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Yeah, anecdotally, the group I was with who like PF1 tried PF2 and hated it
I was the only one who preferred it over PF1
Then again, I liked 4e.
I prefer 5e overall but 4e was an excellent change to bring in new players.
4E had the largest loss of D&D players in history, 5E has the largest gain.
I'm glad that 4E clicked for you and you got to enjoy it but it is definitely not more accessible than 5E.
(Anecdotally, I didn't get a single new person to join RPGs with 4E. Every person I tried to introduce 4E to who had not already played a lot of RPGs - because I did like 4E when it released - bounced off it, and hard. I had more success with 2E and 3E than I did with 4E, though no edition of D&D is really especially great for being a first RPG.)
Yeah. I'm perpetually amused by how Paizo decided that their playerbase, which was built explicitly on the rejection of 4E, was a good group of customers to market a 4E-inspired second edition to.
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tonight i had planned: Big Epic fight against a buffalo-man at Yellowstone in front of the Geyser.
Tonight my players: Challenged a buffalo-man to a waffle-eating contest with poisoned waffles.... in a holiday inn parking lot... then stole shit from his car. (bunch of very cursed artifacts)
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I also preferred when attacks did xWeapon damage, versus having to attack multiple times. Having to do multiple attack and damage rolls is a real time sucker.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
I just wing it and design encounters in waves, with a bunch of invisible enemies I can activate or not activate depending on how the players are doing. I don't trust the CR math in the slightest.
I mean, anecdotally, I brought in something like a half dozen to a dozen players on 4e and they really dug it, even folks who had tried other games prior and bounced off them. How much of that was how I ran it vs. individual player enjoyment of a particular scenario vs. system appeal I couldn't tell you. But people did like 4e, and a bunch of loud people didn't dig what 4e was about even if it had some solid principles it was running on. I ain't saying it was perfect, but it wasn't a complete bomb like some folks try to make it out to be.
EDIT: As someone who's tried to design publishable content for 5e, CR is in fact a joke. Monsters are entirely designed by table feel and I hate it so much compared to 4e's easily iterated formulae.
Wood Elf Rogue
Human Rogue
Firbolg Druid
Sorcerer TBC
I might gently suggest that the sorcerer goes with Divine Soul to get some healing into the mix, but if not I can just make Potions of Healing part of the treasure hoards
Druids can be pretty good healers.
Feels like this is ignoring a variety of factors beyond accessibility.
Textually, 4E's encounter budgeting puts it head and shoulders over 5E in terms of accessibility.
Like, one of the three primary reasons I'm not going to play Lancer is that involving maps and squares and setting up a VTT and shit would multiply the amount of work I need to do to set up sessions by an entire order of magnitude. And 4E feels about on the level of Lancer in terms of "yeah, you kinda do need to have a map here".
And if all else fails, the first character to die might make the party consider a Cleric :P
That's definitely something I miss from 4th - all players having healing surges, and multiple classes being able to activate them
Also the DMG having advice on balancing encounters for parties of non-standard role distribution
I feel like this would be a pretty good party for a Celestial Warlock/Paladin. Get some decent extra damage and some extra healing, when/if needed.
I know that my current Wu-jen took psychic restoration in the 5E campaign I'm in right now and I have never used any of its powers, and we recently hit level 8. Course, we do use the healing surges optional rule, and between that and random potions we find it suffices pretty much all of the time.
Why the fuck isn't this in the MM, I swear to god
Starting with characters that are too powerful and gradually ratcheting up the danger as they learn their classes definitely feels like a more fun option for new players
We don't do a LOT of houserules, but we do jiggle a few knobs around a bit. Healing surges is one, and the DM also made short rests shorter. Mostly because we kind of realized that with a short rest being a minimum of a full hour, like 80% of the time where things were not-against-a-clock enough that we could take a full hour of uninterrupted rest, we could just as easily make it a full 6-8 hour long rest, which was a pain for the short rest classes.
4e was the best-selling edition of D&D, by a large margin, until 5e surpassed eventually surpassed it.
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Saw something that could be transphobic but seemed so absurdly phrased I thought maybe I could have been misunderstanding. So I took a look through his feed. Among other charming opinions one post stated that we should have just glassed all of Afghanistan....
I can't play with this person. I don't know what I'm going to tell my mutual friend. I worry this will get ugly and don't want to have a thing but
It was going to be a one shot that we could choose to continue if everybody wanted too. I'd maybe just play the session and politely decline but I like to have a solidstate world and build my campaigns so that decisions and success/failure affects the world for future groups and I just plain don't want this person in my world. I don't want to have to think of his character a single time after this is over and I don't wanna think about him.
Hell, setting aside that shit like that is the grossest possible shit my current goals for my setting are to depict honestly the immorality of Empires and to be more diverse and interesting regarding gender and sexuality. I would not feel comfortable broaching either topic with such a person in the room.
This sucks.
https://gofund.me/fa5990a5
IIRC this has been true for every successive edition of D&D.
Yeah I had a game implode in session 0 when a stranger spouted off about Jordan Peterson. It's annoying as hell when that happens. If you're not comfortable talking up and it is just a one shot maybe dragging through it is fine enough.
Eh, that might be doable if they weren't running in their own consistent campaign world.
@nightmarenny Bite the bullet. Tell your friend what's up and you need to pull back. What they do with that knowledge is up to them. It isn't worth your sanity and time trying to accommodate one chud if you're worried about them contaminating your game experience that bad.
I just want to see a citation beyond "every grognard at my LGS threw a hissy fit about 4e and only played Pathfinder" to back up the implication that 4e was a massive failure.
It doesn't matter how much of an existing audience a new edition loses if it gains an equal or greater amount of new players to be outselling the previous edition.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Campaign idea. Everyone starts out as a white male human fighter - as God intended, of course - and sets out on an adventure to disperse evil squatters on royal land. Arrive to do battle and find a collection of purple tieflings with side-cut hair, nonstandard stat arrays (gasp!), and a lot of booze. Even worse, said purple tieflings seem to be having a pretty decent time. Actually, the music's not bad either...
They drive the camp away as God intended, but the next morning two of them wake up to weird bumps on their foreheads. Another one suddenly wonders if its such a big deal if they want to wear something other than Full Harness As God Intended (tm). Piecing together the clues, they realize: Oh, no. Their parents were right. They've caught the gay.
And then other character species and magic cult bits can be added for characters that come as they discover the world.
Both to make the learning curve less harsh and to make the lethality of the system bite less.
I like the idea of like, crossing a west marches style game with some roguelite legacy mechanics
I would probably go a different route in terms of system and/or setting, but I'm not sure in which direction
TBH Mythras as the sword and sorcery lethality game seems kinda tailor made for the idea of west marches + rogue like.
Two characters in someone gets to play the absolute chad with decent armour and a sword and shield combat style by default.
But the person still clinging to life initially is stuck with the hunter gatherer 'knife and bow' combat style and trying to keep his XP enought o keep up.
These things always struck me being absolutely backwards.
I've told this story before, so skip ahead if you've heard this one ... but in my very, very first time ever playing D&D, on a Scout outing, I picked a Human Fighter to play. For my weapon, I picked a handaxe because in Dragon Quest on the NES it was a pretty decent weapon from a couple of towns in. I had a potion of Cure Light Wounds that I never used because I never took "Light wounds" (as opposed to "Dark wounds," which is what I figured monsters would inflict, and which struck me as an odd thing to have because wasn't I the good guy and therefore the one who'd be inflicting light wounds?). I asked if we got any treasure when we beat the wolf in our first combat because in Final Fantasy a wolf was worth 6xp and 6gp to a full part of 4; people joked that, yeah, the wolf was totally carrying around a gold piece in its mouth. I gave up trying to come up with a new cool fantasy name for my new character and instead just put a small twist on my own name (I still use the name X years later).
In that very, very first game, it was explained to me that I was The Tank, and it was my job to protect the other party members by preventing the monsters from attacking them. The way in which I did this was ... basically by standing in the way, because that's the only mechanics I had, but it was definitely my job; my Role in Combat, if you will. I just had to hope the DM bought in to what I was trying to do (and, in that session at least, he did; that was not always to be the case).
These sorts of complaints always strike me as similar to complaining about, I don't know, a guitar riff being used in a song by Band A as being ripped off from a particular artist, Band B. But it turns out that Band B was just using something that Band A had already done years and years before, and had only recontextualized it because it was rock instead of blues.
The same is true of, e.g., "taunt" mechanics. As mentioned, in the dim mists of time, I was expected to "taunt" the enemies because that was my job as the Fighter. The rules didn't give me any way to do that (except, depending on variation, I might get a free attack when something walked away from me); I did it with fictional positioning, by saying that I was standing in the door, perhaps, or near a narrow hallway, or what-have-you, and we largely required the DM to play along. There was nothing that prevented him from having the enemies just run around me other than a sort of gentlemen's agreement - and, most of the time but not all the time, it worked. Ish. MMOs couldn't do that - they had no DM running things, and the AI for the badguys was far more simplistic, and there generally wasn't much in the way of physical positioning blocking things (except in very, very few cases). Accordingly, they implemented what we had already been doing via a wink and a nod by having explicit taunt mechanics.
And then D&D borrowed it back - first in 3E, with explicit attacks of opportunity and reach weapons and 5' steps and Combat Reflexes and ..., and then in 4E by making what the fighter was always supposed to be doing explicit. "We told you for years and years that this is what you were supposed to be doing. Now, you actually can, and you will be really damn good at it."
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Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
Stonetop is very good but doesn't quite fit, I don't think.
The premise there is that all of the PCs are villagers in a low fantasy iron age village and have to deal with exploring the world around them and maybe other towns and stuff. So I can see where you're getting that from, because there is that exploratory element.
But the playbooks are all deeply tied to their role within the community and there's not like, elves and goblins and such (or rather, the elves and goblins are part of the Fair Folk and their business is separate from yours). I don't know what exactly you'd unlock, essentially.
Oh yeah, to be clear, this wasn't an indictment of your choice - I think it's a really good fit it's just not exactly what I'm feeling.
I think this might be one of the rare times that I'm interested in proper sci-fi, like, exploring planets and discovering new lifeforms and recruiting them to your crew. Maybe with some like, Farscape derived elements of not being able to go back home, so you need to get more people as time goes on and they're not going to be able to be a human flyboy.
Or something like Heart, maybe. Heart itself doesn't allow you to play a normal person, which makes it difficult, but I love the idea of having characters with zenith abilities in this sort of setting, so even if you're good at surviving you're incentivized to die.
Yea if anything MMOs like WoW took the concepts that D&D was already doing, made them explicit in their design, and then 4e saw that and went "wow being explicit makes the rules a whole lot easier to parse and lets do that too!". The biggest problem 4e had is it didn't provide the right kind of jank with it's systems and pointed out that everyone was playing a game, and was shunned.
In my opinion, a lot of folks who loved 3.5, and in turn 5e, enjoy it being broken a bit, it lets them make it theirs with house rules more than 4e really allowed for.
One thing I will say, is I enjoy the much slower pace of the splat books in 5e. Lets me actually get through a campaign before I have a bunch of new toys to play with. I wouldn't mind settings coming out a bit faster though.
Origin ID: Discgolfer27
Untappd ID: Discgolfer1981
I'm no 4E hater, even if it wasn't my bag, but man, "actually, the reason people didn't like 4E is that it was too good and people want bad things" is some serious smugness going on here.