The Gaming Den

Schwarzkopf wrote:Yeah I honestly don't even think they can, because there's like no fucking mechanics for it at all, except for "Advanced Learning" class feature, which is super discrete and limited.

Yes, it's discrete and limited. If you want unlimited numbers of known spells and yet still to avoid the "clogging" problem that Lago mentions about, then you must be certifiably insane.

hogarth wrote: Yes, it's discrete and limited. If you want unlimited numbers of known spells and yet still to avoid the "clogging" problem that Lago mentions about, then you must be certifiably insane.

If that was directed at me, my problem with the way 3e wizards learn spells is that you can Highlander another wizard and raid his spellbooks for like 30+ new abilities at once, or just skip the Highlandering and go to the scroll section at Walmart. I have no interest in avoiding Lago's "clogging problem" wherein wizards know more than some magic single digit number of spells and therefore the game sucks.

As to Advanced Learning and such, it's not in any way tied to game events and even if you wanted to fluff it that way it's fantastically unlikely to show up at the right time. And while that's fine if you're a warmage (who's fluffed as getting a very specific spell loadout from a rigid martial training program) or a dread necro (who is Charisma-based and doesn't have to know anything and gets spells just for being spooky) it would be pretty poor if you were supposed to be an arcane scholar or care when you found the lich's library.

Finding new abilities through play doesn't have to break the game or make a character insanely complex. There's not much conceptual difference between finding a spell and finding a magic item, or researching a spell and crafting a magic item.

http://community.wizards.com/dndnext/bl ... hit_points

What the fuck? Is this seriously "which number do you like the best?" In the absence of comparable damage?

They have no fucking idea what they're doing, do they?

CapnTthePirateG wrote: They have no fucking idea what they're doing, do they?

well, is that important to making money?

The best selling edition of D&D is the one where they have the least amount of understanding of what numbers do. As long as a fireball is d6 per level it feels 'right', even if there was a big difference between monster hit points from AD&D to 3e.

Mask_De_H wrote:That's a nice sentiment and all, but if you're trying to cut down on complexity, then what point does it have to keep all those spell slots? Especially when the option is there to slot in lower level effects if necessary. And how is spell selection not using your brain as a caster, but throwing down obsolete options is? What makes dropping Magic Missile or Charm Person or Shield such a big deal when you have Lightining Bolt, Charm Monster/Dominate Person, or Blur?

Giving people an option for low level spells they won't ever use is not an argument. We have a system where you can spam one or two of your best spells a few times a day and then go home in 3e Psi, and it's not good for that very reason.

Which is to say, low level spells are a big deal because they stop you spamming your best stuff every round in every fight forever. Duh. That they aren't as good, but you can recover them more often per day, that's maybe going to tempt people into starting off fights with some weaker spells, rather than nova-casting everything. Like I said already.

And fuck Magic Missile at 7th (or any level), it's barely a step up from Burning Hands. And it's a dumb thing to get mad about.

Using what must be the worst possible 1st level spell (a couple times now) to show how useless 1st level spells are is a poor fucking argument. Good arguments and sound logic are the key to understanding anything. If you can't argue cleanly, it's a good sign you can't even think clearly.

And the idea wasn't one slot a level, it was six slots you put any level into. This is also for 5th Edition and has fuck-all to do with the Tomes.

WTF? Frank replied to my idea about 1 slot per spell level, in comparison to someone else's idea about 6 slots to spam like we're playing a bloody Psion, in a thread about how 5e hasn't even been written yet (which, given they're asking about how many hit points a first level fighter should have now, is probably true).

tussock wrote: Which is to say, low level spells are a big deal because they stop you spamming your best stuff every round in every fight forever. Duh. That they aren't as good, but you can recover them more often per day, that's maybe going to tempt people into starting off fights with some weaker spells, rather than nova-casting everything. Like I said already.

I don't think your scheme is bad, but tactically it's 4e encounter powers. Wizards would just burn through their spells in roughly descending order. They'd cast different spells every round but not in a way that's tactically interesting.

You'd also need some at-wills unless you want to constantly force low level wizards into crossbow mode.

CapnTthePirateG wrote:http://community.wizards.com/dndnext/bl ... hit_points

What the fuck? Is this seriously "which number do you like the best?" In the absence of comparable damage?

I think it's a perfectly reasonable question. It's certainly far from the most vital question, but players do have opinions about the scale of values they like to see.

CapnTthePirateG wrote:http://community.wizards.com/dndnext/bl ... hit_points

What the fuck? Is this seriously "which number do you like the best?" In the absence of comparable damage?

They have no fucking idea what they're doing, do they?

maybe they are taking form MtG and just assigning arbitrary numbers and will tweak them later.

it does seem more like you would need something to remove hit points before determining how many you have.

like take infinite hit points, go through a combat and see roughly how many each class loses and after doing that a few times you get a general idea of the range of hit points lsot per combat, then you can tailor the HP based on that.

shadzar wrote: maybe they are taking form MtG and just assigning arbitrary numbers and will tweak them later.

Those numbers aren't arbitrary.

29 HP - 4e Fighter, 14 Con
14 HP - 3e Barbarian 1 / Fighter X, 14-15 Con
12 HP - 3e Fighter, 14-15 Con
7 HP - AD&D Fighter, 15 Con, average ceiling HP roll
6 HP - BECMI Fighter, 13-15 Con, average ceiling HP roll

They built roughly the same fighter in every edition and asked the audience to vote up the fighter edition we like best. Weren't they supposed to be looking for common ground or something?

Using what must be the worst possible 1st level spell (a couple times now) to show how useless 1st level spells are is a poor fucking argument. Good arguments and sound logic are the key to understanding anything. If you can't argue cleanly, it's a good sign you can't even think clearly.

Go fuck yourself. Nitpicking at the example without addressing the underlying argument just shows that you're a fucking idiot who feels the need to engage in semantic sophistry instead of presenting a genuine argument. Presumably because you have no genuine argument. I assume similarly that if I had used Sleep or Color Spray as my example spell that you would claim semantic victory over me having used a spell with a hard level cutoff rather than something that retained base functionality at higher levels like Burning Hands. What. Fucking. Ever.

The point is that shitty action options that were level appropriate some levels in the past and aren't level appropriate now make combat turns take longer without providing much (or in some cases any) real interest or variety. If sorting through 9 actions on a round by round basis is too much now, it's going to still be too much five levels down the road, and the marginal benefit of being able to theoretically access some bullshit maneuver that was weak sauce for you five levels ago is a fucking stupid to buy yourself option paralysis with.

The issue is that it is a fucking waste of time and space to have access to combat actions that you aren't going to use because they suck. But it damages verisimilitude for a character to lose the ability to do something he was able to do when he was lower level. Erasing low level bullshit abilities off your character sheet is good for the game, but it is intellectually insulting in most cases.

You can to a limited degree get around this issue with direct upgrade and replacement. That is, if your "charge" option gets wiped out and replaced with a "wind slicer" option where you still move over there and attack enemies, but you do it in a higher level fashion with more maneuverability and functionality - then people are OK with it. But that restricts you a lot, because it means you can't introduce higher level options that don't have direct lower level equivalents.

But preparation casters have a very easy potential workaround. They have fucking slots that they fill up while other people are talking about shit and they aren't necessarily time constrained while doing it. So for them, having higher and lower level abilities on the list to prepare from is fine. They can just have a big list of powers and select a few of them for their round-by-round deliberations. And then there's no verisimilitude issue, because the lower level spells are not gone, the player just never uses them or has to consider them in combat.

Having dedicated lower level spell slots is, however, the worst of all possible worlds. It means that the player still has to sort through their low level bullshit every day and their round-by-round choices are full of useless low level crap that isn't worth considering. If you're going to do spell slots, they should be multi-level. Because that actually solves real problems in the crunch without creating problems in the fluff.

-Username17

Also, via Twitter they said they were looking to start from Fighter Hitpoints, THEN adjust monster damage

ModelCitizen wrote:

shadzar wrote: maybe they are taking form MtG and just assigning arbitrary numbers and will tweak them later.

Those numbers aren't arbitrary.

29 HP - 4e Fighter, 14 Con
14 HP - 3e Barbarian 1 / Fighter X, 14-15 Con
12 HP - 3e Fighter, 14-15 Con
7 HP - AD&D Fighter, 15 Con, average ceiling HP roll
6 HP - BECMI Fighter, 13-15 Con, average ceiling HP roll

They built roughly the same fighter in every edition and asked the audience to vote up the fighter edition we like best. Weren't they supposed to be looking for common ground or something?

you make my point for me...

they should be looking for common ground, not trying to pick the best edition.

picking the best edition is arbitrary like MtG mana cost, because they just look at something similar, jigger around and slap a cost on it. THEN they play with proxies a few times and tweak the cost.

tat is why i suggest play the game without HP. let playtesters play how they would for a combat, and see how much damage was taken.

then you know the average after a good number of these tests that a combat should take from HP.

having this info, if you want to figure out 10 combats should drain a parties resources.. then you know 10 times the average per class worth of HP would be the MOST the class should be able to expand including healed HP etc.

AD&D and TSR D&D HP only will work for those editions. if you arent using their monsters, then you would pretty much have to rewrite all the monsters anyway.

this goes true for 3rd and its ECL and LA, and CR....and also 4th with its weird bloodied and such.

the best thing, just start ALL over with stats. since the 5e inst supposed to be compatible with ANY edition, but a new edition that has the "feel" of all editions, then you dont put any editions core stats in.

they will need a module for those that like 4th style HP for the "heros" of 4th that has to be added to BECMI to raise the HP.

they cannot have minions in the core game it will have to be added as modules, and that means ANY creature would be able to go against 1st level PCs as per 3rd back. 3rd maybe less as much because of those ECL, etc.

so again.. just see how many hit points a monster should have and see what a level 1 encounter should be and go form there to figure out how much the PCs can take before killing it and viola.

Ferret wrote:Also, via Twitter they said they were looking to start from Fighter Hitpoints, THEN adjust monster damage

the problem with this is what different damage does an orc do compared to a gnoll, when using a club, long sword, mace, etc.

the damage should come from the weapon. if they do shit like a gnollish mace that only gnolls can use, or other 4th edition shit, then they fail at their overall goal.

ALL mace's should have the same damage effect unless magical with a special ability, no matter what race or class picks it up.

the rest of a monsters damage capability comes from special attacks or just plain old STR like the PCs.

doing something else and again they fail at their core goal, because they will have lost the common sense commonality of ALL the TSR editions.

i knew they were dumb with how they did many things, but it seems they dont even know their ass form a hole in the ground the way things are reading and shaping up.

I think Frank, the problem is that Wizards have slots, and those slots are not just for combat actions.

It is worth it to keep X slots a day for casting Detect Magic/Identify/Image spells/Teleport/ect.

Your argument doesn't apply to a Wizard making a choice between memorizing one Greater Teleport and one Mages Private Sanctum and one Contact Other Plane vs two Teleports and one Greater Scrying.

To be fair, neither did tussock's. Although there is something in having utility or downtime slots; the trick is determining what's hard downtime and what isn't

FrankTrollman wrote:But preparation casters have a very easy potential workaround. They have fucking slots that they fill up while other people are talking about shit and they aren't necessarily time constrained while doing it. So for them, having higher and lower level abilities on the list to prepare from is fine. They can just have a big list of powers and select a few of them for their round-by-round deliberations. And then there's no verisimilitude issue, because the lower level spells are not gone, the player just never uses them or has to consider them in combat.

Is there any easy workability... work... around... for the other major resource management systems?

I was trying to write up an example Drain system for D&D but I kept running into this versimilitude problem. If there isn't a crunch workaround, I would at least like a bullshit fluff explanation.

Mask_De_H wrote:To be fair, neither did tussock's. Although there is something in having utility or downtime slots; the trick is determining what's hard downtime and what isn't

Could you get around the downtime issue my making fewer spells single action castings, or building in specific restrictions regarding multiple useage (similar to Augury or Divination)?

FrankTrollman wrote:
But preparation casters have a very easy potential workaround. They have fucking slots that they fill up while other people are talking about shit and they aren't necessarily time constrained while doing it. So for them, having higher and lower level abilities on the list to prepare from is fine. They can just have a big list of powers and select a few of them for their round-by-round deliberations. And then there's no verisimilitude issue, because the lower level spells are not gone, the player just never uses them or has to consider them in combat.

That's actually an amazing idea, that redeemed the concept of DnD wizard to me right now, just wanted to say that.

Well, FatR, that's precisely why people have been pushing for Rituals for so long. The idea of a system where you can only 'ready' a finite pile of powers at once but the pool of total powers is necessarily larger than your ready pool works pretty nicely both for 'obsolete' effects and for 'non-combat' effects.

Of course this scheme only works with certain kinds of resource management. Rage Meter and Drain, for instance (as far as I know anyway, see above question), can't really do these systems too well without hammering another resource management system on top of it.

Mask d H wrote:Although there is something in having utility or downtime slots; the trick is determining what's hard downtime and what isn't

The simple solution would be to have "spells" and "rituals", where you had so many prepared spells (that had a casting time of 2 rounds or less) and so many prepared rituals (that had a casting time of 5 minutes or more). Time consuming abilities of those sorts have very different effects on the game than do abilities that can reasonably be cast in combat. The player isn't being given a "turn" for one thing, so if it takes the player a while to figure out which ritual they want to use, it's not a big problem.

Remember that in almost all cases a combat-use spell can be used out-of-combat. If it takes 5 seconds or 5 minutes to teleport, it really doesn't make much difference to your bank vault heist. But the bleed doesn't usually go the other way. Combats that you can delay for five minutes while you get a magic ritual up and running are few and far between. Fortunately, the out of combat shenanigans are much more forgiving of having long lists of options than are the combat action shenanigans. So considering your out-of-combat options to be all your rituals and all your spells isn't much of a problem.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:

FrankTrollman wrote:But preparation casters have a very easy potential workaround. They have fucking slots that they fill up while other people are talking about shit and they aren't necessarily time constrained while doing it. So for them, having higher and lower level abilities on the list to prepare from is fine. They can just have a big list of powers and select a few of them for their round-by-round deliberations. And then there's no verisimilitude issue, because the lower level spells are not gone, the player just never uses them or has to consider them in combat.

Is there any easy workability... work... around... for the other major resource management systems?

I was trying to write up an example Drain system for D&D but I kept running into this versimilitude problem. If there isn't a crunch workaround, I would at least like a bullshit fluff explanation.

The easiest workaround in terms of flavor is branched ability trees. You can use that in any resource management system at all - even "everything is at-will". You just have to make your ability tree up in such a fashion that every ability you could get is an upgrade of a previously available one. This is essentially like a spell slot system where you have to fill your slots on level-up, but it's very palatable because each new ability you get is specifically upgrading an ability you have. You can even introduce some additional slots later on so that players can fill them with powers that are really new and so that you can give out abilities that have no low-level equivalents.

WoF can allow you to hand out so many new abilities without hitting overload limits that you just don't care about replacing slots. If you start with a 4x6 chart and you gradually grow up to an 8x6 chart, you will have been able to add an ability twenty four times, which is a lot of character growth. At that point, the low level abilities could just plain sit there on the chart and you wouldn't necessarily mind.

But honestly, there are a lot of ways you can skin slots and you can use them for a lot of things. You could have a thing where you let people design their own martial arts, where they have access to a series of stances, and each stance has available maneuvers bound to it (note: this is simply spell preparation where you can spam your prepared spells, you are required to write up your different spell prep arsenals ahead of time, and where you are allowed to spend some action to change your layout from one to the other). You can have chakra binding. You can have totem invocation. Whatever.

Also note that as with the maneuvers locked to stances thing, that abilties once placed into prepared slots can be on any resource management system at all. Each slotted ability could be spammed at-will or on a separate cooldown timer or draw from a collective mana pool or provide some sort of drain or whatever.

-Username17

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Well, FatR, that's precisely why people have been pushing for Rituals for so long. The idea of a system where you can only 'ready' a finite pile of powers at once but the pool of total powers is necessarily larger than your ready pool works pretty nicely both for 'obsolete' effects and for 'non-combat' effects.

Not sure about what model of rituals you're talking here. Although relegating game-defining utility effects, like Plane Shift, and anything with long casting times to universally accessible rituals is a right idea - particularly if we want fighters and rogues to continue their class progression beyond low levels at all - too bad that 4E's implementation sucked balls.

FrankTrollman wrote:

Using what must be the worst possible 1st level spell (a couple times now) to show how useless 1st level spells are is a poor fucking argument. Good arguments and sound logic are the key to understanding anything. If you can't argue cleanly, it's a good sign you can't even think clearly.

Go fuck yourself. Nitpicking at the example without addressing the underlying argument just shows that you're a fucking idiot who feels the need to engage in semantic sophistry instead of presenting a genuine argument.

Nice context editing, Frank. Seriously?

tussock wrote:Which is to say, low level spells are a big deal because they stop you spamming your best stuff every round in every fight forever. Duh. That they aren't as good, but you can recover them more often per day, that's maybe going to tempt people into starting off fights with some weaker spells, rather than nova-casting everything. Like I said already.

Right from the fucking post you replied to. Removed, by you, so you could pretend I didn't present an argument. Very poor form.


Back to the argument.

FrankTrollman wrote:The issue is that it is a fucking waste of time and space to have access to combat actions that you aren't going to use because they suck.

You can to a limited degree get around this issue with direct upgrade and replacement. ... But that restricts you a lot, because it means you can't introduce higher level options that don't have direct lower level equivalents.

But preparation casters have a very easy potential workaround. ... And then there's no verisimilitude issue, because the lower level spells are not gone, the player just never uses them or has to consider them in combat.

In the case of Wizards, there are 1st level spells that always work, even in combat. Something like Ray of Enfeeblement never goes out of fashion. Tasha's Hideous Laughter at 2nd, and so on. You remove variety from the game by making people choose between Hideous Laughter and Dominate Monster, because people will only ever choose the better one.

It's the Psionics problem. If people can just choose their best couple of powers to spam, it gets stupid and boring and people totally do it anyway. It makes the game worse. Ability spam. Anything any character does repeatedly gets to be bland and boring. You can cut up ancient wyrms of power with a singing intelligent sword as you leap through their burning aura and people will call you a boring-ass dumb melee fighter because it's just a sword attack the same as always.

This isn't necessarily a problem that needs solved for every class, many people do like playing the DMF, one just has to recognise that if the Wizard can cast some high level spell all day then that spell is automatically just as boring as a sword attack.

Upgrade Fighter tricks, cool, turn their low level charge vs Orcs into something that still works against a pack of flying Demons, they're bland anyway. But make the Wizards hunt up a useful 1st level spell, don't make another boring, one-dimensional class out of the one that's not.

Having dedicated lower level spell slots is, however, the worst of all possible worlds. It means that the player still has to sort through their low level bullshit every day and their round-by-round choices are full of useless low level crap that isn't worth considering.

If you play by dumping a bunch of top level spells on everything and then going home, all those low level slots are indeed bad news. I'm suggesting one put a stop to top-level spell spamming, or at least strongly discourage it. There's plenty of valid low level spell choices to play when your high level choices are constrained (even if most of the spells have become (or always were) useless).

Kaelik wrote:It is worth it to keep X slots a day for casting Detect Magic/Identify/Image spells/Teleport/ect.

I think it is. The game benefits by reducing your direct combat capacity if you do lots of short-term divining, bypassing encounters, flying everywhere, being immune to stuff, and so on.

We won't see another published version of Teleport that randomly murders the caster, so it needs some other sort of cost. Money doesn't work, players hate XP costs more than death, and the designers don't have the balls to make you sick for a day after teleporting, so spell slot cost it is.

http://community.wizards.com/dndnext/bl ... _of_skills

Here’s the challenge with skills: in 3E and 4E, skills are serving two masters. First, they serve as a customization point for players. Players want to say, “I’m good at this thing,” and write that thing down on their character sheets. They want their choice of skills to say something about their characters: who they are and what kinds of things they do. They also want their choice of customization to be reflected in their overall competence. Skills are great because they allow for differentiation between two characters of the same class, and they help define a character in the mind of the player.

Skills also serve a second master: resolution. In 3E and 4E especially, a skill is how you do something; the skill is the primary way you interface with the game world, and all the rules for doing the task related to the skill live inside that skill.

For the next iteration of the game, however, we are looking at returning to the ability check as the primary means of interacting with the game world, which serves to achieve three primary goals.

someone gets it, so maybe there is hope in the future if not 5e.

skills/powers.. that becomes how people play the game rather than looking at what they want to do THEN look to see if there is already a way to do that, and IF you need to work with that method or just say "Yes"

if the ability check is just let control and remove the silly modifiers.. then i guess some customization can be lost, but character customization comes not only form what is written ont he sheet, but how someone plays the character.

if Bob the Fighter goes through cutting all the ropes and Fred the Fighter goes along burning them..then the character have been customized through play, rather than through the grocery list on the sheet.

this way you do not need a fire-building skill of any sort, because only those times it is REALLY needed do you make a check. which ability to use? that should be made clear in the abilities themselves.

STR... pretty obvious for the most part. you dont check it when you lift your gear, you just assume you can likely lift your own stuff. DEX...again obvious. things like jumping dodging etc fit here, but not walking. you dont check every time you take a step to see if you fall over.

so you use common sense. if you lack that, then you probably arent mature enough to play the game.

i just hope there is NOTHING akin to skill challenges. if a PC doesnt want to build a fire, then they shouldnt have to help someone else do it. they can help in ways other than actually making the fire, like finding dryer materials in a wet area without actually setting then or lighting them. the less the numbers are used, the more interesting the game is by working together. the skills should only be used when something has reasonable doubt by the DM to be able to be done successfully, and extreme circumstances are present. like wet wood.

pre-empting: yes some DMs might be oblivious as to WHEN to use a check or just say it is reasonable to allow them to build a fire...again these are not the best choices to be a DM, and the group needs to work together not rely upon a Wizard in his Coastal Ivory Tower to determine the answer for them. giving the answer to the DMs or players only breeds less good DMs and players because they become unable to think for themselves.

overuse of skills/feats/NWPs has become a crutch to being a DM in trying to make more people DMs and doesnt help make good DMs and such the horror stories of bad DMs abound and of bad house-rules.

it has also become a crutch to being a player by just playing the preprogrammed game rather than doing what you want or can come up with.

pre-empting: players learn through trying, there shouldnt be an easy fix to jsut play multiple choice through the game by picking an option like a skill. leave that for a beginners game which D&D never really was an intro to gaming to begin with. they should try Monopoly or Operation and see what happens when their actions have consequences and learn how to make decisions in playing. you dont have to buy Boardwalk and Parkplace if you own a 2 sides of the board.

so customizing should come from HOW you play your character, not what rules snippets you use that will set Bob apart from Fred.

which is also a key in how you make a single Fighter class and can have some people as ninjas and others are berserkers...its all in HOW YOU PLAY.

tussock wrote:In the case of Wizards, there are 1st level spells that always work, even in combat. Something like Ray of Enfeeblement never goes out of fashion. Tasha's Hideous Laughter at 2nd, and so on. You remove variety from the game by making people choose between Hideous Laughter and Dominate Monster, because people will only ever choose the better one.

It's the Psionics problem. If people can just choose their best couple of powers to spam, it gets stupid and boring and people totally do it anyway. It makes the game worse. Ability spam. Anything any character does repeatedly gets to be bland and boring. You can cut up ancient wyrms of power with a singing intelligent sword as you leap through their burning aura and people will call you a boring-ass dumb melee fighter because it's just a sword attack the same as always.

This doesn't suffer from the Psionics problem because by forcing the player to prepare their spells beforehand you ensure that they have to diversify as they don't know what they are going to face. Firstly, as Frank stated in his proposal, you would be limited in how many spells of each level you could prepare at once. So, at 7th level his example was 3 of 4th and 3 of 3rd. Straight away you have a minimum of 2 different spells. Now, factor in that one of the much-touted benefits of mages is their ability to target the weak save of a monster - this is only possible if you have spells targeting different saves. Now think about immunities - if your "best" spell is dominate monster, are you going to memorise just that? What about undead, golems, oozes and anything else immune to mind affecting things?

Also, the primary difference with the DMF is the wizards "best" spell will change as they go up levels, creating an inherent variation with what they were doing last adventure. The DMF hits with sword at level 1 and hits with sword at level 20.

In the case of Wizards, there are 1st level spells that always work, even in combat. Something like Ray of Enfeeblement never goes out of fashion.

That is stupid. Ray of Enfeeblement is a shitty option at first level and it's a shitty option at 20th level and it is a shitty option at every level in between. If your argument is "But what if you wanted to cast ray of enfeeblement?" then you have no fucking argument. Because Ray of Enfeeblement is fucking terrible.

-Username17