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Evil Mastermind posted:Do those guys have any games that they actually like? Because I'm curious what their standards are, since 4.FAIL doesn't seem to meet them. There's this whole big weird generational thing, as far as I can tell. 4th ed fans like 4th ed. because it's well balanced and easy to run, with a lot of room for tactics. 3/3.5 fans hate 4th ed. because it gives absolutely no shits about immersion, only marginal shits about fluff, and it's balanced in a way that makes almost all builds equally viable, which means there's less skill involved in making a solid character. 2nd edition fans hate 3rd ed. because there's a decline in the amount of fluff, the standardization of a bunch of things like CR make the challenges less unique, and the increased emphasis on character build puts the strategy more in character creation and less in actual gameplay. 1st ed./OD&D fans hate 2nd ed. because it made the game more about story and less about dungeon conquering, which leads to all sorts of poo poo like Mary Sue DMPCs and railroading. Also, the non-weapon proficiency system takes the challenge of persuading people and circumventing traps and makes it more about dice rolling and less about player skill/creativity. I came onto the scene around the beginning of 3rd edition, so I may well be misrepresenting some things, and obviously individual people have much more complex preferences than I can sum up in a few paragraphs. Personally, I really like both 4th and 1st editions. 4th edition's really fun in a sort of super-mechanical board game sort of way, while 1st edition is really fun in a creative-thinking problem solving sort of way.
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Aug 3, 2009 02:22
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Mikan posted:To me, Old School is the difference between this: At first this read to me like a balanced assessment of the strengths, weaknesses, and differences of both old and new school gaming. Then I realized that half of the things I saw as the fatal flaws of old school gaming were meant to be self-evidently good, while all of what I thought were meant to be the strengths of new school gaming were meant to be hideous perversions of the one true fun.
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Aug 4, 2009 17:04
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For perspective, anti-D&D grognardism from 1974 or so. Possibly the first review of D&D ever written.
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Aug 6, 2009 21:49
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Joudas posted:And you know that guy is one of those "realism" pricks. He's sitting there thinking This, this is what is going to change role playing forever. A difference between Dexterity and Reflexes. I actually like having your stat for accuracy and your stat for defense be different. It always kind of bugged me in Exalted that one stat let you both hit/evade more easily, and then also kind of infringed on Strength/Stamina by increasing the amount of damage you and decreasing the amount of damage you take. I really liked it when I saw that Shadowrun broke it in half, into Dexterity for offense and Reflexes for defense. There were way too many stats on that character sheet, but the Dex/Reflex split doesn't seem any weirder to me than the Str/Con one. Granted, this is me coming from a balance/gameplay angle, whereas I do have the feeling that you're right about this being a horrible unplayable pile of 'realism'.
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Sep 13, 2009 01:00
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I don't know. I really like that recent editions have mostly technically well done art, but it kind of bugs me that it's all in such a similar realism-driven style. Some of the early artists like Erol Otus drew poo poo that looked goofy as hell, but somehow it strikes me as better representing the mood that surrounds playing D&D than most of the modern stuff. 4th ed's biggest strength is how streamlined and stylized the rules are, and I kind of wish the art was similarly stylized. I'm not a big fan of realism in art in general, though. I always prefer something that captures how its subject feels more than how it actually physically looks. Covers like that idol eye-stealing one don't look as skilled as modern covers, but they do better match the way I imagine things as I play D&D.
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Sep 17, 2009 20:37
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ThaGhettoJew posted:Fourth edition is bad because it is watered down with too much fluff and apparently a focus on treasure. Unlike second edition. Clearly. I don't even understand that quote; what does he mean by 'fluff'? The big difference between 2nd and 1st eds were that 2nd ed put a big emphasis on GM-steered story and above-ground adventuring and creating a complete pre-manufactured world to adventure in, which are what I think of when I hear 'fluff'. Does he mean complex combat mechanics, with poo poo like shifting and healing surges and poo poo? Until recently I had completely forgotten how completely ridiculous the 2nd ed monster manual was with trying to figure out exactly what role an owlbear plays in its native ecosystem. I don't think D&D was specifically ever good at using the rules to encourage non-combat roleplaying, anyway. It can be done, and it can even be done well, but I feel like the D&D skill system itself tended to get in the way as much as it helped. All the 3.X weirdness that let you get a +24 to Bluff or whatever at level 1 did more to reduce non-combat to a series of die rolls than anything roleplay-based.
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Oct 1, 2009 07:56
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The General posted:There are fewer hard battles, almost no battles you have to run from, or even regroup. Although I don't 100% agree with this, since difficulty is something that can be pretty easily adjusted by the GM, this actually brushes up against a small gripe I have over a lot of modern systems. The heavy emphasis on balance expects the players to play fair, and it makes it really hard to incorporate unconventional but clever ideas made by them without either breaking the system with an overpowered house-rule or marginalize the player's creativity by just making it have some trivial effect/autofail. Games like 4th ed are made to be well balanced and fun if played entirely within the scope of the rules, but the moment you start incorporating cinematic or dramatic actions not directly covered by the rules that carefully built balance starts unraveling pretty badly. A lot of the big 'gently caress you' threats in older systems I think aren't nearly as bad if you think of them as things that should be dealt with in non-mechanical ways, and if you're rolling against them on an equal footing it means you hosed up somewhere along the line. Fights that are way too hard for the players to win are almost puzzles that have to be solved, where the players have to figure out some way to split/weaken the enemy forces before engaging them, turning the fight fair. If I try to do something like that in a modern game I feel like I'm breaking the system and somehow cheating to make the challenges trivial, since by default they're balanced so hard to match the abilities of the characters. Fights that force you to retreat are increasingly bad encounter-building rather than additional challenges to overcome, which does take out a pretty major strategic element from the game. That said, what the gently caress are you going to do? Unbalance the system? That's a pretty poo poo solution. These things are never easy. Err, and all that stuff I said in the second paragraph, I understand that it all relies on a good GM that actually gives the players a chance to take on these challenges from another angle. Overpowered enemies and super-deadly traps that are just thrown at the party with a "ITS IN THE RULE BOOK SO YOU HAVE TO ACCEPT IT, NOW ROLL OVER A 18 OR DIE" attitude are every bit as terrible as everybody here says.
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Oct 22, 2009 08:56
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Hodgepodge posted:What exactly is "challenging" about randomly getting a certain result at a certain time? I think his point is, and he should correct me if I'm wrong, that the challenge should be in shifting the situation to your favor and avoiding truly disadvantageous or unavoidably deadly situations rather than in maximizing your DPS and not choosing your sub-optimal ability for handling the situation.
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Oct 22, 2009 09:07
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Hodgepodge posted:That's the position he's backtracking to, not the position he originally took. I don't know, I think 40% is a harsh number for player death, but a 40% chance of a non-favorable outcome to a fight that adds to the plot rather than just cutting out characters actually sounds like it could keep the tension nice and high (with player death being more like a 2-3% chance unless someone does something really dumb, in which case it goes up a lot). A big problem I actually have for older D&D is that there's no middle ground between being defeated in combat and being dead. Cutting out the possibility of having your character be hosed up temporarily but not out of the game forever is kind of painful.
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Oct 22, 2009 09:21
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Riidi WW posted:"[As a player] I like to be unsure about whether I will be able to win. Therefore [as a DM] you should be unsure about whether I will be able to win." I think the post is more about battles against the same enemies having uncertain outcomes each time, rather than monsters just having unreliable/no guide to power level. To an extent I can empathize, in that if combat is too standardized and the outcome is too predictable it becomes boring. A lot of pre-WoW MMOs had this problem if you played a non-mage class, where combat was just you and an opponent standing next to each other, and the character whose life bar went down slower would almost always win. You'd know who was going to win or lose within the first few seconds of the fight, but it'd drag on quite a bit longer than that in some cases. If combat gets too predictable and the better character always wins, where a level 4 goblin has almost 0 chance of winning against a level 5 PC, while a level 5 PC has almost 0 chance of winning against a level 6 goblin, it takes all the tension out of the game. That said, I don't think I've really seen a game where it got that bad. There has been a drift towards predictable combat over the years, though. I do think having a guide to roughly how powerful monsters are is good, but I do kind of agree with the quoted grognard that if combat becomes predictable it becomes boring, and that if systems take efforts to standardize challenges without somehow keeping them flexible and unpredictable (4th ed does a pretty sweet job of this with all its nuanced combat mechanics, btw) they become stale. Of course, as the Player Death thread shows, unpredictability is only fun if loss adds to the story instead of ending it.
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Nov 4, 2009 00:08
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Super Waffle posted:So something thats been bugging me. Grognards like to say 4th edition is an MMO on paper. How do they feel about DDO being 3.5? Keep in mind that there's not just one breed of grognard; a fresh generation is born every time a new edition comes out. 3.5 vs. 4th ed is the most common since the transition just happened, but there are plenty of 2nd ed vs. 3rd ed and even 1st ed/OD&D vs. 2nd ed guys out there, too. Weren't people screaming that feat trees made 3rd ed too much like Diablo when it first came out?
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Nov 4, 2009 21:08
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Epicurus posted:What the christ? So these players thought that a dungeon was fine if they had to literally throw away the lives of characters to make slow progress in it? They only conceivable way to survive was to 'respawn' again and again? Jesus H. Christ. Some people complain the 4E is inspired by WoW, but I think some of the older editions were inspired by the massive "gently caress you" games of the NES that eventually spawned 'I Want to be The Guy." Can you guess which is a worse inspiration? I don't know if I understand your rage here. It's a guy saying he personally prefers RPGs more as a challenging game than as a hero simulator. He's not raging out against the systems you like, and he's even acknowledging that Tomb of Horrors is kind of hosed up and bullshit, but that he enjoys it a lot anyway. I agree that the methodical unheroic play-style it encourages is super unfun when applied to normal play, but I see that as more of a players needing to fit their playstyle to the game issue than a 'gently caress anyone who likes this type of fun' issue. Then again, I really enjoyed IWBTG. Sometimes overcoming bullshit is fun, as long as the bullshit is something you asked for and not something the DM pulls out unexpectedly. Dropping Tomb of Horrors on a party out of the blue is a pretty dick move, but if the players are actively looking for that type of game I don't see what's so rage-worthy about the DM/players enjoying it. The big thing that makes the grognards posted in this thread ridiculous is the fact that they cling to the concept of 'correct fun', not that they happen to enjoy something different than you.
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Nov 6, 2009 05:00
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Epicurus posted:The whole thing is pretty patently ridiculous, and if you think about this in-character for a moment... Yeah, 'one of the best modules ever' is a pretty bad description. 'One of the modules that delivers the type of gameplay it is trying to deliver the hardest, for better or worse' might be better. Honestly, as much as I like IWBTG, the thought of a dungeon that can only be beaten by character death does strike me as pretty dumb, even with the quick character generation that 1st ed allowed. I'm a big fan of challenge, but Tomb of Horrors is less challenge and more 'and then you suddenly die, gently caress you'. I guess I just have a soft spot for that blog. It's just about the most reasonable justification of the grognard sensibility I've found online, although he does lean a bit into madness at times (like the post you quoted). I just like to understand the relatively sane arguments working behind the grognard mindset, because they illuminate just how removed from reality the posters who end up quoted in this thread really are.
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Nov 6, 2009 05:40
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crime fighting hog posted:I always imagined the lore is kinda why some people get into magic, cause the flavor texts/names/art/etc have a mystique about em and people eventually just get into more of a competitive mode as they get older/know the system better. I agree with this, but I actually kind of remember liking the lore way better when it was vague and metastoryless. I always thought it was way more fun dreaming up dumb poo poo trying to justify why the Shivan Dragon and Atog were working together or whatever than just reading up on whatever bullshit Gerrard was up to. The stories they wrote up to attach to the cards just weren't good enough to be interesting, and by placing most of the cards within a pre-dreampt-up universe it killed some of the fun of dreaming that poo poo up yourself. It didn't discourage it, of course, but it did somehow stop encouraging it, and the fun faded a little from dreaming up the situations myself. Of course, this all might have something to do with me not being 15 years old any more too.
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Nov 16, 2009 06:22
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Warforged are robots because they kind of look like robots. If you want to be accurate it's probably not a word that really applies to them, but people caring about accuracy in their fantasy game is what leads to the vast majority of everything this thread is here to make fun of. This conversation has already gotten way worse than the halflings riding dinosaurs thread, which at least had ideas (however ridiculously arrived at) that could be potentially used to flavor a game.
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Nov 18, 2009 22:44
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I think it's actually a publishing tool. It lets people avoid the weird legal stuff involved with publishing material for D&D by letting them publish material for a game with rules exactly like D&D.
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Nov 20, 2009 07:21
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Danhenge posted:3e was sort of like this, though. There were a number of items that had weird uses that most people didn't think of. Decanter of Endless water, for instance. There were some obvious abuses of an endless source of water that took advantage of buoyancy. However, it was also a 3-round vampire killer if you managed to stake it and you didn't have the requisite holy wafers. I really like seemingly useless and even dangerous wondrous items, but they get used kind of hellishly a lot of the time. They aren't equal to core useful items like armor or weapons, and shouldn't be treated as such when handing out loot, but they can have their potentially quite potent uses if your GM allows you to come up with creative solutions to problems. I don't even mind 'gently caress you' effects like the bag of teeth, but they have to be testable and come with at least some small warning. They're like traps: traps are fun, but an insta-kill pit trap without warning in the middle of a non-descript hallway just leads to cowardly play-styles. A bag that destroys everything placed in it will be horrible if just found on a random orc or, even worse, bought unexpectedly from a store or something. If it's found next to a skeleton with no hand or in a wizard's lab in a box covered in warning signs or something, though, I call it fair game.
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Nov 23, 2009 22:26
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Karandras posted:The ONE bad/good thing about 4.0 is the marking ability. It is bad because it is classic video game/MMO. It is good because the Fighter is allowed to do what he supposed to do, prevent the Mage from being geeked. The real issue is why does the Mage have to be made a gelding/or worse, if a female, just to satisfy Conan the Barbarian fans? Why do I have to be satisfied with a game built for 12 year old boys? And told it is normal to "swallow"? I'm not entirely sure what's going on in this paragraph.
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Nov 25, 2009 03:55
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Super Waffle posted:I have no idea whats going on here. Is he arguing against 4th edition or against older editions? It seems like hes bashing the entire concept of loot. I think he's arguing that 4th edition's loot distribution is bad, since if you get items you don't want you can trade them in for the items you want, but the exchange rate is so harsh that getting the item you want is like getting 6x the treasure. He's arguing that if the GM gives one player the item they want and another an item they don't especially want it unbalances party loot distribution, and that since it's completely by GM fiat you don't even have the excuse of realism. I guess maybe he's arguing that it encourages GMs to hand out exactly what items the party wants every time to avoid dicking over players? Or maybe that by letting a player cash in 6 magic items they don't want for one they do want it somehow makes the items less valuable than 6 magic items they don't want and are stuck with?
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Nov 25, 2009 18:25
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Fire posted:I do agree with Frank that the guidelines on what sort of loot to give out by level leave a lot to be desired. I am tempted to make the exchange rate 100% for items they just found so they can just pick whatever gear they want by ordering them from NPC in my campaign world. I really like the Shadowrun rules for finding rare items where it becomes a shopping skill check to find what you want, but you can get bonuses to finding those items for sale if you're willing to pay extra. It only really works in giant cities with lots of trade, though. I'm a little torn between the fact that getting unexpected magic items and learning to appreciate something you weren't expecting to appreciate can be fun and the desire to allow characters to follow their own builds. I have a soft-spot for random loot, but it has to be weighted in a way that keeps it level appropriate.
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Nov 25, 2009 19:36
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Alpha Phoenix posted:http://www.asmor.com/scripts/4eMagicItems/randomTreasure.php This is amazing. Fantastically useful.
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Nov 27, 2009 02:09
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Drox posted:What is it that you're trying to say here? That there is a One True Combination of feats and powers for every class or build? Or that all of the choices are the same? Neither are true. The whole point of 4e is that everyone is on an even playing field by removing system mastery. It's pretty important to me that player skill (which isn't exactly system mastery, but has a lot of overlap with it) is part of a game, but oh my god character creation is not the place for it. There is a certain skill to finding ways to master the system, but it's not an exciting one. You find a way that gives you more numbers, and then you have more numbers forever and the challenge is suddenly all behind you. Challenges to the players' skills are fantastic, but they should be occur during play, not before it. Figuring out broken builds and unbeatable spell combination and game mechanics exploits before the game does have a certain grim satisfaction to it, but it's a satisfaction that takes the fun out of actually playing, not just for other players, but for yourself as well. It may take skill to create an unbeatable character, but it takes absolutely none to play one. Doing it only really seems useful to me if nobody likes you enough to let you play in their games, so pre-game planning is the only stage of roleplaying you ever really get to do. 4th ed is awesome because it moves the skill of playing from character creation to the battlefield. I do wish the fights were a big faster and more unpredictable, though.
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Nov 27, 2009 19:38
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I'm all for balance through being useful at different things, but it can be dangerous if done badly (and it's hard to do well). I don't mind being worse at combat than another character if I'm also better at, say, traps. Things can get complicated, though, if combat takes 2 hours per fight and I can't do much more during it than to keep my head low and hope I don't get critted while the real combat characters do all the work, and then each trap is just a single roll I get to make that lasts maybe 30 seconds as an encounter. Maybe I'm equally useful as a combat character in that situation, but I'm not spending nearly as much time being useful and if I just have to spend the rest of the game not really powerful enough to contribute anything it's just not fun. Even if the game is 1/3 traps, 1/3 combat, and 1/3 social, though, if each character class can only contribute meaningfully during one of those thirds it's still not fun, since that means any given player is spending 2/3rds of the game sitting on their thumbs. I think a well designed game gives each character a time to shine, but then also gives them something to do during all other times. 4th ed handles this by just making everyone equally good at combat and then kind of flattens out non-combat a little, mechanically. This can be solved by good GMing, but it's not as inherently part of the system any more. It works well, but I wouldn't mind a system a little less combat balanced that somehow made non-combat just as nuanced and cooperative as combat. This system was not 3.X, though. Fighters may have BEEN useful, but they hardly ever got to DO something useful or make relevant choices.
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Dec 2, 2009 22:07
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Hodgepodge posted:My roomate used to have this old book of traps for D&D, from some third party publisher. The only one I remember offhand went like this: I actually really like this idea. . .with some conditions. I think "The Mystery of What Is Slowly Poisoning Everyone and Making Their Hair All Fall Out" would work well, since all the players would have to do is realize it's coming from the sword and get rid of it, which shouldn't be a problem as long as you don't make it reach fatal levels for a week or so. "The Mystery of Hey, You Picked Up A Sword So You Wake Up Dead Tomorrow" is not so fun.
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Dec 8, 2009 08:14
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:One of the things I never get is the "play smart" thing. I get it. It's the idea that there should be some challenge to the player, that forces the player to make decisions and think creatively to win. The problem is that grognards mistake 'playing smart' for 'looking up broken character builds on the internet' or 'taking no risks, ever', when these behaviors are really just inflexible rote behaviors they can carry out without thinking or adapting to the situation, which kind of makes it the opposite of 'playing smart'. It's even worse when the DM confuses these behaviors for 'playing smart', because then the game just becomes a series of puzzles that can only be solved through repetitive and uninspired cowardice. Edit: chelsea clinton posted:Oh yeah, this whole verisimilitude thing. What the gently caress? Where did that start? From what I understand it started around 2e era, with the idea that D&D should be 'more' than just going into dungeons and murdering monsters and dodging traps for money. People decided that the best way to have an interesting story was just to dump mounds and mounds of semi-arbitrary 'realism' into the game. OtspIII fucked around with this message at 22:30 on Dec 9, 2009 |
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Dec 9, 2009 22:26
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Turing sex machine posted:Also, for those of you who keep fellating Dread, RPGPundit just proved that the game (which is not a roleplaying game) is broken. I have taken the liberty of adding relevant smilies. Seems to me like the best way to resolve this is just say "Okay, if you want to do something tell me and we'll switch over to you in the hospital. You're still in control of the character, but if you want to get back in the plot you'll have to get there yourself." Alternately, "You're in a coma. You can try to wake up at any time as a 4 block challenge." If someone refuses to ever draw blocks you can always just leave them in control of the character but not in the path of the story without active involvement on their part.
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Dec 11, 2009 01:27
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Drox posted:
My guess is that he was referring to the children in Labyrinth idea, not the rape or bestiality idea.
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Dec 11, 2009 19:06
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why cant we ban you, again?
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Liesmith posted:if you want to gently caress with someone who overuses rope trick just give them an unidentifiable artifact that happens to be a pocket dimension or have some poo poo go down that cuts the rope dimension adrift on the planes. or decide that there is an interdimensional predator that is attracted to the casting of the spell and has a lure that looks like a rope, so that the wizard climbs right into its mouth I'm against anything that fucks over a player without warning like this. If you don't want people casting Rope Trick just take it out of your game world, don't kill players passive aggressively for using their character options effectively. Alternately, make the Rope Trick less spammable by making it cost a non-trivial amount of gold/reagents to cast, or just making it so that there are ways for hostile creatures to gain entrance if they have a mage or something.
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Dec 16, 2009 07:39
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lighttigersoul posted:You are basically suggesting making Rope Trick into a 4th Edition-esque ritual? I'm suggesting that if people use it so frequently that it breaks the game you add a cost or risk to it to make sure they don't use it frivolously. Also, that the risk is not just 'If you use it repeatedly, some day I'm just going to murder your character out of the blue for it'. Pharmaskittle posted:So, not a big fan of 3rd edition then? Actually. . .I have a big soft spot for 1e D&D, but you need to follow rigorous guidelines to GM it successfully. Basically, I see RPGs like 1e D&D as risk vs. reward challenges. The more heroic risk the player is willing to accept, the more reward they should receive, and the smarter the player plays the less risky the risk should be. The risk needs to be something the player agrees to, and it has to be predictable enough to plan against, though. Death-traps in the middle of nondescript hallways and randomly dying because you cast a spell the GM doesn't like aren't fun. I don't like 3.X, though. Everything 3.X does, either 1e or 4e does better. 2nd and 3rd editions feel like awkward mixes of two incompatible design philosophies to me.
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Dec 16, 2009 10:57
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Using 18 instead of 4 seems like a holdover from random stat rolling. By making it 3d6 instead of 1d6-2 or something you get a nice bell curve that keeps extremely high or low stats rare. If you're using point-buy, though, it is pretty archaic.
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Dec 17, 2009 08:55
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I always felt like the setting for OWoD was more fun to read about than play in. NWoD's setting seems like it was built to be more fun to play in than to read.
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Dec 25, 2009 02:44
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Semantic drift can justify that there was no bad intent behind the words, but the issue from the start has been more that it's kind of hosed up to constantly (if unconsciously) reinforce the notion that gay = bad. Location and medium are not irrelevant, though. I agree with everyone saying that using 'gay' as a pejorative is lovely, but so is derailing the thread every loving time somebody does it. The people who cared got it the first time, and the people who don't aren't going to be won over by thread-making GBS threads repetition. If you want to win over one person at a time, do it through PMs or a new thread or something.
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Jan 9, 2010 19:56
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FirstCongoWar posted:best post in the thread right here (not reading what the grognard claims is almost 4000 words, sorry Mikan) It's a weird post. He claims to be into "theater-style" LARP, like Mind's Eye Theater, which to the best of my understanding really isn't theater-style. He's basically just having a bunch of ideas about how to revise MET-style campaign play, not realizing that actual theater-style games pretty much do all of it already.
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Jan 11, 2010 06:41
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Rocket Ace posted:Yeah. I can't deal with any game where the big strategy comes down to something you think up before the fight even begins, like build order. I know there's more to RTSes than that, but it's such a big part of it that I could never get into them. I like the winner to be determined by stuff you think up and do in the middle of the action, not before it. This is also why I like 4e so much better than 3e. 3e was all about the character sheet, while 4e is way more about the in-battle tactics. There are still some weird flaws, but it is heads and shoulders better than 3e, at least.
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Jan 19, 2010 21:24
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projecthalaxy posted:Don't play gratuitous space battles. Gratuitous Space Battles is kind of weirdly calming, but it's almost more of a fish-tank than a game for me.
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Jan 19, 2010 21:40
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Vulpes posted:Technically yes, but it's a very complicated flow chart. It's more like 'if X while Y and A also has B then do Z, unless C, in which case wait 5 seconds and start again'. This is kind of true of 4e, too, and is actually one of the few valid complaints I hear about the game. That said, both WoW and 4e seem like they do pretty good jobs of making it so that, even if you do eventually become able to play by spreadsheet, you'll get a lot of exciting and intuitive challenge out of the game before you reach that level. I was actually mostly just talking about RTSes in my post above; I hadn't even really thought about WoW. I think it is true that the thing dividing a good player from a great player in, say, Starcraft is going to be adaptability, but there's just this entry level of rote 'not loving up' that you have to master before you hit the point where adaptation makes a difference that I can not get past.
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Jan 20, 2010 03:46
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Cyrai posted:A DM can do whatever he wants, though gently caress yes they can, and this is why I still really like 4e. I think that when people complain about there being too much balance in 4e what they're complaining about is that, since the game is so well balanced, a DM inserting stuff of their own will very easily unbalance the finely balanced combat system that you get straight out of the box. The flaw with this argument is that inserting stuff into 3e unbalanced it every bit as much, but it was already so painfully imbalanced that it just wasn't noticeable. Also, from what I've seen, it looks like there is a lot of material in the 2 4e DMGs all about how to insert special things of your own without breaking the game.
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Jan 20, 2010 03:58
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Luce posted:Are puzzles in general all grognardy or just ones with obtuse solutions and instant player death? I want to mix things up with a puzzle next session. I think there are a few keys to having a good puzzle. Basically, make solving the puzzle give extra reward rather than be necessary to keep the story moving. Spending 2 hours solving a lovely riddle before you can move to the next room blows. Alternately just set up a tricky situation and see what the party comes up with. Rather than having an 'answer', just base how much risk the characters have of wasting time/getting hurt/getting extra treasure based off of how clever their solution is. Puzzles with preset arbitrary correct answers that you can't progress past until you find are usually really frustrating. Failure should offer negative consequences that keep the story moving, not grind it to a halt.
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Jan 22, 2010 21:01
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A Grognard posted:Don't get me wrong, that isn't a bad thing, but it does stretch the thread of history, the one that leads all the way back to Gygaxian lunacy, to the point where you might as well call it Tunnels and Trolls and admit its an entirely new game line. The whole 'but it's not D&D any more' thing must be really painful to creators. If you don't make it different enough people call you out on pumping out the same poo poo just to make money, while if you make it too different people whine that you're bastardizing something they love, and if you strike a balance of keeping true to the old and adding new features you just get called out on both. I try to think of new editions as more or less entirely new games, since anything else seems unfair. And wasn't the whole feat tree thing way more present in 3.X than in 4e? None of the powers really have any pre-requisites, right? I guess a few feats do, but it felt to me like there was tons more of that in 3e than in 4e, and that's not even getting into prestige class builds and so on.
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Jan 23, 2010 19:43
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Is there even anything that says that teleportation moves faster than light? It probably says that it is 'instantaneous' somewhere, but can't the speed of light be considered instantaneous for all practical purposes? If you're teleporting anywhere within line of sight the distance covered will be short enough that the time you spend traveling will be negligible and if you're traveling across the globe a fraction of a second delay won't really make a difference. It only seems like it would be an issue in traveling between planets and solar systems, and D&D doesn't really do that. That said, this is a game where certain people emit objectively measurable Evil particles, so you have some wiggle room determining how the universe works.
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Jan 26, 2010 23:44
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