The Gaming Den

That may have happened since I've not talked to my WotC friend in a few months. But they did start the whole F2P concept before the court case was filed.

http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/ ... als_Update

Ha ha, no one likes the stealth errata done to the game with Essentials.

Suffer, retards, and gaze upon the true horror of your 'god'.


The common/uncommon/rare change gives me real hope that the game designers will be kicked out of the D&D chambers soon and will be forced to get real jobs.

When that day comes, I think I'll celebrate by reposting the old list of 4E criticisms again on 1d4chan again. Mwahaha.

That sounds like an MMOG forum after a nerf patch.

Fuchs wrote:That sounds like an MMOG forum after a nerf patch.

Well, it is.

Fuchs wrote:That sounds like an MMOG forum after a nerf patch.

-Username17

B-bu-but WotC is a business! A business deserves to make a profit!

EDIT: Prestidigitation can no longer move objects. The defense bonus feats are RNG-sodomizing. Things that should have been implemented in the first books (half damage on a failed attack for wizard powers) are finally getting put in. wtfamireading.jpg.

That about right PR?

It sure is.

I have a feeling Superior Crossbow was taken away from rogues due to Martial Archetype. A Rogue (or sometimes Fighter|Rogue) /PMC Ranger/Martial Archetype was putting out as high as 190 DPR with a superior crossbow.. with a hand crossbow, that will drop by a significant margin. (Probably to about 160 or so.) The item rarity hit will drop it by another 40-70 or so, putting a Rogue/PMC Ranger/Martial Archetype back down to the ~100 mark, with a capstone of around 120, which seems to be where the DPR kings are 'meant' to be.

Sigh. It does read like the WoW forums.

It's not really WoW talk so much as "pointless number crunch" talk. Just look at how people argue over MTG cards.

Except that this kind of number crunch is really important and something every designer should do. I see nothing wrong with it. I mean, do you bitch and whine when people here point out that the 3.5 monk sucks?

I normally don't care about pointless number crunch, but the Common/Uncommon/Rare goes a lot further than that.

It's a fundamental shift in how magical items interact with the game. See, players can't get their hands on Uncommon/Rare stuff without sucking the cocks of the DM anymore. Since magical items are a huge part and parcel of how 4E characters are played, this means that your DM now controls your character advancement to an extent not seen even in 1st or 2nd edition. Hint: Frost weapons and Iron Armbands of Power count as Uncommon. Hell, as of the errata (oh, didn't you know, they released another few pages of errata recently!) every magical item not on the list counts as uncommon until said otherwise.

I'm pretty much over 4E, but I'm fucking pissed as hell that the game decided to do this. I was pretty much satisfied at the thought of the current game designers just having to get real jobs, but now I want to see them in a breadline.

It's "pointless" because it's not the designers doing it. But people are free to do it.

4E devs routinely scan the Character Optimization boards. Seriously, not only is it extremely obvious from the errata but there have been at least 1 developer who has flat out said that they really shouldn't have done that, since powergamers game at a 'different' level than the other people.

Trivially made magic items are easily the biggest problem from the 3.0 game that was carried over to 4e.

Of course, if the magic items weren't all so dull in 4e, it'd be a bigger deal. But 4e is a game where "Charm Person" means the victim of the spell gets to make a single basic attack against an 'ally', and Suggestion just means you re-roll a Diplomacy attempt.

So...

Any item that did things you might actually care about is Uncommon and thus uncraftable. Most Rares will be shitty, underpowered legacy crap.

The Shiny New 4.5E classes get cheap-ass damage bonuses from Common items.

Everybody else has to suck DM cock for uncraftable Uncommon SoR's and IAoP's.

People who use weapons and implements once again get extra feat taxes because god forbid a single feat ever affects both.

Also, they have once again made an Evocation Wizard that doesn't do enough damage to actually matter nor has enough control to justify it's existence.

For some reason, they couldn't be arsed to give new attrib bonuses for the three PHB races that won't be in the first Heroes of Shittwinkie book despite the fact it would take all of five seconds to type them out.

The whole item rarity thing is stupid, but the complaints that you have to "suck DM cock" to get magic items or whatever are kind of bizarre. Haven't we established before that letting PCs craft whatever they want, whenever they want to double/break WBL or its equivalent is super-bad?

I agree that if magic items are an expected and required part of PC advancement in order to stay on the RNG or otherwise be competitive against their enemies then the possibility that your DM might withhold the badass winner items for one reason or another is a problem. Part of the problem with 4e is that it has "winner" items at all so that you jump for joy when you get a staff of ruin and weep when you get basically anything else.

Clearly there is some happy medium here.

Sad thing is that in MMOGs, you can't just ignore a patch, but you can in tabletop rpgs. Wiht the exception of 4E, apparently, where the Character builder is the only way to handle the game anymore according to one those posts.

Archmage wrote:. Haven't we established before that letting PCs craft whatever they want, whenever they want to double/break WBL or its equivalent is super-bad?

That was in 3E where you could craft rings of wishes and items that boosted you off right off the RNG. In 4E, items tend to be a great deal more limited, though somehow, even more vital to a character.

Archmage wrote:The whole item rarity thing is stupid, but the complaints that you have to "suck DM cock" to get magic items or whatever are kind of bizarre.

Not really. Recall that 4e has no magic item tables. If something isn't "common" you literally cannot get it. There is no roll you can get, no ability you can use, no place you can go, no resource you can spend, and no thing you can try that will give you even a chance to get such an item outside of the prospect of the DM choosing to put it in a treasure parcel. So if you need a specific item in order to fulfill your character concept or give you the numbers you need to stay competitive and that item is not "Common" then your choices are to suck DM Cock or GTFO. And with the Common Item list being very short and largely filled with items geared towards the Essentials Class Variants, you basically cannot play the old material without writing up a Santa's Wishlist of exactly the items you need and then "happening" to fin them during your adventures.

-Username17

But "letters to Santa" is exactly how you're supposed to be distributing loot anyway (e.g. I've been running a campaign for a year, and the only randomization has been who gets what level item slot out of the parcels for each level out of the DMG). I'm not commenting on the (lack of) verisimilitude of this method, just saying it's not a change from 4e. Without having actually seen/read Essentials yet, it sounds like it's a nerf of item creation rituals more than anything else.

Ideally, if you had to use this item ranking system for some bloody reason, it should go like this:

Basic (boring, but critical) stat boost/keyword changing stuff like Armor of Resistance, Staves of Ruin, Bracers of Archery, Lighting Great swords, Magic Hats that boost your Inititive and give you Perception bonus, etc (we'll ignore that some of these item also have daily powers, because really no one gets the items for those) should all be Common. Common item should, of course, be craftable

Uncommon items should be the fun gear that adds extra options and powers that you wouldn't have other wise. Like Boots of Adept Charging, Gloves of the Hedgemage, Strikeback Tattoos, Belts of Breaching, Salves of Power, that weapon enchantment that let's you make a ranged attack with your weapon no matter what it is, the few items with useful dailies that are left and so on. Uncommon items should also be craftable, but much more difficult to make, in some fashion that prevents making multiples of an item for a single person.

Rares... well having static items as rares are just a bad idea in the first place, but they should be all brand new game changing shit, as there is no item currently in 4E I'd rank as being Rare worthy aside from some of the Boons (which aren't actually items) and a perhaps few pre-errata items like Displacer Armor and such.

FrankTrollman wrote:Not really. Recall that 4e has no magic item tables. If something isn't "common" you literally cannot get it...so if you need a specific item in order to fulfill your character concept or give you the numbers you need to stay competitive and that item is not "Common" then your choices are to suck DM Cock or GTFO.

This makes sense, but there's another issue--random treasure tables can and in all probability will screw you out of the one specific item you wanted. On the other hand, they might drop the Sword of Kas into your lap at level 2, so YMMV. If you really need a cloak of the mountebank to fulfill your character concept and it only has a 2% chance of showing up in a treasure pool, though, you're realistically out of luck anyway and are probably going to have to beg the DM for the item anyway.

It sounds like the best treasure distribution system, based on these issues, is "randomized, but the items on the random list are mostly reasonably balanced with each other," at least for a game like D&D. The Book of Gears solution to fixing crafting is to flat-out limit the number of magical items you can use so that crafting doesn't directly turn absurd wealth into absurd power. I suppose the problem with 3.5e magic item crafting wasn't the fact that you could do it at all and make whatever you wanted (which was fine) but the fact that it doubled your WBL and created a clear wealth equals power progression.

Archmage wrote:I suppose the problem with 3.5e magic item crafting wasn't the fact that you could do it at all and make whatever you wanted (which was fine) but the fact that it doubled your WBL and created a clear wealth equals power progression.

3.5 already has an explicit wealth equals power progression, which is fine with lower level items. The problem is that it scales up infinitely, with more wealth equalling more power ad infinitum.

Really, a system like D&D where items = power needs to have a wealth acquisition system that accounts for the fact that sometimes a character will need to acquire a specific item, whilst not making items so easy to buy that finding a kick-ass magic sword stops being special or there is no need to venture into trap-filled tombs.

We use a system where any character can craft items, however crafting costs the full worth of the item rather than half. It's assumed there is some more cost-effective way of doing things but that takes a lot of levels in "Item Enchanter" class that doesn't give level appropriate spells [/list]

The jump to 3e and even 4e style play does make "random item" tables much more of a problem than in AD&D.

In AD&D, if I roll up a +3 melee weapon, almost anything, the fighter with the +1 longsword will put it down and pick up the +3 thing, no brainer.

In 4e, and to a slightly lesser extent 3e, characters become very strongly married to their weapons at a very low level, and it's effectively impossible to change.

When it comes to rods/staves/wands, once again, AD&D wizards can pretty much use anything equally well...but in 4e? Absolutely positively not, the words practically don't mean the same thing.

So, for weapons, the newer systems really can't support random tables in any form. Other equipment isn't quite as bad, but it's still much easier for a random character to effectively use a random item (assuming the item is useful at all) in the old games than in the new.

Doom wrote:In AD&D, if I roll up a +3 melee weapon, almost anything, the fighter with the +1 longsword will put it down and pick up the +3 thing, no brainer.

Not after they introduced Weapon Specialization in Unearthed Arcana.