The Gaming Den

RobbyPants wrote: What's so magical about the number 20 that you have to write it on your character sheet?

It implies a lot more level-ups that E6 or E8. Level-ups are fun.

Well, maybe we can get people to think E8 sounds like more than D20. It all just depends on the phrasing used, after all.

Not quite. People like to get rewards Only 7 rewards over the life of the game could be too little.

Stop waving 'use Tome material' like it's some kind of panacea at me.

Yeah, Tome Fighters and Barbarians and whatever the fuck can keep going for quite a while longer than their 3.X counter-part, but it doesn't change the fact that the characters are boring when the combat music isn't playing after a certain point, because their abilities are firmly rooted in the 'martial' world. They're BMX Bandits out of combat when their party is Angel Summoner.

Dr.Noface wrote:This would be justified by these characters having bodies and minds unsaturated by other magic. Bad idea?

They're really good at using items? Then they're Artificers or Gadget Knights. It's a good idea, as long as they discard their old names; letting them continue to think that they're warriors cripples their character concepts and ability to advance the plot, because tooling yourself up just to help you kill foes is an increasingly limited schtick at higher levels.

That's my problem with giving fighters the ability to have/use bunch of goodies and still telling them to think of themselves as fighters. They won't use Instant Castles and Lyres of Necromancy and all that stuff because they don't feel that it advances their concept, even though that kind of stuff is the only way that they can maintain screentime.

Psychic Robot wrote: Because I don't want to be cut off at level 8 when the game can go for 20 levels. Which is, essentially, "I don't like how you play, so nyah." And I'm okay with that reasoning.

baduin wrote: Not quite. People like to get rewards Only 7 rewards over the life of the game could be too little.

You're not cut off at level 8 in my E8 variant. You can still keep going past that. It's just that the difficulty of your challenges becomes logarithmic or you get treadmill bonuses--that way you can still advance the game for 12 more levels without your characters transforming into Sword Kings or Archlichs or whatever.

Lago, who cares if they're boring outside of combat? You're not the one playing the class. If you find the class boring, you won't play it. People who find the class interesting, will play it. And if they turn down having an army, a magical mount, and a Batcave of magic items AND THEN complain about having nothing to do out of combat, tell them they screwed themselves over because the rest of the party are demigods. But do these people even exist?

How many plot advancement powers does a party need? Have you played with people who demand (at high level) out of combat screentime to do trivial, mundane stuff and complain when they don't get it? Well, eff those people. But if a player just wants to fight combats and ride the plot coaster then let him. He won't hold the party back in combat, and as long as he's a physical threat to demigods, he'll get to roleplay with demigods.

But you and Frank have convinced me that a tier system would do wonders for getting people on the same page for what stories they want to tell. Just note that the world's greatest and most skilled fighter with artifact level equipment is a legendary tier character that people want to play. In their minds this guy is not a gadgeteer, because he earned his shiny swords through questing and murdering dragons.

Also, I've never known anybody to turn down Instant Castles and Lyres of Necromancy because it made their character less badass. Sweet magic loot is sweet magic loot.

malak wrote:

RobbyPants wrote: What's so magical about the number 20 that you have to write it on your character sheet?

It implies a lot more level-ups that E6 or E8. Level-ups are fun.

baduin wrote:Not quite. People like to get rewards Only 7 rewards over the life of the game could be too little.

There are two ways around this:

1) Use's Lago's suggestion, keep up advancement, but only scale at a logrithmic rate.

2) Rewrite the first 8 levels into 20. This approach might be a bit more work, but it is doable. An alternate version of this is to allow the players to gain fractions of a level as they gain enough XP. For example, going from Fighter 1 to Fighter 2 increasees:

- Your Hit Die
- Your BAB
- Your Skills
- Your Fort Save
- You get a bonus feat

So, you could say that since it takes 1,000 XP to get to level 2, every 200 XP, you can get one of those things. It's a little bit of work up front in that you have to figure out how many feature a class grants and run a quick little division problem, but it's easy to implement. The only thing the DM has to worry about is at 800 XP, you have a party full of 1.8 level characters, so you need to balance encounters accordingly.

It's been brought up before, but 3.5 D&D is basically two games, one is a low-fantasy romp reminiscent of LotR and the second is some superpowered romp through the planes. The problem is some people want to play just LotR, and some people want to play Superheroes, even if it was mechanically possible to accommodate both, should we?

You can have one game with tiered levels or you can have two games that go up to 20. 3.5 tries to have Dr. Manhattan and Aragorn in the same party but we know that doesn't work out. If the grognards are going to be obstinate then maybe it we can find ways of turning the Fighter into a gadget knight that is less objectionable, and include a better Monk for those of use who wouldn't mind playing DBZ. Would letting a Fighter amplify the magic in his sword (say going from +2 to +5) through awesomeness be as objectionable?

Juton wrote:It's been brought up before, but 3.5 D&D is basically two games, one is a low-fantasy romp reminiscent of LotR and the second is some superpowered romp through the planes. The problem is some people want to play just LotR, and some people want to play Superheroes, even if it was mechanically possible to accommodate both, should we?

Honestly I'd rather split the game into two D&Ds, one for the low level, play on a grid style where you have armored knights protecting squishy spellcasters.

Then you'd have another gridless D&D where everyone can effectively soak some damage, and you have crazy battles with people flying through the astral plane every which way and casting spells that blow up castles.

I don't feel like you can adequately do both in one rules set though. You're better off having two vaguely similar rules sets with maybe some conversion guidelines.

RandomCasualty2 wrote: I don't feel like you can adequately do both in one rules set though. You're better off having two vaguely similar rules sets with maybe some conversion guidelines.

You don't really need two rules-sets. E8 characters don't grow all that much after they hit the 'top end of LotR' part so they don't need all that many extra rules to simulate their game. You do need a section in the DMG telling you how to put DCs and monster stats on the treadmill. But it's just adjusting numbers. If the biggest, baddest monster you will fight at E8-level 20 is a fire giant and you were fighting hill giants at level 7 you don't need to rethink any paradigms or even do that much RNG. Fuck, the Epic-20 characters could still plunder many of the same rules you do when they're at around level 9.

But seriously, level 1 to epic and level 1 to LotR use the same rules for levels 1 through 8. It's once they split off you see any difference. And since LotR power scales veeeerrrrry sllllooooowy after a certain cutoff point you don't need a separate book.

Quadratic power curves (and linear ones, for that matter) rise so much more quickly than logarithmic that the existence of 'E-8 specific options for level 20 characters' thrown at level 9 and 10 characters won't even make them flinch. The only thing you have to worry about is compensating for the RNG effect (since a +10 sword means different things in an Epic game and a LotR game), which of course can be taken care of with a few pages of charts.

Dr.Noface wrote: Lago, who cares if they're boring outside of combat?

It's fucking rude, that's why. 'Hey, DM, I find your stories about investigating the murders and hopping from city to city to track down the assassin boring. I'm going to go play Super Smash Bros. until the combat music starts. Then give me a call. Yeah, I know the other people are interested but I don't give a shit about anything other than combat.'

D&D is a cooperative storytelling game. If someone is not pulling their weight in contributing to the story by only playing the parts they want then they're being selfish, taking up screentime without contributing anything.

If they don't want to participate in the non-combat sections then they should GTFO. I wouldn't want a pacifist basket-weaver at my D&D gametable either, even if the DM adjusted the encounters as if they weren't there.

Lago PARANOIA wrote: You don't really need two rules-sets.

You seriously do, because one game envisions fighters as sort of a meat shield that exists to block corridors and shield casters from arrows and crap.

The other game assumes everyone can take care of themselves and presumably hands out a totally different role/style to warriors.

Also, the battle grid is horrible for high level combat. It seriously is. When you've got people flying and maneuverable, I don't think they should be relegated to 5 ft squares, nor is it really even practical to try to track 3D battlefields. At that point terrain becomes almost irrelevant, and you want to have comic book style shit where spiderman is swinging across the city. And there's no way you'll do that with a battlemap. When you try to run fights like that, the battlemap is a total straitjacket.

The combat system is suited for low level, the skill system is suited for low level, lets face it people, everything is pretty much suited for low level, and when you try to put something high level in there like commanding an army or blowing up a city, the result usually makes the game clunky as shit and brings it to a grinding halt.

Can you try to run that with what is effectively a low level tactical rules set? Sure, but there's really no reason to do so.

Not many people want to go from LotR level of power to DBZ anyway. Let people who want to play the LotR game play that and stay there, and people who want high power start there. I think people would have more fun with it anyway. If you want to be blowing up mountains, why should you start as fucking Boromir? Kinda seems like it defeats the purpose. I don't believe in MMO grinds and this "you must start at 1st level" bullshit. Fuck that. If you want to run a high powered game, there's no shame in starting there.

I really hate the idea of a level treadmill. Even dumb players will pick up on the fact that their characters aren't really getting better.

You don't need to put players on a level treadmill at L8. A 20th level fighter has fundamentally the same capabilities as an 8th level fighter, you just have to stop all spellcasters/manifestors/initiators from learning to do anything fundamentally new past level 8. So basically there can be 5th+ level spells but they have to replicate lower level spells, like bigger and better fireballs, and what monsters are acceptable are limited. Seriously with this system a Cloud Giant is an acceptable enemy for a 13th level party, a Glabrezu as written has probably too many abilities.

I think the most D&D way to handle this would be to split the settings, have a new generic setting which is low fantasy where people only see teleport and flesh-to-stone as plot devices then have the classic Forgotten Realms that have the really powerful shit. First problem with this approach is that no matter how hard you yell to not bring FRealms chracters into gritty land, people will, and the DM will wonder why the game got so easy for them. That DM will also wonder what his feet are because he is that retarded.

Splitting D&D by setting also has the upside in that you can tailor the experience of each setting without having to hold to default power value of the new core (which I assume is going to be the lowest). Your steam-punk world may not want teleport because then airships are irrelevant but may want players to be able to cast Overland Flight so that they can have dynamic 3D battles or whatever.

RC2 wrote:
Can you try to run that with what is effectively a low level tactical rules set? Sure, but there's really no reason to do so.

The low level players never get to see the high level rules set. That's the point.

Envision a cutoff point for your E8 characters of power level. You don't want them getting more powerful than that. Now look at an 'epic game' and determine at what level your cutoff point corresponds to that. For example, E8 characters are fine with epic-level advancement until level 7-9, when things scale too quickly for that.

You then copy-paste the powers, monsters, and phlebtonium from Epic level 7-9 into level 20 of your E8 game. You now have two choices from how you want to conduct the game.

- E8 characters scale linearly from their level one to level 20. The advantage of that is that it makes the level treadmill less noticeable. The disadvantage of that is that it will require some division or multiplication converting the numbers from the E8 game to the Epic game and requires decision ahead of time.

- E8 characters scale linearly (or even quadratically, whichever) from their level one to some point on the power curve where the slope rises too fast for them. Then for the rest of the game they scale logarithmically to the finishing point. The advantage of this is that it doesn't force players to decide which campaign they want until the moment of truth. The disadvantage of this is that it can make the level treadmill noticeable since their characters aren't fundamentally different in power from E8 level 8 to E8 level 20; the jump from E8 level 6 to 8 is starker than E8 level 8 to 16.


In neither case do you actually need to write a totally new rulesset. You use the same rules that the epic characters used when they were around your point in the power curve and you don't graduate to a new one. All you get is the RNG curve shifted around, because you're a fucking bingo monkey who can't handle a game where your numbers don't go up at a predetermined schedule.

Neuroglyph sucking WotC cock:

http://www.neuroglyphgames.com/essentia ... rich-baker

This is where we think that there are many experienced Players, that could run Fighters very competently as ‘power-based’ Characters, but who might simply prefer to run a Fighter in what is, essentially, a more ‘classic’ sense of how the class works.

My brain is full of fuck.

That sounds like someone else I was reading, who was pissed that Essentials was so much like 3e. I was confused.

-Crissa

malak wrote:Neuroglyph sucking WotC cock:

http://www.neuroglyphgames.com/essentia ... rich-baker

What drives me nuts is that he didn't ask the most obvious question to put down the "edition war" speculation -- going forward, are you going to keep selling Essentials and the PHB side by side? Of course, the answer is "no", but the weasels never come out and say it in plain English.

hogarth wrote: What drives me nuts is that he didn't ask the most obvious question to put down the "edition war" speculation -- going forward, are you going to keep selling Essentials and the PHB side by side? Of course, the answer is "no", but the weasels never come out and say it in plain English.

It's pure advertisement, obviously they won't discuss anything that is not doubleplusgood.

They already gave some line about returning to publishing the 'normal' 4E books in a year or so once all of the Essential line is out the door at Gencon.

Which is either total bullshit, or if it's true, some of the the worst managing of a property that I've ever seen.

I think we've reached the point where they HAVE to be lying about lot of this 'It's not 4.5' stuff, because otherwise it's the stupidest plan ever.

Rules compendium preview.

One of our goals for the Rules Compendium was to make its rules as up-to-date and clear as possible. To achieve that goal, we have incorporated every update to the core rules that has occurred since the current edition of the game was released. “The book includes updates like the revised Stealth rules, the changes to how weapons and implements work, and new DCs for various tasks,” explains Jeremy Crawford, senior developer and lead on this project. “The revisions that we introduced in Player’s Handbook 2, Player’s Handbook 3, Dungeon Master’s Guide 2, Monster Manual 2, and Monster Manual 3 are all included. When the book is released, it will contain the most current version of the game’s rules.”

We have also clarified many parts of the game, especially those parts that have provoked the most questions. You will find many new examples as well as commentary. Take conditions: their section of the book not only includes the nuts and bolts of how conditions work but also addresses some of the questions that come up in play. For example, players sometimes wonder, “Can an ooze or a snake be knocked prone?” The Rules Compendium says yes and suggests what’s going on in the game world when that amorphous or limbless creature falls prone.

As we worked to clear up as many rules as possible, we also came across portions of the game that needed more than a new example or a fresh turn of phrase. Some pieces begged for revision, particularly subsystems that were overcomplicated or simply no fun to play. For example, we have tightened up the rules for flight, and those rules now appear with the other movement rules, not in a DM-only section. Similarly, we have tweaked how mounted combat works so that it is easier and more fun to include in an encounter.

Every revision we made is meant to work with the material already in print. You will be able to take a flying monster from the Monster Manual, for instance, and use it with the slimmed-down rules for flight without needing to change anything in the monster’s stat block.

So.

Does this sound like Pathfinder's "backwards compatibility" promise to anyone else?

sake wrote:They already gave some line about returning to publishing the 'normal' 4E books in a year or so once all of the Essential line is out the door at Gencon.

Which is either total bullshit, or if it's true, some of the the worst managing of a property that I've ever seen.

I think we've reached the point where they HAVE to be lying about lot of this 'It's not 4.5' stuff, because otherwise it's the stupidest plan ever.

Interesting. I was sure that they wouldn't keep two separate-but-equal player's guides in print. If that happens, you can colour me surprised!

Oops, wrong thread.

Juton wrote: I really hate the idea of a level treadmill. Even dumb players will pick up on the fact that their characters aren't really getting better.

Then why is WoW and FFXI still in bweezness?

Regardless, I agree with you, there just isn't a lot of room you can do. I mean, really, you start out as 'physically fit human being' and want to go to 'badass top end of 'mundane' action hero like anything Schwarzenegger did', which definitely has some room for growth, but how many levels can you put in between before you make advance so slow that it feels like the level treadmill anyway?

You don't have many options. Here's what you can do:

1) Make the bonuses they're receiving relative to their opposition really small. You can either put people explicitly on the level treadmill or you can put people on the level escalator. People can still advance relatively, too. You can make it so that even though your bonuses versus a horde of thugs is the same as theirs at level 4 than at level 3 (because they went up, too), you can use some other sleight of hand to give the PCs a non-bonus RNG like another power or some l33t gear or some shit. This might be too noticeable for many groups.

2) Don't have many levels in the first place. The game tops out at level 5 or 6 or something. That's definitely enough room to simulate 'Civilian' to 'Thug' to 'Detective Bullock' to 'Robin' to 'Batgirl' to 'Batman' and make the advancement feel meaningful. The problem is that people are attracted to big numbers for some reason.

3) File the numbers off of the levels off, make it like Shadowrun where you can advance individual skills so that people feel like they're always on a schedule of reinforcement without letting them go off the charts. Note that this is pretty much putting people on the level treadmill, you're just being deceptive about it.

4) Make the level curve logarithmic or exponential. This requires you to judge when people will least notice the level treadmill and then make advancement slow on those parts. This means that the difference between a level 2 and a level 5 character is smaller (or bigger) than a level 17 and a level 20 character. Namely, you're keeping advancement at a rate so that it's close to a linear rate with a slow amount of levels but you're only temporarily putting someone on the level treadmill. Or the reverse. It's up to you to decide whether people will tolerate the level treadmill more at the beginning of the game or the end of the game. Again, you're still putting people on the level treadmill, you're just adjusting the speed at which it runs.

5) Put people on the level treadmill, hide it some other way. This is what 4E did. This is technically different from option 1, because in addition to fighting back alley thugs you're also fighting ninjas now; the hope is that you don't use back alley thugs anymore, because otherwise people will be able to tell that the absolute difficulty of fighting ninjas is the same as fighting thugs. It's very important of you not to change the nature of these challenges; people should not have to develop schticks like personal flight and teleportation to take on these challenges, otherwise it'll blow your cover. It's up to you to tell me whether people enjoyed it or got offended by it--or rather, they got offended by noticing it. Page 42 could've gone a long way by stating that players should only face DC-appropriate challenges and if you assign some Mickey Mouse challenge to high level characters like balancing on a tightrope you should blam the DM anyway. Again, if people someone notice the level treadmill then your hard work is for naught.