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Nessus posted:I don't think the d20 was particularly sacred before the 3E period. Which is a shame! There have been some 3rd-party supplements that were so neat conceptually that I've bought them despite never intending to play 5e. Give me those for better games!
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Nov 18, 2020 22:35
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NGDBSS posted:AFAIK 5e has gone back to the 3e methods of "we'll just wing it" but more so because they're "optional" and you're choosing between them and ASIs. At least they haven't published a sourcebook's worth of feats yet. Nope, just more and more books that are mostly "new stuff for spellcasters"
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Nov 18, 2020 22:36
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Nessus posted:To be fair to - if not Mearls, earlier generations of D&D developers - it seems as if appearing to copy a core resolution mechanic of a Games Workshop product might have been a great route to the courtroom, at least in the past. Honestly, not so much...as long as they didn’t use any of the same names. It’s settled law in America that game mechanics are not protected by copyright, ever, just specific terms.
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Nov 18, 2020 22:39
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senrath posted:I'll admit I didn't end up playing all that much 5e, but my experience with it was that numbers never got all that high on either side of the equation, meaning that the giant random d20 was often the main deciding factor, which just felt bad when it decided you just sucked for turns in a row. Yeah, a more forward-thinking way to do a similar thing would be to remove to-hit rolls entirely. HP scaling already means individual threats develop into mob threats. Then you could tie secondary effects to the rolls, and offer guidance on how to simplify combat with tons of mooks by assuming average damage and secondaries never hitting, letting you kind of elegantly use mobs of low-level monsters as pseudo-minions. And this is literally just off the top of my head. Going one tiny step like 5E does really doesn't do all that much functionally while still letting them claim to be making the game better with innovative ideas. It means that mobs of lower level opponents have higher chances of hitting you, but doesn't do anything about how easily some spells solve that kind of threat, or make it take any less time to run an encounter like that.
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Nov 18, 2020 22:48
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Also there are a shitload of percentile systems. I'm pretty sure if GW tried to get snippy about that for some insane reason I can't fathom they'd take a Norwegian-piloted steamboat to the skull, considering CoC was probably one of the major influences on WHFRP in the first place.
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Nov 18, 2020 22:48
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Ultiville posted:Yeah, a more forward-thinking way to do a similar thing would be to remove to-hit rolls entirely. HP scaling already means individual threats develop into mob threats. Then you could tie secondary effects to the rolls, and offer guidance on how to simplify combat with tons of mooks by assuming average damage and secondaries never hitting, letting you kind of elegantly use mobs of low-level monsters as pseudo-minions. And this is literally just off the top of my head. This is probably the best description of 5th edition that I've seen. There are a thousand ways to make the game better, but none of them will ever happen and 5th was mostly just a way to sell the 4th edition changes to the grogs who left while removing the most obvious signs of the changes they hated. And the game is still thoroughly mediocre by design because that's the game that the players may not have wanted, but don't disagree on. Like, I played in and ran a couple dnd 5th campaigns not because I wanted to, but because anything else would've pissed off someone in the group so eventually we all just said gently caress it and played the junk food option that no one was happy with. edit: eventually I just walked away and I haven't gamed for about a year because I'm sick of eating trash. No gaming is better than bad gaming.
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Nov 18, 2020 23:23
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Night10194 posted:Oddly, as the hams fantasy guy, I actually don't feel percentile has that much value over d20. I think they're about equivalent. Most things in percentile systems don't really go into the full 'less than 5% variance' granularity that you get from using percentile rather than d20. This is, I find, the core benefit to a percentile-based system - it makes the math obvious.
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Nov 18, 2020 23:24
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Night10194 posted:Also there are a shitload of percentile systems. I'm pretty sure if GW tried to get snippy about that for some insane reason I can't fathom they'd take a Norwegian-piloted steamboat to the skull, considering CoC was probably one of the major influences on WHFRP in the first place. On top of that D&D already had a percentile resolution system with Thief skills. And furthermore, WHFP is so clearly derivative of D&D, GW suing WotC/TSR over resolution mechanics would be as absurd as TSR suing the Tolkien estate over Eants and Hobbits.
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Nov 19, 2020 00:16
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I tend to dislike percentile systems because their default state is to guarantee failure, because there's usually a hard cap on how good you can get(90 or 95% depending on the game, and even that tends to be hard to achieve), which can then be further lowered by circumstances(and collecting bonuses tends to be very situational or very Mr. GM May I Please Succeed). I wish more percentile system would leave you with uncapped skills so you had guaranteed successes on mundane poo poo and then only when King Doomfuck And His Wizard Ninjas are slinging hell shurikens at you, do you have a chance of flubbing your 185% odds of Do Cool Skateboard Trick because the side of an erupting volcano isn't the ideal environment for it.
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Nov 19, 2020 00:33
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Ultiville posted:Going one tiny step like 5E does really doesn't do all that much functionally while still letting them claim to be making the game better with innovative ideas. The honest impression I get from 5e products is that the developers have no idea what they're doing and are trying to hide it under the guise of looking like D&D. Mearls claims the reason 4e failed is that it was too balanced and those pesky players know the rules.. I get the honest impression that he doesn't understand why Essentials failed - after all, they got the old magic missile! That's why they abandoned 4e, right? - and they're throwing poo poo at the wall and obfuscating as much of the system math as they can because their prior efforts were frankly humilating. Look at all the scorn from 3rd edition D&D or the absolute failure of the Monster Manual and feat taxes. These are people who know they can't make a good or innovative game. It's why so much of the playtest was around "feeling like D&D" rather than getting the system math right or figuring out what the hell a monk should actually do. For my last example, I'm going to go back to the Player's Handbook suggested reading list, Appendix E. This is of course present because the original 1e Dungeon Masters Guide had a reading list, so all of the D&D fanboys can clap and cheer like trained seals. Hilariously Mearls and company include N.K Jemisin, an African American author whose work deals heavily in racial themes, as a suggested reading...in the appendix to a book which has hardcoded racial determinist rules explaining that black elves are dumber than white elves. I don't know what else to say. You can pick a page almost at random from the 5e Player's Handbook and it will contain some idea that sounds vaguely plausible and D&Dish and it will be implemented in a completely incompetent fashion. Go on! Grab a bottle of whatever you like to drink, pick a page, and watch them just absolutely poo poo themselves. It's glorious!
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Nov 19, 2020 00:49
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PurpleXVI posted:I tend to dislike percentile systems because their default state is to guarantee failure, because there's usually a hard cap on how good you can get(90 or 95% depending on the game, and even that tends to be hard to achieve), which can then be further lowered by circumstances(and collecting bonuses tends to be very situational or very Mr. GM May I Please Succeed). I wish more percentile system would leave you with uncapped skills so you had guaranteed successes on mundane poo poo and then only when King Doomfuck And His Wizard Ninjas are slinging hell shurikens at you, do you have a chance of flubbing your 185% odds of Do Cool Skateboard Trick because the side of an erupting volcano isn't the ideal environment for it. I largely agree with you with the slight clarification that it has nothing to do with using d100 as a mechanic, it's historical inertia from weird grog thoughts so the majority of percentile system still feel like Runequest or CoC or something. Like in theory I could hack PbtA to use percentile since it's just math, I'd just have to monkey with it so the probabilities came out the same and it'd be a pretty silly to do cause it's fine as is. This is one of those classic artifacts of game designers seeming to always forget 6th grade math.
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Nov 19, 2020 01:15
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NGDBSS posted:Feats proper started out in 3e, where the big draw was that they would open up more character options because you got 7 over your adventuring career independent of your class. In practice this was not true because a lot of feats plugged directly into class features, and because some class features (hello fighter) were just about getting more feats from a curated list. Add to this that the design space of "what is a feat" was poorly defined, so you could have Toughness (+3 HP) and Leadership (get a minion at level - 2) in the same book. There was even a sentiment in those days that Feats Should Be Nice Not Necessary, a response to how some feats were so defining that the gap between the haves and have-nots was insurmountable. Natural Spell for druids, Adaptive Style for swordsages, etc. Finally, well...there were far too many feats. The final total was somewhere in the four digits. I remember trying to play 3rd ed. and living in terror that my character would suffocate or die from a hernia because he forgot to take the Breath Oxygen or Take a poo poo Feat. Not literally but the idea that at any given point, I'd miss taking some vitally necessary thing without which my character would be useless from that point forward.
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Nov 19, 2020 01:15
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Everyone posted:I remember trying to play 3rd ed. and living in terror that my character would suffocate or die from a hernia because he forgot to take the Breath Oxygen or Take a poo poo Feat. Not literally but the idea that at any given point, I'd miss taking some vitally necessary thing without which my character would be useless from that point forward. I have no idea how you were supposed to play 3rd ed without charop forums.
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Nov 19, 2020 01:35
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Everyone posted:I remember trying to play 3rd ed. and living in terror that my character would suffocate or die from a hernia because he forgot to take the Breath Oxygen or Take a poo poo Feat. Not literally but the idea that at any given point, I'd miss taking some vitally necessary thing without which my character would be useless from that point forward. TheGreatEvilKing posted:I have no idea how you were supposed to play 3rd ed without charop forums. All this had to be teased together after the fact, because 3e wasn't good about communicating what it was supposed to be about. To its credit the DMG talks about the adventuring day and encounter pacing. There's even a one-page discussion on wandering monsters! But then all the player-facing stuff is this toolkit stuff, where the designers just threw in whatever they thought of from moment to moment without a proper sense of curation or what a Taunt feat means in the context of exception-based design. NPC statblocks that aren't just Elf Expert 7 are mostly about combat material, and most PC resources are combat-facing*, so regardless of whether adventure writers want people to try to talk their way past monsters they're going to look at most problems with swords in hand. I played 3e three times, in 2004/2005/2013. No one in the group had a clue about optimization in 2004 so we just winged it because it was what we had. In 2005, well, I played a druid and accidentally broke the GM's encounters. (Yay CoDzilla!) In 2013 I was far and away the most knowledgeable person and 3e was what the group had voted for. I sucked it up and deliberately avoided making a combat monster, choosing instead to play a support character. *The single most broken item in 3e was the Wand of Cure Light Wounds because it completely invalidated the core gameplay loop for half the printed classes. More and more I realize that people who didn't like 4e healing surges fundamentally don't actually want to play D&D.
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Nov 19, 2020 02:22
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NGDBSS posted:A lot of those problems were "solved" by papering over issues with your group. And the CharOp forums did have discussions about this and what it meant! I recall Caelic's 10 Rules for Practical Optimization about how people shouldn't just work inside this theorycrafting bubble, the Oberoni Fallacy as a statement that "if you fix a problem that does not negate the existence of the problem in the first place", or JaronK's Tier System which was all about organizing classes into groups for ease of interaction with each other. (Like how wizards and fighters together is a poor idea, but wizards and bards or bards and fighters could do alright separately.) A lot of this stuff was well intentioned but wrong or inconclusive. JaronK's Tier System ranks classes on, among other things, ability to break the game which is nonsense as once someone casts Gate the game is basically over as that's just not a spell you can deal with in any capacity, in the hands of PCs or NPCs. Practical Optimization vs Theoretical Optimization became a screaming match between people insisting that their build/favorite book/favorite class was practical optimization and that the "real TO" was the Blasphemy Blaster in the corner. I've even played at tables where monks were banned for being overpowered and wizards were encouraged to stack free metamagic, and this was after 4e's publication when the community knew better. Hell, look at Pathfinder, and how Jason Buhlman managed to cognitive dissonance himself into believing the 3.5 monk was good because it was a "caster killer". Hell, the Practical Optimization says to trust WotC customer service, who had a long and storied track record of producing rulings directly contrary to what was said in the book, and even cites the example of a polymorph FAQ contradicting printed rules. It's not that these people were stupid or malicious, it's that trying to play a balanced game of 3rd edition just comes down to massive amounts of doublethink and trying to figure out what THIS dm thinks is balanced. It's kind of nuts. I've played at tables where DMs flipped out because you tried to use animate dead on a gargoyle, and I've played in games where you are running persistent spell buffs backed by dragon skeletons you raised yourself. This, coincidentally, is why I'm not very excited to play 3e anymore. Can I make stupid bullshit characters? Sure, but having an argument over whether my rogue/swordsage/assassin multiclass abomination should be banned with the guy playing an Initiate of the Sevenfold Veil is not an experience I'm excited to repeat. I feel compelled to emphasize that the official developer advice on what to play was worse than useless. The Complete Mage infamously had an entire section with mage "archetypes" like "sniper" that...didn't really correspond to what people actually played, and gave completely terrible advice like "play a True Necromancer" or "waste a seventh-level spell slot casting brilliant energy weapon on your enemies as a necromancer, instead of the spell that lets you give your undead sweet custom feat chains". Sample characters to show off prestige classes were infamously terrible as were NPCs in published adventures, and the devs never bothered coordinating what they were putting in each splatbook so each book could unlock vistas of some poorly thought out interaction that would lead to ultimate power, or at least Trouserfang Dwarf. NGDBSS posted:I played 3e three times, in 2004/2005/2013. No one in the group had a clue about optimization in 2004 so we just winged it because it was what we had. In 2005, well, I played a druid and accidentally broke the GM's encounters. (Yay CoDzilla!) In 2013 I was far and away the most knowledgeable person and 3e was what the group had voted for. I sucked it up and deliberately avoided making a combat monster, choosing instead to play a support character. The "core gameplay loop" of fighter/blaster wizard/single-hand rogue tumbling into flanking position/healbot cleric is busted and hates you. Attempting to fight something like a hydra, troll, or frost giant in melee is an exercise is losing because those jerks have more HP, arbitrary amounts of natural armor, and vicious melee attack chains that will put warrior classes in the dumpster. Fighting anything else is a crapshoot of whether or not the DM understands how well the game really works and whether or not they're going to have monsters deliberately lowball tactics to not splatter people all over the floor. God help you if you run into a mind flayer or a demon or something, you're probably going to die, and your healer sure can't keep up with incoming damage. If we're talking about the adventuring day, I've literally never seen healing used in combat until people actually went down, and most damage mitigation is just stacking crowd control to create the Bioware Zone a la Dragon Age origins and then shooting everything inside to death. You still ran out of spell slots to power your CC spells, and at that point those spell slots are the only thing standing between the party and getting mind controlled to death. High power 3.5 is a silly place.
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Nov 19, 2020 03:53
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Ultiville posted:Yeah, a more forward-thinking way to do a similar thing would be to remove to-hit rolls entirely. HP scaling already means individual threats develop into mob threats. Then you could tie secondary effects to the rolls, and offer guidance on how to simplify combat with tons of mooks by assuming average damage and secondaries never hitting, letting you kind of elegantly use mobs of low-level monsters as pseudo-minions. And this is literally just off the top of my head. Electric Bastionland (which is sort of Into the Odd+) does some interesting things with this. No to-hit rolls, PC health is capped at 20, armor is damage mitigation and only goes up to 3, damage rolls are always just an unmodified die, and a character only takes the highest damage rolled against them in a turn. The last one especially creates some cool dynamics, where ganging up on someone creates big diminishing returns. It's a game with a very focused combat flow, though--combats usually go super fast, and are more about the fallout from pre-fight positioning than getting to use a bunch of sweet powers mid-combat. It'd be hard to imagine WotC, which is so beholden to avoid ever actually endorsing a specific playstyle, going in that direction.
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Nov 19, 2020 04:12
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:The "core gameplay loop" of fighter/blaster wizard/single-hand rogue tumbling into flanking position/healbot cleric is busted and hates you. Attempting to fight something like a hydra, troll, or frost giant in melee is an exercise is losing because those jerks have more HP, arbitrary amounts of natural armor, and vicious melee attack chains that will put warrior classes in the dumpster. Fighting anything else is a crapshoot of whether or not the DM understands how well the game really works and whether or not they're going to have monsters deliberately lowball tactics to not splatter people all over the floor. God help you if you run into a mind flayer or a demon or something, you're probably going to die, and your healer sure can't keep up with incoming damage. Regardless, the way "you were supposed to play 3rd ed without charop forums" was gentleman's agreements.  Not claiming it's a good answer, but it was the answer.
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Nov 19, 2020 05:31
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Doesn't banning charop forums means there's an even wider power gulf? Between people who crunch the optimisation math themselves, and those that don't.
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Nov 19, 2020 05:38
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The Lone Badger posted:Doesn't banning charop forums means there's an even wider power gulf? Between people who crunch the optimisation math themselves, and those that don't. It's a ridiculous statement for a whole host of reasons and the real answer to the problem is to play a different game that doesn't have as wide a system mastery problem. Actually, that doesn't work either. So, then the real answer is just don't play with people who will make it a problem.
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Nov 19, 2020 05:45
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The Lone Badger posted:Doesn't banning charop forums means there's an even wider power gulf? Between people who crunch the optimisation math themselves, and those that don't.
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Nov 19, 2020 05:47
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Ithle01 posted:It's a ridiculous statement for a whole host of reasons and the real answer to the problem is to play a different game that doesn't have as wide a system mastery problem. Actually, that doesn't work either. So, then the real answer is just don't play with people who will make it a problem. I played a lot in college and the system itself makes it a problem. Level so quickly becomes a terrible guide to power that it’s difficult to keep things in line after level 5 or so even if everyone is actively trying to.
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Nov 19, 2020 05:50
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Ultiville posted:I played a lot in college and the system itself makes it a problem. Level so quickly becomes a terrible guide to power that it’s difficult to keep things in line after level 5 or so even if everyone is actively trying to. Right, I had the same experience, but this is about character optimization and banning charop advice from forums and that how that doesn't stop optimization from happening. System matters, and DnD is an example of a system that tends to make it a problem moreso than others, but it is fundamentally a person-problem given that defining the nature of what constitutes optimal play or overpowered is situational.
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Nov 19, 2020 06:22
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:JaronK's Tier System ranks classes on, among other things, ability to break the game which is nonsense as once someone casts Gate the game is basically over as that's just not a spell you can deal with in any capacity, in the hands of PCs or NPCs.
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Nov 19, 2020 06:31
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Charop is not necessarily a bad thing. Engaging with the system and mastering the system makes people feel powerful.
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Nov 19, 2020 06:35
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Ithle01 posted:Right, I had the same experience, but this is about character optimization and banning charop advice from forums and that how that doesn't stop optimization from happening. System matters, and DnD is an example of a system that tends to make it a problem moreso than others, but it is fundamentally a person-problem given that defining the nature of what constitutes optimal play or overpowered is situational. I mean, there’s a “human problem” insofar as when you play any game, you should play with people who aren’t jerks, and one way of being a jerk is to prioritize the optimization you enjoy to the detriment of the group as a whole, especially in a cooperative game like D&D. I didn’t intend to be disagreeing necessarily with that (though I do think the extent to which it’s a major problem is super design dependent and agree D&D3 is terrible about it), but rather making a related point about what happens when you’re not playing with any jerks . That D&D3 falls apart so readily even then is really a shameful feature of the design. Optimization is part of the fun of any mechanically heavy game, so the fact that it’s impossible to even articulate a standard by which everyone can enjoy the optimization and be confident they aren’t going to create problems is a huge design failure. Contrast with something like Spirit Island (just because I happened to be reading the new expansion stuff today), a game that’s both much tighter on the power level and also way better about communicating how things interact, like the difficulty scaling. There’s no reason you can’t design a complex RPG to be at least as balanced as that, and at least as good at providing players the tools to operate effectively in good faith.
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Nov 19, 2020 06:57
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Terrible Opinions posted:I'd say it's a pretty good argument by itself that even if you're trying to play 3.5 D&D as intended to ban wizards, sorcerers, clerics, etc entirely. If it's in tier 1 or 2 it isn't suitable for normal play just because of how often players will accidentally destroy the game. At the same time, though, without any spellcasting there’s just not much there to engage with mechanically. You try to get the biggest hit and damage numbers on my “I attack,” maybe with some preference for a ranged attack if the DM makes that frequently necessary. The tactical combat stuff has lots of rules to it, but most of them are either trap options, feat/skill taxes, or way more wordy ways to say “you can’t do X” just by making X such a phenomenally bad idea that it’s always a mistake.
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Nov 19, 2020 07:01
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I mean in terms of how I actually used it everyone just played bards, warmages, and other more limited casters. Them's the mechanics and the top and bottom portion of the power curve are not suitable for play. Which mean using things primarily identified as tier 3 and 4.
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Nov 19, 2020 07:06
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Ultiville posted:I mean, there’s a “human problem” insofar as when you play any game, you should play with people who aren’t jerks, and one way of being a jerk is to prioritize the optimization you enjoy to the detriment of the group as a whole, especially in a cooperative game like D&D. I didn’t intend to be disagreeing necessarily with that (though I do think the extent to which it’s a major problem is super design dependent and agree D&D3 is terrible about it), but rather making a related point about what happens when you’re not playing with any jerks . I wasn't doing a very good job of explaining what I meant either and wiegieman basically said what I probably meant to say which is that some groups enjoy optimization and have different definitions of going to far with it. It's really not a surprise that any edition of dnd is going to fall apart so quickly because there's like ten different established settings and just about every aspect of the game is a source of disagreement or argument for the fanbase. There's probably no edition of dnd that will ever be balanced past level five for that reason. I guess 4th was decently balanced, but that's in comparison to other editions of dnd and it also had a totally different set of problems on top of balance.
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Nov 19, 2020 07:13
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NGDBSS posted:In particular that was a response to how late 2e worked, where the casters could just go nova with a full complement of spells and then use some obscure 2nd-level cleric spell for a quick rest and refresh. (Ask NinjaDebugger for more details, they were around for the playtest scene from there through 4e.) Where the Hell did Nap come from, anyway? The only canonical source I encountered was the Deck of Cleric Spell Cards. On the topic of charop, that poo poo falls apart right quickly on contact with house rules. Diplomancer was DOA with my old DM, simply because we'd never used reaction rolls in the past and he wasn't inclined to start then.
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Nov 19, 2020 13:53
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I enjoy charop in games where the game is actually well designed around it, so to speak. Like, in my DX game I write full stat sheets for NPCs who will probably never be in battle just because making characters and their gimmicks is really fun, and I strongly suspect a big reason you can lose your PC to corruption (though I have a standing rule that you can always request your old PC be the next boss fight and that if you win you can get them back) is because making new PCs with your full EXP total lets you explore all kinds of builds and concepts. It's very much a game built around the pleasure of finding weird combos and matching them to flavor to be a superhero and almost every power has some kind of use, or some fun way to combine it with another set, or some trick you can pull. By contrast I loving hated making high level 3.PF characters and my players actively didn't enjoy leveling up because it meant flipping through the hundreds of worthless feats to find the few good ones that you absolutely had to take to make your PC seem at all mechanically effective.
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Nov 19, 2020 13:59
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The worst slog I've encountered in an RPG for building characters was making Dark Heresy characters but using Ascension, the rules for making what an Inquisitor's elite operatives should have been in the first place and not the 'rando scrub from WFRP but in space' the base game has you start in. It's spending a giant chunk of XP while you dutifully ration it out in 100-300 chunks for attribute/skills/perks and it is just the most tedious thing.
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Nov 19, 2020 14:07
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Dawgstar posted:The worst slog I've encountered in an RPG for building characters was making Dark Heresy characters but using Ascension, the rules for making what an Inquisitor's elite operatives should have been in the first place and not the 'rando scrub from WFRP but in space' the base game has you start in. It's spending a giant chunk of XP while you dutifully ration it out in 100-300 chunks for attribute/skills/perks and it is just the most tedious thing. Now I understand what you're saying and yes, Ascension-level characters suck to build. But the fact that Acolytes prove almost all Inquisitorial work is actually done by 5 terrified normal people while the Inquisitor sits back and takes credit for all of it is absolutely the best part of Dark Heresy. The Inquisition is staffed, secretly, by graduate students.
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Nov 19, 2020 14:09
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Bieeanshee posted:Where the Hell did Nap come from, anyway? The only canonical source I encountered was the Deck of Cleric Spell Cards. Google claims Tome of Magic. wiegieman posted:Charop is not necessarily a bad thing. Engaging with the system and mastering the system makes people feel powerful. True, but the problem I've observed is that Dungeons & Dragons has a fundamentally dishonest sales pitch. If you're a newcomer you won't play D&D well by playing it how you think you play D&D well, and that's where the problem is. To put it another way, class fantasies put forward by D&D are not represented in gameplay. The game always pretends it's about heroic sword and sorcery fantasy action, but the only genre that D&D can emulate is D&D. Actual high level play in Dungeons & Dragons, especially in third edition, is about having planned your character far in advance by digging through the exhaustive and exhausting library of options to fish for the one or two or three things that are actually good and useful in most cases. Like, what is the class fantasy for wizards in D&D? It's shooting Magic Missiles throwing lightning and fireballs, but of course the real power is all in the save or suck spells and summoning magic. Being a blaster wizard is playing the wizard suboptimally, but the game never tells you this and contrariwise actually encourages you to shoot fire and lightning with all the feats and all the spells for shooting fire and lightning and all the art about wizards shooting fire and lightning and all the example wizards who shoot fire and lightning. You rarely if ever see art of wizard casting Fly and dropping Prismatic Sprays everywhere, nor does the game explain this is the true path to power and I honestly am not sure the developers realized that themselves. And you see this accidental bad faith encouragement all throughout Dungeons & Dragons. The game is loaded with dozens if not hundreds of trap options and bad classes with nary a hint anywhere that these things exist and are traps, and despite what The Moon would retroactively claim I am certain this wasn't intentional. The real problem with the Character Optimization Boards is that they needed to be outside the book and unaffiliated with Wizards. Dungeons & Dragons does not actually tell you how to effectively play Dungeons & Dragons. The route to system mastery is not outlined anywhere in the book, to derive it straight from the text requires you to do a lot of math and theorycrafting with material correlated from multiple places in multiple different books, and also requires you to completely ignore every single example character and NPC. All these things come together. Caster Supremacy is tied into the awfulness of believing magic is equivalent somehow to a Fighter's Feats and that creates worthlessness of Skills, and the power of magic (which is actually rarely interesting or flavorful or magical, it's usually just the same 8 to 12 spells from all the levels forever) ties into all that cruft about the 15-minute Adventuring Day and why it exists in practice but not on paper and the reason behind that ties into the math of monsters and speaking of that math is the fact that said math demands you get stat stick Magic Items over flavorful and nifty ones and speaking of flavor and originality just sucking mechanically brings to mind how many drat Trap Options there actually are in the game. It's not one thing or even many things that make D&D's pitch ring untrue, it's that all those things come together into an elaborate framework that you could be fooled into thinking was deliberate. The real game of Dungeons & Dragons bears little resemblance to the game that is advertised as Dungeons & Dragons, and moreover I very strongly doubt that Wizards of the Coast knew that was the game they created when they made third edition D&D. I think they genuinely believed they were making the game they advertised for much of the lifespan of third edition, and that more than anything is what gets my goat about the game.
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Nov 19, 2020 17:36
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Ithle01 posted:I guess 4th was decently balanced, but that's in comparison to other editions of dnd and it also had a totally different set of problems on top of balance. 4e really felt like the extremely flawed but groundbreaking first entry in a new genre of RPGs, and it was a bummer that for like a decade after it came out there was so little other stuff coming out in that vein (I'm not sure I can think of anything other than Strike). I'm real glad that this seems to be changing, with stuff like Lancer (and, in some ways, Gloomhaven) getting big.
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Nov 19, 2020 17:40
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Yes, the fact that D&D gives 0 guidance on how to make an effective character is one of the huge strikes against it from a character optimization point of view. I know I'm smacking a dead horse here, but again, DX (which could use more of this) actually has 'here are the good roles your PC can fit, try to stick to one, maybe branch out into two later on' right there in character creation. You need that! You need a lot of that. Advice on how to make a good character, systems that promote useful characters, and a lot of work and playtesting and stress testing done to make it possible to build a variety of interesting and useful characters. In D&D you never had that. There was 'try to make a useful character without magic, *somehow*' or 'I wrote Wizard on my sheet, I'm a genius at charop!'
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Nov 19, 2020 17:48
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Night10194 posted:I know I'm smacking a dead horse here, but again, DX (which could use more of this) actually has 'here are the good roles your PC can fit, try to stick to one, maybe branch out into two later on' right there in character creation. You need that! You need a lot of that. Advice on how to make a good character, systems that promote useful characters, and a lot of work and playtesting and stress testing done to make it possible to build a variety of interesting and useful characters. What is DX?
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Nov 19, 2020 18:07
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Omnicrom posted:What is DX? Double Cross. Japanese Shonen Superhero Game that I enjoy a lot and reviewed here awhile ago.
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Nov 19, 2020 18:08
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Probably my favorite D&D "edition" was Masque of the Red Death. The Thief Skills were now part of an actual Skills system so that yeah, you could play a Fighter-type who could also maybe pick a lock. There weren't any Feats that I remember and the whole setting was in Ravenloft adjacent 1880s Gothic Earth. Except that it didn't take off because there was like the Boxed Set, one other supplement and then nothing else. I do recall that two of the adventures in the Boxed set were geared toward PCs of various level. The mid-range (5th to 9th or so) one pit the PCs against Dracula, which is pretty cool.
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Nov 19, 2020 18:29
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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Games > Traditional Games > FATAL & Friends 2020: Please Don't Try to Fix Bad Games can apply to DnD.
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Nov 19, 2020 18:36
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Everyone posted:Probably my favorite D&D "edition" was Masque of the Red Death. The Thief Skills were now part of an actual Skills system so that yeah, you could play a Fighter-type who could also maybe pick a lock. There weren't any Feats that I remember and the whole setting was in Ravenloft adjacent 1880s Gothic Earth. Spells were also really jacked up. I remember playing the cleric equivalent (...mystic?) and I think the spells were moved over a time category for casting, so nothing was faster than one full round, and things that used to be big full round spells took minutes long to cast.
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Nov 19, 2020 18:39
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