Lago PARANOIA wrote:Frank, you were doing the 3E D&D playtest.
About how does that SomethingAwful document compare to your first playtest?
The Something awful "leak" wrote:*This info is all from the 1.0 version of the playtest, they're on I believe 1.5 atm, so this may be slightly outdated, but still more concrete than what exists.* Also, I don't have it in front of me now, so it's mostly paraphrasing.
They are stating up front that they are not posting any of the
actual materials. So obviously I couldn't tell you if these "materials" match the style list or not. It's at least supposedly some guy remembering stuff he saw in a sort of stream of consciousness fashion.
Now some of the crap he's talking about is kind of incoherent and maybe slightly contradictory, and that's to be expected from a playtest document to be honest. Quite often there will be two versions that differ slightly or wholly and playtesters will be asked to give feedback for the designers to use against each other in arguments about which one to develop and use.
But bottom line: I could bust out some old 3e, 2eAD&D, and BECMI materials and put together a fake leak based around claiming to have a playtest document by throwing random crap from previous editions into the loose framework that Monte and Mearls have put out. That is one of the reason that there are so many fake leaks. Monte and Mearls have written out a sketch of the game so vague and kind of stupid that
anyone could make a fake leak for trolling purposes.
Ice9 wrote:To take one example - non-scaling skills. That's a bullshit design goal. Remind me who asked for a system where the veteran master of the acrobatic ninja guild is worse at acrobatics than "Bob, the random peasant who rolled an 18 Dex"? Because that's terribad, especially with rolled stats, but even in general it sucks.
The first and last time the Diplomacy system worked was 2nd edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons with the Diplomacy Secondary Skill. It essentially did not scale, and it worked at all. You had a reaction roll and that gave creatures you encountered a disposition to you, and you could take diplomacy actions to try to improve that, and the numbers didn't scale so it all stayed on the RNG.
That is a solid design goal you could totally have. The problems with what Monte has described are several:
- Even granted that you want a Diplomacy system where things scale little or not at all to stay on the RNG, why would you give a shit about acrobatics staying on the RNG?
- The "mastery levels" thing is fucking retarded because it blows up even that previous design goal by making the effective bonus scale anyway.
- Also the master levels thing is fucking retarded because it obfuscates your bonus.
- The Auto-success threshold is just fucked, because either your stat is your modifier (in which case the RNG is way broken even at first level), or the rolled modifier scales at some fractional rate to the attribute (in which case high level characters cannot succeed at any test they do not automatically succeed at).
Basically, the skill system that Monte and Mearls have described is shit and cannot be fixed by putting different numbers into it. They have described a level of skill mastery as everything from +5 to the roll to +1 to the roll, and it doesn't fucking matter because there is
no set of numbers you could put into that equation that wouldn't be garbage.
-Username17