The Gaming Den

If you use tiered conditions, then stunned is soaked to dazed.

If you use healing surge mechanics, have it expend your surge for the fight.

CapnTthePirateG wrote:I feel like Koumei floated the 'take X damage or a condition' as a thing earlier.

Here's a dumb question: What if everything had this ability, X was a sizable amount of damage, and there were no such things as saves (so it was choose between paralysis and X amount of damage)?

Enchantment and Conjuration would synergize a lot better with Evocation.

CapnTthePirateG wrote:Here's a dumb question: What if everything had this ability, X was a sizable amount of damage, and there were no such things as saves (so it was choose between paralysis and X amount of damage)?

Nemesis Age does this - you have Vigor Points that you spend to avoid wounds and conditions, and Health Points that represent actual physical trauma and eventual death. Players all pretty much have the same amount of HP (20), and you are incapacitated at 10 or fewer and die at 0. Weapon damage ranges from 1d6 (punch from an untrained character) to 4d8 (critical hit with a battleaxe using a Mastery Attack), and SoD spells generally just straight-up deal a big stack of damage dice - something like 5d6 - that would be more than sufficient to kill a character.

When you are targeted by an attack and fail to defend, you can spend VP to negate the effects of that attack. Right now, I think it's 10 VP to avoid an attack, 10 to negate a critical, and 20 to avoid or remove an incapacitating condition (stun, paralysis, etc), but it's easy to fiddle with the numbers to tune the ability at present. You can also spend 10 VP at any time to drop into a Guard stance that gives you +10 to all defenses until the start of your next turn, which helps to prevent getting focused (and enables some counter-attack abilities for some characters).

The kicker is that people generally don't have a lot of VP - a first-level character tends to have around 20, with a gain of about 10 per level (to a max of around 200ish at level 20), so even a few modest attacks can deplete a less-experienced character's defensive reserves quickly while a high-level character can hold out against multiple opponents for several rounds.

Koumei wrote:It might not result in a bad game, but it'd be quite different from D&D as we know it. People would always choose to take damage instead of losing their actions (particularly for long durations), and probably never choose to take damage instead of small penalties and crap, depending on HP and damage.

That's true - and the truth is, it's better, in my opinion. When an enemy targets my character with an SoD, I still feel pressure to make my defense roll (analogous to a saving throw), but if I fail, I don't necessarily have to wander off to play Smash Brothers. Since I have to elect to activate the power, it gives me a feeling of having avoided something by using an ability in a way that simply "if you fail to defend against this ability, you lose 10 VP - if you cannot pay, you die" does not. Sure, they're functionally the same, but they feel different in actual play.

echo

Sounds like you're turning all interesting spell effects into boring ass evocations?

I feel like I've missed something, what's this "Nemesis Age"? Closest thing I could find, was some kind of supernatural-horror RPG? http://www.arcdream.com/pdf/Nemesis.pdf

Aryxbez wrote:I feel like I've missed something, what's this "Nemesis Age"? Closest thing I could find, was some kind of supernatural-horror RPG? http://www.arcdream.com/pdf/Nemesis.pdf

It's an in-development tabletop/online RPG my company's working on - I post about it here on the boards every now and then. Our site is still a work-in-progress, but you can take a look at our placeholder site at http://www.nemesisage.com.

Unrelated - that arcdream game has a monster in the bestiary called "Ye Liveliest Awfulness". Awesome!

echo

Mearls wrote:The original concept in 4th Edition was that solos and elites were meant to be size Large and bigger creatures—massive foes that by their nature posed a constant threat. ... That definition didn't stick over time.

Uh, the concept was (surely) the grid requires solo monsters to be at least 2x2 and preferably larger still so the PCs can all crowd around them without looking stupid. They used a bunch of interrupt actions to effectively give the monster multiple turns while not allowing them to wilfully concentrate damage (so the party takes appropriate bunches of damage, but each PC is still OK).

Legendary Creatures Ignore Your Silly Action Economy: Legendary Creatures Are Creatures of Destiny: Legendary Creatures Change Their Environment:

So, the action economy doesn't work, the save system doesn't work, and the encounter generation system that ignores terrain is stupid. Good to know.

Of course, my big old undead critters make the trees bleed a bit too, whatever, but it's not there to give bullshit monster-like environmental riders on the loners (it's forboding, so you don't casually stumble on nightwalkers and shit). I don't know, if your system is that one monster just doesn't work against 4 PCs without killing them, fix the underlying system. Math.




PS: The AD&D solution was to make various large monsters spread their attacks around somewhat (uniquely so per monster, because 1977, but often to target 3 PCs), and used area effects like big breath weapons and large auras, while also giving them more HP and easy saves by virtue of being bigger than you.

Standardise it by the new size categories and simple area affect patterns and so on, and use it. It works.

In the quiet of the night WotC put out a new 5e playtest. That sound you hear is absolutely no one caring. I downloaded it, but I really can't even be bothered to give much more than a glance because I can't even bring myself to care at this point.

With just a quick glance, roles are going to be super hard coded to classes, and even then you have to take the right path/feats for your class. If you are not a {dex} rogue, you will not ever be sneaky enough to matter. Skills, except 'Lore' are gone. Feats are the full run from 'you want this if it's part of your role' (Archery Master) to this feat may do nothing, even if it's your stick (Dual Wielder). Magic is very quickly becoming 'be a caster or be a loser.'

If anyone really cares I'll look at it more, but I guess this is really just a public service announcement.

You know out of all the things, what still gets me is the link to the playtest packs in the official email still sends me to the sign up page rather than the sign in page. After a year, you'd think they'd create a functional link for people.

Anyway- couple other highlights
disparity between humans and other races isn't as excessive. Humans aren't permanently up a point on starting stats, and other races get useful abilities instead of bonuses to the other 4 stats. Interestingly, half-orcs get +2 str, +1 con, which makes them fighter-types by default. The non-half races effectively choose classes based on their subrace.

Ugh. Lores are basically 3.x knowledges. Everybody pick two, and cease to care.

Attack bonuses are revised again. fighter ranges from +2 to +6, spellcasters from +1 to +3 (and this also adds to their spell DCs). Everyone else (including barbarians is in between, but barbs get advantage on all strength based attacks when raging, so whatever).

Mages (renamed wizards for whatever reason), specializing in enchantment get a fuck-you at level 8: whenever they are attacked at close range (25 ft), they auto-charm people. If the attacker fails a wisdom save, they attack someone else or lose their action. Undead and constructs auto-succeed).



Feats are weird. Oh. This is because of that weird shit a while back where feats are going to be equal to ability score improvements, and you pick one or the other. And otherwise, you don't get feats

Ability score improvement also varies by class (you get +2 to one score, or +1 to two, max of 20; or a feat)
Barbarian- 4, 9, 13, 18
Cleric- 4, 6!, 12, 16, 19
Druid- 4, 8, 12, 19
Fighter- 4, 6, 8, 12, 14, 16, 18 (it should also be noted that fighters also get advantage to all saves at level 13, and work their way up to 3 attacks per round- other classes cap at 2, plus a couple surge actions between rests)
Mage- 4, 8, 14, 19
Monk- 4, 9, 15, 18
Paladin- 4, 8, 16, 19
Ranger- 4, 9, 13, 17 (also weird- paladins get spells at level 2, rangers at level 3)
Rogue- 4, 7, 10, 14, 17, 19

Obviously this is some weird attempt to balance classes, but...


The major thing with feats, is most of them are pretty big, for example:
Alert
+5 to initiative
never surprised while conscious
advantage to all wisdom checks to spot or listen

On the other hand, some still kind of suck, despite giving several bonuses, so whatever. Quite a few (like the armor category and weapon category masteries), overlap with class features that you probably already have, like giving proficiency in the armor or weapon type, or do shit that should be inherent anyway- like thrown weapon mastery allows for throwing a weapon with each hand. The only real effect is no disadvantage from long range.

Notable feat- Lucky
gain 3 luck points (get them back at long rest). Spend and roll an additional d20 on attack, save, or check. Choose which roll to use. This can even apply to enemy attacks.


Two weapon fighting is standing out as a little borked. The rules are: when you attack, make an attack with both weapons. The second one doesn't get your ability score modifier to damage rolls.
Thats it. But there are a couple class features that do allow you to add your stat modifier. Always, and forever. So you just have more attacks.
It also isn't clear how the 'two attacks' and 'three attacks' class abilities interact. Do you make 2x attacks for every attack you have? It kind of suggests it, but the wording doesn't match up.


Also crits really suck. Really, really suck. take one of the damage dice, roll it again and add. Note that isn't anything but a single damage die, so a critical hit with a +5 greatsword and 20 strength doesn't do 4d6+20 damage. Or even 4d6+10. It does 3d6+10 instead of the normal greatsword damage of 2d6+10. 1d10 and 1d12 weapons add a passable chunk of damage at low levels (well, potentially), but honestly, whatever. You might as well not _have_ crits.

Fighter choosing his core mechanic at level 3 is interesting

Gladiator gets superiority dice and maneuvers
Knight can protect people adjacent to him
Warrior has passive bonuses for 'simplicity'

Voss wrote:You know out of all the things, what still gets me is the link to the playtest packs in the official email still sends me to the sign up page rather than the sign in page. After a year, you'd think they'd create a functional link for people.

ever since Gamer_zer0 "left" the discussion link on ALL articles on wizards.com only link to the forums and you have to hunt and find where the topic for each article is. they have no web team anymore that is competent, so why expect ANYTHING from the web for them to function, including emails?

OgreBattle wrote:Fighter choosing his core mechanic at level 3 is interesting

Gladiator gets superiority dice and maneuvers
Knight can protect people adjacent to him
Warrior has passive bonuses for 'simplicity'

warrior sucks ass. Fucking awareness is the best thing the warrior gets until level 15, simply because crits are so worthless in this iteration. Though once you get to 15, piercing or bludgeoning crits become rather good, but that is a long time to wait for sucking to pay off.


The light cleric is suddenly rather good at level 2, at least for a few levels. Since channel divinity can be used every encounter, he bombs everything in 25' for 2d10+level (save half) in every encounter. That is significant damage for the next 2-3 levels, and still relevant damage until level 8 or 9 or so.
Plus every single round he can inflict disadvantage on an enemy attack.

The war cleric is rather pants in comparison, simply because its abilities don't scale for shit.


Yeah, ok, here is a weird bit of design. Halberds are randomly excellent control weapons. Every time you do damage with one, the target makes a strength check or falls prone. Every fucking time. What the hell?
And standing up uses _all_ of your movement.

Bolos are similarly awesome team weapons- hit=save or be restrained=all attacks get advantage. The save is only 10, but at best that means a 20% failure chance- and effects things up to large, so this remains oddly relevant for an absurd amount of time- and given the monster design, has some odd targets- ropers, air elementals, beholders, chimeras...

Can you throw halberds at people?

What does everyone think of the Monk?

DDN playtest packets so far have me convinced we're about to have the third D&D system that failed to learn the right lessons from 3.5.

Awesome.

What lessons would that be?

Towards the end of 3.5 they actually were pretty good at making Tier 3 classes with a wide variety of mechanics. Which means they had a really nice selection of versatile and powerful classes that avoided the rocket-tag game. This of course created balanced martial and caster classes without them being remotely the same. To me this is the biggest missed lesson.

Pathfinder didn't follow this; it completely lacks balance. 4E didn't follow this; it lacks sufficient mechanic variety. And DDN seems to be going with the Pathfinder route.

They all have their own flaws beyond this, though they have their positive bits as well (even if some of those positive bits exist mostly as design goals).

Drachasor wrote:Towards the end of 3.5 they actually were pretty good at making Tier 3 classes with a wide variety of mechanics.

HAHAHA

Drachasor wrote:Towards the end of 3.5 they actually were pretty good at making Tier 3 classes with a wide variety of mechanics. Which means they had a really nice selection of versatile and powerful classes that avoided the rocket-tag game. This of course created balanced martial and caster classes without them being remotely the same. To me this is the biggest missed lesson.

Tier 3 is fighter tier right?
I prefer classes with more options myself.

But I don't think there is much difference between the start and end of 3.5.
At the start they had to sometimes deliberately make classes / prestige classes shitty, because their audience is terrible at knowing what is and is not balanced.

While the new classes are not that special either.
Tome of battle was created to make martial spell casters. And could really use some refinement. It was actually the basis for 4e too.
Magic of Incarnum had an awesome concept, but the execution is just fucked.
Tome of magic has awesome flavour, but the class mechanics are terrible.

Prestige classes vary between awesome and completely worthless in all the books.

ishy wrote:Tier 3 is fighter tier right?
I prefer classes with more options myself.

No, Tier 3 is the Factotum to Dread Necromancer Tier. Also known as:

The Tiers are completely arbitrary Tier.

Tires Don Exits, anyway.

OgreBattle wrote:Can you throw halberds at people?

What does everyone think of the Monk?

As far as I can tell, you can't throw anything that doesn't have the 'thrown' property. As in, the system does not let you do things if the proper tag doesn't exist. 'Improvised Weapons' focuses pretty heavily on melee, but also has a clause for treating things sort of like a specific weapon as that weapon. You could make an argument for treating a halberd like a spear for throwing, but then it would have the spear rules, and not the halberd rules.
Oddly enough (but perhaps unsurprisingly) there is no mechanical penalty for improvised weapons. Using a petrified giant cock as a club as a career decision is apparently just fine, and in all respects, just a club.


Monks look pretty good, actually (for 5e) There is a lot of superfluous shit, but they inherently get to exploit two weapon fighting (and the way of the open hand exploits it better, though not till 11th level), can get extra attacks based on ki on top of that, and have various and sundry abilities that do things, at what is generally the normal DC (10+stat mod+attack bonus, same as wizards and clerics). Monk AC is actually potentially better than anyone else's, unless they get +3 armor of the best type; with the exception of people who use shields.

The expertise die may or may not matter. As far as I can tell an 'ability check' is completely distinct from attacks and saves (which are also distinct from each other) so it would only effect the skills that are now... gone. Shit like hide and notice and lockpicking are in the rules anyway, and it would affect that stuff, so... actually monks make pretty good thieves. Proficiency with thieves tools can be picked up as part of a background, so you could have a monk that can sneak, pick locks and disarm traps really well (just as well as a rogue, except at first level), so thats... something.

Ki is done reasonably well, since it starts with multiple points and refreshes on essentially an encounter basis (short rest). So you can flurry and get more attacks on top of your two weapon shenanigans, speed up, stun, get some damage resistance, or pick up some odd elemental effects (of varying quality).


Someone mentioned system mastery (either here or in the other thread)- at the moment system mastery looks really fucking easy. As in there are things that are obviously good, and things that obviously suck.
As an example of this we have the bow vs the crossbow. short/light are simple weapons, heavy/long are martial. This is dumb. Because the stat line is this:
identical gold cost, identical damage, heavier weight on crossbows, identical (or longer range for longbow in the case of heavy xbow vs longbow) and the properties are ammunition, two handed and in the case of crossbows, loading. As in, you must use and action or reaction (minor improvement, unless you need to use those) to reload the damn thing. Which makes a crossbow inferior a bow, full stop. There is never any reason for anyone to use a crossbow. At all.

Armor is still dumb. Medium armor exists at level one, right up to the point where you get 500gp and can move to splint or dragon leather (depending if your dex is 18+ or not).

Voss wrote:Someone mentioned system mastery (either here or in the other thread)- at the moment system mastery looks really fucking easy. As in there are things that are obviously good, and things that obviously suck.

I'd add on that you are making so few choices that you can't really make the character you want anymore.

Things you get to choose when creating a 1st level character:
- Where your randomly rolled stats go
- Race
- Class
- Background
- Equipment

You don't get paths until 3rd level, and then you only get the choice once and are stuck with it forever.

You don't get feats/ability score increases until 4th, you only get 4-5 ever, and it's a pretty clear cut case if you want a feat or not. I.e. If I am a Barbarian with a great axe, I can instantly cut out 7 feats because I will never use them, remove 3 more because they are part of feat chains, reducing the 25 feats to 15 at most. If I don't get suckered into the magic feat chain trap, there are 9 feats left to choose from.



Also, I challenge anyone to make an archer in 5e that isn't a rogue, and doesn't suck a ton.

Fighter archer seems fine. Notably the 5th level fighter is getting multiple attacks with the same bonus to hit as a 15th level rogue, who never gets multiple attacks (which puts the rogue behind almost any class except mages, since the rogue has the exact same shitty attack bonus). I'm not actually sure what makes the rogue a particularly good archer, as sneak attack is miles easier to get in melee. Someone else just has to stand there.

Edit: nevermind. That isn't restricted to melee, for... reasons. Still, the fighter's multiple attacks keep up with sneak attack damage pretty well. 1d8+5 is actually better than 2d6, 3d6 brings them back up to around par, (though you'll have item bonuses on top for the fighter), and SA doesn't catch back up to the potential of three attacks until around 17th, and that doesn't count the action surge once per fight either.

Additionally, archers in general don't seem much worse than melee characters, aside from not having a shield bonus to AC.


As for choices, yeah there are fewer. And they obviously need more classes. But I'm not sure I really care that much about loss of skills, as long as the DCs are functional (though... they aren't, so that is a problem). Feats... eh. I actually like that the feats give more, rather than the 4e shit of '+3 damage with crossbows.' But everything else is problematic: the lack of feats, the lack of places to choose feats, and the fundamentally fucked idea that in a game where every die roll is stat mod + dice roll, a feat can be at all equal to stat bonuses.

But I'm fine with the subclass/path thing- I don't really care enough to think that a gladiator should be wholly different from a warrior, or that enchanters, illusionists and evokers need entirely different class structures- the abilities differentiate them enough. Though some of them (like the warrior and evoker) need a lot of work, because they suck.



Rant on ability check DCs:
Mearls fails at math again.
All ability checks are d20+ stat mod (which is hard capped at +5). Some classes (or paths) for some attributes, have an expertise die which is a bonus to all abilities checks for that stat, and really ranges from d4 to d12. Some classes have no access to an expertise die. Ability check DCs are:
Easy 10
Moderate 15
Hard 20
Very Hard 25
Formidable 30.... this should obviously be 'Impossible' because it actually is impossible without an expertise die. 20+5 = 25.

So, the ability check system is set up so you failed at moderately difficult tasks about half the time if you're specialized in a stat (maxed it out), or easy tasks if you're just average in a stat. Its the comedy of failures all over again.

Also, I challenge anyone to make an archer in 5e that isn't a rogue, and doesn't suck a ton.

Good news, that. If archers don't suck, everyone has to be an archer, including all the monsters that you care about. Half the monster manual doesn't suit being archers, so it's good that they don't have to be.

tussock wrote:Good news, that. If archers don't suck, everyone has to be an archer, including all the monsters that you care about. Half the monster manual doesn't suit being archers, so it's good that they don't have to be.

lolwut