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TheGreatEvilKing posted:Yet this is all usually drowned out by the chorus of "4E === THE WOW" which, while there are some similarities (and the designers referenced WoW for design ideas), people would have forgiven WoW influences if the game had let them continue playing their characters and actually fixed all the problems they identified. People would have thrown money at WotC like a lonely man in a strip club. I cannot look at, attached to something labeled A CRITICAL REVIEW, and believe this is anything but an April Fools Day joke gone on 15 days too far.
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Apr 16, 2018 08:25
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:I don't think anyone actually LIKES Diablo-style itemization where you continually swap out items for new bonuses. People tolerate it because its in a lot of games and is really easy for designers to implement, but I've never seen anyone post about how this hat gives them 5% more fire damage than the hat they got 10 minutes ago and it totally makes their crushing breakup tolerable. People will go for the bigger numbers, but a ring that turns you perpetually invisible is just going to be more exciting than raising your firebolt damage. I think it's also the case that games with an "item treadmill" still fail at implementing Diablo-levels of power creep anyway. Whether you're talking about the second or the third game in the series, the bonuses in those games increases your character's numbers by orders of magnitude. Or to put it another way, people have never tried to solve the Linear Fighters Quadratic Wizards problem by making the Fighters straight-up goddamned Quadratic, much less Exponential. You know what BAB should do? It should act as a multiplier on all damage. TheGreatEvilKing posted:If the Races and Classes preview book is to be believed, early drafts of 4e actually had everything on a per-encounter schedule and were convinced to ditch it by Mike Mearls (who later spun the draft into Tome of Battle). This is true. They shied away from it at the last minute because ostensibly they couldn't swallow the idea of removing the "daily" layer of adventuring, but if you look at Tome of Battle classes and compare it to 4e's design, it's clear that there's actually no "daily" throttle to ToB classes save plain running out of hit points (which is easily obviated with Wands of Cure Light Wounds anyway, but let's assume that that wasn't intended behavior). TheGreatEvilKing posted:Other than that, combat is mostly the same with the exception that everything is measured in squares instead of feet, AoEs are squares instead of circles/circle equivalents, and everyone in 4e-land can fold space and time to move diagonally without penalty. That's different, but it's not actually objectionable as...well, you already play D&D at a table with dice, go ahead and use a board. It's a game. One difference from 3e that I want to point out is that instead of the "cone" shape, they instead use a "blast" shape, which is a square shape of x number of squares to a side. It was a lot easier to adjudicate than trying to figure out what's the jagged-diagonal edge of a "40-foot cone" TheGreatEvilKing posted:What the chapter also points out is that you have a little pile of fiddly ongoing effects, which can end at the beginning or the end of your turn. It also introduces the saving throw mechanic, which is intended to prevent people from getting permanently paralyzed, but manages to gently caress up in every possible way. At its core, you have a 55% chance of ending an effect on you each turn, regardless of the effect or originator. If you are a god - an actual thing the game says you can become - and you mind-control a commoner, that commoner has a 55% chance of breaking free of your control every turn. If said commoner somehow gets a domination power and hits you with it, you have a 45% chance of not making your save. A significant change from 3e is that durations were all revised to last so many turns, or until the end of the encounter, or until a saving throw is passed. This has a tendency to become fiddly, especially when making distinctions between turns, rounds, and starts and ends of rounds and turns ... but the alternative was trying to adjudicate the management of buff spells that lasted x rounds versus x minutes versus x hours versus x days. TheGreatEvilKing posted:To start with, you need a feat to use rituals. Now, already we see that wizards and clerics get that feat for free, but it gets better! Many of the rituals are keyed to arcana, religion, and nature checks - skills the wizard and cleric have, but the fighter doesn't. Now, if you get a scroll of the ritual instead of learning to use it yourself, it takes half the casting time and anyone can use it, but that costs more money. This was definitely one of the "cowardly" outcomes of 4e. The Ritual system was still hugely biased in favor of spellcasters anyway. TheGreatEvilKing posted:4TH EDITION DIDN'T FIX poo poo Since you already dropped an Obamacare reference, my clumsy political analogy is that 4e is lot like Bernie in that this is the compromise candidate. 4e is a lot better in peoples's heads and with the benefit of a lot of internal houseruling that's sort of been inculcated at this point, but just like Sanders's stance against airstrikes in Syria is merely procedural instead of moral, so it goes with 4e being very held back by a lot of hidebound traditionalism within the D&D milieu. People here tend to look upon it nicely because the rest of the party is trash and sucks (and 5e is actively reactionary) and you're maybe one of a dozen people that's ever leveled a criticism against it that wasn't mired in disingenuous horseshit*, but "attacking it from the left" as it were does reveal a lot of flaws that are otherwise glossed over since good alternatives have been so niche and paltry. * I personally have very little respect for the idea that you should be able to carry over your campaign across multiple games, but you do you.
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Apr 16, 2018 08:28
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gradenko_2000 posted:* I personally have very little respect for the idea that you should be able to carry over your campaign across multiple games, but you do you. Hey, 9 year old me still hasn't forgiven TSR for invalidating my Assassin in 1989. Oh no wait yes it has because that complaint mattered for like an hour 30 years ago.
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Apr 16, 2018 09:00
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Mr. Maltose posted:I cannot look at, attached to something labeled A CRITICAL REVIEW, and believe this is anything but an April Fools Day joke gone on 15 days too far. I'm confused, are you saying I should have been screaming about how 4e == WoW == Satan, or that I'm doing that too much like a typical internet crazy person? I generally don't hold much truck with the incoherent 4e is WoW screaming, mostly because I usually see it segue into incoherent bullshit. Yes, the powers have cooldowns, so loving what? I don't even have a problem with fighters being on a cooldown, go deadlift at your max weight (the point where you can only do 1 rep) and then try to replicate that repeatedly for an hour. Good luck! The only argument for "4e is the WOW" I find remotely coherent is the inability to target powers on an object without errata/DM approval and the bizarre terror it has of letting players have any narrative agency - similar to needing the blue key to open the blue door. It's kind of a deal breaker for me to be honest, but I can see how people would be fine with it after dealing with some rear end in a top hat using incantatrix to perpetually be running shapechange or some guys running a scry and fry attack. gradenko_2000 posted:Or to put it another way, people have never tried to solve the Linear Fighters Quadratic Wizards problem by making the Fighters straight-up goddamned Quadratic, much less Exponential. You know what BAB should do? It should act as a multiplier on all damage. That honestly doesn't help fighters as much as people think it does. You CAN get damage out of fighters in 1e-3e and totally wreck anything vulnerable to swording. Yes, it requires specialized builds, but once you figure it out it's no different than the secret of never using fireball in 3.5 and targeting the right saves. The problem is that fighters just don't do poo poo out of combat, but "delete single target" is a viable combat niche. They need better mobility to fight Smaug (or the ability to switch from melee to archery with no penalty) but a charge warrior build is going to kill things harder than a save or die wizard. They need good defenses and stuff to do out of combat. If someone competent bought the D&D IP, I'd love to see something like "well all these mythological warriors were nobility/royalty/demigods, so we're bringing back the castle and followers and giving the fighter political/diplomatic abilities" that would be a step in the right direction. Sadly, there's no real one coherent vision so we get number piles instead. gradenko_2000 posted:A significant change from 3e is that durations were all revised to last so many turns, or until the end of the encounter, or until a saving throw is passed. This has a tendency to become fiddly, especially when making distinctions between turns, rounds, and starts and ends of rounds and turns ... but the alternative was trying to adjudicate the management of buff spells that lasted x rounds versus x minutes versus x hours versus x days. You really only need the per-encounter duration. Tracking 1-round is annoying, but if you do have it make it all end of turn or beginning of turn. Daily or hourly should just be a class feature passive at that point. Have some variant of the saving throw mechanic so you're not eternally paralyzed, but this is really tricky to balance and make it so you can have long-lasting stuns on weak dudes vs RNG variance. gradenko_2000 posted:I personally have very little respect for the idea that you should be able to carry over your campaign across multiple games, but you do you. Go back to the 2008 messageboards, and there are a ton of "where are my bard/druid/monk" or whatever. I wouldn't expect all -or most - of the abilities to be replicated faithfully, but they should be available. If they announced 6e tomorrow and decided that they were going to fix the fighter problem by removing the class and including spellswords instead, I guarantee this board would be pissed. gradenko_2000 posted:the rest of the party is trash and sucks (and 5e is actively reactionary) Yeah, maybe some day we will get an edition of D&D that doesn't make me cringe or require a bunch of doublethink to put together characters.
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Apr 16, 2018 09:31
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It's the fundamental lack of knowledge at the idea that any form of Fourth Edition would not have people screaming about it, because the problem wasn't that the game was WoW poo poo for Babies, the poo poo about it being WoW is the post-hoc justification of the game Being Different. The fact that another company literally ran a campaign about being The Game You Love and insisting that 4E was going to ruin your childhood memories personally, possibly with a blunt object, would have happened even if your mythical Good 4E happened. Blaming 5E and Pathfinder on 4E just not being good enough is to miss the entire reason that Pathfinder succeeded and 5E flailed at trying to regain ground in the most recidivist manner possible.
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Apr 16, 2018 09:46
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:The problem is that fighters just don't do poo poo out of combat, but "delete single target" is a viable combat niche. It's totally a viable niche, one that wizards unfortunately are also very good at. quote:Go back to the 2008 messageboards, and there are a ton of "where are my bard/druid/monk" or whatever. I wouldn't expect all -or most - of the abilities to be replicated faithfully, but they should be available. Ultimately this was going to be a question of degrees. If it hadn't been "Where's my Bard?" It would have been "Where's my Skald?" because 3e made prestige classes such an integral part of the conversation (not that you'd know from either 3.x PHB, neither mentions them.) 4e made the call to keep those, integrate them directly and put them right there in the book along with Epic Destinies so that players could see what the full process looked like instead of having to buy Tome of Battle (or for example wherever Incantantrix was, FR?). Not a perfect solution but the perfect solution was probably an 800 page book. quote:It's the fundamental lack of knowledge at the idea that any form of Fourth Edition would not have people screaming about it, because the problem wasn't that the game was WoW poo poo for Babies, the poo poo about it being WoW is the post-hoc justification of the game Being Different. The fact that another company literally ran a campaign about being The Game You Love and insisting that 4E was going to ruin your childhood memories personally, possibly with a blunt object, would have happened even if your mythical Good 4E happened. Blaming 5E and Pathfinder on 4E just not being good enough is to miss the entire reason that Pathfinder succeeded and 5E flailed at trying to regain ground in the most recidivist manner possible. Right. Also saying it "crashed and burned" is a little weird. It did fine. Each edition has always sold better than the last, 4e included. The notion that it flopped out the game like one of those film reels of old-timey bad airplanes is also part of a narrative that has had a lot of assistance from the internet. theironjef fucked around with this message at 10:01 on Apr 16, 2018 |
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Apr 16, 2018 09:57
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Mr. Maltose posted:It's the fundamental lack of knowledge at the idea that any form of Fourth Edition would not have people screaming about it, because the problem wasn't that the game was WoW poo poo for Babies, the poo poo about it being WoW is the post-hoc justification of the game Being Different. The fact that another company literally ran a campaign about being The Game You Love and insisting that 4E was going to ruin your childhood memories personally, possibly with a blunt object, would have happened even if your mythical Good 4E happened. Blaming 5E and Pathfinder on 4E just not being good enough is to miss the entire reason that Pathfinder succeeded and 5E flailed at trying to regain ground in the most recidivist manner possible. I mean, compare to this: http://archive.li/8pUwz quote:What Is Graduate Your Game?
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Apr 16, 2018 10:00
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I wouldn't give Paizo that much credit, they more fell assbackwards into an effective campaign of preying on nerd toxicity and change resistance.
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Apr 16, 2018 10:05
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Nessus posted:To be fair, wasn't Paizo's whole thing basically that one of their company people took an MBA class and developed a marketing campaign - it was just that in the context of tabletop RPGs, this picking up of basic information was tantamount to the Sa-Matra of the Ur-Quan clans? Paizo used to publish Dungeon and Dragon Magazines for WOTC under license. When WOTC decided to move to 4e, they took Paizo's license away from them. They then also created the GSL to replace the OGL, and it stated that you could no longer publish material for 3.5 if you started publishing material for 4e. Paizo was now in a position that they had lost their primary line of business. They needed to create a game that they owned, completely, so that no one could ever take their licensing away from them the way WOTC did. Enter Pathfinder. But you don't get people to play your 3.5 spin off just because it's there, you need to make a reason. Enter the birth of the "4e is WOW for babbies" and "4e is just TOO DIFFERENT" and "Pathfinder is the true heir to the D&D tradition" talking points. They had to deliberately peel players away from 4e by pooh-poohing it before it ever came out, or else having their own license wouldn't matter because nobody would play it anyway. Now, one might excuse this as "just business", that Paizo was simply doing what it needed to in order to survive, capitalism thrives under competition and all that, but the ethics/morality of instigating toxicity within the hobby for the sake of business is ... not great.
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Apr 16, 2018 10:11
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gradenko_2000 posted:Now, one might excuse this as "just business", that Paizo was simply doing what it needed to in order to survive, capitalism thrives under competition and all that, but the ethics/morality of instigating toxicity within the hobby for the sake of business is ... not great. No that one's Games Workshop, I think.
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Apr 16, 2018 10:18
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PurpleXVI posted:I'm actually kind of surprised no one's tried to make an X-COM RPG
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Apr 16, 2018 10:24
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gradenko_2000 posted:Enter the birth of the "4e is WOW for babbies" and "4e is just TOO DIFFERENT" and "Pathfinder is the true heir to the D&D tradition" talking points. They had to deliberately peel players away from 4e by pooh-poohing it before it ever came out, or else having their own license wouldn't matter because nobody would play it anyway.
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Apr 16, 2018 11:50
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This discussion got me curious, and set me down a path of Just How Much Did D&D 4th Edition's Monster Manual 1 Get Right? I compared the on-release monster creation guidelines with the later ones from the MM3, and came up with the following: Brutes at level 1: * 20 + Con HP, gaining 10 HP per level. No change going into MM3 * 13 AC. No change * d20+4 to attack. MM3 increased the base attack to d20+5 Soldiers at level 1: * 8 + Con HP, gaining 8 HP per level. No change * 17 AC. MM3 reduced the base AC to 15 * d20+8 to attack. MM3 reduced the base attack to d20+6 Skirmishers at level 1: * 8 + Con HP, gaining 8 HP per level * 15 AC * d20+6 to attack No changes at all going into MM3 Lurkers at level 1: * 6 + Con HP, gaining 6 HP per level. MM3 reduced the base HP to 5 + Con * 15 AC. No change * d20+6 to attack. No change Controllers at level 1: * 8 + Con HP, gaining 8 HP per level * 15 AC * d20+6 to attack No changes at all going into MM3 Artillery at level 1: * 6 + Con HP, gaining 6 HP per level. MM3 reduced the base HP to 5 + Con * 13 AC. No change * d20+8 to attack. MM3 reduced the base attack to d20+6 Other notes: 1. When trying to assign a Con score, a 16 can be assumed. DMG 1 assumes that this Con score increases by 1 every two levels. 2. All monsters would gain 1 AC and +1 to attack per level. MM3 never changed these rates, only the base amounts. 3. All monsters had 13 to non-AC Defenses at level 1, gaining 1 Defense per level. MM3 never changed the base amount nor the rate. Elites and Solos: 1. Three out of the four defenses (AC/Fort/Refl/Will) of an Elite should be increased by +2. DMG 2 removed this point. 2. Solos should have four times the HP of a normal monster, and then five times if the Solo is level 11 or higher. DMG 2 removed the 5x clause for level 11+ Solos, so all Solos would only have 4x HP. 3. Three out of the four defenses of the Solo should be increased by +2. DMG 2 removed this point. Damage: According to the DMG 1, the "Medium Normal" damage roll for a monster is supposed to average 8.5 damage (such as 1d10+3), increasing by 0.5 per level, top out at 23.50 average damage by level 30. According to the MM3, the Medium Normal damage roll was instead supposed to average out to 9.0 damage (such as 2d6+2), increasing by 1.0 per level, to top-out at 38.0 damage by level 30 quote:A Medium Normal damage roll is supposed to be used for the At-Will powers of most monsters. In summary, the big changes were: * making everyone deal more damage * making Soldiers less well-armored * reducing the defenses of Elites and Solos, and the HP of Solos In the cold hard light of 2018, you could probably still reduce everyone's HP by 25 to 50%, and you could probably still double everyone's damage (or more), but it's surprising to me how marginal some of these changes actually are. The lack of damage was a very latent issue that reared its head as soon as the game released, and had a variety of knock-on effects (long combat length that felt "meaningless" and "sloggy"), but you think the rest of the numbers would have adjusted more radically, and you wouldn't even really feel the Solo HP change until halfway into the game. It's my suspicion, though not thoroughly investigated, is that a lot of the "long combat" issues that were encountered were caused on the back-end by using over-leveled enemies, as well as players lacking the item-based and per-tier bonuses that would have made enemies feel hard to hit. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 12:10 on Apr 16, 2018 |
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Apr 16, 2018 11:52
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Mr. Maltose posted:It's the fundamental lack of knowledge at the idea that any form of Fourth Edition would not have people screaming about it, because the problem wasn't that the game was WoW poo poo for Babies, the poo poo about it being WoW is the post-hoc justification of the game Being Different. The really funny thing is, this poo poo goes all the way back. 3.x, with its item slots and item affixes? People beat at their breasts over it being Diablo-fied. 2E? My Favourite Class is gone! There are nerfs everywhere! Where are my demonic boobies?! Christ, there are even old Usenet arguments about compiling 1E books somehow turning the game into a tabletop roguelike.
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Apr 16, 2018 12:26
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Yeah, this was not a new or probably unexpected thing. Paizo's aggressive commodification of it (And the fact this was the first edition change after we firmly entered the Age of the Internet) was the wrinkle that made it especially notable.
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Apr 16, 2018 12:35
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Bieeanshee posted:The really funny thing is, this poo poo goes all the way back. 3.x, with its item slots and item affixes? People beat at their breasts over it being Diablo-fied. I was one of the people who hated the changes to magic items going from 2E into 3E. Mostly the idea that they all had a price of some sort. Magical items being for sale just feels like anathema to the idea of a magic item. Once it's something you can pick up at the corner store, it's no longer something particularly exciting, it's just swapping out your +1 model for a +2 model at the Used Sword Salesman's lot, rather than finding something genuinely rare and game-changing. Then again, a +1 was also worth a lot more in 2E.  (and yes I still think 2E AD&D was the best edition of D&D we've had)
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Apr 16, 2018 12:51
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hectorgrey posted:Given that their variant rules for critical hits are either that they're either slightly more deadly or significantly less deadly, that's not exactly a big impact on magic weapons, unless I'm missing something. There's a good number of magic weapon traits or magic weapons that interact with the crit rules, like flaming burst, shocking burst, thundering, vorpal, mace of smiting, nine lives stealer, etc. hectorgrey posted:Also, you keep mentioning extremely well known flaws - for the benefit of the audience (and myself, having not taken much part in discussions about this game at the time), would you care to elaborate? Okay. D&D is a game that encourages long play. The whole game is largely based around campaigns; hence the long list of levels and the ranks of magic items to climb through. I believe the 3rd edition designers estimated a full campaign taking about two years. Which sounds sane in the RPG microcosm, but imagine a board game or wargame that takes two years - it's a really long period of time to dedicate to a game! As such, attribute rolls and critical hits play to it in different ways. Attribute determination has a long tail effect throughout a very long campaign. Not only to they impact that classes you can take and your overall effectiveness, they are, as you mentioned, a determination of what you can do in the future with many classes - what spells and feats you can qualify for. But, of course, your effectiveness determines your survivability as well, not just for you, but for the whole party. D&D is based around a team taking on challenges together, and if the Cleric drops often because they rolled a bad Constitution or Dexterity score, that can lead to failure for the whole group. This is, of course, at odds with a game that expects you to keep playing the same folks for years. Recently I watched a video that prided people for playing weak characters in D&D 5th Edition, but one of the reasons they put forth is that you don't have to care about a badly-rolled character and can take more thrilling risks, since their death will just let you potentially roll up another character! To me, that speaks of a pretty severe dysfunction. Critical hits are just perhaps a microcosm of another contradiction within D&D, where a single bad roll can kill a character. Take a CR 3 ogre against any level 3 character, and an average crit from the ogre will deal about 32 points of damage. That's more than enough to down or outright kill almost any average 3rd-level character, unless you're a barbarian that's focused on hit points. And yet, the game demands that you survive well past 3rd level. Almost all the cool stuff is waiting down the road from there. And unless you know that ogres can deal that kind of damage somehow, there's no forewarning to this, no danger zone where it's like "Okay, we've taken some really bad hits, time to run." Only by metagame knowledge are you likely to know that the ogre, despite being classed for your level, will straight-up murder you on a natural 20. Now, this isn't unique to ogres - orcs can wreck faces at their CR of 1, assassin vines can snap necks like twigs at CR 3, etc. As levels go up, characters become more likely to survive random spikes in damage, and get access to resurrection spells, but it can still really ruin your day when you think you're in the safe zone, then a dragon rolls a 20 on any of its five attack rolls a turn and you're sitting on your thumbs for the rest of a session. And the thing of it is, a lot of players hate confirmation rolls, because the badfeels of getting denied a potential crit is more potent than the awareness that PCs face greater penalties from crits. A monster can die a thousand times and have its sibs around the corner, whereas PCs lose a tremendous amount of progress whenever they die arbitrarily. And a lot of newer GMs will do things like remove those pesky confirmation rolls to avoid the bummer of missed crits, unaware that the downer of losing your character to nameless ogre #17 can be so, so much worse. So offering these kind of variants can have greater effects than some dungeon masters might recognize. Of course, this is part of a larger overall issue with D&D 3rd Edition's combat and a lot of it is holdover issues from earlier editions. Our friend, the ogre, can still take out many characters with just a lucky damage roll - a greatclub hit of 20+ damage will still bring down a lot of party members, after all. And you can say "Well, that's just D&D, that's the way it's been, deal with it.", but 3rd Edition broke from so many conventions that addressing the survivability issue could certainly have been on the table. Many of its systems are all-new (or at least borrowed from games like Talislanta and Rolemaster), so sacred cows were already being slaughtered in the biggest revision the game had seen in over 25 years. And yet, the game's system treats characters as disposable but doesn't want players to treat them as disposable. It's a contradiction that's become enshrined in most versions of D&D, save perhaps some of 4th Edition. And so, systems like randomized attributes or huge, sudden spikes in damage are a big part of that larger issue. Alien Rope Burn fucked around with this message at 16:12 on Apr 16, 2018 |
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Apr 16, 2018 15:35
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There's also no cushioning factor in D&D. There's the fact that you can get rezzed, sure, but that usually only shows up at higher levels. You don't have any 'expend resource to narrowly survive' or 'get knocked out of combat but not killed' rules or abilities. When I played D&D and Pathfinder, it was a common house-rule that we were going on 'jRPG rules' where someone put down in combat was just knocked out specifically so the GM could aim to knock PCs out of a fight without killing characters, because none of us liked dying at level 5.
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Apr 16, 2018 15:45
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There's this 2005 essay from Jonathan Tweet where he talks about how Hit Points are supposed to provide a sense of predictability - you fight a dude, he stabs you for 3 damage, and you know you have 20 HP or whatever, so you know you can take another 4 hits before you're really in trouble. (as a follow-on from that, effects like Cleric turning and charm/dominate/other save-or-suck spells are "bad" because they don't attack HP and their binary nature means that there's no warning before you're killed or disabled. Of course, the funny part with this is when you realize, despite Tweet's high concept, 3rd Edition was terrible with giving people enough HP to be able to react appropriately to the tide of a battle.
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Apr 16, 2018 16:04
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PurpleXVI posted:I was one of the people who hated the changes to magic items going from 2E into 3E. Mostly the idea that they all had a price of some sort. Magical items being for sale just feels like anathema to the idea of a magic item. They had GP sale values on magic items in 1E; I think they got rid of them for 2E for the same reason you (and I, honestly) didn't like it coming back for 3E. D&D economics has always felt weird to me. Especially when it comes to magic items.
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Apr 16, 2018 16:06
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I feel like 95% of the bad aspects of DnD derive from people squawking BUT I WANT MY X JUST LIKE LAST EDITION. Wizards have to learn Fly, even though it instantly and totally invalidates like 30% of the game and what other players can do, because they had Fly before and people will go into conniptions if they "lose" it. I wanna play a Summoner! Let me play a Summoner! And it'd better be just as obnoxious and tedious and impossible to balance as before, or there'll be hell to pay. People even whined that the 4e Fighter was unacceptable because they wanted a boring, weak class for whatever reason. That's why I have literally zero hope that DnD will ever be good in future*; if they cut out anything stupid you can bet your rear end it'll show back up in the next splatbook. 6e will waffle and waver and make some grand gestures and then give all the fun things to Wizards like they always have. * Just to clarify, I don't think it was good in the past either. It was simple, and had deep, systematic flaws, then they made it huge and complex and kept every flaw like it was a treasured gem.
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Apr 16, 2018 16:55
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Alien Rope Burn posted:There's a good number of magic weapon traits or magic weapons that interact with the crit rules, like flaming burst, shocking burst, thundering, vorpal, mace of smiting, nine lives stealer, etc. That's fair; I hadn't considered that. quote:Okay. D&D is a game that encourages long play. The whole game is largely based around campaigns; hence the long list of levels and the ranks of magic items to climb through. I believe the 3rd edition designers estimated a full campaign taking about two years. Which sounds sane in the RPG microcosm, but imagine a board game or wargame that takes two years - it's a really long period of time to dedicate to a game! As such, attribute rolls and critical hits play to it in different ways. The thing is, there are different schools of thought about how D&D should be played, and there have been for decades. The only edition of D&D to focus on one specific style, that of fighting primarily balanced encounters with a party that comprises the same PCs from lowest to highest level, was 4e. 3e was not designed with that as the default method of play. The designers recognised that some people might want to play it that way, however, and so gave options to make it easier (point buy for character gen, with a number of point values based on how powerful you want the party to be). Likewise they recognised that some DMs would want a lower power game, and so gave options for that too. The default is heroic but dangerous, with PCs being all too mortal. You mourn the lost PC and you gen a new one - or else you get raised one level lower, at great expense. Now this is indeed entirely reliant on the DM to know what they're doing - while the DMG does have a lot of good advice for new DMs, 3e is not a game that I would suggest for people new to the hobby in general (though at the time, it wouldn't have been a bad option out of those available). However, just using the default rules will generally lead to entertaining play - and maybe the DMG should have said right at the start that new DMs should run their first campaign just using the defaults before considering any variants. Still, the fact that these variants exist is not a bad thing, and the fact that sub-optimal characters can exist as a result is not, IMO, a flaw in the game. quote:Critical hits are just perhaps a microcosm of another contradiction within D&D, where a single bad roll can kill a character. Take a CR 3 ogre against any level 3 character, and an average crit from the ogre will deal about 32 points of damage. That's more than enough to down or outright kill almost any average 3rd-level character, unless you're a barbarian that's focused on hit points. And yet, the game demands that you survive well past 3rd level. Almost all the cool stuff is waiting down the road from there. And unless you know that ogres can deal that kind of damage somehow, there's no forewarning to this, no danger zone where it's like "Okay, we've taken some really bad hits, time to run." Only by metagame knowledge are you likely to know that the ogre, despite being classed for your level, will straight-up murder you on a natural 20. Now, this isn't unique to ogres - orcs can wreck faces at their CR of 1, assassin vines can snap necks like twigs at CR 3, etc. As levels go up, characters become more likely to survive random spikes in damage, and get access to resurrection spells, but it can still really ruin your day when you think you're in the safe zone, then a dragon rolls a 20 on any of its five attack rolls a turn and you're sitting on your thumbs for the rest of a session. This right here is why there's a multiple paragraph side bar talking about why critical hits work the way they do, and why any changes to the way they work should be made with utmost care. The writers cannot help it if the DM chooses to ignore half a page on the topic. quote:Of course, this is part of a larger overall issue with D&D 3rd Edition's combat and a lot of it is holdover issues from earlier editions. Our friend, the ogre, can still take out many characters with just a lucky damage roll - a greatclub hit of 20+ damage will still bring down a lot of party members, after all. And you can say "Well, that's just D&D, that's the way it's been, deal with it.", but 3rd Edition broke from so many conventions that addressing the survivability issue could certainly have been on the table. Many of its systems are all-new (or at least borrowed from games like Talislanta and Rolemaster), so sacred cows were already being slaughtered in the biggest revision the game had seen in over 25 years. And yet, the game's system treats characters as disposable but doesn't want players to treat them as disposable. It's a contradiction that's become enshrined in most versions of D&D, save perhaps some of 4th Edition. And so, systems like randomized attributes or huge, sudden spikes in damage are a big part of that larger issue. And so this is where we seem to differ. Ultimately I disagree that this is a contradiction - you're not supposed to treat your character as disposable, but you're supposed to be aware of their mortality. Losing a character is supposed to suck, but at the same time if the real danger of that happening is not there, then combat loses all of its tension. It's up to the DM to signpost danger and to ensure that the players have enough IC information to work out how dangerous a situation is. 3e relies on having a good DM, and the main flaw I can see is that sometimes the DMG assumes that a DM will just know what to do.
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Apr 16, 2018 17:01
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Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay: Rogue Trader Gubbinz So, we've got our base hulls, now we're on to what you fill the hull with. This is split between Essential Components, which generally cost few or no Ship Points unless they're a notable upgrade over the 'baseline' model, and Supplemental Components, which always cost ship points because a ship could theoretically sail without guns or cargo bays, but if you tried to go out into space without engines or a gellar field Bad Things would happen. For the most part, there are relatively few decisions to make on essential components in the core book; there are a few spaces where you can save on energy for a penalty to morale on your life-support system, or lose morale by having lovely bunks instead of adequate living space for the crew, but for the most part every Light Cruiser will have the same engine, etc. This is fine, because this gets expanded a lot in later books; later on you'll be able to pick out things like stealthy raiding engines, overpowered engines that might explode and set your ship on fire but that provide great performance, etc. For now, you 'pick' the Engine, record how much space it took based on your hull type and how much power it generates, then 'pick' your Warp Drive (Light Cruiser and Cruiser have heavier ones, they all function the same), decide between a standard Gellar Field (The thing that keeps your ship from becoming Event Horizon during warp transit) or one that provides protection against Warp encounters and a bonus to Navigation (Ha, as if anyone is using those rules!) for +2 Ship Points, grab your void shield array (or make the choice to between a single or double array if you have a Cruiser), and the first real decision is in your Bridge type. A standard Combat Bridge is light and uses little power, and provides damage control team direction that gives +10 Tech Use to fix the ship. A Command Bridge costs an extra Ship Point and is a bit more power intensive, but gives excellent Command and Control that gives characters +5 BS with the ship's guns and +5 to Command tests. An Armored Bridge is heavy but provides a 40% chance to ignore hits to your bridge (Given those can potentially space your entire command crew this might be useful). A Commerce Bridge is light, cheap, uses almost no power, is only useable on a Transport, and gives +50 Winbucks when you're doing trade missions because it have stock-tickers on board. A Ship's Master's Bridge is the best standard Bridge, and also the biggest and most power intensive, and can only go on a Cruiser. It gives +10 to BS to fire the guns, +5 to tests to maneuver the ship, and +5 to Navigation checks. Next you grab up your Life Sustainer, with the lovely one using 1 less power and space and making all Morale drops worse, while the other one just has no penalties. Then you deal with crew, and if you take the 'pressed quarters' you save 1 Space for -2 max morale (Ships have 100 max morale, generally). Finally, you pick between standard, 0 modifier low-energy use M-100 Auger Arrays, +5 Detection but higher power draw M-201b Auger Arrays, R-50 Multiband arrays that give +5 to tests to avoid navigational hazards but -2 detection and +50 Winbux when exploring, or +1 Ship Points Deep Void Auger Arrays that use a ton of power but give +10 Detection. After all that's done, you pick out your weapons. Weapons use a ton of power and space, and are divided into 2 classes at present: Macrobatteries, which fire tons of high power ordinance, and Lances, which fire massive energy beams. Weapons have 4 important stats: Crit Rating (If you get this many DoS on a hit with this weapon, it damages a component in a Critical Hit in addition to damage), Damage (Base damage per hit), Range (Range in Void Units), and Strength (Number of times this battery can hit in one round. Space guns fire at BS+0 base and hit once by succeeding, +1 per DoS, up to the battery's Strength). Macrobatteries have a ton of Strength and potentially long range, while Lances have very good Crit chance, decent damage, and ignore the Armor DR of the enemy ship. Macrobatteries have to pile on the hits to break through armor; unlike in ground combat, a ship's armor is subtracted once from the entire incoming barrage, rather than each individual hit. Shields block a single hit (or two hits if you're a cruiser) from an individual attacker per-round, and weapons can be combined together into volleys to overwhelm armor even further. ALL gun components cost SP. Your Macrocannon options are the lovely Thunderstrike Pattern, a d10+1 Crit 6 Range 4 Str 3 popgun that is barely worth using but very light, the Mars Pattern Macrobattery at d10+2 Crit 5 Range 6 as the 'standard' gun battery, the Mars Pattern Broadside for Lunars and Dauntlesses that adds a bit of Space cost but goes up to Str 5 and can only be mounted on the sides of the ship, the Best Weapon In the Core Book I mean Sunsear Laser Battery at d10+2 Str 4 Crit 4 Range 9 but very high Power costs, and the 2 SP hyper-expensive Ryza Plasma Battery at d10+4 Str 4 Crit 4 Range 5 that also causes nastier critical hits. A Sword with a pair of Sunsears can orbit around enemies firing at long range and picking them apart, I'm just saying. Your Lance options are very minor, and lances are insanely power and space hungry: The Starbreaker at Range 5 Crit 3 d10+2 Str 1 for high power and space and 2 SP, the Titanforge at Range 6 Crit 3 d10+4 Str 1 for even higher power and space and 2 SP, or the Titanforge Battery at Range 6 Crit 3 d10+4 Str 2. Note the Lance Battery is the only multi-hit Lance weapon. Its size and weight and power use means mounting it on anything but a Lunar is going to be tricky and require some sacrifices elsewhere. Once you've got all that done, your ship is technically totally ready to fight and sail. But you probably have some space and Ship Points left over, so now you get to add on all kinds of extra junk. Supplemental Components ALL cost Ship Points, and they're things like extra armor, stronger thrusters, a cunning supervillain maze to entrap boarders, extra cargo holds and observatories and things to grant extra Winbucks, extra supply vaults, barracks for tons of Guardsmen, massive munition stores that boost your Macrocannon damage but can explode like a British Battlecruiser, trophy rooms, killbots, or means to turn dying crew into mindless robit men. All these little things add character but the main interaction with the rules will mostly come with the victory points system. Finally, there are 'treasure' components: Archeotech and Xenotech components. These are things like incredibly good, lightweight, miniaturized engines that also make your ship faster, protective STC life sustainers that lower crew losses and boost morale, superior sensors and targeting systems, a teleporter, Eldar cloaking systems in place of your shields, infinite ammo alien crystal cannons, etc. You likely won't start with them; you can only do so if you roll 'I have a Xenotech or Archeotech component' as a starting complication. These are the sorts of Good poo poo you do whole adventures to get, and rightly so. For instance, the alien Shardcannon battery is lightweight, uses 0 Power, and causes d10+2 Str 4 Crit *3* Range 6; that's a very nice main cannon! You naturally want to seek out and steal these kinds of fantastic space treasures. I also forgot, earlier, that you roll for a specific AI/machine spirit quirk for your ship and a past complication. These are fun things like MARTIAL HUBRIS: This ship gets +5 to hit in combat but -15 to run away as it tries to plot courses back into battle, or Wrested from a Space Hulk, where your ship is reclaimed archeotech with better Armor, Speed and Maneuver but TERRIBLE SPACE PIRATE CURSES that make hits to your Profit twice as bad. These are neat and a fun little way to individualize the ships further. They are also how you have a chance of starting with Archeotech or Xenotech. Next Time: We Build A Spaceboat
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Apr 16, 2018 17:06
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hectorgrey posted:3e relies on having a good DM, and the main flaw I can see is that sometimes the DMG assumes that a DM will just know what to do. If this thread has taught us anything, it should be that "a good GM can fix it" is just an excuse for bad rules. A good GM can fix anything. And, conversely, a terrible GM is still gonna be terrible when using a good system. The measure of a system is how it works for those in the middle - GMs who are well-meaning and want to run a good game, but who are inexperienced, or uncertain, or awkward, or short on ideas. Those guys are going to rely more heavily on the book to help them run their campaign, and they might not recognize a bad rule, or know how to adjudicate when the rules fail. An experienced GM might consider it obvious that an L5R encounter should offer non-violent solutions because the combat is super deadly, but a newbie GM won't, and if they run that Night of a Thousand Screams campaign as written, it's gonna be a bad time for everyone. It's a trap, and the fact that some people can avoid it doesn't make it okay. A good system will let even a mediocre GM run a fun campaign; a bad one will lead her to confusion and frustration.
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Apr 16, 2018 17:28
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PurpleXVI posted:I was one of the people who hated the changes to magic items going from 2E into 3E. Mostly the idea that they all had a price of some sort. Magical items being for sale just feels like anathema to the idea of a magic item. Once it's something you can pick up at the corner store, it's no longer something particularly exciting, it's just swapping out your +1 model for a +2 model at the Used Sword Salesman's lot, rather than finding something genuinely rare and game-changing. Woof, that's a rough time to have solidified your tastes, I'm sorry. 2nd edition was a cowardly mess that failed to address any of the serious issues with AD&D. All it really did was turn the bard from an insane dual class journey into a bad class, and strip out stuff like Assassin, Half-Orc (gotta appease those Satanic Panic moms), Monk, Alignment languages, and psionics, without stuffing anything new in those holes. Anything inexplicable about 1e is still in there (level caps, multiclassing sitting next to dual classing, druids having to get in territory fights). If it was the best edition it was entirely because that's when a lot of really good writers started adding great new settings. If anything it was slightly worse that AD&D, which at least had a crazy sense of vision to it and knew better than to set the character generation standard to 3D6 down the line. And the magic item prices weren't gone, they just stuffed them into those Encyclopedia Magica splats. The notion that you absolutely had to go find even the most basic of magical crap suggested you were for sure playing one very specific kind of D&D game, and even halfway through the life of 2nd edition the writers figured out a lot of people wanted to play different sorts. theironjef fucked around with this message at 17:33 on Apr 16, 2018 |
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Apr 16, 2018 17:30
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Also, a GM should, ideally, be able to spend their time working on the adventure and writing ideas for the story, not patching holes in the part of the game they paid actual money for. It's the designers' job to give me something I can run. The more I have to do to fix a system for my table the less value I'm getting out of their work and the more I might as well have just written a drat game myself.
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Apr 16, 2018 17:34
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megane posted:I feel like 95% of the bad aspects of DnD derive from people squawking BUT I WANT MY X JUST LIKE LAST EDITION. Wizards have to learn Fly, even though it instantly and totally invalidates like 30% of the game and what other players can do, because they had Fly before and people will go into conniptions if they "lose" it. I wanna play a Summoner! Let me play a Summoner! And it'd better be just as obnoxious and tedious and impossible to balance as before, or there'll be hell to pay. People even whined that the 4e Fighter was unacceptable because they wanted a boring, weak class for whatever reason. Alternatively, Fly is really cool and good. I really don't want to lose Fly because I think it's just such a cool thing and is so intrinsically a thing I wanna be able to do if I can use magic. While I understand the reasons for it my biggest disappointment in post-Morrowind ES games is that you can't fly around. Same thing with teleporting. The real problem is that casters shouldn't be able to just invalidate what someone else does. Knock? Why does that spell exist and at such a low level? Why do Wizards have a "Lol gently caress rogues" button? (They actually have a lot of those)
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Apr 16, 2018 17:35
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hectorgrey posted:The thing is, there are different schools of thought about how D&D should be played, and there have been for decades. The only edition of D&D to focus on one specific style, that of fighting primarily balanced encounters with a party that comprises the same PCs from lowest to highest level, was 4e. 3e was not designed with that as the default method of play. Isn't that what Challenge Ratings were designed for and around? I mean, one can certainly point out the flaws in the CR system in regards to varied player character groups (either due to randomness or choice) and the actual assignment of CRs, but it was definitely an early attempt to balance encounters. Granted, there were some occasional subversions - dragons were given artificially low CRs to make them more difficult - but generally speaking that was a deliberate and obvious attempt to make sure heroes weren't overwhelmed. Emphasis on attempt, of course, but the intention seems clear to me. hectorgrey posted:And so this is where we seem to differ. Ultimately I disagree that this is a contradiction - you're not supposed to treat your character as disposable, but you're supposed to be aware of their mortality. Losing a character is supposed to suck, but at the same time if the real danger of that happening is not there, then combat loses all of its tension. Well, you can build tension with things other than "and then I take your character sheet away from you". There are games that are built around rapid character turnover, like Call of Cthulhu or RECON, and that can be fine if the game is designed around that. But those aren't games that lend themselves to or demand extensive and detailed character growth like D&D does. And the thing is, that D&D 3rd Edition expects players to be involved in combat on a very regular basis, and then gives a random chance of just losing a character. Not because they've necessarily taken a big risk, you can be fighting a monster you're supposedly qualified to fight in your specialized method of fighting and suddenly die from a single hit. A fight against an orc or an ogre isn't an exceptional circumstance, it's about as humdrum and standard an encounter I can think up, but even a well-armored, defense-built fighter can march up and die in one bad hit while at full HP at the monsters' given CR. And you're supposed to be having these kind of encounters all the time! And yes, that does create tension, but I can't help but think there are better ways to create that than having an RNG lottery occasionally mulch a character sheet prior to 9th level. That is, presuming you have a Cleric with a Wisdom of 15 or higher once you get to 9th level, anyway. Hope you didn't have somebody that had you roll 3d6 down the line or something, like the Dungeon Masters' Guide presents as an option... don't get me wrong - I think the Dungeon Masters' Guide does have some really good advice and is pretty state-of-the-art for the time, but it also blithely shrugs off some of D&D's core issues because, well. It's D&D. It's hallowed ground. theironjef posted:Woof, that's a rough time to have solidified your tastes, I'm sorry. 2nd edition was a cowardly mess that failed to address any of the serious issues with AD&D. I think there's also been a tendency to champion 2nd Edition as a reaction to 3rd Edition, and it at least reads more coherently than its forebear. But yeah, they deliberately changed little for fear of blowback from their consumers, and so you have stuff like AC being kept the way it is even though the designers full well knew it always felt rear end-backwards. Alien Rope Burn fucked around with this message at 17:53 on Apr 16, 2018 |
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Apr 16, 2018 17:51
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Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay: Rogue Trader Raise the main, uh, sail-thruster! Avast and ahoy, me maties, for it's time to actually build a space-boat and do one of the few genuinely fun parts of the system. Starship combat has its problems (Primarily that it's a dumbed down version of Battlefleet Gothic with a bunch of added 'RPG' stuff where the players are going to be 3-5 PCs controlling a single playing piece between them) but the base IDEA of making your own cool, customized massive space cathedral is fun and only gets better with the addition of more actual options in the later books. Using it might have problems, but creating it is fun! We're going to do this full RAW, so first we're going to see what kind of Dynasty we are. Rolling the bones, we get an 8: 60 Ship Points, 30 Profit, a 'dynasty that is on the wane'. The Kenway Dynasty doesn't have a lot of money, but it has a fine ship. With that kind of starting money, we *could* try a stripped down Dauntless, but it's probably better to start with a Tempest or Sword. We'll try a Tempest Heavy Frigate for the extra space, starting us out with a ship with 42 Space, 19 Armor, 8 Speed, +18 Maneuver, Turret 1, Detection +12, and HP 36, for 40 of our 60 SP. Next we check what she's like: Her Machine Spirit is Adventurous: She gets +10 Detection when we're actively on an adventure and -10 when not, because our ship is haunted by the ancient and subtle spirit of a Border Collie and wants quests ALL THE TIME. She's also Xenophilius, and starts with a Xenotech component (though we have to pay Ship Points for it). She also gets -30 to repair her unless the techpriest leading repairs has a degree in Forbidden Lore (Xenos) because parts of her just don't make sense otherwise. Her drive eats 10 of her 42 Space right off the bat, and generates 45 Power. We note we now have 32 Space, 45 Power to use. Her Warp Engines immediately eat 10 of both, giving us only 22 Space and 35 Power. I used to wish they'd just pre-subtract this stuff but there are actual, different drives available in later books that give them an actual reason to have had these costs, so fair enough. Next we'll put in a normal Gellar Field for 1 Power, leaving 34. Void Shields take up 5 Power and 1 Space, leaving 21 Space, 29 Power. She'll take a fine Command Bridge, costing us 2 Power and 1 Space and 1 SP, leaving us 19 SP, 27 Power, 20 Space. We're not cheap bastards here so she'll have a decent Voidsmen's Quarters (3 Space, 1 Power) and Vitae Life Sustainer (4 Power, 2 Space) for 15 Space left, 22 Power. Add on an adventurous R-50 Auspex Multiband for 4 Power and 0 Space and we've got 15 Space, 18 Power, and 19 Ship Points after the essentials. Now, we're going to be boring and spend 2 SP to have an ancient alien shardcaster battery as one of our guns for our Xenotech component, so that's only 3 Space and 0 Power, saving us a ton of power. Now we have 12 Space left (and 17 SP) and one more Dorsal turret to fill. We'll go big with a Ryza Plasma Battery for 7 Power and 4 Space and 2 SP. We've got 8 more space to play with and 15 Power, plus tons of ship points! It's time to add some murder servitors and poo poo. First, because we are gentlefolk, we add a Luxury Passanger Quarters for 1 Space and 2 Power and 1 SP and -3 Morale (The crew hates having foppish nobles on board but they pay). We now have a flying luxury hotel that grants a massive +100 Winbucks on Criminality, Creed, and Trade objectives. The crew can stuff it. We are now at 7 Space, 13 Power, and 14 SP. To provide contrast, we next add a Barracks (4 Space, 2 Power, 2 SP) which will provide us tons of soldiers for conquest and boarding and extra Winbucks on Military missions, leaving us at 3 Space, 11 Power, and 12 SP. We add a Temple Shrine to the God Emperor (Not as cool as the Auto-Temple but it isn't in this book) to both bling out our ship and fix the morale issue from the hotel, at 1 SP, 1 Power, and 1 Space. Now at 2 Space, 10 Power, and 11 SP. Finally, we put in an actual Cargo Bay And Lighter Hold for 2 Space, 1 Power, and 1 SP, lowering Maneuverability a little (3) but making us able to carry and smuggle goods for +50 Trade/Criminal Winbucks. We blow 3 Power on Augmented Retrothrusters for +5 Maneuver, leaving us with 6 Power and 9 SP. We go back and strip out the old R-50 Multiband for a Deep Void Array because we're worth it, taking us down to an excess of 3 Power, 8 SP, but greatly improving the sensors. At the end, our ship has two powerful cannons with good crit, a functioning resort and military base with a massive cathedral, an entire market and crime zone, it's quick, it can pick up on all kinds of ADVENTURE, and she's eager to get out there and get up to stuff. As you can see, you have plenty of room to give the ship a feeling of being a flying city full of powerful weapons even right from the start, and I appreciate that. We'll name her the Endeavor. She could also have been built as a crazy death-robit infested supervillain lair instead of a flying, heavily armed luxury hotel and smuggler's vessel. You can do all kinds of fun things with your ship and it's one of the strongest points of the system. Next: Things to do with bote.
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Apr 16, 2018 18:11
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Let's once again compare and contrast Rogue Trader's RPG interpretation with Battlefleet Gothic's tabletop interpretation of ship weapons. In Battlefleet Gothic, Batteries let you throw down a bunch more dice and often have better range, but also care about the enemy's orientation and have to beat or exceed the ship's Armor value to hit (super fragile ships like Eldar can be armor 4, most things are 5, crazy hard things like a Necron ship that's not on Brace For Impact or the front armor of an Imperial ship can be 6). Lances on the other hand come in MUCH smaller batteries but just hit on a 4+ full stop (hence the RT idea of them ignoring armor). Some races have fun special weapon types. For example, Ork batteries have a random strength every time they're fired because they're makeshift crap that sometimes is way better than it should be and sometimes is, well, makeshift crap. Tyranids have surprisingly long-range and high-strength Pyro-Acid batteries that are really good at causing ship fires and laughably short-range bio-plasma lances that move too slowly for shields to stop them so whoops don't get shot at by those. Necron batteries are fukken space lightning which is metal as hell.
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Apr 16, 2018 19:27
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Night10194 posted:or Wrested from a Space Hulk DM tip: playing out boarding a Space Hulk, reclaiming a ship, and blasting it free is a really fun adventure in my experience. Switching up to a new, bigger, better ship always feels good, especially if you've made them really work for it.
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Apr 16, 2018 20:02
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Mr. Maltose posted:Yeah, this was not a new or probably unexpected thing. Paizo's aggressive commodification of it (And the fact this was the first edition change after we firmly entered the Age of the Internet) was the wrinkle that made it especially notable. WotC's very sane and measured response, in light of this (and, to an extent, the fact that any 3e book was trivially easy to find online for the back half of THAT game's life cycle) was: We will not be selling any 4e PDFs, or indeed, any D&D PDFs, anymore, until TBD. They reversed course on this at the end of the life cycle of 4e, around which time they started selling 2e and 3e PDFs online again while gearing up for returning D&D to How It Was Meant To Be Played. Meanwhile, Paizo had spent the intervening years either selling book PDFs direct for Pathfinder products, or riding high on drivethrurpg's best sellers lists virtually unopposed in the "is D&D" space.
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Apr 16, 2018 20:55
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And part of that decision no doubt arose from the plans for 4E’s online component, which was derailed by a legitimate tragedy and never actually recovered.
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Apr 16, 2018 21:01
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Mr. Maltose posted:And part of that decision no doubt arose from the plans for 4E’s online component, which was derailed by a legitimate tragedy and never actually recovered. What happened?
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Apr 16, 2018 21:29
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:Also, something that I think gets lost in the historical perspective if you weren't there at the time, but a huge part of 4e's market share tanking was the "big leak" and policy consequences that came from it: A pre-press PDF (for anyone not in publishing, this is the file you send to your actual-physical-book-printer, with "marks and bleeds" and all the other fun printer necessary crap on the margins) of the 4e PHB1 surfaced online maybe a month or two before the game was supposed to come out, and it got around. I recall it being even dumber than that, because it wasn't just the PHB, but multiple books well after the initial release got around with bleed and palette marks. Which means, you know, it was an internal problem of some sort, either someone deliberately leaking the files or someone hacking someone in the production pipeline. So of course their entirely reasonable reaction was to poo poo on their entirely legitimate customers. It was one of the first and biggest removals of "content as service" that I remember, and was such bullshit. Josef bugman posted:What happened? The guy in charge of software development killed himself. (and I think his wife?)
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Apr 16, 2018 21:34
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Josef bugman posted:What happened? The lead (only?) developer killed his wife and then himself.
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Apr 16, 2018 21:35
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Mr. Maltose posted:And part of that decision no doubt arose from the plans for 4E’s online component, which was derailed by a legitimate tragedy and never actually recovered.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_and_Melissa_Batten
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Apr 16, 2018 21:35
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I should also note a dumb as poo poo thing in RT: They present an Example Ship that is meant to show off the shipbuilding rules and/or get players into the game quick if they want to use it. Except it's a Firestorm Frigate (A Sword variant that removes one of the flexible Dorsal mounts for a Prow mount to add a Lance), a hull that isn't listed anywhere in the main book and that has no base stats until one of the add-on books. This is their example ship! Their 'fully created and customized and ready for the PCs to show off how shipbuilding works' ship *is of a class not in the book*.
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Apr 16, 2018 22:17
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theironjef posted:Woof, that's a rough time to have solidified your tastes, I'm sorry. 2nd edition was a cowardly mess that failed to address any of the serious issues with AD&D. All it really did was turn the bard from an insane dual class journey into a bad class, and strip out stuff like Assassin, Half-Orc (gotta appease those Satanic Panic moms), Monk, Alignment languages, and psionics, without stuffing anything new in those holes. Anything inexplicable about 1e is still in there (level caps, multiclassing sitting next to dual classing, druids having to get in territory fights). If it was the best edition it was entirely because that's when a lot of really good writers started adding great new settings. If anything it was slightly worse that AD&D, which at least had a crazy sense of vision to it and knew better than to set the character generation standard to 3D6 down the line. I'm gonna have to disagree. 2nd ed is still, to me, the best edition. Better balanced than 3rd and 5th ed, flows better than 4th ed(though I respect the attempt to add some actual fun things for Fighters to do), and feels less barebones and, again, more balanced for fun with a higher starting power level, than what came before. Not to mention having all the best support in terms of settings(as you mentioned) and other added content(though no, ha ha, I'm not using Combat & Tactics, Player's Option was a great concept, but holy poo poo was some of it a fiddly loving mess). As for chargen standards, 2nd ed AD&D had the whole array, from 3d6 down the line, to 4d6 drop lowest, to various point buy variants, in the DMG, and discussed the pros and cons of them heartily, prepping you for which one you might want to use. In fact, I feel like 2nd ed AD&D is also one of the best DMG's ever, because it really gives you a lot of good advice, some solid variant rules and actual advice on how to use them. theironjef posted:The notion that you absolutely had to go find even the most basic of magical crap suggested you were for sure playing one very specific kind of D&D game, and even halfway through the life of 2nd edition the writers figured out a lot of people wanted to play different sorts. And what's wrong with the game being made for a specific type and feel of play? I feel like I made it pretty clear that it's not about playing D&D the right way or the hardcore way that's not for loser chumps. It's something specific about how it makes magic items feel like even a +1 weapon is something important and special rather than just, y'know, a +1 weapon that you can buy a sixpack of from the local Wizard Factory outlet. It's a necessity for the kind of setting feel that I prefer in my fantasy settings. If someone doesn't like it, they're free to make magic items more ubiquitous... but I'm glad I have an edition of D&D where it's not the base assumption. Trying to play 3E without ubiquitous magic items makes the already threadbare balancing go completely out of whack for most of the classes. Now, I'm not going to say that 2nd ed is perfect. It's got flaws, sure, mostly the fact that it's a sort of tottering Frankenstein's Monster stitched together from like fifty different mechanics and subsystems and types of rolling accumulated from earlier editions, and the one good thing I can say with no caveats about the editions that came later is that the more unified mechanics were a great thing. A D20 for everything? Rolling high always good? Yeah, I'm a fan of that. Also, it's a good thing they stripped out some of the classes from the earlier editions. Even 2nd ed AD&D has too many base classes. Just make it Sword Guy, Stealth Guy, Wizard Guy and Cleric Guy, and then let them have the in-class customization options to make Holy Sword Guy, Nature Sword Guy, Plain Sword Guy and Punch Guy from the basic Sword Guy template, and so on. Class bloat has been one of the worst factors of D&D from 3e onwards. 2nd ed also did multiclassing better than the later editions, but dual-classing was raw horseshit that no one sane ever used. I'll agree with you there. Also uh, good thing they DID strip out Psionics because man, as much as I like a lot of things about 2nd ed psionics, I'm glad they're an optional supplement and not a core thing. Hoo boy they're a loving mess. If you want a "cowardly mess," talk about 5E which failed to address ANYTHING garbage at all about 3E except Prestige Classes. You might as well go play Pathfinder.
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Apr 16, 2018 22:52
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poo poo like this is why I'm a Call of Cthulhu fan.
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Apr 16, 2018 23:05
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