The Gaming Den

Amra wrote:You're right, the Tomes are a huge set of house rules for D&D, but they were established with the avowed intention of doing a rewrite; not because 3.5 was unplayable, but because it could have been done better, and because the classes were vastly imbalanced.

Honestly a lot of 3.5 is unplayable out of the box if you're playing with powergamers. I'm pretty sure it's been figured out how to enter the wish economy by level 5 or so, which instantly breaks the game by default.

There are just so many bugs with 3.5 that nobody wants to play a RAW game without house rules.

The fact that warriors suck relative to spellcasters doesn't make them unplayable, it just makes them suck relative to spellcasters; that's completely playable if you've got a hard-on for warriors, haven't noticed the imbalance (it's amazing how often that happens) or otherwise Just Don't Care.

Well, any imbalance can be "playable". People can be commoners and one guy can be Elminster and you can still play. Some people may even have fun playing the commoner. But it's just not a game that most people want to play.

Iron Heroes contains a load of stuff that's in-your-face unplayable out of the box and needs rewriting before you can use it even if you don't care about the levels of suck. Mearls had a mature existing system to work from as a starting point - in all its flawed glory - and still made a pig's ear of it.

Well Mearls was rewriting the magic system, which pretty much means that the majority of 3.5's balance is out the window at that point, since you're basically cutting out most of the book.

RandomCasualty2 wrote: Honestly a lot of 3.5 is unplayable out of the box if you're playing with powergamers. I'm pretty sure it's been figured out how to enter the wish economy by level 5 or so, which instantly breaks the game by default.

Level one, actually. Using your own resources and buck naked, no less.

You're a changeling (or an Egoist with the alternate class feature from the web article that gives you the changeling racial ability). You take Assume Supernatural Ability. You take the form of a zodar. Graphs aren't even necessary.

Are Zodari humanoid?

Oh, it's easier than that. Much easier, and less cheesy. Core-only too.

Step one, be an elf. Put 4 ranks into Profession: Farmer
Step two, sit around for 100 years (or whatever) running your farm
Step three, buy a candle of invocation

How come when Mike Mearls said that his response to the fact that he could make one fucking functional skill system was to just put a big pile of unfinished mechanics out and let individual DMs sort it out on their own was glee on the part of rpg.netters? He threw in the towel. The 4e skill system not only sucks, and has continued to suck after several extensie rewrites, but the final "system" is apparently going to be "Fuck it. Just figure something out on your own. Whatever you do we'll call it a skill challenge."

Then he asked people to toss out mechanics, with the explicit understanding that he was just going to put them into a list and take credit for the whole thing. And then unceremoniously dump it into the laps of DMs and ask them to mix and match mechanisms out of the pile until they had something that was vaguely passable as a game. Holy crap. That is the shittiest, laziest thing I've seen any game designer ever do. Even Gygax wasn't that much of an asshole.

-Username17

4etards are about as intelligent as 13-year-old girls salivating over the Jonas brothers. They see Mearls, recognize him as a "celebrity designer," and start foaming at the mouth at anyone who would dare question him.

FrankTrollman wrote: Then he asked people to toss out mechanics, with the explicit understanding that he was just going to put them into a list and take credit for the whole thing. And then unceremoniously dump it into the laps of DMs and ask them to mix and match mechanisms out of the pile until they had something that was vaguely passable as a game. Holy crap. That is the shittiest, laziest thing I've seen any game designer ever do. Even Gygax wasn't that much of an asshole.

That's par for the course as far as WotC designers go.

I mean, the 3E tome of Battle Errata was actually the Errata for the complete mage, and despite them knowing about it, nobody actually fixed it, because they were too fucking lazy.

D&D insider is still a pile of crap, and I think even to this day, the D&D online gametable still doesn't work.

I'm sure they'll produced revised skill challenge mechanics at some point down the line which will be present in a book that we will have to pay for. Similar to how the 3E PHB2 had revised polymorph mechanics. But as we saw with that, it just takes them forever to fucking get to actually creating a new system. Until then, it's 3E polymorph territory where you either play with the broken rule, just ban the entire thing or create your own.

RandomCasualty2 wrote: I mean, the 3E tome of Battle Errata was actually the Errata for the complete mage, and despite them knowing about it, nobody actually fixed it, because they were too fucking lazy.

Wow, what the fuck? They have what looks like one maneuver from ToB thrown in for good measure.

RC2 wrote:I'm sure they'll produced revised skill challenge mechanics at some point down the line which will be present in a book that we will have to pay for. Similar to how the 3E PHB2 had revised polymorph mechanics. But as we saw with that, it just takes them forever to fucking get to actually creating a new system. Until then, it's 3E polymorph territory where you either play with the broken rule, just ban the entire thing or create your own.

Don't forget that the PHB2 version didn't solve anything. It was horrendously broken and confusing. The only clarification was that yes, you seriously did get the "spellcasting" trait when you turned into an Abeil Queen.

Frankly, the whole strategy reminds me of nothing so much as this:



-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote: Don't forget that the PHB2 version didn't solve anything. It was horrendously broken and confusing. The only clarification was that yes, you seriously did get the "spellcasting" trait when you turned into an Abeil Queen.

Well yeah, open-ended polymorph itself was unsalvageable. But the PHB2 monomorph spells worked ok. I mean trollform and the dragonform wouldn't break your game in half. And the basic paradigm of the new polymorph wasn't terrible, it was just that the open ended ability to dumpster dive the monster manual and turn into anything was just overpowered.

But I was just pointing out that it took the design team well over 4 years to get to fixing something that was broken in 3.0. And they still didn't even really fix it, they just produced a replacement for it.

So seriously, as far as skill challenges not working, who knows how long it will take before they produce a new version. It might be in the DMG2, or it may not come until some D&D 4.5 sourcebook.

Well yeah, open-ended polymorph itself was unsalvageable.

I don't think so. It just needs to be clarified, limited on CR rather than HD, and have a limited list of special abilities from which you can choose.

Psychic Robot wrote:

Well yeah, open-ended polymorph itself was unsalvageable.

I don't think so. It just needs to be clarified, limited on CR rather than HD, and have a limited list of special abilities from which you can choose.

Doesn't that lead to Dumpster Diving though? Kinda like Paizil Fail does?

I don't think so. It just needs to be clarified, limited on CR rather than HD, and have a limited list of special abilities from which you can choose.

Why does polymorphing need to grant so many special abilities anyway? What would ends up happening is that every monster printed would either have to have polymorphing in mind or would have to have a disclaimer saying that druids get these abilities and not those ones.

And you know what? They already tried that shit; that's why druids were only supposed to get (Ex) abilities. And we know how well that went. To make it work you'd have to be even more specific, saying that druids who transform into tigers get pounce but not rake because that's overpowered. Or something. It's just too much work and puts too much pressure on DMs for no payoff.

The 4E Druid has a selection of beast form powers that they can use in whatever beast shape they want to that fits into the daily/encounter/at-will system. I have no idea why we don't want to do things this way. I mean, yes, the DEA power structure is stupid and boring, but the way of handling 'master of a thousand forms' is sound.

Actually, there are games where they did that, Lago, and they weren't called D&D.

Still, all this reminds me of AGC when after the WotC rep hit on me, I talked him up about their website. After seeing him at their booth, I walked away laughing, their claims were so ridiculous. And none of them would talk to me again, with the one rep who was a speaker actively hiding from me whenever I'd see him.

*sigh*

-Crissa

Doesn't that lead to Dumpster Diving though? Kinda like Paizil Fail does?

A little bit, yes, though I don't consider that entirely problematic.

Hope I'm not dragging this thread too far off topic by talking about skill challenges, but a thought occured to me (while reading the "Seduce the Dragon" skill challenge, incidentally).

How do we allow characters who aren't as good at the relevant skills to actually participate (not just Aid Other) in a skill challenge, without them dragging down the rest of the team? Side challenges.

A side challenge would be a secondary skill challenge (or potentially other type of challenge), with its own key skills, that runs in parallel to the primary challenge. If you succeed, it grants either successes or a bonus on rolls to the primary challenge. If you fail, there may be consequences, but you won't autofail the primary challenge.

How do we allow characters who aren't as good at the relevant skills to actually participate (not just Aid Other) in a skill challenge, without them dragging down the rest of the team?

Personal rather than collective failures.

-Username17

I think we need to decide what skill challenges can do, first. As in, what are we supposed to use them for? For instance, sneaking into the castle: the rogue uses stealth to sneak in, the fighter uses athletics to climb up the wall, and so on. Should this be a skill challenge? Or what about if everyone tries to sneak in, with everyone making stealth checks?

Honestly, I think that skill challenges should not be defined as a concrete mechanic. Instead, guidelines and examples should be given to help DMs.

Ice9 wrote: How do we allow characters who aren't as good at the relevant skills to actually participate (not just Aid Other) in a skill challenge, without them dragging down the rest of the team? Side challenges.

I don't really have a problem with aid another, however, there should be incentive for a PC who has his own skills to use those, instead of everyone just helping the expert.

I see there can be three formats to skill challenges:

Individual Challenge: In this type, you can't help each other, and it's just an individual thing if you succeed or fail. On their turn, everyone must make a check, and accumulating an individual pool of X successes wins the challenge and Y failures loses it. So the cleric and fighter may succeed at the challenge, while the wizard fails it.

Example: Chasing a thief through a crowded marketplace.

Timed Challenge: In this scenario, the party has X amount of rounds to accumulate Y successes. If someone wants to use aid another, they can, but naturally this forfeits their chance of getting a success. If times up before the group gets their successes, they fail the challenge.

Example: Trying to disarm a crushing ceiling trap that's slowly decending.

Individual Timed Challenge: Like in the timed challenge, a group has X amount of rounds before the challenge fails. However, in this case, individuals succeed or fail on their own by accumulating X number of successes. So for instance any character who gets 2 successes succeeds and any character with 1 or no successes when time is up fails. Aid another may or may not be usable depending on circumstance. In some challenges it may be important that a certain percentage of the party succeed and that can be used as an overall challenge.

Example: Trying to navigate and steer a ship through a zone of dangerous reefs.

I don't see how the Skill Challenges are so totally fucked. With Aid Another limited to 2 people and skill applicability determined by Magic Tea Party you get a pretty decent but not trivial success chance, and the MTP part encourages players to involve themselves in the narrative by making up shit so that their skill is relevant.

It's not great, but I don't see how it's so so so so so so so shitty it breaks the game under those terms.

Because multiple dice, by their very nature mean you're either succeeding almost all of the time or almost none of the time with no middle ground. And that means it's either pointless to roll because You Win, or it is pointless to roll because You Lose. Meanwhile, it takes far more rolls to resolve. And if you're trying to retrofit MTP onto the MMO, it takes even longer.

mean_liar wrote:I don't see how the Skill Challenges are so totally fucked. With Aid Another limited to 2 people and skill applicability determined by Magic Tea Party you get a pretty decent but not trivial success chance, and the MTP part encourages players to involve themselves in the narrative by making up shit so that their skill is relevant.

It's not great, but I don't see how it's so so so so so so so shitty it breaks the game under those terms.

Actually, even with Aid Another limited to zero, it's pretty easy for a Bullysaurus, Half-Elf Diplomancer, or other specialist to succeed at skill challenge sub-tests on a 1+. This makes skill challenges an act of magical teaparty where the end result is known - so long as no other player sticks their dick in and entertains the possibility of failure.

Players are NOT encouraged to involve themselves, because all players share the same pool of success and failure. Which really means that there are a finite number of total dice that will be rolled, and every time any player who is not the biggest specialist picks one of those dice up, he's picking up a die that could have been rolled by the specialist. Even if the players differ in skill bonus by one point, it is still actively harmful for the players other than the guy with biggest bonus to roll a die at any point in the process.

It does exactly the opposite of what it says it does. It actively punishes the team as a whole for having anyone but the half elven diplomancer contribute in any way. Worst mechanic ever. That's not hyperbole, it's genuinely worse than the Arduin Critical Fumble rules.

-Username17

Skill challenges also have a serious scope problem, by which I mean that there is no limit to how much they can cover, and so they can easily cover too much, draining all the fun and actual thinking and planning out of a situation. As an illustration of what I'm talking about consider your average episode of Star Trek, let's say Next Gen. Usually in each episode there are a number of central problems which the characters collectively apply different skills to (engineering, diplomacy, etc) until they are solved. Thus there is a temptation to consider the entire episode something that can be captured by a single skill challenge. This is absurd; an episode of ST is the equivalent of an entire adventure, although possibly a short one. So I say that, whatever the mechanics of a skill challenge should end up being, they should be prevented from including too much. Disarming a trap: possible skill challenge. Breaking someone out of jail: not so much.

The problem with that is that the only reason to justify skill challenges is if they have a wide scope in the first place.

If it's too narrow (like worming your way into the royal court), why don't you just roll a skill check or two? Furthermore, the whole original intent of skill challenges is to include everyone. If you have a party of diverse skills, then you need to have a task that will let the cleric, the fighter, the rogue, and the wizard participate. And putting in an adventure where Athletics, Heal, Stealth, and Arcana become cornerstone skills is easily an adventure in itself.

If the party gets separated, can a single PC complete a preexisting skill challenge they come across? Can a DM run a game for a party of 1? Can he include Skill Challenges if he does? Would that be like Schrodinger's Skill Challenge then? Only doable by a single person until someone else observes?