DDN, I'm just a trolling you all!

[JonSetanta]

I'm not saying I was in the right for exploiting Scorching Ray though.
It's broken and the designers should feel ashamed.

No spell should end combat in one hit, and they've had many editions to get it right.
It's the opposite from 3e Evocations but they swung too far the other way.

But alas, if I'm to survive as a Mage, I take the best.

[Voss]

Heh. I have to admit part of my confusion was the earlier versions of scorching ray, and not paying much attention to the evocations anymore.

Prior version 1: create 6 1d6 rays, save for half damage against each.
Prior version 2: deal 15 damage (no hit, no saves) split among as many targets as you like.


I'm curious what else you took and what kind of choices were involved- What other spells? which School? I'm suspecting enchantment, just for the basic feature at level 2- forcing disadvantage on attackers.

[Cyberzombie]

I'm not saying I was in the right for exploiting Scorching Ray though.
It's broken and the designers should feel ashamed.

Scorching ray isn't anywhere near broken. It's okay, but most of the time I prefer just using magic missile. Because in D&DN you're getting 4 missiles if you use a 2nd level spell to cast MM. So you're autohitting for 4d4+4 damage, compared to 6d6 where you may miss. Scorching rays main claim to fame is that it scales well, but by the time you'd really care, you've got spells like polymorph that are better uses of higher level spell slots.

No spell should end combat in one hit, and they've had many editions to get it right.

I don't see a problem with a spell winning a battle with a lucky roll.

[JonSetanta]

SL0
Mage Hand
Shocking Grasp
Prestidigitation

SL1
Magic Missile
Thunderwave
Identify

SL2
Scorching Ray
Invisibility

I mostly tried to replicate a Final Fantasy black mage but to no avail.
Identify thrown in for dungeon crawls although most of our time has been in cities and a huge party in Baldur's Gate.
Invisibility just because.

[tussock]

@Voss, but even the super-limited fluff changes they did for 4e: points of light, faerie plane, shadow plane; it got everywhere. When it didn't fit the Realms they destroyed their most popular campaign setting to make it fit.

I suppose it's not what they're doing, it's who's doing it. This is still the 4e crew.

People broke 2nd edition FR a little, just a couple gods really, to get rid of Assassins and Illusionists, but no one broke 3e FR to fit Sorcerers, Monks, Barbarians, feats, skills, and so on. These "everything bad is because people summoned demons or did deals with the devil" notes are from the same basic people who destroyed the Realms because Wizard powers were slightly different to Wizard spells. Who threw out everyone's cosmology because they wanted to change some minor fluff on fiends and angels.

And point, without them tying in any mechanics one can just ignore it, easy as ignoring 3e's crappy save progressions, only took me a few years to see the harm in the default. But will they ignore it? Or will this be a thing where all the rules end up "LOL, demons" so you can't really avoid it all that easily, because players don't actually care and will just summon them into your pretty little gameworld anyway, and suddenly everything's supposed to go nuts.

Sure, I already do that to some extent, it's my balance trick for stuff, collateral damage and costs to alliances and so on, but you may not want that in your stuff at all, and the FR will perhaps have to fail all over again, not to mention the other published game worlds (if they publish any, which they must to succeed).

[shadzar]

I suppose it's not what they're doing, it's who's doing it. This is still the 4e crew.

it is what they are doing to, as it is HASBRO and WotC the who is known, they want to do it their way cause they think someone buying T$R gives WotC better deign skills.

the what is the problem not only because the bleed over into settings, but the utter destruction of them as you mentioned FR.

also page count of the core books. how many monsters will the MM have, how long will their backstories be? how big is this book going to be? how much will it cost?

let's just call 2nd MM 400 monsters to be generous to both camps. there are more, but less could be counted.

$30/400 monsters = @0.08 per monster hell even 100 monsters in the MC that came with a 3-ring notebook, lets say $2 for the notebook, $18/100 = $0.18 per monster, and that was cheaper than the cost of a photocopy @25 cents each when they came out (yeah then the boom hit and you could get copies other places than the post office and they dropped to 5 cents each.)

really the MM at 8 cents per monster, i could deal with the planescape crap and just chalk up the losses of 8 cents.

how much crapstory and interconnection nonsense (ettercaps sell pixie parts to night hags and herd giant spiders) is this going ot cost people that don't want to play in the ONE D&D WORLD?

OD&D: nowhere and everywhere in fiction
BD&D: Mystara (The Known World)
AD&D: Oerth (read Earth contextually)

TSR kept the core generic as fuck with some specifics spattered in cause well, Gary used the names of the PCs for spells cause why use another name when you are playing with the same people making the game. FREE SPELL NAME! it can be changed like every DMG says you can change spell names, but it shows how wizards can make spells, so PCs can too!

what was 3rd? moving towards a mix of FR and GH?

4th was eBerron, how else would they squeeze warfucked in there?

sure WotC and HASBRO hates Gary (or maybe just Gayle) and everything he did even to make the game they now profit off of....but Greyhawk is as generic as you can get once you strip the PC names out. then you don't have a "default world" with any named places

imagine this:

Drow come from SKullport beneath Waterdeep.

well now if you have drow in your game you must have Skullport and Waterdeep? sounds as bad as saying drow come from the underdark doesn't it, because now EVERY planet has an underdark because drow players need there to be one.

the fix for drow? "Dark Elf", drow are only found in FR world of Toril (pre-Abier, pre-Spellplaque). keep the settings separate and learn to fucking write generic, as little as is required to do the job. people will by "world books" that need extra info, or jsut go back to The Known World concept, and sell beginner stuff with Mystara, the biggest sandbox setting of them all!

I seriously expect Wyatt to have a place on every monster for EACH setting details, or jsut act like all the settings are MtG's Dominaria multi-verse shit. not everyone likes Planescape and Spelljammer to connect all the worlds, so keep it out of core.

[JonSetanta]

Why do spell DCs have a base of 8 rather than 10?

[Voss]

Why do spell DCs have a base of 8 rather than 10?

Because you add both prof bonus and spellcasting stat, and this was a rather sudden change to how the system worked (and notably, the monsters hadn't changed over several playtest cycles). At level one, this is usually a total +4 (with point buy or the array), at the upper end, this is +11.

At some point (which looks like roughly the last minute, they actually looked at the bonuses they gave monsters, and realized they were absolutely fucked with DCs that started at 14 and ended at 21. As in a Black Dragon (10th level) had only a 55% chance of making a save vs a con based spell cast by a first level character, and that is one its good stats.

So they downshifted everything to force the numbers to sorta work. Monsters are still at a massive disadvantage, but this is pretty consistent- fighter types hit monsters laughably easily and are extremely hard to hit in return.

It is yet another example of the really bad math, and their random flailing to 'fix' it.

[tussock]

what was 3rd? moving towards a mix of FR and GH?

4th was eBerron, how else would they squeeze warfucked in there?

3e is pure Greyhawk (without a map), more so in the 3.0 class splats. There's very little in the core books that makes it difficult to transplant though.

4e is "points of light" (family-friendly grimdark), and the Nentir Vale, which is basically Thunder Rift from 1992 where there's a tiny map of a town in a valley with a small set of tame gods and that's it. It's got Warforged because it's the minis game, and the minis game had Warforged.

not everyone likes Planescape and Spelljammer to connect all the worlds, so keep it out of core.

Uh, core's always had the Great Wheel and multiple primes, dude. Folding spelljammer into the astral plane was brilliant in 4e. One of the few useful things they managed.

[JonSetanta]

It is yet another example of the really bad math, and their random flailing to 'fix' it.

3.Xe has a +2 bonus at level 1. I assume this counters the base 10 DC.

They could have increased the saves.

[Voss]

It is yet another example of the really bad math, and their random flailing to 'fix' it.

3.Xe has a +2 bonus at level 1. I assume this counters the base 10 DC.

They could have increased the saves.

Bounded accuracy and all that shit. Remember monster saves in 5e are just the stat. (Or for PCs, stat + prof bonus for class saves). Shifting the save bonus around* would be an admission that their overall structure doesn't work- and this is the key thing, I think. They utterly will not admit that stat bonus +d20 doesn't work for a lot of stuff in their system, but will try to stick to it to the point of insanity. Even when they do modify it (which is actually a lot), they still believe this core conceit is workable. But the reality is, the PCs are NEVER functioning on this system, while the monsters almost always are. And the disparity is huge and grows ridiculous into the higher levels, even with monsters ignoring the 20 cap on stats.

But changing the base DC means they don't have to overhaul monsters because its roughly equivalent to the 10+stat+ spellcasting bonus they were using earlier in the playtest when they wrote the monsters. Though that ranged from ~DC 14 at level 1 to DC 20 at level 20. They nerfed low level PCs a bit, but the DC now jumps to 14 at level 4, and 16 usually around 7, and then slows down on the haul to the upper teen levels.

But you're really going to run into creatures with +0 to shit like Dex and Wisdom all the way to level 20, though Con based spells are largely a bad choice as you get higher in level. Take the pit fiend, with a +5 con and +1 dex. At that level (17), you should be throwing a base DC of 20 on every spell (maybe higher with bullshit magic items), and it either has a 30% chance of saving or a 10% chance.**


*except, obviously, they do it for PCs, so... yeah. Consistency isn't exactly a trait here. But their primary audience is concerned with feel and getting a bonus on 1 or 2 saves (or all of them if you multiclass right), or more if you happen to have a 6th level paladin around (sigh- yeah- you can shove PC saves up around +10 at 6th level, and monster DCs sometimes still float around 12 or 13).
**meanwhile its save DCs are 15 and 16, and much of the party can be rocking out with +10 to wisdom and con saves, or have a paladin around to push them to 10 if they don't, or 15 if they do. Because fuck you, encounter design.

[OgreBattle]

why are they doing bonded accuracy, it just causes problems that they can't fix.

[Sashi]

Bounded accuracy just means putting caps on modifiers people can get. You can cap attack and skill modifiers at +20, and cap defenses and spell DC's at 30 and you've got Bounded accuracy. I don't even know if that's a bad thing, since it pretty much says "People are not allowed to blow the RNG out of the water" and "You're not allowed to stack Diplomacy bonuses until turning someone into your fanatical follower is a trivial roll, even with the -10 penalty for turning your Diplomacy check into a standard action."

What they're doing instead is "No level-based bonuses", which isn't the same thing at all. There's literally no "boundary" to the modifiers that people can get, as long as they keep searching for little bonuses to stack. That's exactly the opposite of bounded accuracy.

[Voss]

why are they doing bonded accuracy, it just causes problems that they can't fix.

Big numbers confuse people. Or something. I've never seen a coherent explanation for it, but it demonstrably shatters just with stuff in the playtest material.

Fun things that snap the game:

potions of heroism: add 2 to Attacks, saves , checks and DCs.

robe of the archmagi: advantage on all saves vs magic, +2 to all DCs, AC 15+dex, +2 to magic attacks. Requirement: ability cast at least one spell from the wizard's spell list. Even assuming this actually means 'prepare spells as a wizard' rather than the literal meaning (because everyone has detect magic on their fucking spell list), multiclassing is a thing that exists.

Anyway, these two alone let you shove spell DCs off the RNG so quickly it isn't even funny.

ioun stones: fucking things.

belts of giant strength- Hey lets bind PC stats to 20 max. Then, uh, break that. Hill giant strength (21) literally doesn't matter, but 25+ up really matters. (AC 18 max on monsters so far... the math is really easy).

plate mail and shield plus any kind of AC bonus at all. No, seriously, as soon as you start stacking spells and effects to this, the game is over for most monsters. Add in the ability to give disadvantage to attackers (which is really common, as either spells or fucking class abilities at levels 2 or 3), and your odds of getting hit spiral out of bounds before level 5.

pearls of power Have a bag, they're only uncommon. Yeah, they only work on spells of level 3 or less, but that includes fuck you shit like haste, prayer or blur. A lot of higher level spells scale badly anyway. But those lesser effects stack up in a nasty way against those tight numbers being used by monsters.

[Cyberzombie]

Bounded accuracy just means putting caps on modifiers people can get. You can cap attack and skill modifiers at +20, and cap defenses and spell DC's at 30 and you've got Bounded accuracy. I don't even know if that's a bad thing, since it pretty much says "People are not allowed to blow the RNG out of the water" and "You're not allowed to stack Diplomacy bonuses until turning someone into your fanatical follower is a trivial roll, even with the -10 penalty for turning your Diplomacy check into a standard action."

What they're doing instead is "No level-based bonuses", which isn't the same thing at all. There's literally no "boundary" to the modifiers that people can get, as long as they keep searching for little bonuses to stack. That's exactly the opposite of bounded accuracy.

I'm not sure why they don't just use Mutants and Masterminds style bonus caps. That would work a lot better to achieve the Bounded Accuracy they're trying for. If you set a 24 AC as the absolute cap at 4th level, you don't have to worry about people finding all sorts of bonuses to stack.

That seems more sound to me for a game that's designed to have all sorts of new (and likely game-breaking) material.

Their current design methodology is ridiculously stupid, given that they've actually removed the 3E style bonus stacking, and just said everything stacks. Anyone who has played any edition of D&D should know how terrible of an idea that is if the goal is bounded accuracy.

[tussock]

One might even question why they don't just cap the part they want to be beatable, like AD&D capped AC at -10 (so you can just hit things at high level even if they do break your sword or whatever) and save modifiers at -4 (so you can just make your saves similarly). Give or take for a couple epic monsters.

I suppose that would be admitting their mistakes, and human beings are basically insane at continuously finding new justifications for their own long-past decisions, imagining mistakes to be things that other people make. It's how people can still play AD&D, after all.

[K]

ioun stones: fucking things.

There are no versions of ioun stones that should not die in an ioun fire.

[ishy]

Hmmm, I don't mind the ioun stone whose only function is that it shines light as a torch.

[TiaC]

A parrying ioun stone isn't bad either. It's just a reskinned helmet.

[Voss]

You're either very confused about what parrying is, or you don't understand the basic concept of helmet. I'm not sure which is worse.

Alternately, I suppose it could be both, but I'm not sure you can be that stupid and still post on a forum.

[JonSetanta]

Hmmm, I don't mind the ioun stone whose only function is that it shines light as a torch.

Continual Flame + "Dead" stone

[Voss]

Hmmm, I don't mind the ioun stone whose only function is that it shines light as a torch.

Continual Flame + "Dead" stone

Dancing Lights. They don't mark you as an obvious fucking target.

[infected slut princess]

why are they doing bonded accuracy, it just causes problems that they can't fix.

They want bounded accuracy so goblins will be "a threat" at all levels, and DMs can fapfapfap all day to "omg lol ur kielled bye teh golblins!!" at level 15. Which might be funny for the 30-minute dick-around-at-lunchtime games they have at the WotC offices, but for everyone else that is retarded.

Hilariously, even this stupid design goal is not being met, according to character AC versus monster to-hit numbers. Red Dragons struggle to hit level 1 losers in plate mail with a shield. But in any case, the original plan was for everyone to have a reasonable chance of hitting anyone else, no matter the levels. Hit points would be the differentiating feature between level 1 fuckface and level 20 Hero with a 12" Dick, rather than attack bonuses, AC, and saves.

[TiaC]

You're either very confused about what parrying is, or you don't understand the basic concept of helmet. I'm not sure which is worse.

Alternately, I suppose it could be both, but I'm not sure you can be that stupid and still post on a forum.

Parrying, as in an ioun stone that interposes itself between your head and attacks, thereby parrying them. The mechanical effects of this would be to prevent attacks from hitting your head, which is also the purpose of a helmet. I'm not sure why this is so hard.

[JonSetanta]

A cloud of interposing ioun stones?

Bbbut that's against the rules!