As was foretold, we've added advertisements to the forums! If you have questions, or if you encounter any bugs, please visit this thread: https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/240191/forum-advertisement-faq-and-reports-thread/

Phasers and Pseudopods: How to Win at 3D Chess and other [Tabletop Games]

195969798100

Posts

  • MaddocMaddoc I'm Bobbin Threadbare, are you my mother? Registered User regular
    That is a cool thing

    Leading in with "Hey you people that liked 4e, check this shit out" is a bad way to get me to actually pay attention to it because I went in looking for something that was like 4e

  • Albino BunnyAlbino Bunny Jackie Registered User regular
    I dunno, to me highly powers driven character classes with tactical options derived from that is about the main defining thing when I think of 4th ed.

    It's literally both what people who don't like it complain about ('caster fighters') and what people who like it always bring up as something they adore. Combine that with the fact that it's got the same colours/WoW armour look as 4e and it seemed a really obvious comparison. It's even one the game's formatting super invites because the power lay out and stuff is all near identical to how I remember the 4e core book laying stuff out.

  • InquisitorInquisitor Registered User regular
    I’m curious about anything that puts a new twist on melee characters other than “I hit it with my sword.”

    I also think grids are super not what i’m Into for rpg combats as they take things out of theatre of the mind and kill a lot of the shared imagination that go into combat by tying everything up into a rigid grid and I have my turn based strategy videogames for that.

  • StiltsStilts Registered User regular


    It really is incredible how quickly a nice idea gets completely kneecapped

    IKknkhU.gif
  • StraightziStraightzi Here we may reign secure, and in my choice, To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered User regular
    That whole thing had some whiffs of bad idea to me from the start

    I'm all for a genderfluid elven society

    But the implication that they seem to be taking is that sex=gender, and that is still immutable

  • Theodore FlooseveltTheodore Floosevelt proud parent of eight beautiful girls and shalmelo dorne (which is currently being ruled by a woman (awesome role model for my daughters)) #dornedadRegistered User regular
    jesus

    f2ojmwh3geue.png
  • ShadowenShadowen Snores in the morning LoserdomRegistered User regular
    edited March 2018
    As someone who likes the concept of how drow can be used to explore a world almost literally inverted from the classic D&D setting...they need to stop using drow. Like, at all. Until and unless they can completely reinvent them.

    Also hiring some actual genderfluid, NB, and trans writers would be nice.

    Shadowen on
  • SleepSleep Registered User regular
    Man, swing and a miss right there. Trying to make drow make sense always fucks em

  • TallahasseerielTallahasseeriel Registered User regular
    yeah uh. I'm not sure they can get their feet much further down their throat there if they tried.

  • MeldingMelding Registered User regular
    i was jsut taking a shower, and i was thinking what i would want from a pathfinder esque 4e off shoot, and I think a lot of it boils down to "fix the math, and re-iterate what the original goal of 4e was"

    one of their big talking points originally was race matters, the idea being that a human fighter and an elf fighter are going to be very different. while that did happen, it was in the form of elves are bad fighters, no one plays an elf fighter. Which made them different than human fighters who were okay, but rare because dwarves were so much better.

    I feel like if you could do that without making people feel like they're forced to play a certain class race combo a specific way that could be real cool. Like i really liked that eladrin wizards could use swords as wands. you didn't need to, but it was cool.

  • Albino BunnyAlbino Bunny Jackie Registered User regular
    I feel like the main way to do that without it being some sort of balance nightmare or making races too samey is the dungeon world thing where races provide a perk relative to how their race approaches that class.

    Because at the end of the day the usual RPG thing where a given race is the smart race and the other is the strong race is always going to lead to class preferences.

  • StraightziStraightzi Here we may reign secure, and in my choice, To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered User regular
    If I were going to make a genderfluid society for a game, I would style it after the French language. Every French noun has an assigned grammatical gender, but I would essentially extend this idea throughout an entire society.

    So by doing a certain action or fulfilling a certain role, you are being a man or a woman or potentially another option.

    If you do that action or fulfill that role in a professional capacity, it may begin to seem (especially to outsiders) like that is actually the gender that you assume, but still, the second you switched to a role or action that had a different gender, you switch to that gender (for the duration of the action, of course). Even things like being at ease or relaxing would be assigned a gender, so there's no real concept of reverting back to "your gender."

    I'd probably try to remove this from a lot of our modern gender roles, although there would inevitably be some crossover (because a complete removal just ends up in that weird opposite territory that speculative fiction always has a problem with).

    Note of course that this is not a perfect system and that is absolutely by design - I would want there to be weird fringes in both directions, people who wholeheartedly embrace one gender and refuse to fulfill the opposite role and people who hate the system and the way that it boxes them into gender by the actions that they take.

  • MaddocMaddoc I'm Bobbin Threadbare, are you my mother? Registered User regular
    Hadn't really put much thought into it prior but man, the big matriarchal setting of the D&D cosmology also being the evilest evil society is kind of a bad look

  • TallahasseerielTallahasseeriel Registered User regular
    I wish it had been the opposite for 4e. Race doesn't matter.

    Honestly the whole character optimization angle of d&d is whatever to me anyway, not the most fun part... but just make race a skin basically IMHO, no mechanical benefits, only maybe narrative things.

  • MeldingMelding Registered User regular
    I feel like the main way to do that without it being some sort of balance nightmare or making races too samey is the dungeon world thing where races provide a perk relative to how their race approaches that class.

    Because at the end of the day the usual RPG thing where a given race is the smart race and the other is the strong race is always going to lead to class preferences.

    yeah, like maybe elves can use dex instead of strength in powers for fighter, only not that, because that's too powerful.

  • Albino BunnyAlbino Bunny Jackie Registered User regular
    edited March 2018
    Straightzi wrote: »
    If I were going to make a genderfluid society for a game, I would style it after the French language. Every French noun has an assigned grammatical gender, but I would essentially extend this idea throughout an entire society.

    So by doing a certain action or fulfilling a certain role, you are being a man or a woman or potentially another option.

    If you do that action or fulfill that role in a professional capacity, it may begin to seem (especially to outsiders) like that is actually the gender that you assume, but still, the second you switched to a role or action that had a different gender, you switch to that gender (for the duration of the action, of course). Even things like being at ease or relaxing would be assigned a gender, so there's no real concept of reverting back to "your gender."

    I'd probably try to remove this from a lot of our modern gender roles, although there would inevitably be some crossover (because a complete removal just ends up in that weird opposite territory that speculative fiction always has a problem with).

    Note of course that this is not a perfect system and that is absolutely by design - I would want there to be weird fringes in both directions, people who wholeheartedly embrace one gender and refuse to fulfill the opposite role and people who hate the system and the way that it boxes them into gender by the actions that they take.

    The lion aliens in Traveller actually do have something like this but it's not fluid. Their society is super sexist in terms of what careers are available to any given gender. As a result when they make contact with alien races (like humanity) they often try to figure out someone's gender based on the task they're doing.

    IE they're almost certain the ships captain must be male and so on.

    Obviously the harshly locked nature of this makes it kind of the opposite to a gender fluid society but it's a neat setting detail that helped flesh out characters.

    EDIT:
    Uriel wrote: »
    I wish it had been the opposite for 4e. Race doesn't matter.

    Honestly the whole character optimization angle of d&d is whatever to me anyway, not the most fun part... but just make race a skin basically IMHO, no mechanical benefits, only maybe narrative things.

    I like the optimization aspect in the sense that race being a choice which is expressed mechanically can be neat. The issue with D&D and most games like it is that the stats granted by it are too primary to your characters function.

    Basically it's fun to have a little bit of tweaking room but that's what they should be: tweaks, not catastrophic mistakes.

    Albino Bunny on
  • DarkPrimusDarkPrimus Registered User regular
    Maybe it's time to ditch the ICONIC Drow society and re-work them from scratch.

  • AistanAistan Tiny Bat Registered User regular
    The only perspective from which the Drow are interesting is the one that looks at them as as a society with no free will.

    I would like it if there were dark elves that weren't Lolth's Drow, to see how they'd just be normal elves if it wasn't for the constant meddling of a malevolent deity.

  • Albino BunnyAlbino Bunny Jackie Registered User regular
    FWIW I'm playing a Drow in dungeon world right now and I think I'm just gonna theme them as a weird genetic defect/magical illness that sometimes shows up in elven families.

  • TallahasseerielTallahasseeriel Registered User regular
    take the bits that used to be the mechanical benefits you get from your race and make those part of your background instead.

  • MeldingMelding Registered User regular
    what if we just made dark elves, kept the drow because Iconic, but also we have dark elves. they're goth as fuck, live in a giant crypt city built in an ancient forest. It's were the elves used to bury their dead before the great divide, the dark elves won it in the divorce.

  • ElddrikElddrik Registered User regular
    Melding wrote: »
    i was jsut taking a shower, and i was thinking what i would want from a pathfinder esque 4e off shoot, and I think a lot of it boils down to "fix the math, and re-iterate what the original goal of 4e was"

    one of their big talking points originally was race matters, the idea being that a human fighter and an elf fighter are going to be very different. while that did happen, it was in the form of elves are bad fighters, no one plays an elf fighter. Which made them different than human fighters who were okay, but rare because dwarves were so much better.

    I feel like if you could do that without making people feel like they're forced to play a certain class race combo a specific way that could be real cool. Like i really liked that eladrin wizards could use swords as wands. you didn't need to, but it was cool.

    For me, if I were writing "4E PF", I think this would be my core list;

    -Fix the math. Obviously, this needs to be #1 on anyone's 4E remake list.
    -Balance powers and power acquisition (one of the reasons fighters and wizards were so incredibly strong in 4E is that they had two to three times as many powers as anyone else. When you have that many more options, the odds that enough of them will be broken to materially affect the class as a whole massively increase.)
    -Either remove encounter-based design, or lean into it much harder. My preference would be to remove it and replace it with something more interesting; I'd rather see round-based balance than encounter-based balance (give players powers that recharge, give players powers with cooldowns, etc).

    There would be a lot of other changes I'd want to make, but I think those are the biggest three I'd want to see to consider it a good fix.

    Making race important without being required is a very delicate line to walk; I like race-as-class-type as a solution, but that doesn't work for everyone. (For example, instead of being a human fighter or a dwarf fighter or an elf fighter, you play a human fighter or a dwarven vaultguard or an elven duelist. In 5E terms, this would be basically racial subclasses; they're all still essentially fighters, but with differences in detail.)

  • TallahasseerielTallahasseeriel Registered User regular
    my major problem with 4e was that by 5th level everyone took ten minutes to pick their power for their turn and didn't bother narrating anything because it was all written on the cards already

    combats took ages.

  • nightmarennynightmarenny Registered User regular
    Make elves patriarchal but also just as evil if not more so than Drow. Elves are the physical representation of pompous privileged oppression.

    ...I uh

    I don't really care for elves.

    Quire.jpg
  • Albino BunnyAlbino Bunny Jackie Registered User regular
    The issue with cooldowns is that they're even more work to track than the resource system Unity has.

    You could probably play around with reset triggers like a lot of martial charms in Exalted use. I.E. 'Reset this charm at the end of the encounter OR when you do X'

    Which can be used to both reinforce theme, give classes different senses of tempo and shape tactics by making powers things you have to actively seek to bring back.

  • MeldingMelding Registered User regular
    Don't get me wrong, i hate the drow for all the reason they're terrible, but if wizards put out a release like "hey we're getting rid of drow because they're incredibly problematic on multiple fronts" i would be worried for the writer's life. So, that is why i suggest a new core dark elf race, and keep drow as the uncle no one talks about but they're still in a rulebook as a player race because if we didn't we'd never hear the end of it.

  • ShadowenShadowen Snores in the morning LoserdomRegistered User regular
    Make elves patriarchal but also just as evil if not more so than Drow. Elves are the physical representation of pompous privileged oppression.

    ...I uh

    I don't really care for elves.

    I don't mind elves, but I still agreed with this because it'd be interesting to see a D&D world where elf culture is all evil, but these elves are evil in a different way, and how players (and the game world) reacted to it. (I predict players would say that drow were still more evil, without ever admitting it's "because they're dark-skinned/ruled by wimmens".)

  • TallahasseerielTallahasseeriel Registered User regular
    where did the drow come from originally?

    forgotten realms?

    burn forgotten realms from living memory is my solution, forgotten realms is so boring anyway.

  • SolarSolar Registered User regular
    Elves are cool

    Making Elves evil seems like something done in a lot of places these days, making them genuinely virtuous seems like a more interesting challenge to me personally

  • MeldingMelding Registered User regular
    Uriel wrote: »
    where did the drow come from originally?

    forgotten realms?

    burn forgotten realms from living memory is my solution, forgotten realms is so boring anyway.

    while i don't disagree, that would be a bad business call, as it is by far their best selling shit.

    Also: it should go without saying but Stop Drawing All Elves as White People is another important part of my idea.

  • AistanAistan Tiny Bat Registered User regular
    More like wish-we-could-forget-'em Realms.

  • Albino BunnyAlbino Bunny Jackie Registered User regular
    Honestly I think the best elves aren’t evil but are failing to be the good they once were. People who have power and are good at heart but whose culture has turned insular and resentful of the world of short lived, violent races always causing head aches.

  • StraightziStraightzi Here we may reign secure, and in my choice, To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered User regular
    edited March 2018
    No race should be evil

    Or good, for that matter

    Straightzi on
  • TallahasseerielTallahasseeriel Registered User regular
    "forgotten what? realms? I'm not sure what you mean, no d&d material has ever been printed with such a setting." should be wizards official statement on it.

  • ChicoBlueChicoBlue Registered User regular
    What about devils and demons?

  • ShadowenShadowen Snores in the morning LoserdomRegistered User regular
    Uriel wrote: »
    where did the drow come from originally?

    forgotten realms?

    burn forgotten realms from living memory is my solution, forgotten realms is so boring anyway.

    No, they were in Greyhawk (the original "Default" D&D setting) almost from the start, but they didn't really get too popular until RA Salvatore's books came out, and they were set in Forgotten Realms.

  • MeldingMelding Registered User regular
    the fastest way to solve the evil race problem is remove the direct connection between race and culture

  • StraightziStraightzi Here we may reign secure, and in my choice, To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered User regular
    ChicoBlue wrote: »
    What about devils and demons?

    They should fulfill the role of Nemesis - they only exist to stand in opposition to the morality and the beliefs of the deity that they are associated to

  • nightmarennynightmarenny Registered User regular
    Straightzi wrote: »
    No race should be evil

    Or good, for that matter

    I say evil but in truth I just like to play elves as having a view point so alien that it appears evil to the humans of the setting. Im a big fan of making races think in ways that are incomprehensible to humanity.

    Which is really hard in an RPG but

    Quire.jpg
  • ShadowenShadowen Snores in the morning LoserdomRegistered User regular
    Melding wrote: »
    the fastest way to solve the evil race problem is remove the direct connection between race and culture

    I mean, they've already done it with humans, so yeah.

This discussion has been closed.