The Gaming Den

Certainly, yes, but "worm that walks" should be a playable character type if it's a possible villain type.

"playable centipede hivemind" is pushing the envelope of realistic game expectations in the same way that "playable gelatinous cube" is

Prak_Anima wrote:Certainly, yes, but "worm that walks" should be a playable character type if it's a possible villain type.

not necessarily.
a villain type is a villain type because it makes for a good antagonist.
PCs are supposed to be the protagonists.

The 2 are not necessarily interchangeable -- nor should they be.
yes, sometimes the 2 can be swapped; but that should be the exception, not the rule.

I don't think it's necessary that possible character types be thrown so wide open.

You need to give some thought to the identity you want for the game, especially these days when organized play has become so ubiquitous. Are parties of increasingly bizarre characters something that you want to encourage or does it dilute the character of D&D and lead to lots of people making gimmick characters and settings that are unbelievable?

The book has playable facehuggers! I am entitled to play facehuggers!

Dealing with strange playable races is annoying. Finding mature gamers is just as hard as finding mature DM's, so the more points of potential conflict you add, the more conflict you will have, and PC races that make no sense can do that. But having strange, playable things is also kind of fun when it doesn't lead to total party cohesion meltdown.

Marks don't even vaguely resemble aggro. It's actually a good idea. It's just that 4e has giant fucking loopholes that make many marks useless without optimization through clever use of readied actions by monsters (or just shift+charge).

A -2 to make single target attacks that don't include the PC generating the mark is meaningless in any scenario where PC defense values differ by at least 2 points and not far from meaningless in scenarios where the opponent has an Area of Effect attack.

Those two cases combine and simplify to "damn near all of the time", meaning that marked as a status in 4e is a useless waste of tracking condition durations - even before you get to shifting, charging and readying action loopholes.. It's only meaningful for class abilities that can trigger off of it, and those abilities could have been designed to trigger off of something else just as effectively.

But the rough idea is actually pretty good and very salvageable.

Yeah, the rough idea of PC's having taunt or damage attraction abilities is fine.

And if, you scaled Marked up to be equivalent to Blind (-5) or Daze or Prone+Push, something where it actually has meaningful penalties and can prevent attacks in some circumstances then it would be worthwhile. At least provided you also streamlined duration tracking to something sane.

imo the knight's aoo against creatures in his aura radius works pretty well for discouraging people not to attack him

angelfromanotherpin wrote:

tzor wrote:I'm going to take the stand of an old fart and say what we need is a revised Original AD&D Edition; with simple inflexible classes and lots and lots of tables.

We have that already. In many incarnations. Hackmaster, Castles & Crusades, Labyrinth Lord, OSRIC, Dark Dungeons, Swords & Wizardry, et multiple cetera. That market is fucking crowded.

I'd argue that we in fact don't. A lot of these games (I have never played Hackmaster but I have played C&C) have significant numbers of late 1E / proto 2E design elements in them. Some have third party concepts in them that people would later hate and dispise (critical hit / fumble tables were not really a core AD&D concept, for example).

I personally don't want any 1E in my DnD peanut butter.

That said, how is a 1E-style game better in ways that board games/warhammer aren't?

Ok, so then there's the question. How bizarre of characters do people think the average game should have?

Personally, I think the gates are pretty much wide open, obviously. But then I favour alien elves, xenophobic dwarves, sentient plants, giant bugs, and swarms in armour as setting pieces.

Modular race design may be an advantage.

Chargen would take longer, but it would cut out a lot of the nonsense regarding racial subtypes. Playing an elf? Take the race and a racial/social package of your choice, such as half elf, extra magical or shits in the woods.

Ideally, I would like background choices such as race to influence advancement and actually improve over the course of a campaign. I want more then a cosmetic difference between a high level dwarf beatstick and a high level orc with the same class, for example.

Paying a feat tax to make a background option distict is not the way to go.

Yet again, FantasyCraft did it. That part worked well, but made character creation harder. Like, noticeably harder, especially for the first time.

Prak_Anima wrote:Ok, so then there's the question. How bizarre of characters do people think the average game should have?

Early D&D was heavily wedded to Tolkienesque where you could be a human, elf, dwarf, halfling or half-orc. This worked well enough for Howardesque campaigns where you could sub in pointy ears or beards for skin colors and nobody would call you racist to your face, and was workable for Lieberesque campaigns where the PCs are limited to humans and martial classes but you can have NPC star wizards and wererats.

But early D&D was also 40 years of pop-culture ago. So the differences between Human, Human-with-pointy ears, angry-human-with-tusks and short-human-with-beard just don't seem all that meaningful in light of the fantasy source material that's happened since.

The options are to either throw things wide open kitchen sink style where everybody is a different type of forehead alien, or do what D&D has done all along and pick 6-15 different generally playable races.

However if someone where to ask me which playable races we should have, I would point out that pop culture in the past 40 years has included 9-ft tall blue elves, a wide variety of space faring muppets, two metric wanktons of vampire erotica, furrygirl kingdoms, shapeshifting smoke monsters, warrior mice, and a whole lot of androids. And I contend that the base race list would probably do better to reflect those trends than to stick to the tolkienesque base of prior editions.

TLDR version: D&D needs a tight list of standardly playable race so that people can keep track of and have some idea what each race is. But the entries on that list should probably be something much more along the lines of Vampire, Android, Catgirl, Jolly Blue Giant, Sentient Mouse, Shapeshifter, Muppet from the stars than yet another rehash of the Fellowship of the Ring party.

Well, I'm not really proposing a giant list of every possible fantasy trope as a players handbook race, just that monsters be created such that it's relatively easy for people to play a monster instead of one of the standard PHB races, if their group is amenable to it.

TLDR version: D&D needs a tight list of standardly playable race so that people can keep track of and have some idea what each race is. But the entries on that list should probably be something much more along the lines of Vampire, Android, Catgirl, Jolly Blue Giant, Sentient Mouse, Shapeshifter, Muppet from the stars than yet another rehash of the Fellowship of the Ring party.

ugh absolutely not. if you want to include that shit in splatbooks, then I'm all for it, but to disregard things like orcs, gnomes, elves, etc. in favor of catgirl is retarded and doesn't feel very D&D

Like it or not, Tolkien is one of the very bases in that D&D was created. Disregarding that for a bunch of races coming from a generic anime clusterfuck is a REALLY bad idea.

Also, Avatar furries and Twilight vampires (that could be blood fairies for what it matters) are horrible ideas and should have not been created ever.

but to disregard things like orcs, gnomes, elves, etc. in favor of catgirl is retarded and doesn't feel very D&D

Well then I guess that the Human, Android, Catgirl. Muppet, PC group has no place at your game table.

I'm all for flushing Tolkien's influence down the lavatory, even if it does mean Avatar, Muppets, anime and vampires.

quanta wrote:What? Being able to heal to full after combat encourages a 5-minute workday? What the fuck are you smoking?

When I talk about the 5 minute work day, I'm using it a bit differently than it's normally used, and I apologize for that. I don't want my PCs deciding to rest, or being forced to rest for 5 minutes, or x minutes or whatever after every combat, be it to regain hp, powers or anything else so important that it would be stupid not to take 5 minutes after every single thing that happens.
 

Agreed. If you want 1st level characters to have about a 1/20 chance of dying per attack then more HP is a bad idea. And for some people this IS desirable. They seriously don't want 1st level characters getting into anything vaguely resembling a fair fight. They want to live by their wits and such. But in the context of how 3e and 4e play, the only way to go is the "more hitpoints" route of 4e (although the ratio has fluctuated somewhat across the edition).

 
Or you could reduce weapon potency, or increase other defenses like making armor provide both AC and DR or you could change the HP system. Increasing HP isn't the only, nor the best way, to increase survivability at low levels. It's just a quick way. So, no the only way isn't to go more HP like 4e.
 

Balance problems aren't solved but solving them is easier and making the rules take less fucking time to comprehend sure is nice. Being able to go from playing a fighter in one campaign to a wizard in another fairly smoothly is a good thing.
 
But really, there's no reason to stick to the micro-vancian system of 4e. The point is just that reusing the same resource scheme for all classes is a lot simpler and easier to balance (unless you just plan to outright disallow multiclassing and such, but if people can dip into other classes powers it's a lot simpler if everyone is on the same resource schedule). The system can be WoF, 4e-powers, an MP system, whatever.

 
I disagree. I specifically don't want everything to be the same class with the serial number filed off. It's extremely boring and monotonous, and 4e has done a pretty good job of showing that. I don't view ease as favorable in the design/balancing process as opposed to doing it right. If they system can't be balanced in an appropriate amount of time, or if the system can be balanced by essentially looking off a 1 page table, I think you're much, much better off scrapping the system all together.
 

No, not anyone could do it in an hour. Seriously, for the sake of making DMing stupid easy, good guidelines for making new monsters really should be right there in the DMG. And that means going above and beyond the 4e guidelines to having your DMG give guidelines about noncombat abilities, movement modes, status effects, etc.

 
Yes anyone could do it in an hour. Grab excel, slap the relevant numbers in, sort by cr and the find the median. Ta-da instant chart for cr appropriate Saves, AC and BAB. The only long part is actually looking up and entering the numbers. The rest takes less than a minute.
 
Creating actual abilities is where balancing gets hard and charts just do not work. How much cr is being able to turn a 10'x10' section of floor into lava worth? It depends on a number of factors. Again this is where we need actual guides, not idiotic charts on average saves/ac or BAB. Those are simplistic to generate for anyone, don't actually do much when designing monsters and in my experience leads to homogenization of creatures.
 

And the great thing about standards is having so many of them, amirite? This really is a problem for 3.5 system bloat (psionics, incarnum, ToB, binder, truenamer, shadowcaster...).

 
Everyone of those is internally consistent with their formatting. Since that's what we're talking about unless you can point out examples where those addon subsystems are not constantly formatted, you have no point. The point was about formatting, not a fascist 1 system for everything from melee attacks, to spell casting, to knocking over boxes, to jumping, to using magic items because that flat out does not work.
 

And seriously, it's actually a good idea for monsters to come with all the most important combat powers completely spelled out. And everything should at least have a short description that makes the monster usable from its stat block alone in the majority of cases.
 
Having to look up, print a big stack of cards, or memorize how various spells work in order to run monsters sucks.

 
The reason 4e doesn't have you memorizing a bunch of spells is because 4e monsters don't actually cast spells. Instead they have a couple 'powers' like Evil Eye which there are 4 or 5 completely different version of, so they had to print everything out and make the 'powers' really simple to fit everything. Otherwise you'd have to memorize 5 different versions of Evil Eye and 400 other silly abilities. So the only reason 4e even seems better is because of how simplistic it has to be to work, which directly cuts down on it's ability to both create interesting encounters and interesting mechanics without it just becoming magical tea party.
 

And are you suggesting the DM should fucking play his monsters dumb so they don't go beat the shit out of the wizard or something? Because I can't make heads or tails of "Marks and auras as a method of aggro control is stupidly pointless when you have a DM controlling the monsters who can do it better than terrible, weak mechanics anyways".

 
I'm suggesting that monsters shouldn't just rush past fighters because 'lol he only does 2d6+4 damage.'  I'm saying that when you've killed 8 kobolds yourself without taking a scratch that last kobold isn't going to fight to the death with you. I'm saying that mechanics and rules have no place dictating the actions of monsters as long as there is a DM.
 
Josh_Kablack has it right. But notice that none of what he's suggested is actually a taunt or outright damage attraction ability. The monster choosing to attack the PC would be a side effect of having a good ability that was useful/dangerous as opposed to having one to specifically be an MMO tank.
 
http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/ ... #332837554

Originally Posted by WotC_Mearls
Aggro in D&D is a big issue. In early drafts, there were much more explicit rules for it, where monsters had to attack the fighter or paladin or a creature's tactics dictated that it attack the nearest foe. All that stuff is gone.
 
....  In early playtests, the fighter soaked up all the attacks and then.... soaked up some more attacks.
 
....However, his ability does not say that the monster must attack him. It makes it a better option, but doesn't eliminate other options.
 
.... There are no mechanics that compel the monster to attack anyone (well, a specific spell might do that, but we already have that in D&D). We want DMs to make NPC fighters and paladins, and it would be really dumb if the DM had to impose a threat or aggro mechanic that dictated who the PCs had to attack.

 
Despite the disconnects in that post alone, marks are clearly aggro mechanics and meant to be used as such. They're just not binary 'I used this, you will now attack me' as Taunt is in say WoW, but they explicitly came exactly from that and it's blindingly obvious. The problem again, is that they didn't need to worry about aggro, they needed to worry about fighters being a credible threat or actually giving them the ability to stop monsters through abilities rather than doing anything to manage aggro or introducing taunts under the guide of 'marks.'
 

Temporary ability score modifiers are a terrible idea. Why? Because then everything that references that ability score needs to be changed. This slows down play.

 
Increasing your str by 4 points in the middle of combat is essentially a +2 modifier to anything that's based on str. You don't have to go through and recalculate everything, generally just add 2 when you do anything that's modified by str. I don't have to sit down, recalculate all my attacks and damage, my carrying capacity and my skills just because my str went up. Temporary stat mods are just like any other  temporary bonus in that respect.
 

Actually, bonus typing was just dumb in the first place. Continually adding new types of bonuses is even dumber. Because it makes bonus stacking rules more complicated and benefits the player who dumpster dives to combine a bunch of different types of tiny bonuses together to get one huge bonus.

 
Well written bonus stacking rules wouldn't get more complicated with more types of bonuses. 3.5 rules were actually decent, it's was just that number of types, and the size of bonuses wasn't kept in check. 4e suffers the same problems of number of and size of bonuses not being keep in check, it's just better hidden because everything is so same that it all runs together until you start paying attention.
 

Numerical bonuses should be capped or better yet players should only be able to be affected by a certain number of buffs max. Buffing routines are fucking annoying, newbie unfriendly, and unthematic.

 
Buffing routines didn't happen much in 3.5 because buffs either lasted long enough that they ran all the time, or if they didn't, buffing was a waste of time compared to actually doing something else in combat. There's no need to cap numerical bonuses if you don't do stupid stuff with adding huge amounts of, or large bonuses which both 3.5 and 4e fail at. There might be some benefit in capping the number of buffs a player can have, but I suspect it would be more pointless bookkeeping and lead to more dumpster diving than actually designing good buffs in the first place and not capping them.

I think that the whole idea of tanks and meatshields and aggro management is kind of dumb. It creates 'must have' roles in the party; not just for the tank but the need to have something to tank.

Personally I'd prefer something like Pokemon where classes had different affinities and whatnot. But not just a strict 'Red is better than Green', it should have a sliding scale tradeoff. Red takes AND gives extra damage to Purple. Green gives less damage to Purple and takes less damage. So you don't have a designated 'tank' class, it's a role that switches depending on the monster configuration. If the monsters are mostly Purple and you have a Green Wizard and a Red Barbarian, the Wizard lays down Zone of Controls and Chaff while the Barbarian hurls axes and rocks from safety. If there are two Red Barbarians in the party it favors an 'ambush' setup. If there are two Green Wizards it favors a lockdown and slow bleed/damage agnostic tactics.

Let's see:

MMO aggro mechanics are only there to justify Tanks. Without them, like in Player vs. Player, the only things left are DPS and Healers.

To get rid of that, a solution that I have seen is to simply give the Crowd Control shtick to Tanks. That way, there's a good reason to attack him first: He's using his powers to stun/inmobilize/grapple you so you can't reach the other party members.

And Psychic beats everything.

Well then I guess that the Human, Android, Catgirl. Muppet, PC group has no place at your game table.

in truth probably not, I actually prefer human groups because I feel that the players and I can relate to them better than stereotypes and clichés of demi-humans. however, I am certainly fine with adding these things to the game in splatbooks (note my favorite race in D&D also happens to be my avatar). I certainly wouldn't trade races like elf and dwarf for psiforged in the main book though

Chamomile wrote:And Psychic beats everything.

The Dark-type would like a word with you.

CapnTthePirateG wrote:

Chamomile wrote:And Psychic beats everything.

The Dark-type would like a word with you.

Steel-type can slug it out with them, too.