The Gaming Den

Blasted wrote:Point 3:
You're going to have to choose between combat and non-combat ability. I predict that trap options will be plentiful and PCs with interesting non-combat options will fail in combat.

If I could trade in some of my attack powers for more uses of utility powers, I totally would. So, when it comes to customization points, we want to let people choose what they want to focus on (be that combat, diplomacy, being the best liar ever, being a super stealthy thief, or whatever) and trust the baseline competence we've built into all characters to make sure everyone feels like they can participate.

If I could say that I trust Rodney and the team with any level of baseline competence, I'd be the best liar ever.

i dont think anybody trusts them. Unification is EXACTLY what 5e is doing.. unifying ALL "D&D" players against WotC, because at least they are smart enough to see WotC's goals are a failure to begin with since you cant please all the people all the time, and the recent attempts haven't pleased enough people, otherwise 4th wouldn't be being shown the door.

as long as a magic casting class exists, there can be no such thing as deciding combat or non-combat, because everything in the wizard's repertoire works for both.

4th had one decent idea behind it that harks back to OD&D.. the game is only a set of combat rules. the problem is that isnt the whole game, as each edition AFTER OD&D proved.

the "social contract" as people call it is what has been missing since WotC took over, and NO amount of rules in the books will build that back, it has to come from the players.

"skill challenges" are as useful to the game as psionics has been. people just need to learn to play the game again, rather than play the rules, and this includes the designers.

what can Mearls & Co offer that you yourself cant come up with to do, or have already heard or seen done elsewhere? why does being effective in combat have to mean a trade off for being less effective in non-combat? the non-combat has nothing to do with the combat system, and you really dont need a set of rules for it that depletes the combat system of its whatever.

they are sadly trying to find the golden number for D&D with some formula, and would have an easier time finding a mathematical formula that defines love.

their module system is a good place to throw that crap into and NOT in the core game, so that people who WANT some addition to D&D to help where they lack social skills to be able to just roll some dice to get past that part of the game.

take PO:C&T for example, MM being separate from the DMG, so put other non-standard things in extra books for those that want them, NOT forcing everyone to pay for wasted pages for something they dont want or need.

WotC/HASBRO should NOT be trusted with D&D as they have never done anything good with it...except give some d20 system away to the public that was based on D&D. so why try to take back something you already gave away?

Blasted wrote: What I think will actually happen is that the Fighter will pull out his Big Sword +3, only to find out that the skelington can only be hurt by a Big Mace. The fighter lacks a Big Mace, or doesn't have a proficiency or feat with Big Mace, so has to sit this one out. Fighter's can't have nice things.

I'm going to be "optimistic" here and guess it'll go like this:
Napoleon Boneyparts: DR 3/Bludgeoning (use the mace!)
Sword-specced Fighter's mace: non-magical, 1d8+Str [4.5+Str]
His big magic sword: 2d6+Str+5 (between magic and shitty class feature number) [12+Str, -3 for DR = 9+Str]

So the fighter will go "You know what, fuck it", throw the mace away, and use the sword forever, sometimes accepting that the enemy reduces damage by a few points. Which is certainly better than "You do not get to participate in this fight as you have the wrong weapon" but makes the whole thing a bit pointless.

Oh, and he'll get so completely used to using the sword for everything that he won't have a bow and "you are attacked by a harpy who drops stones" will be IMPOSSIBLE like the 4rries harped on about.

Juton wrote: He thinks that instead of bringing out a 5.5 edition they would just gradually replace or update the modules that need replacing.

It seems clear that the idea is to never put out a revised version of the core rules and to just keep churning out splatbooks forever. Of course, that didn't work for 3E or 4E, so why it would work for 5E is beyond me.

Jotun wrote:He states that he is having the most difficulty with the skill system, which would be obvious to anyone who has followed skill challenges in 4e. He states that the most difficult systems to design are the ones that have been inconsistent through editions, like skills. He made the ominous promise that while skill challenges won't be a part of core they could be coming in a later book.

Frankly, skills (aside from thief skills like disarming traps) have been the least important part of every edition, so it doesn't particularly matter how much they screw them up. Sad, but true.

Blasted wrote:To meet the expected shipping dates, they must be running late, or Rodney's telling porkies. Given the choice between malice and incompetence, I going to go with incompetence. They're shipping later rather than sooner.

I didn't see anything yet about expected shipping dates nor can I find any info about any release or shipping date on google.

Did I just overlook something? Could you perhaps link to them?

The speculation is that they're aiming for Gen Con 2013. It's just speculation based on the fact that Gen Con is a popular place to debut new games, and 2013 is far enough in the future that it sounds feasible to be done by then.

Juton wrote: I actually listened to this while I made supper. I have a few observations. Mearls is aware there is such a thing a linear warriors and quadratic wizards. One person had a particularly salient observation that characters with more complex options tended to be more powerful, Mearls states that they are looking for ways to decouple complexity and power. Mearls prefers fireball over charm monster, so he will improve fireball to make it on par with charm. He knows enough to state that while a fireball can do 50 damage a successful charm does 'infinity' damage.

What he said was he wants fireball to be better than charm monster. About 16:00 in the podcast, if you want to double check.

That was the biggest wtf moment for me. I mean, Dude on the Left talking about how 4e was "the height of player empowerment" was weird, but we keep hearing about 5e wizards having out of combat spells so who knows what he meant by that.

Kind of the opposite of his goal with Iron Heroes. In that system, he valued evocation WAY higher than any of the other schools of magic.

Oh, god no.

I really don't want to have half the wizard spell list useless again.

like FLY in 4th? encounter power with no measurable time outside of encounter based miniature skirmish terminology.

CapnTthePirateG wrote:Oh, god no.

I really don't want to have half the wizard spell list useless again.

Any fix to the "problem" of caster dominance that involves weakening wizard's tricks is bound to be shit. Sure, it won't hurt to give each particular caster less tricks, but by 3.5 we already were at the point where, unless the authors overlooked the true implications of a spell, it was probably unimpressive, compared to what magic-users in modern high fantasy do.

Unfortunately, I don't think writers of 5E have guts to admit that fighters are suited for low fantasy only.

Nah. I submitted that question in EnWorld's rule of three, and they refused to acknowedge it. Not to mention that when 5e was announced, this was one of the FIRST things brought up on the boards...and discarded in favor of "holy vs radiant".

Dumb fuckers.

FatR wrote:Unfortunately, I don't think writers of 5E have guts to admit that fighters are suited for low fantasy only.

or lower level play, or simply the "high-level" play just doesnt work, and never has for the whole.

they need to focus on D&D, not A&D (Anime and Dragons). but henchmen or followers are coming back for fighters mentioned somewhere, so that means a fighter can do something, just probably not what this generation wants, but what D&D was made for. a fighter becomes a REAL warlord, not just a army rank turned into a pseudo-class.

FatR wrote:

CapnTthePirateG wrote:Oh, god no.

I really don't want to have half the wizard spell list useless again.

Any fix to the "problem" of caster dominance that involves weakening wizard's tricks is bound to be shit. Sure, it won't hurt to give each particular caster less tricks, but by 3.5 we already were at the point where, unless the authors overlooked the true implications of a spell, it was probably unimpressive, compared to what magic-users in modern high fantasy do.

Unfortunately, I don't think writers of 5E have guts to admit that fighters are suited for low fantasy only.

Wait, CapnT, would the useless half of the spell list be the out of combat spells, or the SoLs that are by design worse than Fireball?

SoLs designed to be worse than fireball. Does anyone like Ivory Tower Game design, or that stupid shit in Final Fantasy where there are 50 status effect spells and none of them work on anything you care about?

I like out of combat spells. Hell, that's a large part of the reason I don't play 4e, you can't do dick out of combat beside MTP. No building cool castles or anything.

CapnTthePirateG wrote:or that stupid shit in Final Fantasy where there are 50 status effect spells and none of them work on anything you care about?

Final Fantasy XIII corrected that, with there being a manageable amount of status effects that make a huge difference in battle, boss fights included.

OgreBattle wrote:

CapnTthePirateG wrote:or that stupid shit in Final Fantasy where there are 50 status effect spells and none of them work on anything you care about?

Final Fantasy XIII corrected that, with there being a manageable amount of status effects that make a huge difference in battle.

They made Death the ultimate spell for the barbarian magic user, it's turned into a way to farm this giant turtle monster with more hit points than most boss fights.

And Shin Megami Tensei series of games did the same fix that since the SNES era.

Well, yes, but I've never seen any game that actually managed to make both equally usable without having damage regularly one-hit kill. I'd love to hear if you've found any, though.

Mass Effect 2 handled it pretty alright. It uses more or less a Bloodied threshold. Enemies have a health bar and a "shield" or "armor" bar, damage goes to shields/armor first, and you can't CC until they have nothing but health left.

ModelCitizen wrote:Mass Effect 2 handled it pretty alright. It uses more or less a Bloodied threshold. Enemies have a health bar and a "shield" or "armor" bar, damage goes to shields/armor first, and you can't CC until they have nothing but health left.

How about "fuck no"? Status effects in ME2 are severely inferior to just pumping enemies with more lead, unless you did both at the same time (Incendiary Ammo, maybe Freezing Ammo too, but never bothered with the latter). Particularly because most bosses have no health bar and go from armor to dead.

ModelCitizen wrote:Mass Effect 2 handled it pretty alright. It uses more or less a Bloodied threshold. Enemies have a health bar and a "shield" or "armor" bar, damage goes to shields/armor first, and you can't CC until they have nothing but health left.

My concern is that whittling away at someone is acceptable in a video game where button pushing takes a fraction of a second, but less so in a tabletop RPG, where a PC's simple actions take up to a minute (or more, depending on the system).

FatR wrote:How about "fuck no"? Status effects in ME2 are severely inferior to just pumping enemies with more lead, unless you did both at the same time (Incendiary Ammo, maybe Freezing Ammo too, but never bothered with the latter). Particularly because most bosses have no health bar and go from armor to dead.

Unless you're playing one of the harder game modes and the only way to kill enemies is to spam [the right ability] to do the most damage to [shields/barriers/armor] so you can actually start using CC. Enemies do so much damage that you can't leave cover for more than a second or your shields disappear.

ME3 was a hilarious step backwards when they gave us Biotic Explosions, the best tactic for all situations and enemies.

Wrathzog wrote: Unless you're playing one of the harder game modes and the only way to kill enemies is to spam [the right ability] to do the most damage to [shields/barriers/armor] so you can actually start using CC. Enemies do so much damage that you can't leave cover for more than a second or your shields disappear.

Hardened Adrenaline Rush + strings of headshots with whatever ammo is suited for penetrating target defence (having Warp + Disruptor ammo covers pretty much everything, IIRC). And frankly, nearly all difficult fights are those where enemies rush you, and therefore require sustained DPS to win, cover shootouts require simple patience to win on any difficulty (except maybe for Vanguard which might just run out of ammo).

hogarth wrote:

ModelCitizen wrote:Mass Effect 2 handled it pretty alright. It uses more or less a Bloodied threshold. Enemies have a health bar and a "shield" or "armor" bar, damage goes to shields/armor first, and you can't CC until they have nothing but health left.

My concern is that whittling away at someone is acceptable in a video game where button pushing takes a fraction of a second, but less so in a tabletop RPG, where a PC's simple actions take up to a minute (or more, depending on the system).

I agree. CapnT asked about video games. I don't think ME2's mechanics would be good in tabletop.

FatR wrote: Hardened Adrenaline Rush + strings of headshots with whatever ammo is suited for penetrating target defence (having Warp + Disruptor ammo covers pretty much everything, IIRC). And frankly, nearly all difficult fights are those where enemies rush you, and therefore require sustained DPS to win, cover shootouts require simple patience to win on any difficulty (except maybe for Vanguard which might just run out of ammo).

I've never played a solder. I ran a vanguard and an infiltrator through NG+ insanity and used a ton of CC both times.

CapnTthePirateG wrote:I like out of combat spells. Hell, that's a large part of the reason I don't play 4e, you can't do dick out of combat beside MTP. No building cool castles or anything.

Huh, strangely this is why I really like 4E. There are no rules that let my players spend a whole session jerking off to how they are going to build an imaginary castle so they don't get distrcted by it.

Instead 4E players get to go into dungeons and fight dragons.

The out of combat rules help serve the exploration minigame and the diplomacy minigame. Thats really what I need them to do anyway.

Anyway, if the game lets you trade a bunch of combat power for out of combat power then the game will be to broken to play. Every character must be able to approach every minigame in a reasonable way. Letting a player trade away the ability to be relevant in one facet of the game for any amount of power in another area will lead to totally broken, unchallenable characters for whom the system doesn't work.

Souran wrote:The out of combat rules help serve the exploration minigame and the diplomacy minigame.

How? 4e doesn't have DCs for talking to people, and the only presented diplomacy minigames are "Skill Challenges", which everyone now agrees do not work at all. Like, even the designers have agreed that they don't work, although they have not in fact apologized for having claimed that they did for three years straight.

So... what do the out of combat "rules" do that facilitates the diplomacy minigame in 4e?

-Username17