Lago PARANOIA wrote:I just don't think that many people give a fuck about miniatures. WotC is really barking up the wrong tree trying to push it so much; .
And the people who do give a fuck about minis tend to
Already have several hundred laying around the house due to decades of accumulation during the play of various RPGs and minis systems.
and/or.
Have developed the skills to do decent kit-bashing and customization and build any particular mini they really want.
The problem with selling to those of us in A is that we have the basics covered for any RPG and are only interested in the werid/oddball stuff for your particular game. Also we tend to buy and accumulate slowly, since we've been doing it for many years and have limited storage space.
The problem with selling to those in group B is that for them, it's really not about the minis, it's about the skill and craftsmanship and they would rather spend their own time making their characters' minis perfect than spend their money buying more.
Last edited by Josh_Kablack on Wed Sep 08, 2010 4:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
TheFlatline wrote:In 3.x, I made "character cheats", which were 3-10 pages, duplex printed, which distilled down rules that you needed to know as your character archetype.
This is what I do with Rolemaster and it keeps things very much in the realm of sanity even for that game, surprisingly enough.
K wrote:The interesting idea was twofold: that certain classes would get access to exotic spells by being a specialized caster (I think it was Witches that got access to a type of Exotics based on their Witch type, or maybe it was a feat to get access to all spells of that type... but it's been a while and I can't recall), and there was also a feat for a extra spell which was mostly used by Simple Casters to get Complex spells.
Like I said, it was an interesting idea. If I was 5e DnD, I would probably do a similar system so that Necromancers got access to the wierd necromancy spells and generic spellcasters used a generic list.
Oh sure. If you were just going to do another edition of D&D, you'd probably want to make everyone a Warmage chassis. You' write up a list of "common" spells that had the crap like Detect and Dispel Magic, and you'd announce that everyone had those. Then you'd give everyone who had spells their own spell list and let everyone have those. And then you'd have "exotic spells" that people could choose from when they got their selectable spells every X levels. And then spell prep is out the fucking window, you cast spells like a Warmage with all the Common Spells, all the Uncommon spells tagged for your spellcaster discipline, and whatever Rare spells you happen to have selected with your limited list of them.
The core idea is really rather elegant, even if Monte happened to have sort of flailed about with it. If you were making a new edition that was supposed to be 3rd edition again with streamlining and improvements, you'd totally do it that way. Heck, you'd probably end up doing feats like that as well.
FrankTrollman wrote:And then you'd have "exotic spells" that people could choose from when they got their selectable spells every X levels. And then spell prep is out the fucking window, you cast spells like a Warmage with all the Common Spells, all the Uncommon spells tagged for your spellcaster discipline, and whatever Rare spells you happen to have selected with your limited list of them.
Would this mean that the various casters would fill different explicit combat or adventuring roles such as the idea of different roles of 4e (leader, striker...)?
Last edited by xechnao on Wed Sep 08, 2010 5:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.
FrankTrollman wrote:And then you'd have "exotic spells" that people could choose from when they got their selectable spells every X levels. And then spell prep is out the fucking window, you cast spells like a Warmage with all the Common Spells, all the Uncommon spells tagged for your spellcaster discipline, and whatever Rare spells you happen to have selected with your limited list of them.
Would this mean that the various casters would fill different explicit combat or adventuring roles such as the idea of different roles of 4e (leader, striker...)?
Nothing whatever like the 4e Leader and Striker, because those are shitty role concepts. But the different spellcasters would be good at different things. The Necromancer an the Conjurer would get monster spam and the Warmage would not.
FrankTrollman wrote:
Nothing whatever like the 4e Leader and Striker, because those are shitty role concepts. But the different spellcasters would be good at different things. The Necromancer an the Conjurer would get monster spam and the Warmage get explosion spam.
-Username17
Had to fix that for you.
Last edited by Maxus on Wed Sep 08, 2010 6:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.
He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.
--The horror of Mario
Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
FrankTrollman wrote:Nothing whatever like the 4e Leader and Striker, because those are shitty role concepts. But the different spellcasters would be good at different things. The Necromancer an the Conjurer would get monster spam and the Warmage would not.
-Username17
Ok, I think this is the most important thing to sort out here.
Could you elaborate on the different things they would get?
And place it if possible in context with the rest of the game?
Last edited by xechnao on Wed Sep 08, 2010 6:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Hrm.... if I was doing something like this, it would go like:
The Summoner: His Uncommon and rare spells are all about summoning many disposible or a single beefy creature to attack on the front line while he stands in the back giving mid ranged support to his cannon fodder. Would probably have several different sub lines of spells dependent on type of creatures (undead, magic animals, elementals, golems, etc), you could also give them fun stuff like summoning giant force fields, traps and such.
The Magic Knight: Wears heavy armor or has some sort of beefy magic force field effect to save his ass, His spells are all about either getting him into melee or near melee range to hit the baddie (even if it's flying...) with some cool magic boosted weapon attacks and then zip out to start the process again. Lots of mobility and close range multi-target stuff.
The Wizard: Well, he's the wizard. his spells include both high octane long range zappy shit and elemental/mind-fuckery crowd control stuff that insures the other guys aren't completely overwelmed.
The Mage: the generalist class, doesn't actually have any actual rare spells of their own but can get access to other classes' uncommon spell lists
Last edited by sake on Wed Sep 08, 2010 6:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Too generalist. If you're going to have specialist casters you shouldn't have a "Wizard" or "Mage" you should have shit like "Beguiler" and "Warmage". Your summoner and Mage-Knight look okay (though I'm not convinced the game needs another mage knight. Thats what the Cleric is for)
Red_Rob wrote:Too generalist. If you're going to have specialist casters you shouldn't have a "Wizard" or "Mage" you should have shit like "Beguiler" and "Warmage". Your summoner and Mage-Knight look okay (though I'm not convinced the game needs another mage knight. Thats what the Cleric is for)
The Cleric would lose mage-knight status due to loss of bullshit like Divine Power. He goes back to being a 3/4 BAB guy so he's got reasonable melee; most of his buffs explicitly do not affect him. He focuses on party buffs and condition removal for the party; offensively, he inflicts status effects and summons single high power mobs depending on Uncommon spell selection.
Plagues of locusts, striking the unfailthful with blindness, summoning Solars at high levels, etc.
Party buffs are cooler for other followers of your god (they get an additional rider effect, not enhanced). Bulls Str is +4 Str, say, with an addiitonal 10% defensive miss chance for the faithful, maybe.
Ferret wrote:Party buffs are cooler for other followers of your god (they get an additional rider effect, not enhanced). Bulls Str is +4 Str, say, with an addiitonal 10% defensive miss chance for the faithful, maybe.
So, if I get this straight, the party gets penalised for being an eclectic bunch of individuals, gains an in-game bonus for all playing similar characters, and a Cleric joining an existing party is forced into his God of worship by the most common belief among party members.
Ferret wrote:Party buffs are cooler for other followers of your god (they get an additional rider effect, not enhanced). Bulls Str is +4 Str, say, with an addiitonal 10% defensive miss chance for the faithful, maybe.
So, if I get this straight, the party gets penalised for being an eclectic bunch of individuals, gains an in-game bonus for all playing similar characters, and a Cleric joining an existing party is forced into his God of worship by the most common belief among party members.
Is that about right?
Pretty much that, unfortunately. The idea sounds cool but plays like shit. Unless the game in question has a lot of other worship based effects. I assume we're talking about something like DnD where deity choice is simple backstory to everyone not a Cleric. People should not be rewarded for being lucky enough to pick a deity in their backstory matching their Cleric's deity, nor should they be allowed the option to meta-game that bonus into existence because then it's just writing down "+10% dodge chance", which accomplishes nothing and isn't cool.
It would also force every character to worship a god if they wanted such additional bonuses, which is silly.
But if the game up-front says "You min-max your god choice in this game", then it's all cool. But then we'd have to add in more deity choice shit to justify this one bonus based off that choice, and then the game becomes deity choosing all over the place.
Red_Rob wrote:Too generalist. If you're going to have specialist casters you shouldn't have a "Wizard" or "Mage" you should have shit like "Beguiler" and "Warmage". Your summoner and Mage-Knight look okay (though I'm not convinced the game needs another mage knight. Thats what the Cleric is for)
Yes well, I was trying to be general, to keep the class types as broad as possible and to avoid the need to make 47 different bloody special snowflake versions of "Guy who shoots people with lightning or clouds their minds" "Guy who create hordes of minions to fight for him" and "Guy who like to run up a hit people with their magic'ed sword" Also ideally. all the heal-y magic would be in the general magic list allowing anyone to function as the healer if the need arises, and thus no Cleric/Priest/Healer type class is needed.
Zinegata wrote:
a) D&D 4E - derided as a very bad system as it severely limits player options, and despite its restrictiveness it's still unbalanced.
b) Warhammer 3rd Edition - derided as a really, really weird system that can't decide whether it's a boardgame or an RPG.
I am not familiar with Warhammer 3e but the design idea behind D&D 4e of limiting everything to balanced roles that define shticks so that the game runs only on this front instead of providing "simulationist" tools where you can make subpar or optimized characters is not a bad one. The implementation so far may not have been very elegant and the system may have needed more polish to perfectly function as intended but the idea is not bad.
I'll believe that it's a good idea when someone finally makes a decent RPG using this idea.
FrankTrollman wrote:The core idea is really rather elegant, even if Monte happened to have sort of flailed about with it. If you were making a new edition that was supposed to be 3rd edition again with streamlining and improvements, you'd totally do it that way.
That sounds an awful lot like the ICE edition of Rolemaster Monte worked on, I suspect he swiped rather than originated it.
In that system you had Channeling (Divine) Essence (Arcance) and Mentalism (Psi - kind of) each of these types of magic had Open spell lists which any full (ie wizard / cleric), semi (ie ranger, bard, paladin, etc), or hybrid (ie theurge) caster of the relevant type could take, Closed spell lists which only full casters if the relevant type could take and then Base spell lists which you could only take if you were the relevant class.
Now of course being Rolemaster, it wasn't entirely that simple as the lists got bought in odd chunks and you also could get around some of the limitations depending on optional rules, point expenditures and the phase of the moon, but the basic idea sounds really similar to what you are describing.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
To belatedly answer your question, I think that Jonathan Tweet is probably the best D&D writer WotC has employed. I am actually genuinely sad that 3.5E took out some of his jokes. I'm a fan of David Noonan's pre-4E work. And honestly, while d20 modern is a busted piece of shit I did genuinely enjoy the visual presentation and prose of that book and Urban Arcana so I can't hate Rich Baker too much. As Dragon Child said, after Penny Williams left there was a noticeable decrease in editing quality; I didn't even notice how good we had it until that abomination Complete Divine came along.
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.
Red_Rob wrote:Too generalist. If you're going to have specialist casters you shouldn't have a "Wizard" or "Mage" you should have shit like "Beguiler" and "Warmage". Your summoner and Mage-Knight look okay (though I'm not convinced the game needs another mage knight. Thats what the Cleric is for)
Can't speak for anyone else but I want a mage knight with arcane instead of divine fluff.
Red_Rob wrote:Too generalist. If you're going to have specialist casters you shouldn't have a "Wizard" or "Mage" you should have shit like "Beguiler" and "Warmage". Your summoner and Mage-Knight look okay (though I'm not convinced the game needs another mage knight. Thats what the Cleric is for)
Can't speak for anyone else but I want a mage knight with arcane instead of divine fluff.
Seconded. The Cleric-Mage-Knight says, "I am filled with the powah of my faith!"
And the OTHER mage-knight says, "My sword has a lightning bolt inside it. *SKLURTCH-ZAP!* Now it's inside you."
He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.
--The horror of Mario
Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
Games designers have a worrying tendency to be human, and therefore to make mistakes. Gamers also have a worrying tendency to be human, and therefore to have their own likes and dislikes that may clash with the designers.
Hence you will never see unadulterated praise for any games designer, and every "This was great, I love him!" will be met with a "Well this sucked, I hate him!"
Schwarzkopf wrote:Can't speak for anyone else but I want a mage knight with arcane instead of divine fluff.
So change the fluff. It doesn't impact the mechanics, thats why its called fluff. The Cleric has 3/4 BaB, can cast in heavy armour and has a preponderance of buff spells. What more do you really want from a Mage Knight?
Lago PARANOIA wrote:I just don't think that many people give a fuck about miniatures. WotC is really barking up the wrong tree trying to push it so much; .
And the people who do give a fuck about minis tend to
Already have several hundred laying around the house due to decades of accumulation during the play of various RPGs and minis systems.
and/or.
Have developed the skills to do decent kit-bashing and customization and build any particular mini they really want.
The problem with selling to those of us in A is that we have the basics covered for any RPG and are only interested in the werid/oddball stuff for your particular game. Also we tend to buy and accumulate slowly, since we've been doing it for many years and have limited storage space.
The problem with selling to those in group B is that for them, it's really not about the minis, it's about the skill and craftsmanship and they would rather spend their own time making their characters' minis perfect than spend their money buying more.
In all my gaming, I tend to see most commonly figs for the player characters and tokens/markers/dice/pebbles/whatever for the monsters. Even my friend who does professional jobs on figs (his trolls have glistening drool caught in mid-drip, it's awesome) might only collect a few of his favorite monsters (goblins, orcs, trolls, stuff like that) and paint a dozen or so of them, but will almost always hunt down a fig that represents a character.
Simply put, I think Wizards would be better off offering cardboard cutouts or something cheap to represent the hundreds and hundreds of different monsters in your monster manuals (you'll never get figs of ALL of them, and as soon as you go back to using glass beads, you tend to say "fuck it" and stick with them, after all, it's not like they last more than 3 or 4 rounds anyway), and offer customizable fig kits for PCs. That's where your market would lie. I should be able to buy one or two parts kits and a basic body and be able to get *really* close to what I imagine my character to look like. If you could tie that in with your character designer so you can hit "I want this as a fig" and for 12.95 you get a box of pewter pieces to make your own character, so much the better.
People will pay 50 bucks for a professional drawing of their World of Warcraft character. A dedicated TTRPG gamer will drop 15-20 bucks per memorable character on their fig.
.