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Anything I could have to say on the matter of 5E has been said exhaustively by other people here and elsewhere. So far nothing they've put out appeals to me in any fashion more than games I already own, some of which are called D&D and some of which aren't. They still have a year to conjure up something interesting but at this rate it isn't looking tremendously likely. So instead I'll ask about hamburgers. I don't have a grill or anything, just some skillets (one cast iron, one not) and an electric stove, but I love me some hamburgers. The problem I have is that my efforts at cooking hamburgers always wind up being kind of lousy. Either they end up overcooking and turning dry and tough or they end up cooking too quickly on the outsides and getting burnt and blackened. How do you guys cook hamburgers on a stove? Do you prep the meat in any special way? Temperature settings, cook times, I'm all ears. Hit me with your best stovetop hamburger techniques please.
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Mar 1, 2013 16:16
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Yeah, a grill isn't in the cards for me right now but maybe in the summer I can experiment with a neighbor's.
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Mar 1, 2013 16:44
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Barudak posted:DnD Next's theater of the mind is a poor decision to try and use as a base for a modular system. It requires too much rules overlay and interlocking if you want to make the game's combat more meaty and meaningful in your tactical choices to the point where you might as well go play something that isn't actively working against you. To be fair we haven't seen much of their vaunted "tactical rules module" yet, facing rules and all, assuming that's even still a thing. But I largely agree that for a year into development even the core, basic structure of the game seems incredibly lackluster. I never thought that I would actually say this, but given what we've seen so far I honestly wonder what things would look like now if Monte Cook hadn't left. Like, I'm doubtful that I would think it was a vast improvement or anything, but I don't know.
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Mar 1, 2013 17:37
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Mendrian posted:
I enjoy Knob Creek but I'm not really an expert on booze, I just drink what tastes good.
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Mar 1, 2013 18:11
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Winson_Paine posted:One of the things I liked about the Mongoose Conan d20 game is they actually gave fighters save or die and save or suck maneuvers, so they could kabong a guy in the head and daze him or just cut his goddamned head off if they were a cool enough dude. BECMI had that sort of thing too, as I recall. It was part of the Weapon Mastery rules whereby Fighters could learn all sorts of crazy poo poo with weapons, so you could do things like specialize in using torches as weapons or throw bolas at people and force them to save versus strangulation or die in a few rounds, stuff like that. "Fighter as basic attacking meat robot only" is one of those weird things that people seem to have retro-engineered into an immutable part of D&D's legacy even when it demonstrably hasn't always been the case.
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Mar 1, 2013 18:26
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Winson_Paine posted:What is Danger Patrol? I know it is a tangent and a derail, but I checked with the mod and he said it was OK. It's like a retro-pulp sci-fi game by the guy who did Lady Blackbird and GhostEcho/Ghost Lines. Still in beta, I don't know whether he's continuing to work on it or not.
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Mar 1, 2013 18:38
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Barudak posted:Have they made a clarification of what prestige classes are? Because if leveling is anything like 3e where I should basically never stick to my class unless I'm a wizard I'm going to be more mad than when I see Whiskey Connoisseurs talk down to Wine Connoisseurs in some sort of smugularity. As far as I know, and this is based solely off what's been said in articles and such since I don't think any PrC stuff for Next has been released for public playtest yet, Prestige Classes in Next are essentially the exact same thing they were in 3.X except with the designers re-emphasizing the whole "Prestige Classes are meant to be tied into the setting somehow and not just be buckets of Lego you dip into to build your frankencharacters, no really, this time we mean it" thing that was ostensibly a part of 3.X's Prestige Classes right up to the point that the first supplemental book containing new PrCs came out.
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Mar 1, 2013 19:27
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Slimnoid posted:Honestly if Next was going that far in appeasing the old-schools and started aping BECMI stuff, I'd be on board 100%. Basic is boss as hell. Of course, the problem they'd run into there is that if you've got a hankering to play BECMI then all you really need to do is go and grab the Dark Dungeons BECMI retroclone which is completely free and pretty much comprehensive for all your B, E, C, M, and I-ing needs.
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Mar 1, 2013 19:58
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New Legends & Lore is up a bit early looks like:Mike Mearls posted:It might be strange for the guy in charge of D&D R&D to say this, but here it goes: After the core rules for the game are done, we really want to stop adding so much stuff to the mechanics of the game and shift our emphasis to story.
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Mar 2, 2013 01:26
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Mearls has something of a point in that if you want a game that's all about cleaving to archetypes then you don't want/need a huge list of all sorts of jargon-y options all over the place because you're trying to stick to those archetypes. Fine, okay, except this sort of overlooks that A). a bunch of people play D&D to mash together a half dozen classes and prestige classes and templates into some horrible transporter accident of a character and B). that a lot of things that have gone on to "resonate" with players are things that weren't "traditional D&D archetypal" from the get-go. Yes, like Warlords. Or 3E Sorcerers for that matter, that's a thing that wasn't "archetypal" by D&D standards and now it's so drat popular that it's been in two successive editions of D&D and Pathfinder has all sorts of crazy-rear end options for Sorcerers. Also it sort of ignores that there's another, perfectly valid approach to creating characters and that's to go mechanics first and then think about what sort of character that collection of pieces brings to mind. Maybe he has a point in that the people who very first started playing D&D back in 197X weren't doing it "because they wanted to take Rapid Shot" but these days, y'know, that's not exactly some weird foreign way people like to approach making the greatest archer ever. And as long as D&D has been a game that ostensibly claims to emulate all these amazing fantasy stories and archetypes while mechanically doing a pretty uneven job of doing so at best, fiddling around with the game mechanics like a bucket of Lego bricks has been a time-honored way for players to actually make the character they want rather than the character they thought they wanted but turned out in practice to be something else. Selling people a smaller bucket of Legos and hand-waving it away with "we really want to stop adding so much stuff to the mechanics of the game and shift our emphasis to story"...wait, does this mean Next is a storygame now? I'm confused. edit: There are some good points people made on the page prior to this one before I accidentally got the top of the next page, go and read them. Part of what drives me nuts about these L&L columns is I never really know what point Mearls is driving at, which I'm fully willing to cop to being my fault since it's not like he's the Timecube guy or anything, but still. Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 01:49 on Mar 2, 2013 |
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Mar 2, 2013 01:46
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^^^What the gently caress am I reading?Mikan posted:Yeah, from what I read it's more a matter of organization than anything. Rather than selecting Point Blank Shot, Precise Shot, Rapid Shot, Eight Other Feats To Be 1/10 As Effective As Your Buddy Gandalf, the options you need are presented in the Archer package. If this is what Mearls is getting at it's a sentiment I can get behind, but he could really save himself some wordcount by just saying "We think feat bloat sucks just as much as you do, so we're wrapping that poo poo up yo." Because feat bloat does suck. Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 01:59 on Mar 2, 2013 |
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Mar 2, 2013 01:55
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MadRhetoric posted:Even as someone who got into playing D&D from 3.X, this really isn't the case. People like customization, yeah, but mashing together eleventy billion classes and PrCs and poo poo got you the stink-eye from DMs, either made you suck or stupid good as a player, and was a goddamned headache all around. The defenders of, say, 3.X fighter-types multiclassing all the live long day were the CharOp boards and guys like Frank Trollman; people hate those fuckers. I think this is both not inaccurate in that people do poo poo on CharOp a lot (and Frank Trollman too but largely for different reasons) but I also don't think it's the entire truth of the matter because there seem to be a lot of people who unironically love six-class-characters with a template on top or crazy Warlock/Paladin hybrid shenanigans in 4E. I don't think you can really dismiss that sort of thing as the province of a small handful of rear end in a top hat players, I think this is a pretty popular approach to D&Ding. Maybe not for everybody, and I'm not talking to stupid Pun-Pun levels, but it's there. And like ProfCirno says, they're on record as saying that they're going with 3E-style multiclassing + Prestige Classes for Next so I dunno man, it kind of sounds like they're sort of leaning in that direction already. quote:I don't know how popular Sorcerers actually are (Skip Williams had a hate boner for them, they didn't get introduced in 4E until the PHB2, and never really got the options Wizards did), but the innately magical magic guy is archetypical beyond D&D. Using the Warlock might've been a better example, or the Monk. Barbarians and Druids and Bards didn't get introduced in 4E until the PHB2 as well so beats me. I don't know what Skip Williams' deal is. I did contemplate using the Warlock for that example, but Monks have at least been around in D&D longer than the "I have dragon blood in my veins, cast spells without all that Vancian stuff" Sorcerer has (I'm sure there must have been something called a Sorcerer in earlier editions, there was probably a thing for every synonym of "Wizard" they could look up in a thesaurus). quote:Think you confused yourself with that metaphor Yeah, people have made it clearer what Mearls is driving at in that article, and I agree now that it's been explained to me that it's a good concept to aim for. I also agree that this is one of those good concepts that probably won't last very long in execution, just like Prestige Classes were originally supposed to be these things that GMs tied to the setting and were intended as quest rewards and boons rather than "this endless list of poo poo you graft to your regular classes in order to get sweet bonuses" and look how long that lasted. Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 03:54 on Mar 2, 2013 |
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Mar 2, 2013 02:16
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I fully expect something like League of Legends to be the next big video game trend that people compare D&D Next to in a derogatory fashion, no matter how little sense it makes.
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Mar 2, 2013 03:32
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I don't know what you're talking about re: halfling Paladins in 4E, halfling Paladins aren't some sort of newbie trap "let's all laugh at you for thinking this was a good idea" pick. Halflings get a Charisma boost which sets them up to be good Chaladins, they can force people to reroll hits against them with is a great thing for a Defender to have on hand, they have some pretty good feat support...the small size thing sucks but you're a Defender not a Striker so you can deal with it, or alternately you can focus on implement powers and not give a gently caress about weapon sizes. So I dunno, maybe you need a better example than that because that one isn't very good. Also I'm not sure how you go from saying that you hope 5E moves away from "a competitive bookkeeping exercise" and embraces the idea of "anything goes" when "anything goes" was exactly what WotC tried to do more or less with 3.X and that resulted in, well, 3.X, which practically defines "competitive bookkeeping exercise."
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Mar 2, 2013 04:04
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Also, if we're talking comparisons to WoW (which, sure, an argument can be made that 4E draws upon things like MMOs, but considering that MMOs have drawn upon D&D for years and years now this doesn't strike me as the huge betrayal of elfgame principles that some people think it does), 4E's Marking is not at all similar in practice to how aggro works in MMOs. Anyway I didn't mean to turn this into another 4E does/doesn't equal MMO derail, I was simply humorously trying to predict the next video game that angry elfgamers would derisively compare the new edition of D&D to and I suppose I failed, for that I apologize. In penance, here is a good quick chili recipe that I'm enjoying right now, guaranteed to anger chili snobs but good to throw together on the cheap: 2 pounds ground beef/turkey/whatever 1 large onion 2 cans of diced tomatoes w/chiles 3 cans of Ranch Style beans 1 can of tomato sauce 2 foil packets of chili spice blend (McCormick's or whatever brand you want) 4 teaspoons of chili powder salt and pepper to taste hot sauce (optional) Cook the meat and onion together until browned and drain, then add all the cans of stuff (including the liquid) and spices together, add some water if you think it's too thick, bring to a boil and then reduce heat, cover, and simmer for two hours. Goes great over hot dogs/hamburgers, make Frito pie with it, whatever.
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Mar 2, 2013 04:22
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The length of 4E's combats is a legitimate criticism of the game that, unfortunately, was exacerbated by the wonky monster math that they employed in the MM1 when 4E was new. One of the consequences of this wonky math was fights that took forever and were boring, unexciting slogs. I know because I played through some myself and it was pretty goddamn long and pretty goddamn boring. The revised math helps with that significantly. 4E's combats can still take a while, possibly too long a while, even after the math revisions, but it's less of too long a while than it used to be and the fights themselves are more dynamic than the MM1-era grindfests. I absolutely do not blame people whose early impressions of 4E were "this poo poo takes forever" and I only wish that they'd give it a try again with the new monsters and see if they like it better. Maybe they won't, but I know it certainly helped with my enjoyment of the game. Other flaws of 4E: it took them drat near forever to settle on a decent skill DC table, class skill lists still loving suck, Fighter skill distribution/allotment is still crap for no good reason beyond "legacy," feat bloat is a thing that sucks all the balls, it's full of interesting semi-formed ideas that were either executed poorly or the designers just lost interest in and didn't do much with (martial practices, the disease track mechanic, artifacts), the game goes off the rails at higher levels like usual and they never loving bothered to put out an Epic Tier-focused DMG once again consigning high level play to "eh, they'll figure something out" status, the psionic power point classes were an interesting experiment with lackluster execution, multiclassing was no longer abusive but was also somewhat crippled by feat taxes necessary to do more than lightly dip into another class, expertise feats also loving suck, the designers promised that they'd reign in things like static bonus stacking and sure enough static bonus stacking became one of the best ways to turn poo poo like Twin Srike into cheese, speaking of which attack powers became counterintuitively weighted so that the beefy power with all those [W] dice you thought was awesome actually gets less and less good over time as static modifiers and minor/off-action attacks rise in dominance, utility powers are a weird mish-mash of combat and non-combat abilities which forces players to choose between being awesomer in a fight or awesomer out of it and that's pretty strange for a game where all players are supposed to be pitching in during every scene, etc.
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Mar 2, 2013 07:08
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Red_Mage posted:I loving hate you you ban happy son of a bitch. Beans don't belong in loving chili and even if they loving did they don't come out of a loving can. Also what the gently caress is this chili powder poo poo. I know where you loving live, go down to the hispanic store and buy some christ forsaken peppers. Furthermore and while you are at it use fresh tomatos god loving drat you goony sperg. It's even better the next day once the flavors have had a chance to really blend. Splicer posted:By "Buying it" do you mean "purchasing" or do you mean "believing the "it's like 4E!" bullshit"? Pretty sure he means the latter. The refrain of "Next is throwing 4E under the bus" would almost be some annoying kneejerk thing except, well, it's pretty hard at this stage to point at anything in Next and go "this, right here, is what Next has taken from 4E." I don't really know if that's how the universal D&D that Next has been billed at is even supposed to work...here's the chunk from 2E, here's the bit from 3E, here's the 4E part, here's a dash of BECMI, etc...but at the moment it's not really too clear what the appeal of Next is supposed to be if you're a fan of 4E. It's not even enough to say "well maybe they'll make a module for combat on a grid!" because grid combat isn't the be-all end-all of why people like 4E any more than, I dunno, freeform multiclassing is the be-all end-all of why people like 3E. It's definitely a reason, but it ignores a lot of other important things along the way. And if WotC has determined that the way to fabulous D&D riches is to move away from 4E and back towards other things that's their prerogative and I wish them the best of luck, but I also wish I got a more...enthusiastic feeling off of all the Next stuff? Like, say what you will about 3E and 4E but both editions felt like things that the people making them were really loving excited about, you guys are gonna love this poo poo oh man it will be so amazing. Even if Next turns out to be a game I dislike I'd rather it be something people are super loving enthusiastic about, I dunno. Old Kentucky Shark, you're a Kentucky man. While I know that real life is not like Justified, they keep name-dropping Pappy Van Winkle bourbon on the show and I'm wondering if you've ever had it before. Is it worth looking into acquiring a bottle?
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Mar 2, 2013 18:26
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Winson_Paine posted:I figure it will stay a whimper until maybe this time next year, when you are gonna see a full court press of marketing on the ROAD TO GENCON for the release. I am assuming it will be released at GenCon of next year, anyway. This huge lead is so silly. This huge lead is really, really puzzling. Like, WotC is banking on a tiny handful of releases and reprints being good enough to keep their elfgame department afloat until Next drops. I am not a smarty-man business major or anything but that seems incredibly loving weird to me. I guess there's DDI too, but this seems a lot like quitting your job and then deciding "hey, maybe I should look for another job?" I know that some people think this means the next year is Paizo's chance to dominate the market and usher in a new era of elfgaming, but I can't help but feel that as D&D goes so goes the retailer elfgame market. WotC could loving file chapter 11 tomorrow (not that they will, Magic is huge money, but work with me) and it wouldn't kill the elfgame hobby what with social networking, self-publishers, Kickstarter, et al...but if we're talking "putting books on shelves, selling poo poo in stores" then I'm honestly kind of curious whether the big brand name in pretend-elf going mostly digital reprints and DDI subscriptions for the next year won't have some sort of knock-on cooling effect on the retail side of the hobby. I mean, I don't care, it's not like I own stock or anything, I'm just wondering how this will play out. Or maybe nobody else will care either, who can say. Maxwell Lord posted:There are a handful of "might be neat" things in 5e- I like the idea of turning most status effects into advantage/disadvantage, I like that they're aiming for a core that's as basic as Basic D&D was even if they're going about it the wrong way, etc. But yeah, nothing's really sizzling. I actually kind of dislike the whole advantage/disadvantage thing because it's pretty thoroughly binary and has no nuance to speak of, which I guess is fine for people who are into ultra simplified stuff but to me it just feels kind of ehhhhhhhh, and also it's swingy as hell or it was the last time I messed with Next where it felt like the game was D&D: Find Ways to Gain Advantage Edition. I don't need an exhaustive list of status effects to enjoy an RPG, but I feel like the ad/disad system isn't very fun. I think the most interesting trick arrow Next has in its arsenal is actually the Expertise Die setup they keep tinkering with. Expertise Dice could, in theory, be a really interesting and fun mechanic, but like everything in Next the developers keep flailing around when it comes to how they're going to implement it. There's no real driving vision behind it, it feels like...it's just "well people like rolling dice, so here's some dice. Maybe you can spend them to do cool things, or maybe you can spend them to do more damage, we aren't sure. Maybe they'll be Fighter only, or nope, maybe we'll give them to all these other classes. Maybe we'll change them again later, who can say." But in theory Expertise Dice could be rad as hell, they could be the basis for an entirely new way of designing D&D classes the way that 4E's unified AEDU structure was.
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Mar 3, 2013 03:03
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SilverMike posted:I would love to see expertise dice be a unifying concept, it seems that casters would be able to fun with the design space. For instance, a mage class built around using expertise dice to craft effects in a freeform manner but maybe tied to one of a few keywords you choose for your mage. Or a wizard who gets a bunch of relatively generic spells but can metamagic them with expertise dice. Or a druid who can take on aspects of creatures and nature, gradually being able to do more as she has more dice to play around with. Or any of the many other takes on using expertise dice as part of a core mechanic for a class. Sadly, I have little faith in the Next team's ability to create those without being abusable and/or worthless. Well, the bigger stumbling block to using Expertise Dice in a unified fashion like that is the audience that WotC is courting recoils from anything that smacks of unified class design. Remember, in 4E all classes were literally the same class because they all had the same progression of abilities and therefore Fighters = Wizards and everything is ruined forever. But beyond that I totally agree that ED could be a great core mechanic for designing classes around, but that it would require way better design and a willingness to ignore the outcry of angry fair-weather fans in order to do it and I don't think the Next team is full of that at the moment. Also, to be honest, I don't have a vast amount of faith in the ability of the Next design team to deliver stellar mechanics even if they were willing to ignore the outrage. It's possible I'm being horribly unfair but between Iron Heroes and his captain's-chair work on 4E, I've come to the opinion that Mike Mearls is a decent idea man but not really the guy you want in charge and that his ability to follow through on things is actually pretty lackluster. I don't know the guy, I'm not saying he ran over my dog, I just don't feel like he is a super-exceptional elfgame designer.
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Mar 3, 2013 03:27
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Mendrian posted:Maybe I'm just jaded but even expertise dice seem sort of weaksauce to me. Yeah, this is a thing I've noticed over the course of the Expertise Die's evolution but haven't really bothered to mention because it almost feels like I must be missing something, but it really feels like Expertise Dice just want to be a token pool of some sort. Having them be dice works for a few things, like if you want to let people spend them for extra damage, but then some other uses just seem to be straight-up "spend these like points" and other uses than that employ them as dice but to really loving stupid effect (add your ED roll to your jumping distance in inches). Plus with the whole "flat math" goal they're striving for, a big pool of swingy randomized bonuses feels like it kind of works against that maybe. Winson has a point in that rolling dice is one of those roleplaying game "feel-good" things, but I dunno, as it stands ED feel sort of unmoored. But the general idea of "each class has its own pool of points that it can pay out for to do STUFF" is a pretty nifty one and in theory you could do all kinds of cool stuff with it. Iron Heroes tried to do this and while the actual execution was all over the place (Iron Heroes is a book that needs a lot of errata) the idea is intriguing enough that with better design it could work out all right. I mean, other games do similar stuff, it's not some WILD and RADICAL new idea, though I imagine it'd be a hard sell for a new edition of D&D.
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Mar 3, 2013 07:42
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thespaceinvader posted:Their focus of marketing seems to be Modules! and Edition for Everyone! Well, the problem is that if I (or anybody else for that matter) have an edition that I enjoy playing, what's the draw for me to want to play a game that's at best only partially based on that edition? In theory a universal D&D that brings all D&D fans together at the table in dice-rolling harmony is great and all, but you have to make a game that appeals to all those different fans of all those different editions to do so, and it's pretty clear by this point that those different fans have irreconcilable tastes and wants. Just look at the whargarble every time the matter of Warlords and martial healing comes up. People who are fans of the Warlord and his ability to inspire people's hitpoints back don't want to hear "well we had to ditch martial healing because it causes these people over here to have a tantrum, but hey, compromise!" People who want straight-up D&D-style Vancian casting have been complaining about at-will spells since they made a return appearance in Next. If the choice is between "play an edition that does a bunch of things I like and deal with the warts" and "play an edition that doesn't do a bunch of the things that I like and has its own warts to deal with" then it doesn't seem like there's a lot of incentive for me to make the switch. That's the big question they don't really seem to be answering yet: why would I want to play Next instead of [OTHER EDITION]? Now new things are interesting. If you put out an edition that does a bunch of new stuff, or does the same sort of stuff but in a notably different fashion, then I'm more likely to be interested in giving it a try. That's basically why I wound up giving 4E a try in the first place, if 4E had basically been "3.X with a few more tweaks and a new coat of paint" I'd have given it a pass because I knew what that was like and I wasn't really interested, but 4E was different enough for me to want to see what it was like. Next has glimmers of this, they are tinkering with some stuff that could potentially be new and interesting, but so much of the talk coming from Mearls and the designers is all about "What is the feel of D&D, how can we make this D&D more D&D-like, what are your favorite things from previous editions, how can we make this more like previous editions?"
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Mar 3, 2013 21:01
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Lord Frisk posted:Is anyone actually considering buying the game, or has that been assumed to be a forgone conclusion? I don't The game as it stands now? Not a chance, there are dozens of games I'd rather throw my money towards. The game as it'll be one year from now? Who even loving knows, it's possible they might hammer it into some sort of amazing shape. But if a year from now we're looking at something that rather strongly resembles what we're looking at now? Probably not. I mean, in theory a bunch of pro-tier game designers literally drawing a paycheck to design a game as their day job ought to be able to come up with something really loving rad given a year to work on it...but the Next dev team has already had a bunch of time and so far the best they've come up with is, well, what we've got. I hold no illusions that calling oneself a "professional game designer" somehow bestows you with magical game design powers, that if Sean K. Reynolds gets to call himself a professional game designer then the bar isn't just low, it's non-existent, but I really do wonder what the heck is going on up there. Like, I am intensely curious to see the design process going into Next at work.
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Mar 4, 2013 01:02
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If we're talking really old-school D&D then the apparent assumption was that you weren't just going into a dungeon with you and your 3-4 best buds, you were going into a dungeon with your 3-4 pals and a contingent of hirelings like some sort of ad-hoc subterranean army, and what I've been told is all it took to completely block off an avenue of approach in your typical 10'-wide corridor was three people standing abreast. So in lieu of any sort of gentleman's agreement not to spread the Magic-User across the ground like jam you could also suggest that proper dungeoning tactics would involve an emphasis on marching orders and formation so you could screen fragile party members behind a wall of dudes with shields and spears. Also there were reaction attacks that were like proto-Opportunity Attacks where if you broke away from someone in melee they got a free attack against you, so I suppose you could look at that as a sort of "stickiness," running up to the orc berserker or whatever and getting into melee with it to try and keep it focused on you. Not that gentleman's agreements probably didn't exist either, mind you. I mean, if a GM is really, really determined to bum rush the MU/Wizard then they have limitless enemies to do it with, but in really old-school D&D combat was a thing you tried to avoid whenever possible instead of a thing you dove into for sweet XP. All you really wanted was the money. So I would guess that it was a combination of carefully assigning marching orders and formation, a bit of a gentleman's agreement on the GMs part, and the players trying not to get into fights in the first place. I don't know exactly how this process evolved/mutated over the course of, say, OD&D to AD&D2E though. I know that by the time 3E rolled around the default assumption seemed to be that hirelings weren't a thing most playgroups cared to deal with and fighting monsters was both a source of XP and also an enjoyable end in and of itself and I would guess that the Attack of Opportunity as it was codified in 3E was created to try and give melee fighters the ability to do zone defense after a fashion but, like a lot of things in 3E, it was both needlessly complicated and didn't quite work out as it was probably intended to in practice.
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Mar 4, 2013 03:44
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I won't argue that someone enjoying a game is having actual badwrong fun. Hey, I used to love the hell out of Exalted, so what do I know from good systems? I will, to pick a particular nit out of that post, say that I strongly disagree that things like "no minor actions" lead to a more elegant game when the result of "no minor actions" has been "a bunch of things that work like minor actions used to but we don't have a standardized term and rule for things that fall outside of Attack and Move actions so every time something like that comes up we have to elaborate upon it and give it its own little explanation of how it falls outside the standard set of actions." That's not elegant, that's the opposite of elegance. I don't know why they decided "hey, let's get rid of minor actions" and then proceeded to get rid of the term "Minor Action" and kept everything else about them, but to me that sort of thing is strongly indicative of the design going into Next.
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Mar 4, 2013 04:05
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Lord Frisk posted:The feel of d&d to me was always just STR CON DEX INT WIS CHA. Which is funny given all the "DEATH TO ABILITY SCORES" I see in tradgames.
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Mar 4, 2013 06:15
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Countblanc posted:Does anything currently scratch this itch? Maybe GURPS or HERO depending on your tastes. Heavy Gear, though that's maybe cheating given that Heavy Gear is both an RPG and an actual no-fooling tabletop wargame. Technically Spycraft and Fantasycraft make use of 3.X-style combat measurements, but I don't really have enough hands-on experience with them to say whether people like busting out grids with them...the couple of times I've gotten to play the Craft system the answer has been "not really," but anecdotes and data, etc. My own personal opinion is that out of all the RPG combat systems I've played 4E's stands out as the best blend of robust tactical gameplay and abstraction. There are games that have even more detailed tactical combat systems but a lot of that detail comes at the cost of speed, more numbers to crunch and little edge case rules to flip through, and there are games with combat that moves faster but a lot of them tend to sacrifice detail and options to do so. For me, 4E combat exists in a sweet spot somewhere between the two where you have this steadily growing list of cool things you can do (set up in a way that you can't just spam the best one over and over again, which means you have to consider which one is best at that particular moment and your choices of which will shape your playstyle) but at the same time you aren't having to worry about your facing, whether you're standing or crouched, wound penalties, whether your exploit will work on this particular enemy given the exhaustive rules surrounding the interactions between enemy types and sneak attacks, etc. Part of this too, and it's a big part, is bound up in 4E's monster design. Like, you could have all of 4E's tactical grid combat with all your AEDU powers and class features and healing surges and so on, but if all the monsters were big fat sacks of hitpoints and damage then the game would still be boring as gently caress. 4E monster design, and it was definitely an evolutionary process, is such that pretty much every fight has the potential to be some kind of different tactical puzzle each time that forces the players to figure out what the gently caress is going on and adapt. You have enemies which respond to certain behaviors in different ways, you have enemies which only become vulnerable at certain points or after certain actions, there are enemies that get a free hit on dying or enemies that can make a saving throw to remain alive instead of dying when you drop them to 0 HP, there are enemies that slowly build up to a massive attack thus forcing the players to prioritize what to do, etc. A good 4E combat generally follows this pattern: 1). Combat starts, initial blows are exchanged. 2). PCs get beat on as they try and come to terms with whatever weird poo poo the monsters have going on, usually at the expense of having it go off in their face. "Oh poo poo, when you kill these ones they explode, better watch out for that. Can I get a heal?" 3). PCs either get their poo poo together and rally or dither about and get beat on even more. This goes on until the fight is finished. It's actually kind of amazing how well the whole thing comes together, or how well it came together once WotC unfucked their stupid monster math and such, and while it's not perfect (nothing is) it produces pretty consistent play along these lines. But it wasn't just some random quirk of chance that everything happened to work out that way, the game had to be built to do that sort of stuff on a number of fundamental levels...how PCs work, how monsters work, how healing works, how magic works, etc. It's not tremendously surprising to me that Next isn't really replicating this because it isn't the sort of thing you can package up into a "module" and just plug it in wherever, you really need a game that supports it from first principles. I would love to see more games like 4E in this regard, not exact replicas but games where a lot of attention is really paid to "how can we make combat, or hell, conflict resolution in general more than just people rolling dice back and forth in a Theater of the Mind space until someone's set of numbers beats another set of numbers." The one thing I was really disappointed about is that we never got anything like a "4E Modern." I'd have loved to see WotC when their designers were at their peak turn their attention to making a 4E-style game in a modern/sci-fi flavor. I guess we got Gamma World, and Sacred BBQ looks like it's doing some cool things. Also there's the new XCOM which has a lot of 4E feel to it.
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Mar 4, 2013 07:31
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TalonDemonKing posted:As far as the 'Soul' of Dnd, I fel like, much like a soul, it isn't quite measurable by any means available to us, but can mostly be agreed upon by a good majority of people that it exists. I don't really watch Doctor Who but it's impossible to visit the nerdier parts of the internet and avoid learning anything about it, and a commonly held belief in Doctor Who fandom is apparently that whichever Doctor you get into the series with is generally the one that most fans will point to as their favorite. That makes a lot of sense, really...first impressions tend to be the strongest, so someone who gets into something and really enjoys it is going to associate a lot of happy memories with those initial forays. So at the risk of coming across as glib, I'd say in all sincerity that the soul of D&D for many people is probably "how D&D was when I first started playing it." People who got into D&D during 3E, and there were a lot of people who got into D&D when WotC rolled out 3E...not, like, Harry Potter numbers or anything, but sometimes it's easy to forget 13 years on just how successful 3E was...are likely going to feel that 3E represents the "true soul" of D&D despite numerous editions coming before it, while a dedicated 2E fan is likely to think that the soul of D&D is found in 2E despite several successful editions coming afterwards. It's not a universal truism of course, any more than it probably is in Doctor Who fandom, but I'd bet actual cash money that it holds true in a large number of cases.
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Mar 5, 2013 05:28
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ProfessorCirno posted:The monk class came from some dude going "Man I like this terrible TV show called Kung Fu because it's the 70's and we aren't going to evolve taste for awhile." I am going to briefly don the mantle of The Pedant and say that the Monk was actually intended to be based on the Remo Williams "The Destroyer" novels about a US Government operative and assassin whose mentor teaches him the deadly and completely fictitious martial art of Sinanju, and also Remo is supposed to be the Avatar of Shiva too or something like that. Basically, this is the sort of thing people were using as inspiration when it came time to make new D&D classes. David Carradine can get the gently caress out, that poo poo is way too normal. I would actually really like to see a modular "super D&D" like people are talking about here. There are enough different D&D's within the canon body of D&D history that making a game where you could add in different components and campaign qualities to do "Magical high-school adventures" or turn the dials another way and do "In an age of heroes" and then another set gives you "Remember your iron spikes and ten-foot poles motherfucker, it's dungeon time." Fantasycraft has its different campaign qualities and that's what I'd start with as far as things to blatantly rip off. With all the talk of "modular" from Mearls et al, we've seen remarkably little of that so far. They still have a year, mind you, but I'd love to have a clearer idea of what they mean by "modular" exactly assuming it isn't just their current marketing buzzword good luck charm. Also I would love an Avatar-esque RPG. Dear Margaret Weiss Productions, please contact Nickelodeon and get the license to do an Avatar RPG in Cortex, also I would like a pony and a toy rocket ship, thank you.
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Mar 5, 2013 07:58
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Darwinism posted:Is the "NO BINDER IN BURGERS" argument like the "IF IT HAS BEANS IT'S NOT CHILI" argument You should ask Red_Mage about that second one, apparently he has some opinions on the matter.
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Mar 6, 2013 07:32
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I'm in whydirt's camp in that I don't inherently mind the idea of someone taking all the good bits of the Warlord and rolling them into the Fighter provided that you can actually make something like a Warlord simply by turning the appropriate dials in the right direction instead of "here, you can give someone 1d6 temporary hitpoints 1/fight, now what do you have to complain about?" But it doesn't sound like they're actually interested in doing that, and if they're giving "inspiration and tactics" off to some other class and you're nixing martial hitpoint restoration then you don't really loving have a Warlord, now do you? But I guess the Warlord had to get rolled up and distributed into other classes in the spirit of "compromise," and I'm sure that any day now we'll be seeing them do the same with classes like the Paladin, Ranger, and Barbarian. Any day now. I agree about chili and beans, I'm not really sure I can imagine sitting down to eat a bowl of only-meat chili because while only-meat chili is tasty it doesn't strike me as a very satisfying meal on its lonesome. On the other hand, if I have a good batch of chili with beans cooked up and I get a hankering for a chili-dog I'm not gonna balk at tossing some of that on top.
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Mar 6, 2013 19:18
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Yeah, but people bitched mightily about the Tome of Battle in pretty much the same fashion they wound up bitching about 4E. The word "anime" was used a lot, as I recall, possibly "weeaboo" as well.
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Mar 6, 2013 19:54
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Rexides posted:I played a Crusader and was basically owning the battlefield. It was probably the most fun I had playing 3E (if you don't count a few battles were my rogue worked or when I was extremely lucky). One of the dudes on the podcast goes on at some length about how William Wallace didn't grow peoples' limbs back or stuff their guts back in their bodies by shouting at them, so that should be all the answer you need to tell you whether the Next design team would be cool with martial attacks running off of things like Intelligence or Charisma.
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Mar 6, 2013 20:13
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MadScientistWorking posted:What is really weird about that is there is definitely a podcast from the 4E days where some of the developers kind of emphatically stated that this mentality is kind of dumb. I wouldn't know for certain not having any names to go by but there's a pretty strong chance that whoever those guys were, they aren't working for WotC anymore. I don't mean they were driven off in some sort of ideological PURGE THE NONBELIEVER sort of deal, but how many layoffs/how much turnover has there been in the WotC RPG department since 2008?
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Mar 6, 2013 20:20
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MadScientistWorking posted:It was Mearls and the discussion happens mid podcast. Oh. Well then, never mind 
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Mar 6, 2013 20:42
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Mikan posted:You should make something terrible to alienate the person who doesn't like onions, then make a new friend who does. Onions are the best. All of this. Slow cooker roast is the way to go. Remember, low heat over a long period instead of high heat over a short period unless you like grey, tough meat. Also you can make really good meatballs and red sauce for meatball hoagies in a slow cooker, it gets them nice and tender.
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Mar 7, 2013 01:18
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Asimo posted:Ahahaha, okay yeah I missed that part. I guess that explains why the 5e devstaff seems to be operating from an echo chamber of "everything 4e is bad!!", if that's some of the fan commentary they're seriously listening to. I'm honestly not sure how much commentary they are listening to. All the polls and such on the WotC website basically come across as puff pieces instead of any serious attempt at gathering data, and several times now they've put out a "playtest packet" while simultaneously saying that the most recent packet doesn't reflect the rules that they're currently messing with internally, which would mean that "playtesters" aren't even playtesting the most current iteration of the system.
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Mar 7, 2013 01:34
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ProfessorCirno posted:Again, at least one moderator on ENWorld has playfully commented that a few articles from WotC could have come straight from ENWorld, and Mearls posts on one and only one set of forums, and those are ENWorld. ENWorld also got some exclusive backstage info on 5e before it came out. That doesn't mean that they're listening to ENWorld's commentary, eager for their words of wisdom, though, it could simply just mean that Mearls' tastes in pretend-elf happens to line up with the greater ENWorld forumgoers' tastes. I guess what I'm saying is that it seems more likely to me that Mearls and the Next dev team are simply making the game that they want to make because they think it's cool and their vision happens to mesh with ENWorld's, not that ENWorld has the ear of Mike Mearls and is steering his hand.
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Mar 7, 2013 01:49
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Guilty Spork posted:What amuses me about all of this is that all throughout the time 4e was active Mearls was the figurehead that everyone who hated it would throw their vitriol at (even though Heinsoo was apparently much more important to the design). There are a lot of people to whom Next could be pretty much ideal who have claimed he's a complete and utter moron, based solely on him being involved in an elfgame they didn't care for. There are still people who claim that about Mearls in spite of whatever 5E may shape up to be. I'm pretty sure some of them got quoted in g.txt. I remember back when it was announced that Monte Cook would be coming onboard for Next and there was a lot of groaning about Monte "caster supremacy" Cook and how we were headed back to the sins of 3.X but it was a good thing we had Mike Mearls, the guy who gave us Iron Heroes, to act as a counterpoint and ensure that martial classes didn't get the shaft. Remember that? I'm not an especially big fan of either dude as a lead designer, but I'm finding myself increasingly wondering what the Next we could have had would have looked like instead of the one we seem to be getting now.
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Mar 7, 2013 02:17
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MadRhetoric posted:It would have been disappointing to at least one D&D audience and stupid assholes would've gotten mad about it. Yes, but it possibly would have been an entirely different collection of stupid assholes mad about it for entirely different reasons. Or not, who can say. Monte Cook's new Kickstarted game sounds more interesting to me than Ptolus did, anyway. I was never a huge Arcana Unearthed fan, but who knows, maybe I'll like this one more.
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Mar 7, 2013 04:18
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RPGs as a hobby/pastime have two big hurdles to clear in terms of getting new players involved: 1). They tend to be stupidly dense. To most RPG fans, a 64-page game would be considered "lite" or "streamlined." To most other people, even board-gamers or WoW raid regulars or the like, 64 pages is ridiculous. 2). They are frontloaded with a whole lot of setup and prep even beyond understanding the rules. You have to get yourself and 3-4 of your friends to block out 4-6 hours of time to sit around a table all to roll dice and pretend to be an elf. I'm not trying to put pretending to be an elf down, mind you, that would be hugely hypocritical, but even with a group of genuinely enthusiastic RPG players my last three years of face-to-face tabletop gaming were characterized by not-too-infrequent bouts of "oh poo poo, something's come up and [PLAYER] can't make it, welp, time to bust out some board games." RPGs often require a serious commitment from a playgroup to get off the ground. Board games require a bunch of people to sit around a table too, but board games generally only take about an hour or so unless you're playing something really complex (or Monopoly, but if you're playing Monopoly you have bigger problems to worry about than time). Video games are all about casual play and instant gratification...if you want to play some WoW, you sit down at the computer and BAM, you're running around Azeroth. This is one of the reasons I'm so big on PbP games these days, I can play in one of those for the cost of a half-hour, maybe an hour a day. I like 4E. I think 4E is much less laden with traps than its immediate predecessor was. But I can definitely see why someone who isn't that exact sort of "gamer-y" would look at 4E and be like NOPE.
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Mar 7, 2013 06:40
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