Threads that make us Laugh, Cry, or Both, Continued

[Koumei]

I could only read the second and third post before wanting to punch someone in the throat. Someone direct the Angry Marines onto them.

[Username17]

No DM? WTF? Democratic D&D? What? Where is the challenge in a game where everyone has a say?

It's like they've never played Arkham Horror.

A cooperative storytelling game doesn't need an adversarial relationship to be challenging.

-Username17

[cthulhu]

I have to say Arkham horror has lost its luster as a game for me - but mostly because the encounter system is just nasty.

[angelfromanotherpin]

cthulhu - is that the old version or the new one? I've always found the new game's encounter system quite manageable, while I'm told the older one was much more randomly brutal.

[bitnine]

Wow, that AD&D thread is something. Is it me, or did that one fella intimidate that the only thing better than AD&D would be jacking off at a AD&D game table? Because that's kinda what I got a sense of, and it's a picture I really didn't need to have.

[tzor]

Seeing those so called AD&D players really wants to make me cry. As someone who played AD&D 1st edition in college I have to strongly disagree with a number of things they keep insisting on.

People are complaining that they hate the idea of making the game simple. Heck we all made the game simple; even the guys who worshiped at the altar of Role Master combat tables (including the critical hits and fumbles) would never even think of using the grapple rules as written in 1E. Nor did I see anyone using the weapon vs armor type modifiers.

Nor did they seem to recall the many rules editions produced in Dragon magazine nor did they hear my cry to the high heavens, "The Anti-Paladin ... They broke the game!" Although I was probably mumbling my objections to Unearthed Arcana at the time to be heard.

One can make interesting arguments between 2E and what 2E-G would have been. Personally I think the time was actually ripe for a new edition, but a lot of the ideas that should have been driving 2E were dropped (cantrips/orisons ... aka the 0th level spell was indroduced in Dragon but were never included in 2E) as well as a strong attempt to religiously politicaly correct the game to appease the Chicklets. (That was a BADD idea because it didn't work.)

But having said that, 2E was in some ways better than 1E, and in some ways worse. 3E was in some ways bette than 2E and in some ways worse. 4E is ... am I getting into a rut here?

And what is 1E? What is 2E for that matter? I went to a 1E game once at a con and saw THAC0 ... yes that was used ... for like the last year of the edition's existance. The same is true of 2E ... kits or no kits? The whole game has been constantly evolving and we have all been applying house rules and rules kit based from other systems since the days of chainmail.

[Voss]

Meh. 1E-> 2E wasn't really much of a change. It was more a consolidation. A couple classes got ripped out, fireballs got capped at 10d6, and the crappy 'nonweapon proficiencies' from the dungeoneers and wilderness survival guides got altered and shoved in the PH.

It was more a matter of temporarily going from a dozen or so books back to 3.

[RandomCasualty]

1192127020[/unixtime]]Meh. 1E-> 2E wasn't really much of a change. It was more a consolidation. A couple classes got ripped out, fireballs got capped at 10d6, and the crappy 'nonweapon proficiencies' from the dungeoneers and wilderness survival guides got altered and shoved in the PH.

It was more a matter of temporarily going from a dozen or so books back to 3.

3.0-> 3.5 had more changes than 1E to 2E

[tzor]

I will have to go back to the rule books to check. A lot of the changes from 1E (original) to 2E (original) consisted of the removal of a variety of rules. There are a small number of changes to other rules which were minor.

[Crissa]

tzor, your sig is making me cry. Did you really win nanowrimo twice? o-o

There was a change of alot of tables from 1E to less tables in 2E, but for the most part, they meant the same things. But 3.5 didn't up and get rid of any classes, stats, or whatnot.

3.0 didn't get rid of monsters - that's what they're doing in 4e - and it didn't get rid of any classes - they're doing that in 4e - and while thac0 went away, the actual numbers were in proportion - merely adding instead of subtracting.

I totally have no idea what those grognards had invested in half of the rolls going up and half going down.

-Crissa

[Cielingcat]

1192089149[/unixtime]]

No DM? WTF? Democratic D&D? What? Where is the challenge in a game where everyone has a say?

It's like they've never played Arkham Horror.

A cooperative storytelling game doesn't need an adversarial relationship to be challenging.

-Username17

I believe the whole point is that these people have never played anything other than 2e and refuse to ever play anything else. And in fact, any other game system is evil because it differs from 2e.

[MrWaeseL]

What the fuck is Arkham Horror? Some kinda RPG based around batman? It sounds pathetic already.

[Jacob_Orlove]

It's a board game where all the players run around trying to beat up monsters and then Cthulhu shows up and eats them.

[tzor]

1192147293[/unixtime]]tzor, your sig is making me cry. Did you really win nanowrimo twice? o-o

"Winning" NaNo only means getting 50K words in the month. My first year was a dismal failure. My second year was an erotic fantasy that had a druid female hobbit that had a whole lot of Dr. Ruth in her. That was easy to write. That was the first novel where my characters had to make appointments to give me ideas.

My second success was based on my Nationstates nation. I already had a ton of back history that I made into future history. Still it wasn't easy and i even had to steal the christmas tree from Charlie Brown's Christmas Story. Still writing about werepenguins isn't all that hard once you start.

--

I can't comment on 1E 2E elements until I get the ideal time to organize my room/garrage and find my 1E books. Ideally there wasn't much in the errata monster division between 1 and 2 so that core went to core. I would strongly disagree that they are dropping either classes or monsters; what they are doing is simply selecting a different subset of classes and monsters to put in their first series of books because of the way they like to play the game.

Off the top of my head, here are some of the things you won't see in 2.0E.

Non weapon combat using percentages
Weapon vs armor type
Facing AC rules
Psionics
Ultravision
Level limits based on race


Here are some 2E things you never saw in 1E

WP/NWP

[Koumei]

1192152479[/unixtime]]What the fuck is Arkham Horror? Some kinda RPG based around batman? It sounds pathetic already.

It's Cthulhu-based. Half the people in the world associate Arkham with Batman, the other half associate it with Cthulhu. Enormous elder gods with d100 eyes are better than vigilantes in suits.

Although in the old days, he probably had a Bat-Cthulhu-Repellent in his utility belt.

[MrWaeseL]

Hmm that actually sounds cooler than I thought. But why batman and cthulhu?

[Koumei]

Batman contains a place called Arkham. An asylum for the criminally insane, IIRC.

In the Cthulhu mythos, a lot of stuff happens around Arkham. There may even be a loony bin there that half the investigators end up in.

Incidentally, can someone clear up the term "grognard" for me?

My understanding is that it's basically someone who looks back on the "good old days" of (system), and hates the new one with a passion because it's "not the same". The kind who believes there was nothing at all wrong with (old Edition), that it was perfect. In Warhammer 40K they think space dwarfs are a better idea than spiky Eldar and the C'tan Party Van, in D&D they think it's better that elves and dwarfs are just better from the start but end up never being able to advance.

Is that basically it?

[Username17]

1192182030[/unixtime]]Hmm that actually sounds cooler than I thought. But why batman and cthulhu?

Arkham is the fictional town which is mentioned several times in H.P. Lovecraft stories (and largely based on Salem, MA). Some characters end up in the insane asylum there. In Batman stories, the criminally insane are placed in "Arkham Asylum" - a literary reference to H.P.Lovecraft stories.

Incidentally, can someone clear up the term "grognard" for me?

Sure. It was Napoleon's word for veteran soldiers of the Imperial Guard. So in RPGs, people who played the "old games" take on the term "Grognard" to recast themselves as the "old guard" of RPGs.

It can be used as a term of pride or insult, depending upon whether you emphasize the "old" or "guard" aspects of it.

-Username17

[cthulhu]

1192110812[/unixtime]]cthulhu - is that the old version or the new one? I've always found the new game's encounter system quite manageable, while I'm told the older one was much more randomly brutal.

Oh it's not that the encounters are randomly brutual, it's just that every deck is consistently bad with a few good results.

Except, for no obvious reason, newspaper. Only 1/8 newspaper events are bad and 5/8 are good. And all the good events hand you money in sacks or teleport you. Direct to the magic items shop.

And the newspaper shop is right next to the magic items shop which contains eldar signs which are pure awesome.

So the game is telling you to go camp up newspaper, amass cash, then sythce through the magic items shop fishing for eldar signs. They semi nerfed that tactic by changing the rules in the dunwhich horror expansion which says you HAVE to buy from a shop if you draw cards/shop at it, but it's still a better tactic than anything else because the 'downside' now is you are forced to buy magic items. They also added more magic items to the shop which decreases your chance of getting a magic item.

So you give all the awesome shit you are getting to someone who just kills monsters (because if the terror track goes up the shoppe closes and you get boned), and you send someone else out to gather clue tokens until he gets 5 then send him into a gate and send some other chump to get tokens, while everyone else tries to find eldar signs. Ideally that hobo guy who can effectively draw 6 cards a turn from due to that special ability.

This makes the game ludiciously easy.

Now, the dunwhich horror stealth nerfs and double mythos cards for 5 players made that tactic less effective, but the game is still pretty easy. I haven't lost the last 7? times I've played, though it's come down to the wire a couple of times.

If you DON'T newspaper farm because it's stupid you feel like you are kicking yourself in the testicles because the other encouter decks suck so much compared to newspaper.

[Koumei]

Thanks, Frank. So it actually just means they've gamed for a while, but can be used insultingly in the case I put forward.

[angelfromanotherpin]

cthulhu - I've played the game a few times and never noticed the Newspaper imbalance, but I do know why I never noticed this.

1) I've never gone through the decks counting good vs bad results.

2) Players don't go to the Newspaper because there's no obvious reason to go there. It doesn't accrue clues, it doesn't have portals, you can't buy stuff or trade in trophies there. From the outside, it looks like one of the last places you want to go.

Almost all the expansions have added cards to the Location decks: has this changed the balance of the Newspaper at all?

I had read about the Curiosity Shop mining as a problem, but once again it's never came up in the games I've played. I'm not sure why that is, except perhaps that no-one was interested in sitting on the store turn after turn.

[Manxome]

How do you draw six cards a turn? There's an investigator with an ability that "whenever you draw unique item cards, draw one more, then discard one of your choice," which would allow you to draw 4 cards instead of 3 when shopping, but I'm not aware of any way to do better than that.

Though I also don't have any expansions...


I also haven't gone to the newspaper place much, and yet still haven't managed to lose any of the few games I've played (though got very close sometimes, and discovered after one or two games that I'd made a rules error in my favor...)

[Leress]

Now this has already been put on this thread but I think one needs to revisit this one...
the Geisha

Did I make a miscalculation in my example of a 10th level Geisha meeting the challenges?

[technomancer]

Wow, that thread is bad.

So basically, you think that a single 10th level geisha should always lose to a 10th level geisha unless the first geisha had three more characters with her?

Arg! Do they not read how encounters are supposed to work? Even after you told them to?! A single 10th level geisha should be able to kill 1/5 of 4 10th level geishas.

[angelfromanotherpin]

That Hochiu guy has a sig that's like a half-page long, but here's the best part of it:

Am I a "powergamer"? By Wizards forum logic: Yes, I am. I roll 4d6, reroll 1s once and place my rolled stats into any ability slot I want. I want to enjoy my characters and to do that they have to be reasonably competent in the class they've chosen. So yes. Because my stats aren't all below 15 and my fighter can hit you with his longsword, I am indeed a powergamer.