5e isnt even D&D....

ishy · Post by **ishy** » Fri May 25, 2012 4:05 pm

So does todays xkcd :
http://xkcd.com/1060/

Remind anyone else of 5e?

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Sat May 26, 2012 10:27 am

RobbyPants wrote:Yeah, this works really well if you define your invisibility as affecting the minds of the observers rather than making light pass around the subject. Although, this sort of invisibility would explicitly grant a save.

Or if invisibility is just really good camouflage - there are plenty of underwater things that basically turn invisible via camouflage/transparency, that still leave shadows, and one type of octopus that emits light to make its shadow vanish.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Sat May 26, 2012 12:35 pm

If you saw a shadow moving across the floor would you instantly think "oh fuck theres an invisible guy" or would you think it was a rat or something.

Like, what is meta knowledge and what is character knowledge?

ishy · Post by **ishy** » Sat May 26, 2012 1:05 pm

I'd cast Death Ward to not get my strength drained.

Aryxbez · Post by **Aryxbez** » Wed Jun 06, 2012 12:37 pm

ishy wrote:So does todays xkcd :
http://xkcd.com/

Remind anyone else of 5e?

Not sure, could you please explain? It's my guess the fans don't like cool things, even if it meant these advances in the industry, all because of semantics? Such as thinking it reminds me them of "Anime" or something, as false an assessment it is, especially since Western Mythologies been doing close to high level crap for ages. Or, maybe you're just going about how magic items will just be boring RNG increasers, so PC's will be forgoing like those cool death running boots, tridents of Fish Command, and so forth/

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Wed Jun 06, 2012 1:36 pm

This is the one he was talking about:

http://xkcd.com/1060/

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Wed Jun 06, 2012 1:44 pm

Aryxbez wrote: Not sure, could you please explain? It's my guess the fans don't like cool things, even if it meant these advances in the industry, all because of semantics?

Yeah, Ishy linked that the day-of and didn't think to put in a hard link to the actual comic, so you just get the most recent XKCD comic from his link.

ishy · Post by **ishy** » Wed Jun 06, 2012 5:46 pm

Yeah I screwed up.

RadiantPhoenix · Post by **RadiantPhoenix** » Fri Jun 08, 2012 6:05 am

OgreBattle wrote:If you saw a shadow moving across the floor would you instantly think "oh fuck theres an invisible guy" or would you think it was a rat or something.

Like, what is meta knowledge and what is character knowledge?

If your character knows about invisibility and has any reason at all to suspect someone might be using it, I think it would be quite reasonable.

Blicero · Post by **Blicero** » Fri Jun 08, 2012 6:37 am

RadiantPhoenix wrote:
OgreBattle wrote:If you saw a shadow moving across the floor would you instantly think "oh fuck theres an invisible guy" or would you think it was a rat or something.

Like, what is meta knowledge and what is character knowledge?
If your character knows about invisibility and has any reason at all to suspect someone might be using it, I think it would be quite reasonable.

It could also be any one of the dozen D&D creatures that are made of darkness, or an illusion of a shadow.

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Fri Jun 08, 2012 1:51 pm

The myriad of creatures and magical effects in D&D would leave it fairly open-ended until further investigation, but it would clearly be an indication of the presence of something.

If you wanted to figure out, you'd have to cast Detect Magic or Detect Undead, or throw some flour/sand, or something else to try to narrow it down. That sort of stuff can actually be a lot of fun.

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Fri Jun 08, 2012 2:50 pm

D&D with Porn Stars wrote:Older D&D designs at low levels were hard-to-hit-but-low-hit-points: the tactics and thinking happened largely BEFORE the to-hit roll even happened. The roll itself was in doubt, but if it connected…BAM, possible death. So it required a lot of plotting and scheming to get into place to deliver that payload (or avoid it). By 4e, most of the tactics kick in more and more AFTER the to-hit roll connects--how much damage, where does the foe end up? is there an area effect already there, will the damage be ongoing? etc etc

The first way of playing needs a robust world and a robust interface of PCs with the rest of the world to avoid just being "gamble on your sucky to-hit roll" (which is how people who hate those systems see it), the second way needs a robust and complex tactical situation to avoid being "make perfunctory to-hit rolls and chip away at the monster's hit points for 9 rounds while it chips away at yours."

___
Jeremy D added this, which is smart and simple:
Missing sucks way more when the combat round is long.

A good thought by him after the last babble or the idea that was even more complicated than THAC0.

Voss · Post by **Voss** » Fri Jun 08, 2012 3:18 pm

OgreBattle wrote:If you saw a shadow moving across the floor would you instantly think "oh fuck theres an invisible guy" or would you think it was a rat or something.

Like, what is meta knowledge and what is character knowledge?

I always have trouble with this one. The PCs are adventurers. They deal with strange monsters and weird magic on a daily basis. Knowing about stuff actually means they get money and they don't die.

Not having 'adventuring knowledge' generally means that they are dead morons. Even Tim the Dimwitted Barbarian should be spending downtime listening to bards, sages and storytellers (not to mention other heroes) talk about things they've fought, encountered and bypassed. So even if they can't go and do research like a wizard or cleric, they can still learn basic adventuring survival skills.

It is one more reason why having knowledge, spellcraft and trap skills be class restriction is fucking stupid. All adventurers deal with this stuff on a regular basis in literally life or death situations, and there is no reason why any adventuring class wouldn't have an opportunity to learn some relevant adventuring skills.

ishy · Post by **ishy** » Fri Jun 08, 2012 4:41 pm

I think Ogre's point was not about knowing about certain things. But more the ability to parse information.
It is quite different to have a DM describe : "You see a shadow moving across the floor" and barely spotting a shadow moving to cover in half a second. In the first case you know something is up, while in the second you might wonder if it is your mind playing tricks on you etc etc.

ModelCitizen · Post by **ModelCitizen** » Sat Jun 09, 2012 12:11 pm

If the DM takes the time to point out a shadow, I'm going to set its entire vicinity on fire and then figure out what the fuck it is.

Anyway, I think the shadow thing is just a way to fluff the fact that invisibility doesn't actually make you invisible. You need the Hidden buff to keep people from seeing you, and Hidden comes with its own mechanics for keeping you from giving yourself away. If you don't have Hidden they see you automatically. The shadow thing only matters for determining how rather than if.

Also: it is really lame that Invisibility doesn't make you invisible.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Sun Jun 10, 2012 7:00 am

It never used to make you invisible unless you were careful about it. In AD&D if you had any reason to suspect an invisible person nearby you could see the distortions (like Predator before Predator) and attack at -4, or throw flour on them first and attack with no penalty at all. 3e made it vastly harder to defeat, at least for mundane PCs.

ModelCitizen · Post by **ModelCitizen** » Sun Jun 10, 2012 8:26 am

I think Pathfinder is the only version of D&D where invisibility doesn't rely on MTP to make it better than the rules say it is. In 3e you get a ginormous bonus to Hide checks but you're still theoretically supposed to make a zillion Move Silently checks and almost inevitably fail one. (In practice that probably doesn't happen because nobody wants to uses the real stealth rules, but still.) Pathfinder gives you the ginormous bonus to "Stealth checks," so all those magical beasts who would have caught you in 3e with their max Listen ranks and +8 racial modifiers can go fuck themselves.

E: I'm not trying to say Invisibility should also make you inaudible. Having to make checks to be quiet in 3e would be a good thing, if the rules for that worked right and low-op characters could be good at it.

ishy · Post by **ishy** » Sun Jun 10, 2012 6:16 pm

In my experience nobody really understand how the invisiblity, stealth, scent and hide rules work in PF.

I mean fuck, I can't even get my DM's to agree on what the DC would be if I closed my eyes (or was in some other way blind) and then made a perception check to notice an invisible creature.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sun Jun 10, 2012 6:56 pm

ishy wrote:In my experience nobody really understand how the invisiblity, stealth, scent and hide rules work in PF.

I mean fuck, I can't even get my DM's to agree on what the DC would be if I closed my eyes (or was in some other way blind) and then made a perception check to notice an invisible creature.

No one agrees how the stealth rules work in any edition of the game. For fuck's sake: in 3rd edition the PHB says that your chance to notice things is based on a basic DC adjacent to you with an increase in DC for every 10 feet away (this makes spotting level appropriate sneaking enemies essentially impossible). But the DMG does it the other way: the basic DC is at the horizon, with the DC decreased for every 10 feet closer to you that they are (this makes spotting enemies trivially easy). It's right there in black and white being broken as hell in two completely different ways. Most DMs seem to split the difference and just not use range modifiers at all, which makes stealth generally fail on iterative probability.

-Username17

ModelCitizen · Post by **ModelCitizen** » Mon Jun 11, 2012 5:49 am

ishy wrote:In my experience nobody really understand how the invisiblity, stealth, scent and hide rules work in PF.

I mean fuck, I can't even get my DM's to agree on what the DC would be if I closed my eyes (or was in some other way blind) and then made a perception check to notice an invisible creature.

Yep. Although if your DM did, Invisibility would still let you sneak places sometimes. You'd still get fucked by Scent and Blindsense. You'd still get fucked by Darkvision if your race is one of the weird evolutionary anomalies that never developed it (like, say, human). But you wouldn't get fucked by basically everything, because any time you fall back on the regular old stealth rules you do it with at least a +20 bonus.

That's why I'm ripping on 5e's stealth rules so hard: unlike every live stealth system D&D has ever had, the 5e rules are pretty close to being good. You could make them good by fixing a few issues; in 3e you'd have to rip the whole thing out and start over. Unfortunately I don't think those issues are going to be fixed, because everything Mearls has said about the playtest has been hostile to the idea of improving on flaws in the rules.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Mon Jun 11, 2012 1:30 pm

ModelCitizen wrote:That's why I'm ripping on 5e's stealth rules so hard: unlike every live stealth system D&D has ever had, the 5e rules are pretty close to being good. You could make them good by fixing a few issues;

Uh, yeah, that's not true. I have no idea why you're saying that. They are seriously more busted than 3.0E's stealth rules.
http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=53 ... c&start=25

The hiding rules are fucking busted. Is that a surprise? Regardless, the sheer amount of FAIL they packed into this section is ridiculous.

1.) You need to be obscured by something that covers at least half of you in order to hide. Because fuck camoflague.

2.) Way to include 'as long as someone is looking in your direction' in a game that doesn't have facing.

3.) Making noise causes you to become unhidden. Fucking wrap your head around that. You might go 'oh, they mean non-detected instead of hidden', well, the being spotted by noise only applies if someone is looking in your direction. Seriously.

Being Detected wrote: If you lose the conditions needed to remain hidden, you are automatically spotted, as long as a creature is looking in your direction. You might hide around a corner, and then creep past a guard who is looking the other way.

3.) So what exactly is the point if you make the noise while someone is looking away from you but you stop making the noise before they look in your direction. Once again, this is in a game that does not have facing. It's also a separate point of failure for stealth, so sneaky people have to make two separate rolls like in the stupid days. No, there isn't a bonus for making noise in a loud place.

4.)

Spotting a Hidden Creature wrote: Beacause your search is a mix of looking and listening, you don't normally need to be too specific in your description of where you're searching. A lurking foe might give itself away with a muffled cough, a trail of disturbed dust, or any number of signs.

No, fuck you, you just said that someone needs to be looking in your direction in order to spot someone!

Whatever. Let's move on.

ModelCitizen · Post by **ModelCitizen** » Mon Jun 11, 2012 3:04 pm

I didn't say it was good, I said it could be fixed to be good.

The way Obscurement works is retarded. They keep trying to treat it as an absolute property of the stealther such that it is possible to not have Obscurement against something that can't fucking see you. For example, if you step out from behind the bushes within line of effect of a blind person, you lose Hidden. That's the single biggest failing in the current rules, and it's entirely fixable.

Facing: any *possible* D&D stealth system that is not dicks will need to somehow deal with facing. Most people don't get the iterative probability problem with 3e stealth, but they are annoyed that you can't sneak up behind someone's back because people don't have backs. If your stealth system doesn't add or at least somehow kludge facing, people will throw it out and MTP everything even if the numbers work. They have to address facing somehow but they can't right now because that grid-combat thingy doesn't exist yet. If the game did include facing rules at this stage they'd probably have to be scrapped once the grid shit goes in. So not having facing rules doesn't mean the system is doomed, it just means the game isn't done yet.

Yes, I would bet a lot of money on them fucking this up and facing being MTP forever. But if you start counting fuckups they haven't had the chance to make yet then you're no longer evaluating the rules, you're just evaluating the development team. And frankly I don't see the point in doing any more of that. I think it's been thoroughly established that Mearls is an idiot and the rest of the team appears to have spent the last eight months doing nothing but blogging and playing Minecraft. Moving on.

The only real errors they've made so far are Obscurement, the Ambusher feat (already slated for revision), and Invisibility being mostly unusable by non-specialists. All of that is pretty fixable.

John Magnum · Post by **John Magnum** » Mon Jun 11, 2012 4:50 pm

Okay, "writing entire new subsystems" is a really really far cry from "fixing a few issues". That actually makes Stealth very, very far from playable.

You've described a Stealth mechanic that barely even exists at all, and yet is riddled with basic errors. You're suggesting that they write up an entire new system, not just for Stealth but for everything in the game, and fix these errors. And you seem to think that this is the smallest gap between RAW and playable rules that D&D has produced yet for stealth?

ModelCitizen · Post by **ModelCitizen** » Mon Jun 11, 2012 6:33 pm

Compared to where 3e or 4e would have been at this stage of development, yeah. This is a better start than they had. 3e never solved the facing problem either and is riddled with basic errors of its own.

And they didn't come up with the facing problem through some quirk or design mistake of this particular stealth system. They got stuck with that problem as soon as they sat down to write a stealth system for D&D at all. You could certainly come up with a stealth system on paper that doesn't use facing, but if it won't let you sneak past when a guard's back is turned then no one's actually going to use it.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Jun 11, 2012 7:31 pm

How is there a "facing" problem? You beat the other guy's perception with your stealth and they weren't looking in the right direction at the right time or they didn't notice you anyway. This is not a problem.

The very instant you start talking about hearing with regards to your stealth minigame, facing can seriously go fuck itself. Because hearing already goes in 360 degrees by default. The fact that you have a visual cone that is moving all over the place all the time is seriously unimportant for any possible stealth minigame you'd ever want to actually use.

About the only thing you would ever want to maybe include is to allow people to specifically search an area - giving them a bonus to notice people sneaking in that area (and probably a penalty to notice people sneaking around elsewhere). But a character could jolly well focus on some area while walking in another direction entirely. Heads turn, you know.

-Username17