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inklesspen posted:Sanity-check me here: if I'm fighting a boss backed up by a 10 HD mob and I roll anything above a 1 on my fray die, it hits the mob (because the mob is treated as 1 HD for this), doesn't auto-kill the mob because for applying damage the mob still has its full HD, and then applies damage as normal? It's treated as 1 HD for the purposes of being able to use your Fray Die against it, and then your damage roll of 2 would be translated to 1 point of damage, which then reduces the mob by 1 HD, to 9/10 HD.
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May 17, 2015 15:01
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Searchers of the Unknown Searchers of the Unknown is a free, short, rules-light game by Nicolas Desaix. The whole thing fits on one page. The core concept of the game is that in old-school D&D modules, a monster can be described in a single line of text: pre:Skeleton (AC 7, MV 6’, HD 1, HP 4, #AT1, D1-8 by sword) Character creation All characters are assumed to be "dungeon crawlers, delvers and swordsmen". There are no spellcasters in this game, as clerics are in their churches and wizards are in their laboratories, or perhaps they are the villains, but they're not the ones going into the dungeons. 1. Pick an armor The game uses descending AC: No Armor is AC 9 with a movement (MV) of 12 (inches) Leather Armor is AC 7, MV 9 Chainmail is AC 5, MV 6 Plate Mail is AC 3, MV 3 and a Shield reduces your AC and MV by 1 2. Roll for hit points You get one HD per level, so a level 1 character rolls 1d8 for their starting HP 3. Choose three weapons, or two weapons and a shield Small weapons use a 1d4 damage dice, ranged weapons use 1d6, (one-handed) melee weapons use 1d8, and two-handed weapons use 1d10. While there are prescriptions of what the usual weapons for these are (dagger, bow, mace, and polearm, respectively), the game lets describe whatever it is you might want, so presumably you could write down glaive-guisarme as your two-handed weapon if you really wanted to. 4. Number of attacks You start with 1 attack per round, and gain another attack every 4 levels. 5. Choose a name and a description The game also suggests describing your race such as dwarf or elf, but this has no mechanical effect. As an example, Xylarthen is a level 3 Searcher wearing Plate Mail and wielding a glaive-guisarme. His character sheet would then be: pre:Xylarthen (AC 3, MV 3’, HD 3, HP 10, #AT1, D1-10 by glaive-guisarme) 1. Initiative Each character rolls [1d10+AC], with the highest going first and then descending down the initiative count. Since less armor is higher AC, this means that lightly armored characters have a better initiative. If you have more than one attack, you roll initiative once for each of your attacks. 2. Attack To hit a target, roll 1d20 and get equal to or less than [enemy AC + attacker level]. As an example, Xylarthen would need to roll a 10 or less to hit the AC 7 Skeleton (7 AC + Level 3 attacker = 10). You may notice that this means the character is getting +1 attack bonus/THAC0 every level, something which didn't happen until AD&D. It's a small touch, but I like it, as I've always felt that characters keeping the same attack bonus throughout all of the Blue/Red Box was a bit unrewarding. The other big departure from traditional rules is cleaving: whenever a player-character kills a monster, they can make another attack at the end of the same round. 3. Damage When you score a hit, roll your damage dice, the subtract it from the target's HP. The game explicitly states that while a monster dies on hitting 0 HP, player-characters are only knocked out and are kept as prisoners. This is a nice touch to prevent the game from turning into character-sheet burning meat-grinders, if like me you're not into that. 4. Morale After first monster dies, all monsters take a morale check When half the monsters in a whole encounter are dead, all monsters take a morale check When a monster is reduced to half HP or less, the individual monster takes a morale check A morale check is done rolling 1d10. If the roll is higher than the HD, the monster "will withdraw or surrender to get a better position" This would, again, greatly reduce the lethality of early-game combat, as many monsters would only have a 10% chance of fighting on after taking a check. 5. Rest and Bandages At the end of an encounter, all hit points are restored. "After all, hit points reflect the capacity to escape or stand hits". The game does say though that any character that was knocked out during the encounter might need a longer rest or a potion or healing magic to get back up to fighting form. Beyond the morale rules, this would really ease up on the lethality of OSR D&D, since anything short of a TPK is survivable. Adventuring 1. Stealth and Stunts Sneaking around monsters, hiding in shadows, moving silently, climbing walls or swimming are all actions that are easier in light armor than in heavy. To check for success on such actions, roll 1d20 and get equal to or less than [AC + Level]. Xylarthen would need a 6 or less on a 1d20 to perform any of these normally Thief-like actions. The game recommends using a 1d10 instead of a 1d20 if the task is circumstancially easier. Comparing this to the original game, a level 1 Thief has a 20% chance to Move Silently, an 87% chance to Climb Sheer Surfaces and a 10% chance to Hide in Shadows. A level 1 Searcher with Leather Armor (or a target number of 8) would have a 40% chance of pulling off these actions. Since Move Silently and Hide in Shadows improve by 5% per level in the original game, a Searcher would always be ahead. 2. Saving Throws Whenever an effect or action or spell calls for a saving throw, roll 1d20 and get equal to or less than [Level + 4]. Xylarthen would need a 7 or less on a 1d20 to avoid getting poisoned, or crushed, or getting toasted by a Dragon's breath, etc. This is also used for all other generic "ability checks", such as jumping a gap or tipping over a wagon or picking a lock or searching for secret doors. 3. Dangers In keeping with reducing the lethality of OSR modules, anything that could kill a man outright will instead deal 1d8 damage. If it could kill a horse, 2d8 damage. If it could kill an ogre, 4d8 damage. 4. Magic Even if there are no spellcasters as player-characters, the game still has basic guidelines for using whatever scrolls or artifacts that might be found: If it's a combat-related spell, it'll last for one fight, or else it'll last the whole day. The range of a spell is always whatever's in the same room as the caster. The area-of-effect of a spell is everyone in the room, or one target per spell level, whichever fits better Damage is treated in the 1d8/2d8/4d8 model of the Dangers section Experience Every time the player-characters defeat a monster (explicitly not limited to just killing them), they gain 100 XP per monster HD, divided equally among the characters. A character needs [2000 * Level] XP to get to the next level, and there are no limits to levels. A new level means better attack rolls, better stealth/stunt rolls and saving throws, and more HP. Specifically, the player will reroll all their HD on hitting the new level, then take the new total if it's higher. If it's not, they stay at their current HP level. Variants There are two main variants to the game: 1. Target 20 Attack rolls are now: Roll 1d20 + Attacker Level + Target AC. If the total is 20 or higher, you hit Stealth/Stunt rolls are now: Roll 1d20 + Level + AC. If the total is 20 or higher, you succeed Saving throws/ability checks are now: Roll 1d20 + Level + 3. If the total is 20 or higher, you succeed This allows you to play with old-school descending AC but approach the math from a "higher is always better" perspective 2. D20 Style No Armor is now AC 10 Leather Armor is now AC 13 Chainmail is now AC 15 Plate Mail is now AC 17 A shield adds 1 to your AC Attack rolls are now: Roll 1d20 + Attacker Level. If the total is equal to or greater than your target's AC, you hit Stealth/Stunt rolls are now: Roll 1d20. If the roll is equal to or less than [AC - Level], you succeed Saving throws/ability checks are now: Roll 1d20 + Level. If the total is 16 or higher, you succeed This allows you to play with later editions of D&D or whatever retroclones that happen to use an ascending AC model. Besides those, there are also variants that add traditional Cleric/Wizard spellcasters, or add mechanical weight to race selection, or even "full conversions" that give the game a sci-fi, cyberpunk or even WW2 setting. In Closing I think the game accomplishes its goal of being "a minimalist way to play D&D", while also getting rid of a bunch of sacred cows such as ability scores. The morale checks combined with the vastly relaxed healing and recovery rules feel like they might make the game too easy, but otherwise this is something that I could definitely see myself playing. The character creation is lightning-fast and there's enough room to add whatever flavor or theme you want - someone who wants to play a Wizard might just be rolling standard attack rolls and 1d6 for their Magic Missiles, and circumstantial bonuses for background-related skill checks, and so on. The only other thing that stood out to me was that despite modifying multiple mechanics to be more average or player-favoring, HP is still randomly rolled.
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May 19, 2015 19:50
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When your trope is that Orcs are always evil and never get along with humans, there's only so many ways you can justify the existence of half-Orcs.
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May 25, 2015 04:47
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AD&D 1e PHB: Orcs are fecund and create many cross-breeds, most of the offspring of such being typically orcish. However, some one-tenth of orc-human mongrels ore sufficiently non-orcish to pass for human. (it's notable that Half-orcs were not in the AD&D 2e PHB) AD&D 2e The Complete Book of Humanoids Half-Orcs: Half-orcs result from orc unions with virtually any humanoid or demihuman race except elves. These mixed breeds tend to favor their orcish parent, though a small number can pass for ugly humans. PC half orcs are assumed to be crossbreeds within the upper 10% of the mongrel orc-humans that can pass for human. AD&D 2e Player's Option: Skills and Powers Another example of a hybrid, half-orcs are products of human and orc parents. Of a height similar to half-elves, half-orcs usually resemble their human parent enough to pass for a human in public. D&D 3.5 PHB In the wild frontiers, tribes of human and orc barbarians live in uneasy balance, fighting in times of war and trading in times of peace. Half-orcs who are born in the frontier may live with either human or orc parents, but they are nevertheless exposed to both cultures. D&D 4th Ed. PHB 2 An obscure legend claims that when Corellon put out Gruumsh’s eye in a primeval battle, part of the savage god’s essence fell to earth, where it transformed a race of humans into fierce half-orcs. Another story suggests that an ancient hobgoblin empire created half-orcs to lead orc tribes on the empire’s behalf. Yet another legend claims that a tribe of brutal human barbarians chose to breed with orcs to strengthen their bloodline. Some say that Kord created half-orcs, copying the best elements from the human and orc races to make a strong and fierce people after his own heart. If you ask a half-orc about his origin, you might hear one of these stories. You might also get a punch in the face for asking such a rude question. D&D 5th Edition PHB Whether united under the leadership of a mighty warlock or having fought to a standstill after years of conflict, orc and human tribes sometimes form alliances, joining forces into a larger horde to the terror of civilized lands nearby. When these alliances are sealed by marriages, half-orcs are born. === It appears I was mistaken - D&D never actually went into any specifics as to where Half-orcs come from, except when it implies conception would be either asexual or entirely consensual.
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May 25, 2015 05:26
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hyphz posted:HackMaster combat
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May 28, 2015 18:43
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Wizards Presents: Races and Classes This book was released by Wizards of the Coast in December 2007 to serve as the first preview of D&D 4th Edition. It was later followed by Wizards Presents: Worlds and Monsters in January 2008. I wanted to do a read-through of this book because it presents some of the design decisions that went into 4th Edition, specifically as far as how it was still very much based on learnings from 3rd Edition, and not WOTC trying to reinvent the wheel, as it were. I'll be taking excerpts and quotes straight from the book, to let the authors' words speak for themselves. 4th Edition Design Timeline - Rob Heinsoo quote:Design Work, Orcus I: June through September 2005 So that confirms what I had heard previously, that the Tome of Battle was used as a test-bed of ideas that would ultimately be used as a basis for 4th Edition's AEDU model quote:One Development Week: Mid-April 2006 Right there, the development team acknowledges that they were actually moving too far away from 3.5, had to rein it in, and further flesh out the distinctions between At-Will, Encounter, and Daily powers The Process of Re-Creation - Rob Heinsoo quote:The one-week ORCUS development team realized that Orcus II, as well as earlier drafts, had failed to properly account for attrition powers. Earlier designs had been working too hard on our newfangled renewable powers and hadn’t properly addressed D&D’s legacy of attrition-style powers, powers that went away after you used them once or twice. There's that acknowledgement again of building off of 3rd Edition, and that a core mechanic to D&D's design is attrition. The chapter goes on to mention that one of the core 8 classes supposed to be the Swashbuckler, but that was abandoned and its cooler powers given to the Rogue and Ranger instead, and then the PHB team created the Warlock instead. Mike Mearls also gets a special mention as the guy behind the Barbarian and the Druid, which would later appear in the PHB 2. Design Guideposts - Rob Heinsoo Guidepost 1: Encourage Player Choice This talks about how a character should have an interesting choice to make every time they advance in a level, an interesting choice to make concerning their actions with every round of combat, and an interesting choice to make about which and how much of their resources they'd like to spend in-between encounters Guidepost 2: Provide Information to Help Players and DMs Choose Between Compelling Alternatives The set of powers that every character class has should help them fill at least one valuable role in an adventuring party, and the players should be aware what those roles are so that the players are making a conscious choice when divvying up the classes between themselves. Likewise, the Monster Manual should contain monsters that similarly serve different roles. This is also where it's decided that DMs should always let a player know when a monster is Bloodied, so that players don't have to guess how well they're doing, on top of having another property that abilities can key off of. Notebook Anecdote - Andy Collins quote:Things That Would Make Me Happy In hindsight, we know that "fun and playable at all levels" can tend to break down past Paragon due to the sheer number of powers involved, but "all classes effective at all levels" is a compelling statement to make in the wake of the history between martials and casters. Orcus Design Tenets - Bill Slaviscek quote:5. Three-dimensional Tactics. Email: What Is and What Could Be - Andy Collins quote:We must force ourselves, instead, to evaluate what the rules set aims to achieve with its various new elements and determine if we believe that a) its goals are appropriate, and b) it’s headed in the right direction to achieve those goals. I'm almost certain that this mention of longer-term adventures (and again in Collins' Notebook Anecdote) is a reference to Healing Surges as the attritional mechanic and how it allows for parties to engage in many more combats per day than in previous editions. Heroes in the World - Rob Heinsoo quote:3rd Edition had a sweet spot. Somewhere around 4th or 5th level, characters hit their stride, possessing fun abilities and a number of hit points that allow the player characters to stick around long enough to use them. Somewhere around 13th or 15th level, the sweet spot gets a bit sour for many classes. Skilled players frequently disagree with that assessment, but the truth is that many D&D campaigns more-or-less rise out of existence. As PCs pursue the most fun reward in the game—leveling up—they get closer and closer to the levels where the abilities of the strongest characters eclipse those of the weakest characters, where hard math and a multiplicity of choices push DMs into increasingly hard work to keep their games going. Okay, so on top of acknowledging that the first couple of levels of 3rd Edition were not so good because you were so frail, there's also the note about how the increasing competency and capability of some classes at high-level allowed them to greatly outshine other classes, on top of making it more and more difficult for DMs to create interesting scenarios when these classes have the tools to dismantle a lot of potential obstacles. The passage ends by explaining that it was a deliberate decision to turn monster creation in 4th Edition away from how 3rd Edition did it - no longer would you construct monsters using class levels and the same use as building PCs, because the PCs are supposed to be "center stage" and the monsters are only as important as their interactions (including combat situations) with the players. Longswords and Lightsabers - Rodney Thompson This passage talks about how the Star Wars Roleplaying Game: Saga Edition was, alongside Tome of Battle, another testbed for the ideas that would eventually make it to 4th Edition's core design: 1. Give players options when designing their characters 2. Keep the combat round quick and easy to understand 3. Ability score increases should be handed out more often 4. No more assigning skill points 5. Instead of the defender making saving throws, the attacker would roll to beat a static defense score 6. No more ability damage 7. No more iterative attacks Chris Perkins is mentioned by name as the main designer behind the Star Wars book and consulted with the 4th Edition developers on porting over these ideas from Star Wars to D&D. Power Sources - Mike Mearls quote:Power sources have always been in D&D, but no one ever bothered to pay attention to them. From the earliest days of the game, it was clear that wizards (then called magic-users) tapped into a different source of magic than clerics. Later on, classes like the druid and illusionist seemed to tie into similar sources, but it was never completely clear. As the game expanded, psionics clearly staked out a completely different source of power. There's a lot packed into these three paragraphs. Power sources were always a thing, they were just never formalized with such a term. Martial classes needed their own 'power source' to give them the ability to pull off supernatural actions that are still not spells Spells were the basic building block of every supernatural action (if not just actions, period) in previous editions of D&D, and the fact that there were only either Divine or Arcane spells meant that they all had to be classified into one or the other. This also meant that without a formal system for creating or defining new power sources, every other class' powers in previous editions had to be based off of an existing spell. Next up: Races
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Jun 10, 2015 13:07
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Kurieg posted:Then Mearls got full creative control, Essentials came out, and the Wizard was the only controller again, and basically king poo poo of AEUD mountain. Martials no longer got at will attacks, or dalies, instead getting a bunch of stances and riders on their melee/ranged basic attack. What a difference two years makes: quote:"If you look at the Fighter and the way he works in D&D Essentials, we removed the Daily powers to get more of a sense that 'fighters and wizards should look really different,' because that's how D&D originally approached it," Mearls said. "I remember playing the Wizard way back in Basic D&D, where you had one spell and you had four hit points, if you were lucky, and you needed the Fighter to protect you. That's a much different playing experience than when you are playing the Fighter, where you're in the front line, you're taking all the risks, you're charging into combat. The game you played was different. The way I like to design things - especially in RPGs - is all about that feeling, that when you approach the game, you're approaching it the way your character would. You're thinking like a Fighter; you're thinking like a Wizard."
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Jun 10, 2015 19:24
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Wizards Presents: Races and Classes Part 1 Choosing the Iconic Races - Richard Baker quote:We decided very early in the process that we wanted character race to play a more important part in describing your character. In earlier editions, your character’s race was something that you chose at a single decision point during character creation. Your race pick bestowed a whole collection of static, unchanging benefits at 1st level (many of which were useless clutter on your character sheet), and never really “grew” with your character. A 20th-level dwarf had the exact same amount of racial characteristics as a 1st-level dwarf—and during the nineteen intervening levels, the overall importance of that long-ago race selection had diminished to a tiny portion of the character concept. It goes to describe how the idea of feats that only specific races could choose was borrowed from The Forgetten Realms and Eberron Campaign Settings to further allow your racial selection to remain relevant all the way to higher levels. And then a comparison of designing races from 3rd Edition to 4th Edition: quote:A small problem that handcuffed our design in 3rd Edition was the lack of “space” for ability bonuses and special benefits. Because the races in the Player’s Handbook were all balanced against each other, we couldn’t add new races in later products that had significantly better ability modifiers or benefits, because they’d obsolete the core races of the game. The patch we used in 3rd Edition was the notion of level adjustment (more on that later), but with the new game we have a new opportunity to address this problem. Character races now offer a “net positive” on ability score modifiers, so there’s more room for new character races to stand. By the end of 3rd Edition's run, Baker counts that there was a total of 135 possible player races, so this 4th Edition team had to sit down and cull the list down to what they felt were the most evocative and interesting ones. They toyed with the idea of including a "talking animal" race, especially in the wake of the popularity of the Narnia movies, but had to can the idea because the mechanical design would probably be too difficult and players might regard it as a bad joke. It was out of that discussion though that lead them down to Dragonborn: 3rd Edition already had multiple varieties of "a dragon man", so they thought of combining them all into a single distinct character race with an interesting backstory and a mechanical niche. As well, the Dragonborn was a sort of commitment (or perhaps one might say token) to introduce a new race into the mix, instead of the first crop of races all being ones that had been created before. Tieflings were included because they were one of the most popular of the "second-string" races during the 2nd and 3rd Editions, and because they were a good natural fit for the new Warlock race. It was also during this period that the Halfling was axed: quote:For example, halflings were simply too small in 3rd Edition. You could create a halfling who weighed as little as 30 pounds. That’s like a human toddler, not a heroic adventurer. Halflings also lacked a real place of their own in the world; elves had forests, dwarves had mountains, but halflings didn’t really live anywhere. Humans - Matthew Sernett  quote:The 3rd Edition Player’s Handbook describes humans as “the most adaptable, flexible, and ambitious people among the common races” and human adventurers as “the most daring and ambitious members of an audacious, daring, and ambitious race.” When considering their role in 4th Edition, that seemed great. It’s the same way that humans are portrayed in other works of science fiction and fantasy from Star Trek to Lord of the Rings, and people have a tendency to think of humanity that way in the real world. Yet an aspect of that description bugged us: It’s all positive. Sernett then goes on to describe not so much that all humans are corrupt, but that they like to take roads that are paved with good intentions: sometimes it works, and other times it leads down to where that saying says it leads. Humans are ambitious, and that makes them capable of great things, but that ambition can also take the form of a hunger for power. Humans are brave, but bravery can also lead to rash and irresponsible actions. Humans are adaptable, but that adaptability can take on a darker shade when it means people can warp morality into rationalization. Corruption means that the traits humans possess are both their "staunchest ally and most dangerous enemy" There's also a sidebar from artist William O'Connor about the visual design of humans in 4th Edition: "The candle that burns twice as bright, only burns half as long". Because humans are so short-lived relative to the rest of the other races, human aesthetics are reckless, scavenged and asymmetrical - they don't really care if their boots, gloves or armor aren't matching, because they too busy going all Carpe Diem! on everything for it to matter. Similarly, humans use a lot of representational art such as tattoos, heraldry, crests and standards because they haven't quite reached the sophistication and maturity that has allowed, say, dwarves and elves, to pursue and develop abstract art.  Finally, there's a couple of paragraphs from Logan Bonner on designing the mechanical benefits for humans. It was tricky because all the other races are "humans, but ...", which then leaves you hanging on how the humans actually distinguish themselves. Bonner says they mostly just inherited the 3E design: their attribute bonuses are generic, and they get one free feat - this means they're not really specialized towards one class or role, but at the same time it's never a bad idea for a human to be in any class or role, which suits their theme of adaptability. By the final PHB, the final human bonus was a +1 to defenses, but here Bonner describes it as: quote:Humans are our most resilient race. Though they don’t have more hit points or higher defenses, they recover from damage and conditions more quickly than other races can. Humans are all about dramatic action and dramatic recovery. Many of these benefits come from racial feats. Legend of the Dragonborn - James Wyatt  Note: there's actually a lot of words on every race's chapter about their in-universe origin and other backstory. I'm mostly skipping it as out-of-scope from what I'm trying to relate in this read-through. quote:Dragons are such an iconic monster of fantasy that we named the game after them. Until now, though, playing a dragon meant either using a lot of variant rules (as in the 2nd Edition Council of Wyrms campaign setting) or taking on a hefty level adjustment to play either a dragon or a half-dragon. Designing the [Dragonborn's] Visual Look - Stacy Longstreet  quote:Everyone agreed that this should be a really cool race that everyone would want to play. Yet everyone had different ideas about what it should look like: How much should it resemble a dragon versus how much should it resemble a human? There were lots of discussions and we started with trying to make the head unique by creating a blending of human and dragon. It became very apparent that this had been tried before. We quickly determined that we needed to go in the other direction and work with a more draconic head on a humanoid body. Finally, Gwendolyn Kestrel weighs in that it was very much a deliberate decision that they wanted players to be able to play as dragons/a dragon-like race from the very beginning of this edition because of the power and majesty built up with their name over the years of the fantasy genre. Dwarves - Matt Sernett  quote:When we designed the 4th Edition of the D&D game, we knew we needed to improve how the game handled special kinds of vision. Out of the three 3rd Edition core rulebooks, only humans, halflings, and lizardfolk need a light to see normally at night. Every other creature possesses some special sight that allows it to see in dim light or even in darkness. That seemed a little crazy, and when we thought about it, the inequality of special vision also complicated the game. To play appropriately, the DM has to describe the big dark room one way for the drow (who has darkvision 120 feet), one way for the dwarf (who has darkvision 60 feet), another way for the elf (who has low-light vision), and still another for the human holding the torch. And there’s one more problem with many creatures having darkvision: The PCs don’t get to see the scenery in caves or large dungeon rooms. Besides the gameplay-based change, what stood out to me is that this statement also includes how the lore of the universe reacts to it: Dwarves don't have darkvision anymore, and at the same time the world's internal logic has the dwarves putting up lanterns and sunroofs in their fortresses. Chris Sims then sets up the racial tension between Dwarves and Orcs: simply having them both live in the mountains would cause conflict out of competition for resources, but then there's also "the two peoples' diametrically opposed world views": the Dwarves gather and build while the Orcs scavenge and destroy; the Dwarves and dutiful and industrious while orcs are "treacherous and lazy". The Orcs don't see a point to establishing large and strong permanent shelter nor engaging in agriculture or mining when they can just take stuff from the Dwarves, while the Dwarves have been pillaged by the Orcs so often that they regard them as nothing more than murderers, thieves and despoilers. And then he has this to say about their mechanical design: quote:In the evolution of the D&D game, dwarves have changed little. They’ve always had a clear place and role. In the new edition, the dwarf is a model for how races can be flavorful and still have clear mechanics. Sims then goes on to talk about how they decided to change Dwarves (or some clans of Dwarves) from a fully underground race to a part-surface-dwelling race. It meshes well with how they only have low-light vision: now they need to have their keeps and forts partly aboveground so that sunlight can illuminate the inner halls during the day. As well, it allows the depiction of large dwarven settlements as covering hills or being built into the sides of cliffs or running alongside a mountain instead of just being a large door covering a hole in the ground. Finally, it allows the dwarves to engage in agriculture and raise livestock without having to invent some special grain or special underground-dwelling cow. In Praise of Dwarf Women - Rob Heinsoo  quote:Back in the early days, back before D&D first became Advanced . . . The Eladrin: Why Fey and Feywild? - James Wyatt  quote:D&D is emphatically not the game of fairy-tale fantasy. D&D is a game about slaying horrible monsters, not a game about traipsing off through fairy rings and interacting with the little people. Not really much to say here, as this section was mostly about the Eladrin's lore and not much about their mechanical design. The earlier comment about how the Eladrin's teleport remains relevant up to the final level is probably the most relevant. Next up: Elves, Halflings, Tieflings, other races, and fixing level adjustment
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Jun 11, 2015 14:30
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Young Freud posted:BTW, was "Drow as a player race" ever discussed in the creation of 4th edition? It seems that given how popular they are that they'd just go ahead and make them a PC player race, along with just as supposedly evil tieflings. Yes, the preview I'm reading discusses them a little.
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Jun 11, 2015 18:58
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Wizards Presents: Races and Classes Part 1 Part 2 Reconcepting the Elven Look - Richard Baker quote:If you take a look at the height and weight suggested for elf characters in previous editions, you’ll discover that elves used to be exceptionally small and slight. It wasn’t unusual for elf characters to stand only about 5 feet tall and weigh less than 90 pounds—about the size of a typical 12-year-old. It’s hard to make a character of that stature look slender and graceful without making him or her extremely small, at least as compared to the humans, dwarves, or half-orcs in the party. So we decided to revisit elf stature for the new edition. They've modified the Elves to be as tall as humans, if not slightly taller. They're physiques are now "athletic" instead of "emaciated". They're not and won't ever be linebackers, but they do have the long legs and light builds of born runners. quote:Elves retain several of their distinguishing characteristics from earlier editions, most notably the pointed ears and the slight tilt to the eyes. And elf males don’t have facial hair. They’re not effeminate; they’re lean, athletic, and clean-shaven. That’s not to say that elves never look feminine—female elves sure do! All Yesterday's Subraces - Richard Baker quote:Somewhere around twenty years ago, the D&D game started to suggest differences between varieties of dwarves and elves. Dwarves were either hill dwarves or mountain dwarves; elves were high elves, wood elves, or gray elves. Of course there were drow too, so that suggested the dwarves might have an evil variety, and thus the duergar were born. Different campaign worlds came up with unique and flavorful names for these varieties, and different abilities too, making even more subraces. So before we knew it, we had a game with a dozen varieties of elves and just as many dwarves—and most had different mechanical characteristics from the basic elf, turning one character race into a dozen.  The two archetypal Elf characters are the woodland Ranger and the highly-intelligent Wizard, so all of the other Elven subraces were just compressed to those two: Gray Elves, Sun Elves, Moon Elves are all just part-and-parcel of Eladrin, or High Elves, while Wild Elves, Wood Elves and Green Elves are just ... Elves. That trimmed it down to just those two, plus Drow, all three of which are very distinct from each other, especially with the Eladrin having their own unique noun now. The Evolution of the Halfling — Dave Noonan quote:In the beginning (which we’ll call 1974), halflings were hobbits straight out of Tolkien. The D&D game—at that point three booklets and some reference sheets costing $10—even called them hobbits. But then D&D made the transition from an overgrown hobby to a full-fledged product line, and by 1977 all the hobbits became halflings. A long quote, but I thought it was a good historical breakdown. I didn't even know that Kender was supposed to be a direct spin-off of Halflings. Richard Baker then talks about having to establish where the Halflings would live: Forests went to Elves, Mountains and Hills went to Dwarves, Humans lived in plains (and plains themselves are not very distinctive), so they chose swamps and marshes  There was apparently some apprehension with choosing that as their native terrain because of the generic perception of people that live in swamps as "backwater rubes", but Baker makes the case that it makes sense as far as swamps leading to rivers and coasts, which then follows that sea-travel is the road of choice for non-industrialized societies. As well, swamps are excellent defensive terrain, and fits the 4th Edition depiction of halflings as "waterfolk, skilled boatbuilders and fishers". Baker ends with a sidebar on halfling size: He acknowledges that their depiction in 3rd Edition as 3 foot, 35 pound humanoids was waaay too small, as that's about the size of a preschooler. The team decided to let adult halflings grow to about 4 feet and 65 pounds. That's still significantly smaller than a human, since the target was "the size of 9- or 10-year old kids", but it's supposed to be much more believable now. Tieflings - Bruce Cordell Since they're one of the new races of this Edition, I'm going to include a quote about their origins:  quote:Sundered from humanity by their ancestors’ overweening ego, tieflings are a race whose bloodline stems from an infernal bargain made nearly a millennia ago. Promotion - Chris Perkins quote:Tieflings trace their origins back to the 2nd Edition PLANESCAPE® Campaign Setting. With their horns, tails, and wicked tongues, tieflings quickly became the exotic “bad boys” and “bad girls” of the Outer Planes. Sly, sexy, and a little sinister, they afforded D&D players a chance to flirt with the dark side without actually crossing the line into full-blown evil. Why play Drizzt when you could play the great-grandson of a pit fiend? Chris continues to talk about the "cultural appearance" of Tieflings. They adopt Human culture and garb as a means of blending in, but they also try to get away with "infernal-wear" whenever they can. For Tieflings low on the totem pole, it might just be a hellsteel dagger that to a human just looks like a twisted shard of metal, but higher-level Tieflings will often shed all pretense of wanting to fit in and will don outfits specially tailored to show off demonic origins once they're powerful enough to not need to be bashful.  It's Good to be Bad - James Wyatt quote:Playing a tiefling (or a warlock, or a drow or half-orc, or any other “bad boy” of D&D) is different from playing an evil character. Part of the appeal of playing a tiefling is that being a hero is both more challenging and more dramatic when you’re overcoming the weight of heritage and stereotype to do it. If Han Solo had burst into the room to save Luke from the Emperor at the end of Return of the Jedi, it would have felt contrived. But the fact that Darth Vader, the great villain of the trilogy, sacrificed himself to save his son—that was powerful. Drizzt Do’Urden is a compelling hero because of the evil society he grew up in, the fear and prejudice he faces on the surface world, and the hatred the other drow of Menzoberranzan still hold for him. Bruce then goes on to describe a design concept for racial ability progression: at first level, a player would choose a single minor ability out of a list, that would grant some small benefit. As the character grew in levels, they would get to choose more traits and even feats, but the initial and succeeding selections would serve as a sort of tree that would chain to some choice while also locking out others. He then ends with a disclosure that this idea had to be refined over three drafts as being overcomplicated. Other Races: Celestials - Rob Heinsoo quote:I won’t lie: making Good-associated creatures as exciting as their Evil-curious counterparts is a challenge. I call the challenge the “Ave Maria” problem, a reference to Walt Disney’s original Fantasia, a wonderful animated film that ended with musical meditations on Evil and Good. Evil got Night on Bald Mountain, accompanied by an evil-storm orchestrated by a whip-wielding demon. Good followed up with barely animated candle-bearing keepers of the faith proceeding across the screen singing Ave Maria. It’s a sweet piece of music, and it certainly speaks to the possibilities of Good, but the animation just didn’t hold a candle to lightning storms on Bald Mountain. He then goes on to explain how he had to campaign to drop the term "aasimar" completely and just go with Celestials instead. Other Races: Drow - Chris Sims quote:Elves. Lolth. Spiders. Underdark. Drow are iconic in the D&D game, and we didn’t fix what wasn’t broken. Drow have changed only to fit into the world of the new edition, evolving in ways that make them more accessible as characters and villains. Other Races: The Trouble with Gnomes - Matt Sernett quote:Gnomes lack a strong position in D&D. If you ask someone to name the important races in the world of D&D, gnomes always seem to come in last. They’re elf-dwarf-halflings—a strange mixture of the three with little to call their own besides being pranksters. DRAGONLANCE presented an iconic image of the gnome, but the concept of tinker gnomes and their crazy machines has now been thoroughly used by games such as World of Warcraft, and many D&D players dislike the technological element that version of the gnome brings to the game. World of Warcraft namedrop alert! Sernett actually ends this section by acknowledging that they haven't actually decided yet. They considered making the Deep Gnome or the Forest Gnome as the standard Gnome, but that seemed to still have the same problem, except more exaggerated. The Whisper Gnomes from Races of Stone were advisors to Elves, so that wasn't a very good idea either since it just continued to make the race play second-fiddle to another. Finally, they thought about taking the Whisper Gnome idea and putting a darker spin on it: the Gnomes are Feywild fugitives that were former servants to Evil Fey. They weren't too hot on the idea either as being too distant from the Gnomes' roots. As a sidebar, I'm going to lift a passage from the PHB 2 to see what they had eventually decided upon: quote:In the Feywild, the best way for a small creature to survive is to be overlooked. While suffering in servitude to the fomorian tyrants of the Feydark, gnomes learned to hide, to mislead, and to deflect—and by these means, to survive. The same talents sustain them still, allowing them to prosper in a world filled with creatures much larger and far more dangerous than they are. So ... actually fairly close to the last idea Sernett wrote in the preview, but with a somewhat more hopeful tone: they're escaped former slaves, rather than actively working for the Evil Fey. Other Races: Warforged - James Wyatt quote:People are often inclined to play warforged as unfeeling robots, but that’s not how I see them at all. They’re living creatures, and part of living is emotion, attachment, grief, and love. They might have trouble expressing their emotions because of their blank, almost featureless faces, but to my mind, at least, they feel them just as strongly as humans do. Fixing Level Adjustment - Richard Baker Baker outright says that they were not happy with the concept of level adjustment. While it made sense from a design standpoint, it was difficult for inexperienced players to understand. Further, it was "absolute poison" to low-level characters and to any kind of spellcaster. It was maybe okay to compare a level 14 Human Fighter and a level 13 Genasi Fighter, [/i]"but taking a one-level hit on spell progression was just so bad for spellcasters that players quickly learned to not create Genasi wizards and sorcerers."[i] Dumping level adjustment was a top priority for 4th Edition, and Baker describes a two-pronged approach: 1. Make the basic races more powerful - if even a Human has enough of a racial modifier to be the equivalent of a "+1" or "+2 level adjustment" race, then it's easy to justify giving the more esoteric races the abilities and powers they need to match their in-universe lore. 2. Move the more powerful racial abilities to higher levels quote:everyone knows that drow can levitate and cast darkness. But they don’t have to automatically be able to do it at 1st level, do they? Now you decide if you’re playing a drow whether or not those abilities are worth a feat pick (and presumably many or most NPC drow make exactly that choice). And that ends the section on Races Next up: Classes
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Jun 15, 2015 13:52
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theironjef posted:Wow I don't think I noticed anything about halflings living near swamps in the PHB, did that even make it? I know Celestial didn't, they ended up going with the way cooler Deva. From the PHB 1: quote:Halflings are a small race known for their resourcefulness, quick wits, and steady nerves. They are a nomadic folk who roam waterways and marshlands. No people travel farther or see more of what happens in the world than halflings. Not that I blame you for not noticing - I think most RPG players have such a well-built preconceived notion of the standard fantasy races that we wouldn't read through them unless we're in the can or it's a particularly cool exploration of the concept.
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Jun 15, 2015 16:39
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Wizards Presents: Races and Classes Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Classes Overview - Richard Baker quote:Character classes are the heart of the D&D game. Fighters wear armor and mix it up with monsters in melee. Wizards are fragile but use potent spells to swing entire encounters. Clerics heal and rogues sneak. All those things have been true for 30 years, and they’re going to remain true in 4th Edition I thought the description of Wizards was particularly revealing. It sort of implies that spells should be as potent as Sleep, or that Fireball shouldn't just deal enough damage to hurt a group of monsters, but to guarantee right then and there that you're going to win this particular fight. Identifying Class Roles - Richard Baker quote:One of the first things we decided to tackle in redesigning D&D’s character classes was identifying appropriate class roles. In other words, every class should have all the tools it needs to fill a specific job in the adventuring party. Clerics must heal, fighters must lock up monsters in melee to protect weaker characters, and wizards must deal damage to multiple enemies at range. If you want to exchange characters in the party—for example, replacing a cleric with a druid, or a fighter with a paladin—you should still maintain a mix of high-defense characters, healers, and damage dealers. If you drop in a character who can’t fill the role of the class he’s replacing, you’re weakening the adventuring party and damaging the table’s fun. The defender description I like because it shows that the team understood that "being a tank" was not just about having a bunch of HP and a lot of armor - if the monsters don't want to attack you and they can do that, it doesn't matter. quote:Striker: A character who deals very high damage to one target at a time, either in melee or at range. This is the job we want to move the rogue toward—when she positions herself for a sneak attack and uses her best attack powers, she deals some of the highest damage in the game. Strikers need mobility to execute their lethal attacks and get away from enemies trying to lock them down. Notice that at no point do they mention the Rogue as a "skill-monkey" or as a trap-detector-and-remover, and that they don't call her a Thief anymore quote:Controller: A character who specializes in locking down multiple foes at once, usually at range. This involves inflicting damage or hindering conditions on multiple targets. The wizard is a shining example of this role, of course. Controllers sacrifice defense for offense; they want to concentrate on taking down the enemy as quickly as possible while staying at a safe distance from them. quote:Leader: A character who heals, aids, or “buffs” other characters. Obviously we thought about just calling this role “healer,” but we want leaders to do more than simply spend their actions healing other characters. The leader is sturdier than the controller, but doesn’t have anywhere near as much offense. The cleric is the classic example. All leaders must have significant healing abilities to live up to their role, as well as other things they can do in a battle. This paragraph hits on 2 key points that we'd eventually see as part of the 4E design: 1. A Leader's ability to heal was in placed in the action economy so that they could do it while simultaneously smashing faces in, rather than as a mutually exclusive choice 2. The Warlord wasn't just known for being able to heal characters (by shouting), they were known for granting additional attacks for the rest of the party, ditto the Bard for granting additional mobility, and so on. One Progression Instead of Four - Richard Baker quote:In 3rd Edition D&D, each character class began with a skeleton consisting of four distinct progressions: Attack Bonus, Fortitude Save, Reflex Save, and Will Save. In 4th Edition, these have been combined into a single level-based check modifier that applies to all of your character’s attacks, defenses, and skill checks. All 10th-level characters have a +5 bonus to AC, all three defenses, attacks, and so on. Naturally, your ability scores, class abilities, and feat selection impact this single progression, so you can expect that a paladin’s Fortitude defense will be significantly better than his Reflex defense, and likewise better than the rogue’s Fortitude defense. In fact, every class features important attack or defense boosts at 1st level that distinguish their best traits from their ordinary ones. And here we see the genesis of the Half-Level Modifier. They recognized the problem with good vs poor progression tracks causing problems when comparing one class to the other. As a related sidebar, there's a section in the 3rd Edition Unearthed Arcana called Maximum Ranks, Limited Choices as an alternative way to track skills. Instead of receiving skill points every level and allocating them across your skills, you simply picked a number of skills you would "specialize" in, and then you would just assume that you always had the maximum possible ranks in that skill. A Fighter could specialize in [2 + INT modifier] skills. If they were specialized in Climb, they'd roll [d20 + characterLevel+3 + STR modifier], where characterLevel+3 represents putting all possible skill ranks toward that skill. For any skill they weren't specialized in, they'd roll [d20 + stat modifier]. And therein lies the problem: it was simple to track, yes, but after a few levels you wouldn't have a snowball's chance in hell of hitting the DCs for anything you weren't specialized in, so there'd have to be something added to the non-specialized formula to give you a chance at doing the easy stuff, and maybe even the moderately difficult stuff if you were lucky. So, let's take this Maximum Ranks, Limited Choices skill system, and make a few changes: 1. Add half your character level to all checks, whether specialized in them or not 2. Consolidate the number of skill categories to about half Now doesn't that start looking more like the 4th Edition skill system? Every Class Gets Powers - Richard Baker quote:Perhaps the single biggest change in 4th Edition D&D is this: Every character class has “spells.” In other words, every class has a broad array of maneuvers, stunts, commands, strikes, heroic exploits, or what-have-you to choose from, just like clerics and wizards in previous editions had a wide assortment of spells. Ultimately, a spell, curse, weapon trick, or command is at heart a “power”—a special ability that a character can trigger in a fight. I'm just going to let that stand on its own with emphasis because by God if that doesn't sum up the core of 4th Edition for me. You just wanna frame it. Next up: The Cleric
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Jun 17, 2015 16:48
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Wizards Presents: Races and Classes Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Clerics He doesn’t necessarily hit you with his sword arm. He hits you with his faith. —Andy Collins, March 2006 Class Role - Logan Bonner The cleric is the archetypal leader. They use their divine magic to buff their allies and prevent them from dying. The different deities that a cleric would worship will grant them unique benefits, such as a preferred weapon or a defense bonus. They are melee combatants, and their physical attacks are empowered by their divine magic. An individual cleric might choose to specialize in singling out enemies for death, or lowering an enemy's defenses, or increasing an ally's prowess. Their main combat powers are in the form of battle prayers and spells. Effects that they're capable of include fire and light coming down from above, inducing an enemy to free, or preventing an ally from getting hurt. quote:All 4th Edition characters have some ability to heal themselves and all leaders can increase that healing. A cleric grants all allies near him an increase to their self-healing, and he can also cure their wounds by using healing words. A cleric doesn’t spend any of his other spells to use them, nor will he need to spend the lion’s share of his actions healing others. Just pretend I bolded the whole passage, because these are all key points in 4E's design: 1. Everyone can heal themselves 2. Leaders are "healers", but not just healers 3. Even when leaders are healing, healing isn't supposed to come at the expense of more "interesting" actions 4. Critical/powerful/epic/game-changing spells have been urned into rituals, so casters are still capable of them, but they're not taking up a caster's "spell slots" Sidebar: Why we changed the Gods - Matt Sernett quote:We didn’t move forward in 4th Edition with that pantheon [from 3rd Edition, which was heavily based on the Greyhawk campaign setting] because its deities weren’t designed for the improved experience of D&D we were forming. Also, its ties to Greyhawk and its uses in 3E wouldn’t sync up with the new cosmology and mythology we’ve designed to be better for play. We struggled with what deities to put in the game for a long time, and many factors influenced our final decisions: 3E Clerics Rule! 4E Clerics are Better - Logan Bonner quote:It’s no secret that 3rd Edition clerics are really good. 4th Edition clerics are no longer better than other classes, but are more fun to play. Bonner then goes on to explain how they had to chop down the 3E Cleric spell list. Everything that belonged in rituals, such as restoration, raise dead, cure x, and wards were all moved there, and lots of healing prayers were also removed or made into rituals. This is also the first mention of "alignment no longer has a major mechanical effect", and that's another big pile of spells that can be done away with. Summoning spells were also removed, but were expected to come back in later books. In exchange, the designers were able to play around with all sorts of new effects instead: quote:we wrote a ton of new cleric powers! We wanted persistent magical effects that the cleric could maintain over many rounds (such as spiritual weapon), big magical attacks (like flame strike), and short-term buffs. Most persistent effects sit in the battle prayers, so a cleric drops one in every fight, usually to keep an enemy under control. Big attacks can be found in battle prayers and in spells. They include big explody things like flame strike, supernatural weather (inspired by storm of vengeance), and spells that utterly crush a single opponent. Short-term buffs are much improved because we did away with the duration-tracking that was such a big part of cleric life in 3E. Most short-term buffs lasts until the end of the encounter. That’s it. It’s simple, it’s clear, and the effects are more powerful since the duration’s shorter. Fighters If you don’t choose a defender, the monsters will choose one for you. —Richard Baker, November 2005 Class Role - Richard Baker Fighters are the classic defenders. They get in front of the monsters and keep the monsters from attacking less resilient members of the party. They have the most HP and can wear the heaviest armor. There are even certain feats that will allow a Fighter's DEX to be added to their AC even while wearing heavy armor, that only Fighters will have access to. Fighters also have the most self-healing, and only a Paladin is supposed to even come close to being as tanky. quote:The second quality a defender requires is an ability to keep the monsters focused on him. We called this “stickiness” around the office—once you get next to a fighter, it’s really hard to move away in order to go pound on the party wizard or cleric. Fighters are “sticky” because they gain serious bonuses on opportunity attacks, have the ability to follow enemies who shift away from them, and guard allies nearby through an ability called battlefield control. Once the fighter gets toe-to-toe with the monsters, it becomes very dangerous for the monsters to do anything other than battle the fighter . . . which is, of course, what the fighter excels at. Enemies ignore fighters at their peril! Fighters have Power! - Richard Baker quote:In previous editions of the DUNGEONS & DRAGONS game, the fighter has always been the character who didn’t have any spells or special class powers. Generally speaking, a player running a fighter character did the same thing every round: He took a swing at the bad guys. In 3rd Edition D&D more options became available through the use of various feat trees, but it was still true that the fighter offered none of the resource management or battle strategy of a spellcasting character. Tome of Battle: The Book of Nine Swords introduced a new twist on the 30-year-old mechanics of the fighter class by describing fighterlike classes who used a variety of spectacular martial maneuvers. Using Tome of Battle you could play a fighter (well, a warblade) with the tactical challenge of choosing when and how to use dramatic maneuvers. The new DUNGEONS & DRAGONS 4th Edition game improves and expands this concept even more. Baker then mentions the AED system for the first time: At-wills are attacks that are simple, but the Fighters knows and can do all the time. The example given is a Defensive Strike that gives the Fighter an AC bonus whenever the Fighter hits. This next passage settles a debate that AFAIK kept cropping up on the internet back in the day: quote:Per-encounter powers are special weapon tricks, surprise attacks, or advanced tactics that can only be used one time per fight. The fighter doesn’t “forget” a power once he uses it, nor does a power deplete any innate reserve of magical energy. He can’t use it again because it simply isn’t effective more than once per battle. If an enemy has already seen your dance of steel maneuver, he won’t be taken in by it a second time. Because you can use one of these powers once per battle, the challenge is to find the exact right moment to use each one for maximum effect And finally per-day powers "represent a single act of incredible strength, endurance, and heroism; the fighter digs down deep and finds what he needs to make the ultimate effort." The example given is Great Surge that will let a Fighter deal a devastating attack while also tapping into their healing reserves simultaneously. If the interesting part of using an Encounter power is which round of the fight to use it in, the interesting part of a Daily power is deciding which of the battles within the day do you really need it. Supporting Different Builds - Stephen Schubert quote:The fighter has always been one of the four iconic pillars of the D&D game (along with the cleric, wizard, and thief/rogue). As the game progressed, the fighter grew into an extremely customizable class, especially in 3rd Edition D&D, where a fighter’s feat choices could change the way he looked: was he a lightly armored, Spring Attacking, glaive wielder? A Power-Attacking, greatsword-swinging, damage dealer? An impregnable, Combat Expertise-using, sword and board AC junkie? Or maybe just a spiked chain trip monkey? Schubert acknowledges that the main divide for Fighter builds tends to be between the sword-and-shield Fighter and the two-handed weapon Fighter. For the former, there are feats and powers that improve a Fighter's AC and ability to defend their allies, but the designers didn't just want to give the Fighter nothing but defensive bonuses, so there are always powers that would allow the Fighter to quickly move around to battlefield, to get in the way of monsters before they reach the rest of the party, or to pursue and stop monsters that are trying to slip away. For the latter, the Fighter will have access to "Power Attack-like abiltiies that give the options of dealing more damage with a less accurate swing", but also attacks that trigger when the Fighter's allies are attacked, effectively allowing this kind of Fighter to still defend their team by threatening the enemies with massive damage if the enemies try to attack someone else. The powers system is supposed to be flexible enough to support multiple playstyles: if the game needed a build for a "dancing fencer" or a "two-weapon Fighter", it would just be a matter of adding appropriate powers and feats for it. Finally, the term "build" isn't supposed to be a strict choice. If a sword-and-shield Fighter wants to pick up powers to let them deal more damage, they can choose even those that were originally designed for the two-handed weapon Fighter. Sidebar: Influence of Book of Nine Swords - Richard Baker quote:If you think you’ve seen the idea of per-encounter powers for fighters before, you’re right. Tome of Battle: Book of Nine Swords built a system of maneuvers for martial characters that presaged many of the nonspellcaster powers coming up in 4th Edition D&D. Next up: The Rogue
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Jun 19, 2015 19:33
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theironjef posted:Best kind of garbage. No one likes cold garbage. We will look forward to it! Also, we're so looking forward to this question we got for the next Afterthought: You could run a whole Afterthought on just that question!
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Jun 22, 2015 17:50
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Terrible Opinions posted:What I really don't get about the groggiest of 3.5 fans is their opposition to mechanical minmaxing and multiclassing. That's the system's only strength, what other reason do you have to play it? If you're not into your character, then you're not really role-playing. It's this fear that trying to engage the system purely on its mechanical merits means you're not really playing for the story or however grogs tend to phrase it. It's similar to how when someone points out "I roll to attack. I hit/miss" is boring and the proposed solution is to have the player provide flowery descriptions of combat, rather than accepting that there's a problem with a system when the only way a character can engage with the rules is by a binary d20 roll that only ever affects the target's HP.
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Jun 22, 2015 18:17
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Halloween Jack posted:The narrative that baffles me the most is when people say that the history of D&D was some sort of grand tradition that progressed until 4th edition made a sudden, radical departure. I wonder if these people are really familiar with the rules of AD&D and/or the Basic line. For a subset of the grog population, they either really don't or are engaging in some kind of cognitive dissonance. A whole ton of poo poo that's in 3E and nowhere else is regarded as how things have always been, even in the face of Gygax, PBUH, not liking 3E for reasons he'd been writing about since the 80s.
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Jun 22, 2015 20:09
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Wizards Presents: Races and Classes Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Rogues Class Role - Logan Bonner quote:The rogue is the prime example of a striker. Capable of delivering more damage to a single target than many other characters, a rogue has to spend some effort setting up such a boost. By skillful maneuvering, the help of allies, and the occasional dirty trick, a rogue sets up devastating attacks. In exchange for high damage, a striker ends up frail compared to a defender. The rest of the section talks about how hiding in shadows, jumping over enemies and scaling walls are all tricks that the Rogue uses to set-up their attacks, and they can do these things because they can use their skills more effectively than other classes, and that the skill system for 4th Edition itself has been revamped. Sneak Attack is also touted as a source of a Rogue's damage, and it's been made easier to use and more widely applicable. Both the skill revamp and the Sneak Attack changes will be talked about further in. The last source of a Rogue's bighuge damage is supposed to be their "follow-up attacks", which are tacked onto the end of successful normal attacks to make for flashy results and also good numbers output. Sneak Attack - Mike Mearls quote:In the beginning thieves had the backstab ability, and it was good. A +4 bonus on attacks and double damage were great back in the day, but they came with a catch. It was really, really hard to actually complete a backstab. The rules were vague about how they worked, and most DMs shied away from allowing thieves to use this ability on a routine basis. There's really not much more that can be said about this: they recognized that the use of Backstab/Sneak Attack had to be formalized and structured in such a way that it could be reliably used, they recognized that 3E's wealth of sneak attack-immune monsters was a bad idea, and they expanded it out to a general principle that monsters that are completely immune to a particular class' abilities is not fun, either. What's New With the Rogue - Mike Mearls The core concept of the Rogue is still being retained: light armor, light weapons, lots of skills, and extra damage if your enemy is unaware or otherwise occupied. They're also going to be adding powers that key off CHA for Rogues that want to work off the trickster/deceiver theme, and granting a bonus to trained skill checks if the Rogue has high INT. The designers also recognized a slight shift in the Rogue's theme: on top of being a "skill monkey", the Rogue should be more like a swashbuckler. They're not as heavily armored as a Fighter, but they're still a threat because of how much damage they can put out, and put out quickly. Working with this concept gives the Rogue a clearer role in a fight, whereas previously it was less clear what they were actually supposed to do if the party didn't have any traps that needed disarming. quote:This design decision highlights one of the principles of D&D 4E design. In prior versions of the game, designers would sometimes use out-of-combat abilities to balance combat deficiencies. A rogue might have low AC and low hit points, but a lot of skills were supposed to balance that. True, the rogue had sneak attack, but moving into a flank also left him vulnerable to being flanked himself. Since D&D 4E moves from a model of “the party versus one monster” to “the party versus an equal number of monsters,” this problem became even worse. At this point I'm sort of wondering where this particular Mike Mearls went, because it really does not sound like this is the kind of guy that would end up making Essentials and then 5E. Skills - Logan Bonner Bonner begins with outlining the problems with 3rd Edition's skill system: * You had to assign ranks to skills on every level-up, and that lead to a lot of fiddly book-keeping * All the book-keeping isn't really worth the effort, because all you're doing is keeping up with the rising skill DCs * There were 2 strategies to allocating skills: pick a few and dump all your points into them at every level-up to keep a few maxed, or dabble across a bunch of skills. Only the former was valid, because trying the latter approach would mean that you couldn't ever keep up with the rising skill DCs * There were way too many skills. It's acknowledged here that part of the problem was that since PCs and NPCs had to be assembled with the same rules, they had to create skills that were never ever going to be used by PCs that actually behaved like fantasy swords-and-sorcery adventurers. Beyond the fact that Profession was useless to someone in a dungeon fighting all the time, there was a lot of frivolous skills or way too narrow skills: Use Rope, Appraise/Decipher Script/Forgery being three different skills, Sleight of Hand and Open Lock being 2 different skills, Listen and Spot being 2 different skills, Hide and Move Silenty being 2 different skills, etc etc quote:We greatly simplified the skill system to fix these problems. We stripped the list down and combined skills that were pointing in the same direction (Open Lock and Sleight of Hand appeal to the same character, so they’re now functions of a single skill). Knowledge (arcana), Spellcraft, and Read Magic have all been combined into a single Arcana skill. I don't know when Monte Cook started talking about Passive Perception, but that right there is Passive Perception. Sidebar: Sample power write-up from an early draft of the Player's Handbook quote:I’m Batman Traps and Rogues - Mike Mearls "Traps have always been a part of the D&D experience, but they’ve never really had a stable place in the game. D&D 4E changes that on a two [sic] levels." Traps are now things that threaten the entire party. A spiked wall will crush the whole hallway. Opening floodgates will fill the whole room. Awakening skeletons will now cause combat for the group. At the same time, since traps threaten the whole party, then the whole party must have the means to get avoid, mitigate or neutralize traps. A Fighter can bash the trap into breaking, or a Cleric can heal through damage, or the Wizard can zap its mechanism, and so on. quote:A rogue can still disarm the trap, but that is just one option among many. Furthermore, Trapfinding is now a feat. Rogues receive it for free, but anyone can become skilled in disabling traps. Next up: The Warlocks
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Jun 23, 2015 12:41
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Hypocrisy posted:I think Mike Mearls sells whatever he's supposed to sell. I get that Mike Mearls is going to say whatever he needs to to puff up the edition of D&D that he's working on, but he's actually the guy in charge for 5E, so either the design of 5E came from above him and he just ran with it, or that was the best he could've done with the resources he had on hand, or he deliberately and of his own accord made 5E the way it was in contravention of what he wrote here. Or perhaps he doesn't even think it's in opposition to his previous views?
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Jun 23, 2015 15:38
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Wizards Presents: Races and Classes Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 Part 6 The Warlock I think you should only be able to get soul blast if you take the Pact of James Brown. —Logan Bonner, March 2007 Class Role - Richard Baker quote:Warlocks are arcane characters. They learn their powers from magical entities they commune with through ancient rites. These may be dark, primal fey spirits, old as the earth itself; the restless shades of ancient warlocks and demipowers long dead; strange, magical intelligences associated with prominent stars; or infernal beings bound by ancient laws the warlock knows how to exploit. The Warlock gains two new tools in 4th Edition: Pacts and Curses Pacts describe who or what the Warlock had to bargain with gain their power: Fey, Infernal, Star or Vestige. The different Pacts offer different abilities: the Infernal Pact is more "control" focused with effects that trap or hinder enemies, while the Vestige Pact has more direct-damage through its Soul Blast power. Each Pact has its own set of Curses. These represent the Warlock's Encounter powers. They cause high amounts of damage while also causing movement and action restrictions, and their Eldritch and Soul Blast attacks deal more damage to Cursed targets, and the Warlock will gain an additional follow-up effect when a Cursed target is killed. Warlocks are described as specializing in weakening, slowing, immobilizing or otherwise "debuffing" enemies with Curses. Warlocks Have Changed, Why? - Logan Bonner quote:The reason warlocks changed is simple: Their cool, unique thing isn’t unique anymore. Why the Warlock? - Chris Sims 1. The target of the design team was to have at least 2 classes representing each power source. The Wizard was already the first Arcane class, so the Warlock would be the second. 2. The other target was representing the role. The Wizard is an Arcane Ranged Controller, and the Rogue is a Melee Martial Striker, and the Ranger is a Ranged Martial Striker, so the Warlock would be the Arcane Ranged Striker. 3. The Tieflings were the "dip your toes in evil" race, so the expectation was that they also needed a "dip your toes in evil" class, and the Warlock was a natural match. 4. The Warlock was apparently the most popular 3rd Edition class outside of the original PHB and Tome of Battle. Warlock Evolution - Stephen Schubert The design team built off of the experimentation with alternate magical systems that was done with 3rd Edition's Tome of Magic and Magic of Incarnum. The Binder's Pacts served as inspiration for what would eventually become Warlock Pacts, while the Shadowcaster's method of selecting Mysteries was an early model for the Powers system as far as being able to pick-and-choose. Alignment - Logan Bonner quote:Alignment is one of those systems that’s been in flux for a while because everybody has a strong opinion about it. When one person’s saying “kill it entirely” and another is saying “keep it as it is,” you know there will be a lot of time and discussion about the topic. R&D is really just like a big gaming group: We all have our opinions about what alignment should be. That third and fourth paragraph is really aces and could serve as a good guide to alignment whenever it rears its head. Cube Chatter - Logan Bonner Sometimes these warlock powers get written up so horrifically that they sound like they should be freaking your allies out as well as your enemies. — Rob Heinsoo, May 2007 quote:I worked on the Player’s Handbook with Rich Baker and Dave Noonan (this was in the third stage of the process). We all sat within two cubes of one another, close enough to shout out whatever weird thing one of us had just come up with. Even though people in nearby cubes were working on different projects, they would occasionally hear one of these snippets about the Player’s Handbook. Usually, this was some oddball placeholder name Rich had written for a warlord power, but warlock powers were a common topic, too. I think our neighbors might have known more about the warlock than any other class, actually. Next up: The Wizard Sneak preview: quote:In the end, you are the most powerful adventurer in the group but only when you work with their allies as a team. A lone wizard faces death at the end of foe’s weapon, yet a wizard alone can call down powers that overshadow any other adventurer’s attacks. While some wizards sequester themselves in isolated towers, far from other folk, the mightiest wizards achieved their great deeds with the help of equally legendary warriors, clerics, and rogues. Sure, they might not provide the most intellectually stimulating campfire conversation, but they do have their uses. Ah yes, there's the Mike Mearls we all know and love.
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Jun 24, 2015 13:25
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* The Sleep spell can end a low-level encounter right then and there. The supposed trade-off is that the Wizard can only do it once, but "the Fighter can fight all day." This doesn't quite end up working out the way it should in practice because once a Fighter runs out of HP, he's done for the day. Further, the game assumes a certain number of encounters per day, and each encounter drains the party's resources, and both HP and spell slots are considered party resources. So the Fighter really isn't "fighting all day" because the one resource that he needs before he gets tapped out is included in the game's basic assumption of what gets consumed over time. * Eventually the Sleep spell loses potency, but the Wizard will gain other spells to compensate. Fireballs for 8d6 damage are going to chump a lot of the encounters that you can throw at the * The Knock spell treads on the Rogue's toes, and so on for every other "utility" spell that the Wizard has, exacerbated by the fact that 5e has incredibly relaxed spell selection for Wizards. At some point the buffs available to a Wizard start treading a Fighter's ability to fight, even. * As you start hitting the higher levels, the Wizard is going to have access to more and more spells that have the potential to derail your campaign, or to circumvent the adventuring day/limited spell slots dynamic. If a Wizard can fly, that gives them the ability to bypass large amounts of "plot activity" that you might otherwise have laid in front of the party. If a Wizard can summon a magical tent in the middle of the dungeon, then the party can just sleep whenever they need to, giving the Wizard much better access to their encounter-ending spells since spell slots are now much less moment-to-moment valuable. * If you start throwing up things to try to head off what the Wizard is doing in the previous point, you're just centering more and more of the adventure to be about them. * The Wizard's spells interact with the game's mechanics on a level that the Fighter can't really come close to matching. Even if a spell has to pass through a saving throw and doesn't "just happen", the Fighter cannot inflict the sort of status effects that a spell can. Just Dan Again posted:While the base rulebook doesn't include Warlords or Avengers, the 5e system's apparent simplicity has led to a pretty enormous amount of homebrew classes that fit the vacant slots from 4e very nicely. I loved 4e and had an excellent time with it, but creating a whole new class always felt daunting to me since the sheer number of powers that had to be created and their CCG level of mechanical functionality felt like an awful lot of work. 5e, to me, is less of a big meaty set of rules that work really well like 4th and more of a D&D toolbox. It's easy to start with, easy to modify, and since the concept of the DM deciding whether to use optional rules or not is presented very clearly in the PHB it eases new players into the idea of RAW being a jumping off point rather than a holy canon. Why did you feel that you needed to come up with an entirely new class in 4e? The only Power Source+Role combo that was not represented was Martial Controller, so every other character concept that you might want to capture is just a matter of "refluffing" your character's race, in-universe class depiction and in-universe power description. I also don't really consider it a good thing that "the system is so light that it's easy to throw out some rules" because that assumes that there are going to be rules that need to be thrown out ... which by implication means that you're not going to want to run the game RAW, but if it's not supposed to be run RAW, then why wasn't RAW modified to not include the rules that were expected to be thrown out in the first place? It was a strength of 4e that the rules could more or less handle any question you threw at it, and you could run it as-is and have a good game, because anything else assumes a level of System Mastery that's going to be painful for all involved while the DM hasn't gotten there yet.
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Jun 26, 2015 20:19
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Halloween Jack posted:I remember that in the lead-up to 5e, one of the things they went on about was how your race shouldn't make a big difference at character creation, but you could get more elfy/dwarfy/etc traits as you leveled. Did that happen at all? That's actually more what happened with 4e's design, not 5e's.
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Jun 29, 2015 05:11
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The thing is, pressure is already built into the game outside of casters: if you have a party of an Archer Fighter, a Tank Fighter, a Two-Hand Weapon Fighter and a Sneak Attacking Rogue, they can't take an 8-hour rest after every fight because they cannot create a secure campsite for themselves all the time, and if the DM asks for a "stand watch" roll against a random wilderness encounter you might just fail that roll and get ambushed by wolves or whatnot. But if the Wizard can cast an Alarm spell and/or can create a tent, then the DM has to take additional effort to "re-create" the pressure that already existed in the first place, "uhhh well yeah you can pitch a tent wherever and you'll always be alerted if someone's about to attack you, but if you try to do that the Princess is going to die because Jaffar only gave her 7 hours to live" There's this constant tug-of-war between the players trying to squeeze in every Rest that they can because they can and because who doesn't want to start every fight with full health and resources if you can get away with it, versus the DM that doesn't want every fight to be life-threatening, but has no choice if they cannot enforce back-to-back encounters. The alternative is to come to an agreement with your players that the system is built for 4-6 encounters every day and we'd all be better off if we respected that regardless of what's happening in the in-game fiction (assuming tactical combat is a focus of your session), but the problem derives from the fact that casters can subvert that arrangement in the first place.
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Jun 29, 2015 06:34
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Kai Tave posted:Well it sucks coming and going because of course the GM shouldn't be expected to give the players unlimited free power recoveries on demand, no game really benefits from that, but what's the GM supposed to do when the spellcasters run out and are like "yeah okay, we'd like to get back the reason we're playing casters in the first place now?" Say "tough poo poo, learn to ration better you nerds?" Most even semi-decent GMs are going to want their players to have fun, and a spellcaster with no spells in a D&D where that sort of emphasis is heightened generally isn't going to be having a ton of fun if the current situation is demanding enough to have drained his spells in the first place. From a design perspective you see this even in games that use mana: telling the spellcaster that they can use Fireball until they run out of it, at which point they can start using Firebolt until they can regen some mana back, is just going to make the spellcaster feel like they need to increase their regeneration until they can cast Fireballs all the time.
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Jun 29, 2015 07:50
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fool_of_sound posted:So how is asking players to act as though their characters are invested any different that a Compel in FATE, and how is running out of powerful spells in DnD any different than losing your best spell on a bad die roll in DungeonWorld (which requires a resource to get back, no less)? For that matter, a time limitations make excellent Compels in FATE too. As for GMs adjudicating resources: that isn't an antagonistic relationship unless the GM isn't allowing the player to use the resources at all, even when it would make sense. Limits are inherent to the story/tensions/verisimilitude, even if they aren't explicitly codified in the mechanics. Even then, 5e makes it perfectly clear in the DMG that parties are supposed to go 2-4 encounters between Long Rests; it is part of the game design. If players are bullying their GM into allowing them to run roughshod over that design, that's their own fault. That's where the contradiction lies. If you have a spell that makes Long Rests possible at pretty much any random junction, and then your DM goes "hey you can't do that yet", then what's the spell for? You know and I know that it's better to just have this OOC conversation with the whole table about how an "adventuring day" is supposed to work, but newcomers to the hobby wouldn't, and it reflects badly on the designers that they created this spell that messes with the dynamic so much EDIT: without providing better guidance on how's it's supposed to be used without "breaking" the game.
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Jun 29, 2015 08:01
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LatwPIAT posted:In terns of goal-focused design that accomplishes what it set out to do, early edition D&D is one of the best examples there are. Early edition D&D isn't necessarily what I want out of a role-playing game, but few games are as tightly designed. I was reading through the alignment system of early D&D and how it fit in with Language and Morale and Charisma and it's really quite elegant. Three alignments in D&D: Law, Neutrality, Chaos If you belong to the Law alignment, then you can speak the Law language, and every Lawful creature can also speak it, so you can always communicate with every creature of your own alignment. Every human knows the Common language, and 20% of other intelligent, non-human creatures can speak Common. Otherwise, an intelligent, non-human creature also speaks a language unique to their race, such as all Goblins speaking Goblinoid. If you encounter any other intelligent creature, and you attempt to communicate in your alignment's language, and they're also of that alignment, then you can understand each other, and being of the same alignment assumes that it's an automatic peaceful encounter. If you instead try to speak Law, and they are Neutral or Chaos, then they cannot understand you apart from the fact that they know it's the language of a different alignment, and they'll immediately turn hostile. If you instead try to speak in Common, and they cannot understand, well, the book doesn't really say, but at this point it feels like the right call would be to use the "reaction roll", perhaps at a penalty since any message you convey will only ever be rudimentary. Finally, if you know the creature's native language, and the rules will let you learn an additional native language for every 1 point of INT over 10, then you can parley with it straight up, and your CHA modifier will even improve the result of the reaction roll. Add in the hirelings that you mentioned as additional cannon fodder, and the fact that monsters are supposed to undergo morale checks upon taking losses, and early D&D does not seem to be the ultra-deadly meat grinder that it's usually portrayed as, if all these rules are implemented.
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Jun 29, 2015 12:45
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Wizards Presents: Races and Classes Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Wizards Wizards Make Things Go Boom - Stephen Radney-MacFarland quote:It’s really just that simple. The wizard is, and always has been, the quintessential battlefield controller. Fireball, lightning bolt, meteor swarm, even magic missile—they’re all iconic wizard spells that deal damage to multiple opponents at a distance. They are fun, evocative, and the new wizard gets them in spades. We would eventually see this make it live in the form of the different Arcane Implements. Feats - Stephen Radney-MacFarland "Lots of things in D&D are changing, but don’t fret too much: You’ll still get feats." The designers had to dump metamagic and item creation feats. They got rid of the metamagic feats because they no longer wanted feats that were "conditional on a specific effect". That is, if you were going to make a round-to-round decision, it should be in the form of which power you were going to use. They wanted feats to do one thing, and do it passively, all the time. They then dumped item creation feats because they did not want players to be spending feat slots (nor experience points) on feats, when feats should have a more focused purpose. These were instead moved to rituals. quote:The intent was not to limit choice, but rather to create new and interesting ones for the wizard (and the other classes). Feats can increase the potency of arcane powers. Many of these choices will seem self-evident for the role of the traditional wizard—feats that increase defenses, feats that limit the penalties for using powers in melee, feats that increase speed—but others, called skill feats, add breadth to skills. Cherry-picking skill feats can enhance the know-it-all nature wizards exude. The last thing mentioned about feats is that while feats might require a specific race, or specific skill, or a minimum level, they will never require a class. The designers wanted to encourage players to either pick feats that compliment their build, or play against type, or to look for interesting interactions and synergy by not limiting feat selection to specific classes. Of course, we know that what happened in the end was that feats end up having class restrictions anyway, but you can take a Multi-class Feat to let you count as a member of that class for the purpose of meeting prerequisites, but here they envisioned the "Class Training" feat as a much bigger package: you wouldn't just be able to get skill training in a Fighter's class skills, you'd also be able to select a certain number of powers and abilities from that class. Balancing the Wizard - Stephen Schubert quote:When we set out to determine the right power level for each class, we first had to establish a baseline, independent of any particular class. Once that was in place, we could discuss the aspects of each class in relation to that baseline, comparing the components of a class’s offense, defense, and utility. The wizard has always been high on the offensive scale and on the lower end defensively, and much of that flavor has been maintained. We set out to preserve the idea that the wizard is very powerful, with abilities that affect multiple opponents at once, but he doesn’t last long if the enemy brutes start wailing on him. Thus, the wizard’s powers follow our higher curve of output, using spells and abilities that hit lots of enemies in quick bursts (as opposed to other high-damage classes like rogues or warlocks that do lots of damage to a single opponent, or spread their damage out over a few rounds). Acknowledgement of the save-or-die dynamic notwithstanding, the differentiation of the Wizard here compared with the Warlock and the Rogue is an eye-opener, especially since the Wizard is supposed to be a Controller and those two other classes are Strikers. Are Schools of Magic Dead? - Logan Bonner 4th Edition would categorize spells according to their effects rather than their thematic links. The 3E comparison made here is how Melf's Acid Arrow and Scorching Ray both deal energy damage, and both of them even use the "Ray" mechanic to define their in-game effect, but because one of them creates a real object, they're in different schools. 4th Edition is moving away from this because it's not really a useful way to define spells, and instead are looking more the Orb/Staff/Wand arcane focuses as the differentiating factor. The use of focuses also meant that spells and effects that were only ever useful outside of combat have been moved over to rituals, so that you can access them via an investment of gold rather than having to spend spell slots on it when those slots might otherwise be used when fighting for your life. quote:So where are the schools now? I personally never really got to understand the different D&D magic schools compared to CRPG classifications based on element, or practical classifications such as direct damage, damage-over-time, crowd-control, and so on. After I read the 5e PHB I eventually got it (never did during my Baldur's Gate days), but it still didn't seem like a particularly useful set of distinctions, so this section resonated well with me. Experiments in 3rd Edition - Stephen Schubert Here it's said that while we know that Tome of Battle was a test-bed for 4th Edition ideas, specifically for martials, that the designers were also using other 3E books to tinker with ideas that would eventually become the 4E Wizard. Complete Arcane's Warlock class showed that it was possible and desirable for a class to have an always-available at-will magic strike. quote:While the warlock continued to evolve into its own new class, the lesson had been learned: Every class should be able to do something interesting each round, even at the lowest of levels. The wizard needed to have a power, or better yet a selection of powers, that he could use every encounter or even every round. Of course, this thinking was part of the core of the new system, where every class would be a different mix of at-will, encounter-based, or daily resources. Complete Mage introduced the role of the blaster, which was when the designers began looking at really firming up and strongly defining the role that each class should fill within a group. It also introduced Reserve feats: a Wizard could cast a minor at-will power as long as they had a thematically related spell available to cast in their spell slots. [Excerpt from Complete Mage follows as an example] quote:Clap of Thunder [Reserve] The designers then built off of this concept to simply give the Wizard (and all other classes) the ability to have "interesting" at-will attacks available to them every round, with the Reserve feats' requirement of saving a particular spell in a slot. quote:These trends speak to the greater issue of extending the amount of fun players can have, by extending every class’s resources over many more encounters. While wizards still have the opportunity to cast (and run out of ) spells, they’ll have a few other powers to use much more frequently, allowing them to continue to contribute even once their spells run out. Tracking down the Complete Arcane and Complete Mage books was yet another eye-opener: I've heard it said that Pathfinder was where at-will cantrips got their start, but here we have the designers explicitly calling out a book that came out three years before Pathfinder as where they got the idea for Wizard at-wills, and where they start playing around with explicit definitions of role: the "Blaster" is really just an Archetype with a list of feats and spells for the player to rely on as a guide, but then there's also the "Booster", and the "Controller" and the "Sniper". Next up: Other Classes
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Jun 29, 2015 16:35
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Wizards Presents: Races and Classes Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Other Classes Barbarians - Mike Mearls Here Mearls recalls an instance of his Barbarian character rolling a crit with a greatsword, killing an enemy, then critting on the follow-up Cleave attack to kill a second enemy. 'The words "I rage" are a great part of D&D' The direction they had intended for Barbarians is to give them many different forms of Rage, rather than just a single generic Rage. As well, they want the relationship of Barbarians and Druids to be similar to that of Paladins and Clerics: the latter are the heart, but the former are the violent speartip. As well, they've moved the "weapon tricks and mastery" solely into the Fighter's Powers, so Barbarian Powers are going to be more feral, brutish, direct. quote:On a historical note, my playtest barbarian character used a rage ability called lightning panther strike to move across a dungeon chamber and chop down five skeletons in one round. He also had an unhealthy tendency to follow up strikes from his axe with a quick bite attack. Barbarians are more feral and, well, angrier, than ever. All that stuff might not make it into the final draft, but that’s the direction we’re headed. Bards - Logan Bonner quote:A master of artistry and social grace, a bard is a leader who wields magic both dramatic and subtle. Harnessing a natural talent for creativity (be it song, painting, dance, or oratory), a bard draws magic from otherworldly patrons that admire the bard’s work. This is fundamentally different from the relationship other spellcasters have with their power sources. A bard is not a subservient worshiper like a cleric, nor does he bend forces to his will like a wizard. The relationship between a bard and his patrons is one of mutual respect, and the magical gifts given cannot be taken away. Very little here on mechanical design, apart from the fact that even at this junction they knew that they wanted the Bard to be in the Leader role. Druids - Mike Mearls quote:The druid presents an interesting problem for D&D 4E design, in that the class in 3E covers so much ground. Is the druid the guy who summons monsters? Is he the guy who transforms into monsters? Is he a spellcasting healer like a cleric? Many gaming groups consider the D&D 3E druid one of the most powerful classes in the game, and for good reason. The druid does a lot of things well, though it takes an experienced player to see and fully utilize the possibilities inherent in the class. Some interesting admissions here from Mearls - Druids were one of, if not the most, powerful class in 3E, but at the same time the versatility that they had in 3E leaves them rather unfocused going into 4th Edition. Mearls then elaborates that the team decided that where they wanted to take the Druid was as a shapeshifter: other classes already do the spellcasting thing, and other classes can (eventually) do the monster summoning thing, but only the Druid can turn into bears and elementals, so that's what they wanted the 4th Edition Druid's core to be. As we'd eventually see in the final product, Druids can Wild Shape much more often than they could in 3rd Edition, and the idea presented here was that they'd choose which animals and forms to take much the same way that other classes would select maneuvers, spells and other abilities, and then they'd only get a token number of utility and ranged attack powers to use outside of their Wild Shapes to give them something to work with when they're in humanoid form. Monks - Logan Bonner This section is, like the Bard, similarly thin on details: quote:In battle, no one is faster or more agile than the monk. After darting across the battlefield, a monk can execute rapid maneuvers that send his opponent flying, knock it to the ground, or stun it into submission. A monk’s defenses are also strong—an awareness of his own body and his surroundings lets a monk avoid attacks, and he can channel his ki to heal his own wounds. Paladins - James Wyatt Here the designers says that while the concept of the Paladin is very cool, the actual execution is not: quote:In practice, I hate playing paladins. They live somewhere between the fighter and the cleric, but they get none of the bonus feats of the fighter and none of the cool spells of the cleric. The direction they want to take the Paladin is similar to what they've done with the Barbarian: whereas the Fighter accomplishes his Defender role with martial skill, and the Barbarian accomplishes his Striker role with Nature's fury, the Paladin as a Defender gets the job done through divine power. The armor and the weapons are more of a channel, rather than the actual tools of the trade. Further, a Paladin is going to have different Smites that have different functions, in yet another parallel to how Barbarians won't just be using a single generic Rage anymore. Finally, the designers intended on making Evil Paladins a "normal" occurrence. Rangers - Chris Sims Mostly lore-based descriptions again, although it mostly confirms what we already know: Rangers will be a Nature-flavored Striker, they can use the bow or the dual-wielded weapon on equal terms, and they're going to have mobility-emphasizing powers. Sorcerers - Mike Mearls Here Mearls says that Sorcerers were a challenging class to design for in 4th Edition because they used virtually the same spell list as Wizards, except they had spontaneous casting, but now that spellcasting is radically different, they don't have that distinction to kick around anymore. So instead, they tinkered more with the idea that Sorcerers tap into magic in a way that's more innate and raw than how Wizards do it. quote:Not only do sorcerers in 4E use different spells, but they utilize a different method of spellcasting. Swordmages - Richard Baker Baker talks about how the the Role + Power Source model makes it easier to slot-in class concepts that might otherwise have been harder to find a niche for, and that the Swordmage is a good example of using the different Role + Power Source combinations to create a class that D&D has never really seen before. Whereas the Fighter is a Defender that defends using Martial skill, and the Paladin is a Defender that defends with their Divine faith, the Swordmage is a Defender that uses Arcane magic to accomplish their mission. Instead of heavy armor, they wrap themselves in wards and spell-shields, and instead of smites from a deity, they channel elemental energy through their blades to deal damage. It's also an inversion of the Wizard insofar as this is a class that's expected and supposed to go toe-to-toe with monsters, even as they use the same magics as a Wizard. Sidebar: Feather Me Yon Oaf! - Richard Baker quote:I often use placeholder names in feat and power design until I figure out exactly what I want to call something. For example, in Book of Nine Swords I came up with a Tiger Claw power I simply called Tear His drat Head Off. But the single most egregious example from the Orcus design process was the warlord rally I called Feather Me Yon Oaf. Basically, the warlord uses the power, and everyone in the party gets an immediate opportunity to yank out a missile weapon and shoot the target creature the warlord designates—in other words, “shoot that guy for me” or “Feather me yon oaf!” Warlords - Richard Baker Here Baker says that the original idea for the Warlord came from the Marshal, which was a class from 3E's Miniatures Handbook, but where the Marshal was a 3/4 BAB class that mostly projected different auras to provide small numerical benefits, they wanted the Warlord to have a more fleshed-out set of Powers, and for those Powers to have a more direct impact than a +2 bonus to various rolls. quote:The warlord does not rely on magic; he is a martial character. The leadership qualities of a warlord vary, but they’re all from his own personal power. As a final note, this emphasis on Warlords granting mobility and positioning seems like an outgrowth of the Marshal: it was the Marshal's key special ability to be able to grant an ally an extra Move Action 1/2/3 times a day. Next up: The Three Tiers of Adventuring
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Jun 30, 2015 15:48
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Cheese Dudes: Is Movie Mastery a backer-only kind of thing? I couldn't find it on my podcast feeds and I need to hear you guys rip apart Master of Disguise - I love that dumb film.
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Jul 2, 2015 10:21
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Wizards Presents: Races and Classes Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 The Three Tiers of Adventuring - Mike Mearls quote:Tiers are one of those things that existed in D&D 3E without any official acknowledgement. Anyone who played the game from 1st level on up to double digits likely noticed a subtle, continuous shift in the game. Monster damage grew high enough that low hit point characters could take only a hit or two before going down. Saving throws became more important, as more monsters had save or die effects. Once teleport came into the game, the PCs could go anywhere they wanted, helping to make traditional dungeons more difficult to run. Wands became affordable, allowing a smart party access to unlimited healing, flight, and invisibility. In short, D&D changes across the levels that it covers. The tier system seeks to quantify those changes and define the roles of adventurers across the levels. In a book filled with acknowledgements of things that always existed in D&D but were never formalized, Mearls drops another one. Heroic Levels - Mike Mearls The Heroic tier is, of course, the very start of the game, when characters only have their basic abilities to work with, and they're only starting to pull away from the capabilities of the average person. The locations that the characters frequent are stereotypical Middle-Ages Fantasy: analogous to real world cities and castles and dungeons, just also with non-homo sapien humanoids and with just a sprinkling of magic. The characters might face fantastical monsters, and they might hear about non-Euclidean dungeons filled with warped monstrosities, but they'll still sleep at an inn after slaying the former, and latter are still mostly rumors. The enemies are also still classic D&D: skeletons, zombies, orcs, goblins, kobolds, and the traps are fairly standard fare with pits and darts and spikes. Mearls does make mention that they've revised and broadened the scope a little to accommodate the 10-level spread of the Heroic tier: * Goblins and Kobolds are the target adversaries for the early part of this tier * Orcs and Hobgoblins compose the middle part, but can make early appearances or still pose threats at the last part of the tier in large numbers * Gnolls and Troglodytes are the final set of Heroic enemies, the latter having Abyssal monsters as allies, and the latter residing in the outskirts of the Underdark, where they might have a single Drow combatant with them as an exceptional challenge to Heroic characters * Dragons may appear at the tail end of the Heroic tier, but only the youngest and smallest of their kind * Similarly, characters may have to fight lesser demons, but not much more than imps "The Heroic tier is the stuff of classic dungeon crawls", and here the names Hommlett, Caves of Chaos and the Temple of Elemental Evil are called to mind. The characters are clearing out dens of evil that have fallen into disrepair and are only just being reactivated, or they're pursuing minions of a greater evil, or criminal gangs in a city, or budding evil cults. Their threat only goes as far out as a single town, and while the characters might find evidence of a much larger looming threat, they won't have the chops to fight that just yet. Paragon Levels - Andy Collins quote:When a character reaches 11th level, he crosses a significant threshold. No longer a mere adventurer, he is now known as a paragon hero. At this point, the Paragon Path is introduced as a mechanical conceit - it's a way for a character to further specialize their abilities, allowing one Fighter to differentiate themselves from all other Fighters (insofar as any two Fighters are already not going to have the same Powers and Feats, but even further). From an in-game perspective, the shift in scope and scale also shows: you're no longer just Jarvis the Fighter, now you're Jarvis the Vigilant Defender. Epic Levels - Bruce Cordell quote:D&D has always contained the seeds for high-level play. Did you, like my friends and I, choose gods from 1st Edition’s Deities & Demigods book to fight each other? Those were some epic battles indeed. One thing that bears mentioning here is that in their description of Epic levels, there are only supposed to be a few benefits, but the key is that they are extraordinary and they represent the character passing the bounds of the earthly realm and shedding the laws of the universe. The destiny is also supposed to create a situation where the character accomplishes some final quest, and that will cap off the campaign and allow the player to narrate their riding off into the (galactic) sunset. Paragon Paths and Epic Destinies - Logan Bonner The Paragon path was intended to replace the Prestige class. We're down to the penultimate page of text and the book is still dropping bombshells. quote:We have new ways to expand on your character at higher levels. You’ll pick up a paragon path at 11th level and it will carry you through 20th. At 21st, your epic destiny kicks in and you’ll become a legend. In some ways they’re similar to prestige classes (and a few prestige classes have made the jump to paragon paths), but they’re much cooler because you don’t give up anything. As you’re leveling up in your main class, you’re also gaining abilities from your paragon path or epic destiny. At the same time the requirements are much simpler; they’re easier to understand and won’t make you jump through hoops. Bonner then outlines some salient points of the Paragon path design: * There's a set pace of progression similar to normal leveling, such as all Paragon paths all getting an Encounter Power all at the same time * Less restrictions for taking a Paragon path, and it's explicitly mentioned which paths are supposed to go with which classes, instead of the 3E design where you looked at the prerequisites, the lore and the abilities to guess at who the Prestige class was really "meant" for * Of the twelve Paragon paths to be included in the first PHB, each path was based on the combination of two classes, so that each class would generally have three paths to pick from * Bonner mentions having worked on the Cleric/Paladin, Paladin/Fighter, Fighter/Ranger and Wizard/Ranger paths quote:Epic destinies are a smaller group, but each one gives you some huge benefits. Only a few are planned for the Player’s Handbook, but when you have the option to serve as the right-hand man to a god, become an undying warrior, or call dragons with a wave of your hand, more than a few choices will make your head explode in a burst of awesome. By the time you finish your epic destiny, you’ll be stomping down all challengers, breaking rules of science, and odds are you’ll be immortal. There's still one more part I'd like to present before ending this book: a collection of essays and anecdotes from the various designers on their reflections on both 3rd and 4th Edition's designs. Next up: Staff Thoughts
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Jul 6, 2015 16:01
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Wizards Presents: Races and Classes Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10 Staff Thoughts To cap off this book, I'm going to do one last round of quotes from the various designers commenting on their work on 4th Edition. James Wyatt quote:I’m so excited about 4th Edition I can barely contain myself. Running the Delve in our booth yesterday was awkward—I saw so many of the things I have grown to dislike about 3E come into play. Oh, the poor rogue’s useless against all these plants and elementals. Oh, the poor dwarf didn’t confirm his crit. Oh, look at all the people forgetting about attacks of opportunity (especially at reach) and getting pummeled as a result. I can’t say too much about it, but you can be sure it’s not just grapple that got an overhaul. quote:You can’t really just convert a character directly from 3E to 4E. We pretended you could do that from 2E to 3E, but that conversion book was pretty well bogus. The fact is, as I explained it a lot at Gen Con, that your character isn’t what’s on your character sheet: your character is the guy in your head. The character sheet is how the guy in your head interacts with the rules of the game. The rules of the game are different, so you’ll be creating a new implementation of that character, but the character needn’t change much. In fact, I propose that in 4E your character might actually be truer to your vision of him than in 3E. You might finally see him or her doing all the cool things you imagined doing but that never quite came out on the 3E table. David Noonan quote:New multiclassing rules, you ask. Yep, we’ve got ’em. Multiclass characters are running at a couple of our internal playtest tables right now. Early results are promising, but we’re talking about only a couple of characters, so we haven’t seen broad proof of concept yet. Matthew Sernett quote:It might sound crazy, but most of the monsters designed for 3rd Edition D&D are designed with only a hazy understanding of what numbers are appropriate. Monster design is dictated by the math and rules of design, rather than the math and rules serving a fun play experience. This description of the 3rd Edition monster creation process is interesting in the light of how 5th Edition goes back to the Challenge Rating system, has a 20 step process in the DMG for creating monsters, and that we do have Mike Mearls on record saying that they do have this internal tool for quickly matching CRs. Chris Perkins quote:The game makes the DM’s life easier in many ways. For one thing, monsters are more fun to play. A monster doesn’t need thirty spell-like abilities to be cool. Given that the typical monster has a lifespan of 3 to 5 rounds, it really only needs one or two “signature” abilities in addition to its normal attacks. The new game also makes it a lot easier for the DM to determine appropriate challenges for the party with an encounter-building system that’s much more intuitive than the current EL/CR system. It also doesn’t hurt that we’ll have a data-driven, plug-nplay encounter builder tool on D&D Insider. Do you feel you may face backlash from players who enjoy 3.0 and 3.5 and don’t want to upgrade their rules or campaigns? quote:We faced a similar situation with the change from 2nd Edition to 3rd Edition, so we assume that not every 3rd-Edition player will switch over to the new game overnight. All in all, 4th Edition offers a much better gaming experience for players and Dungeon Masters. Even though 3rd Edition is an excellent game, 4th Edition gives players better character options at every level, makes DMing less of a chore, and (as mentioned above) speeds up round-by-round combat. I expect that the improvements in game play will convince even reluctant players to switch over to 4th Edition. I also anticipate that the majority of d20 publishers will support 4th Edition going forward. We’ve been reading a lot about talent trees in 4th Edition. Will 4th Edition characters progress similarly to those in an MMORPG and was this sort of play dynamic the inspiration for the new 4th Edition rules? quote:Talent trees aren’t unique to MMORPGs. Wizards has produced other games that use talent trees, such as the d20 MODERN Roleplaying Game and the Star Wars Roleplaying Game Saga Edition. The theory of game design, regardless of platform, is constantly evolving. We’ve taken our gaming experiences over the past decade, as well as player feedback on the games and supplements we’ve produced in that time period, to build a system for character creation and advancement in 4th Edition that draws inspiration from numerous sources, but isn’t exactly like anything that’s been done before. It seems as though many of the changes and new rules in 4th Edition were inspired or emulate the ease-of-use of the current generation of MMO. How has the popularity of such systems affected D&D and how has it contributed to creation of 4th Edition’s game systems? quote:Just as MMOs have looked to the D&D game for inspiration, so too have we learned a few things from MMOs. (And not just MMOs, but games of all kinds.) However, the D&D game is not an MMO, nor are we turning it into one. As it happens, certain things that work well in MMOs also work well in tabletop RPGs. For example, we like the idea of being able to create different “builds” within a single character class, so that one player’s 5th level fighter can look and feel different from another player’s 5th-level fighter. This is something we experimented with in various other game products produced by Wizards in recent years. We’ve been reading a lot about class roles and how creating clearly defined roles (and different ways of approaching those roles) are a large part of what will differentiate 4th Edition. quote:Party roles existed in 3rd Edition, but they were never discussed openly in the core rules. We simply assumed that a typical group of players would know enough to make sure their party included a frontline fighter-type character, a cleric or other healer-type character, a wizard or other artillery-type character, and so forth. In the interest of helping less-experienced players build stronger parties, we’ve addressed the issue of party composition more openly and directly in 4th Edition by explaining party roles and the importance of having characters who can fill these roles. Each base class in 4th Edition has been designed to fill a specific role, but that’s not all the class aims to do, and every base class has things that it can do outside of its primary role. Mike Mearls quote:3E got a lot of things right, but anyone who has played it for a time knows that it gets things wrong. There are also legacy issues with the game that have persisted unquestioned for years. 4E is all about taking the things that work in D&D, keeping them in the game, and fixing everything else. That’s the goal, and I think we’re heading there. And that about does it for the book. I found it fairly insightful as a set of "developer diaries" that we get rather often in the video game industry, but not so much in the TRPG hobby, or perhaps, only recently as we've seen a growing shift towards greater interaction with social media. Certainly it serves as a counter-point to the theory that 4th Edition was supposed to a great departure from D&D's tropes (or really, tropes that were only mostly established with 3rd Edition). I rather enjoyed doing this whole thing, and so much so that I started putting it up on a separate site, as much for posterity as for anyone that might want to get people to read it outside of SA.
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Jul 7, 2015 19:23
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Night10194 posted:Would this be a farmer who has to deal with terrible beasts or some kind of exotic monster rancher, or just a chap trying not to starve when the Beet Famine comes? Wouldn't the latter just be Agricola: The RPG? Try to play as the world's most average farmer!
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Jul 10, 2015 03:19
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Dungeons the Dragoning. I want to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.
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Jul 10, 2015 05:46
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I had a big poo poo-eating grin that whole System Mastery episode. You just know it's a terrible system (but a great discussion!) when John/Jeff cling onto any possible tangent desperately just to avoid having to talk about some lovely book. It almost feels like the book was written with equal parts contempt for its players and the Scary-Movie school of "a thing happened" referential gags, and I'm sorry you had to suffer through that.
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Jul 23, 2015 10:39
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I'm no expert on the genre (which is why I left that part up to Kai Tave!), but my interpretation of the whole Magic Deer thing is that it creates a scenario where the heroes are in service of the crown, and the crown is unambiguously good. There is no element of "well what if Queen Jaellin is an imperialistic exploiter and you're actually supposed to join the Shadow to overthrow her". For sure, there are plot hooks that involve domestic issues within the kingdom, but because of how the sovereign is picked, there's never supposed to be any doubt that maintaining the status quo is an ideal goal to constantly strive for.
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Jul 23, 2015 15:17
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That part where you said the book says the Holmeister should just reroll attacks right in front of the players until they hit was hilarious! I was just enamored at how blatant it was, although yes it's a very poor product if you actually paid for it with the expectation to have something that's actually playable. And then you got to the part where there's a full page of lawyer jokes and I just lost it completely.
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Jul 23, 2015 17:23
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PurpleXVI posted:The Golden Hart also sounds like a bit of a dick, it gives the Blue Rose Scepter, an object meant to be held in your hand, to the intelligent animals, none of which have opposable thumbs. How do the "Rhydan" work, anyway? Are they Narnia-esque normal animals, but intelligent and talkative/psychic, with the occasional fantasy animal like a unicorn? Or are they all fantasy animals, while the normal animals are just normal animals? As far as my reading of it, they are "normal" animals, except they have intelligence and psychic ability, but they can still only make the vocalizations available to them as animals, and "verbal" communication is done psychically. You are correct that they do not have opposable thumbs, and they look the same as normal animals, except of course that the normal animals are just that, without the intelligence and the psychic ability.
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Jul 24, 2015 09:12
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Kai Tave posted:That is absolutely a valid option! I would say it's one of the reasons why Sayvin is portrayed as not a baby-eating black-hearted plotter but a guy experiencing a pretty normal bout of jealousy that's beginning to grow into full-blown resentment, someone who's sympathetic but starting to get a bit too wrapped up in his envy. It would absolutely be in keeping with the themes of the game for the players to discover that Sayvin is starting to meander down a treacherous path and pulling him back from it while agents of Shadow work to tug him in the opposite direction. You beat me to it, but yeah, the thing about describing Sayvin as something like post-Episode 1 Anakin rather mid-Episode 3 Anakin at the assumed start of the campaign is so that there's still lots of time to take the character into a redeemable direction. By only having the specter of him turning into the big baddie without committing him to it just yet, it's not a given that he would necessarily fall into that role.
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Jul 25, 2015 18:24
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Is the idea of a golden deer a trope in fantasy settings? I know it was a thing in the 2014 Beauty and the Beast movie with Vincent Cassel, and as I was driving home last night I swear I passed by a "Golden Hart Enterprises", which creeped me the hell out seeing as I go through that road every week and never noticed it before (I'm probably just reading too much Lovecraft lately)
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Jul 26, 2015 01:41
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I think Scarlet Heroes/Red Tide also toys with that idea as far as goblins turning into orcs turning into hobgoblins turning into bugbears.
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Jul 26, 2015 12:27
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Davin Valkri posted:How do people resolve this in universes where concepts like Good, Evil, Law, Chaos, etc., have literal definitions? It seems that themes about corruption of institutions and "the only morals one can trust are one's own" should be more relevant in cases where there isn't a factual god you can appeal to about the Rightness of whatever, which places like Blue Rose and baseline D&D seem to embody. Perhaps the concept of a literal and unambiguous good is so alien to the human experience that we feel a need to subvert that. Something something Pleasantville and the uncanny valley. Night10194 posted:D&D has never seemed to really address what the hell Detect Evil would do to a world. It's just a convenient radar for who you're allowed to murder, usually. I don't know how or why alignment turned into a prescription for behavior/personality, but when it was literally just "pick one, you're absolutely free to murder the other two" it worked quite well.
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Jul 29, 2015 06:09
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