Posted: Sat Sep 26, 2015 8:30 am
True whether it's D&D or Shadowrun at this point.rasmuswagner wrote:5E: The Cargo Cult RPG.
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True whether it's D&D or Shadowrun at this point.rasmuswagner wrote:5E: The Cargo Cult RPG.
I would say that 4e did make mechanics meaningless as well. Just as 5e presents hexes as an empty shell, so too did 4e insist on having things like "Saving Throws" that were absolutely pointless. It's not a meaningful part of the game, it's just a reference to mechanics that were important in other editions.Windjammer wrote:Sure. You can define 'hex fetishism' as the deliberate choice to reduce hexes to an ornamental device stripped of all their core functions.
Mearls introduced hex fetishism to the official D&D product line with 4E's Hammerfast.
Now replace 'hex' with a set of the nouns n designating meaningful core mechanics in D&D, where a necessary condition for 'meaningful' is the facilitation of character-world interaction.
It is then possible to identify 5E as mostly a collection of n-fetishisms.
4e was guilty of a different set of fetishisms. 4E didn't so much map (hitherto) meaningful mechanics onto meaningless ones, but mapped names designating D&D flavour elements with mythological depth onto a mythologically thin and incoherent mess ('re-skinning', 'culture blind fun').
Quite true. That post was written in late 2008 when it seemed the German market was an oddity; the licenser jumped ship while already having translated the core books and Shadowfell. (The 2008 GamesDay PDF still exists as a freebie, and you can see the licensee did not simply translate texts but layouted the whole thing etc.) Core books were released - the end. Then Pathfinder comes up, and the Germans translate and sell it like crazy - a huge portion of the line. So the German scene played out the US sales narrative much quicker, for largely unrelated and unpredictable reasons.FrankTrollman wrote:As for your old RPGsite post, I would point out that you were only scratching the surface when you noted that 4e sold like herpes hotpockets in Germany. We no know that it sold poorly everywhere. We don't have to look at peculiarities of German culture as to why they rejected 4e, because everyone rejected 4e. The 4th edition was simply a hot mess of incomplete mechanics and lazy fluff.
As someone who never played the old editions: what are color pools?Grek wrote:
- Astral Old School Color Pools are back in 5E, as are random "encounters" in the form of rolling on the Physic Wind table whenever the DM decides they want to.
How far would that get you though? I would expect most of the important things to be underwater there anyway.While this is obviously intended to be a compromise position between all the other elemental models out there, it's a compromise I can get behind. Elemental planes honestly don't need to be infinite, merely "very big", and putting Fire next to Air gives an excuse for the whole Efreet/Djinn conflict that we're supposed to care about. Likewise, by making the boundary between the Elemental Planes be stuff like "a whole, whole bunch of volcanoes" or "the world's biggest wall of ice", you make it at least theoretically plausible that a mundane/martial character might travel the planes without magical assistance, simply by getting in a boat and sailing their way onto the Elemental Plane of Water. That's a good thing.
Randomly spawning portals just hanging in the void. They look look you'd imagine, color based on the plane they lead to. Ethereal had equivalent color vapor curtains.Antariuk wrote: As someone who never played the old editions: what are color pools?
They already don't have a 1:1 correspondence, Ash was Negative / Fire. The Air/Fire paraelement was smoke. You don't need a new Air/Earth, the logic of making Air the sky is that there is no Air/anything boundary more logical than simply the surface.Grek wrote:Making the arrangement into a pyramid means two new planar boundaries (Air/Earth and Fire/Water) which in turn means you don't have the one to one correspondence to the AD&D Paraelementals. Its a choice that they could (and arguably should) have made, but didn't.
Floating islands.Wait, so wtf does the Air plane ground look like?
That doesn't answer the question at all.schpeelah wrote:Floating islands.Wait, so wtf does the Air plane ground look like?
You fall.Kaelik wrote:That doesn't answer the question at all.schpeelah wrote:Floating islands.Wait, so wtf does the Air plane ground look like?
If you jump from a floating island, what happens?
Seems like a good place to build a prison/rehab center for demons.Bytopia Optional Rule: DC 10 Wisdom save vs. becoming Lawful Good each long rest. Becomes permanent in 1d4 days if you don't leave.
You'd think so, but it really isn't. In 5e, taking a long rest is optional (you don't have to do it even if you've spent the requisite 8 hours resting) and demons don't have any particular motivation to do so. Remember, monster powers don't recharge on rests in 5E, they're completely divorced from the player rules. Even resting for healing doesn't matter, as demons who die in any location other than the Abyss just reform in the Abyss.OgreBattle wrote:Seems like a good place to build a prison/rehab center for demons.Bytopia Optional Rule: DC 10 Wisdom save vs. becoming Lawful Good each long rest. Becomes permanent in 1d4 days if you don't leave.
What, doesn't the air fall also and get denser until eventually you'll find a point of neutral buoyancy? That could be a more fun option.hyzmarca wrote:You fall.Kaelik wrote:That doesn't answer the question at all.schpeelah wrote:Floating islands.
If you jump from a floating island, what happens?
Forever.
No, because at that depth, the pressure would be immense.erik wrote:What, doesn't the air fall also and get denser until eventually you'll find a point of neutral buoyancy? That could be a more fun option.hyzmarca wrote:You fall.Kaelik wrote:
That doesn't answer the question at all.
If you jump from a floating island, what happens?
Forever.
Not from Germany, but Austria.Windjammer wrote: Which brings us to 5e. The edition that isn't translated, and for which WotC says it's not willing to even negotiate translations. (Lack of manpower overseeing quality control?) But it's selling ok in Germany, where D&D is niche and 3e never sold crazy either. And that's slightly worrying, because it indicates that the Germans can't stand lore-fetishisms, but they don't have any investment in D&D mechanics, and so can stand their dilution.
It's floating islands all the way down.Kaelik wrote:That doesn't answer the question at all.schpeelah wrote:Floating islands.Wait, so wtf does the Air plane ground look like?
If you jump from a floating island, what happens?
Do we actually have worldwide sales numbers for 5E outside of that one site I used that extrapolated from Amazon rankings?Ghremdal wrote:Its been said on these boards before, but 5e is selling pretty much the same way 4e has been for its first year.
So about 150,000-200,000 books worldwide (PHB is the bulk at around 120,000). And thats all folks...I don't know how well the adventure paths are doing...not well I suppose. Reasoning is that even if every 5th person who bought a PHB buys every adventure path, that is still only 24,000 sold per adventure path, worldwide.
Use this table instead:Grek wrote: There's also tables for Framing Events, Complications, Twists and Side Quests. The complications are probably the best ones, while the "Twists" are almost all uniformly terrible.