Why did they scrap Orcus?

[Username17]

Well, the sample characters for the playtest are up:

Fucking piddly shit one-round effects remain in full force? I'm suddenly stopping caring about 13th age.

Just the fact that the Bard has an attack that dazes until the end of his next turn and a buff that lasts until the beginning of his next turn makes me say "Do Not Want". That right there is a deal breaker.

I'm actually on the fence about their Backgrounds stuff. Basically, if you want people to be doing "creative" things with their skills, then skills need to be dadaist expressions with numbers on them. You say "I try to find the small hidden object with my sharp eyes, that I have because I am a tailor!" or something. If you have a skill called "Perception" on your character sheet, then obviously that is the skill you are going to use to spot things and there is fuckall that any skill creativity is going to do to change that.

That being said, even if you have the design goal that people should be doing creative shit with their skill numbers, I think the 13th Age bits are taking it too far. I think a character having "Former Bird +5" as one of their three skills is too out-there for people to grapple with.

And the Icons shit is just straight disempowering. First level characters should not have a mark on their character sheet that explains how more than one of the highest level NPCs in the game want to fuck with them.

-Username17

[John Magnum]

I can see it working if it's not supposed to be the Icon personally, but the Icon's gigantic sphere of influence. Like, the sample Fighter doesn't know the Emperor, but there's some kind of relationship with the Imperium generally. It's a weird metonymy and it doesn't look like they actually want to shut down "I straight-up personally know Icon X."

[Username17]

I can see it working if it's not supposed to be the Icon personally, but the Icon's gigantic sphere of influence. Like, the sample Fighter doesn't know the Emperor, but there's some kind of relationship with the Imperium generally. It's a weird metonymy and it doesn't look like they actually want to shut down "I straight-up personally know Icon X."

That would be better than their actual plan:

The Diabolist - 2 Dice, Conflicted. You did something to make The Diabolist incredibly angry, but you can't remember what it was. She does. Whatever it was, she's taken a special interest in you and won't let you die until the turning of the ages. She's not looking out for you, necessarily, but help comes from unexpected places.

Yeah: they expect first level characters to have the personal attention of the highest level entities in the game. It is difficult for me to imagine something less empowering.

-Username17

[Voss]

Well, the sample characters for the playtest are up:

Human Fighter
Gnome Bard
Elven Ranger
Dwarfforged Sorcerer
Half Orc Cleric

I have no words.

-Username17

No, come on. This is somebody's troll attempt, yeah?

I mean, putting aside fucking 'chosen one' bullshit (despite my urge to go on a frothing rant about it), this stuff is pure crap. The fighter can 'disengage'... on a 50/50 chance, for no apparent reason. And the
'Enlarged Maximized Empowered Hammer Swing' is just fucking insulting (as is the 'awesome warhammer')... I don't even know what escalation dice are, but you need them, have to roll evens and it allows you to... reroll damage. Woo.

And then you get to the math. The fighter is blatantly shit. In a mirror match, he has all of a 30% chance of hitting himself (or a similar monster), and will be beating on that guy for fucking ages, as he needs 4 solid hits before you factor in the defensive and recovery abilities. So probably a 12-15 round fight at fucking level 1, with nothing to do but say 'I swing my ...awesome... warhammer again, maybe a meaningless ability will happen when I do.'

And wow, random bullshit abilities. Well, except the bird ranger, who gets another bird in exchange for having even fewer abilities than everyone else.

So many shitty random mechanics and approaching zero bonuses that don't matter in any way at all.

Also here is the game system in a nutshell:

Sylvan Grace: Once per battle, at the end of your turn, roll a d8. If you roll less than or equal to the Escalation Die, you can take another action. If you roll higher than the Escalation Die, tough

Here is a thing you can do. Odds are it won't work. Fuck you.

[John Magnum]

It would make infinitely more sense to divide the world up into thirteen interesting spheres of influence and saying you have to have a connection to two. And make each sphere of influence headed up by an Iconic, and as you adventure more you gain the attention of more of it until at the last couple levels the actual Iconic is staring you down. So for Magic you've got Iconics for the five colors or twelve Planeswalkers or whatever and if you start with a connection to Blue maybe you begin with something related to blue generally and then at the endgame you have a wizard duel with Jace.

It seems like you could get something pretty functional out of using this as the basic framework for requiring people to write characters that interact with the setting, and give DMs built-in hooks so that PC actions can meaningfully affect shit.

But jeeze.

I am curious about how, exactly, it's disempowering. Can you elaborate on that?

[Voss]

I am curious about how, exactly, it's disempowering. Can you elaborate on that?

I suspect it has a lot to do with the dice and in particular the 'conflicted' tag on a lot of them. It comes across as 'random shit happens, and sometimes people help you in unspecified (but probably trivial) ways, and other times they fuck you over (in equally trivial ways)' But whatever it is, it is bizarre shit that randomly happens to you for no apparent reason, and you have, at best, minimal control over it.

Basically it comes across as Princess Celestia, Nightmare Moon, Elminster, King Arthur, Manshoon, and Old Scratch are watching your party ALL THE TIME, and occasionally a guard pony shows up and gives you a treasure map for no apparent reason, but sometimes an imp shows up and totally burns down the inn you are staying at. And if you have the conflicted tag, the two can flip for no apparent reason.

But it happens because the dm is rolling on charts, not because you actually did anything to deserve the love or the hate.


Also the backgrounds are the kind of over the top melodramatic bullshit that I'd expect from an angsty 15 year old who wants to be the center of attention for the entire gaming session, and not the sort of thing the actual game would seriously encourage.

[John Magnum]

It's weird that the Elven Ranger seems unfinished. As in, doesn't actually seem to have all the Elf or Ranger abilities written up.

Via Critical Hits, apparently the Escalation Die goes up (every round? every round you do X? who knows) and adds to your to-hit. And maybe other stuff depends on its value. Not really thrilling to me, I'd prefer the system just have a higher base chance of success.

If they're going to have abilities become randomly available based on your attack roll, they need way way more abilities per character.

[Username17]

The reason why having your character begin play as someone that the Queen of Vampires gives a shit about is disempowering is because of the "Mission in Space" phenomenon. That is: if you live in a world with Superman in it, then whatever adventures you have need to be either too unimportant for Superman to bother with or take place while Superman is doing something really important in space.

So if the Great Gold Wyrm and the Lich King are important characters in your story who start out giving a fuck about you personally, then every single one of your adventures has to start by explaining why the big Gold and Black demigods have more important things on their plate than whatever the fuck it is that you're doing. That's fucked. Every adventure, and I seriously mean every single one begins with the DM patiently explaining why some shit that is way bigger and more important than what you're doing is going down, which is why big penis NPCs don't come down and kill your party or save the day their own damn selves.

But in any case, to get this a bit away from "Rob Heinsoo still thinks 4e mechanics aren't boring and shitty", let's talk about Mike Mearls some more. Here is what he had to say in 2007:

Power sources have always been in D&D, but no one ever bothered to pay attention to them. From the earliest days of the game, it was clear that wizards (then called magic-users) tapped into a different source of magic than clerics. Later on, classes like the druid and illusionist seemed to tie into similar sources, but it was never completely clear. As the game expanded, psionics clearly staked out a completely different source of power.

4th Edition makes the move to create more vivid differencesbetween the sources of magical power. It also creates a source of power for characters who don’t use magic, such as fighters and rogues. While these characters don’t cast spells, at epic levels they eventually gain the ability to perform superhuman feats. Afterall, some of the greatest heroes of myth and legend toppled buildings with their bare hands, wrestled gods, diverted rivers, and so on. The martial power source allows us to drawa clear line between a mighty hero and the average person in the world of D&D.

Power sources express their influence over the game through design strictures and the general feel of the classes that employ them. We all know that divine magic heals and arcane magic does more damage. That sort of divide provides a foundational building block that we used as the model for further traits to differentiate the sources.

That was seriously what he thought he was doing. By issuing some vague decrees about how Divine Power Sourced Classes should be Better At Healing, he thought he was actually making a real difference between Power Sources. Actually of course, while a Cleric might be "better at healing" than a Warlord, a Paladin sure as fuck isn't, so overall the Divine Power Source does nothing and means nothing.

The sheer hubris of being able to claim with a straight face that you could differentiate Power Sources without actually assigning any rules at all to them is astounding to me to this day.

-Username17

[FatR]

I am curious about how, exactly, it's disempowering. Can you elaborate on that?

Well, under a good storyteller it isn't. About half of the fantasy genre involves the characters being on the radar of the biggest bads in the world and their chief opponents right away, because their main quest is that important. Fairly often it results in reasonably enjoyable stories.

A good storyteller an average GM isn't. So in actual practice having personal attention of super-hardcore-awesome NPCs before you can be even an annoyance to them power-wise is very likely to end in rampant GM wankery and uber-NPCs horror show. Of all the GMing flaws loving your NPCs too much is perhaps the easiest to slip into, even if you're aware of it.

[Lago PARANOIA]

4th Edition makes the move to create more vivid differencesbetween the sources of magical power. It also creates a source of power for characters who don’t use magic, such as fighters and rogues. While these characters don’t cast spells, at epic levels they eventually gain the ability to perform superhuman feats. Afterall, some of the greatest heroes of myth and legend toppled buildings with their bare hands, wrestled gods, diverted rivers, and so on. The martial power source allows us to drawa clear line between a mighty hero and the average person in the world of D&D.

The sheer cognitive dissonance is just baffling. I saw the playtest where he was head designer. And gods have about a +6 to their bonus on their primary stat over an adventurer that's just starting on. On a game with a game where accomplishments scale linearly -- so it's not even like a TN 2 of 8 dice pool system where things just scale that freakin' hardcore.

[Voss]

The sheer hubris of being able to claim with a straight face that you could differentiate Power Sources without actually assigning any rules at all to them is astounding to me to this day.

-Username17

I have more trouble with the idea that he thought the 'flavor' text seven people spent five months working on in 2006 and then never touched again actually made a blind bit of difference.

Well, besides having a bland, featureless world as a starting point, rather than having a hook that actually sold people on the game.


Though if I remember rightly, they spent quite a bit of ink on the idea of power sources in that Races and Classes book enthusing about the potential of power sources, and gibbered about shit like Ki, Shadow, Elemental (which was somehow different from Primal, and also not related to tossing fire/lightning/acid/ice around like arcane casters do). And, less than a year later tossing most of the additional power sources out like the bad ideas they were.

But to come back around to the point about the cleric and the paladin, the other side of it is the Avenger and the Swordmage they randomly stuck in the FR book. The defining traits of these two classes wasn't that one was divine and the other arcane, but that both had a magic shield as part of their thing. The actual important distinction was that the swordmage was stuck with one handed weapons, and the avenger was supposed to be a semi-sneaky guy while waving around a bloody great sword or axe. While teleporting. Because clearly that all added up to 'someone who murders unbelievers.' And occasionally deals with vengeance, because that is actually in the class name.

And there is that other problem with 4e class design: the giant piles of unrelated shit that don't amount to a comprehensible theme in any way whatsoever.

[ScottS]

Now, a bit more backstory, Robert Gutschera is this guy. Unlike the inmates currently running the asylum, he can do math.

I thought I'd seen a couple gloating references to them "having a real mathematician on staff to check their work", but I can't find the links and I never bothered tracking down the name. <insert Departed soundbite "I'm the guy who does his job; you must be the other guy" here, although as already pointed out he was probably off the team before major design decisions were actually made>

The phrase "The Math" in these WOTC articles is rapidly becoming a "Frau Blücher" kind of thing for me (except instead of a horse it's a million babies screaming). I'd be really curious to see if they ever did/do anything sophisticated at all or if they're just counting expected damage like everyone else. If they only looked at avg damage for 4e, then it was probably just DPE and even then I'm confused how stuff like solos could have made it out of the gate.

[K]

The reason why having your character begin play as someone that the Queen of Vampires gives a shit about is disempowering is because of the "Mission in Space" phenomenon. That is: if you live in a world with Superman in it, then whatever adventures you have need to be either too unimportant for Superman to bother with or take place while Superman is doing something really important in space.

So if the Great Gold Wyrm and the Lich King are important characters in your story who start out giving a fuck about you personally, then every single one of your adventures has to start by explaining why the big Gold and Black demigods have more important things on their plate than whatever the fuck it is that you're doing. That's fucked. Every adventure, and I seriously mean every single one begins with the DM patiently explaining why some shit that is way bigger and more important than what you're doing is going down, which is why big penis NPCs don't come down and kill your party or save the day their own damn selves.

You don't have to explain anything. It's not like the PCs or NPCs are omniscient and know what everyone else is doing all the time.

The Lich King or Arch-wizard doesn't have minute to minute updates on your PC's actions and so can't be expected to help or harm you on any particular day. Your character's adventures can be totally unknown to the NPCs and so there is no reason to expect the NPCs to show up.

So when the PCs say "why doesn't the Gold Dragon kill the zombies eating this village," the answer can just be assumed as "he doesn't know about it because he's not a god. When he catches up with you in a few weeks to teach you a new spell, he might ask why you have human bite mark scars and the faint smell of rotting flesh on your equipment."

The same goes for the Lich King. You will spend long periods off his radar even when he's got some guys looking for you. Even getting found doesn't mean that you rate a personal visit because the Lich King probably doesn't think that you are so powerful that he needs to kill you in person (he's a King, so he's got guys for taking out the trash and doesn't need to sully his own bony hands).

Powerful NPCs somewhere in the setting don't change the scale of any PC's adventures. You can try to say "well, the Gold Dragon could totally just kill all the Fire Giants in the Mountain of Doom, so why should we?", but the answer is always going to be "the Gold Dragon is not here at this moment, and there isn't time to go running off to tell him if we want to save the village."

[OgreBattle]

what is the ideal duration mechanic for D&D then?

[DSMatticus]

While Frank might be exaggerating the severity of the problem, it is kind of a problem. If you are the subject of some great prophecy by respected seers about freeing the world from darkness, you might register on the Lich King's personal "I want that guy to go away" radar. And even if the Lich King does not personally have the time or desire to deal with you, he is a king and he does not have to and is not going to send "level appropriate encounters" your way in a timely interval. It would be stupid of him to do so. He's just going to send something at you that gets the job done. Worse, D&D is a levelled game. Shadowrunners can at least escape from overwhelming force by being sneakier than people more powerful than them. When someone is more powerful than you in D&D, it is also probably better at finding you than you are at hiding. If you are on the radar of someone with that kind of resources as a future threat or current annoyance or the subject of a vendetta, only plot-induced stupidity will save you.

But being on the radar of the Lich King's cultic forces? I.e., some local hermit priest says, "the stars have told me this man shall save us from the Lich King!" and some people kind of half-heartedly believe him, and the local Death Knight is like, "psh, whatever. Send some ghouls to drag him out in the streets and tear him apart in front of the village." And then things escalate slowly from there, that totally works.

But yeah, it's a levelled game. Your level pretty much has to match the extent of your accomplishments and expected accomplishments, or else people more powerful than you in every way will take notice of you and do things. Whatever those things may be.

[Kaelik]

what is the ideal duration mechanic for D&D then?

For starters, there should only be one duration that is "one round"

Secondly, all in combat durations on attack spells should be either:

Instantaneous
1 round
1d4 rounds
5 rounds
a minute
Permanent

As for spells which you don't cast in combat, like buffs.


1) Instantaneous
2) Permanent
3) Several Days (CL days? 10 days? It doesn't matter)
4) A day (Only if you want the Frank cheat)
5) 12 hours
6) 5 minutes or 1 minute

That's it.

[Username17]

what is the ideal duration mechanic for D&D then?

There are lots of workable duration mechanics. The key is merely that:

• Under no circumstances should I ever have to check to see if an ongoing effect is supposed to end at two different times during my turn. More than two times is right fucking out.
• I should not be asked to tell you if it has been three rounds or four rounds since Todd's character got hit by the Drow lady's weakness bolt.

Now the first part is real easy. You absolutely need a phase in your turn when things end (or don't end this turn). It can be at the beginning of the turn, or the end of the turn, or you could even allow people to take it at a time of their choosing (stunned people take it early, blessed people take it late). It doesn't really matter so long as all things that end do so during that phase. Hell, the ending phase doesn't even need to be during your turn, effects ending could roll for initiative every turn or some shit. I don't even care, so long as it's consistent.

The second part can be handled any of a number of ways. The simplest is just to make sure that durations longer than 1 round are also longer than combats. But 4e had a passably good idea here (which they ruined, naturally) with having things end randomly. You could have things end on certain numbers on a d6 (so 5+ to end in lieu of "count three rounds"), or you could have people make actual rolls comparing their abilities and the power of the effect on them.

For abilities that last longer periods of time, I think that having phases where things end is just good policy all around. Things shouldn't end "in 24 hours", they should end "at dawn". By having the daily crap end at the same time, you don't have to get into discussions about how long you waited after breakfast to buff up or whatever.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

Really, you want Magic: the Gatheringstyle turn-order to see how shit begins and ends, and Netrunner-style actions you can spend each turn to see what you actually do.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Here's the system I propose:

Universal: Roll all saving throws at the beginning of your turn. Effects end or transition anytime during your turn (including before you take any actions), but declaring that your turn is over means that you must settle all accounts.

In-Combat Debuffs have two durations:
1 round, period.
Make your saving throw once a round. If you fail, the effect continues. If you fail badly enough (usually for things like a level 7 wizard using charm person against a goblin) you have to roll additional dice and have to succeed on all of them. If you accumulate more than 4 dice -- which pretty much means that you have no chance of succeeding within the timeframe of combat -- you have to compare your base saving throw numbers versus the attacker's DC on the Time and Scale Progression chart to see how long you have until you make your next save. A 10th level wizard using a flesh to stone spell against a goblin would last for centuries, against the guard captain would last from 1 round (if lucky) up to several days, and against a dragon might not even last a round.

Buffs have their own durations.
1. One round, period.
2. Saving throws like in 4E D&D. If you roll high enough, the buff ends.
3. Once activated, they last all combat. 5 minutes should do the trick.
4. They last for one to several hours. That way people don't have to do round-to-round tracking of the buff but still get benefits for their 'storm the castle' scene and scheme. The balancing factor is someone being able to declare it before ninjas attack in the night and guessing what point in the day that wandering monsters will attack.
5. Sustained. They stay up as long as someone likes unless 'turned off', but occupies a finite number of stance/aura/polymorph/etc. slots.
6. Permanent. Like Sustained, but they don't occupy slots. Should be rare, confined to stuff like class features and magic items.

[ModelCitizen]

The Lich King or Arch-wizard doesn't have minute to minute updates on your PC's actions

Those sound like the job titles of people who have scrying pools in their living room.

[Username17]

Universal: Roll all saving throws at the beginning of your turn. Effects end or transition anytime during your turn (including before you take any actions), but declaring that your turn is over means that you must settle all accounts.

This is bad and you should feel bad. If you are going to let people take their Upkeep Phase before or after their move, or even between their move and their action, you sure as fuck still need to have them take it all at the same time. Under no circumstances should you have to explain that you're going to check for petrification ending first, then move, then check for mist form ending, then attack, then check for strength of steel ending. Just don't do that. Because it's fucking horribad.

Frankly, I think putting the end of effects phase at the end of a turn is probably easier. Because if you really want buffs that last until the end of next turn, it's a lot easier to remember that it was in fact used this turn and doesn't end. On the flip side, having things end at the beginning of turns means that you either have to do the accounting of stun effects on the initiative count of the person who inflicted them (the 3e way, which is irritating and hard to manage) or have one turn stuns last skip the first upkeep phase of the target's in order to make them lose even one turn (which is obnoxious).

-Username17

[talozin]

The Lich King or Arch-wizard doesn't have minute to minute updates on your PC's actions

Those sound like the job titles of people who have scrying pools in their living room.

I'm thinking this kind of shit depends heavily on your setting and the game mechanics you use. If you're playing 3.5 Forgotten Realms, it is fvcking ridiculous for you to be on Larloch's radar from the start of your career because he can kill you as a free action and his ability to do that probably extends until you get Mind Blank. Which you don't, because he kills you before you do.

If you are playing a game where scrying and teleport ambushing are less dominant, that's a little different. Like, Sauron knows that a Hobbit named Baggins has the Ring from pretty much the start of the trilogy, but in that setting Teleport does not exist, so he has to send the Witch King out to physically ride all the way to the Shire and hunt him down. (Although it's not clear why he didn't just hang out by his palantir and relay continuous updates on Frodo's position to the Witch King. Maybe palantiri can't scry on people, only places.)

To boil it down, it's okay for the Lich King to have the ability to kill you. It's also okay for the Lich King to have the desire to kill you. But at no point can the Lich King have both the ability and the desire to kill you. So if the GM wants the game to start off with the Lich King wanting to kill you, then there must be some limitation on his ability to do so that keeps him from doing it right this instant.

[deaddmwalking]

Specifically for a stun, how would you like to see it implemented so that a target is stunned for 1 round, but not more and not less.

For example, character A takes his turn in round 1. Character B then stuns character A. Since Character A has already acted in Round 1 should he be stunned in Round 2?

In a different fight, Character B goes first and stuns Character A in round 1. Since A has not yet acted, he can miss his turn in Round 1 and should be able to act normally in Round 2.

What mechanic (especially around an end-of-turn status update) would work for this situation?

[Username17]

Specifically for a stun, how would you like to see it implemented so that a target is stunned for 1 round, but not more and not less.

For example, character A takes his turn in round 1. Character B then stuns character A. Since Character A has already acted in Round 1 should he be stunned in Round 2?

In a different fight, Character B goes first and stuns Character A in round 1. Since A has not yet acted, he can miss his turn in Round 1 and should be able to act normally in Round 2.

What mechanic (especially around an end-of-turn status update) would work for this situation?

• You have an "upkeep" phase (I do not care what it is called) at the end of your turn.
• The Stun condition makes the target skip all their phases except the Upkeep Phase during their turn.
• The one turn Stun ends on a 1+ during the Upkeep Phase.

Net result: you stun the dude. He loses his next turn, then his Stun is over. The end.

-Username17

[deaddmwalking]

So the 'upkeep phase' is on each individual's turn (at the end of their turn) rather than at the end of the 'round'?

It's not an objection (in fact, I think I agree with you) but compared to 3.5, the character may not be 'vulnerable' to other's attacks.

As you propose:
A stuns B.
B misses his turn.
C attacks and gains no benefit on B.
D attacks and gains no benefit on B.

Current 3.5
A stuns B.
B is stunned until his next turn.
C attacks and gains a benefit on B.
D attacks and gains a benefit on B.

If the main benefit of stunning is that the target loses their action (and it probably is) it really doesn't matter that there is no bonus on attacks against the stunned opponet. But it would definitely mean that the person who stuns the opponent never gets the benefit that the stun offers (though his companions may or may not depending on turn order).

Is that the way you intend it?

Just to be clear - this isn't a trap. I know you always think your positions through very clearly, so I want to make sure I understand what benefits/pitfalls you see in such a system.