|
I recognized Winnie, Tigger and Piglet right away, but Roo took me a while because a wolf goes A-Rooooooo.
|
#
¿
Mar 1, 2013 06:36
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 17:56 |
|
|
Mirthless posted:You need a feat for BULL RUSHING? There's a feat requirement FOR PUSHING YOUR OPPONENT? The idea is to reward the fighter player who just wants to sit and roll dice over and over again. That's the primary playstyle, and you have to pay through the nose to play it any different. I have never once met one of these mystical "just wants to roll some dice" fighter players who didn't also enjoy options. Hell, I play with one in 4e; he plays a Ranger. He loves using Twin Strike over and over again, but also enjoys the other exploits he gets. He has an uncomplicated playstyle, but to Next's designers this translates to "make it so simple that you could automate it". I showed this player the Next fighter. His reaction was exactly most people's reaction in this thread: That's it? A dude who just shows up mostly to be social and whose most loved thing is rolling dice a bunch doesn't like the Fighter, and yet he's apparently the target audience for the Fighter. That's how bad the current design direction is.
|
|
#
¿
May 4, 2013 23:09
|
|
|
ProfessorCirno posted:I'm reminded of 3e, where you need Intelligence 11 to cast level 1 spells, and Intelligence 13 to get combat expertise and all the maneuver feats that require it. Tripping a dude was more mentally taxing then magic. Shooting a seizure rainbow from your fingertips, creating a horse with your mind and comprehending all languages: Less mentally taxing than attacking while also defending yourself. I can't even imagine using this as the basis for future design. I'm sorry.
|
|
#
¿
May 5, 2013 03:10
|
|
|
The entire power curve of feats is nonsensical to me. Here's the scenario.
Is it the scarcity of feats compared to spells, the inflexibility of feats? Nope, it's not even the "anyone can take them" thing, which pretty much everyone knows is kind of bullshit when you look at the special magic feats only magic people get. The sole determiners of why feats are so much weaker than spells, of which you get dozens, is the "always on" clause. And that's even with feats being often so specific that it's "always on" for the one round every other game night that you get to use it. And this somehow is an argument that flies with people. Yes, my class totally should have more and better powers than yours! They're only single use, after all. (Ignore the part about getting more than one copy, the myriad ways I can bypass this limit built into the system, the fact that they regenerate really quickly in game terms and how some spells are practically "always on" anyway). The Next team's answer to this is to not make feats more powerful or less specific. No, it's to make things that used to be "always on" for everyone be feats instead. What the hell is even going on at the playtest reviews?
|
|
#
¿
May 5, 2013 18:05
|
|
|
ProfessorCirno posted:Also incidentally apparently the latest playtest adds gender to the cleric domains. Can you guess which domains are female and which are male? Ahaha, there's no way this is true especially after that tasteless gender-based ability score joke from last year, it has to be bullsh  (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
|
|
#
¿
May 6, 2013 05:46
|
|
|
I am not joking when I say that this makes me legitimately angry. I have run Basic games dozens of times for groups of kids looking to see what this D&D and RPG thing is about, and a lot of those groups included or were composed of girls. The legend of Salka the Barbarian who rode around impaling orcs, bandits and people who vaguely annoyed her on the horn of her unicorn will live forever at my tables. And the reason that I feel comfortable running Basic games for them, despite the rules being from the freaking eighties, is because they displayed a kind of awareness of this exact kind of thing in that awkward early eighties-to-nineties social awareness way, and are so in a way that a whole lot of games are not. One of the first characters you meet in the Basic set adventure I really like to run (and have expanded on several times) is Aleena the Cleric.  She's pretty cool, she wields a mace, calls upon godly powers to help smite foes and is a good friend to have. If I had to sit down with Aleena's character in a game with a bunch of unruly little girls raring to go and tell them that Aleena's protection domain is gendered and talks about how women are by divine nature mostly nurturing and caring and not in fact kickass battle-priests who wield maces, I'd feel deeply ashamed of doing so. And the worst part is that I will run into at least one person in the next few days who will claim this is historically accurate or that replicating what nerds believe are actual medieval social norms is somehow important in a game about elves and dragons.
|
|
#
¿
May 6, 2013 06:11
|
|
|
It would also meaningfully differentiate between weapons in a way that isn't "yet another minor variation of die size and crit range" and "does one of three types of damage which is only relevant to like one single kind of low-level monster in the game".
|
|
#
¿
May 6, 2013 17:58
|
|
|
Ol' grogs like me will point at AD&D 2e's Skills and Powers book, which had a point-based construction system for your classes (which couldn't make the normal classes properly), stuff like "split" ability scores (here's your strength for combat, here's your strength for everything else) and grab-bag class features. It didn't become a core part of D&D until 3e, though.
|
|
#
¿
May 8, 2013 22:01
|
|
|
AlphaDog posted:One of you guys will know the legal answer to this: Is "Defender, Striker, Leader, Controller" copyrightable? If you wanted to publish a game where those were the actual class names, would you have a problem? Aside from "controller" they're all positions from team sports, so probably not.
|
|
#
¿
May 9, 2013 14:57
|
|
|
I think one thing people are missing is that the player might have wanted to play a metalsmith robot with a metallic hammer and armor because those were options presented in the character builder, rather than the player coming to the game with all those in their head. The options you give people in games can considerably shape the way they play and think! To name an example, Basic doesn't separate class from race. You can be a level 4 Elf in that game. Elves are a character option, but they're not a mobile one you can slot into any class you want. In fact, the traditional four - Fighter, Magic-User, Cleric and Thief - are human only. This will considerably change how you think of elves in the game, as well as how you create your core-four, human-only character. But it plays just fine! Now jump to AD&D, and you get a completely different attitude to how you play "demi-humans" compared to humans. Not only can an elf be one of the core four, but they can be more than one of them at the same time when a human can not. I love to introduce players to Basic, partly to see their reactions when they get to 4e and go "My elf can be a thief now?!" and the character options just light this little light of chargen madness in their eyes. Did people really know they seriously wanted to play psychic robots before 3e and 4e made it possible? Or is it the existence of the option alone that makes people go "hell yeah I'm going to play that?" It's a very engaging and fun experience. But that doesn't dispel the problems with the experience, namely that the ever deepening pool of options will eventually become far too complex. It's not hard for me to see how the game evolved in this direction, but it's causing the games to slowly strangle themselves as the publishing history gets longer.
|
|
#
¿
May 9, 2013 15:41
|
|
|
theironjef posted:I guess that's theoretically relevant and not just goalpost shifting because 5th edition is basically grogbait, right? Says someone who routinely compares wanting to play a character from the fiction associated with the game with wanting to play literal godlike beings, or just straight up gods.
|
|
#
¿
May 9, 2013 19:55
|
|
|
theironjef posted:Confusing me with someone else maybe? I've gone as far as suggesting that people who want to play as characters from the fiction are likely to have unrealistic expectations, but that's about it. No. theironjef posted:Conan was never designed around having 1/4 of the camera. He's a main character, and no one wants to sit down and be the not-main character in a game where there's a main character. It's annoying because Conan is totally one of the iconic fantasy guys, but yeah, the constant call for the ability to make Conan is roughly like saying "This X-Men game sucks! You can't use it to make Superman!" theironjef posted:Those appear to be NPC stats. They statted out Blibdoolpoolp too, but you can't play as naked lobster goddess. In the X-Men analogy, that page of the book would be where they discuss Apocalypse or Mr. Sinister. You're comparing wanting to play Conan, a dude who routinely travels with companions to do things like rob people and loot poo poo, with wanting to play Superman, Mr. Sinister and a lobster god. Yes, it might be unrealistic to expect to be the protagonist, but your comparisons are wildly hyperbolic and reflect nothing anyone has said.
|
|
#
¿
May 9, 2013 20:22
|
|
|
theironjef posted:So let's go ahead and explain that. Those aren't comparisons, those are analogies. Analogies are a type of comparison. quote:If the power baseline is set at Wolverine, I can't just keep using Conan as the example of the iconic character, because while Conan is more powerful than Bob the level 1 fighter, he is not more powerful that Wolverine (or maybe he is, I don't know. The point is analogy), so I move to Superman. And this is just completely bonkers, but certainly a good example of a false analogy. In this example, we're playing Marvel but someone wants a superpowered being from DC which would unbalance the game because it's Superman, a near-godlike being. You are claiming that this is analogous to, when playing D&D, encountering someone who wants to play Conan, not just one of the iconic inspirations for D&D but also a dude who teams up with adventurers quite frequently to loot dungeons and kill evil sorcerers. Which, I hope you'll note, is entirely in D&D's genre. One of these things is not like the other. Wanting to play someone like Conan in D&D is not like wanting to play Superman (or, as mentioned, a God) in any game. D&D even has released adventures where you play Conan and his companions! Wanting to play someone like Conan is an entirely valid motivation, as far as the game seems to be concerned! quote:So, do you think those Conan stats were for a PC or an NPC? Because again, that was the point. Then why does the same company then also release playable stats for Conan? Hell, Gygax mentions that those stats aren't even meant to be used for play at all, NPC or otherwise, and are just a personal thought exercise of his. The release of Unearthed Arcana and its Barbarian class even straight up gives the Barbarian abilities which these stats simulated with psionics. And for that matter, explain why the Barbarian class exists if not to play something like Conan the Barbarian. quote:Also I bet the writers of the Conan cartoon were pretty heavily influenced by what has become canon D&D. Iconic magic weapons for everyone, a ranger and a wizard... Are you even vaguely familiar with Conan? I have to ask, because it's increasingly sounding like you have some kind of crazy inflated image of Conan that has nothing to do with the character or the stories. There have been iconic weapons (magic or otherwise), plus ranger-like and spellcasting companions in Conan media before, including the original Howard and even the first movie. Your comparisons stink, and they were old when I read them in the 90's letters to the editor of Dragon magazine. Rulebook Heavily fucked around with this message at 21:38 on May 9, 2013 |
|
#
¿
May 9, 2013 21:30
|
|
|
theironjef posted:They're not PC stats or NPC stats? They're a thought experiment? Then what the hell good are they and why did whoever posted them in the first place post them in the first place? I honestly don't remember. Thor is literally a god. Like, literally. Not analogous to. He's even a god in the comics. You just moved away from "god-like" to "literally a god" in order to prove how your analogies don't involve players wanting to be literal gods.
|
|
#
¿
May 9, 2013 21:46
|
|
|
gninjagnome posted:Out of curiosity, does anyone actually use the overland travel rules? I've never had a game where they came up - in all my games, long distance travel is either hand waved away, or integral to the story. Like, in their dragon example - either the DM wants us to get lost as part of the adventure (to lead us on a side quest or specifically as something we have to over come), or we don't get lost so we can go fight the dragon. I've never thought rolling to see if you get lost would be a good idea in this scenario. When I use the Overland Travel rules, it's because that's what the game is meant to be about. If the overland travel stuff isn't serving any good purpose, I abstract it away completely or resolve it as a basic skill challenge situation. It's always been important to mix and match what rules you want to use for the game you're playing, but D&D has always been absolutely awful at actually transmitting that information to the players and DMs, simply trusting that they'll somehow manage it through etheric osmosis. I appreciate the overland travel rules when they are there, but if there was ever a point where you can go "This is a D&D Module", it's those rules. Forget all the million character knobs and tweaks being modules, these are the things that will affect the game and how it is played more than anything. The entire Module setup is nothing but a way to transmit to a DM that these things are tools. But of course not only does Next have to do this in a crazy roundabout way (instead of just sitting down and telling the DM "for this style of game, use this"), but they also seem to either be abandoning it or leaving it entirely to character creation, thus frontloading the complexity of their rules system even more right at the start of the game. Frankly, the Next team needs to stop worrying about classes or specific character abilities and sit down and examine what they hell they want people to be doing with their game. "Anything they want" should not be an acceptable answer, because it is so completely obvious and implied that it's a useless goal to "design" for; they need to sit down and ask "what can we make this game do well". Expertise dice on the fighter are just set dressing for things they just haven't been addressing at all in their playtest packets or DM information or even in most of their articles. The expanded DM portion of their playtest packet, the exploration rules, all of that should have been included as close to the start as they could. With a bit of care, you can even make skinless pan-fried chicken breast taste juicy and good. D&D needs that kind of care at this point. -2 or more chicken breasts -flour for breading -butter and olive oil for the pan -salt and pepper -a frying pan with a nice tight lid -an accurate timepiece Bread the chicken with flour, salt and pepper any way you prefer (I like using egg and mixing salt and pepper into the flour directly). Preheat the pan to medium-to-high heat with oil and butter. Reduce to medium when pan is covered in a nice sheet of oil and place chicken breasts on pan. Fry for one minute. Flip and repeat; it should be a light delicate gold color. When both sides are lightly fried, flip to original side and reduce heat to low. Then clap the lid on and do not lift the lid. Keep it like this for ten minutes, then turn off the heat entirely but keep the chicken on the pan for another ten minutes. Again, no touching the lid, and be precise about it. Serve with any side you want (salad, a bit of nice sauce, whatever works for you) and enjoy juicy pan-fried skinless chicken breast. The recipe can substitute pretty much everything in case someone in the home has dietary requirements (diabetes, salt and other kidney-related things, the lot) because only the timing is actually important to getting the chicken right.
|
|
#
¿
May 21, 2013 19:54
|
|
|
Kasonic posted:Feats, weapon tables, and prestige classes are all fine examples of top-down design gone horribly off the rails. At this point switching to bottom-up mechanical design would just get you crushed under a mountain of system shock and object hardness tests. Feats, proficiencies, ability scores and so on are not gameplay. That's the problem. Those are character options that can interact with a strong core of gameplay, but they are not in and of themselves the game being played at the table. If they were the game, the only session you'd play was the character creation one and the rest would be meaningless bullshit. Character creation should at best be prelude to gameplay, and the options should be flavoring or approaches to the core gameplay. Now if only we knew what that is, beyond "The DM will tell you and run D&D or something I guess". They're spending so much time tweaking +1s in the math that they can't even be bothered to get out the exploration guidelines in a game that's supposed to be about dungeon exploration.
|
|
#
¿
May 21, 2013 22:40
|
|
|
I've implemented overland rules in X1: The Isle of Dread, which was the first hexcrawling adventure ever released. So long as everyone knows that the game is now about that, it's a fun little thing that works like a boardgame except you sometimes get hopelessly lost in a dinosaur-infested jungle. Once the island was essentially mapped, though, the overland stuff on it was abstracted away because the exploration bit was done. So it depends on how you're using it, sort of like how you wouldn't roll every combat with goblins at level 30. The half-assed kind where you track detailed travel times and so on but where there's no set of milestones like "hex a24 is explored, well done" is something I've never done and seemed sort of pointless in the same way that encumbrance has always been ever since they removed the "gold you carry out of the dungeon is XP" rule and weight stopped mattering for advancement, but it sticks around because no one in thirty years has cared to examine why encumbrance is even there anymore. Rulebook Heavily fucked around with this message at 23:12 on May 21, 2013 |
|
#
¿
May 21, 2013 23:10
|
|
|
It's pure Cargo Cult design. Let's make D&D the way D&D was always made and then we can At least the spell failure thing is gone, but how hard are proficiencies to get? It used to be a class feature of the fighter that they were the only ones able to use a vast selection of equipment, these days it's "take a feat to get what the fighter gets".
|
|
#
¿
May 22, 2013 17:25
|
|
|
The only way I can see making going on with few spells be a viable option is if regaining said spells is an arduous or lengthy process that requires leaving a dungeon entirely, like the default AD&D rules for memorizing spells (1 hour per spell level per spell: a single 9th level spell would take nine full hours). Regaining all your spent spells could be a process requiring weeks of rest, which encourages frugality with the high-level stuff and actually strains resources, and makes clearing a dungeon on one load of spells an achievement. This goes hand in hand with the slow natural healing rate other classes have, so actually stopping for a rest for a couple of weeks is downright expected. It also creates opportunities like attacking an evil wizard when you know they've been on an arduous planar trip or in a spell battle just days before. Of course, D&D hasn't used that rule for ages. It's practically an entirely different game when played this way, and it does still have the problem of the spellcasters ultimately setting the pace of the adventure.
|
|
#
¿
May 25, 2013 21:09
|
|
|
To phrase what Cirno is saying a little differently and take if further: It can be useful to think of the entire game as a narrative, because after all none of it happens in real life: it's all in our heads. In that sense, all mechanics are narrative mechanics, determining what happens in the shared narrative in our heads. Keep that in mind as I use that word in the following. So. What does sharing this narrative mean? It means we turn to the rules to say what happens in the narrative. When we make a dice roll and do/don't achieve an X level of arbitrary number, something happens in the fiction of the game. When we're playing, we're trying to wrest some level of control over this outcome, usually by playing to our strengths. We want the narrative to go one way (in our favor), and thus try to succeed at rolls. But not everyone is playing fair in the battle for the narrative. Martial classes are consigned to always roll for their narrative success, almost without exception. Roll to damage an enemy. Roll not to fall on your rear end. Roll for swinging on that chandelier. Meanwhile, playing the same game, is a class of character who several times per an in-game narrative unit of time (usually a "day") gets to simply declare that something happens, and it does, by saying "I cast...". And now we've already hit a very basic imbalance of power between people who are supposed to be playing the game, because one type of character rolls for everything and another type can roll for things but also gets to just automatically declare things. Imagine if, in a game of cowboys and indians, the cowboys could simply declare they had arrow-proof shields and could sometimes fire shots that can't miss, and then the indians were told to play fair while having no such thing. In a game of fiction, the ability to declare things about that fiction that are inviolably true is massively powerful. But it doesn't stop there. Because these declaration powers are ostensibly limited in their use (even if the limit is entirely an in-fiction thing that can be resolved with a simple sentence like "we rest"), they also get to be more powerful in the narrative. Even absent the in-fiction realism argument and thinking purely in terms of design, we're making the imbalance problem even bigger. Now our cowboys are summoning herds of bulls to fight for them - surely that makes sense because their job is herding cows, right? Indians don't have a job like that. And let's say that these kids are actually playing a variant made up by their sad, nerdy parents called "Cowboys and Indians team up versus Dinosaurs", and the kids are all meant to cooperate against the dinosaur threat, but nothing else about the fictional power of each has changed - cowboys can still declare there are cows and shots that don't miss, and indians cannot. Now they're meant to cooperate, but they're simply not playing on an even field to begin with. This isn't fair in the least, but this is the situation we're contending with in D&D. This is what 4e addressed so readily by levelling the fictional declarative power in scope and among the classes, and this is what we're returning to because the cowboy players whined and moaned about not being special anymore. This is why the entire argument comes off as being so deeply sad. poo poo, now I'm hungry for beef.
|
|
#
¿
May 27, 2013 13:38
|
|
|
I've taken to resolving linguistic difficulties as an INT-based challenge, like how lifting a rock is a STR-based one. It's just plain easier, makes it more interesting mechanically and it gives INT more to do than serving as a measure of how much magic you can do.
|
|
#
¿
May 29, 2013 04:05
|
|
|
OneThousandMonkeys posted:3e is not an "old" system. It only stopped being supported five years ago officially, has continued to be supported by Pathfinder, etc. I've said it elsewhere, but if 4e was the brand's attempt to become a major mainstream core property for Hasbro, Next is D&D's acceptance that it won't be. 4e marketed to a younger market, while Next goes for the much safer male 25-35 year old market by recalling marketing successes of years past. They design towards "feel" rather than usability because they are marketing to said market of lapsed D&D customers who remember what D&D "feels" like. Basically, D&D is a legacy brand and Next is happy as poo poo with that situation.
|
|
#
¿
May 31, 2013 23:03
|
|
|
P.d0t posted:This right here seems to me like the strongest argument in favour of having multiple different D&Ds being sold and supported at the same time. I know it would/could "dilute the market" but I think if the edition wars have taught us anything, it's that people like different styles of games (duh) and there are people in this world with different (and great!) visions for D&D. Can't we all just get along? The argument against this is the WotC DriveThruRPG experiment, where the older editions already don't achieve the same sales numbers as games like Dungeon World. Older editions are an even bigger niche product than games already are in general, and that's not going to change. Now if only Next was trying to be like those, but better.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 2, 2013 18:31
|
|
|
Dodge Charms posted:I'm not sure it's fair to claim this as a sign of success. If we want to judge editions as successes by whether they're long-lasting, then the 1981 Basic and Expert sets were failures because they were replaced in 1984, despite the Basic set selling a million copies in one year (hell, in one christmas) thus making it the most sold version of D&D ever. Third edition (3.0) was clearly an equally large failure for only lasting three years itself (we can estimate it sold about 5-600.000 copies of the PHB alone, not counting the initial sold out print run). 3.5 lasted a few months less than 4e did, so 4e was more of a success ~*obviously*~, and AD&D 2e was such a success that it drove the parent company to extinction. By similarly insane troll logic, I can deduce that Pathfinder outgrossed 4e always forever because it overtook 4e in physical book sales through retailers for one month once (but nevermind the online market or DDI or that stuff). We can rely on some facts when making our deductions, though they're not many. What we can't really rely on is how long-lasting each edition was. The old TSR catalogues actually reproduced print numbers if you can find those, and some of the numbers are collected here: http://www.acaeum.com/library/printrun.html Rulebook Heavily fucked around with this message at 18:59 on Jun 2, 2013 |
|
#
¿
Jun 2, 2013 18:55
|
|
|
gently caress Next, here's how you bake rye bread the D&D way. 5 cups rye meal 2,5 cups wheat 2 cups sugar 4 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon salt 1 litre milk Mix ingredients. Place dough in 3-4 cardboard milk cartons or large tins (like quality street candy tins), filling them no more than halfway. Seal with plastic wrap, cellophane and duct tape. Journey to a magical realm of natural hot springs. Create small mounds of hot sand and bury the containers in them completely, carefully marking where you left the dough. Come back one full day later and unearth it. Eat with butter and smoked salmon or trout. You have now made and enjoyed Hverabrauð, or Geyser Bread.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 4, 2013 19:38
|
|
|
Well let's see, my wizard in 4e right now can memorize a new battery of spells every day, comprehend all mortal languages pretty much at will, consult ancient sages for hidden knowledge, control weather, transport a party of heroes through a nethery shadow-realm, craft permanent portals between planes and raise a large piece of land and nail it to the sky permanently. In combat powers, he can summon massive storms of ice and lightning, make himself and all his friends fly, grant an ally protection against everything that could possibly damage them, lock foes in a prison of ice, teleport all enemies around him pretty much anywhere he wants on the battlefield at once, cause gravity itself to push down on a foe like the hand of a god and daze even the mightiest dragons with a seizure rainbow he shoots from his fingertips. His blood is partly made of lightning and blasts everyone around when he receives a telling blow. Absolutely none of these things is remotely like what any of the other people in the party are doing. (Ask me about the rogue knocking out an undead, ever-hungry star with the hilt of his dagger.) At this point, I look at posts that say that "everything is the same" in 4e and wonder what the hell else people even want. Also, quote:It's not that I get a cheap thrill out of being more powerful than the Fighter, I just like to have the amount of narrative control the Wizard provides. In a game about creating a cool story, narrative control over that story is power. You really do get a thrill out of being more powerful than the fighter.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 7, 2013 02:47
|
|
|
Rutibex posted:I considered it more wresting control from the DM, not stealing the Fighters spotlight. 75% of the time I was the DM myself; not because I'm a megalomaniac but because I was more invested in the game than the other players. That's the same reason I liked playing the Wizard, not to glorify myself but to guide the story in more interesting directions for everyone's enjoyment. If someone else played a Wizard or Cleric or something equally interesting too it made me excited, not jealous. Yes, the "meta-role" of the wizard hijacking the narrative and the game from everyone else to make the game be about them and their adventures was removed. We were glad that it was gone, and laughed at the tears of players who couldn't have their most-powerful-character teddybear anymore, because wanting all the toys for yourself far beyond what everyone else gets is pathetic but not nearly as pathetic as crying about it on the internet.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 7, 2013 04:00
|
|
|
fatherdog posted:I played all of these, plus B/X slash BECMI. Where does my viewpoint get categorized? It got packaged in styrofoam and sealed in a warehouse back when the Rules Cyclopedia was published in 1990 and Basic ended as a thing in general. The worst loss D&D has ever suffered.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 7, 2013 05:38
|
|
|
Halloween Jack posted:Would you mind expounding on the general merits of the Basic line? Just because I'd like to read it? The RC itself was excellent! It's simply that it was the final product of the line. So. Basic. The original Basic set in 1981 was conceived of as a continuation of OD&D, separate from the AD&D line of Gygax, while also being a more introductory product for gamers so that they could later "graduate" to AD&D. The first set was written/edited by Eric Holmes, who was actually a professional editor. He was given OD&D and told to make sense of it for publication, with a planned level progression of 1-3. Making sense of OD&D is no small task. What he ended up doing was creating a very basic game. There is no town or wilderness in the 1981 set: your characters are literally dropped into a dungeon immediately after character creation. It's a strict turn-based dungeon exploration game with a set amount of things you can do per turn, set rest periods, set duration of spells and light sources, and generally can play very much like a more freeform board game with a moderator. The entire thing was packaged in a nice box with an adventure (which adventure changed between printings, but B2: Keep on the Borderlands was one and thus forms a cornerstone in a lot of early gamer minds for what D&D is) and some on-the-spot decisions like making Magic Missile require an attack roll, because OD&D didn't state that it didn't. This went on to sell a million drat copies in the space of one Christmas. Everything in the other sets adds to that. The original eXpert set added more levels, but it also added wilderness rules. If you played the game boxes as they came out, you essentially started with a fairly gentle learning curve and got gradually introduced to additional complexity - step one of why I personally like the entire endeavor so much. B/X got remade and reprinted with more sets adding on top, each one introducing a new dimension of play (mass combat and realm management, loads of optional rules for tweaking your game, being Gods). The Basic line also had one setting throughout its history, starting from the OD&D Blackmoor setting. Blackmoor had a crashed spaceship in it and stuff was weird, which is why there was ever such a thing as a "save VS Death Ray". Anyway, when Basic rolled along there was a vague "known world" setting which didn't get defined until much later, when it became Mystara and Blackmoor was rolled into that as the setting's prehistory. Mystara is built from the ground up as a setting for adventurers and for D&D. Lords are all high level because they earn taxation gold, and this is pretty much a known fact in the setting. Little details like there being more gold in D&D than is strictly realistic for earth are explained away as simply "there is more gold on D&D worlds! Also a million gold pieces is a fun thing to have". Hexcrawl and realm building rules are built into the setting on every level, with all maps published for it being presented in a hex-based format. The setting books (Gazetteer series) are often very progressive even by modern standards, discuss in a frank and open manner how to approach the game as a fun activity for everyone and include crazy things that not even AD&D would do until years later, like playable monster characters. Some of the supplements are jokey in tone and don't take everything totally seriously. Orcs of Thar is one gigantic series of jokes about the French Foreign Legion, one book includes a lich who is a scotsman- a literal scotsman from actual earth- and one of the gods of the setting is a stranded nuclear scientist from Blackmoor's space ship. Inside the planet is a promised land in which dinosaurs live, led there by Literal Dinosaur Moses to save them from meteoric extinction, and it has even more space for exploration. It's essentially the D&D you played when you were twelve, on paper, but with surprisingly mature discussions in between and not a lot of skeevy bullshit or enforced gender roles or any of that nonsense. There aren't even any half-anythings to complicate matters. Basic adventures are some of the best in the line, most of them designed as "intro" adventures for beginning DMs, and they include innovations like the first wilderness and first social campaigns ever made for any D&D. They were published under B (as in B2 Borderlands, B4 the Lost City) and X (X1: The Isle of Dread, the first hexcrawl campaign ever). They experimented a lot and found a lot of success in expanding the game beyond "enter a dungeon and kill poo poo for loot". The system itself is familiar if you know AD&D, except that it's a lot simpler. Skill rolls are mostly "roll under stat". Attack rolls follow THACO. A lot of things are a simple d6 or 2d6 rolls. Thieves still suck. But the game has for the most part a much smaller and more limited (and sane) selection of spells available, and places much more emphasis on Fighters being not just fighting men, but lords and ladies who carve a kingdom out of the wilderness. It also has a system of weapon specialization that grants fighters crazy fun and good abilities, including straight up encounter powers. If you have the RC, everything you need to run a campaign at every level of detail is in one place, and aside from one instance (what Hit Dice represent - the amount of hits a monster will take on average!) the rules are clear and include explanations and discussion about what their inclusion means in a campaign. When I say it got packed away in 1990, that's essentially what happened. GAZ sales flagged, the final two books were massively late, the adventures and sets went out of print (with the delayed Immortals set not selling all that well and being really odd in ways like having an adventure set on Earth), the company refocused to emphasize the "core" product in AD&D, the RC got compiled and published by one of the line's earliest authors (Aaron Allston, who you might recognize as a dude who now writes Star Wars novels) and it officially came to an end. It's telling that most of the people who worked on Basic didn't last at the company, and that most of the people who now write D&D and talk about what's totally iconic of it wrote for AD&D and didn't really touch Basic. Mystara is a setting mostly known now for a side-scrolling beat em up which is amazing and pretty much representative of how the setting should play out. Too long? In short? Basic and its additions are a simple, clear game with focused design goals (for its time), introduced gradually to players with a neat setting designed to be interacted with first and admired from afar last, not afraid of experimentation or of looking silly sometimes for the sake of fun, which did its best to provide interesting large-scale narrative options to everyone and which can be tweaked to taste with options provided in the book. If you can find the RC, do it! Even if you never play it, it's an illuminating read in light of Next. Rulebook Heavily fucked around with this message at 06:53 on Jun 7, 2013 |
|
#
¿
Jun 7, 2013 06:50
|
|
|
Halloween Jack posted:Woooaaah I missed this completely, where is it? This was a while ago, but it's under "Despair Effect" on p.77. Once per fight, a weapon master can cause enemies to flee with a display of their weapon skill. Technically it's triggered when the DM decides, but it's basically an encounter power! Basic also has proto-paragon paths. Really, it's pretty great.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 7, 2013 19:03
|
|
|
Speaking of Next math, did they fix the XP table yet?
|
|
#
¿
Jun 8, 2013 12:16
|
|
|
WordMercenary posted:Then we have extremely different definitions of the word. I would consider that 'design', not 'the maths'. But honestly that's a semantic difference, and like Amodeus being able to identify monsters, who cares? The game is a game of math interacting with other math. Designing the game means designing the math. Yes, putting a theme on the mechanics is part of it too (this is Dungeon Fantasy, put a Dungeon Fantasy theme on the mechanics), but every time a +0 to +5 modifier interacts with a range of DCs from 10 to 30 the designer needs to have been on the ball in making sure that range of mathematical interactions work in the context of the game system. The designer can't simply make really hard poo poo DC 50 and thus impossible to reach on a roll of d20+modifier by anyone and call that good because all the other elements of the design hang together in their head. quote:I think it's also worth saying that trying to make the system model too many mundane things might well the reason D&D maths so frequently goes wrong. The more demands you place on your numbers the harder it'll be to fulfill them all. This is to do with a level of abstraction, yes. We don't model every single footstep we take in an RPG because we're comfortable with abstracting that stuff away for the sake of gameplay and sanity both, even if we logically know there's a chance for people to fall over during normal walking. What a lot of people don't realize, or prefer not to think about, is that all mechanics are abstractions. People talk about "dissociated" mechanics - mechanics that don't "reflect reality" - as if they were bad because they aren't realistic. None of this poo poo is realistic! But people design towards "simulation" anyway and fall into the same trap over and over again: No simple abstraction can possibly cover every single thing in that kind of "realistic" manner, or even a consistent one. It has to become a really, really complex abstraction to do that, which goes directly against the goal of making a "light" system. But even this gets down to math. Math interacts with all of the above. Math is the reason climb checks are awful and deadly; making multiple rolls to succeed always has a higher chance of failure than making one! Math is the reason all those particularly stupid interactions were discovered and outlisted on 4chan. You can make a system that makes all of those interactions make much more sense to people by getting the math right in the first place. It really does boil, in a whole hell of a lot of ways, down to sitting down with some dice and a calculator and working this poo poo out.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 8, 2013 12:37
|
|
|
WordMercenary posted:It's also a lot of things that aren't maths, like "shall we let the Fighter actually do anything." Yes. I said that and you agreed!  But "shall we let the fighter do anything" also boils down to math in extremely important ways. Look at 3e and how it neutered everything the fighter did by making its armor penalize everything it could specialize in and by giving it too few skills. All of those are mathematical concerns. Armor penalties were too high or not easily negated enough. DCs were too high. There were too few skill points available to raise your mathematical bonuses. Even absent the underlying philosophic issues of "wizards rule fighters drool", the math hosed over even what the fighter was supposed to be good at by design. Now take Next and its "best climber in the world" who can't climb a slippery rope at level 20 without falling three-quarters of the time. The system intends to allow the best climber to climb things well (by giving mathematical bonuses), but falls down purely on a mathematical level because the math is hosed. That's why we say math is important. Yes, it would be nice if the underlying issues of having some classes simply declare success in a system where everyone else has to ask the dice for permission were also resolved (which is a level of design concept I expect even fewer designers to think about than I expect for basic mathematics), but it would also be nice to not have a god-slaying planar-travelling D&D character fail to climb a rope most of the time after specializing in it. It's obvious that the game intends to be about heroes who climb from early levels to late levels and becoming better at mundane tasks to the point where they exceed realistic human potential, but the system doesn't deliver on that because someone seems to not have thought it through.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 8, 2013 13:16
|
|
|
ritorix posted:I think that's what is going on with the DC30 'climb a greased rope' stuff. You can't loving climb a greased rope. Yes, you can. We have competitions in real life that are all about climbing greased poles, for one. This is a thing normal people can do. quote:4chan was whining about not being able to reliably do this impossible stuff, but that was the entire point. Their expectations are those of a 4e mentality where as you gain levels all tasks become more difficult. A level 20 4e ranger is always dealing with high-DC tasks because the DCs for every task scale with your growth. The whole 4e skill system was awful, imo. A Next character doesn't have to worry about that. A difficult wall is always DC20 to climb. That super-climber reliably does that 96% of the time. People could, in 3e, balance on clouds. People could, in AD&D, be as strong as giants, and thieves explicitly could climb surfaces other people would find utterly impossible. This is not some kind of anomalous 4e-only mentality that distorts the perception of Next, this is some basic D&D poo poo older than most people who play D&D. Next is so backwards-looking that it's managed to regress to a time that never existed in D&D's history where climbing a greased rope (or pole, or whatever) is considered utterly impossible, the province of Wizards only to accomplish with ease.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 8, 2013 15:50
|
|
|
I'm a writer, and the idea that having to think about math somehow inhibits creativity is loving bizarre. There are famous musical compositions that are based on numerical sequences, and Mozart's music is widely appreciated on a mathematical level, and that's pretty drat creative right there! (Not to say RPGs are anything near that level of accomplishment.) RPGs are not novels and need different writing skills, but that is not a knock on creativity itself.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 8, 2013 16:02
|
|
|
WordMercenary posted:Clearly I should, because it seems no matter what I say, you will come up with your own incorrect interpretation. You're a writer. If no one understands your point clearly, it's not everyone else's fault for reading you wrong.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 8, 2013 16:43
|
|
|
WordMercenary posted:Okay now we're getting tedious, "everything involves numbers!" is one of those things that, while technically correct, is not particularly useful to the discussion at hand. Category error. You tweak sound by changing wavelengths using a button. You tweak RPG feel by changing underlying maths. Same principle, different methods, and no "math" is not distinct from "feel" because those are the tools the designer has. Math is one portion of the instrument the game designer is playing.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 8, 2013 17:00
|
|
|
WordMercenary posted:That sounds a whole lot like what I just said. No, it doesn't. You said it's not useful to the discussion of how to tweak feel and design. Everyone else is telling you that it plays a much bigger role than you're claiming.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 8, 2013 17:05
|
|
|
^This. It is possible to do a storytelling game without math (such as by a Declaration/Veto system with no randomizers at all). If you at all include a randomizer, do the math.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 8, 2013 19:32
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 17:56 |
|
|
There are ways where I could see the Advantage/Disadvantage thing being okay despite being swingy, like a d20 roll-under system using the 3-18 stats as written. Less benefit for having a really high stat+Advantage, but also less chance of outright failure for it, and meanwhile having a stat in the 10-13 stat is much less of a drawback if you gain Advantage on the roll but Disadvantage becomes more of a risk. A high stat would be more about imposing reliability on your roll. It would also be Bounded Math as gently caress. It could work on a roll-over style mechanic too, but having it AND static modifiers AND magic weapons AND a climbing stat advantage over levels AND skill dice? Not so much. Next is making the classic mistake of thinking that more stuff = more better in design. e: Actually, let me examine this a little further. What are all those things telling you, as a player? When you're rolling the dice, you're asking a question like "do I hit" or "how much damage do I do". The question asked of a D&D dice mechanic is, 99% of the time, a yes/no binary question. Why the hell do we need a d20 dice roll + Skill Dice roll + Ability Modifier + Situational modifier + Dis/Advantage + Magic bonuses to answer nothing more complex than a yes/no question? All of those extra mechanics are just making the answer of the exact same old question more complicated, not more interesting or nuanced. It's meaningless complexity for its own sake. Rulebook Heavily fucked around with this message at 13:03 on Jun 9, 2013 |
|
#
¿
Jun 9, 2013 12:58
|
|