CuddlyZombie posted:

Welp I just wantered into TGD after staying in YCS TG threads and drat this is a good thread.

clockworkjoe posted:

clockworkjoe posted:

http://forum.rpg.net/archive/index.php/t-152431.html

Naar posted:

creepy japanese 4chan poo poo

Red_Mage posted:

My gaming group tried out 4th edition - we've nicknamed it Wizardhammer 40K. I wanted to give it a chance before I made up my mind about it. So far, I see no redeeming features. The ONLY thing I liked is the setup for races. The addition of the dragonborn and tiefling give players who like monstrous characters something to pick from that you can play at first level with no crazy ECL. Outside of that - nothing. The spellcasting system castrates wizards, and the clerics' uniform abilities regardless of diety take the fun out of playing one. Plus, healing surges for all classes take away one of the major support roles for the cleric. The fighter gets screwed because you can only use things like Cleave once in an encounter, and once you've declared it, it's used whether you land the hit or not. The ritual system that allows any class to cast if they take the rituals feat also sucks because the expense and time for each of the rituals makes them useless in game. AND last but not least (for this rant anyway), the action points system in 4th edition is quite odd. In Eberron it was easy to figure out how many action points you had, and when and how they could be used. For 4th, apparently, you only really ever have one. Sure, you can get an additional action point after 2 encounters, but by then you've most likely spent the one you had before, so - you get one. You might as well just take 6 hours off in game and call it good. Eesh. I think I'm sticking with 3.5. Never ever wanna play Wizardhammer again. Ever.

Red_Mage posted:

I recently received a call from a friend who was all excited about the upcoming release of 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons. Since I have not gotten my hands on a rule book yet (well OK no one has except maybe some play testers) I can't talk about the quality of the game or the mechanics in the game. What I can talk about is Wizards of the Coast and their transparent attempts to empty our pockets. Don't get me wrong I do not begrudge anyone making money. I have happily spent hundreds of dollars a year on gaming supplements for most of my life, and I hope the companies I spend money on succeed because they are producing products I enjoy. What I am talking about is how WotC has started the disturbing trend of releasing a new version of D&D every three or four years.

First they released 3rd Edition in 2000. The game was flawed from the start. It was less than a month after it came out that the group I played with started making up house rules to repair its inadequacies. Three years later they released version 3.5 which "fixed" the flawed system. The worst thing is many of the things that were fixed had to have been discovered in play testing if we discovered them in less than a month of play. You will not be able to convince me they didn’t know the original 3.0 was flawed. Then they started re-printing all the books they had released to date upgraded for 3.5. This was nothing more than programmed obsolescence in my opinion. They sucked us in to 3rd edition… then "fixed" it so we would buy all the books for it twice. And now that D&D 3.5 is going strong they announce that 4th edition is on the horizon. Other than there being WAY too many books out for it to keep track of D&D 3.5 is fine as it is. There is no need of a 4th Edition, and this is just another attempt to sucker us all into buying the books we already own for a third time! They will just be revamped as 4th Edition.

I personally do not intend to spend one penny on 4th edition, and I strongly suggest everyone else do the same (or not do the same as the case may be). There are better games out there than D&D anyway, or keep playing 3rd edition if you like it. Just because WotC is releasing a new edition does not mean we should buy into it. It makes me sick to see my fellow gamer geeks taken advantage of, and I hate Wizards of the Coast for ripping us off. I gave up giving WotC money for Magic the Gathering a long time ago because I realized that it was just a trap designed to get more and more of my money. Now they are doing the same thing with D&D and I do not intend to let them take advantage of me. 4th Edition is specifically being released to make all our old stuff obsolete, and I’m not falling for it.

Once again proof Wizard’s of the Coast is Evil! The Wal-mart of the gaming Industry!

Red_Mage posted:

My gaming group tried out 4th edition - we've nicknamed it Wizardhammer 40K. I wanted to give it a chance before I made up my mind about it. So far, I see no redeeming features. The ONLY thing I liked is the setup for races. The addition of the dragonborn and tiefling give players who like monstrous characters something to pick from that you can play at first level with no crazy ECL. Outside of that - nothing. The spellcasting system castrates wizards, and the clerics' uniform abilities regardless of diety take the fun out of playing one. Plus, healing surges for all classes take away one of the major support roles for the cleric. The fighter gets screwed because you can only use things like Cleave once in an encounter, and once you've declared it, it's used whether you land the hit or not. The ritual system that allows any class to cast if they take the rituals feat also sucks because the expense and time for each of the rituals makes them useless in game. AND last but not least (for this rant anyway), the action points system in 4th edition is quite odd. In Eberron it was easy to figure out how many action points you had, and when and how they could be used. For 4th, apparently, you only really ever have one. Sure, you can get an additional action point after 2 encounters, but by then you've most likely spent the one you had before, so - you get one. You might as well just take 6 hours off in game and call it good. Eesh. I think I'm sticking with 3.5. Never ever wanna play Wizardhammer again. Ever.

CoarsestGrate posted:

...

"All things 4th Edition go here! This is specifically for 4e rules/ suggestions/ gameplay talk. Anything general D&D goes above."

Underlying assumption - The above statement includes negative takes on 4.0 as they're still a part of 4.0 things, and this post specifically covers the rules and gameplay to some extent. I did not post it in general because general excludes 4.0. If you don't like anti 4.0 content hit your back button now. You have been warned.

Basically, D&D has moved out of the niche that they could easily secure and not compete with much to try to compete with something they cannot possibly compete with, namely hack and slash video games. After all, hack and slash video games come with pretty graphics and do the math for you, so it's flat out impossible for any pen and paper system to do it better. What makes tabletop into its own niche is the everything else - creativity, roleplay, etc.

Now, 4.0 completely ceases to make any sense whatsoever the moment you stop thinking of it as a video game. For example, you are expected to take at least 5 minutes off between every battle to recover your 'encounter' powers, heal your little scratches with healing surges, and so forth. If you assume that enemies are remotely intelligent and therefore can hear the noise you made and are possibly continuing to make this falls apart - you get interrupted because the whole dungeon is on alert and you die because you're stuck scratching through the rest of the dungeon with your piddly little at wills. If however you assume that the mobs simply have not spawned yet, video game style this makes a twisted sort of sense, as the mob isn't there to be alerted (and yes, my use of MMO terminology is intentional). You can even see hints of this in designer talk, where they say things like the monster exists for 5 rounds. Not is being fought for 5 rounds, exists for 5 rounds. This is used as the reason why the DM should focus on the 'interesting' (read: combat) abilities and not worry about anything else.

Then there's rituals, which are a better example. You're expected to stand there chanting for 10 minutes to open a door. This also permanently takes a big bite out of your WBL as WBL no longer accounts for consumables. Nevermind that since Hardness does not exist the Wizard could punch the door down in less time, with the same or less effort, and for free. As an added bonus, if the mobs have spawned and interrupt you you can just pick up right where you left off. This only makes sense if you regard doors as video game like obstacles where you have to get the Blue Key and cannot simply break them down, even if your character is carrying a sword, bombs, a fire rod, and other such implements that could easily handle the job.

I could keep going too. Minions (apparently there are entire subspecies that can be OHKOed by housecats, even if the creature is supposed to be pretty tough), and for that matter the other subsets of creature where you get three guys that look exactly the same, except one has 1 HP, one has 100 HP, and one has 250 HP. At least 3.5 doesn't make them look the same, as the second and especially the third guy are loaded down with shiny magic items to glow and such and look much stronger/tougher/smarter... and video games at least swap the color palettes so you can tell these are tougher.

The entire skill challenge system. Ignoring how badly they've screwed even that much up, the entire system is what you'd expect to see in a video game that due to hardware limitations cannot handle real roleplaying so they have to improvise and jury rig it. Simply by including this, WotC is insulting every DM that would want to run it by telling them that their brain is incapable of handling actual roleplaying, so here's some jury rigged BS that does not actually work. It also insults any player that would want to play under such a DM for the same reason. Makes sense... unless and until you stop thinking of 4.0 as a video game, then it falls apart.

The fact that any and all of the above failings are viewed as features and not bugs by the overzealous fans.

Note: 'Overzealous fans' refers specifically to those individuals that freak out and cry edition war or some such nonsense the moment you say anything that might possibly be less than perfectly flattering to 4.0 if you took it in the worst possible way... maybe. Simply liking 4.0 and thereby being a fan of it does not make you an overzealous fan, so if you can actually handle critique of your favored system without whining, this is not directed at you.

Entire, essential subsystems are missing. The overzealous fans call this a feature, and decry anyone who (correctly) proves otherwise. Apparently you're supposed to just pull random arbitrary crap out of your rear end, and this is a good thing.

Except that there already is a system for that. It's called free form, and as the name implies it costs nothing. Why would anyone choose to pay hundreds of dollars for something that they can get for free? The whole point of buying books is so that someone else is designing the system for you, and you are paying them to devote their time and effort to this instead of your own. The main problem with free form is that it breaks apart the moment the inevitable 'I shot you!' argument comes up.

Which brings me to my next point. If I wanted to design my own system, I would do so. I would not buy someone else's system, just to end up making my own anyways. Therefore I would not be in the red financially for something that does not serve its intended purpose and is therefore completely irrelevant. Further, I might actually be in the green as I could potentially market my work and profit from it. Choosing to not lose and possibly make money trumps throwing money out the window any day.

And another thing. The moment you try to actually influence the world, it completely falls apart. Just like a video game and its railroading enforced status quo, except you don't even get that much. The much maligned 3.5 Fighter has more ability to affect the world around him than any 4.0 character. Any real character in 3.5 does even better at that.

Even if you just think of 4.0 as pure combat and nothing else it doesn't even do combat that well. It creates the illusion of complexity with a bunch of crap like +1 to minor crap you don't care about for 1 round, and all the little bad video game style push and pull crap. But a level 1 Druid with Entangle has a better ability to influence combat than most, if not all of what 4.0 has to offer. The moment characters start getting actual abilities that matter the game explodes. This should not come as a surprise to you, as everyone in 4.0 is a 3.5 Fighter, and the only reason that actually works out is because 'everyone' includes the enemies, so they don't just auto negate you.

The fact that a design system is missing critical bits at release is a sign of failure. The fact you have to pay for the patches upgrades said failure to Epic levels.

When the system is so critically flawed and missing key bits that it completely falls apart the moment you think of it as an actual world and not just a backdrop for grinding on mobs, you know you have failed as a system and world designer.

4.0 = Epic Fail is Epic.

QED.

-Crusader of Logic, High Inquisitor of the Church of Logic, primary go between to the Lolcats, Team Evil Captain in good standing, Vulpus Awesomus, Head Designer of Long Pretentious Sounding Titles for the Lulz.

CoarsestGrate posted:

...Nevermind that since Hardness does not exist the Wizard could punch the door down in less time, with the same or less effort, and for free...

clockworkjoe posted:

I get it. I really do. The mechanics are a mess. They were various degrees of bad under 1ed, and that tradition continued under 2ed. I get that people don't like the setting. They say it's too "small" now, too heavy on metaplot, too many nipple piercings, too many heroin pissing dinosaurs, too many people focusing on the setting without bitching about the mechanics. I get it. This isn't a thread about that. This is a thread about Exalted hate fucks. This is a minus thread for negativity about Exalted. And it's based on one premise:

Just get your hate gently caress and move on.

Mechanical hate fuckers: The game isn't going to magically fix all the broken stuff that's come before, and all the new stuff is probably going to be broken too. Quit saying "if book X isn't mechanically sound I'm dropping the game" only to bitch about all the mechanical problems you've found in all the products since X. Quit grandstanding like your opinion means a poo poo, only to backpeddle the second some new shiny thing comes out. It also doesn't change the fact that people having fun playing the game are having fun playing the game. I know it's hard to understand, but you'll just have to trust me on this. If someone says they're playing "by the rules" and having fun, the correct response is not to tell them all the ways that such a statement is contradictory.

Setting hate fuckers: You guys are even worse. You're bitching about loving make believe stuff. "The Wyld Hunt killed my pony." "Beasts of Resplendent Liquids are so bad they ruined my memories of playing D&D." "All the detail in 2ed stifles my creativity." "I hate that there's metaplot, and I hate that the metaplot contradicts itself." If you lack the confidence and imagination to ignore stuff you don't like and replace it with something better, don't even bother. Not just with Exalted, but with any game. Seriously, pack it up and take up another hobby like stamp collecting or getting hit in the nuts with a mallet. I don't care. Exalted is an RPG designed around the premise of a huge world with an open background. I'm sorry your feelings got hurt when the 2ed version Gem didn't match with your vision based on a torn paragraph you dreamed you read in badly mangled copy of the 1ed core. Have a wahwie pop.

"But we hold out hope that Alchemicals/Infernals will be different!" No, it won't. At best you won't have more fuel to bitch about, at which point you just won't talk about it; you'll continue to bitch about everything else though. Equally likely is that they'll be as bad as all the other products that you told yourself would be "different". See, for you hate fuckers all you have is the hate gently caress. You don't want the game to be perfect, since your fun comes from finding the dog turds in the game. And you have to cram those turds down everyone's throat. Over, and over, and over, and over, and over. In. Every. Single. Exalted. Thread. But you can't quit the game. You don't like it, you don't play it, and the only way you really help anyone is by buying all the products you don't like and keeping the game line going. Well shine on you consumer whore!

CoarsestGrate posted:

...

LightWarden posted:

Odd, rules for HP of doors and things are on page 65 of the DMG. But never let being consistently wrong get in the way of a good rant.

Mikan posted:

I'm not going to quote anything from this thread but gently caress this thread.
Dude who posted it should have been driven out of the forum and instead most everyone plays along.

quote:

I find that quoting Monty Python always leads to a barrel full of laughs. It's especially important, I think, to lighten the mood when the GM or another player's been attempting to depress us all with an overly serious story.

RagnarokAngel posted:

huh so it is. I thought that was too obvious of a thing to miss.

clockworkjoe posted:

Door destroying is a proud D&D tradition

quote:

Transcription of keynote speech given on the first day of Gnomish History Month

*Address given at Garl Glittergold Memorial Middle School, Blingdenstone. Given by Grimble Gromble, gnomish bard, historian and rights activist*

Thank you for inviting me here today to speak to you all. This is a day that will live in the hearts and minds of gnomes everywhere, and its an honor to be here, deep beneath the surface in the heart of Svirfneblin territory to once again reaffirm the ties of surface and deep gnomes. Other races of the Underdark maybe hateful of their surface dwelling cousins, but Gnomes of all stripe show an ingenuity, a sense of common purpose and a drive to treat others fairly not found in ANY other race in Faerun.

On this, the first day of our hopefully annual celebration of all things gnomish that shall soon spread across the length and breadth of Faerun, we gather for two purposes: one, to celebrate our heritage - to reaffirm our communal spirit and highlight gnomish successes of the past years; but secondly, and perhaps most importantly, to remember those gnomes who are no longer with us. It is well known we gnomes do not have it easy. The perils of the gnomish way of life are many - beyond common ailments and old age, the perils and pitfalls of life as a "shortleg" as humans call us, are many and varied. Being squished by giants and dragons, being captured by ogres and used in their sporting events as shot puts, discii, and javalin targets, captured by wizards placed under petrification spells and used to ghoulishly decorate their lawns and gardens, and of course we all know the perils of being employed by an adventuring party and used as "henchmen" - more like "mobile trap finders".

Recently, I came across a shattered gnome community deep in the heart of Southern Faerun. The images you see show the savage desolation of this once proud mining community of Thumbvale. Known for decades as the home of hardworking, proud, and industrious gnomes, their voices have now all been silenced forever in the most savage and inhumane way possible. Travelling with a cleric friend of mine, we happened upon this burnt and desolate community, and the savagrey displayed here has stayed with me since, as I know it will stay with you.

THIS is what we are here today for! To make sure this never happens again! If we all work hard, and spread the message, one day everyone in Faerun will shout with one voice on this day "Ich Bein Ein Thumbvalian!"

As a historian, I was moved to discover the truth of this atrocity. My cleric friend assisted me in speaking with the dead, silenced voices, now moved far beyond out mortal realm, to discover the truth of the matter. As a rights activist, I was moved to assist in the creation of this awareness celebration, to work with human, elven and dwarven officials to bring awareness of this heinous act and its repurcussions on the gnomish community.

As a bard, I was moved to write this song. I apologize for its frank harshness, but the bitter ashes in my mouth after witnessing the unspeakable would allow no kind or happy messages. Please induldge me:

Iggwilv came across the sea
She brought us pain and misery
She enslaved our tribe, she corrupted our creed,
She took our game for her own need

We fought her hard we fought her well
But on the plains, she sent us to hell
Her magic's strong, our saves too weak,
Oh will we ever be set free?

Riding through dustclouds and barren wastes
Flying hard o'er the plains
Chasing the shortlegs back to their holes
Taking their treasure and names.
Mages and ghale, fighters and monks,
The flew in on owls and destroyed us for fun!

Run to the Horn, run for your lives!
Run to the Horn, run for your lives!

Lawful good? Try HATEFUL NEUTRAL
Hunting and killing's their game.
Spewing some nonsense 'bout "Fiendish taint"
The only good gnomes are tame.
Stealing their artifacts and taking their gold
Destroying the town, both the young and the old!

Run to the Horn run for your lives!

Fenarisk posted:

idgi either I am not nerd enough or too nerdy

clockworkjoe posted:

I also like old-style, but I can't claim nostalgia since I didn't start gaming till I was 17 (am now 22).

What I like mostly is more of the focus on descriptions rather than mechanics.

Example:

Player: "How wide is the ledge?"
GM: "Maybe 2 inches.."
(New School) Player: *seeing the modifiers of the Balance skill for that short a span* "Oh, nevermind, I better find another way across."
(Old School) Player: "Okay ... can I press myself up against the cliff face and side-step across?"
GM: "Sure. Since you aren't pressured and can take your time, you don't even have to roll anything."
(yes, I am aware that other rules exist in the new-school that can circumvent this situation, but that's just it: they are rules, rather than descriptions)

In other words, it's more about player (and GM) creativity. I just feel much more of a sense of magic and wonder from old-school editions. ATM I'm thinking that RC D&D does just what I want old-D&D to do.

RagnarokAngel posted:

...what?

clockworkjoe posted:

When the new edition of D&D enters the game shop, gaming begins to correct itself. Let me use this example: Imagine four different editions of D&D on the edge of a gaming shop shelf. Say a direct copy of the the edition nearest the shelf is sent to the back of the line and takes the place of the first edition. The formerly first edition becomes the second, the second becomes the third, and the fourth falls into the discount bin.

Old School D&D works the same way.

clockworkjoe posted:

When the new edition of D&D enters the game shop, gaming begins to correct itself. Let me use this example: Imagine four different editions of D&D on the edge of a gaming shop shelf. Say a direct copy of the the edition nearest the shelf is sent to the back of the line and takes the place of the first edition. The formerly first edition becomes the second, the second becomes the third, and the fourth falls into the discount bin.

Old School D&D works the same way.

RagnarokAngel posted:

Well it stands to reason that since 4e is dumbed down for the WoW crowd that they'd just let you automatically break doors down.

LGD posted:

If you will recall, a bonus to breaking down doors was one of the wonderful class features they gave fighters the option of taking to fix their "dead levels" in late 3.5 so really it's just another example of the horrible power inflation so prevalent in 4e. To say nothing of the obvious infringement on the 3.x fighter's clearly defined and important niche in a party.