TD, you make it extremely difficult to be polite to you. When you say things, I kind of want to hit my face against my desk. I mean, I hate 4e, and RC2 will defend it occasionally, and I don’t want to cause myself permanent brain damage from his posts, so I think you must be doing something wrong.
The reason why paladins had to be LG or lose their powers wasn't because that was what the audience wanted but because the designers didn't know what they were doing. This isn't a change in target audience - this is the original designers not actually knowing what their audience wanted. Hell, the dark, evil knight archetype is not exactly novel - death knights have been around since at least the 1980s, and the idea of playing a "holy" character who isn't LG isn't exactly new either.
Paladins in AD&D must be LG. Your arrogance in asserting that the 3e designers didn’t know what they were doing because they kept in that legacy item is one of those face-desky things. You might disagree with their decision, but that doesn’t mean that they didn’t know what they were doing.
To put it bluntly, D&D has always targeted the audience it targets today. And that audience isn't "13-year-old WoW crowd". The 13 year olds WoW crowd is a part of the target audience but, guess what? It was back in 2000 too. And in 1989.
Please tell me World of Warcraft’s release date and I will explain to you why you’re wrong. D&D might have always targeted teenagers—something that irritates me to no end, as I want to play a fantasy game that’s not “family friendly”—but they weren’t the WoW crowd back then. Generations change, TD. The kids today are different from the kids back in 1989. There might have been some similarities, but we can see that D&D has progressively become more like a videogame with the growing popularity of videogames.
There’s a reason for that.
And I'll tell you with a straight face that they aren't draeni and blood elves. Why? Because WoW is based on D&D. Tieflings predate draeni and blood elves. Eladrin are an ancient archetype which predates Dungeons & Dragons.
Like I said to mandrake: compare 3e tieflings and eladrin to 4e tieflings and eladrin. They’re draenei and blood elves now. Before, they were just humans with a drop of demonic blood in their veins/CG outsiders. Now they’re all giant horns and tails and blond elves that wear red armor.
Sirlin is a professional game designer and also an extremely skilled competitive fighting game player. He's one of the best in the world at Super Street Fighter Turbo - not the best, but he's very good, and that was his original claim to fame. If you've heard people talking about playing to win, and throwing around terminology like "scrub", there is a good chance they're referring to Sirlin's work. He published a book on the subject which is now available for free on his website.
And as for the idea that namedropping is irrelevant - no, it isn't. You're fucking wrong. If I say something, and leaders in a field agree with me, there's a much better chance that I'm right than if they disagree with me. This is not to say they're always right - they aren't. But if you disagree with them, there's a good chance you're wrong. Welcome to reality!
Empirical evidence, of course, beats authority every single time. But when you're talking about abstract things, people are less likely to agree on the empirical evidence.
Face-desky. If your argument is strong, it will stand on its own. Your namedropping adds nothing in the way of actual support—in fact, it increases the likelihood that I’m going to doubt the veracity of your statements because you’re mixing your arguments with smoke and mirrors. You then go on to contradict yourself by saying:
Thing is, if you said that 8 years ago, that would carry some weight.
But that was eight years ago, and since then, the 3e devs have admitted that the CR system was pulled out of their asses (which was pretty obvious), and that SoDs are crap. Back then, empirical evidence would be needed to overcome the common wisdom of the day.
See, I’m having more face-desky moments right now. You just admitted that your ideas aren’t actually absolute (as your claims imply) because the 3e developers included SODs. By your reasoning, the developer mindset of “SODs are awesome” would be more likely to be correct because the developers believed so. Similarly, if the developers said that D&D would be better served by being about assfucking one’s way through 13th century Bavaria alongside gay ponies, your reasoning says that they would be more likely to be right.
That’s completely wrong. Utterly and completely wrong. It’s incredibly stupid, too.
Oh, and then you go on to say that you’d need “empirical evidence” to support the idea that SODs are bad. That’s not possible. SODs being bad are really a matter of opinion and design goals. Some people like high-lethality games, you know.
Oh, and Edward is sooo romantic. Yeah. That’s the kind of thinking you support. (14 million retarded fangirls can’t be wrong!)
This is the dumbest analogy possible. You know why?
Because D&D 4e has pistols, M-16s, and rocket launchers. They're called at-will, encounter, and daily powers. Indeed, the analogy is quite accurate - pistols are not as good as M-16s or rocket launchers, just as at-will powers are worse than encounter and daily powers. However, pistols are not useless, because you do run out of ammo with the big guns, and moreover, there are situations in which using a smaller, lighter gun is superior to using one of the bigger guns - you are more mobile while carrying a 3 lb pistol than while toting around a 50 lb bazooka, and you don't always want to use a bazooka or M-16 because the firepower is excessive or the gun is too noisy. This is true in 4th edition as well - sometimes, your at-will power is better than the encounter or daily power for these reasons. And also because, sometimes, it does something your other powers doesn't do.
Before you use an analogy, perhaps you should put some thought into it.
For someone who claims to be completely awesome at the vidyagames, you sure don’t seem to know a lot about them. First off, most FPS games are designed so that you can have lots of ammo for your main gun (namely, an M-16 or uzi or whatever). Secondly, the pistol is strictly a back-up weapon that you use when you’re out of ammo. Full stop. There are no instances in which the pistol is the superior choice of weapon. Do you know why? Because the games aren’t designed that way. Pistols have poor range and low damage, and a pistol isn’t magically 1,000 decibels quieter than a machine gun. If you want more mobility, you use a submachine gun, not a pistol. Why? Because pistols are weak.
They’re not balanced with the rest of the system. And they’re not meant to be—they’re supposed to be a back-up weapon.
Oh, and I’d like to see you respond to this:
Me wrote: I will provide another video game example: MUME, or Multi-Users of Middle-Earth. It's a MUD, and it's all about doing things like killing orcs. In fact, the orcs are a playable faction, as are trolls and black Númenóreans. The thing is, all of the dark races have severe disadvantages--they all have weaker stats, orcs are crippled in the sunlight and have junk magic, black Númenóreans are really only good as mages and they suffer from depression (which lowers their mana supply), and trolls permanently die in the sunlight. But there are plenty of people who play the underlings and try to kill the good races.
Please stop picking and choosing which points to respond to. It indicates an inability to formulate a counter-argument.
You are absolutely wrong. Spotlight balance has everything to do with the ability to do things which occupy the spotlight. Combat prowess is one of them. Out of combat prowess is another. It doesn't matter how much play-acting you enjoy if I can cast charm person and make them do what I want them to do. I will still have the spotlight, because I mattered.
You make grand statements like this and you prove that you don’t understand what you’re talking about. Spotlight time matters and combat prowess doesn’t. If 95% of the game is spent lavishing praise on the Pretty Pretty Princess while Angry Wizard stands around doing nothing, then when Angry Wizard explodes the dragon in three rounds, it doesn’t matter.
Me, me, me wrote: It's not balance that counts. It's the people you play with. If you're playing in an extremely combat-heavy game, balance counts. I'll be the first to admit that never hitting in combat is frustrating. However, once you're out of minis-mode and back to role-playing, balance is put on the back burner. And what happens if you're playing in a game where you spend about half an hour every session doing combat? How much does it matter then if the wizard can end the fight in three rounds?
Face it: it doesn't matter much at all. It's the spotlight that counts. If the spotlight is on everyone fairly equally, then combat balance doesn't mean a damn thing.
The fact is, when I cast
haste in 3e, the party gets more awesome. They all get a lot of use out of
haste while I, the wizard, do not. They end up doing more than me because they can make extra attacks and move faster. My one spell, though, is what can turn the tide of battle. Yet, I receive no spotlight time because of it.
Skills aren't nonmagical. I'm not sure where you got that idea from. You can make an arcana check to detect magic, which is definitely a magical ability, at least by our standards. You can also make an athletics check to jump 50 feet.
Face-desky.
Diplomacy and Bluff are not magical. Athletics is not magical, no matter how far you’re jumping. (Now, you might use magic to make a longer jump, but that’s an entirely different story.)
Okay, let me get this straight:
The entire point of playing a summoner is to summon things and have them do things for you.
In 4th edition, you summon something. And then, you have it do things for you.
What about this violates the fantasy trope? That's right, nothing. There is nothing in the trope of the summoner which says "this generates action advantage". And indeed, usually summons do no such thing.
Take final fantasy X for example. In that, when you summon an Aeon, it replaces the party with the summon. In FFXII, you replace the other two characters with the summon. In pokemon, the player has their summon do all the fighting for them. This is a very common way for summons to function - oftentimes controlling the summon is what the summoner DOES, and the summoner themselves sucks at combat, which is why they summon crap to fight for them.
Can you do it in Core 4e? (Again, 3e definition.) No, you can’t. And that’s the entire point. Not to mention that we were talking about summons having independent actions from the summoner (and, again, I’m fine with that.)
Also:
Me, again wrote: Yes, [a mind-control spell] does grant someone the equivalent of multiple characters, and I'm okay with that. Not to the extent with which 3e did it, mind you, but I am okay with enchanters having extra characters. Why? Because it's their schtick--they go around and use their magic to get other people to do what they want.
You just said exactly why it obsoletes Diplomacy - its more likely to succeed with less effort.
Are you here to debate or are you here to troll?
Me, making an argument wrote: Charm person doesn't obsolete the Diplomacy skill at all. How could it? You have to wave your hands around and chant and look like a total goober and then if the target fails his save--then and only then does it replace the Diplomacy skill. What happens if the save fails? And what are people going to say when they see you trying to cast charm person on someone else? And what happens when the spell wears off?
Respond in an intelligent fashion or admit that you’re wrong.
Me, yet again, making an argument wrote: Then let's move on to skill challenges. They're broken. Completely. Frank did an accurate analysis of them that highlights their flaws, one of them most crippling being that it encourages dice spam. The reasoning is simple: you have a pool of successes and failures. Every time someone fails, you grow closer to failing the entire skill challenge. That means that only the people who are likely to succeed are encouraged to participate, since anyone who screws up has the chance of screwing it up for the entire party.
I’m waiting for your answer.
