Epic Battles

[RandomCasualty]

1097186114[/unixtime]]
Can you give me a reason why a Knight of the Middle Circle or a Frenzied Berserker should be strictly superior to a monk or a fighter?

The reason is that the WotC designers don't think about stuff when they make them, and they just think it'd be cool if their latest pet PrC can totally dominate everything else.

It's not a good reason, but that's the reason the above is true, plain and simple. When the designers start making PrCs about diversity instead of frenzied berserker "screw the party and see how big my cock can get" style then maybe things can be better.

Stringing feats together is probably the only way a fighter-type can pray to be competitive, and that sort of thing is FUN, not boring and game-breaking. Combining karmic strike with combat reflexes with improved disarm with snatch weapon is way more awesome than swinging a sword at a +28 bonus to attack.

It generally becomes less awesome when your turn takes 20 minutes to resolve because of chained effects. There needs to be some restriction on effect chains, otherwise things get into ridiculous levels.

Feats and class abilities are the only thing that keep non-spellcasters/non-rogues in melee combat at all and making a pile of their feats worth even less than they are now is lame.

Well rogues are good in combat simply because of sneak attack. Which is nothing more than a damage bonus. So by that thinking if we can make a rogue competetive with damage, then we can do the same with a fighter.

If that's all it is, you can jolly well just have the Orcs wear Demon Lord suits and never change anything at all.

It depends on what demon you're trying to simulate. If it's a succubus, it obviously needs more specialized powers. If it's the balrog, well then it really doesn't. The fire and brimstone stuff is just nothing more than special effects, and it's basically just going to slash or whip you until you die, just like an orc with a sword, only it does it a lot better.

You might give it some DR and stuff, to reflect its magical nature, but you really don't need to dress it up much.

[erik]

How about this. Get rid of save or dies.
Everything deals damage.

Sleep spells deal damage (if enough to put you at <0, then KO'd).
Polymorph spells deal damage (if enough to put you at <0, then turned into a fish or whatever)

All that remains is figuring out a good baseline for damage that spells should inflict.

This method has the useful effect of allowing fighting types to collaborate with spellcasters. Before, a fighter could wail away on a BBEG for 10 rounds, and then have the wizard zap it once and out do those 10 rounds of work. Instead of turning undead for example (an all or nothing proposal), deal damage.

I suppose that if multiple spell effects are laid down (sleep, polymorph, etc), one would apply them all as applicable to a felled foe.

SR & Saves will still have a role by allowing one to avoid a spell or take half/no damage of course.

This would potentially be a kick in the nuts to casters, but they're begging for it anyway.

Combat won't be over in one shot, but it won't take forever either. You'll be accumulating real results towards finishing the combat.

[Josh_Kablack]

Can you give me a reason why a Knight of the Middle Circle or a Frenzied Berserker should be strictly superior to a monk or a fighter?

Yeah.

It works like this:

Premise 1: Prestige classes are optional.
Premise 2: The core rules core classes are not optional
Premise 3: If you as the DM include a prestige class, you obviously intend for PCs to take it at some point
Premise 4: Players will attempt to optimize their characters according to available options.
Conclusion: Therefore, prestige classes should offer slightly superior character optimization potential to core core classes.

Some additional elaboration:

If an optional class or class combo is inferior to the closest similar non-optional class or class combo, players will not take that optional class for their characters. If players are not going to take levels in a class, including it is a waste of time and effort. There is absolutely no reason to include optional classes worse than core classes.

Ideally all classes, optional, core, prestige, etc should all be balanced, but since we really can't acheive that, it's better to err on the side of having the optionals be slightly better.

[rapanui]

Of course you're right Clikml.

[Username17]

How about this. Get rid of save or dies.
Everything deals damage.

How about this: I have players who have a difficult time figuring out if a collection of numbers adds up to twenty six or not (which is enough to drop some of the characters). If everyone seriously has to add up numbers to see if they add up to two hundred and sixty eight, then the game is just going to grind to a screeching halt.

As soon as the math part of the game takes up a seriously large part of combat, we should stop playing table-top altogether and just go pay Asheron's Call. The advantage of the table-top environment is that it is open-ended instead of coded, and we have direct personal interactions. The advantage of the computer is that it does all of our math for us. The instant we spend more of our time adding things up than making shit up, the computer environment is clearly optimal for everyone concerned.

Hit points and damage suck. Maybe not now, but soon if you keep letting them get bigger.

-Username17

[Desdan_Mervolam]

Frank, your players are idiots. Seriously. I don't think that we really ought to be making allowances for people who cannot do math on a third grade level. I mean geeze, at least use scratch paper.

-Desdan

[Username17]

Some of them are, sure. But actually when you have 26 hit points, having 3 points of physical damage, 8 points of subdual damage, 7 points of physical damage, 2 points of physical damage, another point of physical dmaage, and a hit for 13 points of physical damage applied and then having to figure out while drinking and talking whether your character is unconcious or dead, or unconcious and bleeding to death is not trivial.

And now imagine having numbers of approximately the same size, but having ten times as many of them. I's not that you can't get the right answer - it's that it starts taking so long to get that right answer that it stops being worth while.

BTW: What is the condition of the character in the example?

-Username17

[Maj]

To the best of my knowledge, that character would be disabled.

Desdan... The old psionic bonus power point chart actually requires a knowledge of integral calculus in order to "easily" calculate how many power points you have if you don't have the chart or if your stats and/or caster level are off the chart. Either that, or you have to spend a long time in Excel making a new chart to cover what you need.

A roleplaying game is not a math game, and despite the "ease" of adding and subtracting, it takes time, it breaks flow, and is genuinely a pain in the ass. More math in this game is not a good thing.

[Username17]

To the best of my knowledge, that character would be disabled.

Disabled and unconcious. Hit points = zero, and subdual damage is a positive number (eight). Eight is more than zero, so the character is unconcious in addition to being disabled.

Had she not suffered any subdual damage, she'd be disabled and staggered, since her hit points and subdual damage would be an equal number (zero in this case).

Which is kind of the point. All that work, and you still got it (slightly) wrong. And that didn't even require integral calculus. Imagine if it had just as many terms, but some of the terms depended upon other terms (like Harm)?

-Username17

[Maj]

Right - I forgot that was current HP and not HP overall.



There are a lot of aspects of the game that I tend to avoid because I just don't want to deal with the bookkeeping. The Paladin's smite evil, synergy bonuses like +2 to UMD only when using scrolls, favored enemy, etc... It's another reason why the new buff durations drive me crazy - you can't write them down on your character sheet because they're nothing long-term, but if you have it cast on you, then you have to refigure everything. But compared to a lot of D&D players, I prefer less complexity in the game rather than more, so shunning math - however passable at it I may be - is pretty much a goal of mine.

I played a 2E game a couple of weeks ago for the first time ever, and the other players (who are adamantly opposed to 3E) said that the more math and less unity of rule-set, the better. It was the best way to keep stupid people from playing the game. What they don't realize is that if people want to play the game, they're going to play regardless of how well they can add and memorize rules. The question, then, is whether or not the rules should enable more lousy games as a result of too much complexity and math. BTW - The other players sucked - their math skillz were small and weak. I will never game with them again voluntarily.

[erik]

I reckoned that if anyone is making it to epic, there was a fair amount of dedication to learnin the rules and mastery of counting up HP damage during the journey. For the sake of argument as to whether converting save or dies to HP damage is a viable epic variant to keep combat fair, fun and relatively streamlined, I'm going to assume that tallying hitpoint damage isn't a major hinderance.

The DM and Players can keep 2 damage tallies, one subdual, one normal... and really this is oft required anyway in normal DnD.

I thought on this idea some more, and I believe that I wouldn't apply the spell effects beyond damage unless they were what dealt the "killing" blow. This would be to keep that archer's last arrow putting the guy over the top in damage, from turning the opponent into a fish due to a prior polymorph endured. Most effects would be kinda wasted and mostly be flavor, since the victim is unconscious or dead at the end anyway, and this is in all liklihood a mark against taking save or dies as HP damage.

There is still also a fuzzy area of save vs. inconvenience, which I'm not very comfortable in turning that into damage. A few examples being Bane, Doom, Hold Person, Bestow Curse, Slow, etc. Tis a little hypocritical tho since some inconveniences may as well be a death effect for how dangerous they are.

That's all I gots fer now.

[Username17]

BTW, hypocritical means "meaningless". Hypercritical means "very important". Not sure what you meant there.

---

In any case, your assumption that keeping track of ever larger piles of hit points is not a major hinderance is obviously bollux. Sure people don't have a huge problem keeping track of them at first level - but that logic would dictate that because we have no problem reading the stat bonus table that Rollmaster is somehow easy to play because it's that same simple procedure over and over again.

If you must do things with hit points, make damn sure that the hit points and damage are kept in check. Hit points probably shouldn't ever go up under any circumstances. The more hit points you have, the more of a pain in the ass keeping track of them is, but the less hit points you have the more pixelated the game system becomes and the less gradations you can have between wounds.

So there's a sweet spot! There's exactly the number of hit points that maximizes the differentiability between wounds without becoming a headache or slowing down play. So at first level, you want things to be at the sweet spot. At level thirty you want things at the sweet spot. At level nnety seven you want things at the sweet spot - and the sweet spot doesn't move! If you want people to be tougher, they should lose less hit points from the same attacks, they shouldn't just have more hit points.

Here's something to read on that subject:

http://frost.bbboy.net/thegamingden-vie ... [br]-Username17

[Maj]

making it to epic

I think the terms epic and epic are being confused here. I don't think that epic battle refers to a battle that takes place at epic levels, just a battle that surpasses the ordinary.

I reckoned that if anyone is making it to epic, there was a fair amount of dedication to learnin the rules and mastery of counting up HP damage during the journey.

Actually, it's not mastery; it's called Excel. I have columns for class, and how many levels I've taken in each one. The levels are summed to get my total HD, which is then multiplied by my Con mod (which is a separate calculation). In another column, I have the average result of the associated HD for each class, and I add the sum of those numbers to my HD*Con mod. Or rather, Excel does that for me. I just write down the final result on my character sheet.

Basically, to figure out all the new abilities for my epic character, I enter her new class level, and any feats. Excel takes care of stat-ups, skill points, BAB, Saves, etc automatically because by hand, the whole process used to take me about four hours every time she leveled. It now takes me about 5 minutes.

As for save-or-dies in general at epic levels... In my experience, the DCs are too low to really cause much worry. And then, there's always True Resurrection - which is one thing for the epic cleric to do with his 9th level spell slots.

[erik]

Hypocritical, as in professing a belief, but actually holding contrary beliefs. I said that I wanted to do away with death effects, but there were still stealth death effects that I didn't want to be rid of. Sorry my word choice was vexing.

My proposal of turning combat into damage counting is to try and allow combat whereas:

1) Multiple rounds are guaranteed for tough foes (no insta-kills)
2) Every player makes a contribution during the fight.
3) Even a fairly large battle doesn't take inordinate amounts of time for the players.

Other than the difficulty of implementation of converting save or dies into flavorful damage spells (i.e. rewriting a huge amount of spells), the only problem I'm faced with is the time consumption. So I'll try to focus on methods to speed up damage counting.

Perhaps a system for speeding up HP counting could be implemented similar to as is done with DnD minis. Take all damage in 5 HP increments rounded (dunno if they chose to round up or down). I'd probably kick this in effect at level 10 or so, and could scale it up as the levels go up (10 increments HP at level 20, etc.). You still have the time sink problem of simply adding up the dozens to hundreds of dice rolled for damage, therefore the system needs to fix how damage is dealt.

Perhaps changing dice rolls to be multiplication: instead of 5d6, do (1d6)*5... tho there will be a big change in the bell curve of how damage is rolled.

Another alternative is to get rid of the rolling for damage and just deal average damage every time. Boring, but speedy.

So there's a few ways to speed up combat, some of which may be combined (tho I don't really feel the need to round damage to increments of 5 as miniature combat does, if one of the other methods is employed).

[Username17]

So you're proposing that at a specific arbitrary time we should collapse damage into "decahitpoints" and eventually "kilohitpoints"?

Why not just scale it continuously? Keep everyone's health levels completely static, and have the number of health levels lost from an attack scale to the relative strength of the attack and your defensive awesomeness. That would be the same in the long run, but people wouldn't have to continually learn new damage accounting systems at weird-ass times. Also, you wouldn't have those weird blips where someone in one damage accounting system was fighting someone in another.

Instead, their attack power would just be relatively large (or small) to the defenses of the target, and the damage would accumulate accordingly.

Example system:

Every attack has a damage power, which is expected to be larger than the resistance bonus of the fool you are hitting with it. They roll a save, and lose a health level for every two points they miss the save by (DC = damage value of attack).

People gain resistance bonuses instead of hit points, and you can always resolve absolutely everything by rolling no more than two dice, and you never ever have to keep track of more than 10 "hit points" while still getting "tougher" in a measurable and obvious fashion.

-Username17

[erik]

Those are fair objections to the mini-combat method. What about the others- Do you think that simplifying damage rolling is problematic, or just not speedy or simple enough?

In principle I like the idea keeping HP steady and throwing in a new means of ablating damage, but it bothers me a little bit, some things I can't even put my finger on quite yet. What happens to healing? Does it become harder also to heal people of higher levels, or does a cure light wound heal all but the most massive wounds? Fast healing and Regeneration seem pretty super buff under a low HP system.

I'm a little reluctant to have to do an total overhaul on every critter in the book, and there are ripple effects like healing and those special abilities to worry about. My hope is to modify the mechanics as little as possible and just streamline things. That might not be enough, but that's my hope currently.

I'm still not sold on that adding larger numbers is significantly difficult to worry about it. Adding 21 to 58 is functionally the same as adding 435 to 4983. Tis just adding one number to another. With pencil and paper it should be a snap... then again, I have a friend who carries a card which tells him how much a 15% tip is for a given meal price, despite how the necessity for such a calculator device baffles me. Maybe people really can't add two numbers together... but then won't they have just as many problems with adding bonuses to get their damage power ratings, then comparing them with enemy resistance bonuses and then taking 1/2 the difference as the HP damage? I dunno. Tis hard for me to get inside the head of people who need to use a table in order to take 1/10 of a number, then half of that and add them together (to get 15%).

Anywho, I'll think more on static HP and other methods. There's still something that intuitively bothers me about using a resistance rating that I haven't pinned down yet.

[User3]

I've always advovated turning save or dies and debuffs into either "effect at 0 HP" or ability damage.

By not adding Con to HP, and just letting you get a Natty armor bonus, you can actually have HPs by level that mean something (rather than having things like the Con 35 Wizard with more HP than the Raging Barbarian).

I don't like the damage resistance method(for damage or effects) because at some point a character is not getting hurt by stuff and he goes off and does fantastic things like lay on beds of daggers or bath in poison.

While DnD can allow those things, I prefer a meatier campaign where heroes don't walk through armies of first level guys without ever taking any damage.

The resistance method also plays havoc with attack rolls for splash attacks, touch attacks, grappling, ect.

It would be a complete rewrite of every part of the system. At that point, we might as well play Shadowrun and just pretend that we're in a DnD setting.

[Username17]

Do you think that simplifying damage rolling is problematic, or just not speedy or simple enough?

Going from xd6 to d6*x is a problem, yes. It increases the difference between effects massively. With a 10 die attack, you have a one in six million chance of inflicting 60 points of damage - while with a d6 times ten you have a one-in-six chance of inflicting a full 60 points of damage. And that plays holy hell with death margins like you wouldn't believe.

At first level, attacks do about 7 or 8 points of damage most of the time, at 10th level attacks do about 35 points of damage most of the time. And that means that with a Death Margin of about 30 or 40 points you could get the same dynamics at 10th level that you have at first level. But when damage is being determined on a d6 times ten, you can't recover those dynamics at all. A death margin of fifty points still doesn't take exceptional results to make your head explode - just a linearly high roll on a roll with a flat curve. And it damn sure isn't likely to make you "nearly dead" when dropped - the rest of the attacks are short of doing that by like 10-40 points.

And of course, just inflicting average damage all the time is kind of... suck. Most notably when dealling with DR and energy resistance.

-Username17

[Username17]

While DnD can allow those things, I prefer a meatier campaign where heroes don't walk through armies of first level guys without ever taking any damage.

Then play at levels where people aren't supposed to use up any resources for walking through armies of first level characters. I don't know what else to tell you. The level system says that a ninth level character is supposed to be able to do that.

That means that people probably shouldn't be able to pull that off before then, but that's all it means. The question is not "should high level characters be able to run through armies without taking damage", the question is "how should high level characters be able to run through armies of first level characters without taking damage"?

-Username17

[User3]

Then play at levels where people aren't supposed to use up any resources for walking through armies of first level characters. I don't know what else to tell you. The level system says that a ninth level character is supposed to be able to do that.

Thats BS.

The system won't let a 9th level character get XP from one CR 1 guy under normal conditions. That's it.

Larger numbers of guys can arbitrarily be a higher CR encounter, as can any number of CR changing conditions.

The "hit on 20 roll" rule clearly implies that heroes should still get hit by at least 1 in 20 peon attacks barring unusual defenses like massive DR, incorporality, or some other BS.

Aside from some clearly marked cheese inherent in spellcasters, most characters are vulnerable to armies of peasants.

Your system works well at making anime gods out of high level characters. DnD does a poor job at that.

[Username17]

The system won't let a 9th level character get XP from one CR 1 guy under normal conditions. That's it.

But large numbers of low-level opposition are treated as multiple instances of single low-level opponents. The intention really is that you get nothing for taking out large numbers of low level opponents - because they aren't supposed to use up any resources.

That's the assumptions of the level-system. They could have made different assumptions, but they didn't. The world would keep spinning if people got levels that did not mean as much - so that only someone of like level 20, or 50, was actually immune to low level dudes. But that's not the assumptions of D&D. That's not the setup that we are currently talking about.

So if you want the break-point to be somewhere other than level nine, you need to paraphrase that intent with an additional intent to have a level system in which individual levels are less big of a deal. Such a system would probably look more like Final Fantasy XI, with classes going up to level 40 and 60 while still being in the standard framework.

-Username17