Dark Sun returns

[K]

I'm not terribly worked up about 4e for the simple reason that I can wait it out until 5e.

The secret is that when WotC was taken over by Hasbro, they did some market research and learned that their biggest selling books were the base ruleset book (PHB, DMG, MM) by a huge margin. This led them to create a new edition.

No other reason than profit exists. This means that in 2...maybe 3.... years, there will be a new edition. Hopefully, in the years of experimenting people are going to be doing because of the blandness of 4e that will keep them away from it, they will come out with some ideas more original than "let's create a ruleset to sell more minis".

I mean, the brilliance of 4e is that it's extremely dumbed down. Even MMOs which cater to the masses have rules that interact in complicated ways, and to expect people who are also trying to tell a freeform interactice story to accept the formula of "you have sixteen ways to swing a sword, all with a different name" as the whole of their character is preposterous.

4e is intentionally flawed as far as I can see. 5e will probably be completely story driven and like Storyteller games and they'll use it as a vehicle to sell some other product much in the same way the Transformers cartoon was made to sell plastic toys.

[Draco_Argentum]

Well, Frank, what do you want, exactly?

I'm not Frank but I'll have a go.

I want to raise an army of the dead and take over the world.

I want to be a shiny pants paladin and create societies that are good and just.

In general, I want to do stuff other than kill stuff. What does 4e do in that respect? It doesn't beat Shadowrun, Exalted, aWoD or 3.x, thats for sure.

[erik]

I've wanted to have a small character living in a house built out of an animated huge or gargantuan skeleton, along with a gang of other undead minions who do various story effect chores for me.

I also liked being able to raise wrecked boats off the coast of some dangerous waters and magically repair them so I could create my own fleet and control trade in a region. I was well on my way to doing this in a 3e campaign before we retired it around level 12 or so.

I want to be able to train powerful creatures as steeds and companions, even as a fighter.

The list goes on and on.

Does 4e allow using powers in non-combat situations like that?


Rawr.

[Fuchs]

I play pen and paper games to do stuff I cannot do in MMOGs. Pure Combat is better done in MMOGs and CRPGs - faster, flashier, better graphics. World changes is what computer games are bad at, and that's what I want in pen and paper games.

[Aharon]

Well, the Ritual System is very limited, but I think it is one of the best aspects of 4th ed. An all-arcane party using aid another can actually get decent durations/effects on most of them, and their cost isn't that high.

It doesn't matter nearly as much as the non-battle things you could do in 3rd ed, but I imagine if I were ever convinced to play 4th ed, than only in an all-arcane party.

[Vnonymous]

Aharon, you are wrong.

The ritual system is useless, because apart from the crappy teleports, you are better off, both financially and in terms of the effect you get, just hiring someone to physically do what you want or doing it yourself.
Knock isn't worth the paper its' printed on, nor is the scrying spell that lets you spend ten minutes preparing to listen to 30 seconds of a conversation within line of sight.

You would be more effective with a mobile phone and a business listing than you would with any number of ritual casters.

[Voss]

4th Edition is dead by 2012.

They're not pacing themselves correctly. I mean, honestly, it's going to be 2010 and they're going to have three Player's Handbooks out. What are they going to do for the other 4 years, hmm? Release a Player's Handbook 6? A Dungeon Master Guide 5? A Martial Power 5?

Go back to some of the promo interviews they did when 4e came out. That was seriously the plan.


@sake- BG3 was cancelled years ago when Black Isle folded. Which was something like 10 years ago, before Troika folded, and before Obsidian folded... oh wait, no one has put them out of my misery yet.

I suspect that Hasbro didn't license 4e out until they were sure that the interactive crap they were half-assing around with was sure to die unsuccessfully.

[RandomCasualty2]

I want to raise an army of the dead and take over the world.

I want to be a shiny pants paladin and create societies that are good and just.

Honestly, you really can't do that in 3E either. There's no mass combat simulation, so the army of the dead is basically window dressing, because you can't use them in tactical combat without bogging combat down to a total crawl. As far as whether they win against another army, that's totally DM fiat and you're in magic teaparty territory. And if I don't know what this undead army can do, it's probably not even important to have rules for forming one.

As far as running a society, there's no kingdom simulation rules either. So basically you're back to magic teaparty there too. As far as I can tell, creating a society basically entails just going in and killing the last evil ruler, which is something you can do in either edition.

In fact, in 3E, the amount of world change that you can inflict isn't really about change, it's more just about breaking the gameworld. The fact that you can break the economic system isn't a feature, it's a bug. Because there exist wizards who could do that before your character came along. So any kind of bug would already have been exploited and there wouldn't even be an economic system in the world.

There's really only a few things in 3E that let you affect the world in a somewhat balanced fashion. Most of the time, 3E world change only proves to fuck things up in the sense that it's not change, so much as rendering the entire world nonfunctional.

The main problem with 4E is that the combat system breaks rapidly, both because it turns into padded sumo and because there are broken builds and powers that the designers won't fix for some reason, like orb of imposition. I can only guess this is the case because one of the designers plays an orbizard and doesn't want to get nerfed.

[tzor]

I want to raise an army of the dead and take over the world.

I want to be a shiny pants paladin and create societies that are good and just.

Honestly, you really can't do that in 3E either. There's no mass combat simulation, ...

That's not exactly true ... there's no good mass combat simulation ... there is that POS in Birthright.

Really, what is being discussed is not 3E more as it is 1E. It's hard to realize that becasue we now believe that the most important things get the most writing, but in fact that is not the case, especially back in 1E. The most complex things got the most writing which is why there is probably more pages in the DMG for unarmed combat (what a complex mess that was) and Psionics than there is for the 1E combat rules with facing for both square and hex maps. But there were also detailed rules for building your cleric's own holy water fountain as well as hordes of followers.

[RandomCasualty2]

That's not exactly true ... there's no good mass combat simulation ... there is that POS in Birthright.

Honestly, never even read Birthright, so I wasn't even aware. Why they wouldn't put mass combat in something like the Complete warrior is beyond me. But the fact that the rules apparently suck isn't a good sign. Having no rules is better than having bad rules.

I'm a fan of modular game design, where you add separate minigames as the game develops. So your army minigame should be the place where you have rituals and rules for recruiting armies as well as rules for them to do battle.

The economy could also have its own rules and so forth. But something that's specifically thought out to be "what if the PCs try to be merchants" and so on.

I actually don't mind the 4E approach of just having some things you can't interact with because there are no rules created for them yet. It's a heck of a lot better than having a bunch of broken ways to interact with something that isn't well thought out.

[Kaelik]

You don't need mass combat rules to have a combat with a crap ton of skeletal minions. Just like you don't need ship to ship combat rules to have ship to ship combat.

[RandomCasualty2]

You don't need mass combat rules to have a combat with a crap ton of skeletal minions. Just like you don't need ship to ship combat rules to have ship to ship combat.

Yeah you do. Unless you want the combat to go on forever. There's just no wa you're going to do like 4000 skeletons sieging a city versus 3000 human soldiers without mass combat rules or DM fiat.

I mean technically you could use the base combat system, It'd just waste about 15+ sessions solely on that combat. And by the end of it, it'd basically guarantee that your PCs never try to lead an army ever again.

[Prak]

Well, Frank, what do you want, exactly?

I'm not Frank but I'll have a go.

I want to raise an army of the dead and take over the world.

I want to be a shiny pants paladin and create societies that are good and just.

In general, I want to do stuff other than kill stuff. What does 4e do in that respect? It doesn't beat Shadowrun, Exalted, aWoD or 3.x, thats for sure.

Hell, 4e doesn't even beat OWoD in that respect... I still remember playing a demon and swaying a church full of people into being my cult and army.

[mean_liar]

I want to raise an army of the dead and take over the world.

I want to be a shiny pants paladin and create societies that are good and just.

Honestly, you really can't do that in 3E either. There's no mass combat simulation...

AEG's War
Eden Studios' Fields of Blood
Malhavoc's Cry Havoc

As far as running a society, there's no kingdom simulation rules either.

AEG's Empire
Atlas Games' Dynasties and Demagogues
Eden Studios' Fields of Blood


Just throwing those out there. Collectively, there's enough good ideas and mechanics to compile a decent hodge-podge house system that works for what you want to see.


EDIT: Naval combat is covered in Mongoose's Seas of Blood.

[Prak]

I want to raise an army of the dead and take over the world.

I want to be a shiny pants paladin and create societies that are good and just.

Honestly, you really can't do that in 3E either. There's no mass combat simulation...

AEG's War
Eden Studios' Fields of Blood
Malhavoc's Cry Havoc

As far as running a society, there's no kingdom simulation rules either.

AEG's Empire
Atlas Games' Dynasties and Demagogues
Eden Studios' Fields of Blood


Just throwing those out there. Collectively, there's enough good ideas and mechanics to compile a decent hodge-podge house system that works for what you want to see.


EDIT: Naval combat is covered in Mongoose's Seas of Blood.

I think Arms and Equipment also went over a very bare bones naval combat system. Maybe vehicle combat in general.

[Kaelik]

You don't need mass combat rules to have a combat with a crap ton of skeletal minions. Just like you don't need ship to ship combat rules to have ship to ship combat.

Yeah you do. Unless you want the combat to go on forever. There's just no wa you're going to do like 4000 skeletons sieging a city versus 3000 human soldiers without mass combat rules or DM fiat.

I mean technically you could use the base combat system, It'd just waste about 15+ sessions solely on that combat. And by the end of it, it'd basically guarantee that your PCs never try to lead an army ever again.

Why would you have 4000 skeletons? Do you not know anything about how D&D works. The only thing you need to do is determine how many 20s are rolled by the mooks, or use Mob/Swarm rules, because you make a bunch of Fire Giant skeletons or shades and you go to fucking town.

[Murtak]

Why would you have 4000 skeletons? Do you not know anything about how D&D works. The only thing you need to do is determine how many 20s are rolled by the mooks, or use Mob/Swarm rules, because you make a bunch of Fire Giant skeletons or shades and you go to fucking town.

That is of course the correct way to use your undead creating powers, but your answer doesn't actually help with the "mass combat" part.

[Kaelik]

And nobody said "I want to use mass combat rules!" They said "I want to use Undead to take over the world" which is done by having many powerful undead, not thousands of pussy undead.

You don't need Mass combat rules to take over the world with your undead army in 3.5. That's entirely my point.

No one needs mass combat rules, and no one asked for them.

[Murtak]

As I said, your proposal works fine for "I want to conquer the world with undead", but it doesn't work for "I want to conquer the world with my tribe of orcs". Also huge clashing armies are a fantasy staple. It would be nice to have some sort of system for these battles, so the DM doesn't have to make up everything by himself.

[Kaelik]

As I said, your proposal works fine for "I want to conquer the world with undead", but it doesn't work for "I want to conquer the world with my tribe of orcs". Also huge clashing armies are a fantasy staple. It would be nice to have some sort of system for these battles, so the DM doesn't have to make up everything by himself.

Which is not something anyone requested. We want single characters to be able to cool important stuff, No one ever said they want to lead an army. Leading an army is not cool stuff, saying "I require thousands of other people to do cool stuff" is exactly the opposite of what we have said we actually want.

Seriously. Leave your "You need mass combat rules to conquer the world" strawman at home and discuss the actually issue, doing cool shit.

[MGuy]

Actually some people want to lead armies. Some people would prefer that there are mechanics for this. Moreover raising undead or gathering a horde of orcs to overrun your enemies are both equally cool things to do.

[RandomCasualty2]

Seriously. Leave your "You need mass combat rules to conquer the world" strawman at home and discuss the actually issue, doing cool shit.

That's half the problem with D&D. Is that half the people want classical fantasy and the other half want it to be some kind of fantasy/superhero game. D&D really needs to decide what it wants to be.

If it's going with the latter, then there shouldn't be armies at all. Nor should you even get the ability to make them. It can no longer try to be the everything fantasy game, because Aragorn can't even travel with the god wizard of fairy tale magic. Aragorn should be travelling with Gandalf.

Similarly, the economy needs to make some serious decisions too. If you can go and loot cities and such singlehandedly without any effort, then probably what you get shouldnt' be valuable. Like Superman can totally go around and rob Fort Knox, but the money won't help him become a better superhero. If you can break the economy, then breaking the economy shouldn't actually help you at that point, because there's nothing that the mundane economy has that can increase your power level. So while you can have fortresses and crap, the ability to buy infinite ballistas and catapults doesn't even matter, because the shit you fight is immune to those.

[Titanium Dragon]

There's a story. I want to do something to affect it. In 4e, all the powers cease to have any meaning or effect the moment the combat music stops. When I want to interact with the story at all, I am told to just make something up or use the skill system. The skill system is garbage, so basically I'm down to just making shit up.

That's disheartening. 4e has dozens of books and thousands of pages, and yet my character's contribution to the story is still just the fact that I can imagine and describe things that a human could probably do and try to convince the DM that he could do those things with my winning smile and graphic description. What the fuck man?

Well, first of all, if you aren't RPing in combat, nor advancing the story, you're "doing it wrong". Given that D&D is designed to be 50%+ combat, if you don't consider combat to be a part of the story or to advance the story, then you're really probably playing the wrong game. When something matters in over half of what you do, I'd consider that to be a pretty significant impact.

Secondly, "make something up" is pretty much the cornerstone of roleplaying. No good system covers everything because there are always going to be things which do not come up nearly often enough to warrant rules. For example, I might, in one adventure, have to bake a cake with a file in it to break someone out of jail. Now, is there a skill check for baking? No, nor should there be.

The skill system in 4e is general enough that you can, however, find something which makes sense for it. For the cake, you could easily do a complex skill challenge involving bluff and diplomacy checks, for baking the cake and getting the guards to let you give it to the prisoner. Not an unreasonable choice, as that's more or less what you're doing.

But not everything requires a die roll, nor SHOULD require it, and sometimes things might just work. Its not a big deal, and that's kind of the point of having a DM in the first place. If the only way you have to interact with the world is through the rules, then you WILL be limited, ALWAYS.

I'm not terribly worked up about 4e for the simple reason that I can wait it out until 5e.

The secret is that when WotC was taken over by Hasbro, they did some market research and learned that their biggest selling books were the base ruleset book (PHB, DMG, MM) by a huge margin. This led them to create a new edition.

No other reason than profit exists. This means that in 2...maybe 3.... years, there will be a new edition. Hopefully, in the years of experimenting people are going to be doing because of the blandness of 4e that will keep them away from it, they will come out with some ideas more original than "let's create a ruleset to sell more minis".

Well, firstly, here's a little secret: you're wrong.

3rd edition was not a "Oh, Hasbro bought WotC, we're going to make a new edition" thing. Indeed, TSR was already starting to work on 3rd edition when they were purchased by WotC. Crazy how reality trumps your conspiracy theory, am I right?

Now, what WotC did was employ a market research company to figure out what their customers wanted, and then tossed the garbage TSR was doing out the window and actually made a game that was a real, marked improvement. That was 3rd edition.

So why 3.5? Some will say "Well, they were gouging people for money/those evil corporate bastards/ect." But they've said that 3.5 was a mistake because, basically, it failed at its objectives - it didn't fix the game and not everyone was willing to purchase a "patch" to the rules (and with good reason).

So what about 4e? Will 5e come out in 2012? The answer is no. But why? How can I say that with any degree of certainty?

The reason is that developing a new edition is very expensive. Rather than having their staff work on books, they're working on a lot of stuff which never sees the light of day because they're reworking the base system, which takes a ton of time and effort. Sure, the core books sell well, but it takes them 2-3 years to produce a new edition, which is a considerable undertaking in terms of manpower.

Yes, the core books sell the best, but they cost the most to produce.

Moreover, as they learned from 3.5, a lot of people will be slow to transition if you narrow the distance between editions too much.

So the reality is that I wouldn't expect 5e until at least 2014, and it may take until 2018. It really depends on when they think it is worth more money to produce a new edition than to cheaply produce splatbooks.

I mean, the brilliance of 4e is that it's extremely dumbed down. Even MMOs which cater to the masses have rules that interact in complicated ways, and to expect people who are also trying to tell a freeform interactice story to accept the formula of "you have sixteen ways to swing a sword, all with a different name" as the whole of their character is preposterous.

Actually, the brilliance is that it isn't "dumbed down". Again, compare 3e fireball to 4e fireball. 3e fireball is garbage. Not from a power standpoint, but rather, from a usability standpoint. The description of the spell is enormously long and stupid, full of unimportant dross. 4th edition's fireball is clean and concise, and thus it is very easy to use and understand (not to mention to find in the rulebook).

The shorter description speaks of concision. And to the average user, it is "Oh, this is much easier to use."

The trouble you have is that you simply do not understand modular design, nor do you understand why simplicity is a virtue, and complexity a vice. The rules should be easily understood, and complex gameplay can arise from very simple rules.

It cut out garbage, not the meat. What good stuff did it remove, I ask you? Skills are still there. Feats are still there. Many spells are still there in some form or another, more balanced. Some were removed due to being worthless, ridiculously overpowered, or obsoleting other party members, but if you are going to complain about that no longer being possible, I don't think WotC wants you in their audience. It is a SOCIAL game, let us remember.

The old grapple rules were garbage. The new ones are far sleeker and more efficient. Is grabbing people terribly useful? Ususally not, no, save in the context of a few powers. But that's okay.

I want to raise an army of the dead and take over the world.

I want to be a shiny pants paladin and create societies that are good and just.

In general, I want to do stuff other than kill stuff. What does 4e do in that respect? It doesn't beat Shadowrun, Exalted, aWoD or 3.x, thats for sure.

So play them. D&D is not for you.

And this is what a lot of people simply do not understand. D&D is not meant to allow you to run an army. That's not what it is for. It isn't meant to be a kingdom simulator either. It is meant to represent a group of heroes who do various deeds. They're the protagonists of an anime or of the Hobbit.

3.x is garbage for that stuff as well anyway. Sure, you can raise an army of undead... and it is horribly unfun for everyone else at the table. I've seen it happen EVERY SINGLE TIME. The guy thinks it is awesome, and everyone else knows it is retarded and horribly time consuming. Running a kingdom in 3.x is making shit up, and you can do the same, but better, in 4th edition because 4th edition actually paid attention to putting in real noncombat mechanics. Sure, they're flawed. Heck, I made a post over a year ago on the WotC boards which was basically "Skill checks are irreparably broken because you can get such a large bonus on them all the time that one person will always fail while another always succeeds." Which is true. There are ways of making the system work, and perhaps they'll actually bother in 5th edition. But that won't be for a long while.

But seriously, if you give examples, you might actually want to give games which support those things. 3.x doesn't support what you were talking about, and from what I remember of WoD, I don't think it really supports running an army either, though I may be mistaken. Exalted is all about that sort of thing from what I understand of it.

I've wanted to have a small character living in a house built out of an animated huge or gargantuan skeleton, along with a gang of other undead minions who do various story effect chores for me.

Vehicle rules in 4th edition actually would work just fine for the house (see stuff like the apparatus of kwalish). As for "story effect chores", I'm not sure what you mean by this. Do you mean stuff like keeping watch (similar to the Alarm spell), cleaning your laundry, cooking your food, delivering messages, ect.? Or do you mean "sending them off to do the adventure for us"?

I also liked being able to raise wrecked boats off the coast of some dangerous waters and magically repair them so I could create my own fleet and control trade in a region. I was well on my way to doing this in a 3e campaign before we retired it around level 12 or so.

Yeah... unsurprisingly. And really, what's to stop you from doing this in 4th edition? The "control trade in a region" part is, again, handwavium in both editions, and will probably involve adventures and stuff which correlate with your success at the task and the challenges which face you.

I want to be able to train powerful creatures as steeds and companions, even as a fighter.

Well, this is always a problem due to the "multiple turn" issue. Fundamentally, if you give one player multiple turns, bad stuff happens, namely, everyone else gets less time (and if everyone has multiple turns, the game takes forever to play).

In 4th edition, you can have a beast companion as a ranger, or a mount, but they share your actions, which is a reasonable way of doing it as it gives you access to these things while avoiding the extra actions issue.

I play pen and paper games to do stuff I cannot do in MMOGs. Pure Combat is better done in MMOGs and CRPGs - faster, flashier, better graphics. World changes is what computer games are bad at, and that's what I want in pen and paper games.

Shittier, the monsters are far dumber, the battle situations are not as varied or interesting. Seriously, MMO combat is not really all that awesome, and often is pretty repetitive.

And again, "changing the world". What do you mean by this? Your actions have consequences? What about 4th edition prevents that?

Knock isn't worth the paper its' printed on, nor is the scrying spell that lets you spend ten minutes preparing to listen to 30 seconds of a conversation within line of sight.

Nor should it be. The entire point of these rituals is that they DON'T obsolete skill checks, but are usable in situations where you lack, say, someone who can pick locks or sneak around and listen around the castle (which is really what that ritual is for, I think; you're going to meet with the king and you are put in one of the towers, and you do the ritual to listen in on the conversations in the throne room/the king's bedroom/one of the other tower rooms).

AEG's War
Eden Studios' Fields of Blood
Malhavoc's Cry Havoc

So, in short, stuff which isn't a part of 3e?

I could play a freaking game of Warhammer with them too to represent it, and, sadly, it will probably be better that whatever hashed-together mass combat rules some random 3PP produced.

Or I could make it an abstraction - each character is leading a group of people, and the monsters are represented by single monsters, and we just play it out like a normal combat, except instead of killing individual monsters, you're killing troops and when they hit you, they're beating up your men. And then it is basically a normal combat with different stakes.

If it's going with the latter, then there shouldn't be armies at all. Nor should you even get the ability to make them. It can no longer try to be the everything fantasy game, because Aragorn can't even travel with the god wizard of fairy tale magic.

And this is precisely what D&D has decided.

[Kaelik]

Actually RC, I would argue that 3.5 made it's decision, and it was a good one, and then a bunch of whiny babies like you decided that because you didn't like that decision you'd pretend it had problems and couldn't decide.

Then while those of us who wanted a fantasy game where off having fun in our fantasy game you guys whined about how it wasn't doing what you wanted, so then WotC made a crappy party of adventurers game that doesn't have and real resemblance to fantasy gaming at all.

Now you can either play 3.5 if you want a fantasy game, or 4e if you want a dungeon crawling game. And we will see which one 5e turns out to be, but whatever. My money's on shitty hybrid ala 1e and 2e.

[Username17]

3rd edition was not a "Oh, Hasbro bought WotC, we're going to make a new edition" thing. Indeed, TSR was already starting to work on 3rd edition when they were purchased by WotC.

No they weren't. They were working on AD&D 2nd Edition Revised when WotC bought TSR. They came out with that and immediately went to work on 3rd edition.

AD&D2R is the material that was in the works in TSR when it was transferred to WotC control. WotC owned TSR for over three frickin years before 3rd edition hit the shelves.

-Username17