D&DNext: Playtest Review

[MfA]

Instead of a rage meter, what about something like a "tension die" that increases by 1 every round and you're unable to use some attacks until the tension is at a certain level?

It has been discussed before, but there is quite a lot of hate on this forum for anything which allows five moves of doom ...

Also 13th age is doing it and they have rabid fan boys who will call you bad names if you try it in another game.

[erik]

Frank, I'm pretty sure you're saying that the encounter the players suffer is either "The goblins attack you in your sleep" or "You go find the goblins and attack them". That implies that the adventurers are resting in the same place where the danger is, which is stupid.

He's not saying that. He's saying that you can either attack the goblins today and have to heal up tomorrow morning, or you can attack the goblins tomorrow morning and have to heal up tomorrow morning right after. Either way you are burning tomorrow's resources. If you don't attack the goblins today then you have leftover daily resources that go to waste.

I play in games where there's a dangerous location, you're supposed to clear it out. So you go in to fight things, and then you leave the dangerous location and recharge your batteries somewhere like the woods (this is hogarth's post almost verbatim).

???

This is an example that supports Frank's thesis. If you have somewhere safe to rest, then you don't want to rest until your healing is totally expended (and yer likely a bit wounded).

Your second example is the other half of the coin where that strategy does have downsides. I have played where it pays to not burn down all your healing because of undesirable encounters, so I totally get that. But your first example, quoted above, that's nothing but support for Frank's position.

There's literally no reason not to sleep with low healing.

You have it a bit backwards. IF you have a safe place to rest then there's literally no reason not to go on until you run out of healing. The rub is in that "IF".

[ModelCitizen]

Instead of a rage meter, what about something like a "tension die" that increases by 1 every round and you're unable to use some attacks until the tension is at a certain level?
It would probably lead to a lot of DBZ-inspired fights (aha, I was just toying with you! THIS IS MY TRUE POWER), but it could be workable.

The I'm-not-left-handed meter?

The problem with that is that you can no longer have fights where the villain shows up halfway through, just as you're defeating the last of the guards.

That's not the half of it. Every fight has to be the bad guys ambushing the PCs, unless you're OK with the PCs slapfighting for five rounds before they kick in the door.

This is why I don't trust Rage Meter or escalation mechanics in tabletop. Rage Meter is a cool power scheme and I'd love to see it done right, but it's way too easy to fuck up. There's just too much temptation to assume the game has a hard "in combat" state that only starts when the DM says so. You don't have to do that if you're vigilant about writing good rules, but it just takes one writer who isn't willing to do the extra work and then that's the only way the rules can function.

Not trying to rip on RavenGM or Josh, I know you guys are just spitballing, but if somebody like the Exalted or recent D&D writers got hold of it I'd expect those same errors at release. For example, see 13th Age.

[MfA]

If you don't mind offending the mundane action hero folks you can always make the escalation detectable. Essentially you make it like Spirit Pressure in Bleach, if someone goes Super Sayan outside of your door you notice.

[Josh_Kablack]

Not trying to rip on RavenGM or Josh, I know you guys are just spitballing, but if somebody like the Exalted or recent D&D writers got hold of it I'd expect those same errors at release. For example, see 13th Age.

None taken. I have the utmost faith in Mearls and Crew's ability to louse up any mechanic. If we want to get back to the main topic of this thread we could start a pool on which one they'll screw up in their next press release.

[ModelCitizen]

If you don't mind offending the mundane action hero folks you can always make the escalation detectable. Essentially you make it like Spirit Pressure in Bleach, if someone goes Super Sayan outside of your door you notice.

Well, then your game can't have in-combat stealth, but more importantly it only solves the problem in that one specific case. PCs will still slapfight to unlock mobility and healing powers.

If you want the PCs to hold super moves until the end of a fight, you can still do that even if you have PCs start fights with full meter. It's pretty easy to implement something like Drain in a rage meter setup. Give PCs defensive abilities they need to hold meter in reserve to activate. Most of the time they want to hang on to enough meter to use their defensive stuff, but if they think they can end the fight by plowing those points into a super move they'll do that instead. (For a more brute-force solution you can also have super moves that stop the caster from regaining meter for a couple rounds - worth it at the end of a fight, not worth it at the beginning.)

[MfA]

Well, then your game can't have in-combat stealth

Just because it can be detected doesn't mean it can be pinpointed.

but more importantly it only solves the problem in that one specific case. PCs will still slapfight to unlock mobility and healing powers.

For healing powers you just add a [non-escalation] qualifier ... and you can allow escalation simply based on concentration.

[Sashi]

That's not the half of it. Every fight has to be the bad guys ambushing the PCs, unless you're OK with the PCs slapfighting for five rounds before they kick in the door.

The issue isn't slapfights in the halls, after all people totally have slapfights in the hall to pump themselves up.

Assassin's should obviously be able to sneak up on enemies and build their Death Strike gauge before the enemy is even aware of them. It totally makes sense for a Barbarian to ready a Rage Strike for when he jumps off the roof onto the Titan's back. And nothing should stop the Fire Mage from building up a Plasma Cascade to nuke the hall of the ice giants. An Arcane Archer can ensorcel a pack of lightning arrows to drop on a goblin camp in one round.


No, the problem with Rage Meters is that they can just create a time-reversed 5-minute work day, where you spend all your daily healing building up a Rage Meter so you can win the combat with your Desperation Move on the first round. You also don't make it a Final Fantasy 8 style State Dependent At Will. If you give people auto-crits at 10hp or less players will start having their characters stab themselves into critland after resting for the night.

Don't let the Warblade recharge or use regular maneuvers for 3 rounds after using Omnislash. The Barbarian gets a Rage Strike if he takes damage while bloodied or raging, but loses it if he regains hp for any reason. Plasma Cascade empties the Fire Mage's spell points and turns him into a mindless fire elemental until they recharge completely.

[Username17]

Frank, I'm pretty sure you're saying that the encounter the players suffer is either "The goblins attack you in your sleep" or "You go find the goblins and attack them". That implies that the adventurers are resting in the same place where the danger is, which is stupid.

No. I'm saying the choices are to:

• Attack the Goblins. Then Sleep in a Rope Trick.
  or
• Sleep in a Rope Trick. Then Attack the Goblins.

In the first option, the Goblins inflict some amount of damage on you. You have whatever small amount of healing is left, plus whatever you heal by resting, and all the rest of the damage comes out of your day 2 healing.

In the second option, the Goblins inflict the same amount of damage on you. All of that damage comes out of your day 2 healing.

So where is the fucking advantage in Option 2? It's exactly like Option 1 except that by definition you use up at least as much (or more) of your Day 2 healing. There is no advantage in Option 2. Even if you're completely out of Healing on Day 1, you're still better off with Option 1, because the healing during your rope trick rest is still non-zero and may save you some amount of healing on Day 2. Option 2 is physically incapable of bringing anything to the table if all you're low on is post-combat heal effects.

-Username17

[Username17]

Is there any kind of mechanic you could use with which Ultimate Super Attacks only become "unlocked" at intense moments? So that you use your Ultimate Attack on the boss or other desperate situation, like in anime, instead of using your Ultimate Attack on every random encounter then taking a nap to recharge. And if so, is that a good way to set things up? It seems to emulate certain kinds of stories, but also has important disadvantages compared to other recovery systems.

My untested idea for that is use the 50% hp threshold as the trigger. Either you are bloodied, or your foe is, or maybe both.

Or tie certain rules to the bloodied status, like "when you are blooded you take maximized damage". So if your Kamehameha is a 6d6 attack, it will always do 36 damage against a bloodied foe.

I forgot to mention this at the time, but this is one of the stupidest fucking ideas I've ever heard. Think about what it does for a moment:

• People who have enough hit points to be dropped in one attack are not affected because they are never bloodied.
• People who have enough hit points to be dropped in two or three attacks are only affected in that they are more likely to die when dropped, because they are only bloodied for the attack that would drop them anyway.
• People who have enough hit points to be dropped in four attacks are dropped in only 3 because they take twice as much damage when they are half down. There are similar proportional reductions in beat down times for all larger enemies.

That is the exact opposite of what you want your hit point system to do. It means that there has to be extreme hit point inflation for durable enemies, which in turn makes it more difficult for those durable enemies to become mook enemies through the expedient of leveling.

-Username17

[Sashi]

For healing powers you just add a [non-escalation] qualifier

If you let players refresh healing on Escalation then you've got the dumb dumb dumb tactic where people delay the killing blow on the last Goblin so they can keep refreshing their Escalation heals. It's the absolute worst method of limiting healing.

You have two options: literally infinite healing that refreshes on some combat timescale that is essentially irrelevant while resting. Or permanently limited healing that refreshes on whatever timescale you want an "adventuring day" to last. Personally I'm in favor of infinite healing out of combat, but forcing people to retreat and refresh heal powers if combat goes on too long (if healing refreshes while actively in combat, then already sloggy combats turn into horrific wars of attrition).

In 3.X God Sticks are so cost effective that actually casting Cure Light Wounds out of a spell slot past level 5 is madness. Wands of Lesser Vigor are even more cost effective if you have the time to twiddle your thumbs with a 1hp/round fast healing rate. "out of combat" in this case isn't a different game state, it's "those times you can afford to sit and suck your thumb until your HP is full". The actual rate of healing from the individual actions being taken at this time are irrelevant.

In combat the absolute value of healing pales in importance to the rate of healing. A wand of Lesser Vigor heals 550HP for 750GP, a Scroll of Heal does 130HP for a much less efficient 1650GP. If my 15th level character is at 2HP with a dragon bearing down on us and you pull out a fucking wand of Lesser Vigor I will slap you.

... and you can allow escalation simply based on concentration.

I still don't like the Escalation thing, but I'm a big fan of letting people activate any ability at any time by concentrating.

[ModelCitizen]

That's not the half of it. Every fight has to be the bad guys ambushing the PCs, unless you're OK with the PCs slapfighting for five rounds before they kick in the door.

The issue isn't slapfights in the halls, after all people totally have slapfights in the hall to pump themselves up.

What I meant by "slapfight" was PCs building meter with trivial but mechanically real combat. As far as I can tell John Henderson's coach isn't making real unarmed strike attacks; I don't see any danger of Football Dude I Didn't Previously Know Existed falling unconscious from any number of those oldmanslaps. RPG-wise, coach is maybe making some kind of social check to make Henderson fight better, fluffed as non-HP-reducing slapping.

Honestly I don't see how our positions are different at all. Your position seems to be that (A) poorly written Rage Meter mechanics encourage PCs to do stupid shit to build meter, (B) that's unacceptable and can be avoided by writing good rules, and (C) combining rage meter with drain mechanics works well and is pretty cool. As far as I can tell we're saying the same things. Am I misunderstanding?

[...You Lost Me]

He's not saying that. He's saying that you can either attack the goblins today and have to heal up tomorrow morning, or you can attack the goblins tomorrow morning and have to heal up tomorrow morning right after. Either way you are burning tomorrow's resources. If you don't attack the goblins today then you have leftover daily resources that go to waste.

Yes, I know he's saying that. But then you go to the woods where there are dangerous random encounters to sleep and you have no healing so now you're in danger when you're attacked.

???

This is an example that supports Frank's thesis. If you have somewhere safe to rest, then you don't want to rest until your healing is totally expended (and yer likely a bit wounded).

[etc. etc. completely off base]

OK, so you haven't read hogarth's post. Go read hogarth's post. You are missing the most key piece of this argument.

[CapnTthePirateG]

http://www.wizards.com/dnd/Article.aspx ... l/20120716

In other words: there's a problem, but we ain't doing shit.

WotC, fire this man.

[Seerow]

Seriously, the big revelation is "We're going to give guidelines for how much fighting there should be in a day"

I mean what the fuck? Have we not had that (and ignored it entirely) for 2 editions already? What the fucking shit makes him think this is going to be any different?

[CapnTthePirateG]

Seriously, the big revelation is "We're going to give guidelines for how much fighting there should be in a day"

I mean what the fuck? Have we not had that (and ignored it entirely) for 2 editions already? What the fucking shit makes him think this is going to be any different?

That's not even what he's saying at all. His last paragraph is pretty much "Well, DMs, fix it to whatever you want. We aren't writing rules."

So why should I pay money for these books when all they contain is "make shit up?"

[ModelCitizen]

That was dumb. The playtest fighter wants to do one fight per day just as much as the cleric does, and the rogue can't pull its weight in combat over any number of rounds. It's like he's writing about some hypothetical D&D in his head instead of the game he actually showed us.

By the way, do you guys think 3e people in general would be put off by Encounter abilities? Granted they don't remove the 5-minute workday unless they replace dailies altogether, but they do at least make your second or third fight of the day more tactically interesting. I seriously don't get why it's OK to have orc squad leaders with 4x HP and buff auras that aren't available to PCs, but refreshing on short rest is too much of a 4e-ism.

[CapnTthePirateG]

Three words: Tome of Battle.

No.

[Dean]

Encounter powers never offended me. "What counts as an encounter" is a reasonable question but not one I think will come up in more than 1 percent of cases. When any DM I know wrote an adventure out he would write the monster groups from different encounters in different parts of their notebooks. You could also do something simple like "3 full rounds of rest give back all of your "tiring" powers".

[Seerow]

Encounter powers never offended me. "What counts as an encounter" is a reasonable question but not one I think will come up in more than 1 percent of cases. When any DM I know wrote an adventure out he would write the monster groups from different encounters in different parts of their notebooks. You could also do something simple like "3 full rounds of rest give back all of your "tiring" powers".

4e, and I believe Tome of Battle as well, used the method of "If you get 5 minutes of rest, your encounter powers refresh", which worked pretty well for defining an encounter for me.

[OgreBattle]

By the way, do you guys think 3e people in general would be put off by Encounter abilities? Granted they don't remove the 5-minute workday unless they replace dailies altogether, but they do at least make your second or third fight of the day more tactically interesting. I seriously don't get why it's OK to have orc squad leaders with 4x HP and buff auras that aren't available to PCs, but refreshing on short rest is too much of a 4e-ism.

4e's problem was making it formatted the same way as spells. Pathfinder has done well by plopping them inside of Feats. Cavalier/Samurai has 'once per day' limits on things like staring at people hard.

[ModelCitizen]

4e, and I believe Tome of Battle as well, used the method of "If you get 5 minutes of rest, your encounter powers refresh", which worked pretty well for defining an encounter for me.

ToB is one minute, but yeah, same idea.

[Username17]

"Per Encounter" is an incredibly alienating and metagame concept. Don't like it. However, putting abilities on a one-minute, five minute, or even fifteen minute or Full Round refresh rate accomplishes everything you'd want a "per encounter" limit to do without being metagamey.

So the Factotum was a metagame monstrosity filled with arguments (did you encounter the door?), but the Tome of Battle classes weren't.

The one really good thing I can say about their failure on the 5 minute workday essay is that from what I could tell, a majority of the comments on that were negative.

-Username17

[hogarth]

"Per Encounter" is an incredibly alienating and metagame concept. Don't like it. However, putting abilities on a one-minute, five minute, or even fifteen minute or Full Round refresh rate accomplishes everything you'd want a "per encounter" limit to do without being metagamey.

Well, 1 minute would be kind of annoying. Tracking one minute durations sucks.

[RobbyPants]

I always saw (in game) "per encounter" simply being "don't do any combat or stressful stuff for one minute".

It could be a rest or not, but basically, if you can take 10 for a full minute, you refresh. It's the same thing, but "per encounter" is metagame shorthand that people can quickly understand once they know what the rule actually does.