The Gaming Den

Crissa wrote:How is it a straw man that Kaelik said 'these hard encounters are too hard for unoptimized characters?'

It is not. That's why this particular statement is simply an incorrect stantement, while "You said that all fights should be designed in places that are advantageous to the PCs, and should be weaker versions of the actual challenges" is a strawman.

Note, that there might be different assumptions at work, because when I say "unoptimized", I mean stuff like barbarians with two-handed axes (without ubercharging), blaster/buff wizards, clerics that play a support role and rogues that don't throw acid flasks. You know, the characters that most people who don't visit CharOp boards tend to play. If when he says "unoptimized" he means stuff like "characters that forget to pump their primary stat, put money in stuff that does not help their primary schtick and spend all feats on Diehard, Toughness and Skill Focus (basketweaving)", then obviously he is correct in saying that such characters won't be able to handle tough encounters. But these characters aren't really "unoptimized". They are "deliberately crippled", as any player who is not an idiot will realize that making such choices will undermine his character's competency.

FatR wrote:

Crissa wrote:How is it a straw man that Kaelik said 'these hard encounters are too hard for unoptimized characters?'

It is not. That's why this particular statement is simply an incorrect stantement, while "You said that all fights should be designed in places that are advantageous to the PCs, and should be weaker versions of the actual challenges" is a strawman.

Note, that there might be different assumptions at work, because when I say "unoptimized", I mean stuff like barbarians with two-handed axes (without ubercharging), blaster/buff wizards, clerics that play a support role and rogues that don't throw acid flasks. You know, the characters that most people who don't visit CharOp boards tend to play. If when he says "unoptimized" he means stuff like "characters that forget to pump their primary stat, put money in stuff that does not help their primary schtick and spend all feats on Diehard, Toughness and Skill Focus (basketweaving)", then obviously he is correct in saying that such characters won't be able to handle tough encounters. But these characters aren't really "unoptimized". They are "deliberately crippled", as any player who is not an idiot will realize that making such choices will undermine his character's competency.

No FatR, you didn't say all. You just said the CR 8 encounter that the party faces should be in terrain advantageous to them (the party), and shouldn't be a really hard CR 8 challenge.

You then further clarified in a later post that level 10 parties shouldn't have to fight the creme of the CR 8 crop, when in fact, they do, and they also have to fight CR 10 and 12 monsters.

But you know what, you want set up dichotomies between unoptimized and deliberately crippled, and that's cute. But people actually do take Toughness with their Wizards, Skill Focus (some shit) with lots of characters, Diehard with Barbarians, and spend money on non-primary schtick and not push primary stat all the time.

The Pathfinder Iconics don't fucking take Skill Focus Basketweaving, they still can't fight their way out of a CR appropriate bag.

Make A core only party of level 10, don't use Acid flasks, don't use archery + ring of blink, don't use BC and save or dies with optimization, make a fireball Wizard, make a Cleric that does whatever, and make a Barbarian with a Greataxe. Use the Elite Array. Have fun. Compare that party against an actual goddam it CR ten encounter or four.

My very first game of 3.5 D&D had all those things, the TWFing rogue, the Greataxe Barbarian, the Cleric who thought he was a healer. And I fucking carried the team against non CR opponents. Because goddam it, if we had faced real CR challenges, I don't know that I'd have been able to keep them all alive.

The Barbarian actually had Endurance and Diehard. The Rogue was blowing all his feats down the TWFing tree and still could never get a full attack sneak attack off without tremendous set up. That's not deliberately crippled, but it is crippled. The "iconic party" can't actually fucking face appropriate CR challenges past level 8.

Kaelik wrote:I fucking carried the team against non CR opponents. Because goddam it, if we had faced real CR challenges, I don't know that I'd have been able to keep them all alive.

So, were you playing d&d when this happened?

It is really astonishing how narrowly some people define D&D.

Let's say an adventure consists of a thieves guild terrorizing a small village. They've got a badnit camp out in the forest, raiding caravans, a slaving and smuggler business hidden under a tavern, with the innkeeper part of the operation, and ties to pirates. All enemies are NPCs, and the NPCs are carefully built so they can challenge the PCs.

By some definitions that's no D&D adventure.

Kaelik wrote:No FatR, you didn't say all. You just said the CR 8 encounter that the party faces should be in terrain advantageous to them (the party), and shouldn't be a really hard CR 8 challenge.

Bull. Shit. That's what I initially said:

FatR wrote:A level 10 fighter beating CR 8 challenges =/= rocket launcher tag, as described by Roy and the need to optimize relentlessly to keep up. Not even nearly. Particularly if the GM tries to specifically compensate weaker classes, or places the encounters in places that allow the fighter to easily engage them (like, you know, dungeons).

Where the fuck "party" is involved in this. Where the fuck "shouldn't be really hard" is mentioned? This is actually fucking reasonable conditions for suvival of a single PC (even before taking in the account fact that fightarz tend to depend on others at these levels), as a routine encounter for a single lvl 10 PC should presumably be CR6, and anything above that carries a non-insignificant chance of dying.

Kaelik wrote:You then further clarified in a later post that level 10 parties shouldn't have to fight the creme of the CR 8 crop, when in fact, they do, and they also have to fight CR 10 and 12 monsters.

More bullshit. Here's what I said:

FatR wrote:Except... no. A classic party of fighter, cleric, rogue and wizard won't have any problem. Even though you picked cream-of-the-crop of CR8 challenges, instead of destrachans, mohrgs and whatever. Unless by "unoptimized" you mean "deliberately crippled". Granted, they won't have problems mostly because the casters are inherently awesome, but they won't.

FatR wrote:And again... no. Unless you put of them in situations that seriously favor the monster in question and give the party no time to prepare, and rearrange spells for the couatl, these will be moderately difficult at best. As they should be. Hydra, in fact, requires a very advantageous terrain, that allows it to melee and does not allow the party to scout it beforehand, to be a threat at all.

Even putting aside the fact, that PCs do not actually have to fight that particular things, this is extreme strawmanning, made all the more insane by the fact, that anyone can easily check the thread and see that I didn't say any that. You're about one post away from joining Roy on the ignore list for exactly the same reason.

Kaelik wrote:But you know what, you want set up dichotomies between unoptimized and deliberately crippled, and that's cute. But people actually do take Toughness with their Wizards, Skill Focus (some shit) with lots of characters, Diehard with Barbarians, and spend money on non-primary schtick and not push primary stat all the time.

You know what? This is also OK, for certain kinds of games, where ability to fight appropriate CR don't even fucking matters at all, because the game is primarily non-combat/GM doesn't even look at it and always adjusts the difficulty to the party's competence. But I assume that if we explicitly play the game of fantasy SWAT, then people will be able to fuigure out that being combat-focused is a good thing. And so they will not put feats like Diehard, Toughness or Skill Focus (random crap) on their characters, or at least will not do so after their first game ever.

Kaelik wrote:My very first game of 3.5 D&D had all those things, the TWFing rogue, the Greataxe Barbarian, the Cleric who thought he was a healer. And I fucking carried the team against non CR opponents. Because goddam it, if we had faced real CR challenges, I don't know that I'd have been able to keep them all alive.

And a short 3.5 game in which I've recently played had even worse characters (a single-wielding rogue, a hexblade who didn't use his magical abilities, like, at all, relying solely on his two-hander, a druid who rolled extremely poor stats, never meleed and had useless horse companion, so he just slinged around direct spell damage and summoned wolves, and my wizard who only joined later and deliberately was built like a standard low-end Batman-wizard, instead of something more appropriate for an endurance run through a dungeon chock-full of over-CRed undead). We were levels 5-6, running through an official module (Heart of Nightfang Spire), which is intended for level 10 (although 3.0 level 10, but still). We were owning it, if through a slow and rather boring way of gradual attrition and careful preparation. Granted, mostly because monsters acted like mobs (i.e., they didn't come to hunt us en masse, BBEG didn't left his sanctum to kill our asses personally after the first attack, and, IIRC, non-boss undead were all too prone to attack the closest living target, leading to being distracted by summons). But guess what, that's how this module is supposed to be run, that's how 3.X is supposed to be played by its authors, and that's how it is played, because someone bought these modules, and other modules after them, after all. You can argue that this way to run the game is dumb and ruins the suspension of disbelief and I will even be highly inclined to agree. You cannot argue, that 3.X does not work without optimization, if it is run the way authors intended it to be ran.

EDIT: Also note, that the dumb behavior of opponents was only mandatory for survival because we were massively underleveled, half the party really sucked at building strong characters and half the party (I and the druid player) was deliberately hobbling our characters. My own campaign, mentioned above, was loosely based on Rise of the Runelords AP from Paizo, only one player was remotely optimized, while still likely being a total loser by your standards (even with houserules aimed at improving melee classes), and, well, the party survives so far.

FatR wrote:Bullshit. The second and third Paizo's APs from Dragon are not "most published adventures". In fact, they are far more lethal than most of Paizo's normal Dragon adventures, never mind their non-Dragon APs, which tend start with things like goblins and human experts (with no numerical advantage) or WotC APs. As a side note, the first fight in the Shackled City AP is not CR 3 and the party must really be quite unlucky to lose it, considering that they even have support, and the first unavoidable fight is CR 2 (PCs also might have support by this point), so no, it doesn't start with a "decently tough level 3 fight".

And of course, you go dumpster diving through some random obscure things like six people have played, ever (counting the four playtesters) instead of using examples people might actually use (Age of Worms, Shackled City, Savage Tide, RHoD...)

Let's see... Age of Worms starts with 3 wolves. Just stock mobs really, except two have minimum HP and one has maximum HP. In any case, 3d6+3 is likely going to take one person down. And they'll totally do that. They even say they do that. And this is happening every single round. This is also just the beginning.

Already been over the others so I'll stop there.

Entirely false. The entire fight is CR 8, it comes in two waves, it mostly consist of weak-ass warrior 2 grunts, all enemies are seriously underoptimized. And as the ambushers are said warrior 2 grunts, that have -4 to Hide and -2 to MS, they need a lot of luck to pull the surprise. And it is unclear, whether RHoD starts at level 5 or 6 (the cover and the text contradict each other).

Try again. Count them up. As for the stealth, cover, distance, and possible distraction, combined with the fact that if spot/listen isn't on your list you'll suck at it. Sure, they aren't good at it, but they'll probably get the jump. And while it is a swarm of mooks, this is level 5. So you have abilities that deal with that, except they're too far apart for those abilities to do much. And just the fact there's six of the dumbfuck auto attackers shooting the same person + other stuff starts us off with a death a round. If it were a bit higher level you can just pull a Glitterdust, got them all. Indeed, that's exactly what you do later on.

Except... focusing fire on a single particular enemy in ranged combat is nowhere near a basic tactics, in typical situations, unless you treat mobs as the extensions of GM's Hivemind, and not allowing to melee-gangbang one character from all sides is as basic as trying to do it.

Fail.

Enemy A shoots.

Enemy B turn.

Is the target down (yes/no)?
-Yes: Select next target in line.
-No: Shoot same target.

Even if you were honestly fucking trying to argue that understanding the basic rules of their world - injuries do not impede combat effectiveness in any way until they cause the target to lose consciousness or die were somehow anything other than basic tactics, oh right. RHoD is about fighting a bunch of military sorts. So if it did qualify as something more advanced than 'hurk durk duh', you'd still fucking see it.

The rest of that doesn't even make any fucking sense. Giant Frog is Giant.

A lie. No... a bald-faced, fucking lie. Unless you deliberately anti-optimize encounters, by, say making enemies bugbear sorcerers with Ligtning Bolt as their best spell; equipping enemies with feats like Diehard; granting them shit PrCs like Blighter; putting ECL-adding templates on primary spellcasters; and using sword-and-board or two-weapons-without-bonus-damage grunts a lot. (All examples are from RHoD, said to be the hardest WotC adventure, probably because you cannot screw up dragons too much.) Which you don't, if your actual game examples and, oh, every point you have ever made in discussions I'm aware of, is any indication.

And you conveniently forget to mention that for the most part, you're expected to go from 5 to 10-12 with very few chances to shop for upgrades. Which leaves you stuck with the random drops. And while quantity wise, there's a lot of stuff there most of it is gold fodder either because it's equal or inferior to what you already have, or is just plain useless. So while the mobs are gimps, so are you, and that's why it gets that rep.

RandomCasualty2 wrote:"Things they are supposed to overcome." According to what? Some arbitrary guidelines in your head?

No. And since you haven't gotten it the other times I explained it to you, you never will.

If you can "jack it up", you can also power it down. I don't really see the problem.

Fail. Learn to read. Again.

You've got a big flaw in your thinking. If you want challenging encounters, optimization increases the chances of death, because charOp in 3.5 is almost exclusively offensive. So the more optimized you are, the DM optimizes your foes and you've got glass cannon on glass cannon. That makes the game more lethal, not less. Having more offense makes the game more swingy and open to one bad roll screwing people.

BZZT! Fail.

If you're just playing stock stuff, then PC casters have save or dies. And save or loses, which are functionally near identical. They have those because you can just pick them up and use them, no optimization involved or required. A long list of enemies has them as well. And the enemies that don't just kill you in 1-2 full attacks. PC non casters do not, by default have any means of 1-2 rounding the enemy though, despite the fact everyone else does.

Now, the spells 1-2 round you because you can only get your saves to average level, at best without optimization. And while '50% chance to make a save' sounds good in theory, in practice it means Iterative Probability is spitroasting you every combat.

The auto attacks 1-2 round you because it's basically impossible for AC to protect you, and very few characters have any more meaningful alternatives at all.

Start optimizing, and it's really hard to improve on 1-2 round wins. But there's a lot of save boosting tricks and real defense gaining tricks you can use that do improve your capabilities. Even when you consider the save DC is also going up, or the attack bonus you're still getting a bigger gain on the defensive side because there's more room to improve on the defensive side. And then there are immunities to common effects. So really, optimizing makes it RLT with forcefields. Because that's what you call it when you have a 95% chance of ignoring the win spell every round assuming you are not immune, and can actually deal with the auto attack spammers by auto attacking, yourself.

It's also about the only way, ever a group can be anywhere near competent and take longer than 18 seconds to deal with any combat anywhere within the range of level appropriateness... even if that means the highest possible level you should be throwing at them as a BBEG fight.

Funny how the way my game actually works is so different from the way you blindly caricature it as working eh?

RandomCasualty2 wrote:

Lago PARANOIA wrote:So how come Mutants and Masterminds hasn't taken off as an awesometastic RPG yet?

Effects are easy to adjust to monsters and all of the PCs are generally about equal to each other as long as they have blast and flight. And you can grab whatever bullshit effects you want to 'express' your charater. Seems like the perfect kind of roleplaying game.

Well it's 3rd party d20, which instant limits its widespread nature.

Also, fantasy RPGs tend to be more popular than superhero games for whatever reason. Really, no superhero game has ever been that popular in general. M&M is maybe the most popular Superhero RPG, beat out only by Champions maybe, but I don't have statistics. But the genre just doesn't seem to be something that sells well.

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but didn't D&D 3.5 sell very well? Sure, it wasn't advertised as a superhero game, but look at it for a few seconds. Looks familiar, doesn't it? And it does the superhero thing better than most systems specifically for that. Which isn't saying much, granted, just thought I'd point that out.

Fuchs wrote:

Kaelik wrote: I know. What was I thinking? How dare I expect people who want to play D&D to follow the rules of D&D.

I think you forgot rule 0, Kaelik. Blind adhering to the rules if they are no fun is stupid. If you can improve a game for you and your group by changing fluff, rules, or just some parameters you are by the rules allowed to - last I knew no one stated in the rules how NPCs need to act - why wouldn't you?

I find the idea that just because my NPCs rather capture than kill - something Frank mentioned as a concept too, once - I am suddenly not playing D&D anymore rather ... weird.

You weren't called out on capturing for it not being D&D. You were called out on it because... wait for it...

GETTING CAPTURED IS WORSE THAN FUCKING GETTING KILLED IN D&D BY FAR!

And since you were trying to argue against 'no, they don't die all the time in every single fight', pointing out that you make something worse happen when you're claiming something better is happening is monumental stupidity, Giant Frog, and Epic Fail.

For that matter, so is the entire other side of this thread. Seriously, it's devolved into fucking Paizil Brand Fail where people try to pretend objective definitional factors are not, Fuchs keeps wanking off to his 'opposite of what author intended' strawman, and one or two others give him a reach around. And meanwhile, they're ignoring the people with actual sense, so they can turn the Den into a fucking gay dumbfuck orgy.

And ya know what? For all the bitching around here about centaur sex and pony sex and dog sex that would actually be an improvement for this thread. No really. As bad as the subject of bestiality is, it is still less objectively repulsive than this sort of blatant stupidity. And that isn't because I support any of those things, so don't bother wanking off to that straw man. It's because as bad as they are, this is worse. Of course, we'd all be better off if the topic matter changed to something people actually fucking wanted to talk about. That goes without saying.

But the Dumbfuck Squad here is literally worse than dog sex. Fuck you with a barrel of horse cocks.

FatR wrote:Even putting aside the fact, that PCs do not actually have to fight that particular things, this is extreme strawmanning, made all the more insane by the fact, that anyone can easily check the thread and see that I didn't say any that. You're about one post away from joining Roy on the ignore list for exactly the same reason.

Fuck you in your fucking ear. Yes, people can look back at the thread, which is why they can see you complaining about how I picked creme of the crop CR 8 monsters to go against a level 10 party, and they can see that is fucking bullshit. And they can fucking see that you you keep accusing me of strawmanning for talking about the things you actually did say, like "compensate for weak classes" (AKA nerf monsters) or "places the encounters in places that allow the fighter to easily engage them" (AKA, no I can't let monster that have ambushes or hit and run described in their actual tactics sections use those tactics. They just have to be nice to the fighter.)

And you know what, every single person but you knows that when I am talking about a Fighter being useless against CR 8 monsters, I'm not talking about him soloing them. Every fucking person but you. Take a goddam poll.

And don't be a whiny bitch and threaten me with the big ignore button if I keep contradicting you. Just do it or don't.

Kaelik, once you mature a bit you might undestand that not everyone has to play like you or Roy do. That tailoring or adapting an adventure to the actual PCs in game is how many people play D&D. Maybe even that not everyone has fun the way you do.

I understand how you play D&D, I just wish you might understand how others play D&D, and that both styles are equally valid.

Fuchs wrote:Kaelik, once you mature a bit you might undestand that not everyone has to play like you or Roy do. That tailoring or adapting an adventure to the actual PCs in game is how many people play D&D. Maybe even that not everyone has fun the way you do.

I understand how you play D&D, I just wish you might understand how others play D&D, and that both styles are equally valid.

Suck a fucking dick and learn to read. I never said other people can't play other ways. I said you can't fucking tell Roy he's wrong about the mechanics of D&D when he's right because you can change the mechanics. You can also play Shadowrun, that has no effect on D&D.

Kaelik wrote:

Fuchs wrote:Kaelik, once you mature a bit you might undestand that not everyone has to play like you or Roy do. That tailoring or adapting an adventure to the actual PCs in game is how many people play D&D. Maybe even that not everyone has fun the way you do.

I understand how you play D&D, I just wish you might understand how others play D&D, and that both styles are equally valid.

Suck a fucking dick and learn to read. I never said other people can't play other ways. I said you can't fucking tell Roy he's wrong about the mechanics of D&D when he's right because you can change the mechanics. You can also play Shadowrun, that has no effect on D&D.

This is what I said:

Fuchs wrote:Not everyone plays D&D with the assumption that the DM is actively trying to kill off PCs and only minmaxing and good tactics and good rolls can keep them alive. Losing doesn't have to mean dieing.

Some play a much more relaxed game, where PCs do not die unless the player chooses so. (They might get captured, enslaved, routed, humilated, etc., but the character doesn't (perma)die unless the player wants to change PCs.

And this was in response to this:

Roy wrote: First, bullshit. You are in direct competition with Team Monster. If you lose your character dies. Sometimes it's worse than that. As this defines the entire game, it is very much competitive.

It's quite simple, really: Not everyone has characters die after a lost combat. And if someone says that D&D means character death ("or worse"), then that's wrong.

Kaelik wrote: Fuck you in your fucking ear. Yes, people can look back at the thread, which is why they can see you complaining about how I picked creme of the crop CR 8 monsters to go against a level 10 party, and they can see that is fucking bullshit. And they can fucking see that you you keep accusing me of strawmanning for talking about the things you actually did say, like "compensate for weak classes" (AKA nerf monsters) or "places the encounters in places that allow the fighter to easily engage them" (AKA, no I can't let monster that have ambushes or hit and run described in their actual tactics sections use those tactics. They just have to be nice to the fighter.)

And you know what, every single person but you knows that when I am talking about a Fighter being useless against CR 8 monsters, I'm not talking about him soloing them. Every fucking person but you. Take a goddam poll.

And don't be a whiny bitch and threaten me with the big ignore button if I keep contradicting you. Just do it or don't.

There you go. The life is too short to waste on people who shift goalposts every time (now it is suddenly "fighters suck" - thank you for this profound revelation, Captain Obvious, but this is no way proves that parties cannot play DnD without optimization and survive) and cannot argue honestly.

Fuchs wrote:It's quite simple, really: Not everyone has characters die after a lost combat. And if someone says that D&D means character death ("or worse"), then that's wrong.

Go get plowed by a fucking horse.

Fuchs wrote:It's quite simple, really: Not everyone has characters die after a lost combat. And if someone says that D&D means character death ("or worse"), then that's wrong.

Yes, I just fucking quoted you twice. Know why I did that? Read that bolded part.

You fucking said losing can mean capturing or whatever. Not just once, but you spammed that lying straw man of Fail all over the fucking place. And getting captured is a fate worse than death for reasons that have been spelled out and that everyfuckingone but you understand and accepts.

Which means by your own fucking words, you're wrong. Congratulations, you fellated a sword, you retard.



Dur dur dur dur dow dunh dunh dunh!

Obvious Fucking Troll is Fucking Obvious.

Now stop wasting our time with your drivel.

Oh, and about Oberoni Fallacy. Picking weaker compositions of opponents, never mind running monsters with their standard package of weak feats and spells is not, in fact, committing it. Neither is ensuring that the party doesn't croak through non-mechanical methods, such as BBEG being too busy dragging himself out of his imprisonment or otherwise occupied until the endgame, so that he won't scry and fry PCs as soon as they interrupt his plans (or, again, some encounters happening in these places, that are right there in the game's name). Strictly by RAW, the GM is perfectly within his rights to pick a composition of enemies that is in fact, plays against the party's strengths, and is not demanded to pick enemies that assault their weaknesses. Neither does RAW demand to pick the best spells and feats for humanoid enemies (and one can argue, that rearranging feats on monsters is actually a deviation from RAW). Moreover, Roy and Kaelik so far failed to make clear, how the hell a game (assuming, that people at the table don't consider the optimization minigame the main attraction of DnD) can actually benefit from not taking any of the above-outlined lethality-reducing measures.

Actually. I'm not sure why you would focus on the (actual fact) that getting captured is largely more humiliating, frustrating and unfortunate than character death in D&D.

Because. Er. Not having character death is actually a giant house rule within the D&D rules system. I'll go with 3.x because that's what I know best.

So lets pretend for a second that just choosing not to use death SoD effects is even possible. It's a massive stretch that writes large chunks of the best spells off everyone's lists, sort of, since to pretend it's not a giant Oberoni house rule they are "still there" but no one is allowed to actually use them.

And lets pretend that monsters with death effects or death spells like Medusa and shit, just happen to exist in the game world (again to avoid the house rule accusation) but just happen not to turn up (and lets pretend that isn't a massive limitation on encounters and adventure possibilities that divorces vast parts of D&D including iconic D&D shit like Mind Flayers and Beholders).

Let's go straight to DROOLING IDIOT TOWN where every monster and NPC want's to take you alive. And all the ones with death rays just left their death rays at home or went on a six month cruise touring everywhere you aren't.

Assuming all those MASSIVE FUCKING HOUSE RULES and pretending they AREN'T massive fucking house rules but "just choices"...

The basic way damage dealing and the HP system works STILL makes character death a very real and regular possibility unless you actually completely house rule the damage system too. Even if every dumb ass in existence tries very hard to minimise their damage output and use x2 crit only weapons. Death happens unless you Oberoni like a little bitch!

You can ONLY eliminate character death using the rules by ignoring options that you officially pretend still exist if every sucker in the universe ALSO uses god damn penalized weak as piss flat of blade and untrained unarmed non lethal damage crap!

I mean seriously the dark knight has to be all "Well then PCs, you are here to foil my plan to kill the king, I shall pummel you with untrained fisty cuffs"

Then the wizard just casts sleep and the DM running the "nonlethal" game is shipped off to kindergarten for the day whether he likes it or not because mommy is tired of his moronically house ruled game and how it's not just utterly alien to the core rules but also actually objectively shitter than ever before.

If you say that a problem in a rule set does not exist because the rule set could be changed to not have the discussed problem, you are wrong.

That doesn't apply to this conversation. 3e sucks. I don't see anyone arguing that 3e doesn't suck because DMs can deliberately run encounters that are dramatically easier than those suggested by the guidelines.

Now, you could argue that this is "Edition Trolling". People were talking about regular 3e, and suddenly Fuchs starts talking about 3e with a DM who matches the challenges to the party, rather than following the CR guidelines. I would be frankly amazed if the 3e DMG didn't have some text to encourage those type of shenanigans. This would be a completely valid complaint if this wasn't a thread called 4e quirks.

The 4e DMG broadly talks about dealing with sucky players, such as the Instigator who deliberately does stupid things because they are bored. This is because 4e is a game designed for sucky players and sucky DMs. Yes, I'm sure some of you sometimes play characters that are stupid and easily bored, and yes, this is in fact roleplaying. The DMG is talking about players who always play characters that are stupid and easily bored, because those players are stupid and easily bored.

PL, the only real important criteria for a game is whether everyone involved had fun. If a game is more fun without SoDs, off they go. If everyone has more fun when the DM sticks to a few themes for enemies, and doesn't plug in Beholders, Mind Flayers and Aboleths just because they are in the MM, then that's what people do.

With regard to character death: Having characters permadie is utterly alien to the core 3.0 game as soon as you reach middle level. In higher levels, death is just a speedbumb and a gold tax.

I'd rather have a game where PCs do not die, but where I can remove raise death than feel like "hardcore" for having the cosnequence of death being 5K gold and a spell used yet having massive adjustments to the game world for all the revive spells being included.

Others don't, that's their taste.

But "objectively shitter"? If everyone has fun compared to not having fun before, then it's not objectively shitter, but better. If all are having fun and without such adjustments and gentlemen's agreements and house rules there wouldn't even be a game to play because the DM won't run it, then it's the right thing to do.

FatR wrote:There you go. The life is too short to waste on people who shift goalposts every time (now it is suddenly "fighters suck" - thank you for this profound revelation, Captain Obvious, but this is no way proves that parties cannot play DnD without optimization and survive) and cannot argue honestly.

Hey fucktard, remember this part: "And Rogues and Wizards but not Druids."

Yes, unoptimized fighters suck. The point here is that holy fucking shit, unoptimized parties suck. My contention is that unoptimized parties can't face CR. To say I'm changing the subject when I'm talking about how one fourth of the iconic party can't do it, that's not a different subject, it's one fourth of the subject. And it applies just as well to unoptimized Wizards and Rogues and Clerics.

That isn't a gentleman's agreement you moron, it's a massive set of complex house rules.

You have to do the following.

House rule out all death spells (big change, massively restrictive, but most of BIG CHANGE YOU MORON).

House rule out all death monsters (big change, big change, massively restrictive, but most of BIG CHANGE YOU MORON).

House rule changes to the way damage and the HP system work in very significant ways. (BIG CHANGE YOU MORON)

But. You see you were claiming you weren't house ruling you were just "happening to have NPCs that just happen to use certain options".

SO assuming that incredible claim of yours were true about SoDs and so forth I had a look and oh, oops NO you still have to use a massive fucking house rules.

Unless you have an objectively shitter game because you can't use more than half of the printed material and all the enemies are restricted to FUCKING UNARMED STRIKE FISTY CUFFS. Because to satisfy you INANE claim that you aren't invoking Oberoni that's where you are at.

Because to "gentleman's agreement" rather than house rule into the territory you claim we are seriously seeing "flat of blade" and "unarmed strike" as the major theme of the entire game world. And that is retarded.

And by extension so are you.

edit: Oh and also hilariously, all of this Oberoni smoke screen is to back a claim (now so back peddled and restated as to be almost unintelligible) you have some sort of unique and better differentiation from other gamers.

Because you can house rule, er... gentleman's agreement, er, totally ignore the game rules to declare characters haven't really died because that sucks... er. Yeah. Like that's original or different.

Like I said, you present nothing but a Real Role Player slur.

I here by officially declare you to be one of Them. You are a Basket Weaver.

the only function of CRs is to (how their name says) Rate the Challenges the GM decide to send against the players (how well they do that is another discussion) , if a GM decide to use the CR to send only easy fights to his players, well, that is his own business and -unless you play in his campaign- certainly not yours. And even more certainly you can't say he is not playing D&D.

PhoneLobster wrote:House rule out all death monsters (big change, big change, massively restrictive, but most of BIG CHANGE YOU MORON).

Wait -- so every time I neglect to put a particular monster (no matter how stupid it is) into my campaign, it's a BIG CHANGE YOU MORON? By that standard, every published module fails except for "The World's Largest Dungeon".

I better start putting some elasmosauruses and shriekers into my campaign, stat! Otherwise it won't be a "real" D&D game!!!!!!!

While I grok the rest of it, agree even, I don't understand how choosing not use the more deadly monsters within a CR is a big change. You're already going through a very finite number of monsters at each level, and very much not going to use all of them. You're not 'not playing D&D' if you happen to choose the relative gimps of each CR as the selection. Or am I not playing D&D because I haven't had a first level game with kobolds in it to this day?

EDIT: What hogarth said.

I don't have changes to damage, HP, nor do I consider not using every monster a house rule. And given the range of the printed material for d20 I couldn't use 90% of it even if I crammed all my sessions full of fights against different monsters each time.

Also, the "You claim to be better" is getting boring. I never said my way of playing was better, that's a figment of someone's imagination. But for me, my way of playing is more fun. Maybe you should stop feeling so defensive.

You know, I remember trying to do something like what Fuchs suggests back in 3.0. We eventually scrapped that plan when we realized that it was impossible and implausible to pull out all of the "you die, you lose, you're just fucked" effects in the game, especially above 10th level.

violence in the media wrote:You know, I remember trying to do something like what Fuchs suggests back in 3.0. We eventually scrapped that plan when we realized that it was impossible and implausible to pull out all of the "you die, you lose, you're just fucked" effects in the game, especially above 10th level.

It's been working for me since 3E came out. So, it is not impossible. Implausible? I have a less implausible world to run, all things considered, if I use some "movie rules say you survive" than if I had to juggle all the raise dead spells and their impact on society. It's easier for me to accept a few PCs as being damned lucky than adjusting the world I play in to what it would look like given the possibilities magic offers.

If you find yourself in a group where all of your players make unoptimized characters, what do you do with them? Do you warn them of the danger, then proceed to TPK them until they start making characters worth a damn? Do you refuse to run a game until they make a character (or let you make) that won't trip onto its own sword? Do you pull your punches or hand them artifact swords, steadfastly refusing to call it 'D&D', instead calling it 'my campaign'?