result in a lot of characters that people are proud of and passionate about. 5e doesn't have that, as far as I can tell. For all that it's smoothed out some of the most egregious flaws of 3.5's design, it lacks the thing that could actually make it work well as a system provided you had good players and good DMs and the moon was fading gibbous and the floor was made of lava. It lacks a shitload of stuff. And with the skeleton crew approach to its design, where a tiny team makes half-hearted rules updates and occasionally farms out books to third parties, I'm not sure that problem will ever be solved.
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Sep 9, 2015 23:26
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Yeah the main strength of 3.5e is that it has so much stuff that statistically some of it is really well balanced against each other. A binder/swordsage/warlock/factotum party or whatever is cool and has a lot of stuff they can do without anyone overshining. Also, 3.5's splats without any core books are far better balanced than the reverse.
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Sep 9, 2015 23:29
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The Real Foogla posted:Partywide gimmick: everyone starts as level 1 Ranger and then progresses in their "normal" class. I generally refer to this as the "KOTOR Rule©"; start your campaign with everyone as Rogue or Fighter up to level 2, then you become a ~real~ class 
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Sep 9, 2015 23:35
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Jenny Angel posted:And with the skeleton crew approach to its design, where a tiny team makes half-hearted rules updates and occasionally farms out books to third parties, I'm not sure that problem will ever be solved. It won't be. Instead they'll continue to print things like this alternate Ranger test, where the features either don't work, are bad, or are far more useful/better for classes that dip into it. When I first opened it and saw it was a 1-5 "test" I wondered, "Really, is it so hard to flush out a martial class from 1-20 that they have to piecemeal it like this?" Upon reading it, the answer for them is apparently "Yes."
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Sep 9, 2015 23:39
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Generic Octopus posted:It won't be. Instead they'll continue to print things like this alternate Ranger test, where the features either don't work, are bad, or are far more useful/better for classes that dip into it. On that topic, has anyone actually run 5e without the "optional" multiclassing rules? How'd that go?
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Sep 9, 2015 23:49
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Bhaal posted:Rangers having best hit dice is very much intentional, citing survivability of Aragorn (from movies, not books even I have been laughing about this for the past hour. It's Kindergarten Playground logic "No seriously he's super tough cause he didn't die!"
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Sep 10, 2015 00:18
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P.d0t posted:On that topic, has anyone actually run 5e without the "optional" multiclassing rules? How'd that go? On the one hand, he's the only character that rolled his stats instead of using the array (and they were much higher for some reason), on the other hand he's a 3/3 ranger/wizard. So pretty meh. Edit: Conan was crucified for a few days. What should his HD be?
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Sep 10, 2015 00:24
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All Rangers have an innate +5 to banging elf chicks
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Sep 10, 2015 00:24
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Bhaal posted:Yeah I think you're right, I was wondering as well if those feats only gave 1 attack, but really can't remember their specifics. I figured the guy asking Mearls who clocked it as 6 had worked it all out, and it got a "Yes" response, so maybe they all overlooked it. If you want crunchier, your best bets are 4e, 13th Age, and Strike! You can check out the thread for Strike! here on SA if you want to know more. As for where to hear about things, I read the monthly chat thread and the kickstarter thread here and that's where I get most of my gaming news. I also read a couple of blogs but the games they talk about I mostly hear about here first.
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Sep 10, 2015 00:31
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Bhaal posted:Yeah I think you're right, I was wondering as well if those feats only gave 1 attack, but really can't remember their specifics. I figured the guy asking Mearls who clocked it as 6 had worked it all out, and it got a "Yes" response, so maybe they all overlooked it. You could streamline 4th edition by disallowing immediate powers that aren't key class abilities and/or using average damage rolls for everything. You might need to toss in an extra encounter power of the character's highest level to make up for the loss in killing potential, or you might need to let everyone use second wind as a minor or free action. Just play it by ear and be willing to adjust to your group's taste a little bit. And the first couple encounters might be trivial or impossible through no fault of the players. Probably not, though, because while immediate powers are a cornerstone of optimized builds you can still field a solid party without them. Those changes can cut both ways, though. Immediate powers effectively insert a new turn every time they're used, and they slow down existing turns because you have to wait a second after every declaration to see if an immediate has been triggered. Without immediate powers demanding the players' attention they might zone out until their turn comes back around, which means they take longer to play their turn. Average damage rolls replace a dice roll and a simple addition with a lookup, potentially cutting a few seconds from every turn. But rolling damage dice really hits the D&D feeling.
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Sep 10, 2015 00:36
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The hatred of rolling damage dice is really weird. One of my character's defining moments involved damage dice. If turns are taking too long the dm needs to start skipping people.
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Sep 10, 2015 00:45
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Rolling damage is fun and takes 5 seconds. Unless it's the gm rolling for a metric fuckton of goblins or something. As I said before, in my experience it's tactics (fun, unless someone's being a tool) and adding up 50 attack modifiers (needless busywork most of the time) that slows down combat.
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Sep 10, 2015 00:57
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Yeah, rolling wasn't a problem but with 4E we just had a couple too many people who couldn't pass up all the opportunities available to optimize and coordinate the party's actions, and would agonize when the consequences of suboptimal positioning or whatever became realized. We have let's call it a dynamic group when it comes to their capacity to powergame and think tactically, and I'm not against giving some people a nudge when they're overlooking a class ability that they should be leaning on or whatever. But with 4e those little for-your-benefit pieces of advice are just all over the place and you easily end up with table coaching happening every round to maximize aoe, keep all the enemies stuck to a tank, etc. Our group gets along famously and has for many years, but I couldn't find a socially palatable way of getting us to stop degenerating into play-by-committee with 4e, so we just moved off it. Also all the markers and status things. The best we came up with was little colored rubber bands that we'd use to decorate the minis like they just got off the plane at Honolulu (red = bloodied, purple=marked, etc). That stuff was a bear to keep track of after about 4th level.
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Sep 10, 2015 01:21
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Splicer posted:Rolling damage is fun and takes 5 seconds. Unless it's the gm rolling for a metric fuckton of goblins or something. As I said before, in my experience it's tactics (fun, unless someone's being a tool) and adding up 50 attack modifiers (needless busywork most of the time) that slows down combat. Condition tracking and interrupts/reactions killed 4e combat for my group, in addition to the huge amount of tactical discussion Edit: exactly the kind of discussion described above.
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Sep 10, 2015 01:31
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Bhaal posted:Yeah, rolling wasn't a problem but with 4E we just had a couple too many people who couldn't pass up all the opportunities available to optimize and coordinate the party's actions, and would agonize when the consequences of suboptimal positioning or whatever became realized. We have let's call it a dynamic group when it comes to their capacity to powergame and think tactically, and I'm not against giving some people a nudge when they're overlooking a class ability that they should be leaning on or whatever. But with 4e those little for-your-benefit pieces of advice are just all over the place and you easily end up with table coaching happening every round to maximize aoe, keep all the enemies stuck to a tank, etc. Our group gets along famously and has for many years, but I couldn't find a socially palatable way of getting us to stop degenerating into play-by-committee with 4e, so we just moved off it. On the one hand, it's awesome when there's a chain of reactions and counter-reactions in a desperate last-ditch battle with the BBEG. It's less fun when it happens every. single. encounter. 
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Sep 10, 2015 01:52
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Kurieg posted:I have been laughing about this for the past hour. It's Kindergarten Playground logic "No seriously he's super tough cause he didn't die!" I mean it's literally just the AD&D ranger, which was as plain as "I want to be Aragorn" without calling it that as they could make it. But then in AD&D the ranger was literally just flat out better then the fighter, period, at just about everything, intentionally.
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Sep 10, 2015 02:53
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Well I had this for an idea - What if there was a list of abilities and stuff that were akin to the Battlemaster Manoeuvres, but greatly expanded. They would be broken up into levels, and martial-focussed classes and subclasses could obtain varying sets of them. So Rogues, Rangers, Fighters could get lots of them, while Paladins could get a smaller array. So basically organised spells for martials. And it would go beyond "I hit the goblin 1d8 harder" and go more towards "I use the goblin as a throwing weapon" or "I Kool-Aid man through the wall" or "I ignore the Instant Death spell because I am That Tough"
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Sep 10, 2015 05:20
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Skellybones posted:Well I had this for an idea - What if there was a list of abilities and stuff that were akin to the Battlemaster Manoeuvres, but greatly expanded. They would be broken up into levels, and martial-focussed classes and subclasses could obtain varying sets of them. So Rogues, Rangers, Fighters could get lots of them, while Paladins could get a smaller array. So basically organised spells for martials. And it would go beyond "I hit the goblin 1d8 harder" and go more towards "I use the goblin as a throwing weapon" or "I Kool-Aid man through the wall" or "I ignore the Instant Death spell because I am That Tough" Just write your own game; even I'm ready to give up on polishing this turd.
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Sep 10, 2015 05:26
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Kurieg posted:I have been laughing about this for the past hour. It's Kindergarten Playground logic "No seriously he's super tough cause he didn't die!" I honestly think that they just gave him 2d6 because that's how it was in OD&D (I think? or some other edition?) and they didn't even realise that would make him the toughest class in the game until after they'd published. Then Mearls just said whatever excuse first popped into his head. I really like 5e so far but Mearls seem to be a bona fide idiot.
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Sep 10, 2015 05:34
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Skellybones posted:Well I had this for an idea - What if there was a list of abilities and stuff that were akin to the Battlemaster Manoeuvres, but greatly expanded. They would be broken up into levels, and martial-focussed classes and subclasses could obtain varying sets of them. So Rogues, Rangers, Fighters could get lots of them, while Paladins could get a smaller array. So basically organised spells for martials. And it would go beyond "I hit the goblin 1d8 harder" and go more towards "I use the goblin as a throwing weapon" or "I Kool-Aid man through the wall" or "I ignore the Instant Death spell because I am That Tough" This is called 'playing a Stalwart in 13th Age' (although the Stalwart is a fan class). Alternatively, 'playing a martial initiator in 3.5e'. Alternatively, 'playing 4e'.
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Sep 10, 2015 05:34
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Yeah I wasn't talking about 5E, I meant a different game, like those ones.
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Sep 10, 2015 05:34
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Skellybones posted:Yeah I wasn't talking about 5E, I meant a different game, like those ones. It's actually not a bad idea, but watch: someone will come in here and tell me "no really, a Power doing the exact same thing but having a different Class heading and/or Power Source matters because [charop shitheel reasons]" any second now.
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Sep 10, 2015 05:47
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P.d0t posted:It's actually not a bad idea, but watch: someone will come in here and tell me "no really, a Power doing the exact same thing but having a different Class heading and/or Power Source matters because [charop shitheel reasons]" any second now. Well I think "unified ability pools" in a class-based game are kind of boring in general, whether we're talking martial classes, magic classes, whatever. At that point I start to question why I'm bothering with classes at all instead of a point-based game of some sort. Like to take this over to the magic side of the coin, I think it's pretty lame how many "variant D&D spellcasters" there are that basically boil down to "you get these and these and these spells from the Grand Unified Spell List, plus some class abilities for flavor." What's a Sorcerer? Oh, he's a spellcaster that casts exactly the same loving spells as a Wizard, he just casts some of them more times and gets fewer of them overall. What's a Thrakminian Hexweaver? Oh, he's a spellcaster that gets the same spells as everyone up to level X and can get a +5 to Perform (Kazoo) 3/day. edit; to clarify, I think having a pool of "unified martial abilities" probably has a place in any sort of fantasy adventure RPG featuring multiple kinds of dudes with swords and knives but no magic, I just think that placing an emphasis on that sort of thing as "the thing martial classes excel at" isn't a very interesting way to go with things if you're making a class-based game. Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 06:20 on Sep 10, 2015 |
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Sep 10, 2015 06:12
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I think if we're talking about the 4th Edition paradigm, powers aren't really what separates classes. Role abilities and class features do that. Those things inform the kind of riders you should expect on a class' powers. But yeah, Strike! seems to go that direction a little bit, with Role and Class being divorced. The main point is like, if a Rogue is gonna be able to do a move that a Fighter can do and a Ranger can do a move that a Fighter can do and etc. ...like, why write 3 powers? Classes are gonna have stuff in common, why not embrace that and see if you can simplify the presentation?
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Sep 10, 2015 06:23
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Mh i think that a unified pool of abilities is okay as long as nobody gets all of them and having class features to differentiate classes as well is actually quite interesting.
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Sep 10, 2015 06:31
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P.d0t posted:I think if we're talking about the 4th Edition paradigm, powers aren't really what separates classes. Ehhhhhhhh. I mean, it's kind of a common way people blow off a lot of stuff in 4E, "pffff, wow yeah, a sword blow and a missile of arcane power, bet they both hit and push a square, wowee," but while there's some inevitable overlap there's a fair amount of distinction to be found. Unless I've missed something Rogues and Rangers are using Come and Get It, Fighters aren't doing that Rogue thing where they get to ride a monster around like Master Blaster, etc. You can say that I'm just cherry picking examples but "cut away a lot of the padding and fat and focus on the stuff that people like to cherry pick" is a thing I would have liked to see in a hypothetical 4E Revised or 4.X or whatever. The "4E paradigm" is a combination of role and class features which then in turn play off of an appropriate selection of powers, I don't think you can lay it all at the feet of one thing or dismiss the others out of hand.
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Sep 10, 2015 06:37
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well, by and large I'm talking about the "hit with a melee weapon, for as many [W]s as allowed this tier" powers. Like, gently caress, just make that an encounter power-level Rage Strike; you can use a specific power from your class or just expend the "slot" to do the generic  power. You could easily make that a class-spanning thing.
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Sep 10, 2015 06:45
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Bhaal posted:I'm at the point where I'm going to chuck 5e on a shelf (I can't in good faith re-sell the books, lest some teenagers starting out get their hands on it), I'm just not sure where to turn to. I'd look at Rules Cyclopedia D&D or AD&D 2e (or their respective free retroclones) for generic fantasy that's better than 5e but still plays fairly fast and still has enough crunch to grasp onto. If you want more crunch/player agency than that, you have some options, but it's a slippery slope towards 4e or reinventing it. I played 5e so loosely it feels like I should be running Dungeon World except to-hit, HP and AC numbers were set instead of the more vague "soft move" or "hard move". Strike! conceptually hits a lot of right notes for me, but the rules are wordy enough that I haven't really had the time to sit down and go through all of them, plus I'm getting to that point where I'm pretty tired of battlemaps and would rather run things loosely. Jenny Angel posted:Here's a thought I just had about 5e, tell me if I'm being dumb: I said mostly the same thing about Pathfinder: the "core" is pretty bad, but there's enough splat published for it that the (well-used/moderated) splat can also at the same time solve most of the balance problems. Sailor Viy posted:I honestly think that they just gave him 2d6 because that's how it was in OD&D The Strategic Review Vol 1 Num 2  Skellybones posted:Well I had this for an idea - What if there was a list of abilities and stuff that were akin to the Battlemaster Manoeuvres, but greatly expanded. They would be broken up into levels, and martial-focussed classes and subclasses could obtain varying sets of them. So Rogues, Rangers, Fighters could get lots of them, while Paladins could get a smaller array. So basically organised spells for martials. And it would go beyond "I hit the goblin 1d8 harder" and go more towards "I use the goblin as a throwing weapon" or "I Kool-Aid man through the wall" or "I ignore the Instant Death spell because I am That Tough" It's just another of 5e's long list of disappointments that they finally have a core mechanic for martials that they can poo poo out splat after splat with, except they give it to one archetype of one class and never expand on it.
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Sep 10, 2015 06:46
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gradenko_2000 posted:Strike! conceptually hits a lot of right notes for me, but the rules are wordy enough that I haven't really had the time to sit down and go through all of them, plus I'm getting to that point where I'm pretty tired of battlemaps and would rather run things loosely. This is pretty much where I'm at with Strike! as well, fwiw. One of the things that caused me to "hit the wall" with 4e was the amount of stuff that went into building monsters, only to be told "well if you're not making interesting terrain, traps, and hazards, and 2ndary objectives, the combat will still be grindy and boring." fffffffffff Like, playing 4e was always fun for me, but I hated DMing it, and my DMs always seemed to hate it, too.
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Sep 10, 2015 06:54
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P.d0t posted:well, by and large I'm talking about the "hit with a melee weapon, for as many [W]s as allowed this tier" powers. Like, gently caress, just make that an encounter power-level Rage Strike; you can use a power specific power from your class or just expend the "slot" to do the generic I mean yeah, I agree, some stuff could (and probably should) be consolidated. Generic "hit and do huge damage and nothing else" powers are pretty boring in general in my opinion, I wouldn't really lose a lot of sleep over that being turned into a general sort of thing. gradenko_2000 posted:I said mostly the same thing about Pathfinder: the "core" is pretty bad, but there's enough splat published for it that the (well-used/moderated) splat can also at the same time solve most of the balance problems. Pathfinder isn't a great game, but enough writers have thrown enough poo poo at the wall over the years that between that and any bits of backwards-compatible 3.X era stuff you care to port over that you can probably curate a halfway decent experience out of it. That sounds like way more effort and tedium than I want to go through for my pretend-elf playtimes, but compared to Next where there's basically nothing to curate from it winds up sounding like a better option. Like yeah, Pathfinder Fighters suck, but there's like Paths of War stuff and probably some sort of horrible mish-mash of stuff you can use to assemble a Fighter-like being that's better than the default. Next's Fighter sucks and the only real options you have are "homebrew like a motherfucker or don't roll Fighters." Or wait until Unearthed Arcana comes up with some ridiculous "we didn't playtest this at all" variant rules I guess.
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Sep 10, 2015 06:55
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