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AlphaDog posted:Yeah, we had a look at 5th edition through the free "basic" set or whatever and decided that it was too much loving trouble. Hackmaster 5e is... pretty much everything 4e was making fun of in the funny bits. Hackmaster 4e is a good AD&D clone. Since the rulebooks are well laid out, it's an easy job to learn the game if you're familiar with AD&D - not 2nd ed, not 3.5, AD&D. Which was the whole point. I suppose if you pop a writeup in FATAL and Friends that'll be a better place to ask this, but when and why did Hackmaster start taking itself seriously? And, relatedly, is D&D Next trying to pitch to precisely those people who WOULD take Hackmaster seriously?
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Apr 7, 2013 08:04
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Glazius posted:I suppose if you pop a writeup in FATAL and Friends that'll be a better place to ask this, but when and why did Hackmaster start taking itself seriously? 5th edition went serious. 4th is clearly tongue-in-cheek in places, to the point where it's fairly obvious which parts of the rules you can just discard, and it's very clear the stuff that you should leave in for the Improved AD&D experience. I'm not going to do a writeup (and I'll shut up about Hackmaster in this thread after this post), but there's a thread in archives where I tried to talk about Hackmaster 4e a bit, but nobody was really interested (which isn't surprising). Yes, I'd say Next is pitching to exactly those people. Maybe not just those people, but they're definitely a target audience. Some of the stuff about earning better abilities, no free magic items, combat is deadly (deal with it!), Paladins Are Always Lawful Good, etc that the Next team have been saying over the last 6 months could have been copy/pasted directly from the Hackmaster 4e rulebooks.
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Apr 7, 2013 08:22
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AlphaDog posted:Paladins Are Always Lawful Good, No not quite they are just always lawful with a few other powers depending on their alignment.
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Apr 11, 2013 00:59
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Made steak tonight using a cast-iron grill pan in the oven, and it was great. 1. Oil your pan with a high-heat-smokepoint oil. I used sunflower. 2. Preheat your oven to 500F (or put it on "broil") 3. Put the pan in the oven during the preheat, or for about 10 minutes 4. Pat dry your steaks, oil them slightly with the same oil type you used for your grill pan, and season with a coarse salt and fresh-ground black pepper 5. When the oven is preheated, put your steaks on the (very hot!) grill pan. No more than 2 minutes per side! Less, if you think you can get away with it. 2 minutes, flip, 2 minutes 6. Take steak out and let rest under tented aluminum foil for 2 minutes. I don't have access to an outside grill/BBQ right now, and this did em up a perfect medium-rare. Now, when's the new playtest pack due out?
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Apr 11, 2013 06:23
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Survey came out. What did you say about the game? I told them that they need to seriously liven up the way the game plays because right now it's just kind of dull. I also said they need to move the game out of the shadow of former editions.
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Apr 11, 2013 23:12
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Mendrian posted:I told them that they need to seriously liven up the way the game plays because right now it's just kind of dull. I feel like, not only play, but the actual experience of reading the rules needs to be livened up. Reading about 3e after coming from 2e was mind-blowingly cool. 4e, whether or not it delivered it, promised a whole insane new paradigm for the game that made me hunger to learn more about the system. 5e has... slightly different mechanics for old things, and a couple of small tidbits that might make you go "huh". The greatest failing of Next to me isn't the wonky math or character imbalance. It's the fact that every class, ability, or creature I read the rules on instills in me a sense of anticlimactic disappointment. I couldn't get through even the parts of the latest playtest packet I was interested in because it was so dull.
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Apr 11, 2013 23:27
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New Q&A. Caster level, whatever, some stuff about multiclassing. I'm not sure if I'm reading question three right but I think it's saying you should just start at level 3 and make it take three levels of experience to reach level 4? That's silly. quote:For those wanting to start their campaigns in the Adventurer Tier, does that mean they are required to start at level 3?
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Apr 12, 2013 03:56
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Mikan posted:New Q&A. From what it says, I think they're having you slide the whole xp scale down three levels. So you'd hit level 4 at the same xp goal as level 2, and so on. E: but on re-reading, maybe not... This is a poorly worded response. It could be that you adventure until you earn enough xp to go from level 3 to level 4, but I don't get what they mean by "extra time" Dr. Lunchables fucked around with this message at 04:16 on Apr 12, 2013 |
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Apr 12, 2013 04:10
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It reads more like they're addressing people who are worried about missing out on the adventuring time you'd normally play through from 1-3.
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Apr 12, 2013 04:14
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So if I've got this straight, you adventure for the amount of time it would take you to reach level 4, but don't actually go up in level until you reach the xp bank for 4. Instead you have all the benefits of being level 3, but it takes forever to gain the first level? This whole "start at 3" thing is taking a really weird turn in terms of game design. Throws the whole semi linearity of level progression out the window.
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Apr 12, 2013 04:24
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Mendrian posted:Survey came out. Well part of the reason is that it's just play test stuff with no art or fluff just basic rules.
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Apr 12, 2013 04:28
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Lord Frisk posted:So if I've got this straight, you adventure for the amount of time it would take you to reach level 4, but don't actually go up in level until you reach the xp bank for 4. Instead you have all the benefits of being level 3, but it takes forever to gain the first level? It just feels like a really bad solution to a really dumb problem that they created for no reason. So it fits 5e perfectly. Edit: It also "solves" multiclassing in that it sinks pretty much one of the only reasons you'd actually do so in a 3e game for easy low level stuff, so it solves multiclassing by making it always awful rather then situationally awful and situationally really awesome. What's even the point of multiclassing now? Stop leveling in one class so you can gain an extra level that grants you absolutely nothing? Because if you multiclass then you start in those "apprentice" levels that grant jack poo poo. Why? It astonishes me how everything in 5e looks like an intentional mistake made for parody, and yet none of it is. ProfessorCirno fucked around with this message at 04:39 on Apr 12, 2013 |
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Apr 12, 2013 04:35
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MonsterEnvy posted:Well part of the reason is that it's just play test stuff with no art or fluff just basic rules. Sticking art on a dull game doesn't make it an interesting game.
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Apr 12, 2013 04:39
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PantsOptional posted:Sticking art on a dull game doesn't make it an interesting game. Yeah. Also, any deviation from the standard D&D fluff (which is already present in Next) isn't going to happen anyway. There's never been anything particularly compelling about the D&D fluff, but any attempt to change it up a bit sets a lot of people to yelling about how changing D&D is a terrible idea and gently caress you for thinking about it. I'm looking at you, Dragonborn Warlord haters.
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Apr 12, 2013 07:30
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The whole Apprentice Tier thing just sounds incredibly stupid to me. The reason they list apparently has nothing to do with multiclassing and sounds like a made up reason that will almost never come up. The classes are sparse enough at 1st level, and levels thereafter, without splitting that first level into three.
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Apr 12, 2013 08:10
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AlphaDog posted:Yeah.
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Apr 12, 2013 08:39
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Nessus posted:Dark Sun owned and should be made the core setting. Perhaps in 6E. That's kinda my point. Dark Sun owned. Planescape owned. The standard D&D setting/fluff is dull as gently caress. For races, you've got: Humans, obviously. Elves. Short. Into magic and forestry. Dwarves. Short. Tough. Into mining. Also there used to be gnomes, You're going to have to do something to that to make it interesting. Even the classes are boringly generic, with the possible exception of Druid. Edit: If this sounds like it's a really bad opinion of D&D as a whole, it isn't. Every previous addition has attempted to add fluff to the game. AD&D had druids, gnomes, etc. 2nd Ed had specialist wizards (instead of just a separate illusionist class) and some different race/class stuff. 3rd ed had some cool bizarre stuff and changed Druid from a vaguely celtic version of the cleric into a shapeshifting dude. 4e introduced dragonborn, warlord, and a few other nontraditional D&D things. Next has brought nothing new to the table as far as built-in fluff/setting stuff goes. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 09:55 on Apr 12, 2013 |
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Apr 12, 2013 09:49
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Or keep the typical fantasy thing as the base and go back to 2e full-throttle-creation of product lines that are off the beaten path. The new batch of Darksun, Planescape, Ravenloft, and Spelljammer - either literally or figuratively. For the product lines to gain any depth, they will have to let the system run for a while though. Keep the main game simple and Tolkien-lite, it works fine for people that like "fantasy" and/or are new to DnD from fantasy novels, games, movies, etc.., then introduce weirdnesses into the other settings. As far as fluff goes, I liked the ecology-of style monster write-ups. 
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Apr 12, 2013 09:57
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ProfessorCirno posted:It astonishes me how everything in 5e looks like an intentional mistake made for parody, and yet none of it is. e: Somebody forgot to tell the art guy. Splicer fucked around with this message at 10:10 on Apr 12, 2013 |
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Apr 12, 2013 10:04
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Personally I like the 4E default setting (points of light? or something). It has the standard races that a guy coming from Lord of the Rings might want to pick (dwarves, hobbits, two kinds of elf), has a couple more exotic for people who can't bother with that boring poo poo (Dragonborn, Tiefling), there is no world-related baggage to the classes that a newbie can't possibly know about, and you can basically drop anything you want in it. There are no dinosaur-riding halflings in it, but there is nothing stopping you from putting halflings on dinosaurs, right?
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Apr 12, 2013 10:59
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The Nentir Vale is pretty generic but it doesn't come with the cruft and baggage (and occasionally really dumb writing) of something like Forgotten Realms and it's a pretty good mix of "here is the traditional D&D experience with elves and dwarves fighting kobolds and orcs for sweet loot" but also dragonmans and demon-dudes and even warforged are technically a default part of the setting since they first showed up in 4E in a Dragon article way before 4E Eberron came out. I'm also a big fan of the cosmology as opposed to the Great Wheel because I find the tripartite regular world/feywild/shadowfell sandwich to be more gameable than "here's a bunch of planes you'll never loving go to, just yank the wildlife from to do your bidding if you're a spellcaster." It's not super-revolutionary or anything, but it's a setting I enjoy playing in. Also as much as the setting itself is mostly inferred and implied, with huge swathes left undefined or not touched on at all, you'd think the gamer segment that was all about exploration would dig it but because it doesn't have wandering monster charts and hex-grids it's impossible to run sandbox exploration games in 4E, so.
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Apr 12, 2013 11:23
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"People are complaining about the depth of the game", says one developer. "That there isn't much to do. That it seems like a hollow homage to previous editions." "That sounds hard," says Mearls. "I'm willing to hear ideas about what we can do." "We could bite the bullet and write some real classes." "No," replies Mearls. "The grognards would poo poo a brick." "We could futz with the rules, try to get some new ideas in there," says another developer. "Already tried", says Mearls. "No more new ideas than you can count on one hand." "We could split level one into three, blander levels" offers an enterprising intern. "We could call it Apprentice Tier." "Yes," says Mearls. "Yes. Let's do the gently caress out of that idea." Then a clown swings through the board meeting on a lamp cord suspended over garden buckets full of LSD tabs.
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Apr 12, 2013 13:18
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AlphaDog posted:
quote:I'm also a big fan of the cosmology as opposed to the Great Wheel because I find the tripartite regular world/feywild/shadowfell sandwich to be more gameable than "here's a bunch of planes you'll never loving go to, just yank the wildlife from to do your bidding if you're a spellcaster." It's not super-revolutionary or anything, but it's a setting I enjoy playing in
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Apr 12, 2013 13:51
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MadScientistWorking posted:The 4E cosmology didn't solve that problem though as the Great Wheel got smashed into pieces and brought back into the setting. Sure it did. Because: A). Most of the stuff from the Great Wheel could generally be ignored if you wanted in favor of crazy faerieland shenanigans or kicking around D&D Silent Hill, it wasn't the only game in town. And B). When they did steal from the Great Wheel they tended to strip a lot of the stupid bullshit out (oh boy paraelemental plane of salt, can't wait to go adventuring there) and stuck the rest in one or two places and said "here, go." The Elemental Chaos, as a place to go adventuring, is better than "here are four planes all made up of a single element each with a couple interesting landmarks as the only places you'll ever go unless you really have a hankering to go explore the endless tracts of fire and nothing, and here are a bunch of made-up bullshit quasielemental planes that nobody was really asking for but SYMMETRY DEMANDS IT."
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Apr 12, 2013 13:58
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MadScientistWorking posted:Gnomes were the only interesting thing in the game that wasn't a ripoff of Tolkein. If anything I'd rather have more races like the gnomes than the generic lets just blatantly rip off Tolkein stick that the other races have. Oh, I agree. Hell, Gnomes could be awesome, but if they ever make it back in, it's unlikely to be as anything other than "smaller dwarves with magic, but I guess they're more into gems than metals". They could make Elves and Dwarves way more interesting too. But they won't. Kai Tave posted:...here are a bunch of made-up bullshit quasielemental planes that nobody was really asking for but SYMMETRY DEMANDS IT." It took me years to realise how stupid that was, and it still kinda appeals to my inner sperg.
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Apr 12, 2013 14:02
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Are they addressing at all the issue that people with Favorite Edition X can just play that? (Instead of Compromise Edition that only incorporates elements of the thing they like.) If anything, they've increased fragmentation by reselling PDFs and the commemorative hardcovers. They're in a really bad spot, since their audience allows only the narrowest band between Nostalgia and innovation. I just wonder what they hope to accomplish by even trying.
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Apr 12, 2013 14:17
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AlphaDog posted:Edit: If this sounds like it's a really bad opinion of D&D as a whole, it isn't. Every previous addition has attempted to add fluff to the game. AD&D had druids, gnomes, etc. 2nd Ed had specialist wizards (instead of just a separate illusionist class) and some different race/class stuff. 3rd ed had some cool bizarre stuff and changed Druid from a vaguely celtic version of the cleric into a shapeshifting dude. 4e introduced dragonborn, warlord, and a few other nontraditional D&D things. I read a couple RPGnet threads recently praising how Next is shaping up, and it looks like the highest praise is coming from people who are happy that it's mostly 3e but without tactical movement, and who are lapsed players--like, not people playing old editions, but people who remember some version of D&D fondly but haven't played any version of it for awhile.
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Apr 12, 2013 15:23
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Halloween Jack posted:I think the single weirdest thing about D&D is that despite being the face of the hobby and the far-and-away most popular game, it breaks from the standard followed by almost every other game insofar as it doesn't have an official setting, but it's also got too many embedded tropes and peculiarities to be a generic game. The weirdest thing about D&D is the way it's become generic fantasy. Druids turning into animals is from D&D. Druids don't turn into animals in religion or mythology. If they did turn into anything, it would have been a tree. The separation of "fighting guy" and "sneaking guy" is a D&D-ism. Conan snuck around all the time, and so did Aragorn, Beowulf, Gilgamesh, Sigurd, Odysseus, etc. In fact, "big dumb warrior protagonist" isn't a thing outside RPGs and RPG based fiction. Wizards that carry around spellbooks and memorize/cast/forget/rememorize spells are present in... that one Jack Vance series, D&D, and D&D clones. The cleric is purely D&D based. "Fighting-priest who's also a healer" just wasn't a thing in fantasy fiction before D&D. But all those concepts are now pervasive throughout fantasy. Because D&D. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 16:45 on Apr 12, 2013 |
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Apr 12, 2013 16:43
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Kai Tave posted:Sure it did. Because: Man they were fine. Because Elemental Chaos is exactly the same thing as Quasi-elemental Vacuum when it's being used to describe some poo poo that's happening on the other side of the magic windows in the planar fortress you're raiding. No one ever goes adventuring in the weird elemental planes because that's not what they're for. They were best used as backdrops for a single crazy adventure. I guess I like them because I was introduced to them via Planescape, maybe. Since that was exactly what they were in that setting. You'd hop a portal, next thing you know you're in a big Crystal Castle in Crystal County of Crystal Planet fighting the Crystalloids, and then after the boss dies you hop another portal, either home or to the plane of ultra-fire. If you did that with Elemental Chaos, it would be exactly the same. You're just in a big crystal chunk of the elemental chaos, hooray! Might as well be synonyms. I guess they would suck if your DM was all "Day 42. You head east. It continues to be ooze. One wonders why you went to the Plane of Ooze without a plan" but that's definitely a DM problem.
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Apr 12, 2013 18:59
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theironjef posted:I guess they would suck if your DM was all "Day 42. You head east. It continues to be ooze. One wonders why you went to the Plane of Ooze without a plan" but that's definitely a DM problem. If you played and lost against a Wizard and his "Figure it Out" you get the Plane of Slime. Its simple cause and effect.
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Apr 12, 2013 19:06
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I have always loved Hell and the Abyss which I found almost always had interesting fluff.
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Apr 12, 2013 19:30
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theironjef posted:Man they were fine. Because Elemental Chaos is exactly the same thing as Quasi-elemental Vacuum when it's being used to describe some poo poo that's happening on the other side of the magic windows in the planar fortress you're raiding. No one ever goes adventuring in the weird elemental planes because that's not what they're for. They were best used as backdrops for a single crazy adventure. I guess I like them because I was introduced to them via Planescape, maybe. Since that was exactly what they were in that setting. You'd hop a portal, next thing you know you're in a big Crystal Castle in Crystal County of Crystal Planet fighting the Crystalloids, and then after the boss dies you hop another portal, either home or to the plane of ultra-fire. If you did that with Elemental Chaos, it would be exactly the same. You're just in a big crystal chunk of the elemental chaos, hooray! Might as well be synonyms. If you're only using them that way they are the same, but the thing about elemental chaos is that while it contains all the usual elemental weirdness, it is not inherently hostile towards human life. I mean the wildlife is going to maul you if you're not badass or protected enough but it's possible to find food to eat, water to drink, air to breathe and warmth to not freeze without having to resort to magic. there are settlements of planar people out there. You can take any adventure you could have on the prime material plane, swap the background vistas with images from metal album covers and plop it into the elemental chaos and it'll work fine. You can have wilderness adventures where you're exploring crystal forests, fording rivers of ice and riding up waterfalls that fall upwards towards floating volcanic islands. It's basically the plane of magical geography. You can even plop 1st level adventurers into elemental chaos just fine. Some high magic kingdom has set up a settlement to mine for magic crystals or whatever. The royal wizards set up a permanent teleport circle and the colonists got sent through. Then you can have a campaign where the party of second generation colonists that were born in the elemental chaos are helping to defend their home from wildlife and establishing trade routes and playing political games with other planar settlements and generally growing up into badasses while surviving in a harsh frontier land.
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Apr 12, 2013 19:52
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Technically, didn't you start at level 3 in Dark Sun ? Throw back that way. The splitting the levels into tiers is not a bad idea. It would be really cool if there was an apprentice tier, and once you transitioned to heroic tier, your apprentice levels didn't mean anything, but a fully leveled aloe entice was roughly equivalent to a level 1 heroic. This would have been a good idea in 4th also, with the correct implementation. Power bloat relly started in paragon tier, so if you could ignore your heroic levels, and only care about your paragon, it might have led to a cleaner game.
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Apr 12, 2013 20:01
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Okasvi posted:You can even plop 1st level adventurers into elemental chaos just fine. Some high magic kingdom has set up a settlement to mine for magic crystals or whatever. The royal wizards set up a permanent teleport circle and the colonists got sent through. Then you can have a campaign where the party of second generation colonists that were born in the elemental chaos are helping to defend their home from wildlife and establishing trade routes and playing political games with other planar settlements and generally growing up into badasses while surviving in a harsh frontier land.
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Apr 12, 2013 20:16
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AlphaDog posted:Druids turning into animals is from D&D. Druids don't turn into animals in religion or mythology. If they did turn into anything, it would have been a tree. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnbhennach " The two fought, taking a series of animal and human forms" Druids turned into animals all the time in Celtic mythology. But the rest of what you say is true.
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Apr 12, 2013 20:45
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Okasvi posted:If you're only using them that way they are the same, but the thing about elemental chaos is that while it contains all the usual elemental weirdness, it is not inherently hostile towards human life. I mean the wildlife is going to maul you if you're not badass or protected enough but it's possible to find food to eat, water to drink, air to breathe and warmth to not freeze without having to resort to magic. there are settlements of planar people out there.
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Apr 12, 2013 21:01
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4e also had an apprentice level, remember. It was level 0, and the rules appeared in Dragon. Basically you picked your power source, but not your role or any powers. You had one special attack, and a bunch of tokens that you could use to add various role-related riders to that attack, so you could spend a token to be a leader for a turn, then try out being a defender next, and so forth. It was a pretty cool idea to let new players try out the various roles before having to pick one 'for real' because role is such a huge part of a character in 4e. Sometime like that, to let starting players test run the various mechanical systems and then pick the one they find the most interesting, would be great and actually serve a purpose. Instead, we got "Start at level three if you want to not suck."
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Apr 12, 2013 21:51
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J. Alfred Prufrock posted:Instead, we got "Start at level three if you want to not suck." Even better, we get "start at level three if you want to not suck and maybe spin your wheels for three levels." Minimal treasure, no advancement, just 2250 XP per person before something interesting happens.
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Apr 13, 2013 01:48
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I need all of you to decide an important debate. I made stew for dinner. Its very warm in the FL, where I reside, so I thought a more fruity approach would be welcomed. I used mango, cilantro and a sangria wine to accomplish this. My wife thought this clashed with the carrots, squash garlic and beef, and oats that was the base of stew (also we usually use a shiraz or a merlot for the wine). I thought it tasted fine, but she disagreed.
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Apr 13, 2013 02:39
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Ulta posted:I need all of you to decide an important debate. I'm not usually a fan of root veggies and fruit together in the same dish, but that doesn't sound that bad.
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Apr 13, 2013 02:51
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