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D&D is really not the game for that.
I don't think we had seen another living soul in at least three game sessions that wasn't a monster. We covered a lot of area in that time, trying to get catch the big bad whom we've been chasing for pretty much the whole damn game now. I'm pretty sure the DM just decided it was XP time and grabbed some monsters out of the bestiary that looked good.
We may have gotten a roll, I forget now, but given they were at a distance and stationary while flying, waiting in ambush, I think it was too ridiculously high for anyone to make.
The full round stuff pisses me off and I'll be sure to mention it. And again, the DM plays monsters as realistically as he can. If it doesn't make sense for a monster to not pull his punches, then it's not going to pull it's punches.
I just wish the one guy in my group didn't think 4e was bullshit for a bunch of reasons that IMO are bullshit themselves but I'm tired of arguing with him about it. Plus 4E got bloated and one thing I'll say for Pathfinder is that it's nice only having 4 books to look through for character shtuff.
SoogaGames Blog
Which is a thing us dorks sometimes do - treat someone like crap and then explain why it was logically necessary.
SoogaGames Blog
I can't say I agree with that, even though this campaign has been ripe with people dying because of shit like that. If a monster has an intelligence above DUR, it's going to realize that just being down or stunned isn't going to last forever. Killing the player when you have the chance is the smart thing to do, especially when there's an obvious healer in the group. In the scenerio above, I was benched for that entire fight 'cause I died. That means the monsters had to deal with a party of 3 rather than a party of 4. Had he not killed me, when it was one of my teammates turn they likely would have thrown a rock at my head or something and woke my ass up.
Shit, I learned that lesson back when I was but a wee lad playing Doom, when I realized that 1 healthy Baron of Hell and 1 dead one was better than two wounded ones.
I may not like him playing the monsters that intelligently, but I can't really argue that's the best move they could make. It's certainly the move my group would make, especially if there's enemy healers about.
With somebody pushed into negatives it's a bit more complicated. Unless the other PC's totally desert the downed PC and monster it's not usually something I'd go in for.
Borderlands 2 PA Xbox Metatag - Bazillion Guns
Well, this is partially a problem of "simulationist" DnD, which is that in the "real" world, it would be unlikely that a group of adventurers survive countless hostile encounters from level 1 to 30 or whatever.
And so your party will die, because the NPCs are smart, and will kill you.
SoogaGames Blog
In 3.5 an effort was made to lessen impact of "Save or Dies". They added the "Save every Round" thing to a couple different spells, like Hold and Sleep. Ironically this greatly increased the reasonableness of smashing the fuck out of a held person because you could never be sure when they'd pop out of it.
Borderlands 2 PA Xbox Metatag - Bazillion Guns
SoogaGames Blog
Yes, Sim"Fantasy that never existed and never could because nobody bothers to get simple things like basic economics so they make sense but we're going to try and we're going to do it without computer because everybody likes doing an excessive amount of handwritten bookkeeping, math and other tedious bullshit in their leisure time".
I get it, I'm just not a fan.
Borderlands 2 PA Xbox Metatag - Bazillion Guns
If you're high-level enough to be even remotely important you probably want some people around you to soak up those invisible-ogre-assassinations.
SoogaGames Blog
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Another Mearls post, meaning it's pretty well thought-out. I don't know if I necessarily agree with the theme of it, that being turn undead should be something other than damage, but I don't disagree and remember thinking early on in 4e that it was weird that it didn't work the same way as 3e.
Last week's poll results are up as well, naturally --- a reigned-in save or die is the winner at 43.7%, followed by no save or die at 23.9%.
fix'd.
So, I guess it'll probably be core, but, whatevs.
Secret Satans! Post | D&D Wishlist | General Wishlist
Yeah, I did not like the way they framed all the variations on "I want save or die", but so it goes. But hell, I'm under the assumption now that the polls are just putting up the appearance of collecting feedback anyway, and no matter how they turn out their decisions are made. In that model of the process, save or die was in the moment they brought it up.
Now I've killed my share of characters in 4E, but I can say that every one of them died at the end of long tough battles or just a poor decision (like the Minotaur Barbarian who provoked an AoO on 2 HP, then exploded from the 3d6+6 damage lightning effect of a storm shard. There was a way of absolutely guaranteeing not dying in that situation, but poor decisions lead to his death - not bad dice rolls). Personally, I think that if these do return the concept of having them deal HP damage and if you are reduced to 0 HP by it is instant death (instead of negative HP and dying) is an interesting one. In fact, I've used effects like this in 4E, such as a sphere of annihilation that instantly destroys a character that drops below 0 HP. Conceptually though, this requires you to be on a poor amount of HP and to actually be hit/get in the path of this thing in the first place - so it's the accumulation of tactics/situation that kills you - not "Whoops one bad dice roll".
Save or Die and Save or Suck effects are just utterly terrible and I don't even think they make for a better "hardcore" campaign either. It's the same logic behind why I don't like critical fumbles either - more randomness does not inherently make the game better.
Did you know that off-turn actions slow down the game because they're hard to remember, so instead we're gonna de-emphasize that mechanic and replace it with 3.5-style saving throws? Then, instead of taking off-turn actions, you can take saving throw boosts and it'll be pretty much the same thing!
Making the decision to use a discrete action in a tactically intelligent way is the same as rolling a d20 to see what happens, right? Pretty much the same.
Related to this whole what-the-hell-are-they-doing-with-5E thing, I picked up the Cortex RPG rulebook from Drivethru for $5 and have been reading through it. I like it. I want to use it for a modern-era game, kind of a mashup of Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, and Supernatural.
Limiting the number of off-turn actions a player can get is not a bad idea. Especially putting a larger limit on one role's off-turn actions over another. Defenders, for instance, should have one, simple, consistent off-turn action, while leaders should have several. Strikers should have a few, but limited strictly to defense and mobility, while controllers probably don't really need very many at all, but a few defensive ones are handy.
It's not so much that he's suggesting saves are the same thing, it's that he's suggesting they perform a similar role in the game. Specifically, making a save helps the player feel like they are actively participating in their character's defenses, instead of just standing there taking whatever happens (in other words- getting to roll more dice). Replacing the system with saves won't really help that much, and it won't be as interesting, but it may be somewhat quicker, so....whatever.
Secret Satans! Post | D&D Wishlist | General Wishlist
Depends on the off-turn action I think. Shield, for example, is just, "Nah nah, you don't hit me," and done. Off-turn attacks, a lot of times, don't really take that long either if they don't impact the rest of the creature's turn. So like, Disruptive Strike really takes no longer than executing the attack. More complicated ones, like shit that blinds or slides or whatever, ... that can take a while since it reverses the DM's planned turn, but it seems a pretty broad generalisation to suggest that all off-turn actions are similarly impediments to quick gameplay.
On the other hand you can end up with ridiculous action/reaction chain sequences to try and parse. And we've not even got half way through paragon yet so I can imagine it only getting worse as time goes on.
WiiU: JamWarrior
My issue with Thompson's article is that his solution is reinventing the wheel: if he want his players to roll their defenses instead of going with the static scores, then he should just let them switch 1d20 for the flat 10 in calculating defenses. Saving throws in 4E provide a very different and very useful role by letting players actively work to end ongoing unwelcome effects - removing this role is actually removing player agency, not adding to it.
Right. off-turn actions CAN slow the game down a bit, absolutely. However, I think if it becomes a severe problem that it's mostly a pilot error; a player who is planning on using an off-turn action should be watching the board like a hawk during the turns he's planning on disrupting so that he can step in and perform his action immediately. Likewise, someone who gets their turn disrupted (usually the DM) should be prepared to deal with that relatively quickly (although generally speaking I don't see a lot of decision points being created by an off-turn disruption - usually they either just deal damage, in which case the planned turn doesn't change, or they slide/prone/etc, in which case the planned turn usually just ends instead).
I certainly don't think that the downside of off-turns (somewhat slower play) outweighs the upside (more involved play, greater player agency, wider array of tactical options, wider array of mechanical options, etc). More importantly, though, it seems absurd to me to suggest that if we make players roll saves that fills the same 'player agency' niche as an active decision. It baffles me that the designers seem to think that generating a random number is somehow inherently fun, or that it is inherently fun in the same way as making decisions that do things.
I'm having trouble even getting frustrated about it anymore. These people are just clearly not playing the same game I am, have never been playing the same game I am, and have no interest in designing a game I would want to play.
If I am ever asked why I'm not interested in 5ED, I'm going to quote you.
@Denada: Sounds like the Scion adventure module and rule tweaks I'm writing right now, only mine is set in WW2
Not only that, but you can't take immediate actions on your turn (it's harder to react to a reaction). So action sequences greater than one reaction can happen, but it's pretty rare in my experience. PCs would have to be loaded with reactive-style free actions.
It's getting harder, indeed. As time has worn on my friends' interest has waned, in part because of the slog but also because it's becoming obvious that this is not our game. I'm kind of excited. I haven't grognarded over anything yet.
Sadly, there are plenty of people who look on 'player agency' as 'player entitlement'.
I should get some whiskey from the cupboard and have a drink every time someone at WOTC takes a step backwards in game design.
oh
shit
Player of Li Mei Feng, Monkey Princess, The Dresden Files Low Profile
GM of Monsterhearts: Blackwood
But it also misses the problem that turns took ages because of increasingly exploding multiple attack powers too - where someone was working out resolving 3+ attacks in a single round (sometimes before an action point). A tigher action economy from the start would have really helped a lot of the late game problems that 4E faced immensely.