The Gaming Den

I've never understood why they picked that quote. Frank is more restrained nowadays. If they'd wanted to ban him for being rude they could've went to any of his other posts and probably found something better.

FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1186297342[/unixtime]]Skip Williams liked to be treated as an infallible Pope of D&D.

I don't normally like to comment on real life people, but I really want to put an "amen" on that one. Mostly because the real irony is not obvious to the casual observer. You see, skip is neither.

Skip's biggest problem is that he pulls rules out of thin air (or out of his ass whichever is closest). At least popes have to go through the motions of reading all the decisions of prior popes all the way back to the early church fathers.

And the biggest fuck of all is that he's still doing it. The famous rules decree now enshrined in the FAQ that dwarf beards grow at the same rate as humans but takes 10 years to fully mature is the perfect example of the above.

Skip thinks he's the pope, but he's really the Wizard of Oz; a charlatan, a con artist, someone who is not what he claims to be, but still gets, in the end, a paycheck.

Isn't it Andy Collins who's The Sage now, and hence the self-acknowledged expert in the growth of dwarf-beards?

I'm very out of touch on what Wizards/Hasbro/whoever and the tiny little minions they own are doing, but why did the topic of dwarf beards even come up?

I mean, I can understand someone writing in about the Truenamer (for example), saying that the numbers don't work out and how the hell is this mechanic supposed to work, but...

there seems a rather big difference between crunchy rules questions and the fluffy stuff which is entirely author/campaign/DM prerogative.

Voss at [unixtime wrote:1186363979[/unixtime]]I'm very out of touch on what Wizards/Hasbro/whoever and the tiny little minions they own are doing, but why did the topic of dwarf beards even come up?

I mean, I can understand someone writing in about the Truenamer (for example), saying that the numbers don't work out and how the hell is this mechanic supposed to work, but...

there seems a rather big difference between crunchy rules questions and the fluffy stuff which is entirely author/campaign/DM prerogative.

Sage Advice (AKA the FAQ) was once just a column in Dragon Magazine. You could write in and ask about literally anything.

If you asked about something mechanical (especially broken or self-contradictory), you were usually told that you should "ask your DM" (usually you were "your DM", which is why you were asking).
If you asked some meaningless fluff about the rate of pubic hair growth on dwarves, you'd get a 3 paragraph essay (if you were lucky) might add some new broken and/or self-contradictory rules.

I remember the Sage Advice column from the long, long ago. I just didn't remember it being quite that stupid...

Usually, when I try to play-test something, I try to find as many ways to make rule loop-holes and ways to break the game as we know it. If I cannot do so, and it has been repeatedly tested in almost every single kind of event/fight/adventure/party and nothing glaringly broken came up, I will assume it to be balanced as long as someone else cannot find a way to break it.
But I wonder if the designers at WotC use this same technique. If any of you guys know how they play-test something for game balance, let me know.

Lol, when I tried to play a class other than some sort of druid/cleric or wizard "Hey wait, these guys are shit and do exactly nothing fun (Read: Cool stuff that clerics/druids/wizards do), what the hell is the point of these guys again"

One more question, Frank: When rules inconsistencies pop up, do you believe that making house rules on the spot is a good tactic or not? In one forum, I noticed you saying that more house rules makes the game worse. As rules inconsistencies pop up in all RPGs, if the Gamemaster can cook up a suitable house rule to clean up the damage, is that okay, or are official changes required? With infinite power loops, and the knowledge of their existence is made aware, most RPG players can hand wave the ridiculous rule. So how would official changes change anything other than making the game designers admit that they're wrong?

P.S. Can you explain these Spell Dancing, More Wishes, Balor Mining, Phoenix Duplication, Chain Binding, and Archer Clerics?

P.P.S. The link is here:
http://www.enworld.org/archive/index.php/t-64108.html

And more required house rules = a worse rules set. Period. End of discussion.

I want the rules to stop all the infinite power abuses and I am willing to employ house rules to make it so.




fixed broken quote tag --Z

Captain_Bleach at [unixtime wrote:1186376669[/unixtime]]
But I wonder if the designers at WotC use this same technique. If any of you guys know how they play-test something for game balance, let me know.

WotC literally does not playtest things.

If any of you guys know how they play-test something for game balance, let me know.

Funny story... WotC fired their playtest department moving in to 3.5. At that point they stopped proactive playtesting altogether.

Now what they do is detail a certain number of people to read the WotC board and suggest courses of action which will remove the most vocal complaints. That's why in the 3.5 revision they nerfed haste, and harm rather than planar binding.

But here's the really epic part: they can effectively reduce balance complaints by banning people who frequently voice balance complaints! Furthermore, they can also reduce balance complaint overhead by making things incomprehensible. I can't possibly stress this enough: according to the current WotC balance success criteria the Polymorph Subschool revisions were a complete success. Not because they aren't broken or anything, but because noone knows how they work any more and the shape changing spells stopped showing up in detailed writeups for builds.

Remember: to meet your goals you don't have to raise your sights - you have to lower expectations!

-Username17

WotC literally does not playtest things.

How do you know this? What if they try to play-test, but simply play an entirely different game than we do?

Edit: This was posted before I read Frank's response.

If Frank's post wasn't enough for you, look in any 3.5 book. There are no playtester credits. None. Ever.

When I play D&D, I have fun, but whenever obvious game balance issues prop up, or I look at the rules examples on these boards, I suddenly feel an urge that as it stands, D&D is inherently unbalanced and cannot be fixed. Yet despite these obvious imbalances, the players who have characters that are not Clerics/Druids/Wizards still have fun, and isn't that the point of RPGs? What is it that I want? Even though I read through Frank and K's Tomes, I still feel that even with these rules, D&D is still broken. What should I do?

Play a better system. That's what me and my friends decided to do.

Of course, they like Storyteller, but at least we're designing our own variation without the shitiness of White Wolf rules.

Give in to the dark side, free form it up a bit, manipulate the rules so your players still have fun and bang your golden? Just give the fighter the artefact sword or whatever and go for it

Play a better system.

What systems would you consider "better?"

If you want to stick to d20, Star Wars: Saga Edition was fun and is less horrible than D&D.

How was it overall?

Force Powers were fuckwin, but less awesome than spells in D&D in that they only did lots of damage instead of insta-killing whole groups of people.

P.P.S. The link is here:
http://www.enworld.org/archive/index.php/t-64108.html

Wow... yeah that was me starting and quitting enworld. On account of it sucked. I could not fvcking believe it. I walked in, threw down some of the simplest, most well defined infinite power loops in the game, and um... people gave me shit for being a power gamer. Beautiful.

Anyway.

Can you explain these Spell Dancing, More Wishes, Balor Mining, Phoenix Duplication, Chain Binding, and Archer Clerics?

Sure.

• Spell Dancing: The Spell Dancer is a class from Magic of Faerun. And like all things from that book, it is broken as hell. The key to it is that it allows you to repeat add the same metamagic feat bonuses over and over again based on the result you get on a Perform check. There are ways to get bonuses to your Perform check based on the number of Metamagic feat equivalents you add, and so if you just did it over and over again you got a larger and larger bonus (which did not stack, but merely replaced the older smaller bonus). This became the Artificer Skill Dance because Artificers ramp up to infinity much faster than Spell Dancers ever did.
  
  
• More Wishes Let's say that you have a wish that you don't spend XP for - say you've got a bound Efreet, or a ring of 3 wishes or something. Now you might want to use one of those wishes to wish for a ring of three wishes. Which oddly enough you can totally do because wishing for a powerful magic item just increases the XP cost of the spell and if you aren't paying the XP cost you aren't paying the XP cost. Repeat as required. Get a Staff of Wishes. Or a Rod of Unlimited wishes. I don't even care.
  
  
• Balor Mining First off, cast 3.5 shapechange - quite an earthshattering event to begin with. Now, spend a Free Action to turn into a Balor. You get all his Supernatural abilties, including his supernatural ability to have a +1 Vorpal Sword. Now, also as a free action, drop that sword. Since you're using shapechange, that sword retains its form and qualities while on the ground. Spend a ful-round action flipping off the wealth-by-level guidelines, and on your next turn spend a free action to turn into a different Balor - gaining its ability to have a +1 vorpal sword.
  
  
• Phoenix Duplication First you'll want a large number of unconcious enemies that you don't give a damn about - orcs or something. Now cast shapechange and magic jar. Then you can body jump into one of the orcs, it doesn't matter which one because your personal spells (like shapechange) follow you into the new body. Then spend a free action to change into a Phoenix. Phoenixes are awesome because they have the supernatural ability to kill themselves, create a giant explosion of fire and divine wrath, and then create a fully functional duplicate of themselves in the crater with all of their mind and daily abilty uses back. Use that ability. You go back into the jar, your duplicate starts laughing like Invader Zim, and then you magic jar into another body and do it again. Eventually your army of one will be big enough that you'll get bored and conquer the plane of existence you're on.
  - This is distinguished as being the least interval between publication and formalization of an abusive power loop - negative six months. It was reported and named as a reaso why shapechange did not provide supernatural abilities. But Ed Stark must have his nose candy.
  
  
• Chain Binding Let's say that you want to use planar binding to pull in an Efreet and force it to start up More Wishes but you are not an 11th level character. No problem, because you can actually get limited wishes out of monsters you can lesser planar bind. You can use the limited wish to replicate a planar binding and start it all up at 9th level (7th level with he right patron god). Hell, you can even use one of the wishes to replicate greater planar binding if you really want a cohort who is so powerful that he wouldn't get XP for killing you.
  
  
• Archer Clerics The Cleric Archer is now called the CoDzilla because people on WotC have no fvcking sense of history. The original Cleric Archer was simply a mathematical analysis of why the Arcane Archer was 10 pounds of shit in a five pound bag - you could simply replicate all of his powers by just being a Cleric and using half of your spell slots to buff yourself. Spend the remaining spell slots (that you wouldn't have had were you a real arcane archer) on raising the dead or hurling firestorms or something. It was a remarkably difficult point to get across over there - but eventually it got into the public conciousness.

So how would official changes change anything other than making the game designers admit that they're wrong?

I take it you've never experienced a discussion of Shadowrun where someone brings up fvcking Bloodzilla. Again.

-Username17

FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1186380931[/unixtime]]

I take it you've never experienced a discussion of Shadowrun where someone brings up fvcking Bloodzilla. Again.

Bloodzilla?

That and C.o.D.zilla is really super catchy. I was lolling very hard at the bit in that enworlds thread when you say "and spell like abilities don't cost any exps" and then he says " summoned creatures cannot do anything that costs xps"

Game set and hilarious.

Captain_Bleach at [unixtime wrote:1186379858[/unixtime]]

Play a better system.

What systems would you consider "better?"

Savage Worlds, FUDGE, GURPS, Exalted, Feng Shui, Unknown Armies, Hero System, Runequest, Paranoia...

Rob_Knotts at [unixtime wrote:1186391354[/unixtime]]Savage Worlds, FUDGE, GURPS, Exalted, Feng Shui, Unknown Armies, Hero System, Runequest, Paranoia...

...Wushu, Weapons of the Gods, Shadowrun, Nobilis, Spirit of the Century, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying game, BESM...