Spell text is an example of one of my big beefs with almost every edition (bar 4th) of D&D.
Most D&D - even during combat, the most regimented and organized part of the game - takes place in a very vague fictive space. A character doing melee attacks rolls to do a few points of fight damage to an enemy in a period of time that could last as long as a minute (the length of combat rounds for the first 26 years of D&D's life). Any more detail than that - "you wave your sword and do 6 points of fight" - is called "flavor" and treated with a kind of bemused tolerance. "Sure, Dave, you can say you tackle the orc if you want."
But everyone knows it didn't really happen that way. Dave waved his fightstick and did fight. If he insisted too strongly on any other outcome of his actions, everyone would get impatient or even upset at this spotlight-hugging lame-o. Most characters at most times in D&D have to live with the fact that the only real thing they do per the game rules is make number go down man go die. Or they can pay a bunch of feats to do, like, one other thing.
MEANWHILE
Spells, completely unlike the entire rest of the game, are written in hyper-precise, wildly over-detailed, legalistic language.
D&D spell text be like
"this spell creates 10d100 cubic meters of chocolate Jell-O in a spherical volume, though the Jell-O immediately flows to conform to the shape of any sufficiently large container. Living beings may choose to eat the Jell-O as a full-round action, healing 2 HP per attempt, though must make a DC 10 Constitution save each subsequent round to avoid tummyache. A butterfly with 1d3 hit points flaps its wings near the caster. Meanwhile, 6d10 kilometers away, a pregnant woman (see Table 16-3 for race and age) gives birth to a child named Jellosophes weighing 3d6+5 ounces. Eighteen years from now, the child will have a GPA of (1d4) point (1d10) at the nearest wizard's college or barding school on the same plane of existence.
The Jell-O vanishes after 10 rounds."
And it invites this insane, Talmudic scrutiny from players poring over the text like they're death row lawyers preparing a hail mary case, and it invites them to play this stupid fucking adversarial game where they try and catch the DM out with some kind of "it doesn't say a dog can't play basketball" bullshit.
Meanwhile, the fighter who just wants to do literally anything besides swing a sword? That guy can eat shit.
The reason people got super mad at 4th edition is because it expected wizards to play on that field too, instead of getting to directly alter the fiction in a way no other class could. Now everyone rolls to make number go down, and they fucking hated it.
I always wondered why people thought 4e sucked when the ability component seemed like an actual improvement over previous editions.
"It makes DND more like WoW!"
Okay, and? WoW has cool abilities for everyone not just the wizards.
It's why I try to add a lot of flavor to combat for everyone so that it's more exciting:
A near-miss becomes "your axe grazes their armor, letting out a chilling screech"
a miss becomes "they dodge out of the way of your axe, it slams directly into the wooden planks, splitting it in two"
a near-hit becomes "your axe pierces their chainmail, sending an arc of blood through the air"
and a high hit or crit that doesn't kill them becomes "you chop off their fucking arm you badass motherfucker"
One thing I picked up from one of my friends that DMs is to let the player choose the killing blow. "How do you wanna do this" is the best phrase in combat because it means "aw shit that mofo gonna die I can do what I want"
It's also why I ended up with so many severed heads in that campaign.
Because WoW is a game where you push buttons to make number go down, and that's boring. If I wanted that experience, I'd play WoW.
The best I can summarize it is thus:
WoW is a fantasy game you can play with your friends. Your actions are severely limited by what the game allows, and are mostly various flavors of "do damage"/"heal"/"apply status." Your actions are ultimately meaningless - the world is static. The upside is that the game does all the heavy lifting for you, and you get to look at pretty graphics and watch your character get increasingly ridiculous weapons and armor as you go.
Tabletop RPGs are fantasy games you can play with your friends. You can do things that are not explicitly allowed by the rules, and you can affect the fiction in meaningful ways. The disadvantage is that they are messy and take more work to play, because all the action takes place in your imagination.
4E was a game in which your actions are severely limited by what the rules allow, and are mostly various flavors of "do damage"/"heal"/"apply status;" but it's also a game that expects players to keep track of tons of constantly changing modifiers (which videogames are really good at!). So it was a combination of the least interesting things about both MMOs and tabletop games, without the fun stuff from either.
Anyone have recommendations for tutorials on using Fantasy Grounds (possibly also in modding it) that you have actually watched and found helpful? Not just a basic "how to roll a character" but how to actually run an adventure. There's a zillion listed on youtube but it takes a while to realize a given speaker either doesn't teach well or is going to end up telling you to bury a chicken bone in a coffee can in your back yard and eat the succulent fruit of the tree that grows from it.
It's a roughly American sized continent subjected to an effect that prevents travel from it, and dumps people's from across the multiverse on it. It's expclity got a knack for pulling in refugees who need a new homeland, and is cruel to would be conquerers.
The current species include Orcs (based off lions), Ogres (drawing on hippos), Satyrs (Drawing on inca culture, very recent refugees to the setting), HUmans (Survivors of way too many wars, with a big connection to the Fae), Undead (Products off the natural magic of the setting), Mer (Based on Sea snakes, also products of the natural magic of the setting), Aeterni Elves (The flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long), and Pygmy marmoset (Created by a dark lord to be his spies, they backstabbed the dark lord and escaped, and ended up on terra incognita. they're like 50-60cm tall as adults, officaly the "Small" race of the setting)
Spell text is an example of one of my big beefs with almost every edition (bar 4th) of D&D.
Most D&D - even during combat, the most regimented and organized part of the game - takes place in a very vague fictive space. A character doing melee attacks rolls to do a few points of fight damage to an enemy in a period of time that could last as long as a minute (the length of combat rounds for the first 26 years of D&D's life). Any more detail than that - "you wave your sword and do 6 points of fight" - is called "flavor" and treated with a kind of bemused tolerance. "Sure, Dave, you can say you tackle the orc if you want."
But everyone knows it didn't really happen that way. Dave waved his fightstick and did fight. If he insisted too strongly on any other outcome of his actions, everyone would get impatient or even upset at this spotlight-hugging lame-o. Most characters at most times in D&D have to live with the fact that the only real thing they do per the game rules is make number go down man go die. Or they can pay a bunch of feats to do, like, one other thing.
MEANWHILE
Spells, completely unlike the entire rest of the game, are written in hyper-precise, wildly over-detailed, legalistic language.
D&D spell text be like
"this spell creates 10d100 cubic meters of chocolate Jell-O in a spherical volume, though the Jell-O immediately flows to conform to the shape of any sufficiently large container. Living beings may choose to eat the Jell-O as a full-round action, healing 2 HP per attempt, though must make a DC 10 Constitution save each subsequent round to avoid tummyache. A butterfly with 1d3 hit points flaps its wings near the caster. Meanwhile, 6d10 kilometers away, a pregnant woman (see Table 16-3 for race and age) gives birth to a child named Jellosophes weighing 3d6+5 ounces. Eighteen years from now, the child will have a GPA of (1d4) point (1d10) at the nearest wizard's college or barding school on the same plane of existence.
The Jell-O vanishes after 10 rounds."
And it invites this insane, Talmudic scrutiny from players poring over the text like they're death row lawyers preparing a hail mary case, and it invites them to play this stupid fucking adversarial game where they try and catch the DM out with some kind of "it doesn't say a dog can't play basketball" bullshit.
Meanwhile, the fighter who just wants to do literally anything besides swing a sword? That guy can eat shit.
The reason people got super mad at 4th edition is because it expected wizards to play on that field too, instead of getting to directly alter the fiction in a way no other class could. Now everyone rolls to make number go down, and they fucking hated it.
I always wondered why people thought 4e sucked when the ability component seemed like an actual improvement over previous editions.
"It makes DND more like WoW!"
Okay, and? WoW has cool abilities for everyone not just the wizards.
It's why I try to add a lot of flavor to combat for everyone so that it's more exciting:
A near-miss becomes "your axe grazes their armor, letting out a chilling screech"
a miss becomes "they dodge out of the way of your axe, it slams directly into the wooden planks, splitting it in two"
a near-hit becomes "your axe pierces their chainmail, sending an arc of blood through the air"
and a high hit or crit that doesn't kill them becomes "you chop off their fucking arm you badass motherfucker"
One thing I picked up from one of my friends that DMs is to let the player choose the killing blow. "How do you wanna do this" is the best phrase in combat because it means "aw shit that mofo gonna die I can do what I want"
It's also why I ended up with so many severed heads in that campaign.
Because WoW is a game where you push buttons to make number go down, and that's boring. If I wanted that experience, I'd play WoW.
The best I can summarize it is thus:
WoW is a fantasy game you can play with your friends. Your actions are severely limited by what the game allows, and are mostly various flavors of "do damage"/"heal"/"apply status." Your actions are ultimately meaningless - the world is static. The upside is that the game does all the heavy lifting for you, and you get to look at pretty graphics and watch your character get increasingly ridiculous weapons and armor as you go.
Tabletop RPGs are fantasy games you can play with your friends. You can do things that are not explicitly allowed by the rules, and you can affect the fiction in meaningful ways. The disadvantage is that they are messy and take more work to play, because all the action takes place in your imagination.
4E was a game in which your actions are severely limited by what the rules allow, and are mostly various flavors of "do damage"/"heal"/"apply status;" but it's also a game that expects players to keep track of tons of constantly changing modifiers (which videogames are really good at!). So it was a combination of the least interesting things about both MMOs and tabletop games, without the fun stuff from either.
Ok so that part does kind of irk me in this context. If you are saying that nearly every edition of D&D fits that description and are comparing it to some other system then yeah I could see that argument. But for 4e it absolutely was not true in the books as written that this was the case compared to 3rd or 5th ed. I have several theories as to why this misconception seems to be widespread (character creator program I am looking in your direction) but whatever the reason it is something that existed in the culture of how some people played 4th ed and not in the books.
Anyone have recommendations for tutorials on using Fantasy Grounds (possibly also in modding it) that you have actually watched and found helpful? Not just a basic "how to roll a character" but how to actually run an adventure. There's a zillion listed on youtube but it takes a while to realize a given speaker either doesn't teach well or is going to end up telling you to bury a chicken bone in a coffee can in your back yard and eat the succulent fruit of the tree that grows from it.
I’d check out their tutorial discord
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Zonugal(He/Him) The Holiday ArmadilloI'm Santa's representative for all the southern states. And Mexico!Registered Userregular
So, I have been thinking on how I would adapt the maneuver sub-system from D&D 3.5's Tome of Battle into 5E.
These is the different schools/styles in 3.5:
Styles or Schools of the Sublime Way
The nine schools presented in the book each take a different philosophy of martial action, and enhance the warrior in different ways. Each school has a range of maneuvers and stances from first to ninth level, like magic spells, as well as a Legendary weapon whose powers mirror the style it represents.
-- Desert Wind: A flowing style, Desert Wind adepts do battle with swift movement and swirling, flaming strikes. Its exemplar weapon is a scimitar, also named Desert Wind. This sword was owned by a wealthy emir who wasted his entire fortune on the blade.
-- Devoted Spirit: A tough style, Devoted Spirit adepts battle their enemies based on their alignment. Its exemplar weapon is a falchion, named Faithful Avenger. This sword has passed between good and evil hands, doing great deeds for either.
-- Diamond Mind: An insightful style, Diamond Mind adepts anticipate their enemies' actions before they happen. Its exemplar weapon is a rapier, named Supernal Clarity. The theft of this blade by a rakshasa prince called Kaziir Thet led to the downfall of the Temple of the Nine Swords.
-- Iron Heart: Iron Heart adepts glory in skill above all else. Its style concentrates on balance and footwork. Its exemplar weapon is a bastard sword named Kamate. This blade was forged by hobgoblins and is fabled as the first sword to be made.
-- Setting Sun: The "Judo" style of the nine schools, Setting Sun adepts prefer to turn their enemies' strength against them. Its exemplar weapon is a mithral short sword named Eventide's Edge. This sword's powers were discovered by a child defending himself against a clan of giants on a deserted island.
-- Shadow Hand: One of the two "traitor" schools, the Shadow Hand masters a long time ago assaulted and destroyed the original fighting monastery. Its discipline teaches stealth, deception and ambush, and is effective even if somewhat tainted. Its exemplar weapon is a dagger named Umbral Awn. Many previous owners of this blade died trying to find the true source of the Shadow Hand's power.
-- Stone Dragon: This style depends on toughness over all and its abilities can only be used if standing on the ground. Its exemplar weapon is a greatsword named Unfettered. This blade was crafted by an enslaved dwarf and goliath as an act of defiance. The dwarf was killed, but the goliath used the blade to escape. Years later, the goliath awarded the blade to Reshar.
-- Tiger Claw: All-out bestial attack is the trademark of this school, the second "traitor" school. Its exemplar weapon is a kukri named Tiger Fang. This blade was passed down by a dying warrior to his son, who wished to prove himself and honor his father. The local rajah would not let him be in the army, but the young warrior attempted to prove himself, at the disdain of the rajah. Finally, the young warrior died saving the rajah from a sorcerer who had summoned demons, bringing honor to his father's name.
-- White Raven: The "leader" style, White Raven's abilities are less about enhancing oneself and more about one's cohorts. Its exemplar weapon is an adamantine longsword named Blade of the Last Citadel. This weapon's history is split into three legends describing how the blade was used to defend those who could not defend themselves.
I'd want to create new school entirely, such as one dedicated to ranged weaponry (darts, bows, throwing weapons) and I'd also want one school to be elemental attacks (so think Desert Wind but incorporating more elements like water, cold, air, lightining, thunder, acid, ect...).
What would you folks do? Would you approach this around a central theme (like basing all of them off of current martial art styles)? Would you create them based on classic fighting archetypes (berserker, duelist, knight, wrestler, ect...)?
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MaddocI'm Bobbin Threadbare, are you my mother?Registered Userregular
From a combat perspective, 5e is one of the few editions where Fighter is actually on a somewhat level playing field with spellcasters
Their ability to deal damage is nearly unparalleled
Unfortunately, spellcasters can also do lots of other cool stuff
From a combat perspective, 5e is one of the few editions where Fighter is actually on a somewhat level playing field with spellcasters
Their ability to deal damage is nearly unparalleled
Unfortunately, spellcasters can also do lots of other cool stuff
even in the most extreme cases of linear-fighter vs quadratic-wizard (eg: mid to high level 3rd ed) a wizard isn't the best in terms of raw damage output against a single opponent. But in those cases the most devastating combat spells aren't the damage ones but those where the target needs to save or be so impaired that they are effectively taken out of combat.
Attacked by tweeeeeeees!
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MsAnthropyThe Lady of Pain Breaks the Rhythm, Breaks the Rhythm, Breaks the RhythmThe City of FlowersRegistered Userregular
Spell text is an example of one of my big beefs with almost every edition (bar 4th) of D&D.
Most D&D - even during combat, the most regimented and organized part of the game - takes place in a very vague fictive space. A character doing melee attacks rolls to do a few points of fight damage to an enemy in a period of time that could last as long as a minute (the length of combat rounds for the first 26 years of D&D's life). Any more detail than that - "you wave your sword and do 6 points of fight" - is called "flavor" and treated with a kind of bemused tolerance. "Sure, Dave, you can say you tackle the orc if you want."
But everyone knows it didn't really happen that way. Dave waved his fightstick and did fight. If he insisted too strongly on any other outcome of his actions, everyone would get impatient or even upset at this spotlight-hugging lame-o. Most characters at most times in D&D have to live with the fact that the only real thing they do per the game rules is make number go down man go die. Or they can pay a bunch of feats to do, like, one other thing.
MEANWHILE
Spells, completely unlike the entire rest of the game, are written in hyper-precise, wildly over-detailed, legalistic language.
D&D spell text be like
"this spell creates 10d100 cubic meters of chocolate Jell-O in a spherical volume, though the Jell-O immediately flows to conform to the shape of any sufficiently large container. Living beings may choose to eat the Jell-O as a full-round action, healing 2 HP per attempt, though must make a DC 10 Constitution save each subsequent round to avoid tummyache. A butterfly with 1d3 hit points flaps its wings near the caster. Meanwhile, 6d10 kilometers away, a pregnant woman (see Table 16-3 for race and age) gives birth to a child named Jellosophes weighing 3d6+5 ounces. Eighteen years from now, the child will have a GPA of (1d4) point (1d10) at the nearest wizard's college or barding school on the same plane of existence.
The Jell-O vanishes after 10 rounds."
And it invites this insane, Talmudic scrutiny from players poring over the text like they're death row lawyers preparing a hail mary case, and it invites them to play this stupid fucking adversarial game where they try and catch the DM out with some kind of "it doesn't say a dog can't play basketball" bullshit.
Meanwhile, the fighter who just wants to do literally anything besides swing a sword? That guy can eat shit.
The reason people got super mad at 4th edition is because it expected wizards to play on that field too, instead of getting to directly alter the fiction in a way no other class could. Now everyone rolls to make number go down, and they fucking hated it.
I always wondered why people thought 4e sucked when the ability component seemed like an actual improvement over previous editions.
"It makes DND more like WoW!"
Okay, and? WoW has cool abilities for everyone not just the wizards.
It's why I try to add a lot of flavor to combat for everyone so that it's more exciting:
A near-miss becomes "your axe grazes their armor, letting out a chilling screech"
a miss becomes "they dodge out of the way of your axe, it slams directly into the wooden planks, splitting it in two"
a near-hit becomes "your axe pierces their chainmail, sending an arc of blood through the air"
and a high hit or crit that doesn't kill them becomes "you chop off their fucking arm you badass motherfucker"
One thing I picked up from one of my friends that DMs is to let the player choose the killing blow. "How do you wanna do this" is the best phrase in combat because it means "aw shit that mofo gonna die I can do what I want"
It's also why I ended up with so many severed heads in that campaign.
Because WoW is a game where you push buttons to make number go down, and that's boring. If I wanted that experience, I'd play WoW.
The best I can summarize it is thus:
WoW is a fantasy game you can play with your friends. Your actions are severely limited by what the game allows, and are mostly various flavors of "do damage"/"heal"/"apply status." Your actions are ultimately meaningless - the world is static. The upside is that the game does all the heavy lifting for you, and you get to look at pretty graphics and watch your character get increasingly ridiculous weapons and armor as you go.
Tabletop RPGs are fantasy games you can play with your friends. You can do things that are not explicitly allowed by the rules, and you can affect the fiction in meaningful ways. The disadvantage is that they are messy and take more work to play, because all the action takes place in your imagination.
4E was a game in which your actions are severely limited by what the rules allow, and are mostly various flavors of "do damage"/"heal"/"apply status;" but it's also a game that expects players to keep track of tons of constantly changing modifiers (which videogames are really good at!). So it was a combination of the least interesting things about both MMOs and tabletop games, without the fun stuff from either.
Ok so that part does kind of irk me in this context. If you are saying that nearly every edition of D&D fits that description and are comparing it to some other system then yeah I could see that argument. But for 4e it absolutely was not true in the books as written that this was the case compared to 3rd or 5th ed. I have several theories as to why this misconception seems to be widespread (character creator program I am looking in your direction) but whatever the reason it is something that existed in the culture of how some people played 4th ed and not in the books.
Page 42 of the 4e DMG was a thing. It basically gave what was needed to run tons of improv, but tons of people ignored it or thought it wasn’t enough.
Dark Horse and Mantic Games has announced plans to publish Hellboy: The Roleplaying Game using Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons rules. Earlier today, Dark Horse and Mantic Games announced that it would launch a Kickstarter to fund the production of Hellboy: The Roleplaying Game, which will let fans create and play as a BRPD agent as they face off against occult creatures. Character options include BRPD field researchers, security agents, or even a rookie with hidden supernatural powers.
Spell text is an example of one of my big beefs with almost every edition (bar 4th) of D&D.
Most D&D - even during combat, the most regimented and organized part of the game - takes place in a very vague fictive space. A character doing melee attacks rolls to do a few points of fight damage to an enemy in a period of time that could last as long as a minute (the length of combat rounds for the first 26 years of D&D's life). Any more detail than that - "you wave your sword and do 6 points of fight" - is called "flavor" and treated with a kind of bemused tolerance. "Sure, Dave, you can say you tackle the orc if you want."
But everyone knows it didn't really happen that way. Dave waved his fightstick and did fight. If he insisted too strongly on any other outcome of his actions, everyone would get impatient or even upset at this spotlight-hugging lame-o. Most characters at most times in D&D have to live with the fact that the only real thing they do per the game rules is make number go down man go die. Or they can pay a bunch of feats to do, like, one other thing.
MEANWHILE
Spells, completely unlike the entire rest of the game, are written in hyper-precise, wildly over-detailed, legalistic language.
D&D spell text be like
"this spell creates 10d100 cubic meters of chocolate Jell-O in a spherical volume, though the Jell-O immediately flows to conform to the shape of any sufficiently large container. Living beings may choose to eat the Jell-O as a full-round action, healing 2 HP per attempt, though must make a DC 10 Constitution save each subsequent round to avoid tummyache. A butterfly with 1d3 hit points flaps its wings near the caster. Meanwhile, 6d10 kilometers away, a pregnant woman (see Table 16-3 for race and age) gives birth to a child named Jellosophes weighing 3d6+5 ounces. Eighteen years from now, the child will have a GPA of (1d4) point (1d10) at the nearest wizard's college or barding school on the same plane of existence.
The Jell-O vanishes after 10 rounds."
And it invites this insane, Talmudic scrutiny from players poring over the text like they're death row lawyers preparing a hail mary case, and it invites them to play this stupid fucking adversarial game where they try and catch the DM out with some kind of "it doesn't say a dog can't play basketball" bullshit.
Meanwhile, the fighter who just wants to do literally anything besides swing a sword? That guy can eat shit.
The reason people got super mad at 4th edition is because it expected wizards to play on that field too, instead of getting to directly alter the fiction in a way no other class could. Now everyone rolls to make number go down, and they fucking hated it.
I always wondered why people thought 4e sucked when the ability component seemed like an actual improvement over previous editions.
"It makes DND more like WoW!"
Okay, and? WoW has cool abilities for everyone not just the wizards.
It's why I try to add a lot of flavor to combat for everyone so that it's more exciting:
A near-miss becomes "your axe grazes their armor, letting out a chilling screech"
a miss becomes "they dodge out of the way of your axe, it slams directly into the wooden planks, splitting it in two"
a near-hit becomes "your axe pierces their chainmail, sending an arc of blood through the air"
and a high hit or crit that doesn't kill them becomes "you chop off their fucking arm you badass motherfucker"
One thing I picked up from one of my friends that DMs is to let the player choose the killing blow. "How do you wanna do this" is the best phrase in combat because it means "aw shit that mofo gonna die I can do what I want"
It's also why I ended up with so many severed heads in that campaign.
Because WoW is a game where you push buttons to make number go down, and that's boring. If I wanted that experience, I'd play WoW.
The best I can summarize it is thus:
WoW is a fantasy game you can play with your friends. Your actions are severely limited by what the game allows, and are mostly various flavors of "do damage"/"heal"/"apply status." Your actions are ultimately meaningless - the world is static. The upside is that the game does all the heavy lifting for you, and you get to look at pretty graphics and watch your character get increasingly ridiculous weapons and armor as you go.
Tabletop RPGs are fantasy games you can play with your friends. You can do things that are not explicitly allowed by the rules, and you can affect the fiction in meaningful ways. The disadvantage is that they are messy and take more work to play, because all the action takes place in your imagination.
4E was a game in which your actions are severely limited by what the rules allow, and are mostly various flavors of "do damage"/"heal"/"apply status;" but it's also a game that expects players to keep track of tons of constantly changing modifiers (which videogames are really good at!). So it was a combination of the least interesting things about both MMOs and tabletop games, without the fun stuff from either.
Ok so that part does kind of irk me in this context. If you are saying that nearly every edition of D&D fits that description and are comparing it to some other system then yeah I could see that argument. But for 4e it absolutely was not true in the books as written that this was the case compared to 3rd or 5th ed. I have several theories as to why this misconception seems to be widespread (character creator program I am looking in your direction) but whatever the reason it is something that existed in the culture of how some people played 4th ed and not in the books.
Page 42 of the 4e DMG was a thing. It basically gave what was needed to run tons of improv, but tons of people ignored it or thought it wasn’t enough.
Whole lotta folks running games without a DMG. If you want something to be seen by the majority it needs to be up front in the PHB.
I love the principle of class based XP systems, and I think there's a good start there, but I would definitely change it around a bit
A big problem with D&D doing a class based XP system is that it uses very big numbers for XP, which means there's going to be a lot of math, and stuff like needing to get the DM to tell you the amount of hit dice of monsters you defeated or whatever
I feel like a good class based XP system should be something that the players can keep track of themselves
One of the many reasons I'd love to try Burning Wheel is that each player writes Beliefs for their character, and you get XP* for engaging with your character's Beliefs. In other words, players define what they want to be rewarded for.
*actually what you get is metagame currency you can spend to help difficult rolls succeed. You get the same credit toward advancement whether you succeed or not, but spending points makes hard rolls not a guaranteed failure.
Spell text is an example of one of my big beefs with almost every edition (bar 4th) of D&D.
Most D&D - even during combat, the most regimented and organized part of the game - takes place in a very vague fictive space. A character doing melee attacks rolls to do a few points of fight damage to an enemy in a period of time that could last as long as a minute (the length of combat rounds for the first 26 years of D&D's life). Any more detail than that - "you wave your sword and do 6 points of fight" - is called "flavor" and treated with a kind of bemused tolerance. "Sure, Dave, you can say you tackle the orc if you want."
But everyone knows it didn't really happen that way. Dave waved his fightstick and did fight. If he insisted too strongly on any other outcome of his actions, everyone would get impatient or even upset at this spotlight-hugging lame-o. Most characters at most times in D&D have to live with the fact that the only real thing they do per the game rules is make number go down man go die. Or they can pay a bunch of feats to do, like, one other thing.
MEANWHILE
Spells, completely unlike the entire rest of the game, are written in hyper-precise, wildly over-detailed, legalistic language.
D&D spell text be like
"this spell creates 10d100 cubic meters of chocolate Jell-O in a spherical volume, though the Jell-O immediately flows to conform to the shape of any sufficiently large container. Living beings may choose to eat the Jell-O as a full-round action, healing 2 HP per attempt, though must make a DC 10 Constitution save each subsequent round to avoid tummyache. A butterfly with 1d3 hit points flaps its wings near the caster. Meanwhile, 6d10 kilometers away, a pregnant woman (see Table 16-3 for race and age) gives birth to a child named Jellosophes weighing 3d6+5 ounces. Eighteen years from now, the child will have a GPA of (1d4) point (1d10) at the nearest wizard's college or barding school on the same plane of existence.
The Jell-O vanishes after 10 rounds."
And it invites this insane, Talmudic scrutiny from players poring over the text like they're death row lawyers preparing a hail mary case, and it invites them to play this stupid fucking adversarial game where they try and catch the DM out with some kind of "it doesn't say a dog can't play basketball" bullshit.
Meanwhile, the fighter who just wants to do literally anything besides swing a sword? That guy can eat shit.
The reason people got super mad at 4th edition is because it expected wizards to play on that field too, instead of getting to directly alter the fiction in a way no other class could. Now everyone rolls to make number go down, and they fucking hated it.
I always wondered why people thought 4e sucked when the ability component seemed like an actual improvement over previous editions.
"It makes DND more like WoW!"
Okay, and? WoW has cool abilities for everyone not just the wizards.
It's why I try to add a lot of flavor to combat for everyone so that it's more exciting:
A near-miss becomes "your axe grazes their armor, letting out a chilling screech"
a miss becomes "they dodge out of the way of your axe, it slams directly into the wooden planks, splitting it in two"
a near-hit becomes "your axe pierces their chainmail, sending an arc of blood through the air"
and a high hit or crit that doesn't kill them becomes "you chop off their fucking arm you badass motherfucker"
One thing I picked up from one of my friends that DMs is to let the player choose the killing blow. "How do you wanna do this" is the best phrase in combat because it means "aw shit that mofo gonna die I can do what I want"
It's also why I ended up with so many severed heads in that campaign.
Because WoW is a game where you push buttons to make number go down, and that's boring. If I wanted that experience, I'd play WoW.
The best I can summarize it is thus:
WoW is a fantasy game you can play with your friends. Your actions are severely limited by what the game allows, and are mostly various flavors of "do damage"/"heal"/"apply status." Your actions are ultimately meaningless - the world is static. The upside is that the game does all the heavy lifting for you, and you get to look at pretty graphics and watch your character get increasingly ridiculous weapons and armor as you go.
Tabletop RPGs are fantasy games you can play with your friends. You can do things that are not explicitly allowed by the rules, and you can affect the fiction in meaningful ways. The disadvantage is that they are messy and take more work to play, because all the action takes place in your imagination.
4E was a game in which your actions are severely limited by what the rules allow, and are mostly various flavors of "do damage"/"heal"/"apply status;" but it's also a game that expects players to keep track of tons of constantly changing modifiers (which videogames are really good at!). So it was a combination of the least interesting things about both MMOs and tabletop games, without the fun stuff from either.
Ok so that part does kind of irk me in this context. If you are saying that nearly every edition of D&D fits that description and are comparing it to some other system then yeah I could see that argument. But for 4e it absolutely was not true in the books as written that this was the case compared to 3rd or 5th ed. I have several theories as to why this misconception seems to be widespread (character creator program I am looking in your direction) but whatever the reason it is something that existed in the culture of how some people played 4th ed and not in the books.
It was true for combat, which was 95% of the game as defined by play time.
It was my first impression on reading the rules, granted; but actual play failed to change my mind.
I do think one of the biggest weaknesses of TTRPGs in general is that player experience varies wildly depending on the skill of the player, the other players at the table, and especially the GM. I played mostly living world modules at my FLGS because that was my friend group's preferred social activity at the time, and those are just the most perfunctory, boring shit and the apotheosis of 4E as MMO. I knitted so many socks during that time.
Even games that weren't that were also mostly roll dice number go down, though.
...I think this is maybe similar to how some people see superhero movies as a series of action scenes glued together with tedious obligatory story, and other see them as a series of story scenes glued together with tedious obligatory action. I'm a story person, and in every 4E game I played in, "story" was a few sentences of exposition - maybe a short scene and a few skill checks if you're lucky - you got as a reward for finishing one 45 minute combat before diving into the next one.
Anyway, I could totally buy that it's a problem with the culture of how some people played it - except that under multiple GMs and with dozens of other players, I never experienced any other way of playing. The published modules in particular seemed designed to disincentivise treating them as anything other than a scripted raid, or your character as anything more than a pile of numbers. At what point does it stop being a problem with the players and start being a problem with the game?
I love the principle of class based XP systems, and I think there's a good start there, but I would definitely change it around a bit
A big problem with D&D doing a class based XP system is that it uses very big numbers for XP, which means there's going to be a lot of math, and stuff like needing to get the DM to tell you the amount of hit dice of monsters you defeated or whatever
I feel like a good class based XP system should be something that the players can keep track of themselves
One of the many reasons I'd love to try Burning Wheel is that each player writes Beliefs for their character, and you get XP* for engaging with your character's Beliefs. In other words, players define what they want to be rewarded for.
*actually what you get is metagame currency you can spend to help difficult rolls succeed. You get the same credit toward advancement whether you succeed or not, but spending points makes hard rolls not a guaranteed failure.
Spell text is an example of one of my big beefs with almost every edition (bar 4th) of D&D.
Most D&D - even during combat, the most regimented and organized part of the game - takes place in a very vague fictive space. A character doing melee attacks rolls to do a few points of fight damage to an enemy in a period of time that could last as long as a minute (the length of combat rounds for the first 26 years of D&D's life). Any more detail than that - "you wave your sword and do 6 points of fight" - is called "flavor" and treated with a kind of bemused tolerance. "Sure, Dave, you can say you tackle the orc if you want."
But everyone knows it didn't really happen that way. Dave waved his fightstick and did fight. If he insisted too strongly on any other outcome of his actions, everyone would get impatient or even upset at this spotlight-hugging lame-o. Most characters at most times in D&D have to live with the fact that the only real thing they do per the game rules is make number go down man go die. Or they can pay a bunch of feats to do, like, one other thing.
MEANWHILE
Spells, completely unlike the entire rest of the game, are written in hyper-precise, wildly over-detailed, legalistic language.
D&D spell text be like
"this spell creates 10d100 cubic meters of chocolate Jell-O in a spherical volume, though the Jell-O immediately flows to conform to the shape of any sufficiently large container. Living beings may choose to eat the Jell-O as a full-round action, healing 2 HP per attempt, though must make a DC 10 Constitution save each subsequent round to avoid tummyache. A butterfly with 1d3 hit points flaps its wings near the caster. Meanwhile, 6d10 kilometers away, a pregnant woman (see Table 16-3 for race and age) gives birth to a child named Jellosophes weighing 3d6+5 ounces. Eighteen years from now, the child will have a GPA of (1d4) point (1d10) at the nearest wizard's college or barding school on the same plane of existence.
The Jell-O vanishes after 10 rounds."
And it invites this insane, Talmudic scrutiny from players poring over the text like they're death row lawyers preparing a hail mary case, and it invites them to play this stupid fucking adversarial game where they try and catch the DM out with some kind of "it doesn't say a dog can't play basketball" bullshit.
Meanwhile, the fighter who just wants to do literally anything besides swing a sword? That guy can eat shit.
The reason people got super mad at 4th edition is because it expected wizards to play on that field too, instead of getting to directly alter the fiction in a way no other class could. Now everyone rolls to make number go down, and they fucking hated it.
I always wondered why people thought 4e sucked when the ability component seemed like an actual improvement over previous editions.
"It makes DND more like WoW!"
Okay, and? WoW has cool abilities for everyone not just the wizards.
It's why I try to add a lot of flavor to combat for everyone so that it's more exciting:
A near-miss becomes "your axe grazes their armor, letting out a chilling screech"
a miss becomes "they dodge out of the way of your axe, it slams directly into the wooden planks, splitting it in two"
a near-hit becomes "your axe pierces their chainmail, sending an arc of blood through the air"
and a high hit or crit that doesn't kill them becomes "you chop off their fucking arm you badass motherfucker"
One thing I picked up from one of my friends that DMs is to let the player choose the killing blow. "How do you wanna do this" is the best phrase in combat because it means "aw shit that mofo gonna die I can do what I want"
It's also why I ended up with so many severed heads in that campaign.
Because WoW is a game where you push buttons to make number go down, and that's boring. If I wanted that experience, I'd play WoW.
The best I can summarize it is thus:
WoW is a fantasy game you can play with your friends. Your actions are severely limited by what the game allows, and are mostly various flavors of "do damage"/"heal"/"apply status." Your actions are ultimately meaningless - the world is static. The upside is that the game does all the heavy lifting for you, and you get to look at pretty graphics and watch your character get increasingly ridiculous weapons and armor as you go.
Tabletop RPGs are fantasy games you can play with your friends. You can do things that are not explicitly allowed by the rules, and you can affect the fiction in meaningful ways. The disadvantage is that they are messy and take more work to play, because all the action takes place in your imagination.
4E was a game in which your actions are severely limited by what the rules allow, and are mostly various flavors of "do damage"/"heal"/"apply status;" but it's also a game that expects players to keep track of tons of constantly changing modifiers (which videogames are really good at!). So it was a combination of the least interesting things about both MMOs and tabletop games, without the fun stuff from either.
Ok so that part does kind of irk me in this context. If you are saying that nearly every edition of D&D fits that description and are comparing it to some other system then yeah I could see that argument. But for 4e it absolutely was not true in the books as written that this was the case compared to 3rd or 5th ed. I have several theories as to why this misconception seems to be widespread (character creator program I am looking in your direction) but whatever the reason it is something that existed in the culture of how some people played 4th ed and not in the books.
It was true for combat, which was 95% of the game as defined by play time.
It was my first impression on reading the rules, granted; but actual play failed to change my mind.
I do think one of the biggest weaknesses of TTRPGs in general is that player experience varies wildly depending on the skill of the player, the other players at the table, and especially the GM. I played mostly living world modules at my FLGS because that was my friend group's preferred social activity at the time, and those are just the most perfunctory, boring shit and the apotheosis of 4E as MMO. I knitted so many socks during that time.
Even games that weren't that were also mostly roll dice number go down, though.
...I think this is maybe similar to how some people see superhero movies as a series of action scenes glued together with tedious obligatory story, and other see them as a series of story scenes glued together with tedious obligatory action. I'm a story person, and in every 4E game I played in, "story" was a few sentences of exposition - maybe a short scene and a few skill checks if you're lucky - you got as a reward for finishing one 45 minute combat before diving into the next one.
Anyway, I could totally buy that it's a problem with the culture of how some people played it - except that under multiple GMs and with dozens of other players, I never experienced any other way of playing. The published modules in particular seemed designed to disincentivise treating them as anything other than a scripted raid, or your character as anything more than a pile of numbers. At what point does it stop being a problem with the players and start being a problem with the game?
yeah the open game nights are generally just combat encounters. I was working as a retail monkey at WOTC when 3rd ed came out and it was the same way for Living Greyhawk.
And that's really what I was trying to say. D&D is still and always has been a game about killing monsters and getting treasure. Compared to other games there is way more emphasis on combat. It used to be dungeon crawling, overland exploration and combat but those first two have become comparatively vestigial over the last couple decades.
There are other games that have a different emphasis in their rules and traditions. I was just saying that 4th ed did not discourage improv in combat or have any more emphasis on killing monsters than any other edition of the game (especially compared to 3rd and 5th). I personally think it did a better job at killing monsters and getting treasure than 2nd, 3rd and 5th ed but a lot of the people I play with thought that in doing so it become too complicated and prefer the "I roll to attack, ok turn over" simplicity of 5th.
Attacked by tweeeeeeees!
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webguy20I spend too much time on the InternetRegistered Userregular
I think 4th could have done much better released in today's RPG climate, especially if it took the tact of releasing like Genesys. Present a rules system that is mostly theme agnostic, then release setting modules to drape on top of it, or create your own setting to do so.
I think the note of effect tracking is pretty on point. Also the whole reaction economy. I have never gotten so lost in an initiative count as I did in 4e simply because I'd have a monster do something and then a bunch of player reactions would go off and then one of those player reactions would trigger another players reaction and then that would trigger a monster reaction and oops I forgot where the reaction train started. Maybe that was just an issue I ran into on my tables with a bunch of players trying to make sure they wrung everything out of the action economy.
I think the note of effect tracking is pretty on point. Also the whole reaction economy. I have never gotten so lost in an initiative count as I did in 4e simply because I'd have a monster do something and then a bunch of player reactions would go off and then one of those player reactions would trigger another players reaction and then that would trigger a monster reaction and oops I forgot where the reaction train started. Maybe that was just an issue I ran into on my tables with a bunch of players trying to make sure they wrung everything out of the action economy.
4e (not by design I'm sure) favored small group sizes and cinematic, story important combat. It absolutely failed in doing the older version style random encounters. It was just too much combat, and too complex. They at least had some idea of that though, because they actually tried to provide rules for role playing and non-combat encounters with the skill challenge system.
By the end of the edition they had REALLY tightened it all up. They could have done amazing things with a 4.5 edition that had everything they had learned between monster manual 2&3, the refined skill challenge system and inherent bonuses.
Between the failure of bringing their virtual table top to fruition, and how much tighter the releases had been between 2e and 3e (11 years) and 3.5 and 4e (5 years) people were just sick of buying books.
I do actually appreciate 5e's slower roll out of content.
Edit: I think the thing I like about 4e the most is that it tried to give a new DM the most tools to run a game inside and outside of combat. To help level that curve of "Figure out how to play half the game yourself!" that the other editions have in regards to the RP aspect of the system.
The status/effect issue is absolutely a big deal. We found some ways to work around it, but messed it up a bunch too. I would have liked to see it simplified a whole bunch. As well they needed to straighten out the bonus progression issue that popped up, preferably with inherent bonuses so you can also drop the absolute need for magic items.
I do absolutely maintain that had D&D 4e and Pathfinder simply swapped brands, both would have been better liked.
4e (not by design I'm sure) favored small group sizes and cinematic, story important combat. It absolutely failed in doing the older version style random encounters. It was just too much combat, and too complex. They at least had some idea of that though, because they actually tried to provide rules for role playing and non-combat encounters with the skill challenge system.
Going with classes closer to Essentials or 13th Age style classes, and make a Short Rest more like the 5th Ed short rest where you have to commit to it, it's not assumed, but it doesn't take a multi-hour commitment, then I think random encounter stuff would be a little easier to manage. But spellcasting would be wildly different as well in that situation so I dunno.
The status/effect issue is absolutely a big deal. We found some ways to work around it, but messed it up a bunch too. I would have liked to see it simplified a whole bunch. As well they needed to straighten out the bonus progression issue that popped up, preferably with inherent bonuses so you can also drop the absolute need for magic items.
I do absolutely maintain that had D&D 4e and Pathfinder simply swapped brands, both would have been better liked.
4e (not by design I'm sure) favored small group sizes and cinematic, story important combat. It absolutely failed in doing the older version style random encounters. It was just too much combat, and too complex. They at least had some idea of that though, because they actually tried to provide rules for role playing and non-combat encounters with the skill challenge system.
Going with classes closer to Essentials or 13th Age style classes, and make a Short Rest more like the 5th Ed short rest where you have to commit to it, it's not assumed, but it doesn't take a multi-hour commitment, then I think random encounter stuff would be a little easier to manage. But spellcasting would be wildly different as well in that situation so I dunno.
So this is my opinion, but I think the reason random encounters weren't 4e's baliwick was because how much the system assumed the terrain was as much an enemy or ally in the battle as the actual characters. With all the push/pull/movement abilities along with everything else 4e combat was the most fun with a dynamic map with height differences, hazards and cover. Having to have these kind of things made up in advance for random encounters was a big time sink back in the day. 4e combat wasn't nearly as fun when it was in a square room with 4 pillars.
I ran a 4e game at near the end of the edition's life, when inherent bonuses were a solid concept. It made magic items super cool because I could give my players this awesome item with cool abilities (but no +1), and they would actually keep it and use it! They weren't always after the new shiny. I could these unique weapons stories and stuff, and any upgrading didn't have to line out when the players needed a bonus.
I'm also a big fan of super rare high magic items that actually have a story behind them, and might even be sentient with goals of their own. decoupling the hit/damage bonus is always something I'm striving for in my games.
Yeah in 4e the combats had to either be a very quick speed bump (max 2 full initiative passes) or a meaningful set piece, and they all had to be a necessary part of your narrative. God forbid the party just decide to pick a fight with someone you hadn't planned out ahead of time.
Also skill challenges were a fuckin beautiful invention. I still use them in 5e on the regular. Basically just number of successes before number of failures, figure out which skills are applicable, which aren't, let the players try to sell you on bringing their skills into it, figure out what completing the challenge gets the party and what failing it does to them.
We basically used inherent bonuses in our game. I mean, magical items were more on the order of, like, elven chain or most Harry Potter stuff. They were magical, but they weren't necessarily super amazing awesome. Like, my Warlord had a magic throwing item that returned. I gave our Warlock a tattoo item that was stylized as an extension of his pact. Stuff that was super flavorful but not ridiculously powerful.
Skill challenges were good but ended up needing a lot of post-release development to really come into their own. Overall they were quite good, though. Once I did an Ability Challenge which was everybody made raw ability checks, and the whole group got a bonus based on a given character's skill training (so Con check to endure a dangerous climb, aided by the Fighter's Athletics, failure cost a healing surge as they wore themselves out).
double-edit: I also felt like hit dice being replaced with healing surges was a good step as well, it gave more emphasis to the notion that it was a character resource not explicitly tied to HP, which gave it other potential uses. 13th Age calls them Recoveries, and I like the idea of giving the mechanic a name that's doesn't fully imply being tied so directly to healing, even if that will be the most direct and obvious connection.
Yeah in 4e the combats had to either be a very quick speed bump (max 2 full initiative passes) or a meaningful set piece, and they all had to be a necessary part of your narrative. God forbid the party just decide to pick a fight with someone you hadn't planned out ahead of time.
Also skill challenges were a fuckin beautiful invention. I still use them in 5e on the regular. Basically just number of successes before number of failures, figure out which skills are applicable, which aren't, let the players try to sell you on bringing their skills into it, figure out what completing the challenge gets the party and what failing it does to them.
I also bring skill challenges into my games. Trying to figure out the best way to do it with 13th age, since it doesn't have explicitly defined skills, but that actually might make it even easier. I also try to get my players to describe what they are doing during the challenges, so it's more a cooperative storytelling experience, with the dice letting the players know up front if they succeed or fail, instead of just a bunch of dice rolling.
No but seriously this reminded me of a moment in the Epic tier of my 4e game where on one character's turn, they provoked an Opportunity Attack, and the enemy took the attack, which triggered my character's Interrupt, which allowed another character to make an attack that triggered yet another character's Reaction, and ended with the attacking enemy getting obliterated.
No but seriously this reminded me of a moment in the Epic tier of my 4e game where on one character's turn, they provoked an Opportunity Attack, and the enemy took the attack, which triggered my character's Interrupt, which allowed another character to make an attack that triggered yet another character's Reaction, and ended with the attacking enemy getting obliterated.
You know, thinking about it I think the greatest sin 4e had was that as a player, you HAD to pay attention to other peoples turns to keep up on what was going on. You can't fuck off in that game. The flipside is that 4e really let you build a coherent team with abilities that could all play off each other in awesome combos, like your story.
No but seriously this reminded me of a moment in the Epic tier of my 4e game where on one character's turn, they provoked an Opportunity Attack, and the enemy took the attack, which triggered my character's Interrupt, which allowed another character to make an attack that triggered yet another character's Reaction, and ended with the attacking enemy getting obliterated.
You know, thinking about it I think the greatest sin 4e had was that as a player, you HAD to pay attention to other peoples turns to keep up on what was going on. You can't fuck off in that game. The flipside is that 4e really let you build a coherent team with abilities that could all play off each other in awesome combos, like your story.
There were ... some times that you could sort of tune out some, but yeah 4e really wanted the whole party engaged all of the time. I don't think that was necessarily a bad thing, but I can definitely see where some wouldn't enjoy that.
For me the tactical/wargame aspect of it was a very positive quality, and it's something I very much miss in other games, but I absolutely know that not everybody is going to want to engage with that aspect of a game and I get not wanting to.
No but seriously this reminded me of a moment in the Epic tier of my 4e game where on one character's turn, they provoked an Opportunity Attack, and the enemy took the attack, which triggered my character's Interrupt, which allowed another character to make an attack that triggered yet another character's Reaction, and ended with the attacking enemy getting obliterated.
You know, thinking about it I think the greatest sin 4e had was that as a player, you HAD to pay attention to other peoples turns to keep up on what was going on. You can't fuck off in that game. The flipside is that 4e really let you build a coherent team with abilities that could all play off each other in awesome combos, like your story.
My players had among them a Fighter who used a...Chain Whip, I think? It let him use the positional bullshit Fighters get from reach, which did a lot of work. And the Warlord in the group used a Triple Flail and had some bullshit that knocked guys down when they got moved against their will next to him, and the Fighter had some other bullshit that let him attack things that got knocked down. There were quite a few times during the campaign that Chumbawumba was played.
No but seriously this reminded me of a moment in the Epic tier of my 4e game where on one character's turn, they provoked an Opportunity Attack, and the enemy took the attack, which triggered my character's Interrupt, which allowed another character to make an attack that triggered yet another character's Reaction, and ended with the attacking enemy getting obliterated.
You know, thinking about it I think the greatest sin 4e had was that as a player, you HAD to pay attention to other peoples turns to keep up on what was going on. You can't fuck off in that game. The flipside is that 4e really let you build a coherent team with abilities that could all play off each other in awesome combos, like your story.
My players had among them a Fighter who used a...Chain Whip, I think? It let him use the positional bullshit Fighters get from reach, which did a lot of work. And the Warlord in the group used a Triple Flail and had some bullshit that knocked guys down when they got moved against their will next to him, and the Fighter had some other bullshit that let him attack things that got knocked down. There were quite a few times during the campaign that Chumbawumba was played.
I remember that combo. It was a Flail Mastery feat that said when you did forced movement you could knock them prone (I think it was instead of moving, idr). A buddy of mine and I looked at that, did the math, and decided it was too OP and to go with something that would actually be fun. But yeah, that was definitely in there and definitely quite powerful.
Der Waffle MousBlame this on the misfortune of your birth.New Yark, New Yark.Registered Userregular
the talk of having trouble tracking which one of three kinds of bonus you might be getting is giving me flashbacks to a very unoptimized high level 3.5e game where on at least several occasions combat ground to a halt for half an hour as everyone had to recalculate their character sheets because someone cast some attribute buffs.
No but seriously this reminded me of a moment in the Epic tier of my 4e game where on one character's turn, they provoked an Opportunity Attack, and the enemy took the attack, which triggered my character's Interrupt, which allowed another character to make an attack that triggered yet another character's Reaction, and ended with the attacking enemy getting obliterated.
You know, thinking about it I think the greatest sin 4e had was that as a player, you HAD to pay attention to other peoples turns to keep up on what was going on. You can't fuck off in that game. The flipside is that 4e really let you build a coherent team with abilities that could all play off each other in awesome combos, like your story.
My players had among them a Fighter who used a...Chain Whip, I think? It let him use the positional bullshit Fighters get from reach, which did a lot of work. And the Warlord in the group used a Triple Flail and had some bullshit that knocked guys down when they got moved against their will next to him, and the Fighter had some other bullshit that let him attack things that got knocked down. There were quite a few times during the campaign that Chumbawumba was played.
Have chain whips been statted-up for PCs in 5E? I know at least a sample shadar-kai has one in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes. I wonder how many times players have fought that particular shadar-kai statblock and wanted to take the chain whip for themselves.
Dark Horse and Mantic Games has announced plans to publish Hellboy: The Roleplaying Game using Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons rules. Earlier today, Dark Horse and Mantic Games announced that it would launch a Kickstarter to fund the production of Hellboy: The Roleplaying Game, which will let fans create and play as a BRPD agent as they face off against occult creatures. Character options include BRPD field researchers, security agents, or even a rookie with hidden supernatural powers.
D&D rules are a bad fit for Hellboy and I am disappointed that a more appropriate and lesser-known system is not getting the increased attention it would receive from a branded tie-in, and instead it's just more D&D.
the talk of having trouble tracking which one of three kinds of bonus you might be getting is giving me flashbacks to a very unoptimized high level 3.5e game where on at least several occasions combat ground to a halt for half an hour as everyone had to recalculate their character sheets because someone cast some attribute buffs.
I used to have a cheat sheet in my pathfinder game that listed out my attacks with variations based on the common buffs the group used. It was like an entire column of a two column page.
Dark Horse and Mantic Games has announced plans to publish Hellboy: The Roleplaying Game using Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons rules. Earlier today, Dark Horse and Mantic Games announced that it would launch a Kickstarter to fund the production of Hellboy: The Roleplaying Game, which will let fans create and play as a BRPD agent as they face off against occult creatures. Character options include BRPD field researchers, security agents, or even a rookie with hidden supernatural powers.
D&D rules are a bad fit for Hellboy and I am disappointed that a more appropriate and lesser-known system is not getting the increased attention it would receive from a branded tie-in, and instead it's just more D&D.
I feel like Hellboy would work really well in Mutants And Masterminds.
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
Dark Horse and Mantic Games has announced plans to publish Hellboy: The Roleplaying Game using Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons rules. Earlier today, Dark Horse and Mantic Games announced that it would launch a Kickstarter to fund the production of Hellboy: The Roleplaying Game, which will let fans create and play as a BRPD agent as they face off against occult creatures. Character options include BRPD field researchers, security agents, or even a rookie with hidden supernatural powers.
D&D rules are a bad fit for Hellboy and I am disappointed that a more appropriate and lesser-known system is not getting the increased attention it would receive from a branded tie-in, and instead it's just more D&D.
I feel like Hellboy would work really well in Mutants And Masterminds.
I ran a not technically BPRD but essentially BPRD game in Mutants and Masterminds off these very forums ages ago
It was a lot of fun - I set it in the 1980s, mixing supernatural threats with Soviet stuff (and Soviets trying to get their hands on supernatural things, of course)
Did some drop in stuff where each session was a single mission, so the agents assigned to the mission were just whoever showed up that day, and had some premade characters (with a lot of help from @DE?AD) who were available if you didn't want to deal with M&M's arcane character creation systems
Blades in the Dark is just so right for it in my opinion. I’m pretty sure I could make two custom moves apiece and put the cast in it in the next 30 minutes.
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DepressperadoI just wanted to see you laughingin the pizza rainRegistered Userregular
I was contemplating running a like, Survival Mode D&D game. I'm talkin' equipment weight, managing their camp, making sure they've got food and water, marching speeds.
I'd do something to combat, add a grievous wound table or something.
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Because WoW is a game where you push buttons to make number go down, and that's boring. If I wanted that experience, I'd play WoW.
The best I can summarize it is thus:
WoW is a fantasy game you can play with your friends. Your actions are severely limited by what the game allows, and are mostly various flavors of "do damage"/"heal"/"apply status." Your actions are ultimately meaningless - the world is static. The upside is that the game does all the heavy lifting for you, and you get to look at pretty graphics and watch your character get increasingly ridiculous weapons and armor as you go.
Tabletop RPGs are fantasy games you can play with your friends. You can do things that are not explicitly allowed by the rules, and you can affect the fiction in meaningful ways. The disadvantage is that they are messy and take more work to play, because all the action takes place in your imagination.
4E was a game in which your actions are severely limited by what the rules allow, and are mostly various flavors of "do damage"/"heal"/"apply status;" but it's also a game that expects players to keep track of tons of constantly changing modifiers (which videogames are really good at!). So it was a combination of the least interesting things about both MMOs and tabletop games, without the fun stuff from either.
My Terra Incognita setting!
It's a roughly American sized continent subjected to an effect that prevents travel from it, and dumps people's from across the multiverse on it. It's expclity got a knack for pulling in refugees who need a new homeland, and is cruel to would be conquerers.
The current species include Orcs (based off lions), Ogres (drawing on hippos), Satyrs (Drawing on inca culture, very recent refugees to the setting), HUmans (Survivors of way too many wars, with a big connection to the Fae), Undead (Products off the natural magic of the setting), Mer (Based on Sea snakes, also products of the natural magic of the setting), Aeterni Elves (The flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long), and Pygmy marmoset (Created by a dark lord to be his spies, they backstabbed the dark lord and escaped, and ended up on terra incognita. they're like 50-60cm tall as adults, officaly the "Small" race of the setting)
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/id/TheZombiePenguin
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Ok so that part does kind of irk me in this context. If you are saying that nearly every edition of D&D fits that description and are comparing it to some other system then yeah I could see that argument. But for 4e it absolutely was not true in the books as written that this was the case compared to 3rd or 5th ed. I have several theories as to why this misconception seems to be widespread (character creator program I am looking in your direction) but whatever the reason it is something that existed in the culture of how some people played 4th ed and not in the books.
I’d check out their tutorial discord
These is the different schools/styles in 3.5:
I'd want to create new school entirely, such as one dedicated to ranged weaponry (darts, bows, throwing weapons) and I'd also want one school to be elemental attacks (so think Desert Wind but incorporating more elements like water, cold, air, lightining, thunder, acid, ect...).
What would you folks do? Would you approach this around a central theme (like basing all of them off of current martial art styles)? Would you create them based on classic fighting archetypes (berserker, duelist, knight, wrestler, ect...)?
Their ability to deal damage is nearly unparalleled
Unfortunately, spellcasters can also do lots of other cool stuff
even in the most extreme cases of linear-fighter vs quadratic-wizard (eg: mid to high level 3rd ed) a wizard isn't the best in terms of raw damage output against a single opponent. But in those cases the most devastating combat spells aren't the damage ones but those where the target needs to save or be so impaired that they are effectively taken out of combat.
Page 42 of the 4e DMG was a thing. It basically gave what was needed to run tons of improv, but tons of people ignored it or thought it wasn’t enough.
"The only real politics I knew was that if a guy liked Hitler, I’d beat the stuffing out of him and that would be it." -- Jack Kirby
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Whole lotta folks running games without a DMG. If you want something to be seen by the majority it needs to be up front in the PHB.
One of the many reasons I'd love to try Burning Wheel is that each player writes Beliefs for their character, and you get XP* for engaging with your character's Beliefs. In other words, players define what they want to be rewarded for.
*actually what you get is metagame currency you can spend to help difficult rolls succeed. You get the same credit toward advancement whether you succeed or not, but spending points makes hard rolls not a guaranteed failure.
It was true for combat, which was 95% of the game as defined by play time.
It was my first impression on reading the rules, granted; but actual play failed to change my mind.
I do think one of the biggest weaknesses of TTRPGs in general is that player experience varies wildly depending on the skill of the player, the other players at the table, and especially the GM. I played mostly living world modules at my FLGS because that was my friend group's preferred social activity at the time, and those are just the most perfunctory, boring shit and the apotheosis of 4E as MMO. I knitted so many socks during that time.
Even games that weren't that were also mostly roll dice number go down, though.
...I think this is maybe similar to how some people see superhero movies as a series of action scenes glued together with tedious obligatory story, and other see them as a series of story scenes glued together with tedious obligatory action. I'm a story person, and in every 4E game I played in, "story" was a few sentences of exposition - maybe a short scene and a few skill checks if you're lucky - you got as a reward for finishing one 45 minute combat before diving into the next one.
Anyway, I could totally buy that it's a problem with the culture of how some people played it - except that under multiple GMs and with dozens of other players, I never experienced any other way of playing. The published modules in particular seemed designed to disincentivise treating them as anything other than a scripted raid, or your character as anything more than a pile of numbers. At what point does it stop being a problem with the players and start being a problem with the game?
yeah the open game nights are generally just combat encounters. I was working as a retail monkey at WOTC when 3rd ed came out and it was the same way for Living Greyhawk.
And that's really what I was trying to say. D&D is still and always has been a game about killing monsters and getting treasure. Compared to other games there is way more emphasis on combat. It used to be dungeon crawling, overland exploration and combat but those first two have become comparatively vestigial over the last couple decades.
There are other games that have a different emphasis in their rules and traditions. I was just saying that 4th ed did not discourage improv in combat or have any more emphasis on killing monsters than any other edition of the game (especially compared to 3rd and 5th). I personally think it did a better job at killing monsters and getting treasure than 2nd, 3rd and 5th ed but a lot of the people I play with thought that in doing so it become too complicated and prefer the "I roll to attack, ok turn over" simplicity of 5th.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
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As a fighter...
As a Warlord...
4e (not by design I'm sure) favored small group sizes and cinematic, story important combat. It absolutely failed in doing the older version style random encounters. It was just too much combat, and too complex. They at least had some idea of that though, because they actually tried to provide rules for role playing and non-combat encounters with the skill challenge system.
By the end of the edition they had REALLY tightened it all up. They could have done amazing things with a 4.5 edition that had everything they had learned between monster manual 2&3, the refined skill challenge system and inherent bonuses.
Between the failure of bringing their virtual table top to fruition, and how much tighter the releases had been between 2e and 3e (11 years) and 3.5 and 4e (5 years) people were just sick of buying books.
I do actually appreciate 5e's slower roll out of content.
Edit: I think the thing I like about 4e the most is that it tried to give a new DM the most tools to run a game inside and outside of combat. To help level that curve of "Figure out how to play half the game yourself!" that the other editions have in regards to the RP aspect of the system.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
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I do absolutely maintain that had D&D 4e and Pathfinder simply swapped brands, both would have been better liked.
Going with classes closer to Essentials or 13th Age style classes, and make a Short Rest more like the 5th Ed short rest where you have to commit to it, it's not assumed, but it doesn't take a multi-hour commitment, then I think random encounter stuff would be a little easier to manage. But spellcasting would be wildly different as well in that situation so I dunno.
Campaign recently hit the 3 year mark and I think we might storm Castle Ravenloft by year 5.
So this is my opinion, but I think the reason random encounters weren't 4e's baliwick was because how much the system assumed the terrain was as much an enemy or ally in the battle as the actual characters. With all the push/pull/movement abilities along with everything else 4e combat was the most fun with a dynamic map with height differences, hazards and cover. Having to have these kind of things made up in advance for random encounters was a big time sink back in the day. 4e combat wasn't nearly as fun when it was in a square room with 4 pillars.
I ran a 4e game at near the end of the edition's life, when inherent bonuses were a solid concept. It made magic items super cool because I could give my players this awesome item with cool abilities (but no +1), and they would actually keep it and use it! They weren't always after the new shiny. I could these unique weapons stories and stuff, and any upgrading didn't have to line out when the players needed a bonus.
I'm also a big fan of super rare high magic items that actually have a story behind them, and might even be sentient with goals of their own. decoupling the hit/damage bonus is always something I'm striving for in my games.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
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Also skill challenges were a fuckin beautiful invention. I still use them in 5e on the regular. Basically just number of successes before number of failures, figure out which skills are applicable, which aren't, let the players try to sell you on bringing their skills into it, figure out what completing the challenge gets the party and what failing it does to them.
Skill challenges were good but ended up needing a lot of post-release development to really come into their own. Overall they were quite good, though. Once I did an Ability Challenge which was everybody made raw ability checks, and the whole group got a bonus based on a given character's skill training (so Con check to endure a dangerous climb, aided by the Fighter's Athletics, failure cost a healing surge as they wore themselves out).
double-edit: I also felt like hit dice being replaced with healing surges was a good step as well, it gave more emphasis to the notion that it was a character resource not explicitly tied to HP, which gave it other potential uses. 13th Age calls them Recoveries, and I like the idea of giving the mechanic a name that's doesn't fully imply being tied so directly to healing, even if that will be the most direct and obvious connection.
I also bring skill challenges into my games. Trying to figure out the best way to do it with 13th age, since it doesn't have explicitly defined skills, but that actually might make it even easier. I also try to get my players to describe what they are doing during the challenges, so it's more a cooperative storytelling experience, with the dice letting the players know up front if they succeed or fail, instead of just a bunch of dice rolling.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
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No but seriously this reminded me of a moment in the Epic tier of my 4e game where on one character's turn, they provoked an Opportunity Attack, and the enemy took the attack, which triggered my character's Interrupt, which allowed another character to make an attack that triggered yet another character's Reaction, and ended with the attacking enemy getting obliterated.
You know, thinking about it I think the greatest sin 4e had was that as a player, you HAD to pay attention to other peoples turns to keep up on what was going on. You can't fuck off in that game. The flipside is that 4e really let you build a coherent team with abilities that could all play off each other in awesome combos, like your story.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
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There were ... some times that you could sort of tune out some, but yeah 4e really wanted the whole party engaged all of the time. I don't think that was necessarily a bad thing, but I can definitely see where some wouldn't enjoy that.
For me the tactical/wargame aspect of it was a very positive quality, and it's something I very much miss in other games, but I absolutely know that not everybody is going to want to engage with that aspect of a game and I get not wanting to.
My players had among them a Fighter who used a...Chain Whip, I think? It let him use the positional bullshit Fighters get from reach, which did a lot of work. And the Warlord in the group used a Triple Flail and had some bullshit that knocked guys down when they got moved against their will next to him, and the Fighter had some other bullshit that let him attack things that got knocked down. There were quite a few times during the campaign that Chumbawumba was played.
I remember that combo. It was a Flail Mastery feat that said when you did forced movement you could knock them prone (I think it was instead of moving, idr). A buddy of mine and I looked at that, did the math, and decided it was too OP and to go with something that would actually be fun. But yeah, that was definitely in there and definitely quite powerful.
Have chain whips been statted-up for PCs in 5E? I know at least a sample shadar-kai has one in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes. I wonder how many times players have fought that particular shadar-kai statblock and wanted to take the chain whip for themselves.
D&D rules are a bad fit for Hellboy and I am disappointed that a more appropriate and lesser-known system is not getting the increased attention it would receive from a branded tie-in, and instead it's just more D&D.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
I used to have a cheat sheet in my pathfinder game that listed out my attacks with variations based on the common buffs the group used. It was like an entire column of a two column page.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
I feel like Hellboy would work really well in Mutants And Masterminds.
I ran a not technically BPRD but essentially BPRD game in Mutants and Masterminds off these very forums ages ago
It was a lot of fun - I set it in the 1980s, mixing supernatural threats with Soviet stuff (and Soviets trying to get their hands on supernatural things, of course)
Did some drop in stuff where each session was a single mission, so the agents assigned to the mission were just whoever showed up that day, and had some premade characters (with a lot of help from @DE?AD) who were available if you didn't want to deal with M&M's arcane character creation systems
I'd do something to combat, add a grievous wound table or something.