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Giant robot time traveling adventure FPS?
I know exactly how you feel.
Than, you're wrong. There is a noticeable difference between 8 and 15 fps. It's noticeable as flicker, and it's noticeable in terms of how fluid motion the motion is. There is a huge difference between 8 and 24 fps. And the vast majority of people can notice the difference between 25 and 30 fps. Hell people used to NTSC can be given headaches from seeing the screen flicker of PAL.
"What better libertarian tribute could there be than forcing players into a world of rules they didn't create to achieve a goal they never chose?"
fantastic
Boosh
computer rpg design had to overcome all those design problems as they developed, and its interesting nobody thinks the way he does any more
most people with taste turn off their 120 hz mode of their HDTVs tho
"Mastery Traps" make sense for a competitive game, like Magic: The Gathering, where a player is rewarded by defeating his tactically inferior opponent because he recognizes the metagame and the realities of what works and what doesn't versus theoretical improvements that look attractive to the uninitiated.
Applying that mindset to a co-operative game like Dungeons & Dragons is why Monte Cook needs a firm smack in the mouth.
Melding was telling me last night and is also ecstatic
or as ecstatic as Meldings get anyhow
Can we just nuke the planet and be done with it? Humanity kind of sucks.
Check out all these:
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/88382
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/114756
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/36182
There's a complicated response to this that I can't go into, since there are Judder police everywhere.
They know you have judder. Did you see that, just now? No? Well that was judder. It's all around us. Like air or The Force and shit. And it's bad. So bad, somehow!
Yeah yeah
Who cares about old versions built on 3.0 or whatever
No one
4E Gee Dub 4 lyfestyle
This is the best news.
Hopefully, he will move on to pursue projects where his talents can be appreciated; perhaps something involving self-guillotining.
Thanks Jacob.
the classic example, and one he admitted to, is the Toughness feat in D&D 3rd edition. The description says that this will make your guy harder to kill in combat. What it actually does is give you a trivial number of extra hit points (like, 5 extra hp every three or four levels, when you gain as many as 1-10 per level normally) that are vastly outclassed by other options - for instance, if you want to not die, you're always mathematically better off taking one of the options that raises your defense so you don't get hit in the first place.
But those options don't really come out and say what they do - they might be given innocuous names like "advanced shield proficiency" or something. To actually weigh your options, you need to go through the book with a calculator or a spreadsheet and sit down and crunch numbers, and people who do that will have results that are mechanically better than people who don't. The guy who picks "toughness" is going to sit around getting hit a lot and dying and wondering why his little man isn't actually that tough. Which, since the game is ostensibly about playing a role rather than winning at math, seems unsportsmanlike.
Actual Play: Mage: the Awakening - At the Edge of All Things
I remember those games
Halcyon times
making stuff all look like its filmed on a 50 dollar camcorder is another
Meaning that the non-magical, martial-type dudes like Fighters and Rogues increase in power linearly, with their numbers steadily going upwards at a set pace, while Wizards, Clerics, and other spellcasters might start out kind of assy but towards the high levels become gods.
It's a retarded way to design a co-operative multiplayer game
This is known as space bagging.
then I realized I clicked on the wrong thread.
The problem is that a system like 3.5 is so vast and complex that choosing options that would fall under this category of trap are harder to spot than not.
Iiiiiiinteresting. I didn't realize anyone was doing BATTLAN TIEM in mafia. Hmm!
I am definitely envisioning more of a straight up hex map -- "Move my guy from A1 to B2 and shoot at TehSloth's tank."
If there were competing objectives and you could start->finish within a two weeks I think it might be fun.
Gotta look at these mafias in more detail.
That's what any reasonable player does.
Again, this doesn't seem like a trap or poor design philosophy. So long as the mathematical formulas are provided by which one can weight the various attributes and so discern the mechanically best build...it seems fine to me.
I rip movies from Blu-Ray and then play them on my HTPC using Windows Media Player Classic Home Cinema (even the acronym for this shit is long) on a 120Hz flatscreen. The neat thing is that the refresh rate automatically gets switched down or up to whatever it was natively. And because it's 120, it's always going to be a rate the panel can match. It's not a bad way to do it.
The truly maddening thing about toughness is that every goddamned 3e-based crpg offers it as a default choice for auto-leveling or "recommended feats" or whatever
A lot of people dont play games to do math and take the rules at face value so they can continue on to doing what they want to do which is make a cool character and role play.
you are playing a role
you should be making choices primarily based on the semantic content of the trait, not its underlying mechanism - if the mechanism is overlying the semantics, then you are playing the mechanism not roleplaying the experience
this is a sliding scale thing, but in general if your players are always peeking under the hood to build themselves then it means your players cannot take your descriptions at their face value or understand them intuitively
Like CCGs? Check my CCG's Thread in CF and help me playtest it!
You should totes get in touch with Infidel at the very least
the original version of Toughness in 3e was even worse than Jacob has stated, since it was literally just a flat, tiny HP bump when you first took the feat and then never any more later. They tried to fix that in 3.5, but yes Toughness is a perfect example of a "mastery trap".
Hilariously enough, 3.5 introduced quite a few of its own version of reverse Mastery Traps, which felt like they were designed to entice math nerds with spreadsheets who never get to fucking play the game with real people at an actual table.
"If I take this feat from this book, and this prestige class, combined with this item, if an enemy uses this spell on me I will have unlimited hit points"
Like, they'd be mathematically correct but no DM in his right mind would allow those sort of contrivances in a character in the first place and even if he did, the circumstances they'd need to excel at their mathematical excellence would be meaningless.
I remember reading a post on the WotC forums where a guy was SUPER pissed because he showed up to play a game with some dudes from college and he had this really amazing, optimized combat build... only to discover these guys enjoyed the dramatic aspects of D&D more and if any dice were rolled at all in most game sessions, it was for things like Diplomacy checks.
whooooooooops