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I am not enjoying this playtest.
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Mar 26, 2012 16:44
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| # ¿ Apr 16, 2024 07:26 |
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It might be. I'm enjoying griping about it, though. God, our playtest reply doc is going to be a thing of beauty though.
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Mar 26, 2012 19:33
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Honestly, I just want to read my GM's playtest response doc. Because I'm pretty sure getting able to link it would probably explain everything that I felt during that session, with the added bonus of being already written so that I wouldn't have to come up with any new words. I will say it's unquestionably D&D. Which is good, because it's what they were aiming for. But I'm pretty sure we can all agree that D&D is a pretty bad target to shoot for, for any number of reasons.
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Apr 11, 2012 22:36
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Swagger Dagger posted:That said, I really like the Icons and the social mechanics but I'm probably just going to steal the Icon idea and use it in something else. Yeah, so much this. d20 is a pretty awful base system for anything, and in this case, it's really kind of sad. There's a lot of cool stuff that could be done, but it's limited by its base system as far as I've seen. Especially due to things like empty rounds. As for the flattened math, it didn't really seem to help much at all in regards to that or actually being able to hit anything. The combat was a slog into a kill-zone, and it wasn't our kill-zone. We resorted to making jokes about the futility of life and talked about how we should just lay down and die, as it would end the fight quicker. We actually did that, I think. Lich King Forever. What I'm sayin' is, d20 is an awful system, and the sooner people stop trying to make games in it, the better. Andrevian fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Apr 30, 2012 |
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Apr 30, 2012 22:33
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Mikan posted:I don't like d20 either, but I didn't run into this with 13th Age. Well, not as much - it's still annoying to have something like a +4 to hit at first level, where the d20 roll is way more important than what's on your character sheet. I plan on fixing it by just bumping up the numbers to be honest, or altering it to something like 3d6 for a better distribution (and finding a different way to represent the triggered results, or maybe even leave them the same) That was pretty much all of our game. Empty rounds on our side, murder on the enemy side. It was like watching a geriatric bowling league, where the other team is consistently making strikes, and we're throwing out our hips as we get physically destroyed, or desperately hoping our one-damage-on-a-miss (seriously, this had to have been a cruel joke) does something worthwhile to enemies that would've been better as minions. And enemy AC was hilarious in comparison to ours, too.
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Apr 30, 2012 23:18
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MadRhetoric posted:Not to be a grognard, but I've been over this earlier in the thread; this is not the d20 rolling mechanic's fault, this is a fault of the numbers being added to said d20. If the numbers aren't tuned to, say, your intrepid hero successfully smacking a dude in the face about 55-80% of the time and you getting popped about 20-50% (I'm pulling numbers out of my rear end, here), that's all the underlying numbers. A d20 can be swingy, but it is the easiest rolling mechanic next to a d100 to know exactly how much or how little you have to dick with the bonuses with. Every number has a 1 in 20, or 5% chance of showing up. A +/- 1 shifts the chance of hitting at or over a certain number by +/- 5%. If you have a +/- (Target Number+1) relative to the number you're trying to hit, then your roll probably doesn't matter, you'll auto-succeed or auto-fail respectively. If you can't hit poo poo, then they botched the numbers on the bonus/penalty end (And you have possibly angered the Random Number God I'll admit, I wrote that while on a bit of a hate on D&D systems, and it isn't really the math's fault. Balancing the math is easy! Though frankly, the math should be balanced to the point where I don't have to go and get knuckle-deep in it to try and figure out where the hell it went wrong. If a d20 is so easy to balance, then I don't know what their excuse is. However, d20+number, while being easy to balance due to math fixes, is going to be pretty lovely with binary success/failure. This is my problem, though I articulated it badly. A lot of systems do this without thinking, and things d20-based love the poo poo out of this, 13th Age included, though it is better about it than say, 3.x. Even with fail-forward in effect and using all the drat tricks you can, there are better ways to handle things than "Swing! You miss? Well, have this one damage; maybe if you get six of those, you'll kill a goblin!" The average TN for us to hit anything seemed to be about 15 (We had a +4 to roll against enemies with, IIRC, AC 17 and AC 19). The average TN they needed to hit us was something like 8 (Our average AC was some mess along 14 or so, they had +6 or +7 to hit). The escalation die was used as a math fix in this regard, rather than as something cool you could base off of. Had we lived to see the fourth or fifth turn we might have started hitting things. Might. And this was in a prepackaged encounter for level 1 characters. Apparently they "mathhammered" nothing. I hope they fix that. So yeah. In sum, my main problem isn't with the base d20 rolling mechanic, even though I was stupid and said it was with that; it's with the apparent obsession with binary success and failure that sticks to these games. The attempts to rectify this don't go far enough. And to answer your question posed to foosorb: Oh god yes, does it bog combat down when they swarm you and you try to get away. If I want to play a P&P game, I'm going to play something where even failure has interesting results mechanically supported, so I'm not encouraged to sit around and wait for my turn. The D&D that I've played runs like a dying dog on IRC, and encourages me to go off and play Minecraft while it's someone else's turn, no matter how good the GM is. Apparently it's not something that other people found, as they used bards and clerics? Perhaps if we had avoided multiclassing, brought a (full) cleric, and maybe brought a brace of wizards instead of a sorc, we'd have had a better run of it. The math wasn't with us, the dice weren't with us, and the apparent off-turn stuff wasn't enough to be worth noting in our game. That's how it went, and it's not an experience I care to repeat. I hope they fix the hell out of this. fake edit: Don't know if we missed something, but that pack of goblins was awful to run, because there were a lot of them. There's actually something about grouping them? Because oh boy, that would've made it a little more tolerable.
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May 1, 2012 05:18
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). Fancy dice tricks don't hide screwy probabilities.
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Not anywhere near fast enough, it doesn't.
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May 1, 2012 05:38
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Oh, they all acted on the same init. They just rolled for attack. And yes, we random rolled, figuring it would be a viable option. Hell, we've rolled in 4E before, and it wasn't that bad. Hoooo boy, was that a mistake and a half. And, double-checking, my AC was 13. Wizard/rogue, so I figure that just makes sense. Multiclassing drops your AC by one right out the gate. Our highest AC person was 19, and that worked pretty well for him. Since with AC, you take the middle of con, wis, and dex, it really didn't help if you didn't plan that that out at all. Here I was thinking I could at least be a glass cannon. I was sugar glass. edit: And yeah, I was the only lucky one to have an 18 in my primary stat and 16s in secondaries. Which meant a +4, as I was dumb enough to multiclass. Andrevian fucked around with this message at 05:55 on May 1, 2012 |
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May 1, 2012 05:52
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I initially wanted to go bard, but then the siren song of the Rogue's Momentum feature seemed really, really cool. So I wanted to try it. However, being a rogue totally didn't fit the character concept, because we tend to work together to fit ideas together before a game. So I decided to go half-and-half. Then the bard's level 0 multiclass thing gave nothing, possibly as a "oh we forgot to put something here" thing, so I decided I didn't want to be a total load and mutliclassed wizard. I figured magic missile would be a good thing to have, I mean, guaranteed hit right? I should've opened with it. I can probably give a good recounting of stats. All of them are in the following format: Str Dex Con Int Wis Cha pre:Rog/Wiz: 14 18 13 16 13 16. Ftr/Rog: 13 16 16 11 10 12. (Dex melee fighter) Sorc: 11 15 15 13 13 18 Monk: 12 18 17 12 15 11 Ftr/Clr: - Don't have a record for this one. I still think it's an important question to ask, though; how long is a combat supposed to be, in 13th Age or in other editions of D&D? How long were your encounters? IRC or RL? This is something I've got to know, because I'm wondering if our general experience is atypical or rules functioning as intended.
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May 1, 2012 06:35
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Nah, wouldn't accuse you of that. I'm honestly not sure either what made them so different. That's something I want to find out. I know that time was one thing. Even with people fairly on-the-ball with the system, it took us three hours to burn through the combat on IRC. This isn't uncommon for D&D games as far as we have run them; 3.x was fairly similar, and 4E takes an egregious amount of time for a moderately hard combat. I don't know how other IRC-based groups do it. Even using maptools for 4E or something similar does not help. Also, the talisman/boon thing only came up for some of the people in the match, as while it was a straight-up gift, it came from a source most of the group was wary of (Lich King), so only two folks got it. Even throwing us a bone and letting us activate it early didn't really seem to help anything. The sorc was the biggest help in the fight, and even then "Targets: 1d2 or 1d3" put a direct limit on those contributions. Consistently rolling one was pretty bad. With people getting knocked down to half health or nearly dead in the first round, and being unable to contribute meaningfully to the fight, I think it was a bad situation all around and helped make the slog feel even worse. edit: I am informed only one person got to use the boon. Even letting two of us do it, it did no good. All it did was make me miss action points. Andrevian fucked around with this message at 07:01 on May 1, 2012 |
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May 1, 2012 06:58
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Uh, yeah, we did. That was the whole point of choosing stuff we did, only we also figured the multiclass rules could have been something other than awful. Reskinning is totally cool! Only, you know, that doesn't help if the system is broken in other places.
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May 1, 2012 14:13
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Haha. Wow. That seems really weird in comparison to how my group used them. Granted, my group never had truck with that "Luke Skywalker is a level sixteen badass, you'll be lucky to lick his boots!" sort of thing. I think, with our interpretation, it wasn't "How 'in' are you?" it was more "How important are you to their plans currently?" This is mostly a remnant of the fact that we're in general opposed to the sort of play that involves "earn your position and your fun", as it's just... not interesting to us. Which is probably again why we rarely play D&D. With our group, I think our Steelborn Monk (Steelborn being vessels of dead gods in this) was actively being pursued by the Lich King and several others. The dragonspawn sorc figured into some dragonplan. An undead* High Elf had straight-up spat in the eye of the Lich King before breaking away. Two others didn't go int much detail on their things. Mine was the last High Elf of her House, which was pretty much full of bastard elves who got killed by all the other High Elves for being total dicks; had personal interaction with the Elf Queen, because otherwise she'd be dead. I know mine was there as Strong Complicated, I don't remember the others. Maybe we're just bad at D&D though. I don't know. * Indistinguishable from your standard High Elf, but done mostly because the three elves in the party were family, and the youngest was a half elf, whereas mine was the last living full-blooded elf in her family.
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May 7, 2012 06:13
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Haha. Wow. I understand what the game is doing. I understand that, holy poo poo, some people like that. It just doesn't work for my group, and I figured I'd say something about that for other people that it doesn't work for. To think that this is about anything like "indie cred" is hilarious, when it's really more about "hey this is how we envisioned this mechanic." It's just like the disappointing Escalation Die mechanic to me, only it's at least not an ingame math fix, or the game of keepy-uppy in Jupiter gravity that Momentum was. Maybe you should find a seat without the stick before posting.
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May 7, 2012 13:13
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I already covered my trouble with the escalation die. You can go sift if you want to find it. You even responded to it then, when my group pointed it out. Maybe if you weren't flipping out at some irreverence when presenting an opinion, you'd be able to breathe and use your brain to remember things. In summary: It needs to do more, needs to not be a math fix, etc. It's been a one-shot, yeah, because we couldn't stand the system (because we are bad at D&D, like I said). I didn't interact with whatever mechanics were supposed to be there because we figured that going "Hey, I know so-and-so" would be a reasonable bit for the goblincide playtest. The implications of being linked closely to Icons is that they're there, they show up a bit more often, and maybe they're not Epic Level Whatevers. Eberron had it right, I think, where people who shaped the world were pretty reasonable in ability and strength, they were just notable and damned important. It humanizes them and allows just that; a more personal link with the pillars of the setting. I don't even disagree with not allowing Strong Positive or Strong Negative with someone, mostly because hey, maybe you're not a member of the Hong Kong Cavaliers yet. I think it should be considered, but not barred. And yeah, I think that it could've held just fine knowing them from the beginning in a long game, as long as you accept that status quo isn't something that holds, and that things change. I've been in plenty of games like this, and some of which have been long, varied, interesting things. Perhaps the mechanics should be something that can reflect that, rather than "I'm going to attach my star to this edifice and ensure that it holds forever, so that I don't lose the use of those points until the last level." I'm not sure it covers what happens if you straight up kill the person you've got a negative relationship with. Does it? Status quo is boring. It doesn't help that, as written, Icons are the coolest thing the game has. I don't see the reason behind restricting them from using cool toys right from out of the box. Especially if it'll get my group more interested in things. If you like looking at things from afar and saying "Won't it be cool someday when..." then that's fine. We don't really care for that, save for certain situations. In fact, if there's just an organization not headed up by one of the Icons, but able to straight up match them in power, that would be cool too! Maybe this is related to the fact that I don't find representations of the Great Man theory of history to be compelling on their own. I really don't know. Either way, Icons can be cool, but like everything else, it's going to need an overhaul before it's good. Even then, it might have its own set of assumptions that people don't care for, and I hope it's at least transparent enough to allow for reasonable houseruling. If it doesn't, it'll probably get houseruled anyway.
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May 7, 2012 18:34
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moths posted:So you decided you couldn't stand the system before your first game, and then found fault with one of its new mechanics. Does this kind of thing happen a lot in RPGs? Uh, no. I decided I couldn't stand the system after the first game. After the Escalation Die was awful, momentum was useless, multiclassing a noose, the Icons inconsequential, and the "1 damage on a miss" insulting. And we're bad at D&D.
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May 7, 2012 18:52
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Escalation in our game just... didn't help. I don't know if it's IRC gaming or what, but turns are massive, arduous undertakings with a new ruleset. We were dead or wishing we were dead by the third turn. Even if we had lived to see turn six, it would've only raised our to-hit rolls to around a 60% chance at best. It was more a combination of it being inadequate to compensate for rolling. My GM has threatened us with an additional run-through with a set of pregens. If he makes us go through with it, I'll have better data on if it's quite as awful as it felt like, where we were bad at D&D, and probably new places where it feels unsupported. Andrevian fucked around with this message at 19:10 on May 7, 2012 |
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May 7, 2012 19:06
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Meh. It's not a big deal. That's partially my bad this morning anyway; I should not be trusted with a keyboard before a final. Nothing good comes of it. And yeah, you're exactly right on Escalation dice. Though, what I think would be cool is if you could have something where momentum could be used as a team resource, so that everyone could play around with it, and maybe have it more robust in some way. That would be really, really cool. Or maybe have it so that the Rogue can pull off cool stuff in conjunction with others as a part of momentum or have that for everyone too. It's not that much drift. Which is why it struck me as really weird in the first place, when people were talking about not knowing Icons. There are ways to be right there with them, and it's not a big deal. It strikes me that Strong Positive and Strong Negative are tiny, tiny areas where it's weird to be, and Strong Conflicted covers... everything. I think Strong Positive and Strong Negative could probably have something to make them less of a big deal at starting as well, though right now I can't think of anything off of the top of my head. I think they should just have a way to be legitimately interesting on their own, rather than just being written off as "boring and one-dimensional for starting characters." Because if that's the case, why have them for future characters? Granted, I'm in the "all Icons should be ambiguous" crowd too. Maybe all relationships should be conflicted? If we're trying to get away from boring, and all. Also, I'm going to still sit here and laugh about someone called The Emperor being Good. It's like someone missed the definition of empire or something. I don't think "possibly ambiguous" covers it. As for stats, yeah, there does need to be something for people who aren't good at D&D. Probably a lot of things good for that, because I think aiming your product at "people who are good at D&D" alone is probably going to cut down on a lot of people.
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May 7, 2012 21:29
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| # ¿ Apr 16, 2024 07:26 |
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I'm not sure. D&D and SR are the only system-types that we've run where a fight can eat a whole session. I know we're bad at D&D, but we're not that bad at SR (SR is bad on its own, what with initiative passes and all). And by 'eat' I mean 'people feel like the night has been wasted afterward.' We managed to tweak SR to avoid that, though we've since stopped using it. If there are other folks who ran over IRC, I'd like to see how fast theirs went. Or any D&D game. I'm honestly surprised games don't have a 'This is how long an encounter took on average in these conditions' metric in them anywhere.
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May 9, 2012 18:58
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