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Dungeon command is super sweet, but you can still "miss" based on enemy action. They basically took the variance from dice potentially wasting your turn to a combination of chance and hidden information based on order cards, which is amazing. Dungeon Command isn't an RPG, but if you wanted a heavily tactical RPG combat system, you could do a lot worse than taking inspiration from it.
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| # ? Jul 12, 2012 17:06 |
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| # ? May 21, 2013 08:42 |
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Transient People posted:No, I'm presenting an example where having the choice between hitmore and other things is a good idea. That example is item creation, where you should be able to set all the parameters to your liking, completely. Set the damage, range, attack bonus, special qualities (think of such feats as Surprising Charge, Headsman's Chop, Nimble Blade, and so on and so forth, except they no longer have to compete for space with interesting choices), and even properties (think magic items), the whole nine yards. This is the sort of system where boring numbers are not only not bad, but good and necessary, because only an idiot thinks you need to get fancy when configuring the basic parameters that govern what the gently caress happens when you use a power and see such things as Range: Weapon and 1 [W] pop up. Establish rules for weapon and implement design (AKA, make them all run under the same stipulations, not the awful poo poo that weapon rules are right now with their inconsistencies), follow them without deviating, and then make them public to players so they don't have to guess what your intentions were and can create items to perfectly suit their characters. And as a neat little bonus, you get to axe the magic christmas tree while you're at it, because you no longer have to print out a shitload of nichey magic items to cover everything you think needs to be an option. You can just let players figure things out instead. Does this all make sense, or is there anything about this that seems objectionable? It makes sense, but it's not my idea of fun. I'm an "all weapons should have the same accuracy and do the same base damage, weapon choice should be based primarily on flavour concerns, mechanical differences should come from what powers you took to use those weapons" kind of person. The moment you let the weapon creation rules interact with the power rules, you create a combinatorial explosion that guarantees that suboptimal combinations of weapon choice and power choice will exist, and that creates system mastery traps that the game is better off without.
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| # ? Jul 12, 2012 17:08 |
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Countblanc posted:"Love" is a strong word. There's a lot of different kinds of love, Countblanc. It may not be the passion of young lovers, but perhaps it's the quiet affection of a stable relationship that has persisted into your twilight years. The kind that accommodates fights and growing distance but is built on a bedrock of trust and loyalty that never goes away. At the very least it could be a really unsightly abusive relationship that all your friends have tried to talk you out of, to no avail. It'll be different next time, you say, choking back sobs as you queue up for Deathwing Lair, but even you don't really believe it anymore.
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| # ? Jul 12, 2012 17:19 |
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DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:Actually the open gaming license did pretty much nothing except create a bubble of lovely publishers for a few years, who all went out of business later, except Paizo, who is now WotC's most direct and successful competitor in tabletop roleplaying games. The direct result of that is the fundamental shift in D&D Next to try to court Paizo fans back. Its basically a race to the bottom to capture as much of a toxic and reactionary fanbase back from a competitor it created, by its foolish implementation of the OGL. I guess it's just my opinion that it's a race to the bottom, but the OGL was terrible for Wizards and pretty neutral for customers. It was a really difficult decision for Paizo to branch out into their own Pathfinder game and was a direct result of Wizards not having solid third party publishing support for 4E. Paizo could still be publishing Dragon and Dungeon magazine and making products that directly supported WotC's product line. The OGL created freedom. It created the freedom for anyone out there to cobble together a lovely module, adventure, or supplement and try to sell it to the masses. But much like lovely games that come out every year for PC's and consoles it's sort of up to the consumer to do a bit of research before you spend your money on a product. These things aren't released in a vacuum there are plenty of reviewers out there and as a publisher if you can't get your stuff reviewed you deserve not to make sales. A lot of crap came out but a lot of talent got the chance to work in an industry that expanded. That opportunity might not have been there otherwise. There's a business model out there that would make WotC (and their parent company Hasbro) a killing and revolutionize the RPG industry but they lack vision and the willingness to invest and do the research necessary to succeed.
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| # ? Jul 12, 2012 17:24 |
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Barudak posted:Right. In order for it to work you not only need to include some elements of chance but you also need to give the monsters and players an expanded array of tactical options. Enemies that have the ability to draw aggro, swap positions with each other, punish certain formation patterns but crumble to others and such would have to be included. Effectively fights would need to go from "oh god I hope I hit this stupid dragon" to "can we learn the puzzle technique behind the dragon before it wipes the floor with us" Yeah, I quickly noticed that as I ran the system. It was way, way too much of a hassle for one DM though. I had to create fifteen reliable, different options for a boss fight to make it reasonably long without being samey. Even with the system being super simple to understand and with me being the guy who made it, it was way too much loving effort. It was honestly easier to fiat new powers as needed, which meant it needed serious refinement...and that the system wasn't very workable on tabletop. Thuryl posted:It makes sense, but it's not my idea of fun. I'm an "all weapons should have the same accuracy and do the same base damage, weapon choice should be based primarily on flavour concerns, mechanical differences should come from what powers you took to use those weapons" kind of person. The moment you let the weapon creation rules interact with the power rules, you create a combinatorial explosion that guarantees that suboptimal combinations of weapon choice and power choice will exist, and that creates system mastery traps that the game is better off without. See, I don't mind suboptimal so long as it's still good. I'm of the fighting game school of thought - local balance is irrelevant, what matters is the global. A character can have straight up better normals everywhere compared to everybody else, but so long as something else is given up they could still be balanced. Chess balance isn't good for a tactical game. It's best reserved for rules-light games like FATE...which still don't do it much. Solvarn posted:It was a really difficult decision for Paizo to branch out into their own Pathfinder game and was a direct result of Wizards not having solid third party publishing support for 4E. Paizo could still be publishing Dragon and Dungeon magazine and making products that directly supported WotC's product line. If you honestly believe RPG reviewers are good you're more of an idealist than me, and I'm the guy who's saying +Hitmore can be balanced with Not +Hitmore.
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| # ? Jul 12, 2012 17:31 |
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Transient People posted:See, I don't mind suboptimal so long as it's still good. I'm of the fighting game school of thought - local balance is irrelevant, what matters is the global. A character can have straight up better normals everywhere compared to everybody else, but so long as something else is given up they could still be balanced. Chess balance isn't good for a tactical game. It's best reserved for rules-light games like FATE...which still don't do it much. I don't think "rules-light" and "tactical" have to be mutually exclusive. Chess is both more rules-light and more tactically deep than the vast majority of RPGs, after all. Now, sure, there are plenty of good reasons why we don't just pull out a chessboard when we want to resolve a combat in an RPG, but there's nothing inherently impossible about making a good tactical game without front-loading a bunch of strategic calculations into character creation.
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| # ? Jul 12, 2012 17:39 |
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Thuryl posted:I don't think "rules-light" and "tactical" have to be mutually exclusive. Chess is both more rules-light and more tactically deep than the vast majority of RPGs, after all. Now, sure, there are plenty of good reasons why we don't just pull out a chessboard when we want to resolve a combat in an RPG, but there's nothing inherently impossible about making a good tactical game without front-loading a bunch of strategic calculations into character creation. There is. Without strategy, you cannot have proper advancement. This is why only games like Wushu don't feature advancement...and they are, in fact, both purely tactical and more disliked than liked because they lack depth. The key is to simplify long-term planning for those who can't be arsed to bother with it, not eliminate it. Eliminate that and you necessarily lose depth in a game where you're supposed to expand what you can do as you grow. EDIT: And this is particularly important to note because Wushu is a very good indicator of what happens when you sacrifice strategic depth - it has a hopelessly broken system because defense is just so much more powerful than offense. The game literally has to come out and tell GMs 'don't go all-in on defense, your players won't be able to win if you insist on it' because otherwise things don't work.
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| # ? Jul 12, 2012 17:42 |
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Transient People posted:Yeah, I quickly noticed that as I ran the system. It was way, way too much of a hassle for one DM though. I had to create fifteen reliable, different options for a boss fight to make it reasonably long without being samey. Even with the system being super simple to understand and with me being the guy who made it, it was way too much loving effort. It was honestly easier to fiat new powers as needed, which meant it needed serious refinement...and that the system wasn't very workable on tabletop. Honestly a system like this would basically demand that a DM own two or three monster books because like you said it would be/is incredibly time consuming to build a valuable interesting encounter. quote:If you honestly believe RPG reviewers are good you're more of an idealist than me, and I'm the guy who's saying +Hitmore can be balanced with Not +Hitmore. Its balanceable because hits are a just as much a formulation of damage as a flat more damage increase. It gets tricky when you throw in things like squares moved and such but at that point it should become a matter of specialization rather than staight DPS as team total DPS needs to be considered as well. One thing I'd like is if they keep things like acrobatics, knowledge arcana, etc to have them feed back into skills. If I have 10 in healing I should get a bonus to abilities that have that keyword.
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| # ? Jul 12, 2012 17:47 |
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fosborb posted:WotC's D&D brand isn't doing well? I mean yeah, D&DNext has been a marketing disaster so far, but are you saying 4e... failed? I'm a 4E fan; I'm using it for my campaign I'm running right now. That being said there is a lot about it that does not lend itself well to storytelling. If they had done better with magic items (not being a second leveling mechanic) and non-combat it would not have been as divisive. You can change a lot of this if you are a more experienced game master but I think out of the box it's a lot more difficult to deliver the type of experience that has made D&D successful in the past. I think they greatly underestimated the draw that a larger product base and grogs had on their numbers. I think they were only concerned about tapping in to the World of Warcraft audience. The way that Gamma World, the Fortune Cards, the board games, Essentials, etc. came out and the way they were handled reeked of desperation or poor leadership. In all the FLGS I've been in the organized play events for Pathfinder have a significantly higher interest than the WotC stuff (encounters, etc.) I've been hearing it's getting to be this way at conventions too. I have been batting around the idea of doing Pathfinder Society up here not because I like Pathfinder especially but simply because it is a better supported product. I don't trust WotC anymore and D&D Next is simply a bad gamble at this point. WotC is interested in making a good game second. They will do whatever it takes to try to get their former audience back, including re-releasing their 1E core rulebooks to test the waters for a secondary revenue generation and thinly veiling it as a charity event. So yeah I'm taking this mad scramble to get their customers back from Paizo as desperation. They've done everything but apologize for trying to innovate their product. Instead of targeting specifically what needs to be changed with 4E they are throwing it all out the window. I'm not sure how else it could be interpreted. You know who is doing 13th Age.
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| # ? Jul 12, 2012 17:50 |
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Solvarn posted:I'm a 4E fan; I'm using it for my campaign I'm running right now. That being said there is a lot about it that does not lend itself well to storytelling. If they had done better with magic items (not being a second leveling mechanic) and non-combat it would not have been as divisive. quote:You know who is doing 5E D&D Next right? quote:The way that Gamma World, the Fortune Cards, the board games, Essentials, etc. came out and the way they were handled reeked of desperation or poor leadership.
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| # ? Jul 12, 2012 17:56 |
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Transient People posted:See, I don't mind suboptimal so long as it's still good. I'm of the fighting game school of thought - local balance is irrelevant, what matters is the global. A character can have straight up better normals everywhere compared to everybody else, but so long as something else is given up they could still be balanced. Chess balance isn't good for a tactical game. It's best reserved for rules-light games like FATE...which still don't do it much. Take ability scores in 4e. They give you the option to make a charismatic fighter or a buff avenger, but these are never good ideas. Or a less obvious choice, should I take Dirty Fighting or Expertise on my shifty rogue? If you don't know what you're doing you could pass up on all the important but boring hitmore+1s and end up way under par. And while you may say these are lovely mechanics and 4e has a lot of cruft, you'd be right, but it's also true that this stuff is still really hard to balance. Even CharOpers frequently have disagreements about the power level of options. I'm not saying never ever have +hitmore as an option in any game ever, but when you do have it as one you need to acknowledge that you're increasing the odds of unfun system mastery traps by quite a bit. And all anyone has been saying is that when the basic mechanic is "succeed at hitting or do nothing interesting for a turn", it may be a positive step towards a more accessible game not to let people trade away their expected +hit.
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| # ? Jul 12, 2012 18:04 |
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Transient People posted:There is. Without strategy, you cannot have proper advancement. This is why only games like Wushu don't feature advancement...and they are, in fact, both purely tactical and more disliked than liked because they lack depth. The key is to simplify long-term planning for those who can't be arsed to bother with it, not eliminate it. Eliminate that and you necessarily lose depth in a game where you're supposed to expand what you can do as you grow. Wushu's problem isn't a lack of strategic depth, it's a lack of tactical depth, and it wouldn't even need that much extra tactical depth to unbreak it: after all, rock-paper-scissors with different payoffs for each option is all you need in order to create a basic, functional tactical game. Any extra depth on top of that is there to make your game into what you want it to be, not because it's required in order to have any kind of game at all. As for advancement, I don't care very much about it and am perfectly happy to play RPGs that don't have advancement systems, but I'll admit that this probably puts me in a distinct minority of D&D players. (In any case, you can easily do advancement without strategy if you want: anything that happens automatically as you advance like "add half your level to all rolls" is advancement without strategy. And if all you want from your advancement system is for players to be able to do new things at higher levels that they couldn't do at lower levels, that kind of advancement is enough.)
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| # ? Jul 12, 2012 18:06 |
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MadScientistWorking posted:Honestly this is pure and utter bullshit. It is in fact significantly better than most of the previous editions in storytelling because it removed a ton of the crap that made it annoying in other editions. You had the removal of the twenty thousand skills that permeated 3.5. You removed the incredibly power bloat which tended to make certain classes insanely powerful. When you talk about powerful and class bloat, I assume you mean combat. 4E combat is great, I really like it. I'm talking about everything else that happens outside of combat, specifically the way skill challenges are handled. Numbers and balance are really important for a team based combat game where everyone needs to make a contribution. I think they could have done much better with how skill challenges and things outside of combat were handled. I haven't ever played in a home game where there weren't serious modifications to the skill challenge system. When I played in Living Forgotten Realms RAW skill challenges left a lot to be desired. The board games are great. The most recent game, Lords of Waterdeep, is awesome. I'm not saying that the board games are bad necessarily; I actually really like them. I'm saying that they are part of a very muddled strategy.
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| # ? Jul 12, 2012 18:09 |
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Solvarn posted:When you talk about powerful and class bloat, I assume you mean combat.
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| # ? Jul 12, 2012 18:17 |
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Hell, I'd love it if d&d went the gamma world model. random booster packs could go, but set packs of cards aren't a bad idea. Their biggest gently caress up was a lack of in store and online promotion. Legion of Gold was just like "uh, buy it I guess? Whatever, just finishing the set..." Gamma World even has modular rules. Each expansion included additional classes, sure, but also additional overall mechanics like factions and occupations (bundled, tiered feats) as well as an adventure that you could string together into one full level progression campaign. GW vehicle rules is also one of the best supplements I've seen in dungeon. And that's not even getting into the streamlining of 4e and other mechanics that made it a joy to freeform dm.
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| # ? Jul 12, 2012 18:20 |
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MadScientistWorking posted:I would say that 13th Age is continuing on in the same vein as 4th edition did. Not really. 13th Age's roleplay and character creation tools are fantastic, but the combat is in no way as good as 4e (which, as far as I'm aware, was the main draw of 4e over any other roleplaying system).
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| # ? Jul 12, 2012 18:36 |
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Also while I think 13th Age is a flat out better game than 5e right now, and probably will be at release, and while I think Pelgrane is doing a flat out better job at promotion than wotc, the fact remains that Pelgrane is doing amazing things with a budget and brand that is nothing compared to d&d. It's a testament to 13th Age that it's doing so well, but d&d should be doing effortlessly better with their greater online presence, recognition, and flgs contacts, and will almost assuredly outsell 13th Age even if from now to launch d&d's webpage is replaced with a video of mearls making GBS threads and the core books are just 12 months of Mearls's actual feces in an attractive binding.
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| # ? Jul 12, 2012 18:45 |
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Countblanc posted:Not really. 13th Age's roleplay and character creation tools are fantastic, but the combat is in no way as good as 4e (which, as far as I'm aware, was the main draw of 4e over any other roleplaying system).
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| # ? Jul 12, 2012 18:46 |
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MadScientistWorking posted:No. I'm talking both in combat and out of combat. You could derail an entire campaign with the skills of a magic user in 3.5E/3E. 4E solved that problem by basically taking everything that wizards did outside of combat and making it rituals. I always kind of felt that was handled awkwardly also but I can't really criticize because I haven't really seen a good way to handle non-combat spell usage in 4E. I certainly don't have any decent ideas. I have let casters spend a healing surge to quicken the ritual casting, that's about as far as its gone.
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| # ? Jul 12, 2012 18:55 |
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Countblanc posted:Not really. 13th Age's roleplay and character creation tools are fantastic, but the combat is in no way as good as 4e (which, as far as I'm aware, was the main draw of 4e over any other roleplaying system). I haven't tried their combat yet but I'm not really enamored with how it looks. Of course I wasn't a big fan of the way 4E looked until I tried it. I'll have to reserve judgement on that. I do know that I'm poaching an awful lot of their stuff for my home game and it looked so promising I paid almost $50 for a pre-order so I could get my hands on the test draft. Even if I never receive a book I'd consider it money well spent. I can't remember the last time I was interested in a WotC product like that. I should be feeling this way about D&D Next but I don't. I haven't spoken to anyone that's been excited about D&D Next. Are there people in this thread that think it's actually looking like a good system?
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| # ? Jul 12, 2012 18:58 |
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Solvarn posted:4E solved that problem by basically taking everything that wizards did outside of combat and making it rituals. I always kind of felt that was handled awkwardly also but I can't really criticize because I haven't really seen a good way to handle non-combat spell usage in 4E. I certainly don't have any decent ideas. I have let casters spend a healing surge to quicken the ritual casting, that's about as far as its gone.
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| # ? Jul 12, 2012 19:05 |
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MadScientistWorking posted:No. They nerfed the living daylights out of Wizards. As far as I know a lot of the powers that broke plot and the game are just non existent in any form in 4th edition. A lot of them got shunted into Epic levels. To get the full scrying and teleporting power suite that a 7th level 3e Wizard has, you need to be 28th level in 4e.
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| # ? Jul 12, 2012 19:15 |
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I wish they'd do away with scrying entirely. Any world where scrying is common enough for players to have it would also have bad guys who could spy on our heroic do-gooders and make their lives really miserable. I can't think of any storyline that is made better by scrying than by any other means of clue-finding and a whole lot of them that are made worse.
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| # ? Jul 12, 2012 19:52 |
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Old Kentucky Shark posted:A lot of them got shunted into Epic levels. To get the full scrying and teleporting power suite that a 7th level 3e Wizard has, you need to be 28th level in 4e. A lot of people had problems with that but I thought it was a good change. Long distance teleporting and scrying are story killers. Imagine Lord of the Rings if Frodo and Samwise just teleported to Amon Amarth. At least scrying was addressed. Wasn't so hot for Denethor, Saruman, or Pippen.
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| # ? Jul 12, 2012 19:54 |
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MadScientistWorking posted:No. They nerfed the living daylights out of Wizards. As far as I know a lot of the powers that broke plot and the game are just non existent in any form in 4th edition. Am I wrong in reading this as you thinking it's a bad thing they took such options away?
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| # ? Jul 12, 2012 20:08 |
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Solvarn posted:It was a really difficult decision for Paizo to branch out into their own Pathfinder game and was a direct result of Wizards not having solid third party publishing support for 4E. Paizo could still be publishing Dragon and Dungeon magazine and making products that directly supported WotC's product line. It was an easy decision, and easy process - copy the SRD, buff casters. quote:The OGL created freedom. It created the freedom for anyone out there to cobble together a lovely module, adventure, or supplement and try to sell it to the masses. But much like lovely games that come out every year for PC's and consoles it's sort of up to the consumer to do a bit of research before you spend your money on a product. These things aren't released in a vacuum there are plenty of reviewers out there and as a publisher if you can't get your stuff reviewed you deserve not to make sales. A lot of crap came out but a lot of talent got the chance to work in an industry that expanded. That opportunity might not have been there otherwise. The OGL created freedom for 3rd party developers. There's a reason that You haven't seen wizards licensing any of the classic campaign settings in 4th like they did in 3.x - the third part products had worse balance than the core products and were generally low quality or didn't get the setting (I'm looking at you, Ravenloft). On top of that, there was no way for WotC to stop things like the BoEF or other toxic garbage that makes their system look bad and gets associated with them even though they had nothing to do with it. The problem from WotC's perspective wasn't that the OGL existed, it was that everything that came out from it was steaming garbage that copied their game and gave them very little in return. quote:There's a business model out there that would make WotC (and their parent company Hasbro) a killing and revolutionize the RPG industry but they lack vision and the willingness to invest and do the research necessary to succeed. The problem is that D&D is a labor of love. You know why they're pandering to Grogs? So they'll shut up and stop slandering WotC and Hasbro on the internet. It's PR control because the monkeys in marketing keep seeing the companies names ran through the mud on search engines. There's no indication 4e failed on any economic level, they've just plateaued in terms of abilities they can make and don't have a direction to run anymore. There's a myth that WotC bought D&D to make a ton of money, but the truth is they didn't. They even stated when they bought it that they obtained the license because they played D&D and it was one of their inspirations. M:TG is a cash cow. It keeps FLGS's in business across the country, they don't need D&D and never did. Next is going to be an attempt to unite the player base. They hope that by obscuring the tactical advances of 4e behind  and hiding the math again and then releasing more tactical modules for people who liked 4e that they can at least banish the worst of the Grogs back to the dark recesses of the internet.
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| # ? Jul 12, 2012 20:42 |
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ImpactVector posted:The problem is, there often aren't upsides to the tradeoffs, or not enough to offset them. Especially when dealing with new or unsavvy players. See, right here you have an implicit assumption that is coloring your perceptions about what I'm saying. Did I, at any point, mention that trading away your expected to-hit was supposed to be something you could do? No. In fact, if you go look at my previous posts, one of the things I mentioned was specifically that you had to set an immovable floor for accuracy that players couldn't dip below. I'm not talking about expected to-hit is the thing. I'm talking about extra hitrate. Set all characters to be good first, and then make them different varieties of good is what I've been saying all the while.
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| # ? Jul 12, 2012 21:00 |
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There's no such thing as "extra" hitrate as long as a miss means you wasted your turn.
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| # ? Jul 12, 2012 21:10 |
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TheAnomaly posted:The problem is that D&D is a labor of love. Case in point, 3e was initially supposed to be sold at a loss as a "thank you" to nerds. Mind you, this was back when WotC had hit their big bubble and had WotC stores everywhere and things were generally lovely and laughably unprofessional. It changed rather fast.
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| # ? Jul 12, 2012 21:21 |
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Really Pants posted:There's no such thing as "extra" hitrate as long as a miss means you wasted your turn. There is if you have control over your hitrate.
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| # ? Jul 12, 2012 21:30 |
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Transient People posted:See, right here you have an implicit assumption that is coloring your perceptions about what I'm saying. Did I, at any point, mention that trading away your expected to-hit was supposed to be something you could do? No. In fact, if you go look at my previous posts, one of the things I mentioned was specifically that you had to set an immovable floor for accuracy that players couldn't dip below. I'm not talking about expected to-hit is the thing. I'm talking about extra hitrate. Set all characters to be good first, and then make them different varieties of good is what I've been saying all the while. OK, so let's pretend that in a hypothetical game system, a 10+ on a d20 hits on a normal attack (so your expected hit-rate is 55%). If you don't hit, you do nothing that turn. You've got two powers, one that hits on an 8+ and one that hits on your normal 10+. Using that second power is a trap because you're now ten percent more likely to sit on your rear end and do nothing that turn. That 10+ power would have to be way better than the one that's more likely to hit, otherwise I'm never using it because I'm more likely to throw my turn down the hole if I do. In other words, Really Pants posted:There's no such thing as "extra" hitrate as long as a miss means you wasted your turn. e: Transient People posted:There is if you have control over your hitrate. Relying on dice to determine if you hit or not means you have no control over your hit rate beyond "do I use the thing that's more likely to hit or the thing that's less likely to hit"
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| # ? Jul 12, 2012 21:34 |
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Transient People posted:There is if you have control over your hitrate. "Different varieties of good," i.e. one option that is better and other options that are worse, is not control--it's just the same old system mastery/feat tax crap.
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| # ? Jul 12, 2012 21:48 |
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Transient People posted:There is if you have control over your hitrate. Post-roll I'm definitely on board with. Trading away extra +hit to do cool things after you've already hit is fine, if fiddly with the way modifiers work in D&D (and if you have a smaller range of numbers you're starting to look a lot like FATE's Spin). I could even see an argument for pre-roll, where if you've got a good/guaranteed chance at hitting some particular guy you might want to trade away some +hit for something else. Probably not without a bell-shaped probability curve though -- that 1d20 makes every little +1 count for a lot. At character creation though, there's no way. When you don't know what your chances are you're way better off planning for the worst. +hit is absolutely central to the way D&D-style combat works since if you miss, generally nothing else happens. Really Pants posted:There's no such thing as "extra" hitrate as long as a miss means you wasted your turn.
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| # ? Jul 12, 2012 21:50 |
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Fungah! posted:OK, so let's pretend that in a hypothetical game system, a 10+ on a d20 hits on a normal attack (so your expected hit-rate is 55%). If you don't hit, you do nothing that turn. You've got two powers, one that hits on an 8+ and one that hits on your normal 10+. Using that second power is a trap because you're now ten percent more likely to sit on your rear end and do nothing that turn. That 10+ power would have to be way better than the one that's more likely to hit, otherwise I'm never using it because I'm more likely to throw my turn down the hole if I do. Actually its not that simple. Lets assume you deal an average of 10 damage and your hit rate is (d20) 1-10 miss 11-20 hit. Your expected damage on any given roll is therefore 5. If you increase your to hit by +1 you now hit 55% of the time your average damage increases to 5 1/2. If you take a +1 to damage but your accuracy remains the same you also move up to 5 1/2. The increase in damage need not be tremendously stronger (in this case a +2 would dwarf a +1 to hit) in order to outweigh the benefit of a +1 to hit. That all said, the vast majority of players will take the +1 to hit for explicitly the reason you stated. People hate not doing anything and they sure as hell hate variance that is between nothing and doing something. DnD can keep trying to balance +to hit and +to damage but they'll always run into the quandry of players taking +1 to hit in 100% of scenarios where the outcome is equal and ignoring it in many others leading to power gamers whiffing 25% more often than average players but hitting for 5 or 6 times the damage. To be honest since variance from fun->boredom is the big issue here I don't see why complete whiffs are still in the system for standard actions. Why not just make a miss count as half damage or effects of an attack don't apply but damage is dealt? That way players get to keep playing the game, "misses" can influence strategy and introduce chance, but nobody is stuck rolling for hours because they need a 15+ to hit the drat thing.
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| # ? Jul 12, 2012 21:58 |
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TheAnomaly posted:It was an easy decision, and easy process - copy the SRD, buff casters. Quite a bit more went into the decision and subsequent design than slapping a Pathfinder icon on the SRD. quote:The problem is that D&D is a labor of love. You know why they're pandering to Grogs? So they'll shut up and stop slandering WotC and Hasbro on the internet. It's PR control because the monkeys in marketing keep seeing the companies names ran through the mud on search engines. There's no indication 4e failed on any economic level, they've just plateaued in terms of abilities they can make and don't have a direction to run anymore. There's a myth that WotC bought D&D to make a ton of money, but the truth is they didn't. They even stated when they bought it that they obtained the license because they played D&D and it was one of their inspirations. M:TG is a cash cow. It keeps FLGS's in business across the country, they don't need D&D and never did. I thought it was because Paizo was outselling them at their own product and they are panicking but I could be mistaken. Again if they hadn't taken their ball and gone home with 4E and maybe had some of the better publishers not putting crap out involved with some of the design, feedback, and testing they would be in a better place now. quote:Next is going to be an attempt to unite the player base. They hope that by obscuring the tactical advances of 4e behind They're doing the same thing that Hollywood producers have been doing succesfully for years now. Have you seen 21 Jump Street? "We're reviving a canceled undercover project from the '80s and revamping it for modern times. The people behind this lack creativity and they've run out of ideas, so what they do now is just recycle poo poo from the past and hope that nobody will notice."
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| # ? Jul 12, 2012 22:06 |
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Solvarn posted:Quite a bit more went into the decision and subsequent design than slapping a Pathfinder icon on the SRD. As someone who was a giant Paizo fanboy and who was involved in every single one of their beta tests until the end of Ultimate Combat? No. There was not quite a bit more then that. Paizo had very little that made it different from the SRD in it's beta tests, and frankly their beta tests removed that little they had. Since then they've made one fairly good splatbook (APG) and have descended straight into no creativity hell. They've got nothing. I agree that Paizo was - and is - unprepared to fully develop a game on their own, but I contend that they entirely thought they could. quote:I thought it was because Paizo was outselling them at their own product and they are panicking but I could be mistaken. Again if they hadn't taken their ball and gone home with 4E and maybe had some of the better publishers not putting crap out involved with some of the design, feedback, and testing they would be in a better place now. I'm not sure where you heard that. I think by and large the OGL was cancelled largely because it failed in it's job to take over the industry. Yeah, I get that people now love to get all touchy feely about the OGL bringing "Gaming to the gamers" but that wasn't it's goal. Ryan Dancey only started claiming that after he was let go from WotC after burning every single bridge he could on the way out, and entered creepy obsessive stalker mode. The initial goal of the OGL was to leverage D&D's popularity to force other games to convert to the d20, and from there create D&D at the center of the web. It was designed to literally destroy creativity. Go read Ryan Dancey's review of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying Game, where he attacks it literally for not being a d20 game, insulting it and stating that only d20 games matter "these days."
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| # ? Jul 12, 2012 22:22 |
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ImpactVector posted:You're right that we may be miscommunicating. Do you mean post-roll, pre-roll, or at character creation? Post-roll, yes. I mentioned bringing play to the act of rolling beyond 'binary hit-miss'. This is exactly what I'm talking about. D&D badly, BADLY needs something like Fate or Force points, ideally at least as easily renewable as the former.
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| # ? Jul 12, 2012 22:28 |
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Transient People posted:Post-roll, yes. I mentioned bringing play to the act of rolling beyond 'binary hit-miss'. This is exactly what I'm talking about. D&D badly, BADLY needs something like Fate or Force points, ideally at least as easily renewable as the former.
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| # ? Jul 12, 2012 22:41 |
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Taran posted:You might be talking about http://dndnext.blogspot.com/ ? I think the person who wrote that blog gave up in disgust after awhile, though. That's the one, thanks.
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| # ? Jul 12, 2012 22:43 |
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| # ? May 21, 2013 08:42 |
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MadScientistWorking posted:I get the distinct impression that the people working full time on 5E aren't working on it full time considering the fact that they have to split their time between other ventures which require as much design work than an RPG.
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| # ? Jul 12, 2012 23:04 |
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