I guess, but if the players are like, competing against each other as opposed to working as a team that seems kinda dumb? A lot of the problems with casters to me comes from the idea of blasting all their spells out at once and then being able to just sleep it off again, which has come I think mostly from video games rather than real tabletop interaction. As it gets later on yes casters deal more damage, they also get improved buffs that are often best used on characters like fighters, they can also still die quite easily, and if dungeons/adventures are designed decently you can end up with a solid balance of the casters trying conserve spells and use them sparingly while the non casting classes can bust out all the stops every encounter.
If the characters are simply ignoring one another and trying to be king cool guy of the group, then yeah I get where the fighter would go "well this sucks" near the end of the game. However, if you as a caster aren't using any of your tools to improve the party members around you...you're bad and the adventure should be punishing you for it. If you try to throw a fireball or disintegrate everything and never buff anyone else / hose the badguys so the muscle can lay into them with full attacks/whatever then you shouldn't be getting through adventures. Your DM should be putting challenges up that require everyone's help, not just the wizard saying "I cast this and I win" .
Also out of combat things should be important, if all your characters are building around is 100% try to do more damage and have more hp then yeah that's OK if you're doing a campaign that's all about fighting, but some of the strengths of others classes like rogues or other skilled classes are things that aren't just fighting. Finding/disarming traps, secret doors, sneaking through areas, pick pocketing a key off someone undetected. I think that's a problem in the campaign if someone has skills that just never come up so they feel useless compared to the casters. That's the DM not looking at the strengths of each guy and making adventures where they help. I guess I find a lot of the problems with casting to be DM issues and not real game balance problems. If all your adventures are "the normal goons with no special abilities of note charge at you" then yeah wizard guy is going to look good throwing out fireball after fireball, but that's bad adventure writing not "this game sucks"
Lastly, as far as higher levels go, I don't think campaigns should really sit up there for that long. If the large amount of the focus is on the levels 15+ I don't think it's a great way to go about things. I'm sure others disagree, but to me those are the "finishing up/finale" levels. There's not that much more "figuring out" what's going on, or a ton of side quests, or uncovering ancient secrets, like at these levels you've got your goal. I'm not saying there can't be anything new story wise, but this is the climax, and if the climax lasts for an hour or two in a movie, it's not really a climax, it's just kind of a hodge podge of crazy action and one "big reveal" after another and you just become desensitized to it. The last parts should be impactful, interesting, important, and concise to me. I get that this part is more personal opinion than anything else, but to me the parts where you are reaching into that all powerful everyone is maxed out point is where you need to have a big finish and start something new because continuing to just hang around as the super dudes gets boring after a while, and eventually you get annoyed with the fact that somehow every week or so there is another epic cosmic threat to the world and only you can stop it and hey how did the world ever survive without us saving it every 10 days? (Which would actually be a kind of fun thing to do with an epic level campaign but that's neither here nor there)
TL;DR
#notallD&D's
I guess I just don't see why designing the game this way makes anything fun. Like, why design a class that is objectively more powerful than everyone else at higher levels, and then decide that that portion of the game should be significantly shorter than the rest of the campaign so that the other 4/5ths of the group doesn't have to spend too much time sucking?
Why design a game that requires players and DMs to make specific meta-game decisions so that whoever is stuck with the loser-class during that level range still gets to have a good time? In other words, why design a game where the players of the game have to do extra work to let each other have fun?
What if you designed a game where, from a mechanical perspective, everyone was on an even playing field the entire time? What if the master thief could be the master thief and not just the sub for when the wizard ran out of spells before the next save point? What if the dragon slayer could be the dragon slayer and not just the sub for when the dragon has the Immune to Wizards flag set to "Yes"?
My group knows Wizards and stuff get powerful later on but we've still got a rogue and a fighter and a paladin
The mechanics aren't as important as digging your character is to us
And the new character background stuff fits that really well. Rolling a few d6s and having to roll with a background and create a story for Florian Swiftfingers, asshole cutpurse, or re-roll if you get something you absolutely hate is a lot of fun
I guess, but if the players are like, competing against each other as opposed to working as a team that seems kinda dumb? A lot of the problems with casters to me comes from the idea of blasting all their spells out at once and then being able to just sleep it off again, which has come I think mostly from video games rather than real tabletop interaction. As it gets later on yes casters deal more damage, they also get improved buffs that are often best used on characters like fighters, they can also still die quite easily, and if dungeons/adventures are designed decently you can end up with a solid balance of the casters trying conserve spells and use them sparingly while the non casting classes can bust out all the stops every encounter.
If the characters are simply ignoring one another and trying to be king cool guy of the group, then yeah I get where the fighter would go "well this sucks" near the end of the game. However, if you as a caster aren't using any of your tools to improve the party members around you...you're bad and the adventure should be punishing you for it. If you try to throw a fireball or disintegrate everything and never buff anyone else / hose the badguys so the muscle can lay into them with full attacks/whatever then you shouldn't be getting through adventures. Your DM should be putting challenges up that require everyone's help, not just the wizard saying "I cast this and I win" .
Also out of combat things should be important, if all your characters are building around is 100% try to do more damage and have more hp then yeah that's OK if you're doing a campaign that's all about fighting, but some of the strengths of others classes like rogues or other skilled classes are things that aren't just fighting. Finding/disarming traps, secret doors, sneaking through areas, pick pocketing a key off someone undetected. I think that's a problem in the campaign if someone has skills that just never come up so they feel useless compared to the casters. That's the DM not looking at the strengths of each guy and making adventures where they help. I guess I find a lot of the problems with casting to be DM issues and not real game balance problems. If all your adventures are "the normal goons with no special abilities of note charge at you" then yeah wizard guy is going to look good throwing out fireball after fireball, but that's bad adventure writing not "this game sucks"
Lastly, as far as higher levels go, I don't think campaigns should really sit up there for that long. If the large amount of the focus is on the levels 15+ I don't think it's a great way to go about things. I'm sure others disagree, but to me those are the "finishing up/finale" levels. There's not that much more "figuring out" what's going on, or a ton of side quests, or uncovering ancient secrets, like at these levels you've got your goal. I'm not saying there can't be anything new story wise, but this is the climax, and if the climax lasts for an hour or two in a movie, it's not really a climax, it's just kind of a hodge podge of crazy action and one "big reveal" after another and you just become desensitized to it. The last parts should be impactful, interesting, important, and concise to me. I get that this part is more personal opinion than anything else, but to me the parts where you are reaching into that all powerful everyone is maxed out point is where you need to have a big finish and start something new because continuing to just hang around as the super dudes gets boring after a while, and eventually you get annoyed with the fact that somehow every week or so there is another epic cosmic threat to the world and only you can stop it and hey how did the world ever survive without us saving it every 10 days? (Which would actually be a kind of fun thing to do with an epic level campaign but that's neither here nor there)
TL;DR
#notallD&D's
I guess I just don't see why designing the game this way makes anything fun. Like, why design a class that is objectively more powerful than everyone else at higher levels, and then decide that that portion of the game should be significantly shorter than the rest of the campaign so that the other 4/5ths of the group doesn't have to spend too much time sucking?
Why design a game that requires players and DMs to make specific meta-game decisions so that whoever is stuck with the loser-class during that level range still gets to have a good time? In other words, why design a game where the players of the game have to do extra work to let each other have fun?
What if you designed a game where, from a mechanical perspective, everyone was on an even playing field the entire time? What if the master thief could be the master thief and not just the sub for when the wizard ran out of spells before the next save point? What if the dragon slayer could be the dragon slayer and not just the sub for when the dragon has the Immune to Wizards flag set to "Yes"?
Because it gives you a sense of the power of magic, it makes classes feel genuinely unique and not like a differently flavored guy that can basically accomplish the same things as everyone else, and I just don't really view being a critical part of the party that plays an important role as sucking just because you get fewer killing blows during the end game. I genuinely like playing support this is why I brought up mobas, as just because you aren't the one dealing the most damage in the game, doesn't mean you are less important to the team and you may actually be more so. Going 10-0 isn't possible without a solid stunner/slower, without guys that can soak up damage for you and keep you safe to dish it out. Objectively, your carry is stronger at the end of the game, but does that mean anyone playing support at that point sucks and is lame and stupid?
In the same way, no you didn't deal 15d6 damage to those three demons just now, but you holding the important high ground, tripping and bashing them so they're stuck next to you, and dishing out some damage to a couple of them was the only reason they didn't straight up kill the guy that did that 15d6 in the first place, and your damage was the difference from having 3 hurt yet still dangerous and function enemies, and 2 dead guys and 1 almost dead essentially worthless mook left. I don't view that as the sucky class, I view that as a role and just because the role doesn't have as strong an option for "dish out tons of damage and stuff" doesn't make me feel lesser or neglected or shitty. It's supposed to be a synergy between different classes. The wizard doesn't get off his spells in time without a strong area controlling fighter up front. The enemies wouldn't have been weakened enough to kill easily if the rogue doesn't find the lightning trap and rig it to trigger against them. Everybody is hitting more often and for more damage thanks to the cleric's buffs. If it wasn't for the wizard's buffs the fighter wouldn't be able to avoid so many attacks with a higher AC and do his own job better. Sure the wizard is dishing out the most hurt, and "objectively" is the strongest character if the only way you measure enjoyment and fun in a game is the amount of damage possible in a single round, but everyone is still massively important.
Plus, it's not like casters are utterly unstoppable and the guys are powerless to stop them. Even without spell resistance, guys sometimes just ya know, make their saves, and the spell doesn't do jack. I like the idea of daily spells because it requires you to conserve resources and it creates a different play style. As a caster you have to play risk reward, how much is this going to help vs how much it'll hurt to not have this for future encounters. Sure you can do more damage in one round, but fighters/rogues/whoever don't have to worry about that. They always try to hit for whatever the can, and they don't need to worry about resources outside of HP which becomes much less of an issue at higher levels when you basically just go back to full HP after every fight. When you hit with a power attack, you're not out of power attacks. Casters have to worry about that. There's a reason it's spells per day. There's an inherit implication that they need to be managed or budgeted. If the game is specifically designed to have you do that, and you try to sleep in the middle of an evil fortress, and the DM just goes "yup nobody notices you for a full 8 hours great job" and gives you your spells back every time, I don't see that as a poorly designed game, I see it as bad DM'ing. You're actively subverting the way the game both is designed and presents that design to you. I don't see that as meta-game decisions so it's ok for Mr. Bad class. I see it as NOT actively making meta-game decisions that make casters orders of magnitude more powerful than they're designed to be.
I'm gonna play D&D on Monday for the first time since high school! It's with some work friends who are starting new characters in a longstanding campaign. It's 3.5, which I have zero experience with, but I have a player's handbook on the way.
Apparently we're playing Drow. And we're starting at level 14 CLE, whatever that is.
I am in so far over my head and I'm excited.
You mean 14 ECL? Means that you have enough XP to play a 14th level character, but some races (particularly drow and other crazy powerful critters that can be PCs) have a built-in level modifier as a penalty. Like, I think a troll's ECL is its monster hit dice (7, I think) plus its ECL penalty (+5, again I think) plus its class levels. So you could have a troll that is a level 2 Barbarian under that formula. I think drow are ECL+2 in 3.5 so your drow would probably be a level 12... something.
Oh my, thank you. Googling CLE was just getting me a bunch of ads for continuing legal education, which was less than helpful. I'm thinking I'll try and roll a kind of tank-y warrior just to keep things simple, and the party already has magic/rogue/ranger covered.
Not a problem. I've been messing with ECL lately because I'm considering re-joining a 3.5E game and my total new character ECL allowance is 9. The campaign's rule is that new characters come in at 2 levels lower than the party average, to encourage people to Raise Dead on killed party members instead of rerolling all the time (you lose one level when you get raised from the dead).
I want to join as a lizardman (2 "monster" levels and ECL +1) Fighter 2/Monk 4 (2+1+2+4= ECL 9). He has some crazy-good benefits like a big natural armor class bonus and claws and fangs, but another player is running a catman (ECL +1) barbarian 5/rogue 4/ranger 2 (1+5+4+2= ECL 12, he's one of the characters that was an original party member from level 1, and has only died twice). He is afraid that I will outshine him in the "animal headed brawler" department. So instead I am considering a tiefling (ECL+1) Rogue 3/Cleric of Technology 5 (1+3+5= ECL 9) who uses a triple-barrel rifle (Ptolus has some crazy firearms, yo).
This has been your overly-complicated 3.5E level mechanics lesson for the day.
There just seems to be this idea out there that the one single way to measure being a "good" or "bad" class in D&D is "How much damage can they do at level 16?". Like, ok wizards win there, but A: It's a team game, B: They have a multitude of weaknesses built into that high damage potential, C: There are tons of things to do in D&D besides straight up fights in empty rooms and using a variety of them doesn't mean you're "Meta-gaming against casters" It means you're running a good game that values more than simply "how much damage do you do".
I think in every game system ever made there is a class that can do more damage than the others, but for some reason it's only 'broken' when it's in D&D.
To use a sports analogy: Tim Duncan doesn't score the most points per game on the spurs and thus he sucks.
Like, nah. Tim Duncan is really good, he just doesn't play in such a way as to score 25 a game.
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Which of course, still leaves the fighter high and dry.
I am of the mindset that you should just focus and have fun with your game, but I always have fun breaking down the analogy:
Tim duncan may be really good, but if you could be, say michael jordan, or tim duncan, who you gonna be?
or, even, imagine that one of tim duncan's teammates had enough moves to immediately end the basketball game before you got off the bench, so that you don't even get to be awesome in your own way. Now, you get to be excellent at excercise, but you don't get to participate fully in the part that you like the best (the basketball game).
Because it gives you a sense of the power of magic, it makes classes feel genuinely unique and not like a differently flavored guy that can basically accomplish the same things as everyone else, and I just don't really view being a critical part of the party that plays an important role as sucking just because you get fewer killing blows during the end game. I genuinely like playing support this is why I brought up mobas, as just because you aren't the one dealing the most damage in the game, doesn't mean you are less important to the team and you may actually be more so. Going 10-0 isn't possible without a solid stunner/slower, without guys that can soak up damage for you and keep you safe to dish it out. Objectively, your carry is stronger at the end of the game, but does that mean anyone playing support at that point sucks and is lame and stupid?
In the same way, no you didn't deal 15d6 damage to those three demons just now, but you holding the important high ground, tripping and bashing them so they're stuck next to you, and dishing out some damage to a couple of them was the only reason they didn't straight up kill the guy that did that 15d6 in the first place, and your damage was the difference from having 3 hurt yet still dangerous and function enemies, and 2 dead guys and 1 almost dead essentially worthless mook left. I don't view that as the sucky class, I view that as a role and just because the role doesn't have as strong an option for "dish out tons of damage and stuff" doesn't make me feel lesser or neglected or shitty. It's supposed to be a synergy between different classes. The wizard doesn't get off his spells in time without a strong area controlling fighter up front. The enemies wouldn't have been weakened enough to kill easily if the rogue doesn't find the lightning trap and rig it to trigger against them. Everybody is hitting more often and for more damage thanks to the cleric's buffs. If it wasn't for the wizard's buffs the fighter wouldn't be able to avoid so many attacks with a higher AC and do his own job better. Sure the wizard is dishing out the most hurt, and "objectively" is the strongest character if the only way you measure enjoyment and fun in a game is the amount of damage possible in a single round, but everyone is still massively important.
Plus, it's not like casters are utterly unstoppable and the guys are powerless to stop them. Even without spell resistance, guys sometimes just ya know, make their saves, and the spell doesn't do jack. I like the idea of daily spells because it requires you to conserve resources and it creates a different play style. As a caster you have to play risk reward, how much is this going to help vs how much it'll hurt to not have this for future encounters. Sure you can do more damage in one round, but fighters/rogues/whoever don't have to worry about that. They always try to hit for whatever the can, and they don't need to worry about resources outside of HP which becomes much less of an issue at higher levels when you basically just go back to full HP after every fight. When you hit with a power attack, you're not out of power attacks. Casters have to worry about that. There's a reason it's spells per day. There's an inherit implication that they need to be managed or budgeted. If the game is specifically designed to have you do that, and you try to sleep in the middle of an evil fortress, and the DM just goes "yup nobody notices you for a full 8 hours great job" and gives you your spells back every time, I don't see that as a poorly designed game, I see it as bad DM'ing. You're actively subverting the way the game both is designed and presents that design to you. I don't see that as meta-game decisions so it's ok for Mr. Bad class. I see it as NOT actively making meta-game decisions that make casters orders of magnitude more powerful than they're designed to be.
I'm having a hard time understanding what it is you actually want. You started out describing "crazy strong" magic-users that shake the world with a power that non-magic-users could never hope to match. You lamented the MMO-ization of the tabletop experience because every class does the same thing (which they don't, nor do they in MMOs). But after a couple posts you're now just describing a Striker (DPS) and a Defender (Tank) and I'm really not seeing what you're after.
Casters seem to be pretty dang strong from the one terrible 5e demo I did at GenCon. The other fighter in our group got one-shot by a enemy wizard thug at level one by taking 16 damage in one spell before they could do anything in the first combat.
(In the first combat of he adventure, three hours in.
God, forgot how bad WOTC and the DCI was at this.
COME FORTH, AMATERASU! - Switch Friend Code SW-5465-2458-5696 - Twitch
I am of the mindset that you should just focus and have fun with your game, but I always have fun breaking down the analogy:
Tim duncan may be really good, but if you could be, say michael jordan, or tim duncan, who you gonna be?
or, even, imagine that one of tim duncan's teammates had enough moves to immediately end the basketball game before you got off the bench, so that you don't even get to be awesome in your own way. Now, you get to be excellent at excercise, but you don't get to participate fully in the part that you like the best (the basketball game).
OK, but what I'm saying is, it's cool for the wizard that after probably months and months of play, you get to feel that kind of power, because it makes magic feel powerful and special and different than a guy with a sword. You can control and harness the energies of the cosmos and have mastered that mighty power to the point of being one of if not the most powerful wizard of your generation at level 15 or whatever, it SHOULD feel good. You should feel like you've got something extra special up your sleeve, you shouldn't feel the same as everyone else but you shoot red beams instead of a glowing red piercing arrow.
However, stuff like that should happen RARELY. It should be the once in a while, talk about for days with your friends "Holy SHIT dude!" kind of moment. If you go "Ok, this challenge can be overcome by these two spells in combination very easily. I shall now make all further challenges in this campaign a slight variation of this same challenge." Then like, sorry I don't blame the system you're using for making the fighter look bad. I blame the fact that you actively tailor your game to one guy's character. Every encounter or challenge you build as a DM is a choice, and if all you ever do is pick stuff the wizard is good at and no one else is, yeah he looks good, but you're shitty at your job and it's not the game's fault you never have any secret doors or traps or guys with spell resistance or guys with high saves or guys that are resistant to fire or guys that close distance fast or guys that sneak attack or guys with poison or other spellcasters that can counter you or guys with abilities that force fort saves or guys with abilities that force ref saves or guys that can deal lots of damage from a distance or guys that can deal a large amount of damage in one hit or guys who delay until you start casting and then attack. I could keep going but you get the point.
None of these are "making meta-game decisions" and making your game anti-wizard so it's playable and NOW it's fun for everyone that you've fixed this broken game. Like none of those things are house rules, if you just make every adventure bland straight up fights with high hp low save guys with little in the ways of special abilities that's more boring to me.
There just seems to be this idea out there that the one single way to measure being a "good" or "bad" class in D&D is "How much damage can they do at level 16?". Like, ok wizards win there, but A: It's a team game, B: They have a multitude of weaknesses built into that high damage potential, C: There are tons of things to do in D&D besides straight up fights in empty rooms and using a variety of them doesn't mean you're "Meta-gaming against casters" It means you're running a good game that values more than simply "how much damage do you do".
I think in every game system ever made there is a class that can do more damage than the others, but for some reason it's only 'broken' when it's in D&D.
To use a sports analogy: Tim Duncan doesn't score the most points per game on the spurs and thus he sucks.
Like, nah. Tim Duncan is really good, he just doesn't play in such a way as to score 25 a game.
Okay, I haven't really been arguing on this tangent, but I think the issue is, "what if you could just choose to be Michael Jordan?" MVP of the year, every year. The traditional problem with wizards under a Vancian system is that they're the best at combat, but, give them eight hours and they're the best at anything.
There is going to be a rest of the team, of course, but they're only playing interference for the wizard, because they know that he's the guy who can make the 3-point shot.
Theoretically, with some planning, every PC could be a wizard, and it just makes things that much easier. In the group I mentioned I was thinking on re-joining in my last post, there's a conflict between me and another player because I want to make a highly mobile skirmisher, but he already has an established highly mobile skirmisher (with a drastically different build, but they outwardly appear similar in niche). This same party has an Invoker wizard and a Necromancer wizard, and nobody sees this as any sort of problematic duplication of talent. Because it isn't one. One is a magical howitzer and one is a disposable minion-generator. Of course, the Necromancer also has howitzer-capabilities and the Invoker can also summon minions, but neither care, because Michael Jordan certainly doesn't mind passing the ball to Also Michael Jordan.
This problem is also exacerbated by the fact that wizards, at least in 3.5E also get bonus feats ("You mean I can just make a FIREBALL wand and keep tossing bombs even when I'm out of spells?") and generous skill points/lists, making them one of the best classes outside of combat as well.
I am of the mindset that you should just focus and have fun with your game, but I always have fun breaking down the analogy:
Tim duncan may be really good, but if you could be, say michael jordan, or tim duncan, who you gonna be?
or, even, imagine that one of tim duncan's teammates had enough moves to immediately end the basketball game before you got off the bench, so that you don't even get to be awesome in your own way. Now, you get to be excellent at excercise, but you don't get to participate fully in the part that you like the best (the basketball game).
I am of the mindset that you should just focus and have fun with your game, but I always have fun breaking down the analogy:
Tim duncan may be really good, but if you could be, say michael jordan, or tim duncan, who you gonna be?
or, even, imagine that one of tim duncan's teammates had enough moves to immediately end the basketball game before you got off the bench, so that you don't even get to be awesome in your own way. Now, you get to be excellent at excercise, but you don't get to participate fully in the part that you like the best (the basketball game).
OK, but what I'm saying is, it's cool for the wizard that after probably months and months of play, you get to feel that kind of power, because it makes magic feel powerful and special and different than a guy with a sword. You can control and harness the energies of the cosmos and have mastered that mighty power to the point of being one of if not the most powerful wizard of your generation, it SHOULD feel good. You should feel like you've got something extra special up your sleeve, you shouldn't feel the same as everyone else but you shoot red beams instead of a glowing red piercing arrow.
However, stuff like that should happen RARELY. It should be the once in a while, talk about for days with your friends "Holy SHIT dude!" kind of moment. If you go "Ok, this challenge can be overcome by these two spells in combination very easily. I shall now make all further challenges in this campaign a slight variation of this same challenge." Then like, sorry I don't blame the system you're using for making the fighter look bad. I blame the fact that you actively tailor your game to one guy's character. Every encounter or challenge you build as a DM is a choice, and if all you ever do is pick stuff the wizard is good at and no one else is, yeah he looks good, but you're shitty at your job and it's not the game's fault you never have any secret doors or traps or guys with spell resistance or guys with high saves or guys that are resistant to fire or guys that close distance fast or guys that sneak attack or guys with poison or other spellcasters that can counter you or guys with abilities that force fort saves or guys with abilities that force ref saves or guys that can deal lots of damage from a distance or guys that can deal a large amount of damage in one hit or guys who delay until you start casting and then attack. I could keep going but you get the point.
None of these are "making meta-game decisions" and making your game anti-wizard so it's playable and NOW it's fun for everyone that you've fixed this broken game. Like none of those things are house rules, if you just make every adventure bland straight up fights with high hp low save guys with little in the ways of special abilities that's more boring to me.
I replied a little farther up, but again, all you're describing is different party roles. This is a concept that has always been a part of D&D but never explicitly stated or addressed except in 4E, where it was often decried as being an MMO mechanic. What you're describing now is exactly the thing that caused a lot of people to say that 4E wasn't "real" D&D. The idea that yes, a magic-user is powerful, but so is everyone else (just at different things).
You've transitioned from wanting magic-users to have mountain-moving power that a non-caster could never hope to match, to wanting wizards that are good at certain things but not at others, just like everyone else. This already exists in 4E and you don't even have to wait until level 16 to get it.
I know this isn't a particularly popular opinion, but I've always kind of liked the idea of casters, especially wizards, starting out lower end and through the mid and end game they get crazy strong. Like firstly, it makes more sense to me in getting into the RPing aspect. Magic is powerful, and yeah it's nice mechanics wise if everyone stays on exactly the same plane the whole time, it's also just kinda boring to me. If casters don't gain some measure of power as the game goes on, it feels flat, like you're just playing an MMO put onto a tabletop. If some guy with a two handed beatstick can just walk in and charge straight at a caster and rip him to bits without much issue even if that caster is the grandmaster of the mage's guild it breaks the illusion that magic is actually there and powerful and feels just like a token mechanic for that class and nothing more. Magics should be the forces that shape the world, that tear down mountains and challenge the strongest creatures the world can muster. If some guy swinging a sword is equally effective at almost everything, then it starts feeling stale.
It's not as if these casting classes have no weaknesses, they're still vulnerable to most attacks. If someone gets the jump on them, they go down a lot quicker and can be pretty effectively shut down by most combat classes if they close the distance are actually trying to put the squeeze on them. You need help, you still need someone to be there right beside you, to keep guys from just running up and beating the tar out of you, or grappling you, etc and often times monsters have plenty of defenses against magic, in which case your best move is still to play support for the muscle guys and watch them go to town.
It's kind like MOBA's to me. Sure it'd be...nice I guess if everyone could be good early, mid, and late game? It would also be bland and annoying. If you're playing a caster, you're playing for the late game. Early on you're going to struggle, you're not going to be the big #1 go to guy on your team. As the game progresses though, you move into the teams star and that guy that was #1 becomes your support. It's a natural progression that makes things feel different and fun to me, you're not just playing the same way the whole time and I like that variety.
Plus most of the crazy power concerns result to me from questionable DMing. Sure you can run out, cast all your daily spells in 5 minutes, and rest. If you're DM is just going to let you do that every time yeah, then that's a pretty bad power imbalance if every encounter you're throwing out 3 or 4 of your highest level spells. In my opinion your DM is also dumb for allowing it. There are very simple ways to limit a lot of these concerns.
The problem with this is the fact that, unlike MOBAs, pen and paper RPGs have a late game that can take months, and take place a year or more after the early game. If a sword dude is outmatched "late game" by the wizard, that translates to potentially tens of sessions where the caster wins automatically and the fighter sits on his hands.
A better way to balance would be to somehow have mechanics that break up individual adventures into an "early, mid, and late" game, giving each character type a chance to excel at different things. The problem is D&D tends to focus on who can soak/deal the most damage for it's concept of which is the best class. In that framework, I definitely think you have to take a 4e route of relative parity, or create completely different but equally important combat roles for different characters (which hey, 4e also attempted this!)
I guess, but if the players are like, competing against each other as opposed to working as a team that seems kinda dumb? A lot of the problems with casters to me comes from the idea of blasting all their spells out at once and then being able to just sleep it off again, which has come I think mostly from video games rather than real tabletop interaction. As it gets later on yes casters deal more damage, they also get improved buffs that are often best used on characters like fighters, they can also still die quite easily, and if dungeons/adventures are designed decently you can end up with a solid balance of the casters trying conserve spells and use them sparingly while the non casting classes can bust out all the stops every encounter.
If the characters are simply ignoring one another and trying to be king cool guy of the group, then yeah I get where the fighter would go "well this sucks" near the end of the game. However, if you as a caster aren't using any of your tools to improve the party members around you...you're bad and the adventure should be punishing you for it. If you try to throw a fireball or disintegrate everything and never buff anyone else / hose the badguys so the muscle can lay into them with full attacks/whatever then you shouldn't be getting through adventures. Your DM should be putting challenges up that require everyone's help, not just the wizard saying "I cast this and I win" .
Also out of combat things should be important, if all your characters are building around is 100% try to do more damage and have more hp then yeah that's OK if you're doing a campaign that's all about fighting, but some of the strengths of others classes like rogues or other skilled classes are things that aren't just fighting. Finding/disarming traps, secret doors, sneaking through areas, pick pocketing a key off someone undetected. I think that's a problem in the campaign if someone has skills that just never come up so they feel useless compared to the casters. That's the DM not looking at the strengths of each guy and making adventures where they help. I guess I find a lot of the problems with casting to be DM issues and not real game balance problems. If all your adventures are "the normal goons with no special abilities of note charge at you" then yeah wizard guy is going to look good throwing out fireball after fireball, but that's bad adventure writing not "this game sucks"
Lastly, as far as higher levels go, I don't think campaigns should really sit up there for that long. If the large amount of the focus is on the levels 15+ I don't think it's a great way to go about things. I'm sure others disagree, but to me those are the "finishing up/finale" levels. There's not that much more "figuring out" what's going on, or a ton of side quests, or uncovering ancient secrets, like at these levels you've got your goal. I'm not saying there can't be anything new story wise, but this is the climax, and if the climax lasts for an hour or two in a movie, it's not really a climax, it's just kind of a hodge podge of crazy action and one "big reveal" after another and you just become desensitized to it. The last parts should be impactful, interesting, important, and concise to me. I get that this part is more personal opinion than anything else, but to me the parts where you are reaching into that all powerful everyone is maxed out point is where you need to have a big finish and start something new because continuing to just hang around as the super dudes gets boring after a while, and eventually you get annoyed with the fact that somehow every week or so there is another epic cosmic threat to the world and only you can stop it and hey how did the world ever survive without us saving it every 10 days? (Which would actually be a kind of fun thing to do with an epic level campaign but that's neither here nor there)
TL;DR
#notallD&D's
The using all of their spells then sleeping it off goes back to Jack Vance and the Dying Earth series. It's one of the reasons you see the term Vancian Magic used to describe D&D's spell casting system. And people abusing that goes back to basic, and well before the explosion of video games. D&D comes out of a wargaming background and players breaking the hell out of the system isn't exactly anything new. The balance for this was supposed to be spell components being something you can't just visit a town and quickly resupply. But tracking that stuff is mind numbingly boring. So it tended to go by the wayside.
As for the idea that other classes bring non-combat stuff to the table, the problem with this is that D&D's core design is based around combat. D&D is a combat system with some non-combat interaction systems bolted on. So when you bring up the argument that there are things other then combat to focus on, you're telling them that they will have something to do on rare occasions but the bulk of the time what they do is irrelevant, and when it's important they are irrelevant. Now one way to solve this is to equalize the damage. The other way is to give people something to do that isn't damage related but combat related. This could be things like buffing and debuffing. It could be battlefield control. Sadly the idea of these things leads to people screaming "OMG MMOism!". So then the discussion basically has to come back to damage.
Now the idea that the good DM will find ways to solve this isn't new but it's full of it's own issues. It means that the DM is having to overcome the issues with the system, which doesn't mean the system is good, it means that a DM can wrangle a system into being decent. The realty is that systems should be designed so that with an average DM/GM/Whatever that the game is fun. You shouldn't need to find an above average DM/GM/Whatever to have fun. Because depending on the person in charge to be above average means that the majority of people playing a system won't be having fun. And that means shitty design.
There are lots of other ways to get great flavor in a game.
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PiptheFairFrequently not in boats.Registered Userregular
I am of the mindset that you should just focus and have fun with your game, but I always have fun breaking down the analogy:
Tim duncan may be really good, but if you could be, say michael jordan, or tim duncan, who you gonna be?
or, even, imagine that one of tim duncan's teammates had enough moves to immediately end the basketball game before you got off the bench, so that you don't even get to be awesome in your own way. Now, you get to be excellent at excercise, but you don't get to participate fully in the part that you like the best (the basketball game).
OK, but what I'm saying is, it's cool for the wizard that after probably months and months of play, you get to feel that kind of power, because it makes magic feel powerful and special and different than a guy with a sword. You can control and harness the energies of the cosmos and have mastered that mighty power to the point of being one of if not the most powerful wizard of your generation, it SHOULD feel good. You should feel like you've got something extra special up your sleeve, you shouldn't feel the same as everyone else but you shoot red beams instead of a glowing red piercing arrow.
However, stuff like that should happen RARELY. It should be the once in a while, talk about for days with your friends "Holy SHIT dude!" kind of moment. If you go "Ok, this challenge can be overcome by these two spells in combination very easily. I shall now make all further challenges in this campaign a slight variation of this same challenge." Then like, sorry I don't blame the system you're using for making the fighter look bad. I blame the fact that you actively tailor your game to one guy's character. Every encounter or challenge you build as a DM is a choice, and if all you ever do is pick stuff the wizard is good at and no one else is, yeah he looks good, but you're shitty at your job and it's not the game's fault you never have any secret doors or traps or guys with spell resistance or guys with high saves or guys that are resistant to fire or guys that close distance fast or guys that sneak attack or guys with poison or other spellcasters that can counter you or guys with abilities that force fort saves or guys with abilities that force ref saves or guys that can deal lots of damage from a distance or guys that can deal a large amount of damage in one hit or guys who delay until you start casting and then attack. I could keep going but you get the point.
None of these are "making meta-game decisions" and making your game anti-wizard so it's playable and NOW it's fun for everyone that you've fixed this broken game. Like none of those things are house rules, if you just make every adventure bland straight up fights with high hp low save guys with little in the ways of special abilities that's more boring to me.
I replied a little farther up, but again, all you're describing is different party roles. This is a concept that has always been a part of D&D but never explicitly stated or addressed except in 4E, where it was often decried as being an MMO mechanic. What you're describing now is exactly the thing that caused a lot of people to say that 4E wasn't "real" D&D. The idea that yes, a magic-user is powerful, but so is everyone else (just at different things).
You've transitioned from wanting magic-users to have mountain-moving power that a non-caster could never hope to match, to wanting wizards that are good at certain things but not at others, just like everyone else. This already exists in 4E and you don't even have to wait until level 16 to get it.
Yeah, but I'm just saying that's ALREADY what wizards are. I think wizards are already good at certain things and bad at others. I want wizards at an extremely high level after playing through a progression that does put them at a disadvantage earlier and somewhat through the mid game too, to have a little extra juice at the end. I like the idea of a progression instead of "everyone is at the same level always" because I just like that flavor and style of play.
I like having the transition. As a fighter, you don't just decide "I'm the tank" or "I hit stuff with this two handed ax for a lot of damage" and that's it forever that's your thing now just get good at that and there you go we're done here. I like the idea of "early on I'm the big man, so I've got to try to tank but also work harder on dishing out damage. I should take the head and also for bosses I should grab buffs and try to tangle while people keep me going and do what else they can" to the mid game of "a solid mix of tanking, working more on controlling the battlefield, and maybe start to specialize in disabling, or massive 1v1 damage for caster busting, or something" to the end game of "I can still take dudes down, but not quite like the wizard can, so now my job is more about finding a niche or going full support for our glass cannon who is still extremely vulnerable to everything but will save abilities. I can either find a build here to do my thing, or I can form a dynamic duo with my wizard friend."
But those party roles are already there, 4e didn't make them, it just took away other things. It felt like an MMO mechanic because everyone functioned the same now. Instead of saves working differently, you just had 4 AC's now. Instead of spells and having sneak attacks and extra feats and such, everybody just got powers and that was it. They all functioned off the same mechanics, in the same way, and that was it. It didn't make things have better defined party roles to me, it made me feel like a magic missile was the exact same thing as an arrow. I liked that things used to feel different for the classes, that a magic missle would hit for less but it was GOING to hit and that made it different and useful in some situations and not in others and you didn't get an infinite number of them which also changed how you used them.
Basically, I like the idea of casters being a little weaker early and a little stronger at the end. I like how that works, if you don't I get it but I find it more interesting to have classes evolve in their power structure over time instead of just remaining the same throughout.
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PiptheFairFrequently not in boats.Registered Userregular
pathfinder classes are all totally viable late game except monks
there are some crazy fucking monk archetypes though
I think most of the time D&D rulesets are too focused on combat and dealing damage, and it is easy to fall into the trap of designing and playing a game with that in mind.
In my Dungeon World game right now, I am sure the wizard could be doing a fantastic amount of damage if he would ever learn some offensive spells, but he doesn't want to. Such things are beneath him. He works together with the group simply because he wants to run cons with the thief, make fun of the druid, etc. He actually proved he was monstrously useful in combat by orchestrating a complex ritual spell (which in DW lets you do whatever you want as long as you are in a place of power and conform to 2-4 arbitrary rules I set as the DM) so that the fighter could corner a local warlord and fight him one on one without any of his troops intervening.
...
I guess in the end what I want out of a game is more narrative-based. Crunchy bits are there to introduce chaos and thwart your character's designs, not to limit what your character can do in balance with an entire closed system of the game world. I understand folks who like to have defined rules and game systems, but my brain just doesn't work that way.
This started out as a post meant to contribute to the conversation and ended up just talking about the kinds of games I like, but w/e
Pip, you are not alone here in your love of Pathfinder. On Wednesday I killed a small blue evil cave fairy by throwing a tarot card through it's eyeball. Not a magic tarot card, I can't do that until next level. Just a regular tarot card.
And on Saturday I start playing in Iron Gods!
Before following any advice, opinions, or thoughts I may have expressed in the above post, be warned: I found Keven Costners "Waterworld" to be a very entertaining film.
You know, you could probably apply the whole early bloomer/late game killer thing to D&D 4e pretty easy.
You just start some of your classes off at level 5 or so while everyone else is level 1, and then penalize them some percentage of exp so that they're only level 20-something when everyone else is level 30.
Boom, done and done.
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chiasaur11Never doubt a raccoon.Do you think it's trademarked?Registered Userregular
I'm gonna play D&D on Monday for the first time since high school! It's with some work friends who are starting new characters in a longstanding campaign. It's 3.5, which I have zero experience with, but I have a player's handbook on the way.
Apparently we're playing Drow. And we're starting at level 14 CLE, whatever that is.
But those party roles are already there, 4e didn't make them, it just took away other things.
Yeah, I specifically said that 4E didn't create them. But what did 4E take away?
It felt like an MMO mechanic because everyone functioned the same now.
But they don't function the same. A fighter does different things than a ranger, who is different from a rogue, who is different from a warlock, who is different from a wizard. They all have their basis in a standardized mechanical system, but the way they implement those mechanics in play is different.
Instead of saves working differently, you just had 4 AC's now.
The only thing different is who rolls the d20. Different things tend to target a different defense, with spells targeting something other than AC more often (hmm, that seems familiar...)
Instead of spells
Still there in 4E.
and having sneak attacks
Still there in 4E.
and extra feats
Replaced by feats that are specifically tailored for certain classes, races, or other qualifiers (in addition to general feats that anyone can take depending on how they want to specialize their character). Also humans still get an extra feat.
and such, everybody just got powers and that was it.
That's not it. Also, feats and powers can be retrained as you level up, for example if you wanted to slowly transition from one play-style to another.
They all functioned off the same mechanics,
True.
in the same way, and that was it.
Not true.
It didn't make things have better defined party roles to me,
Why not? What party roles were you looking for, and what kind of definition did you feel was missing?
it made me feel like a magic missile was the exact same thing as an arrow.
Not true. Hell, even an arrow isn't the same thing as an arrow, depending on who's doing the shooting.
I liked that things used to feel different for the classes, that a magic missle would hit for less but it was GOING to hit
Magic Missile does auto-hit, but for less damage. In fairness, the original Magic Missile in the 4E PHB didn't auto-hit, but it did do more damage than the auto-hitting version. I will also note that, to my knowledge, there are no auto-hitting arrows in 4E.
and that made it different and useful in some situations and not in others
Still true for the 4E version.
and you didn't get an infinite number of them which also changed how you used them.
Well you've got me there. I mean there are still choices to make in how you use Magic Missile since you have several other spells to choose from and Magic Missile might not be the right choice for a given situation, but yeah they are infinite now if your wizard chose to learn that particular spell.
Basically, I like the idea of casters being a little weaker early and a little stronger at the end. I like how that works, if you don't I get it but I find it more interesting to have classes evolve in their power structure over time instead of just remaining the same throughout.
I understand this statement and while I don't like the idea of one PC being weak (in some ways) for a certain span of the game compared to their peers in exchange for being a little stronger (in some ways) for a little while a lot later, I recognize that that is a subjective opinion.
know what i didn't like about 4e? how magic items where mandatory and had to be constantly upgraded or replaced for math's sake.
Yeah, there was rules in the dmg2 for not including them but that just kinda highlighted the issue.
I think that's my only real big complaint about 4e. That and resistances and vulnerabilities where kinda boring but if i really cared i could have house ruled in different things.
I want wizards at an extremely high level after playing through a progression that does put them at a disadvantage earlier and somewhat through the mid game too, to have a little extra juice at the end. I like the idea of a progression instead of "everyone is at the same level always" because I just like that flavor and style of play.
Not everyone plays a character from low-level to high-level, or even from low-level to mid-level. Even if you were planning on playing a character from levels 1 to 20, knowing that you'd be able to cast spells that could kill every monster in an encounter twice over once you gained another 10+ levels doesn't mean anything to the game that you're actually playing right now. Wizards might seem balanced on paper when you take levels 1 through 20 in aggregate, but that's not how the game actually plays out. If "Level 1 Wizard" and "Level 20 Wizard" are effectively different classes where one is deliberately shitty and one is deliberately more powerful and versatile than other classes, then both classes are badly designed when viewed in the context of actual gameplay at their respective levels.
It's worth noting that the idea that wizards are weak at low levels and strong at high levels isn't anywhere nearly as true of 3e/PF/5e as it is of AD&D. And being a low-level wizard in AD&D was a miserable experience - once you used up your handful of spells (or your spell, singular, at level 1), you were about as useful to the party as a random goblin hireling would have been. (Maybe even less useful, since goblins could use bows, wear armor, and shared the fighter's superior saving throws.) 3e more than compensated for that low-level grind by giving the wizard baseline buffs that remained useful at all levels, but didn't compensate for the power imbalance on the other end of the scale where the high-level caster could easily and often accidentally dominate the game. If anything, 3e made the high-level disparity worse by (among other things) giving wizards more spells per day, not just at lower levels where wizards were previously weak but even at the higher levels where older editions' casters would outshine the rest of the party despite having possibly half as many spells as a same-level 3e caster.
I don't have the best grasp of 4e. I played it right when it came out, and that's how it felt the first few times me and my friends played it, and at the end of the day we just went back to 3.5 for a while. Was it analytically fair, probably not, especially not now with more books out for it and when I'm several years older etc. I'm not trying to sit here and make this a giant slam of 4.0 . I didn't dislike it because it tried to make party roles and that's like an MMO or anything, party roles are a good thing. I didn't like 4.0 for reasons that are probably purely personal at the end of the day. I'd like to be able to completely separate emotion from the equation, but I probably can't and I doubt I'll ever really like 4.0 that much.
I just don't get this idea that keeps getting brought up that in other D&D editions there are two roles: Wizard and dumb idiot who isn't a wizard. I've never encountered the problem of a useless character in a campaign, nor have I ever encountered a point where the wizard is so far past anyone that while they're playing, all they're doing is cleaning up the mess left in their wake. I have also never felt like the only reason that wasn't happening was that the DM was specifically hamstringing the wizard in every encounter so someone else could win for a change. I have encountered the part where the wizard starts being able to do some pretty cool shit and takes to the forefront of pure damage capability and I genuinely liked both the journey there and playing once they had finally 'arrived' so to speak.
People may say (possibly rightly so, I haven't played the variety of systems other people have) that 3.5 did a bad job of working skills in, we used the systems a lot and genuinely enjoyed them and spent a lot of time out of combat working with it. If it's bad and so D&D really is all about combat and skills in it were just a pity party, like ok I can't really argue with you here. I haven't played 1000's of campaigns all around the world to establish what an "average" dm/player is, I played the ones I've played and in every one out of combat took up a lot of our time and mattered at least as much as anything else. Out of combat and skill things were always important. All our campaigns had some form of caster and never did I feel like they could just do everything. I felt that they filled a role in our party well, and while they had some abilities that could help them out in other areas and could be more adaptable, I never felt like the caster could out-fighter the fighter, or out-rogue, or anything of the sort.
Maybe that's just our party and our DM's, I don't know, maybe we just got it to work out just right and the system is total bubkis. I dunno, I never felt playing it that is was so wildly unbalanced and that playing the wizard was easymode and ruined the system. I'm going to stop arguing because I'm basically defending the older system I liked and the newer system that is using some things from that old system I liked against either things I've never played before or don't have much experience with and there's not much point to that and all I'm going to do is look either like a dingus or some giant trog shouting "Tabletops are dead now, they're all ruined since the one I got in my teens!"
Like I'm happy they brought back the old casting system and I like the balance of powers between classes shifting as a campaign goes along. I don't think it ruins player roles or breaks the game or causes all these gigantic problems, but I could be wrong and that's simply a result of how my group plays. I think we've probably argued this to death at this point.
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Der Waffle MousBlame this on the misfortune of your birth.New Yark, New Yark.Registered Userregular
I'm currently looking at 13th Ages' multiclassing rules.
I've spent the last couple of days trying to wrap my head around the Key Modifier table, convinced that I'm missing something important because there's no way that rule was as dumb as how I am reading it as.
Finally, talking with other people, it turns out it totally is that dumb.
Basically, when combining two classes, each has an ability score listed on a table. For all your attacks and class features that key off of one of the two ability score, they now key off of the lower of the two.
Which is incredibly clunky in practice and makes for some very weird stat considerations.
Like combining a Fighter with a Commander. Two classes who primarily rely on strength, now have charisma thrown into the mix.
So a Fighter/Commander with high strength and lower charisma is suddenly swinging their sword by sheer force of personality.
Or on the reverse tack, they're healing allies extra well and throwing out attack bonuses by BEING SWOLE.
I'm currently looking at 13th Ages' multiclassing rules.
I've spent the last couple of days trying to wrap my head around the Key Modifier table, convinced that I'm missing something important because there's no way that rule was as dumb as how I am reading it as.
Finally, talking with other people, it turns out it totally is that dumb.
Basically, when combining two classes, each has an ability score listed on a table. For all your attacks and class features that key off of one of the two ability score, they now key off of the lower of the two.
Which is incredibly clunky in practice and makes for some very weird stat considerations.
Like combining a Fighter with a Commander. Two classes who primarily rely on strength, now have charisma thrown into the mix.
So a Fighter/Commander with high strength and lower charisma is suddenly swinging their sword by sheer force of personality.
Or on the reverse tack, they're healing allies extra well and throwing out attack bonuses by BEING SWOLE.
my guess is that it's done to limit trying to break multi-classing which was a serious concern in both 3.x and 4th
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Der Waffle MousBlame this on the misfortune of your birth.New Yark, New Yark.Registered Userregular
No, I get that.
But there's already so many restrictions placed on the multiclassing (the biggest being no power crossovers) and in a lot of cases already a lot of MAD considerations that penalizing you to the point of completely locking you out of your good ability score is a bit excessive.
Aaand we’re back! GenCon was a blast as always, and it was great to meet so many of you. Lots of insightful questions about the draft, too, all of which I got down in red pen to look at when we redline.
Before we start, two points.
First, as you’ve by no doubt heard by now, the book formerly known as Mystery Play: The Fallen World Chronicle is now officially Mage: The Awakening, Second Edition. Which is, you know, neat.
Second, thanks to the release schedule until August 2015 getting published at GenCon, I can stop dancing around questions like “are you going to cover the magical materials” (which, seriously, I get asked about once a week.) Our first book for Mage after the new corebook is going by the working title of Shards of Power. It’s about Mysteries of Supernal origin – everything from a chapter on Yantras, expanded magical item crafting, to Artifacts, Supernal Verges and (if we can get them in) ghost mages and other liches.
With a three-vote margin, Paradox has finally won the day.
When we started to put the new edition together, we had a few goals in mind. We knew that Paradox’s function in the game is to give mages enough rope to hang themselves, that it’s the risk they take for overextending themselves. We also knew that the current magic system doesn’t neccessarily get that across – Paradoxes are relatively easy to absorb, and spells are set as either covert or vulgar in their mechanics, for reasons that often had more to do with balance considerations than any in-world logic. It was a progression from Ascension‘s “coincidental” and “vulgar” magick, which depended on how believable a spell was to the consensus. After nine years, knowing what Paradox is in Mage, we can go further.
The new Paradox system – in fact, the new edition – doesn’t contain the words “covert” or “vulgar.” No spell automatically risks Paradox. Instead, the spellcasting system defines whether a character can comfortably achieve a given effect, or if it’s difficult enough to risk the Abyss corrupting the spell’s imago. Mages have a defined gap between what they can achieve and what they can achieve safely. Going beyond those limits tests a mage’s ability to build a spell imago, and risks the Abyss corrupting the spell.
We call this concept Reach. As in “exceeds grasp.”
Reach and Paradox Risk
In the current system, when a mage has more dots in an Arcanum than she needs to cast a spell, she can employ advanced spell factors, use sympathetic range, or access any special mechanics in the spell’s description. For the second edition, we’ve wrapped all of these up together, slightly reduced the effectiveness of spells without using them, and decoupled it from requiring more dots.
By default, spells are cast in ritual time (as defined by Gnosis), on the caster or something the caster is touching, using the basic versions of all spell factors. Casting in combat time (Turns), on something the caster can sense, or using an advanced spell factor all cost Reach. Many spells have additional effects for more Reach.
You get one Reach for free with every dot in the primary Arcanum you meet or exceed the spell’s Practice by. Every additional Reach risks Paradox dice according to Gnosis. You can also risk Paradox in other ways – casting an obviously magical effect in front of Sleepers adds a die, or using a spell that you’ve burned your Wisdom over previously. If you have a Paradox dice pool, you also bag an extra die for each previous paradox roll your character has prompted in a scene. Multiple Sleeper witnesses apply a dice trick to the Paradox roll – a single witness doesn’t, but a handful of people will give it 9-again, light traffic 8-again and a crowd gives it the rote quality.
Witnessing magic like this, provoking Paradox, also makes Sleepers suffer an Integrity breaking point. Which unless you’re particularly hubristic will probably make the mage suffer a Wisdom breaking point. It’s bad all round.
Paradox Risk is reduced by two dice in the Shadow and Underworld. In the Astral Realms, Supernal Verges, and Demesnes, it’s removed entirely – no spells suffer Paradox at all, allowing mages to let loose with the strongest forms of their spells. In Abyssal Verges, however, it’s automatic – every die of Paradox Risk becomes a success with no need to roll.
Once a spell has a Paradox dice pool, you can’t get rid of it entirely. Spending Mana reduces the Paradox pool one-for-one, using your dedicated magical tool as a yantra knocks two dice off. The most you can do is reduce the Paradox pool to a chance die, though – once you’re risking Paradox, the Storyteller is going to roll it.
At this point, you the player haven’t rolled any dice. You can see the size of your spellcasting pool, you can see the size of the Paradox pool that’s coming for you. At this point, you have a decision to make.
Mages can sense the Abyss when it starts to take hold of a spell, as a clammy, icy feeling in their soul accompanying the rush of using magic. They can clamp down on that influx of Paradox, trying to contain it within themselves, or they can let it go, allowing the Abyss to warp the spell.
Containment
If a mage tries to contain a Paradox within herself, the Paradox roll is contested by the character’s Wisdom score. Any Paradox successes cancelled out become resistant bashing damage. If the Paradox roll still succeeds, however, the mage feels the hurt – she gains a Paradox Condition as the Abyss can’t corrupt the spell but gets grounded into her instead. The game has one sample Paradox condition per Arcanum, but we encourage you to think up your own. Here’s one that may seem familiar:
Bedlam The mage is driven insane by her proximity to the Abyss. If the Paradox roll nets three or less successes, she gains a mild derangement. If it nets four or more successes, she gains a severe derangement (See p. XX).
Paradox Conditions grant Arcane Beats when they cause you problems, but are technically persistant. When a period of time determined by your Wisdom elapses, a Paradox Condition becomes “settled” – it’s fully entered your character’s pattern and will increase any Paradox rolls by a die until you remove it – and finally free yourself from it – by Pattern Scouring it out of yourself: effectively completing the attempt to turn the Paradox into resistant damage.
Whether the Paradox happens or not, the spell roll itself is unchanged.
Release
If a mage chooses not to take the personal risk of containment himself, the Paradox pool’s successes penalize the mage’s casting dice pool. More than that, though, successes on a released Paradox become Reach – Reach that the Storyteller can spend. Paradox successes cancel Reaches that the player wanted, add additional ones he didn’t (your spell to affect one target now affects everyone in sensory range, for example), or even (when the Paradox gets multiple successes) leave an Environmental Tilt behind or summon an Abyssal Entity. No matter what happens, though, the resulting Paradox won’t come after the mage by default — unless you happen to be targeting yourself with your spell, releasing a Paradox is the safer option. For you. Not so much for any bystanders.
Example
That’s a lot of explanation. Let’s look at an example.
Mark is playing Wolsey, a paranoid Silver Ladder Mastigos who is concerned that he’s building up too many sympathetic connections that the Seers of the Throne (or his political enemies in Caucus) could exploit. Wolsey is Gnosis 3 and has Space 3.
He doesn’t need to engage in creative thaumaturgy, as the spell he’s after is described in the rules.
Veil Sympathy (Space ••)
Practice:Veiling Primary Factor:Duration Suggested Rote Skills: Politics, Subterfuge, Survival A magician’s sympathetic connections allow her to reach out beyond herself, but they are also an avenue by which her enemies can attack her. This spell conceals one of the target’s sympathetic links, chosen by the mage from those she is aware of. Any attempt to uncover the link, or to use the target as a Sympathetic Yantra, provokes a Clash of Wills.
+1 Reach: Rather than suppressing a sympathetic connection, the mage may instead make the target appear to have a sympathetic link to someone or something else instead. Attempts to detect the link provoke a Clash of Wills to see through the deception, but attempts to use the target as a Sympathetic Yantra automatically fail.
+2 Reach: The mage may suppress all the target’s sympathetic links. This effect applies in both directions; that is, if the mage casts it on herself, she cannot be used as a Sympathetic Yantra, nor can any Sympathetic Yantra target her, without a Clash of Wills.
Now then. Wolsey has Space 3, so he can manage 2 Reach without risking Paradox. By default, the spell will affect himself or anything he’s touching (that’s fine – he’s aiming at himself), and require a ritual which at his level of Gnosis will take an hour (regrettable, but doable). The real pain as far as he’s concerned, though, is that it will only last for three turns (duration is the primary spell factor, so it moves up the duration chart by his Space dots. That’s still only nine seconds, though).
In order to get the spell to last an appreciable amount of time, he’ll have to Reach. Using one of his two Reach switches it to the advanced duration spell factor, where his Arcanum mastery nets him a week. He doesn’t fancy recasting this spell every week, though, so takes a 2-dice penalty to his casting roll to make it last a month. Using High Speech and destroying a photo of himself in the ritual will give him three bonus dice from Yantras, anyway, putting him on a mighty seven-dice casting pool. He’s feeling confident.
Unfortunately, he doesn’t know which angle the Seers will attack him from. Or even if they exist at all. Suppressing all of his sympathetic connections costs 2 Reach as per the spell’s description – combined with making the effect last, that’s beyond his abilities. If he were an Adept of Space, he wouldn’t have a problem, but now he’s sitting on two (thanks to his Gnosis) Paradox dice.
We’ll take the example through both of Mark’s options here, so you can see them play out.
Wolsey contains the Paradox: Dave (the Storyteller) rolls the two Paradox dice and gets a success. Mark rolls Wolsey’s Wisdom (5) and gets two successes. Wolsey suffers a level of resistant Bashing damage and the spell goes on unaffected – Mark’s seven dice easily get a success, and for the next month any attempts to use a sympathetic connection on Wolsey provoke a Clash of Wills.
Wolsey does not contain the Paradox: Dave rolls the Paradox pool and gets a success. Mark’s pool is penalized by one, reducing it to six. Dave is also feeling mean, so uses the Paradox’s success to add a Reach Mark didn’t ask for (if Dave were feeling particularly vindictive, he’d just undo the Reach for duration and let the spell elapse in a matter of Turns, but that’s boring). He uses it to activate the other function of the spell, to create false sympathies. Mark rolls his reduced dice pool, still succeeds, and instead of being off the grid Wolsey now has a collection of nonsensical sympathies – some of which are noted down in Dave’s chapter notes to come haunt him later…
Next week!
Lots for you to pick over there, I think. Next time, let’s look at something we haven’t had up for vote before. Antagonists or Legacies?
I assume the ST can always spend a point of Paradox reach to rule the Building is now on fire. Explains Dresden
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
Get a few friends, some drinks, a pre-made dungeon/characters, then randomly pass those out as bingo cards and make sure no one tells anyone else what is on their cards until that goal is marked off. Either incorporate drinking into completing goals somehow or just say that the person who fulfills the most goals wins the evening.
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gavindelThe reason all your softwareis brokenRegistered Userregular
So, Paradox:
They have not fixed shit.
Reach looks every bit as fiddly as Paradox ever was. You still need to stop play to calculate your Paradox roll. All he's done is switch around which dots you put into your spreadsheet. Except now I guess you won't need a Demense when you want to cast that midlevel spell while alone? Great. Real big game changer.
The penalties for Paradox remain disruptive to greater play and minimal to the acting character. My players don't respond to Paradox with tension and horror. They respond with "Man, now we have to stop what we're doing and calculate out the new effect". That's not getting any better with these new rules. I've said it before with the God Machine Chronicles: Conditions and Tilts are nothing but added book-keeping pretending to be thematic.
Abyssal entity? Its a stupid spirit, people. The flavor says its an unknowable horror; the rules say its a rank 3 spirit that you set on fire like everything freaking else.
Meanwhile, bedlam is a terrible mechanic, and now its extended! Making players "act crazy" is not a good mechanic. Not in vampire, not here. You either get serious whiplash as they go Fish Malk to torch the world, or they pick something completely trivial to go crazy with. Players are not going to pick a derangement that will actually hinder their play, and they will whine like a child if you give them something that goes against concept. Feel like being mean and give them a bedlam of cowardice for their Adamantine Arrow? Congrats, you have effectively removed that player from the game, and they will now devote their attention to their Nintendo DS for the next four hours.
So, in a new edition, Paradox remains a way to bog down the game, get in the way of cool moments, and saddle players with a little bit of extra book-keeping that amounts to minor irritants.
I'm glad to see they got rid of the absolutely stupid set of tiers from paradox in the first edition. How in the world the developers thought wild magic was less dangerous and disruptive than bedlam or a pest of a spirit, I have no idea. Hell, bedlam and the third level reality warp were often cool! You could walk around with demon horns or turn a city block into your personal playground of twisted magical energy!
I look at those new rules as an ST and I see no additional guidance on how to make Paradox meaningful in terms of flavor. More problematic, I see no way to make Paradox fun. I know they want Paradox to be the threat of a mage's own hubris, but the mechanics just don't support it. Paradox is a speed bump on your way to frying that annoying cabal of vampires with a noontime sun in their Council meeting.
Kane Red RobeMaster of MagicArcanusRegistered Userregular
edited August 2014
Does anyone have a better D&D 4e character sheet than the one that comes in the book? I'm going to be running a short campaign in a few weeks and I have some new players who I want to go through the sit down and write out your character steps for so they have a better idea of how their stuff works than just handing them printed sheets from the builder.
The campaign is basically fantasy Battlestar Galactica.
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ShadowfireVermont, in the middle of nowhereRegistered Userregular
Scalp-taking, adversarial GMing is such Stone Age bullshit, but it's exactly in the wheelhouse of the angry 50-year-olds that Wizards has aimed 5e at like a fucking laser-guided rocket
I'm not getting that feeling at all, but I don't play with a meat grinder GM or a min-maxing group. We've been challenged a couple of times with the basic set campaign, but we've overcome most of the fights with relative ease. Shit, we killed the green dragon in three rounds at level 3. Part of that was luck (my wife, playing the rogue, crit three times in a row), but we weren't in terrible shape otherwise.
know what i didn't like about 4e? how magic items where mandatory and had to be constantly upgraded or replaced for math's sake.
Yeah, there was rules in the dmg2 for not including them but that just kinda highlighted the issue.
I think that's my only real big complaint about 4e. That and resistances and vulnerabilities where kinda boring but if i really cared i could have house ruled in different things.
Honestly this is the only real, true "MMO-ism" critique of 4e I've had to sit back and say, "Yeah that's pretty true. It does become a bit of a gear grind."
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I guess I just don't see why designing the game this way makes anything fun. Like, why design a class that is objectively more powerful than everyone else at higher levels, and then decide that that portion of the game should be significantly shorter than the rest of the campaign so that the other 4/5ths of the group doesn't have to spend too much time sucking?
Why design a game that requires players and DMs to make specific meta-game decisions so that whoever is stuck with the loser-class during that level range still gets to have a good time? In other words, why design a game where the players of the game have to do extra work to let each other have fun?
What if you designed a game where, from a mechanical perspective, everyone was on an even playing field the entire time? What if the master thief could be the master thief and not just the sub for when the wizard ran out of spells before the next save point? What if the dragon slayer could be the dragon slayer and not just the sub for when the dragon has the Immune to Wizards flag set to "Yes"?
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My group knows Wizards and stuff get powerful later on but we've still got a rogue and a fighter and a paladin
The mechanics aren't as important as digging your character is to us
And the new character background stuff fits that really well. Rolling a few d6s and having to roll with a background and create a story for Florian Swiftfingers, asshole cutpurse, or re-roll if you get something you absolutely hate is a lot of fun
Because it gives you a sense of the power of magic, it makes classes feel genuinely unique and not like a differently flavored guy that can basically accomplish the same things as everyone else, and I just don't really view being a critical part of the party that plays an important role as sucking just because you get fewer killing blows during the end game. I genuinely like playing support this is why I brought up mobas, as just because you aren't the one dealing the most damage in the game, doesn't mean you are less important to the team and you may actually be more so. Going 10-0 isn't possible without a solid stunner/slower, without guys that can soak up damage for you and keep you safe to dish it out. Objectively, your carry is stronger at the end of the game, but does that mean anyone playing support at that point sucks and is lame and stupid?
In the same way, no you didn't deal 15d6 damage to those three demons just now, but you holding the important high ground, tripping and bashing them so they're stuck next to you, and dishing out some damage to a couple of them was the only reason they didn't straight up kill the guy that did that 15d6 in the first place, and your damage was the difference from having 3 hurt yet still dangerous and function enemies, and 2 dead guys and 1 almost dead essentially worthless mook left. I don't view that as the sucky class, I view that as a role and just because the role doesn't have as strong an option for "dish out tons of damage and stuff" doesn't make me feel lesser or neglected or shitty. It's supposed to be a synergy between different classes. The wizard doesn't get off his spells in time without a strong area controlling fighter up front. The enemies wouldn't have been weakened enough to kill easily if the rogue doesn't find the lightning trap and rig it to trigger against them. Everybody is hitting more often and for more damage thanks to the cleric's buffs. If it wasn't for the wizard's buffs the fighter wouldn't be able to avoid so many attacks with a higher AC and do his own job better. Sure the wizard is dishing out the most hurt, and "objectively" is the strongest character if the only way you measure enjoyment and fun in a game is the amount of damage possible in a single round, but everyone is still massively important.
Plus, it's not like casters are utterly unstoppable and the guys are powerless to stop them. Even without spell resistance, guys sometimes just ya know, make their saves, and the spell doesn't do jack. I like the idea of daily spells because it requires you to conserve resources and it creates a different play style. As a caster you have to play risk reward, how much is this going to help vs how much it'll hurt to not have this for future encounters. Sure you can do more damage in one round, but fighters/rogues/whoever don't have to worry about that. They always try to hit for whatever the can, and they don't need to worry about resources outside of HP which becomes much less of an issue at higher levels when you basically just go back to full HP after every fight. When you hit with a power attack, you're not out of power attacks. Casters have to worry about that. There's a reason it's spells per day. There's an inherit implication that they need to be managed or budgeted. If the game is specifically designed to have you do that, and you try to sleep in the middle of an evil fortress, and the DM just goes "yup nobody notices you for a full 8 hours great job" and gives you your spells back every time, I don't see that as a poorly designed game, I see it as bad DM'ing. You're actively subverting the way the game both is designed and presents that design to you. I don't see that as meta-game decisions so it's ok for Mr. Bad class. I see it as NOT actively making meta-game decisions that make casters orders of magnitude more powerful than they're designed to be.
Not a problem. I've been messing with ECL lately because I'm considering re-joining a 3.5E game and my total new character ECL allowance is 9. The campaign's rule is that new characters come in at 2 levels lower than the party average, to encourage people to Raise Dead on killed party members instead of rerolling all the time (you lose one level when you get raised from the dead).
I want to join as a lizardman (2 "monster" levels and ECL +1) Fighter 2/Monk 4 (2+1+2+4= ECL 9). He has some crazy-good benefits like a big natural armor class bonus and claws and fangs, but another player is running a catman (ECL +1) barbarian 5/rogue 4/ranger 2 (1+5+4+2= ECL 12, he's one of the characters that was an original party member from level 1, and has only died twice). He is afraid that I will outshine him in the "animal headed brawler" department. So instead I am considering a tiefling (ECL+1) Rogue 3/Cleric of Technology 5 (1+3+5= ECL 9) who uses a triple-barrel rifle (Ptolus has some crazy firearms, yo).
This has been your overly-complicated 3.5E level mechanics lesson for the day.
I think in every game system ever made there is a class that can do more damage than the others, but for some reason it's only 'broken' when it's in D&D.
To use a sports analogy: Tim Duncan doesn't score the most points per game on the spurs and thus he sucks.
Like, nah. Tim Duncan is really good, he just doesn't play in such a way as to score 25 a game.
Tim duncan may be really good, but if you could be, say michael jordan, or tim duncan, who you gonna be?
or, even, imagine that one of tim duncan's teammates had enough moves to immediately end the basketball game before you got off the bench, so that you don't even get to be awesome in your own way. Now, you get to be excellent at excercise, but you don't get to participate fully in the part that you like the best (the basketball game).
I'm having a hard time understanding what it is you actually want. You started out describing "crazy strong" magic-users that shake the world with a power that non-magic-users could never hope to match. You lamented the MMO-ization of the tabletop experience because every class does the same thing (which they don't, nor do they in MMOs). But after a couple posts you're now just describing a Striker (DPS) and a Defender (Tank) and I'm really not seeing what you're after.
(In the first combat of he adventure, three hours in.
God, forgot how bad WOTC and the DCI was at this.
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OK, but what I'm saying is, it's cool for the wizard that after probably months and months of play, you get to feel that kind of power, because it makes magic feel powerful and special and different than a guy with a sword. You can control and harness the energies of the cosmos and have mastered that mighty power to the point of being one of if not the most powerful wizard of your generation at level 15 or whatever, it SHOULD feel good. You should feel like you've got something extra special up your sleeve, you shouldn't feel the same as everyone else but you shoot red beams instead of a glowing red piercing arrow.
However, stuff like that should happen RARELY. It should be the once in a while, talk about for days with your friends "Holy SHIT dude!" kind of moment. If you go "Ok, this challenge can be overcome by these two spells in combination very easily. I shall now make all further challenges in this campaign a slight variation of this same challenge." Then like, sorry I don't blame the system you're using for making the fighter look bad. I blame the fact that you actively tailor your game to one guy's character. Every encounter or challenge you build as a DM is a choice, and if all you ever do is pick stuff the wizard is good at and no one else is, yeah he looks good, but you're shitty at your job and it's not the game's fault you never have any secret doors or traps or guys with spell resistance or guys with high saves or guys that are resistant to fire or guys that close distance fast or guys that sneak attack or guys with poison or other spellcasters that can counter you or guys with abilities that force fort saves or guys with abilities that force ref saves or guys that can deal lots of damage from a distance or guys that can deal a large amount of damage in one hit or guys who delay until you start casting and then attack. I could keep going but you get the point.
None of these are "making meta-game decisions" and making your game anti-wizard so it's playable and NOW it's fun for everyone that you've fixed this broken game. Like none of those things are house rules, if you just make every adventure bland straight up fights with high hp low save guys with little in the ways of special abilities that's more boring to me.
Okay, I haven't really been arguing on this tangent, but I think the issue is, "what if you could just choose to be Michael Jordan?" MVP of the year, every year. The traditional problem with wizards under a Vancian system is that they're the best at combat, but, give them eight hours and they're the best at anything.
There is going to be a rest of the team, of course, but they're only playing interference for the wizard, because they know that he's the guy who can make the 3-point shot.
Theoretically, with some planning, every PC could be a wizard, and it just makes things that much easier. In the group I mentioned I was thinking on re-joining in my last post, there's a conflict between me and another player because I want to make a highly mobile skirmisher, but he already has an established highly mobile skirmisher (with a drastically different build, but they outwardly appear similar in niche). This same party has an Invoker wizard and a Necromancer wizard, and nobody sees this as any sort of problematic duplication of talent. Because it isn't one. One is a magical howitzer and one is a disposable minion-generator. Of course, the Necromancer also has howitzer-capabilities and the Invoker can also summon minions, but neither care, because Michael Jordan certainly doesn't mind passing the ball to Also Michael Jordan.
This problem is also exacerbated by the fact that wizards, at least in 3.5E also get bonus feats ("You mean I can just make a FIREBALL wand and keep tossing bombs even when I'm out of spells?") and generous skill points/lists, making them one of the best classes outside of combat as well.
So very ghosted.
I replied a little farther up, but again, all you're describing is different party roles. This is a concept that has always been a part of D&D but never explicitly stated or addressed except in 4E, where it was often decried as being an MMO mechanic. What you're describing now is exactly the thing that caused a lot of people to say that 4E wasn't "real" D&D. The idea that yes, a magic-user is powerful, but so is everyone else (just at different things).
You've transitioned from wanting magic-users to have mountain-moving power that a non-caster could never hope to match, to wanting wizards that are good at certain things but not at others, just like everyone else. This already exists in 4E and you don't even have to wait until level 16 to get it.
The using all of their spells then sleeping it off goes back to Jack Vance and the Dying Earth series. It's one of the reasons you see the term Vancian Magic used to describe D&D's spell casting system. And people abusing that goes back to basic, and well before the explosion of video games. D&D comes out of a wargaming background and players breaking the hell out of the system isn't exactly anything new. The balance for this was supposed to be spell components being something you can't just visit a town and quickly resupply. But tracking that stuff is mind numbingly boring. So it tended to go by the wayside.
As for the idea that other classes bring non-combat stuff to the table, the problem with this is that D&D's core design is based around combat. D&D is a combat system with some non-combat interaction systems bolted on. So when you bring up the argument that there are things other then combat to focus on, you're telling them that they will have something to do on rare occasions but the bulk of the time what they do is irrelevant, and when it's important they are irrelevant. Now one way to solve this is to equalize the damage. The other way is to give people something to do that isn't damage related but combat related. This could be things like buffing and debuffing. It could be battlefield control. Sadly the idea of these things leads to people screaming "OMG MMOism!". So then the discussion basically has to come back to damage.
Now the idea that the good DM will find ways to solve this isn't new but it's full of it's own issues. It means that the DM is having to overcome the issues with the system, which doesn't mean the system is good, it means that a DM can wrangle a system into being decent. The realty is that systems should be designed so that with an average DM/GM/Whatever that the game is fun. You shouldn't need to find an above average DM/GM/Whatever to have fun. Because depending on the person in charge to be above average means that the majority of people playing a system won't be having fun. And that means shitty design.
There are lots of other ways to get great flavor in a game.
I am a pathfinder guru so ask away
Yeah, but I'm just saying that's ALREADY what wizards are. I think wizards are already good at certain things and bad at others. I want wizards at an extremely high level after playing through a progression that does put them at a disadvantage earlier and somewhat through the mid game too, to have a little extra juice at the end. I like the idea of a progression instead of "everyone is at the same level always" because I just like that flavor and style of play.
I like having the transition. As a fighter, you don't just decide "I'm the tank" or "I hit stuff with this two handed ax for a lot of damage" and that's it forever that's your thing now just get good at that and there you go we're done here. I like the idea of "early on I'm the big man, so I've got to try to tank but also work harder on dishing out damage. I should take the head and also for bosses I should grab buffs and try to tangle while people keep me going and do what else they can" to the mid game of "a solid mix of tanking, working more on controlling the battlefield, and maybe start to specialize in disabling, or massive 1v1 damage for caster busting, or something" to the end game of "I can still take dudes down, but not quite like the wizard can, so now my job is more about finding a niche or going full support for our glass cannon who is still extremely vulnerable to everything but will save abilities. I can either find a build here to do my thing, or I can form a dynamic duo with my wizard friend."
But those party roles are already there, 4e didn't make them, it just took away other things. It felt like an MMO mechanic because everyone functioned the same now. Instead of saves working differently, you just had 4 AC's now. Instead of spells and having sneak attacks and extra feats and such, everybody just got powers and that was it. They all functioned off the same mechanics, in the same way, and that was it. It didn't make things have better defined party roles to me, it made me feel like a magic missile was the exact same thing as an arrow. I liked that things used to feel different for the classes, that a magic missle would hit for less but it was GOING to hit and that made it different and useful in some situations and not in others and you didn't get an infinite number of them which also changed how you used them.
Basically, I like the idea of casters being a little weaker early and a little stronger at the end. I like how that works, if you don't I get it but I find it more interesting to have classes evolve in their power structure over time instead of just remaining the same throughout.
there are some crazy fucking monk archetypes though
In my Dungeon World game right now, I am sure the wizard could be doing a fantastic amount of damage if he would ever learn some offensive spells, but he doesn't want to. Such things are beneath him. He works together with the group simply because he wants to run cons with the thief, make fun of the druid, etc. He actually proved he was monstrously useful in combat by orchestrating a complex ritual spell (which in DW lets you do whatever you want as long as you are in a place of power and conform to 2-4 arbitrary rules I set as the DM) so that the fighter could corner a local warlord and fight him one on one without any of his troops intervening.
...
I guess in the end what I want out of a game is more narrative-based. Crunchy bits are there to introduce chaos and thwart your character's designs, not to limit what your character can do in balance with an entire closed system of the game world. I understand folks who like to have defined rules and game systems, but my brain just doesn't work that way.
This started out as a post meant to contribute to the conversation and ended up just talking about the kinds of games I like, but w/e
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Thanks! I get the books tomorrow and I'm sure I'll have some questions.
And on Saturday I start playing in Iron Gods!
You just start some of your classes off at level 5 or so while everyone else is level 1, and then penalize them some percentage of exp so that they're only level 20-something when everyone else is level 30.
Boom, done and done.
Eesh. Drow.
Like elves, but worse.
A whole species based on idiotic backstabbing.
Why I fear the ocean.
But they don't function the same. A fighter does different things than a ranger, who is different from a rogue, who is different from a warlock, who is different from a wizard. They all have their basis in a standardized mechanical system, but the way they implement those mechanics in play is different.
The only thing different is who rolls the d20. Different things tend to target a different defense, with spells targeting something other than AC more often (hmm, that seems familiar...)
Still there in 4E.
Still there in 4E.
Replaced by feats that are specifically tailored for certain classes, races, or other qualifiers (in addition to general feats that anyone can take depending on how they want to specialize their character). Also humans still get an extra feat.
That's not it. Also, feats and powers can be retrained as you level up, for example if you wanted to slowly transition from one play-style to another.
True.
Not true.
Why not? What party roles were you looking for, and what kind of definition did you feel was missing?
Not true. Hell, even an arrow isn't the same thing as an arrow, depending on who's doing the shooting.
Magic Missile does auto-hit, but for less damage. In fairness, the original Magic Missile in the 4E PHB didn't auto-hit, but it did do more damage than the auto-hitting version. I will also note that, to my knowledge, there are no auto-hitting arrows in 4E.
Still true for the 4E version.
Well you've got me there. I mean there are still choices to make in how you use Magic Missile since you have several other spells to choose from and Magic Missile might not be the right choice for a given situation, but yeah they are infinite now if your wizard chose to learn that particular spell.
I understand this statement and while I don't like the idea of one PC being weak (in some ways) for a certain span of the game compared to their peers in exchange for being a little stronger (in some ways) for a little while a lot later, I recognize that that is a subjective opinion.
There's a couple of fighting style feats that make Monks pretty incredible, imo.
In my experience Monks are kinda iffy unless you build them really, really, well and get some good items for them.
Yeah, there was rules in the dmg2 for not including them but that just kinda highlighted the issue.
I think that's my only real big complaint about 4e. That and resistances and vulnerabilities where kinda boring but if i really cared i could have house ruled in different things.
Not everyone plays a character from low-level to high-level, or even from low-level to mid-level. Even if you were planning on playing a character from levels 1 to 20, knowing that you'd be able to cast spells that could kill every monster in an encounter twice over once you gained another 10+ levels doesn't mean anything to the game that you're actually playing right now. Wizards might seem balanced on paper when you take levels 1 through 20 in aggregate, but that's not how the game actually plays out. If "Level 1 Wizard" and "Level 20 Wizard" are effectively different classes where one is deliberately shitty and one is deliberately more powerful and versatile than other classes, then both classes are badly designed when viewed in the context of actual gameplay at their respective levels.
It's worth noting that the idea that wizards are weak at low levels and strong at high levels isn't anywhere nearly as true of 3e/PF/5e as it is of AD&D. And being a low-level wizard in AD&D was a miserable experience - once you used up your handful of spells (or your spell, singular, at level 1), you were about as useful to the party as a random goblin hireling would have been. (Maybe even less useful, since goblins could use bows, wear armor, and shared the fighter's superior saving throws.) 3e more than compensated for that low-level grind by giving the wizard baseline buffs that remained useful at all levels, but didn't compensate for the power imbalance on the other end of the scale where the high-level caster could easily and often accidentally dominate the game. If anything, 3e made the high-level disparity worse by (among other things) giving wizards more spells per day, not just at lower levels where wizards were previously weak but even at the higher levels where older editions' casters would outshine the rest of the party despite having possibly half as many spells as a same-level 3e caster.
I just don't get this idea that keeps getting brought up that in other D&D editions there are two roles: Wizard and dumb idiot who isn't a wizard. I've never encountered the problem of a useless character in a campaign, nor have I ever encountered a point where the wizard is so far past anyone that while they're playing, all they're doing is cleaning up the mess left in their wake. I have also never felt like the only reason that wasn't happening was that the DM was specifically hamstringing the wizard in every encounter so someone else could win for a change. I have encountered the part where the wizard starts being able to do some pretty cool shit and takes to the forefront of pure damage capability and I genuinely liked both the journey there and playing once they had finally 'arrived' so to speak.
People may say (possibly rightly so, I haven't played the variety of systems other people have) that 3.5 did a bad job of working skills in, we used the systems a lot and genuinely enjoyed them and spent a lot of time out of combat working with it. If it's bad and so D&D really is all about combat and skills in it were just a pity party, like ok I can't really argue with you here. I haven't played 1000's of campaigns all around the world to establish what an "average" dm/player is, I played the ones I've played and in every one out of combat took up a lot of our time and mattered at least as much as anything else. Out of combat and skill things were always important. All our campaigns had some form of caster and never did I feel like they could just do everything. I felt that they filled a role in our party well, and while they had some abilities that could help them out in other areas and could be more adaptable, I never felt like the caster could out-fighter the fighter, or out-rogue, or anything of the sort.
Maybe that's just our party and our DM's, I don't know, maybe we just got it to work out just right and the system is total bubkis. I dunno, I never felt playing it that is was so wildly unbalanced and that playing the wizard was easymode and ruined the system. I'm going to stop arguing because I'm basically defending the older system I liked and the newer system that is using some things from that old system I liked against either things I've never played before or don't have much experience with and there's not much point to that and all I'm going to do is look either like a dingus or some giant trog shouting "Tabletops are dead now, they're all ruined since the one I got in my teens!"
Like I'm happy they brought back the old casting system and I like the balance of powers between classes shifting as a campaign goes along. I don't think it ruins player roles or breaks the game or causes all these gigantic problems, but I could be wrong and that's simply a result of how my group plays. I think we've probably argued this to death at this point.
I've spent the last couple of days trying to wrap my head around the Key Modifier table, convinced that I'm missing something important because there's no way that rule was as dumb as how I am reading it as.
Finally, talking with other people, it turns out it totally is that dumb.
Basically, when combining two classes, each has an ability score listed on a table. For all your attacks and class features that key off of one of the two ability score, they now key off of the lower of the two.
Which is incredibly clunky in practice and makes for some very weird stat considerations.
Like combining a Fighter with a Commander. Two classes who primarily rely on strength, now have charisma thrown into the mix.
So a Fighter/Commander with high strength and lower charisma is suddenly swinging their sword by sheer force of personality.
Or on the reverse tack, they're healing allies extra well and throwing out attack bonuses by BEING SWOLE.
my guess is that it's done to limit trying to break multi-classing which was a serious concern in both 3.x and 4th
But there's already so many restrictions placed on the multiclassing (the biggest being no power crossovers) and in a lot of cases already a lot of MAD considerations that penalizing you to the point of completely locking you out of your good ability score is a bit excessive.
Paradoxical!
I assume the ST can always spend a point of Paradox reach to rule the Building is now on fire. Explains Dresden
You know....
Get a few friends, some drinks, a pre-made dungeon/characters, then randomly pass those out as bingo cards and make sure no one tells anyone else what is on their cards until that goal is marked off. Either incorporate drinking into completing goals somehow or just say that the person who fulfills the most goals wins the evening.
They have not fixed shit.
Reach looks every bit as fiddly as Paradox ever was. You still need to stop play to calculate your Paradox roll. All he's done is switch around which dots you put into your spreadsheet. Except now I guess you won't need a Demense when you want to cast that midlevel spell while alone? Great. Real big game changer.
The penalties for Paradox remain disruptive to greater play and minimal to the acting character. My players don't respond to Paradox with tension and horror. They respond with "Man, now we have to stop what we're doing and calculate out the new effect". That's not getting any better with these new rules. I've said it before with the God Machine Chronicles: Conditions and Tilts are nothing but added book-keeping pretending to be thematic.
Abyssal entity? Its a stupid spirit, people. The flavor says its an unknowable horror; the rules say its a rank 3 spirit that you set on fire like everything freaking else.
Meanwhile, bedlam is a terrible mechanic, and now its extended! Making players "act crazy" is not a good mechanic. Not in vampire, not here. You either get serious whiplash as they go Fish Malk to torch the world, or they pick something completely trivial to go crazy with. Players are not going to pick a derangement that will actually hinder their play, and they will whine like a child if you give them something that goes against concept. Feel like being mean and give them a bedlam of cowardice for their Adamantine Arrow? Congrats, you have effectively removed that player from the game, and they will now devote their attention to their Nintendo DS for the next four hours.
So, in a new edition, Paradox remains a way to bog down the game, get in the way of cool moments, and saddle players with a little bit of extra book-keeping that amounts to minor irritants.
I'm glad to see they got rid of the absolutely stupid set of tiers from paradox in the first edition. How in the world the developers thought wild magic was less dangerous and disruptive than bedlam or a pest of a spirit, I have no idea. Hell, bedlam and the third level reality warp were often cool! You could walk around with demon horns or turn a city block into your personal playground of twisted magical energy!
I look at those new rules as an ST and I see no additional guidance on how to make Paradox meaningful in terms of flavor. More problematic, I see no way to make Paradox fun. I know they want Paradox to be the threat of a mage's own hubris, but the mechanics just don't support it. Paradox is a speed bump on your way to frying that annoying cabal of vampires with a noontime sun in their Council meeting.
I'm not getting that feeling at all, but I don't play with a meat grinder GM or a min-maxing group. We've been challenged a couple of times with the basic set campaign, but we've overcome most of the fights with relative ease. Shit, we killed the green dragon in three rounds at level 3. Part of that was luck (my wife, playing the rogue, crit three times in a row), but we weren't in terrible shape otherwise.
Oh, shit, I should redeem that. Some Catalyst guys came through the FFG line at GenCon Thursday morning and handed out coupons with that on it.
COME FORTH, AMATERASU! - Switch Friend Code SW-5465-2458-5696 - Twitch
Honestly this is the only real, true "MMO-ism" critique of 4e I've had to sit back and say, "Yeah that's pretty true. It does become a bit of a gear grind."