You used the word 'simulationism' in a way that's not ironic so I'm just going to make this face at you:
Regardless:
Apalala wrote:I'll agree that 4e doesn't feel different enough at the higher levels of play, but uh...how did they take out the tactics from 3.5? What tactics?
The lazy answer to your question: For sword-based classes, 3.5E had noticably fewer tactics than 3.0E because of the ongoing nerfs of the fighter class and it looks like Pathfinder will have fewer still. Regardless, 3.5E did have quite a few tactics to it as long as you weren't playing a sword-based class. Heck, high-level D&D play was pretty much all about trying to overcome an enemy's countermeasures with spells.
The less lazy answer to your question is that Andy Collins specifically said that feats like cleave and whirlwind were going to be eliminated from 4E and converted into powers. Because powers rarely have synergy with each other this by definition reduces the amount of tactics in the game.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
Andy: The biggest change in design philosophy for feats in 4th Edition was the exclusion of those feats that offered the character entirely new combat options (or in 4th Edition terms, new powers). Everybody thinks of Spring Attack, but I count roughly two dozen feats in the 3E PH alone that either grant new powers (Whirlwind Attack, Rapid Shot) or turn an effectively unplayable option into a key tactic (Improved Trip, Two-Weapon Fighting). Over the lifespan of 3rd Edition, this category proved the most exciting one to mine for new ideas. That's hardly surprising, considering that half the characters in any given party probably relied on feats for most of their "powers."
Jeremy: But while creating feats for 4th Edition, we took this option off the table. Cleave, Manyshot, and other favorites rightfully turned into powers, leaving big shoes to fill in the feat list.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
If by synergy, you mean stacking things like power attack on top of spring attack and what have you, then that's part of the number crunching. Doesn't affect the way you actually play the game at all.
Martial characters would still be one trick ponies and casters would have a 4e ranger-ish nova strategy.
If by synergy, you mean stacking things like power attack on top of spring attack and what have you, then that's part of the number crunching. Doesn't affect the way you actually play the game at all.
No, I'm talking about basic tactical synergies like Whirlwind + TWF or Improved Disarm + Karmic Strike + Combat Reflexes.
Yes, thanks to 3.5E Power Attack and Improved Trip became the new gold standard for feats, making a lot of old fighter standbys meaningless. Compounding this non-rogue TWFing and non-cleric archery became obsolete schticks after the so-called 'revision'. Thanks a whole fucking lot, Andy Collins. Even so, 1 is still a bigger number than zero.
Last edited by Lago PARANOIA on Thu Sep 24, 2009 5:39 am, edited 1 time in total.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
Give the players a legitimate choice. Give them multiple options all of which are viable yet different and need some real tactics to choose between.
I'll use Go as an example of a simple yet deep game. Go is stupidly simple, go look up the rules and you'll see. It can take someone 10 minutes tops to learn the basic rules of the game, but you can express the core rules in about 2 sentences.
Go is also a deep game because you have a huge amount of options about where to place your piece and many of them are viable. It's up to experience to show you which ones are the better moves of course, but there are legitimate strategies and such despite it's simplicity. Hell, you have 19^2 possible moves to start with, although half of those are probably bad ideas. Still, (19^2)/2 starting moves blows apart chess's 20 total possible starting moves (not discounting the bad ones for chess).
Last edited by Thymos on Fri Sep 25, 2009 3:46 am, edited 1 time in total.
K wrote:
The ideal would be "high variety, low complexity"; however, I'm not sure if its an attainable goal.
I'm a bit late for this but there is a high variety, low complexity game. It's called Risus. The game is a bone-simple dice pool RPG, but you can make up the adjectives assigned to your dice pools and said adjectives determine how you interact with the world.
Your choices are only limited by your imagination, but at the end of the day, the system is "roll dice at it until the scene's over".
FrankTrollman wrote: Halfling women, as I'm sure you are aware, combine all the "fun" parts of pedophilia without any of the disturbing, illegal, or immoral parts.
K wrote:That being said, the usefulness of airships for society is still transporting cargo because it's an option that doesn't require a powerful wizard to show up for work on time instead of blowing the day in his harem of extraplanar sex demons/angels.
Chamomile wrote:
See, it's because K's belief in leaving generation of individual monsters to GMs makes him Chaotic, whereas Frank's belief in the easier usability of monsters pre-generated by game designers makes him Lawful, and clearly these philosophies are so irreconcilable as to be best represented as fundamentally opposed metaphysical forces.
Whipstitch wrote:You're on a mad quest, dude. I'd sooner bet on Zeus getting bored and letting Sisyphus put down the fucking rock.
Draco_Argentum wrote:Its not rules zero either, the mechanics are unchanged.
That's not true.
I am familiar with the described system. The imagination bit basically kicks in where you have to negotiate with your GM as to whether your skill is applicable to some action. I believe the described example was something like negotiating your way into using Hairdressing skill with possible penalties to take out Ninjas in combat.
It was a minimalist game of "may I please Sir" arbitrary rulings followed by arbitrary rolls, so it meets my approval.
But your imagination and your ability to describe and negotiate what you imagine was very much an instance of highly variable arbitrary rulings.
The complexity of potential actions, skill sets and the negotiations to determine their impacts and the arbitrary rulings that confirm or deny those negotiations was basically limitless. Thats a lot of complexity.
Phonelobster's Self Proclaimed Greatest Hits Collection : (no really, they are awesome)
Lago PARANOIA wrote:
No, I'm talking about basic tactical synergies like Whirlwind + TWF or Improved Disarm + Karmic Strike + Combat Reflexes.
Yeah I don't really know if I like the feat stacking for a lot of crap like that. Because it unfortunately leads to one trick ponies, where you get one good attack and just spam it, because once you've invested 3-4 feats in it, there's really no point using anything else.
That's the sort of stacking that really shouldn't happen. Because that actually removes options by making one way better than the rest, and was basically the death of the sword classes.
Really, the standalone power model that 4E used is probably the best thing, you just have to make powers that actually make people give a damn. You just need more options and maybe a WoF system to get people to mix up using powers. But synergies should be between separate powers, not metapowers that act only to make some powers better than others. Metapowers don't create options, they take them away.
Last edited by RandomCasualty2 on Fri Sep 25, 2009 8:15 am, edited 3 times in total.
You're saying that there should be synergy between options but that there shouldn't be metapowers. Um, that's impossible. You can give people powers that by and large have nothing to do with each other like 4E does, but you can't stop metapowers and also have powers work together because--guess what--synergistic powers create metapowers.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
Low Complexity pretty muchs requires high transparency. Complexity pretty much begins and ends with the player being unable to know for certain what their abilities do.
Games in which your abilities are extremely subjective, or where their effects are highly contingent on sets of unknowns are totally complicated.
A metapower is a power that works on other powers. A feat that doubles the bonus of another feat, or a class ability that supresses a spell are both metapowers. And RC is completely right in that you can have have synergy without metapowers. Two-Weapon fighting and sneak attack have synergy, as do Web and Stinking Cloud. I don't know why he doesn't want Dispel Magic in his games though.
WoF doesn't introduce depth either, it just forces some variety.
This is "true."
However, variety can prevent a system from becoming degenerate, which can hold onto whatever depth your system has in the face of determined number crunching.
Checkers is a solved game, but they stll do Checkers Tournaments by forcing both players to randomize their starting couple of moves, making the game regain tactical depth despite having been mathhammered to static oblivion.
