The Gaming Den

I'm going to take the stand of an old fart and say what we need is a revised Original AD&D Edition; with simple inflexible classes and lots and lots of tables.

Call it Advaced Dungeons and Dragons - Reborn (AD&D R)

tzor wrote:I'm going to take the stand of an old fart and say what we need is a revised Original AD&D Edition; with simple inflexible classes and lots and lots of tables.

We have that already. In many incarnations. Hackmaster, Castles & Crusades, Labyrinth Lord, OSRIC, Dark Dungeons, Swords & Wizardry, et multiple cetera. That market is fucking crowded.

Swordslinger wrote:5E needs to take the best of 3E and 4E and combine them to make a better game.

I'm not sure there's enough things to 4e to borrow. I mean, I know there is a lot of stuff that conceptually could be good, but I don't think anything that's actually in 4e would be useable.

They really need to question some of the underlying assumptions of both editions. Prestige classes/Paragon paths, Feats, the entire build culture. These things may help to set up the supplement treadmill, but they also shorten the life of the game through power creep or erratta and risk making the game feel more about creating characters than playing the game.

Yes, by all means let's just keep reducing powers, feats and skills options down till Character Creation is nothing but "Choose between a Red Warrior, Blue Wizard, or Green Elf, then press the start button" Pfft...

Hell, as it is, if I had to point to single thing that proved to me, more than anything else, that 4E was finally and truly on it's way out. It would be their release of a completely choiceless class like the god damn Vampire.

If people are spending 3-4 hours on character and enjoying it (without irritating other people) that's a huge plus for your game. It invests people in your product coming and going; they keep the game in mind when there's not a game available AND it gives them an incentive to look for other groups to use the character on.

Now, character creation SHOULD have the option of being able to be plowed through quickly for games that were literally organized a few minutes ago. But being forced to choose I'd rather have a game where people had a character creation process that was long than short.

High magic, low magic or complex vs simple, a lot of players say they want one or the other. Ideally 5e should be able to accommodate both, maybe through different campaign settings or by spinning off one version of the game with a different name.

What would be cool, but possibly impractical to implement, is a system that could actually operate at different levels of detail. So for instance, these would all be valid character sheets:

Goblin, Tricky Swashbuckler, 5th level

Goblin, Swashbuckler, 5th level, [Stats from Array],
Combat Styles: Dirty Fighting, Acrobatic Evasion
Skill Areas: Urban Society, Thief

Goblin, Swashbuckler, 5th level, [Stats from PB]
[Individual Manuevers]
[Individual Skills]
[Individual Advantages]


Failing that, you could get a similar result by having individual manuevers/skills, but also pregen packages for character creation. Get a playable character in a few minutes, then spend hours tweaking it later, if you want to.
Actually, IIRC, one of those blogs was about something similar to this. I have no great hopes for it being implemented in a non-FUBAR way though.

Juton wrote:High magic, low magic or complex vs simple, a lot of players say they want one or the other. Ideally 5e should be able to accommodate both, maybe through different campaign settings or by spinning off one version of the game with a different name.

That was my thought reading through Mearls' latest blog entry; this could be accomplished by running separate games in different settings. Or possibly one setting at different stages, i.e. Middle-earth's First Age would be more like high-level play, but the Third Age would be more like mid-to-low level play. That combined with a Lite and Full version of rules, plus pre-packaged class builds that make instantaneous action an option.

Here's an idea I had about character creation: No one likes first level, right? It's basically just there to be gotten out of, so why not make the old standby of "Don't create a PC background until 2nd level," an actual mechanic? First level characters are playable with just a class and a basic equipment list. Just start playing and interacting with the others. Then, after the first mission (which should be a brief, introductory couple of scenes/encounters just to give a taste of what's to come) or first session, everyone hits second level, where the customization comes in. This gives you a chance to get to know the other party members and probably how everyone's going to be interacting, as well as the tone of the setting and the campaign, before you delve into the hours-long process of defining your new PC both imaginatively and mechanically. I say give first level characters only a small level of customization outside of class, just enough to be meaningful (reduced amount of skill points, some item options), and then the bulk of your chargen skill points, feat selection, etc., comes after you've gotten a taste of the encounters and how you like to play this character. This first level can then be skipped for experienced players who are already secure in their gaming groups or making new characters for an already familiar campaign, etc., etc.

1st level should give you 5 HP and 2nd level should give you 25

Previn wrote: I'm not sure there's enough things to 4e to borrow. I mean, I know there is a lot of stuff that conceptually could be good, but I don't think anything that's actually in 4e would be useable.

Sure there is.

[*] Short rest to heal all your hit points.
[*] More hit points at level 1
[*] Paradigm where your AC, attack bonuses and the like scale up at about +1 per level. This isn't 100% due to what equipment you might get, but your expected bonuses will increase by +1 (and so will equivalent monsters)
[*] Powers for everyone
[*] Monster generation uses formulaic guidelines to determine a monster's attack bonus, damage and defenses based on level.
[*] Standardized format of powers was so much easier to read and understand.
[*] Marking and sticky auras for fighter types gave them some interesting features besides just hitting things again and again.
[*] 4E saving throws were a good idea, so people always had something to do on their turn even if it was just making a save.
[*] Removal of temporary ability score modifiers.
[*] Less crazy new bonus types.

Swordslinger wrote:[*] Short rest to heal all your hit points.

I don't want a short rest to heal all my HP. I don't think that's a good thing because it reinforces the 5 minute workday, closes off attrition as a method of building tension, and breaks several types of narration for little if any gain.

[*] More hit points at level 1

Maybe.

[*] Paradigm where your AC, attack bonuses and the like scale up at about +1 per level. This isn't 100% due to what equipment you might get, but your expected bonuses will increase by +1 (and so will equivalent monsters)

Scaling bonuses exists for attacks (BAB) and saves (Class save bonuses) in 3.5. Skills 'scale' through skill points, which just needed a tweaking. Scaling everything leads to idiocy like a iron lock going from DC10 to DC30 just because you got better and in fact has shown to not work for balance anyways in 4e. It also means that you never really get better at doing anything.

[*] Powers for everyone

TERRIBLE IDEA. I cannot state how stupid this was both in idea and execution. It does not work and leads to massive homogenization. Balance problems aren't solved with straitjacketing everyone into the exact same power/resource system and then neutering it because the powers themselves aren't balanced.

In fact the power system is basically a micro-vancian casting system that everyone has to use.

[*] Monster generation uses formulaic guidelines to determine a monster's attack bonus, damage and defenses based on level.

Except the formula had to be rewritten, and it doesn't actually work anyways dues to scaling problems with PCs. additionally having a scale for monsters base damage is simplistic and almost completely pointless because that's the easy part. Anyone with an hour could come up with it. It doesn't help at all with creating actual interesting abilities, and 4e fails utterly at having anything but magical tea party for monsters outside of combat.

[*] Standardized format of powers was so much easier to read and understand.

Martial maneuvers, spells, psionics, classes feats, and just about every other thing in 3.5, or any game uses a standardized format. 4e powers are simple to read because the simple, bland and boring just as 4e is. They don't have to cover edge cases because 4e thinks it sanded off all the edge cases (which it didn't).

[*] Marking and sticky auras for fighter types gave them some interesting features besides just hitting things again and again.

3.5 was rarely 'hit things and hit things' again, and greater than 90% of the powers in 4e are 'hit things with some other minor effect'. Marks and auras as a method of aggro control is stupidly pointless when you have a DM controlling the monsters who can do it better than terrible, weak mechanics anyways. Aggro and marks are for computers that are terrible at making decisions about what to attack.

[*] 4E saving throws were a good idea, so people always had something to do on their turn even if it was just making a save.

In 3.5 the player made all the saves rather than having them be passive defenses, and was always making saves when it wasn't their turn, often several times. 4e just shifted which rolls the players were making. It's pretty clear you have absolutely no clue what so ever what you're talking about with regards to 3.x because this point alone should have been blindingly obvious to even the most idiotic player.

[*] Removal of temporary ability score modifiers.

Not seeing that as a good thing.

[*] Less crazy new bonus types.

Yeah, they have less crazy bonus types because they have fewer books and less conceptual space to create bonuses due to putting everything into the power + item system and stripping out everything else.

So again, there's enough things to 4e to borrow. I mean, I know there is a lot of stuff that conceptually could be good, but I don't think anything that's actually in 4e would be useable. Out of the 10 things you suggested, 1 thing isn't a bad idea, or was done before in 3.5, and that 1 idea depends entirely on the mechanics, numbers and play style as to if it's a good idea or not.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:If people are spending 3-4 hours on character and enjoying it (without irritating other people) that's a huge plus for your game. It invests people in your product coming and going; they keep the game in mind when there's not a game available AND it gives them an incentive to look for other groups to use the character on.

Now, character creation SHOULD have the option of being able to be plowed through quickly for games that were literally organized a few minutes ago. But being forced to choose I'd rather have a game where people had a character creation process that was long than short.

It's not a plus when character creation keeps feeding back into the game all the time. I want to spend my advancement choices on things that reflect what my character is doing in the game, not what I need to complete a 'build'. With both 3E and 4E character creation never ends.

I'm going to disagree on the monster generation one. Ideally, your monsters should all be playable (to a point - you could play a drow, centaur, mind flayer, or pixie, but not a giant centipede) and all your player race NPCs should be built the same as PCs so we don't get the stupid "the baleful heretic gets different powers which you can never learn. I don't care that you're a tiefling wizard, you're not learning them. And Jimmy, no your fighter can't learn the gnome nutstabber's awesome attack, because you're a PC!"

I hate that crap.

Stubbazubba wrote:This first level can then be skipped for experienced players who are already secure in their gaming groups or making new characters for an already familiar campaign, etc., etc.

Except that, no matter how you lay out levels, talk about game tiers. and design character progression, there will still be an endless number of shitheads who refuse to even consider that a new game can start at a level besides first. And this design is just condeming a lot of innocent players to having to play through the shitty 'tutorial' level over and over again.

sake wrote:

Stubbazubba wrote:This first level can then be skipped for experienced players who are already secure in their gaming groups or making new characters for an already familiar campaign, etc., etc.

Except that, no matter how you lay out levels, talk about game tiers. and design character progression, there will still be an endless number of shitheads who refuse to even consider that a new game can start at a level besides first. And this design is just condeming a lot of innocent players to having to play through the shitty 'tutorial' level over and over again.

Then call the primer level 0. Your second point might be spot-on, though.

CapnTthePirateG wrote:I'm going to disagree on the monster generation one. Ideally, your monsters should all be playable (to a point - you could play a drow, centaur, mind flayer, or pixie, but not a giant centipede) and all your player race NPCs should be built the same as PCs so we don't get the stupid "the baleful heretic gets different powers which you can never learn. I don't care that you're a tiefling wizard, you're not learning them. And Jimmy, no your fighter can't learn the gnome nutstabber's awesome attack, because you're a PC!"

I hate that crap.

I actually have to take issue with this:
monsters (and villains in general) should have different abilities than the PCs -- this is what keeps them interesting, and keeps the game interesting. Not only that, but these unique abilities can often be used as plot catalysts.

if monsters just have the same abilities as the PCs, then there is not much left (other than fluff) to differentiate them.

wotmaniac wrote:

CapnTthePirateG wrote:I'm going to disagree on the monster generation one. Ideally, your monsters should all be playable (to a point - you could play a drow, centaur, mind flayer, or pixie, but not a giant centipede) and all your player race NPCs should be built the same as PCs so we don't get the stupid "the baleful heretic gets different powers which you can never learn. I don't care that you're a tiefling wizard, you're not learning them. And Jimmy, no your fighter can't learn the gnome nutstabber's awesome attack, because you're a PC!"

I hate that crap.

I actually have to take issue with this:
monsters (and villains in general) should have different abilities than the PCs -- this is what keeps them interesting, and keeps the game interesting. Not only that, but these unique abilities can often be used as plot catalysts.

if monsters just have the same abilities as the PCs, then there is not much left (other than fluff) to differentiate them.

Well I guess I'm just not with you. I think the difference would be that they don't have a human PLAYER attached to them but that whole shit where you can't learn nutstabber attack? That should never be, barring anatomy issues.
Everything should be done to prevent the psycho with the Dmpc of legend.

Midnight_v wrote:Well I guess I'm just not with you. I think the difference would be that they don't have a human PLAYER attached to them but that whole shit where you can't learn nutstabber attack? That should never be, barring anatomy issues.
Everything should be done to prevent the psycho with the Dmpc of legend.

something as simple as nutstabber attack (or otherwise anything that is just a type of simple attack) -- yeah, sure, go ahead.
I'm talking about stuff that's beyond the realm of normal human(iod) potential.

If the PCs potentially have access to each and every special ability that a monster can have, then seriously, how does that not get boring?

wotmaniac wrote: I actually have to take issue with this:
monsters (and villains in general) should have different abilities than the PCs -- this is what keeps them interesting, and keeps the game interesting. Not only that, but these unique abilities can often be used as plot catalysts.

if monsters just have the same abilities as the PCs, then there is not much left (other than fluff) to differentiate them.

I don't think it's a bad idea in principle but there needs to be some careful thought. If the monsters powers are based on items then the game needs to allow the pcs to pick them up off the dead monsters and use them. Or figure out how they work and make them.

Likewise if a monster has a power that they could concievably teach a pc, then this needs to be accounted for.

You could concievably make a division between villians, (which work like PCs) and monsters (your completely inhuman things)
On the other hand no one needs to care what feats a displacer beast has.

wotmaniac wrote: something as simple as nutstabber attack (or otherwise anything that is just a type of simple attack) -- yeah, sure, go ahead.
I'm talking about stuff that's beyond the realm of normal human(iod) potential.

If the PCs potentially have access to each and every special ability that a monster can have, then seriously, how does that not get boring?

I imagined that you'd allow PCs abilities to learn a set number of monster powers at a time, assuming they had the right keyword. So fighters could learn weapon powers, and wizards could learn spell powers. Though to prevent this getting out of hand, you'd have to be at least 1 level higher than the monster to learn its power and the power would always have the same attack and damage bonuses that the monster had, and couldn't be modified by other stuff. (this would allow you to do 4E style monster powers without worrying about breaking the game). Since they wouldn't scale, you'd constantly be burning through them and replacing them as you encountered new monsters.

Similarly, wizards might have throwaway spells like this that they could learn (possibly even from various scrolls or spellbooks). Because your bonuses don't increase with these learned powers, you avoid the 3E problem of getting a stack of crap to sort through, as you're constantly cycling stuff out because it doesn't have a bonus to make it useful anymore. That way if there is some kind of uber monster attack power, it will, in a few levels, become a power that misses too much to be actually useful.

This stuff won't be something you can choose at character creation, it will be stuff you have to find by observing monsters fight or getting them to train you. One of the biggest problems with both 3E and 4E is that there wasn't nearly enough good stuff to actually find. The ability to pick up a new spell you saw a goblin mage cast or the sword trick a minotaur did would make for a more interesting adventure, and would also allow you to cut back on handing out magic items, because sometimes the "treasure" would simply be new maneuvers you picked up.

I don't want a short rest to heal all my HP. I don't think that's a good thing because it reinforces the 5 minute workday, closes off attrition as a method of building tension, and breaks several types of narration for little if any gain.

What? Being able to heal to full after combat encourages a 5-minute workday? What the fuck are you smoking?

Sure, you could say, "finite healing surges and dailies reinforce the five minute workday", but uh... not what's being talked about here.

And tension through attrition is what leads to the five-minute workday in the first place. You want to end the five-minute workday? Then either PCs shouldn't use up resources with each encounter but regenerate resources by sleeping, or there needs to be a combo meter, or every quest needs to be on a timer. Something along those lines.

All other things equal, healing surges are good for attrition-based gameplay compared to a system where you have healing that's effectively unlimited on a daily basis.

Maybe.

Agreed. If you want 1st level characters to have about a 1/20 chance of dying per attack then more HP is a bad idea. And for some people this IS desirable. They seriously don't want 1st level characters getting into anything vaguely resembling a fair fight. They want to live by their wits and such. But in the context of how 3e and 4e play, the only way to go is the "more hitpoints" route of 4e (although the ratio has fluctuated somewhat across the edition).

Scaling bonuses exists for attacks (BAB) and saves (Class save bonuses) in 3.5. Skills 'scale' through skill points, which just needed a tweaking. Scaling everything leads to idiocy like a iron lock going from DC10 to DC30 just because you got better and in fact has shown to not work for balance anyways in 4e. It also means that you never really get better at doing anything.

He said AC, attack bonuses, and the like. Not everything scaling. So yeah, strawman.

I kind of agree though, there's a strong argument to be made that 4e didn't really accomplish or use auto-scaling in any meaningful way since for many challenges it was still extremely important to pump your prime stat.

TERRIBLE IDEA. I cannot state how stupid this was both in idea and execution. It does not work and leads to massive homogenization. Balance problems aren't solved with straitjacketing everyone into the exact same power/resource system and then neutering it because the powers themselves aren't balanced.

In fact the power system is basically a micro-vancian casting system that everyone has to use.

Balance problems aren't solved but solving them is easier and making the rules take less fucking time to comprehend sure is nice. Being able to go from playing a fighter in one campaign to a wizard in another fairly smoothly is a good thing.

But really, there's no reason to stick to the micro-vancian system of 4e. The point is just that reusing the same resource scheme for all classes is a lot simpler and easier to balance (unless you just plan to outright disallow multiclassing and such, but if people can dip into other classes powers it's a lot simpler if everyone is on the same resource schedule). The system can be WoF, 4e-powers, an MP system, whatever.

Except the formula had to be rewritten, and it doesn't actually work anyways dues to scaling problems with PCs. additionally having a scale for monsters base damage is simplistic and almost completely pointless because that's the easy part. Anyone with an hour could come up with it. It doesn't help at all with creating actual interesting abilities, and 4e fails utterly at having anything but magical tea party for monsters outside of combat.

Yes, the implementation failed. No, not anyone could do it in an hour. Seriously, for the sake of making DMing stupid easy, good guidelines for making new monsters really should be right there in the DMG. And that means going above and beyond the 4e guidelines to having your DMG give guidelines about noncombat abilities, movement modes, status effects, etc.

He wasn't talking about the out-of-combat bits of monsters so you're strawmanning again to claim he wanted that part to work 4e-style or just bringing up something unrelated to his point.

Martial maneuvers, spells, psionics, classes feats, and just about every other thing in 3.5, or any game uses a standardized format. 4e powers are simple to read because the simple, bland and boring just as 4e is. They don't have to cover edge cases because 4e thinks it sanded off all the edge cases (which it didn't).

And the great thing about standards is having so many of them, amirite? This really is a problem for 3.5 system bloat (psionics, incarnum, ToB, binder, truenamer, shadowcaster...).

And seriously, it's actually a good idea for monsters to come with all the most important combat powers completely spelled out. And everything should at least have a short description that makes the monster usable from its stat block alone in the majority of cases.

Having to look up, print a big stack of cards, or memorize how various spells work in order to run monsters sucks.

3.5 was rarely 'hit things and hit things' again, and greater than 90% of the powers in 4e are 'hit things with some other minor effect'. Marks and auras as a method of aggro control is stupidly pointless when you have a DM controlling the monsters who can do it better than terrible, weak mechanics anyways. Aggro and marks are for computers that are terrible at making decisions about what to attack.

Marks don't even vaguely resemble aggro. It's actually a good idea. It's just that 4e has giant fucking loopholes that make many marks useless without optimization through clever use of readied actions by monsters (or just shift+charge). But the rough idea is actually pretty good and very salvageable.

And are you suggesting the DM should fucking play his monsters dumb so they don't go beat the shit out of the wizard or something? Because I can't make heads or tails of "Marks and auras as a method of aggro control is stupidly pointless when you have a DM controlling the monsters who can do it better than terrible, weak mechanics anyways". Because seriously, either wizards don't really need a frontline (i.e. well played 3e wizards), they get faceraped by monsters, the DM just plays them dumb to humor the players and fix a system problem, or there's a good system of zones of control and/or marking and punishment. Options 1 and 4 are the only one of those that don't blow chunks. If you don't like option 1, then option 4 it is.

In 3.5 the player made all the saves rather than having them be passive defenses, and was always making saves when it wasn't their turn, often several times. 4e just shifted which rolls the players were making. It's pretty clear you have absolutely no clue what so ever what you're talking about with regards to 3.x because this point alone should have been blindingly obvious to even the most idiotic player.

I'm pretty sure the point is that in 4e, you make saving throws on your own turn (with a few exceptions). Whereas in 3e, many spells don't have continuing saving throws. So you roll a saving throw once on someone else's turn.

It's actually a good idea in the case of unopposed rolls to consolidate all rolling for attacks to either defender or attacker rather than having different cases depending on the attack.

Removal of temporary ability score modifiers.

Not seeing that as a good thing.

Temporary ability score modifiers are a terrible idea. Why? Because then everything that references that ability score needs to be changed. This slows down play.

Incidentally, this is also why having too many temporary modifiers even without the additional layer of referencing something else (like 4e's tiny little modifiers) is also a terrible idea.

Yeah, they have less crazy bonus types because they have fewer books and less conceptual space to create bonuses due to putting everything into the power + item system and stripping out everything else.

Actually, bonus typing was just dumb in the first place. Continually adding new types of bonuses is even dumber. Because it makes bonus stacking rules more complicated and benefits the player who dumpster dives to combine a bunch of different types of tiny bonuses together to get one huge bonus.

Numerical bonuses should be capped or better yet players should only be able to be affected by a certain number of buffs max. Buffing routines are fucking annoying, newbie unfriendly, and unthematic.

@Dog Quixote:
I concur.

@Swordslinger:
While I wouldn't necessarily run it quite like that, I fail to hate what you've presented.

CapnTthePirateG wrote:Ideally, your monsters should all be playable (to a point - you could play a drow, centaur, mind flayer, or pixie, but not a giant centipede)

Actually, there's a point here with which I disagree. Even giant centipedes should be playable, because there is some definite traction in the "I'm a hive mind of vermin that walks around in a people suit" trope.

Prak_Anima wrote:Actually, there's a point here with which I disagree. Even giant centipedes should be playable, because there is some definite traction in the "I'm a hive mind of vermin that walks around in a people suit" trope.

There's a fair distance between "Guy who looks and acts human, is secretly a hive-mind of bugs" and "Very large centipede who does not think anything but centipede thoughts".