Zero Buzz on 5E...Is It Dead Out The Gate?

[darkmaster]

Hey, Mad Bull 34 has a scene where a seven foot tall police officer who's built like an Olympic level weight lifter drops trow and stars pulling grenades off his pubes in order to break up a drug deal. I will tolerate no defamation of such an insane master piece.

Besides, things aren't really better now. For every Attack on Titan or Trinity Blood there's a Evangelion or School Days. The only real difference is what we're exposed to since we generally consume our Anime through the internet and can, therefore, be much more choosy with our time.

[shadzar]

Fitting it into D&D seems to be where the problem comes up.

this IS the problem. i watch anime every week at various palces online and off. many modern like BTOOOM! are good, but it is NOT something that D&D fits with for the most part. Shin Megumi and the girl party fighting to save the country, maybe, Slayer, Lodoss Wars, etc fits with the concdept of D&D a party that goes on adventures. Log Horizon is a great MMO based version like SOA and .//HACK but without the modern world creeping in that is a great representation of the D&D concept even with the 3.x and upward design styles that are present in MMOs like skills.

The problem comes when D&D is made to be Xiolin Showdown, DBZ, etc. There is a reason it was medieval generic Europe for 23 years before WotC bought it. you could adapt that into ANYTHING from Spelljammer, to Dragonlance, to Ravenloft, to Planescape. That is fine. most of those settings suck, but go right ahead and play them if you want. The problem is when, like with 4th, EVERYTHING becomes Planescape with its Asstral Sea, or DBZ like Pathfinder.

Art is a BIG part of how the game looks, not jsut the pictures but the ideas coming with them. Anyone exposed to anime will start thinking in those terms.

Why msut D&D be turned into the next NAruto d20? Why can't they make both a medieval and anime style game if that is what they want? Munchkin has Cthulu, D&D, Santa, all other kinds of weird things that work because THAT is what EVRYONE wants, and can leave out the sets they don't. Don't like vampires, don't use Munchkin Bites.

D&D having too much and too many in the core, just ends up with a confused product.

Anyone remember the anime characters in Pathfinder Beta book? those were quickly laughed at and the art changed a bit.

it is about what the style conveys mostly. Not everyone wants to play Anime & Dragons, but with amore generic core, than can make D&D into that. You add too much then it is hard to remove things like "Bloodied" because Saiyan's get stronger after each time they are brought to near death.

Some people like comic books but hate comic book movies. Some people like anime, but hate reading manga (even when reading it left to right). there is a reason things have different genres because like the races of the world, each genre has a culture and they don't always match with each others tastes.

Remember Mearls idea to make a D&D for everyone, and think about what I am saying. Things will likely be such a mishmash trying to please everyone, it will please no one. that has been my point! not just today, but since they announced D&DN and the design goals for it.

I can't believe I just agreed with Maxus.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Hey, Mad Bull 34 has a scene where a seven foot tall police officer who's built like an Olympic level weight lifter drops trow and stars pulling grenades off his pubes in order to break up a drug deal. I will tolerate no defamation of such an insane master piece.

Unfortunately, such moments are ruined by the show's rather sincere and shocking moments of sexism and racism and to a lesser extent classism. It's one thing to parody New York City as an asphalt death course where even Judge Dredd and Lord Humongous would run crying from, it's quite another to have endless scenes of nubile blonde women getting sexually victimized.

[Kaelik]

I think a lot of people might not realize that good anime exists. Some of the older stuff is good, but the quality of anime in general has been declining for years.

Yeah, Bill O'Reilly, sure, and everything was better when you were a kid.

Here, let me show you something:

When you were a kid, you watched anime that Japan liked so much that it was successful, and that someone who wasn't Japanese watched and said... yeah, that looks like it will make money in America.

Today, every anime show in existence airs like a weak later on crunchyroll or funimation websites.

Yes, there is a lot of meaningless drivel. There was also meaningless Drivel in the old days, you just didn't see it.

Yes, Naruto is a dumb show. So was DragonballZ in literally the exact same way because they are both shows of the same genre featuring the same tropes and appealing to the same audience.

Your pretension that the past was just so much better than the present is, like all such, completely and wholly made of self delusion.

[Prak]

I will point out that there is one difference between Dragonball and Naruto which matters to a certain percentage of the population-- the art style. Some people will prefer one (Naruto*) over the other (Dragonball*)

(*disclaimer: this is my personal opinion, and while I think it is the correct one, others will likely disagree.)

edit: oh, the writing style too, I suppose. But that one's harder for me to opine on, since I never watched Dragonball because I thought the art was that lame.

Also, reddit deciphered the entire chart: http://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/27 ... _warlocks/

And yes, "Unicorn" is a separate entry from "monster chosen by the dm."

[Dean]

Besides, things aren't really better now. For every Attack on Titan or Trinity Blood there's a Evangelion or School Days.

I can't figure out which ones you are referring to as the good ones. I thought Attack On Titan was painfully terrible but if some of those are really good anime I'm down to watch them.

EDIT: Decided to make a thread entirely about those anime, so question retracted.

[virgil]

So, I was at A-Kon last weekend and dealt with a rather bad DM. He declared that armor/shields don't provide any AC bonus if you lack proficiency. That took a bit to get the ruling out of him because he instinctively resisted any attempt to borrow/buy a shield from the castle we were hired at; claiming that every shield was going to be needed after losing several men (no reinforcements were coming) from a recent attack.

The pre-gen included Minor Illusion as a cantrip, which works as Silent Image or Ventriloquism and cantrips can be cast at will. There was no way in hell I was turning that down.

Afterward, he threw a couple random encounters, including three will-o-wisps (level 5 monster) at our level 1 party. That encounter quickly saw my character die as soon as I was unconscious without any attempt at an explanation, so I left. Later, I found out that wisps have an at-will death knell, & the DM apparently gave the wisp an extra action to make sure I died that round (cleric was adjacent and hadn't gone yet).

With stuff like extremely dangerous random encounters and insta-kill effects, is 5E returning to its roots of Gygaxian crap?

[Koumei]

Clearly you should have made an Int check to instantly kill them all before they acted, unless that stupid idea no longer exists in their rules. I can't keep track of all the shit they fling at the wall.

[Night Goat]

Clearly you should have made an Int check to instantly kill them all before they acted, unless that stupid idea no longer exists in their rules. I can't keep track of all the shit they fling at the wall.

I haven't been following 5e development until recently. What's this?

[Username17]

Clearly you should have made an Int check to instantly kill them all before they acted, unless that stupid idea no longer exists in their rules. I can't keep track of all the shit they fling at the wall.

I haven't been following 5e development until recently. What's this?

Early in development, they decided that they were going to have the system revolve around attribute tests, and that their flagship mechanic was that if there was a DC equal to or less than your attibute's literal value you could pass the test without rolling. And one of their examples of using this subsystem was making an Int test to grab the control gem on a golem, causing it to power down and for you to win the fight without interacting with the rest of the system.

This proposal has so many problems that are so obvious that I was and am surprised that even fuckups like Mearls would allow that shit to go on long enough to be leaked to the public as a serious offering. I mean, when they first announced it, I was sure that it meant that your stat bonus to attribute rolls was 1:1 instead of 1:2 like in 3rd edition - because otherwise characters with high stats could not succeed on actions they had to roll for. But no, it turns out that they really did mean that adding 2 to Strength added 1 to your die roll and 2 to your auto-success threshold. Like, I literally could not believe the math was as bad as it was when they verbally described the system.

However, since releasing that subsystem in a playtest packet, they talked about it less and less and I think scrapped it entirely. It's been a while since they used the words "bounded accuracy," so maybe that horse shit has been dropped as well.

-Username17

[shadzar]

With stuff like extremely dangerous random encounters and insta-kill effects, is 5E returning to its roots of Gygaxian crap?

I would say this has more to do with inept DMs that should not be DMing, or a WotC common occurrence; shitty adventure design.

It could be a combination of both.

For those decrying "Gygaxian crap", is it really the rules or the thing he published and those that followed his bad practices?

Yeah he said "If you aren't playing the game as written, then you aren't playing AD&D" but there was no one to force that or to agree with him. It WAS said about tournament environment which Akon could easily be a support event and the way events are ran, to the lteer of the adventure. This would be what WotC does to ensure EVERYONE gets the same out of the adventure, without understanding:

1. not everyone wants the exact same thing nor plays for the same reasons
2. not every DM is trained in the same way to give proper play because ther is no such thing as a DM college to train these people how to do it at event so people DO get a GOOD experience from an adventure. (only the writers know what the hell the wrote and EVERYONE else is just guessing)

in this case I see that TSR and WotC have always done the same thing as the new WOP or whatever is the same trite crap as the RPGA was and both are failures for not understanding that the system has NEVER worked because of #2 above.

was this a random game or a scheduled and sponsored event?

[Ravengm]

Well, if we're just talking position, that's kind of a minor thing, at least when you compare it to some of the horrible, horrible poses WotC artists have churned out:

Jeska, Warrior Adept from mtg. That's actually her right leg you're seeing. She essentially has a lazy susan in place of a spine.

Speaking of lazy susan spines....

[RadiantPhoenix]

Speaking of lazy susan spines....

Oh hey, it's the T&A pose on a guy.

[CapnTthePirateG]

With stuff like extremely dangerous random encounters and insta-kill effects, is 5E returning to its roots of Gygaxian crap?

Mearls is on record as saying that he wants to get rid of save-or-dies, but leave them in the hands of monsters. Make of that what you will.

[virgil]

With stuff like extremely dangerous random encounters and insta-kill effects, is 5E returning to its roots of Gygaxian crap?

Mearls is on record as saying that he wants to get rid of save-or-dies, but leave them in the hands of monsters. Make of that what you will.

I don't doubt you, but do you have a source? I want to use citations with someone.

[Username17]

With stuff like extremely dangerous random encounters and insta-kill effects, is 5E returning to its roots of Gygaxian crap?

Mearls is on record as saying that he wants to get rid of save-or-dies, but leave them in the hands of monsters. Make of that what you will.

I don't doubt you, but do you have a source? I want to use citations with someone.

Here you go.

He wants to keep regular Save or Dies for "powerful monsters" and replace all other Save or Dies with contingent hit point damage. And then of course, when it came to actually implementing this shit, "powerful monsters" apparently includes 4th and 5th level monsters, because go fuck yourself.

-Username17

[CapnTthePirateG]

Do we know what all has changed from the last playtest packet? Because we haven't heard of any new developments in that time and they seem to be going ahead with the tepid crap pile.

[darkmaster]

Well, I can see the desire to cut Save or Dies out of the game, but at the same time, fucking medusas how do they work? Still, I feel like there has to be a middle ground between only letting team monster use flesh to stone and letting anyone get their hands on a ring of flesh to stone. In no small part because people will still want to play as monsters and if monster abilities are their own little thing that would be... difficult.

[virgil]

Well, I can see the desire to cut Save or Dies out of the game, but at the same time, fucking medusas how do they work? Still, I feel like there has to be a middle ground between only letting team monster use flesh to stone and letting anyone get their hands on a ring of flesh to stone. In no small part because people will still want to play as monsters and if monster abilities are their own little thing that would be... difficult.

This is largely irrational, but I always felt the incremental petrification to feel kind of lame. It can be as easy to cure as a scene from Disney's gargoyles, but the effects of a stone gaze just don't feel right as anything but binary.

[Prak]

Speaking of lazy susan spines....

Oh hey, it's the T&A pose on a guy.

Ah, the Hawkeye Initiative

[erik]

I grew up on Hack with the cockatrice taking several hisses to turn my dungeon delver into stone, so I'm okay with it being an incremental state.

Another formative experience, I had an olde Conan comic that had him fighting a Naga that had lizard-breath weapon that was incrementally turning him into a scaly lizard before he of course murdered it to death.

A couple years back we had discussion on progressing status effects. Frank had a notion of 3 tiers of status effects (minor, major, combat ending) and I fleshed it out and tweaked as I saw fit.

CONDITION TRACKS

Tier	Brained	Charm	Disease/Poison	Fear	Grapple	Maim	Movement	Sanity	Sleep
1	Dazed	Distracted	Sickened	Shaken	Entangled	Bleeding	Slowed	Confused	Fatiuged
2	Stunned	Fascinated	Nauseated	Frightened	Pinned	Staggered	Checked	Hallucination	Exhausted
3	Unconscious	Charmed	Diseased/Poisoned	Panicked	Unconscious	Maimed	Prone	Cowering	Sleeping

Track generalizations:
Tier 1: Minor penalty, short duration
Tier 2: Major penalty, often temporarily dropped out of combat 1 round
Tier 3: Removed from combat. Longer term penalty: Stuck with Tier 1 penalties and status until healed/recovered.

It would be easy enough to have special attacks reference the tracks, and if you wanted to make them special just follow the same penalties but call it a different track and have something different trigger on a tier 3. Makes it easy to design different attacks while having a sort of standardization.

Petrification has the same penalties as Movement track except with the nastier Tier 3 of turning to stone (or ice if Elsa froze your heart/mind).
Burning has the same penalties as the Maim track except with the nastier Tier 3 of immolation.
Diseases and Poisons would have their own unique Tier 3 effects, but being diseased makes you more susceptible to poison and vice versa.

It's not fully fleshed out since at the time I was working on a non-D&D game, and most of those things are already statuses for D&D anyway so easy enough to apply.

A concern is that it is easy to stack status effects so if 3 characters synergize they can effectively 1-shot enemies that way. Then again, that's still better than one person doing the 1-shotting independent of what everyone else is doing I reckon.

[OgreBattle]

Speaking of lazy susan spines....

Oh hey, it's the T&A pose on a guy.

I remember when Vagrant Story came out and there was no big deal about manbutts.

Nobody does it better than JoJo's Bizarre Adventure though

[Krusk]

http://www.wizards.com/dnd/Article.aspx ... x/20140610

Apparently you are proficient in tools now.

Not sure where I stand on that. On one hand it opens up the "Exploration pillar of the game" with hard coded role protection, but on the other hand you can be proficient with playing cards so Fuck you Mearls.

Edit** and not like twisted fate or gambit. Like you play card games good.

[deaddmwalking]

I'd buy incremental petrification. Willow had that; Willow hit Bavmorda with an Acorn of Stony Flesh and she slowly transformed before successfully resisting it.

[shadzar]

Like you play card games good.

and in 3 months it will require MTG card to play D&D in order to increase the sales o the already dominant MTG game.....

torch do 1 fire type pokemon.. i mean damage

lanterns with oil inside... do no damage because they are not just a flask of oil.