D&D NEXT: Infinite Posts of the Abyss

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Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

treeboy posted:

fwiw, despite odd decisions on the part of the designers, and some...interesting...math, I really have enjoyed everything I've played in 5e so far. I think a lot of the griping that's going on is due to a couple key reasons.

The playtest was excruciating. You'd see a problem, give feedback then they would fix it to the best of their ability. Grogs would scream, and it would go back to sucking. Repeat that dozens of times over the course of years and you get pretty frustrated. My character would get new features, then lose them with no rhyme or reason. Weapon features would be removed without them re-balancing the damage, making more and more weapons identical. Spending time playtesting the thing, then getting vetoed by their psychopathic 'consultants' was very annoying and several people were even stalked.

# ¿ Jul 15, 2014 17:36

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 21:57

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

slydingdoor posted:

TPK factory, what? It's a melee monster with 5 ft reach. If it tries to skirmish it'll be eating opp attacks, 2 with the right formation, which would also keep it from body splashing two people at once. It's not going to be able to beat half decent passive perceptions either, so it probably won't get surprise.

Tell me you're not one of the weirdos that gives aoo's for entering and leaving the threatened area.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2014 05:36

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

Mr Beens posted:

Except you have 2 dozen other sentient human beings and their gear following you about at all times in order to give him that "agency". Which creates issues in a lot of situations.

Not least of which is you are playing 1/24th of a decent character.

# ¿ Sep 2, 2014 17:30

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

Radio Talmudist posted:

I always got the sense that they were ancilliary, a way of adding flavor to an experience that can exist comfortably in the imagination. Is this accurate, or is it recommended I buy a few to make combat more coherent/intelligible?

Without a map and minis, you are either ignoring most of the rules and relying on DM permission to attack and use spells, or slowing the game to a glacier pace by describing the x/y/z location of every object. D&D is based off miniature wargaming.

# ¿ Sep 2, 2014 18:41

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

In 3e every class had the same number of actions per turn to manage and rolled the same size of die ergo..

# ¿ Sep 2, 2014 18:48

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

You don't need fancy minis. Board game pieces are great. Cardboard tokens, lego, whatever you got. I've gotten tons of mileage out of the pathfinder beginner box pawns and the lovely boardgame Dragon Strike.

I don't have a horse in the race, I've played a crap ton of 5e, but jesus loving christ this thread reads like it's from 2008 complete with the tummy feels argument.

Babylon Astronaut fucked around with this message at 19:03 on Sep 2, 2014

# ¿ Sep 2, 2014 19:00

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

Heck, you might not even need minis if you are way into mapping. Overhead projector and laser pointer works too. You just need to track tactical movement and positioning, or else many things don't work quite right without massive house-ruling.

# ¿ Sep 2, 2014 19:11

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

The NPC Expert class was better than the core martials.

# ¿ Sep 2, 2014 19:55

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

Radish posted:

This sounds cool but it's really hard to get my group to do non D&D stuff.

BECMI is D&D. Rules Cyclopedia is the all in one book form. It's my favourite edition, and Dark Dungeons is a clone. The differences are very, very small besides the cool fun way to do initiative.

# ¿ Sep 2, 2014 20:15

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

Radish posted:

Sounds cool I'll try and look into that one.

I didn't think I'd like it after reading it, because AD&D is too complicated for me to bother with, but it plays really well once you realize that the process is simple. You need a paper plate and brad to track time, then you just roll 2d6 4 times and get it on.

Play a little old d&d and you'll understand why 5e is everyone's second favorite D&D.

# ¿ Sep 2, 2014 20:37

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

AlphaDog posted:

In a world where learn cantrips and first-level spells, as well as crossbow, staff, etc is equivalent to learn all armour and weapons...

Why aren't an army's "archers" dudes who have trained in short sword and firebolt rather than short sword and crossbow? You'd save money on equipment, and they could step up to magic missile and eventually fireball instead of +1 to hit with crossbow and eventually some other poo poo archers don't need.

Considering that you need to be just as intelligent to learn to shoot a fireball, as you need to fight defensively, no reason.

# ¿ Sep 3, 2014 02:48

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

The most economic way to heal wounds in the world of 3e is to get pin-cushioned with spell storing shurikens.

# ¿ Sep 3, 2014 05:57

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

Some people really can't stand it if npc's and pc's have different rules. It's cheating or unrealistic or something stupid. I found having to build a character for npc's horrible, and I wouldn't mind something like ol' hitdice or something.

# ¿ Sep 3, 2014 06:09

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

A 5e character with a +10 to their jumping can set the world running long jump record by a less than 3 inches by rolling a 20 going by the old sample DCs. By the current rules you'd need a strength score of 30. Anyone slightly taller than 4ft without a negative strength modifier can slam dunk.

Ok wait. Do the basic rules really not have a table of contents? What the christ.

# ¿ Sep 3, 2014 06:23

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

Going off the ol' settlement rules from 3e and Pathfinder, a city the size of my graduating high school class would have access to 4th level spells, and would have 1000gp in magic items. 8th level spells still only take a city with 25,000 people. So it's not crazy to think that every hamlet had a hedge mage and thousands of gold worth of magic items.

# ¿ Sep 3, 2014 09:20

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

Is there something I missed that you're supposed to do to monsters immune to non-magic weapons?

# ¿ Sep 3, 2014 10:13

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

Don't need a map, don't need equipment, should go the distance and say you don't need dice because you can draw numbers out of a hat. It's old school.

# ¿ Sep 3, 2014 10:30

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

I'd use shatter. Ok, tell me how I did? Better or worse than hitting it with a non-magical weapon?

# ¿ Sep 3, 2014 21:19

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

Power Player posted:

I lost the DCI registration card they gave me though Maybe it's at the store or maybe they can just give me the number they gave me and I can send a letter to Wizards or whatever.

You shouldn't need your DCI card for anything. The number is all that matters. It's linked to your name when you get it, assuming they do it like magic, so I'd just ask the store what your number is.

# ¿ Sep 4, 2014 21:21

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

Power Player posted:

Cool, thanks! I thought I also had to register it with the code that's revealed when you scratch off the thing at the bottom.

OK that makes sense. Magic has the store do it because they report results to DCI the day of.

# ¿ Sep 4, 2014 21:48

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

ProfessorCirno posted:

There aren't any divergent resource management styles pre-4e you loving idiot. There's "HAS RESOURCES" and "DOESN'T HAVE RESOURCES."

Point casters, tob classes, artifacers. If you mean "has thing, spends it" then just tob classes and the fact that psions have the focus mechanic.

# ¿ Sep 5, 2014 01:16

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

MonsterEnvy posted:

Some news about the Monster Manuel.

New NPC spotted.

Babylon Astronaut fucked around with this message at 02:34 on Sep 5, 2014

# ¿ Sep 5, 2014 02:30

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

They solved that problem in Holmes Basic. You put the brief monster stats in the paragraph with the encounter, then you put full statblocks in the middle so you can take out the staple and remove them. Usually you had a map on the outside pages and monsters on the inside. It worked for the B series back in the 70's.

# ¿ Sep 5, 2014 02:50

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

Really Pants posted:

What about Dungeon Master's Guido?

...actually forget I asked.

He got the player's hand, bitch.

# ¿ Sep 5, 2014 03:01

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

This game isn't even out yet, and already people will lie and weasel to defend their precious tummy feels.

# ¿ Sep 5, 2014 03:29

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

kingcom posted:

The pf thread is a lot better than this because the people that enjoy the game (like myself) acknowledge that there a giant loving problems with the game.

And the inverse is true as well. If you go barging into the middle of a discussion about pathfinder with "hey guys, caster supremacy" I don't think you'll get a warm welcome because at this point everyone knows and it's not worthy of discussion.

# ¿ Sep 5, 2014 05:19

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

That's hilarious. In B-2, the caves of chaos were almost an afterthought, and the lesson seems to be "wander off and do whatever."

Even when D&D is amicable to looking for clues and whatnot, the exciting part is the chance of getting caught and fighting it out. So yea, I like either fighting, or being under threat of fights.

A dungeon can be lots of things, a castle, a city, whatever form a string of obstacles in a larger contiguous area takes.

Castle Ravenloft was a good example of what you can do with the dungeon idea. They called it a "house dungeon" because it was one of the first times someone set a dungeon craw indoors, but it also had Straud doing his thing. It can be cool as hell to be "playing" the antagonist and luring and stalking the PCs. You don't even need to be playing it turn by turn, just more like when they go in this room, he slams the door and bars them in or something, just don't be an impossible prick. With perfect knowledge you can make this unsolvable. I pulled out some amazingly dirty tricks without cheating in an ice dungeon, and when they caught the necromancer, they beat his head into pulp with a hammer. That's a good way to set up an adventure to me. Build up the antagonism, let them plan a way to take him down, then the catharsis of smashing the bastard.

I don't know, I like more horror dungeon Vietnam where it seems utterly impossible and people are covering themselves in mud to avoid heatvision and poo poo like that, but generally I make it seem much more dangerous than it really is to make my players feel like complete bad asses.

Babylon Astronaut fucked around with this message at 08:23 on Sep 5, 2014

# ¿ Sep 5, 2014 08:15

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

AlphaDog posted:

My main point about this is that while it's possible to look for clues in D&D (and probably that you'll end up doing it at some point), there's zero rules or guidance about what a clue might be, how to place it, how many you should need to "win", what to do if players get stuck, etc. There's nothing stopping you from doing it, but there's nothing there to help you either.

Oh absolutely. I hate the whole "freeform by omission" argument, that by not having rules about investigation, the DM has some great freedom that other games don't offer. I just like the simple idea that you get to do something twice, then roll a chance for an encounter. To me that's the vacuum that "newer" editions never filled. What are the rules for tying down a mast? Hurry up and do it before the monsters get you. What's the rule for turning a crank to raise the portcullis? Hurry up or the monsters will get you. Without the threat of wandering monsters, you're just guessing what the DM wants you to say, or rolling skill checks with no consequence for failing. It's especially vexing in DM pixel bitching scenarios where it's "you didn't say under the socks in the top drawer of the dresser, keep looking" bullshit. You can have more, like degrees of success and stuff, that's cool, but that's not D&D.

# ¿ Sep 5, 2014 08:36

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

SmellOfPetroleum posted:

Regarding combat, have people had a lot of success with auxiliary objectives besides beat the enemy? Like having to drive something or interact with an object? I haven't played with the concept too much. It usually feels like one player gets a wasted turn.

I like the new technology of giving the ancillary challenge an initiative count, so it feels more like part of the encounter than just something that someone needs to waste a turn on. Like you're fighting on a ship, the crashing wave is acting on count 6, so someone should either grab the wheel and make a roll before then, or it's getting a turn to screw you up like any other threat in combat. The Mines of Madness module did that pretty well. I think besides the encounter balance being wonky, and some of the challenges being unsolvable, it had some good challenges.

I don't remember which one, but one of the early, early 5e playtest modules had a bottleneck where you couldn't start the adventure until someone succeeded at a DC15 int check. That could have actually been something, but there is no consequence for failure that isn't DM fiat which sucks, because someone gets singled out for dire consequences, usually the dude rolling to perform a physical task, and dude rolling to read ancient runes can do so at their leisure.

Babylon Astronaut fucked around with this message at 09:02 on Sep 5, 2014

# ¿ Sep 5, 2014 08:54

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

Yea, homeboy who based his fantasy homebrew system on the "there's always a way" rule from basic really helped with letting everyone be useful. At the worst, a character with balanced stats has a 55% percent shot at doing anything because you just under or equal your stat. So ideally, you'd have the high dex do the fine motor skills challenge, but no one was up poo poo creek unless they were specifically gimped.

You could go full DM mask, and make them solve a rubix cube or a tavern puzzle for like 30 seconds at a time. That could either be fun or terrible, I have no idea, just spitballing.

Babylon Astronaut fucked around with this message at 09:09 on Sep 5, 2014

# ¿ Sep 5, 2014 09:06

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

You just deal damage and when the killing blow lands you decide if it's fatal or not.

Yo Cirno, tell me what you mean by "There aren't any divergent resource management styles pre-4e" with regards to point casters, psionic focus mechanic, tob classes, and artificers.

Babylon Astronaut fucked around with this message at 10:11 on Sep 5, 2014

# ¿ Sep 5, 2014 09:41

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

ProfessorCirno posted:

I'd say that artificers are just more vancian casters, psionic focus was barely used at all in 3.x (though I'd grant them as point casters, with the caveat that it was really only in 3.5 that it actually worked), and using what 3.x fans tend to hate because it was explicitly part of late 3.x's experimental "proto-4e" stuff is stretching it.

You're taking several decades and then pointing at a 2-3 year span right at the end and waving your arms yelling "SEE!"

Also it's Cirno, come on.

Also laffo at you trying to call me out.

Yea, there's some tone thing missing, because I honestly wanted to know what you thought about those things. Not everything is a Gotcha! I agree that those things are outliers and not really indicative of the game at large, that's why I had to ask. I wanted to see if there was a reason you considered them the same type of resource management like you think of the artificer.

Babylon Astronaut fucked around with this message at 10:16 on Sep 5, 2014

# ¿ Sep 5, 2014 10:12

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

Payndz posted:

Yay, I helped with something! (Here's the link if anyone wants to check it out.)

It's a great rule, that as you said, is overlooked all the time. The other one I like a bunch is one from RC: you roll on a curve by using incremental d6's as ascending difficulty. That's actually in the book! Why that never took off I have no idea.

# ¿ Sep 5, 2014 10:50

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

This is what, the fifth 5e thread? They always fall to poo poo when there isn't anything new going on.

Babylon Astronaut fucked around with this message at 11:32 on Sep 5, 2014

# ¿ Sep 5, 2014 11:13

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

Covok posted:

Can you elaborate on this?

Sure. The default way to roll an ability or skill check was to roll a d20 under your ability score, and if you had a relevant skill you added it to your score. To change the difficulty, the DM modified your roll by 1-4. The alternate rule was instead to roll a number of d6's against your ability score according to the difficulty. This was pretty cool, because you would have an expected result, and certain tasks you just couldn't fail at. So instead of doing something mundane with a sizable bonus and still having a chance of crapping out, you'd just win. That helps with what I call the keystone kops effect: usually in D&D, about one in twenty times you attempt a roll you will hit a 1 no matter how good you are. I hate the "critical fail" rule for this reason. Rolling multiple dice makes it better to attempt difficult tasks than 1d20, because every number on the d20 is just as likely, while multiple dice make a curve. This was in the Rules Cyclopedia back in '91, and solved the swingy d20 problem decades ago.

# ¿ Sep 5, 2014 22:42

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

My bad, had RC mixed up with BECMI. It's on page 20 of the Dungeon Master's Rulebook from Mentzer Basic. I always assume RC has everything from the box sets, and it bites me in the rear end! So 1983, drat.

Babylon Astronaut fucked around with this message at 00:26 on Sep 6, 2014

# ¿ Sep 6, 2014 00:17

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

A reminder:

0 Notice something large in plain sight
5 Climb a knotted rope
10 Hear an approaching guard.
15 Rig a wagon wheel to fall off.
20 Swim in stormy water.
25 Open an average lock.
30 Leap across a 30-foot chasm.

Opening an average lock is significantly more challenging than swimming in stormy water. The holder of the world record long jump has 30 in strength.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2014 01:58

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

DalaranJ posted:

Unlocking the average medieval lock with thieves tools would be as trivial as opening the lock with the actual key.

Oh god yes. Even a modern tumbler lock, can be picked by almost anyone with a little practice. Swimming in stormy ocean water is a death sentence. I wouldn't give even odds on an Olympic medalist in swimming surviving stormy ocean water. Nothing about those DCs make any sense at all.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2014 05:48

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

I kinda hate the myth that spellcasters are supposed to rare in 3x, when rules as written, a town of 30 people has a level 4 spellcaster. It would probably be better if it was a divine caster instead of some mad wizard who could wipe out the hamlet in an instant, but provides almost no benefit to society.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2014 23:21

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 21:57

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

I'm still pretty down on their beginner box. The fact that they didn't include a battlemat to preserve the delusion that it is designed for abstract positioning is shameful.

# ¿ Sep 10, 2014 01:56

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