Will 5e Suck Harder than 4e?

ModelCitizen · Post by **ModelCitizen** » Wed Jan 18, 2012 1:15 pm

Swordslinger wrote: 2E handled minions the best of any edition. It scaled AC a lot slower which kept monsters like ogres and trolls threats even at higher levels and HP didn't scale like crazy either so you conceivably could care if a gnoll got a few lucky hits.

Then equal-level creatures' attacks eventually auto-hit. That solution is bad, and it just looked like it worked in AD&D because PCs were more likely to be low level.

You could write an attack/defense progression that does work though. For example, have attack/defense growth slow down as level increases.


Level	Bonus
1	+0
2	+1
3	+2
4	+3
5	+4
6	+4
7	+5
8	+5
9	+6
10	+6
11	+6
12	+7
13	+7
14	+7
15	+7
16	+8
17	+8
18	+8
19	+8
20	+9

If you assume HP grows like in pre-4e (HP = level * class-based constant), then a creature with half your HP is at most 3 points behind your defenses. Even accounting for slight attribute/item differences you could still expect the one-shottable mook to have a 40% chance to hit.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Jan 18, 2012 1:24 pm

ModelCitizen wrote: Then equal-level creatures' attacks eventually auto-hit.

So? If combat rounds are going to take more physical time as we go up in level, you're damn right that my chances of failing to do anything when my turn comes up should go down.

-Username17

ModelCitizen · Post by **ModelCitizen** » Wed Jan 18, 2012 2:11 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:
ModelCitizen wrote: Then equal-level creatures' attacks eventually auto-hit.
So? If combat rounds are going to take more physical time as we go up in level, you're damn right that my chances of failing to do anything when my turn comes up should go down.

-Username17

If you actually want attacks to auto-hit you should just write attacks that do that. Rolling the d20 when it's basically a sure thing wastes table time and obfuscates the way the system really works. As far as Power Attack goes, it's a decent patch for 3e but I wouldn't want to lean on it if I was writing a new system. Calculating optimal power attacks is more math than I want to do during a session and I don't think the average player knows how to do it at all.

RadiantPhoenix · Post by **RadiantPhoenix** » Wed Jan 18, 2012 4:09 pm

ModelCitizen wrote: If you actually want attacks to auto-hit you should just write attacks that do that. Rolling the d20 when it's basically a sure thing wastes table time and obfuscates the way the system really works.

I think it's a matter of making a unifying mechanic -- there are times when the attack isn't supposed to auto-hit too, or something.

talozin · Post by **talozin** » Wed Jan 18, 2012 4:44 pm

Josh_Kablack wrote: And then there are net-infamous systems like Senzar, Sinnabar and FATAL which are supposedly even worse than those on my list.

SenZar is not only tolerable but looks like it would be kind of fun. You wouldn't even have to twist my arm to get me to play SenZar if it were with the right group (basically, any 4-6 adults with ironic senses of humor who understand what the word "deconstruction" means in an RPG context). I'm pretty sure I'd rather play it with such a group than I would 4E.

Synnibar is terrible. I do not believe that there are any words sufficient to express just how bad it is. Imagine Rolemaster, but without the charm or good writing.

Krusk · Post by **Krusk** » Wed Jan 18, 2012 5:08 pm

Josh_Kablack wrote:Sadly, no.

are all less playable and have more problems than 4e.

Don't look at it as "how many bad things do they have" look at it as "how many good things do they have".

With 4e the only positive I can think of is that they used the XP budget system instead CRs. Everything else is a negative, or at best boring and uninteresting. There is basically nothing else 4e did right. That one thing? Its behind the scenes and most players won't even interact with it.

At least they got the errata cycle under control, and now the system is stable enough that you can play a game as written without changing characters every couple of months.

Swordslinger · Post by **Swordslinger** » Wed Jan 18, 2012 7:09 pm

ModelCitizen wrote: Then equal-level creatures' attacks eventually auto-hit. That solution is bad, and it just looked like it worked in AD&D because PCs were more likely to be low level.

You could write an attack/defense progression that does work though. For example, have attack/defense growth slow down as level increases.

Yeah, I wasn't advocating we wanted it exactly to be like 2E, because 2E had a lot of flaws. I was just saying that 2E handled minion types the best.

But yes, I definitely think it'd be nice to reduce the scaling on everything and just up the damage/hp a bit.

icyshadowlord · Post by **icyshadowlord** » Thu Jan 19, 2012 8:48 pm

There are minions in 2e? I only recently got to try it out, and all we managed to fight on the first session were some giant frogs and then a bunch of skeletons, the latter of which butchered me (three crits in a row) and I didn't really have the energy to read through the books themselves.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Thu Jan 19, 2012 9:07 pm

icyshadowlord wrote:There are minions in 2e?

There are minions in the sense that there are weak creatures that could potentially bother higher level characters, not in the strict 4E mechanical sense of the word.

kzt · Post by **kzt** » Fri Jan 20, 2012 10:48 pm

NineInchNall wrote:Warhammer FRP is worse, too.

i knew some guys who enjoyed that a lot. Of course, they started their sessions at the bar next door, then wandered over after an hour or two to start playing.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Fri Jan 20, 2012 11:22 pm

But going back to the original point, I have a really hard time seeing how 5E D&D would be worse than 4E D&D short of Mike Mearls failing to fix any of the original problems and throwing in a bunch of crap subsystems that also weren't fixed.

ScottS · Post by **ScottS** » Sat Jan 21, 2012 12:19 am

Is there any recent evidence of where the design trinity's heads are at? Apparently Schwalb has sole author credit on Song of Fire and Ice RPG; has anyone read/played that? Has Cook done anything more recent for 3e besides the DungeonADay thing? (Cordell has been doing 4e of course...)

I guess what I haven't seen here yet is a list of system successes (e.g "Rolemastering" D&D with d20?) or failures (e.g. 3.0 psionics...?), to give people more of a concrete idea of what might come out of the sausage stuffer this time.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sat Jan 21, 2012 12:50 am

I do know that Robert J. Schwalb was pretty much the only person keeping Dragon and Dungeon afloat late 2010/2011/probably now, too after Mike Mearls and Bill Slavocsek pretty much took an extended sabbatical. That period of the game was also when weaker and less supported classes started getting support and the game came out with Themes -- and his interpretation of them (making them more like kits then punishment-free multiclassing) was a lot more popular than Cordell's was pretty popular.

His willingness to listen to fans and being a reliable workhorse earns a lot of brownie points in my book. Even though he doesn't have any writing credits to my name I wouldn't be terribly offended if he was the head 5E guy.

Cordell just sucks, though. I have no idea how he managed to keep his job for this long. I would rather have Titanium Dragon on my writing staff, as he at least knows how to conduct a decent playtest and has system familiarity. I would rather have Sean K. Reynolds on my writing staff than him, a man who offered to write feats to raise money for his kitty cat. I would rather have Matt Ward on my writing staff than Bruce Cordell. I am not joking.

EDIT: Sorry, I thought that for some reason Bruce Cordell was the major credit for the Dark Sun Campaign Setting. He was not, he wasn't even on that book.

ishy · Post by **ishy** » Sat Jan 21, 2012 1:11 am

Lago PARANOIA wrote:I would rather have Sean K. Reynolds on my writing staff than him, a man who offered to write feats to raise money for his kitty cat.

Lets not go crazy here, I'd rather make a deal with the devil to abort my baby than have skr work on anything good or well anything ever.

Lokathor · Post by **Lokathor** » Sat Jan 21, 2012 1:29 am

Okay so what's the deal with the writing feats to help his cat? You bring that up a lot it seems.

Famous People sell photos and signatures, he sold having your homebrew feats (which people were gonna write anyways) being "written" by him. I don't see what the deal is.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Jan 21, 2012 7:13 am

Lokathor wrote:Okay so what's the deal with the writing feats to help his cat? You bring that up a lot it seems.

Famous People sell photos and signatures, he sold having your homebrew feats (which people were gonna write anyways) being "written" by him. I don't see what the deal is.

You don't see the big deal with someone announcing in public that they were going to start taking bribes to announce peoples' crappy homebrew shit was semi-official? That doesn't make you think that they maybe can't be trusted with the official product stamp?

Lago wrote:But going back to the original point, I have a really hard time seeing how 5E D&D would be worse than 4E D&D short of Mike Mearls failing to fix any of the original problems and throwing in a bunch of crap subsystems that also weren't fixed.

Wait. You read Mearls' tirade about skills where you have to cross reference numeric bonuses and titular categories in order to generate DCs and then you have to compare the number you passed by and your titular category to someone else's titular categories and numeric bonuses to generate their DC? That's seriously the worst skill system I have ever heard of. I'd rather do opposed checks in a d% roll-under system. Because that is seriously less steps.

Let's put this in perspective: the lead on the project is a man whose worst failing is that he starts and does not finish project after project, leaving a path of wreckage composed of failed and unfinished subsystems all over any edition he works on. He has announced that the signature point of the new edition is that it will have far more semi-transparent subsystems than any other edition of the game has ever had. We're in for Iron Heroes II: Even More Shitty Token Accounting. And you can't imagine how that could be worse than 4e?

-Username17

Lokathor · Post by **Lokathor** » Sat Jan 21, 2012 7:43 am

He didn't put them in official products, as far as I know. He just put them on his website.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Jan 21, 2012 7:48 am

Lokathor wrote:He didn't put them in official products, as far as I know. He just put them on his website.

Yes. That is why I said "semi-official". He put them up on SK "Official D&D Writer" R's website. For people who don't know what a jackass he is, that's official-ish. If he had still been able to put things into actual official products, do you believe he wouldn't have taken bribes to put them there instead?

It's stupid and fairly pointless corruption, but he really did say that he was willing to damage the game for money. In pretty explicit language.

-Username17

ModelCitizen · Post by **ModelCitizen** » Sat Jan 21, 2012 3:47 pm

Somebody give me a good bile-filled rant on what's wrong with Bruce Cordell. I can name a few stupid things he's written (the soulknife, mindscape combat) but people here seem to think everything he touches turns to shit and I don't see it.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Jan 21, 2012 4:04 pm

ModelCitizen wrote:Somebody give me a good bile-filled rant on what's wrong with Bruce Cordell. I can name a few stupid things he's written (the soulknife, mindscape combat) but people here seem to think everything he touches turns to shit and I don't see it.

The thing about Bruce Cordell is that he has been in charge of Psionics for most of 3rd and 4th edition. It was his brilliant idea, for example, for 4e Psionicists to pump all their power points into making their at-wills bigger so that they could be even more fucking boring than a normal 4e character. Other people cleaned up after his shit later on, but the initial cluster fuck was all him. He's basically the Mike Mearls of Psionics.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Bruce Cordell wrote the one and only Class Acts article that WotC has ever apologized for and redacted. Yes, he fucked up his "read the rules" check so hard when writing a fucking puff piece on line that it actually caused people to be incensed enough that they wrote enough nasty grams that Andy Collins was forced to apologize for it personally and have it rewritten.

And when they task him with getting feedback from players of D&D to add fuel to the open playtest shenanigans, the best question he can come up with is This. That is not a joke. He actually thinks this is a fucking question that needs to be asked.

-Username17

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sat Jan 21, 2012 4:15 pm

The Dark Sun Campaign Setting was reasonably popular in 4E and as a fluff piece was actually pretty good. I mean, it contained the typical 4E stupidity like the 'can't defile unwilling allies', but compared to the rest of the edition's books it's definitely in the top three. Bruce Cordell single-handedly killed off the product line with his monumentally stupid Dark Sun adventure (his having a large source of untainted water in a relatively easy-to-access place) and his balls-ing up of the Creature Catalog. Remember that thread we had awhile back that had that ridiculous three-separate initiative counts and actions solo monster? That crap started there.

But wait, that's not all! Bruce Cordell also killed off the Forgotten Realms cash cow with his ballsing up of the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting. You know, the book that was so bad that it had its own page of Wallbangers back when TvTropes was cool.

But wait, that's not all!! He also wrote Keep on the Shadowfell as well. The very first module of 4E D&D, which left a bitter taste in everyone's mouth. Why? Well, for one, it was everyone's introduction to the massive pile of fail skill challenges were. It was also very railroady and was too difficult of a module for low-level people playing 4E D&D for the first time. Also, it was so poorly edited that it was the only module that had its own FAQ entry on the Wizards site.

ScottS · Post by **ScottS** » Sat Jan 21, 2012 9:31 pm

I think Cordell has written decent mods (some of the "Return" adventures like ToH, WPM, also some of the little psionicy stuff for Malhavoc). The category I wanted to put him into was "guy who has pretty good 'fantasy ideas' and who can translate them into system mechanics in a passable way, but who falls down somewhat with large system projects due to not 'foreseeing consequences'". The question I had is whether or not Cook/Schwalb fall into the same category. Cook does or doesn't depending on how much credit you give him for the pros/cons of d20; Schwalb I have no idea (although as pointed out DS4e made some improvements on 4e until they "old Naxx'ed" it with Essentials).

ishy · Post by **ishy** » Sat Jan 21, 2012 10:17 pm

So the summary of Bruce Cordell is that he has done some decent things, some good things and quite a bit off the wall stupid things?

Still sounds like he is one of the better ones then.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sat Jan 21, 2012 10:56 pm

Uh, no. Don't even try to pull that 'they're all of the same' dismissive crap, Bruce Cordell is significantly worse than even bottom tier authors like Andy Collins.

Here is a list of his credits: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Cordell. I would love to hear the books that would justify a 'some good' or even 'some decent'. Because there aren't fucking any.

I have Keep on the Shadowfell and Kingdom of Ghouls. And they both suck. Keep on the Shadowfell's failing is extensively documented, Kingdom of Ghouls sucks because it's a low-level adventure masquerading as a high-level one. Seriously, one of the skill challenges is 'convince an old man where to let you go' and an epic-level use of Athletics is 'climb over this obstruction'. So even though I can't say for certainty that he has written a half-decent adventure module, I own two of them and are familiar with several others (ENWorld of all places ripped into the Dark Sun one), I think ScottS is talking out of his ass.

As far as third-party stuff goes, I wasted my money on If Thoughts Could Kill, which is a psionics supplement for d20 Modern. Yeah. It's such a pile of shit that it would offend even a sewer worker who laughed off a city-wide Kick Your Lactose Intolerance With A Tall Glass of Heavy Cream festival.

Seriously, though, look at the rest of his design credits. What does he have that's even remotely any good? The only thing that was even leaning in the direction of good is the Epic Level Handbook which was not only an Andy Collins project but is widely acknowledged even among fans as being a pile of donkey dicks. I mean, James Wyatt is mostly filled with fail but I really loved Oriental Adventures. What about Bruce Cordell's record makes you think that he's anything other than the Uwe Boll of TTRPG writing?

CapnTthePirateG · Post by **CapnTthePirateG** » Sun Jan 22, 2012 12:01 am

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Uh, no. Don't even try to pull that 'they're all of the same' dismissive crap, Bruce Cordell is significantly worse than even bottom tier authors like Andy Collins.

Here is a list of his credits: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Cordell. I would love to hear the books that would justify a 'some good' or even 'some decent'. Because there aren't fucking any.

I have Keep on the Shadowfell and Kingdom of Ghouls. And they both suck. Keep on the Shadowfell's failing is extensively documented, Kingdom of Ghouls sucks because it's a low-level adventure masquerading as a high-level one. Seriously, one of the skill challenges is 'convince an old man where to let you go' and an epic-level use of Athletics is 'climb over this obstruction'. So even though I can't say for certainty that he has written a half-decent adventure module, I own two of them and are familiar with several others (ENWorld of all places ripped into the Dark Sun one), I think ScottS is talking out of his ass.

As far as third-party stuff goes, I wasted my money on If Thoughts Could Kill, which is a psionics supplement for d20 Modern. Yeah. It's such a pile of shit that it would offend even a sewer worker who laughed off a city-wide Kick Your Lactose Intolerance With A Tall Glass of Heavy Cream festival.

Seriously, though, look at the rest of his design credits. What does he have that's even remotely any good? The only thing that was even leaning in the direction of good is the Epic Level Handbook which was not only an Andy Collins project but is widely acknowledged even among fans as being a pile of donkey dicks. I mean, James Wyatt is mostly filled with fail but I really loved Oriental Adventures. What about Bruce Cordell's record makes you think that he's anything other than the Uwe Boll of TTRPG writing?

I think we could make a case for XPH not being too bad...