recent d&d deathwatch data

[Lago PARANOIA]

GUESS WHO WROTE THAT MODULE, DOOM?!

[Doom]

Well, Cordell's name is on the cover, but there's a real chance that they just slapped it on there. Such things happen.

[Koumei]

So 4E sucks because it doesn't have a robust bee-cooking system? That's an awesome criticism, dude.

Next time I make a game system, there will be a good system for cooking bees.

[Zinegata]

Good God, WHY?

I don't think we have a good system for cooking bees even in the real world.

[Koumei]

Zine: you skewer them all on... well, a skewer... then spit-roast them over a very small fire. Remember to remove the stingers and venom sacs before eating them, or tragedy may befall you.

[TheFlatline]

Zine: you skewer them all on... well, a skewer... then spit-roast them over a very small fire. Remember to remove the stingers and venom sacs before eating them, or tragedy may befall you.

Unless you come from the barbarian tribes, where eating bee venom is a mark of passage and manhood, granting you a full point of damage reduction every 5 levels.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Well, Cordell's name is on the cover, but there's a real chance that they just slapped it on there. Such things happen.

Alternatively, this degree of writing is right up his alley, considering that he's written several bad D&D works. Including but not limited to:

• A Dragon article so awful that Andy Collins pulled it, personally apologized, and rewrote it himself.
• The 4E's Forgotten Realms Player's Guide/Campaign Setting, which were so bad that it killed off the product line.
• Absolutely anything having to do with psionics.
• Mein Kampf d20.

This guy is easily the worst writer I have seen for 3E and 4E. He is worse than the guy who offered to write homemade feats in order to raise money for his cat's surgery (SKR).

I'm just amused that anyone expected anything out of him that wasn't a big old pile of fail. It's like watching an episode of Star Trek written by Brannon Braga or a videogame published by LJN or a song performed by Ringo Starr. Sure, they might output a huge volume of crap, but that doesn't mean that the law of averages will come to your aid.

[Swordslinger]

[quote="FrankTrollman"]
And so on. The only reason it doesn't matter where you go or what you fight in 4e is because nothing you do actually matters. They can dispense with players being able to influence the course of events because the entire game is a waste of time.
[/quote]

Yeah, we all know killing people can't ever matter. Nobody ever remembers wars, nor do they ever result in anything important in history happening. The rise and fall of nations is completely trivial compared to the ability to brew beer or cook something.

And hey, those arbitrary DCs for skills are just terrible. I don't know about you but I want a static DC like 3.5 for diplomacy, so I can use the skill on anyone, regardless of circumstance, because factoring in trivial stuff like the personality of the NPC you're trying to convince or the argument you're using is a total waste of time and doens't create a believable setting at all. It's so much more believable to me when every NPC in the world is equally easy to convince. What ease of suspension of disbelief, when the gods are as easily convinced as a common street drunkard.

And as for traveling the world, I love to just pick a random planar destination out of the book and go there on a whim because it's a sure thing that my DM has already completely fleshed out this new setting and what awaits me there won't be a faceless locale, but a fully detailed setting complete with tons of new quests and interesting NPCs! After all, it's easy to prepare for a PC randomly choosing an extraplanar destination that's totally unrelated to anything the group has done in the campaign so far.

All these are excellent arguments why 4th edition D&D is a terrible system and we should all hate it. Also my neighbor's cat got feline AIDS from touching a 4th edition Player's Handbook. True Story.

[RobbyPants]

Well, it's the cat's fault for not using a condom.

[MGuy]

Yeah, we all know killing people can't ever matter. Nobody ever remembers wars, nor do they ever result in anything important in history happening. The rise and fall of nations is completely trivial compared to the ability to brew beer or cook something.

Indeed I do believe brewing beer and the ability to cook has done far more for the world than all the wars in the world combined. Yes... Even more than "Those" wars. But seriously. Saying 3E is bad too doesn't make 4E better. Personally I don't care about brewing or cooking. But the very fact my blazing sword strike can't light my god damn campfire pisses me the fuck off!

[mean_liar]

MORE BEE-COOKING PLZ

[Blicero]

• A Dragon article so awful that Andy Collins pulled it, personally apologized, and rewrote it himself.
• Mein Kampf d20.

Details/links plz

[Starmaker]

In the opening scene of Taikô, the main character eats a bee raw. Bees = candy.

[shadzar]

• A Dragon article so awful that Andy Collins pulled it, personally apologized, and rewrote it himself.
• Mein Kampf d20.

Details/links plz

i think this is what is meant...

http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rp ... ngers.html

the article itself is probably locked behind the DDi firewall....dont know if i have both versions saved or just one..

[hogarth]

4E's motto: "Insectivores Don't Get Nice Things"

[ScottS]

And hey, those arbitrary DCs for skills are just terrible. I don't know about you but I want a static DC like 3.5 for diplomacy, so I can use the skill on anyone, regardless of circumstance, because factoring in trivial stuff like the personality of the NPC you're trying to convince or the argument you're using is a total waste of time and doens't create a believable setting at all. It's so much more believable to me when every NPC in the world is equally easy to convince. What ease of suspension of disbelief, when the gods are as easily convinced as a common street drunkard.

Sliding DCs for unopposed checks are generally a silly idea. If the game tells you that your character is getting better at something, but then raises all the benchmarks as you advance so that your success chance never changes, the designers are engaging in intellectual dishonesty. If they think that having to roll for piddly nonsense like picking locks, poking the floor for trapdoors, etc., is awesome and fun, and want to keep that relevant over the entire level range of the game, then they should just freeze the skill ranks and DCs at lvl 1 and spell out that that's what they're doing. See the Lago threads for angry fan reaction to that move.

(I'm not going to comment on Diplomancy because my 3.X is rusty and I don't know all the hacks. If this is the "high Dip = mind control" problem, then yes the check should be a Will attack or something rather than fixed DC. But I thought that the larger problem surrounding that was being able to juice Dip and other supposedly "non-combat" skills to ridiculous levels that the DC table didn't account for.)

[Bihlbo]

• A Dragon article so awful that Andy Collins pulled it, personally apologized, and rewrote it himself.
• Mein Kampf d20.

Details/links plz

Even though his website shows that he votes nazi, I'm pretty sure that second one is a joke. Honestly though, I think Andy's good writing far outweighs his bad writing. He's pretty good.

[TheFlatline]

Yeah, we all know killing people can't ever matter. Nobody ever remembers wars, nor do they ever result in anything important in history happening. The rise and fall of nations is completely trivial compared to the ability to brew beer or cook something.

Well, I am a brewer. And I've studied the history of brewing. And... well... it wouldn't be a stretch to say that most of western civilization owes itself to brewing and alcohol.

How so?

The Egyptians used it to keep the slaves drunk and sort of fed.

The Romans were great wine drinkers and spread their skill and knowledge of cultivation and brewing throughout the empire.

The introduction of hops to ale was an integral part of the Protestant reformation (up to that point, the church controlled and was careful about dispensing the rights to grow the other bittering agents for ale), not to mention the idea that clean water was hard to come by, and thus *everyone* drank at least smallbeer.

The shift in brewing from a cottage industry in most of Europe to an actual business was one of the things that helped kick-start the renaissance.

The pilgrims were originally going to the West Indies because the weather rocked there, but decided to stop where they did because they had run out of beer and needed to plant more barley & hops.

When in European waters, the British sailors who managed to defeat Napoleon and prevent all of Europe from falling under his control were given a share of one gallon of beer a day to drink, and this more than anything else kept the sailors in line.

When colonizing India, Britain only had one real problem: the soldiers wanted beer, but it'd spoil on the way out, and so they spent an immense amount of time and effort trying to figure this out and realized that hops and high alcohol helped preserve beer, and created India Pale Ale, without which colonization of far-off tropical lands would have been far more difficult.

Louis Pasteur may have invented pasteurization which prevents many things from spoiling and going bad, but his real goal was the discovery of yeast and a method of extracting pure yeast strains out of a large culture so that one could brew beer repeatedly and consistently without worry of spoiling the beer..

Unfermented beer is an amazing growth medium for just about every mold, fungus, bacteria, and yeast that you can imagine. It's *so* good, that it wasn't uncommon to use it in petri dishes in a gel form. I can't be certain, but odds are good that the dish penicillin was discovered in was grown on essentially unfermented beer.

While the Germans may have given us math, philosophy and music, but they really gave us beer. Every great innovation in beer has more or less come from Germany or been introduced to Europe by Germany. When the Germans migrated to other places in the world, they brought their brewing techniques with them. You name a brewery or beer style that has any history to it, and odds are it was started by a German family.

And that's *just* beer, and a brief bit of it too. I could go on for pages and pages if I included wine and spirits. I won't say that alcohol is the cornerstone of western civilization, but it's certainly been a more constant, steadfast companion than war has.

[Doom]

You missed the key issue:

Early hunter/gatherers HAD to settle down in order to grow the crops for beer. If you don't sit in one spot, you can't get past the nomad stage of civilization.

[Kaelik]

(I'm not going to comment on Diplomancy because my 3.X is rusty and I don't know all the hacks. If this is the "high Dip = mind control" problem, then yes the check should be a Will attack or something rather than fixed DC. But I thought that the larger problem surrounding that was being able to juice Dip and other supposedly "non-combat" skills to ridiculous levels that the DC table didn't account for.)

You're welcome.

[Swordslinger]

Sliding DCs for unopposed checks are generally a silly idea. If the game tells you that your character is getting better at something, but then raises all the benchmarks as you advance so that your success chance never changes, the designers are engaging in intellectual dishonesty. If they think that having to roll for piddly nonsense like picking locks, poking the floor for trapdoors, etc., is awesome and fun, and want to keep that relevant over the entire level range of the game, then they should just freeze the skill ranks and DCs at lvl 1 and spell out that that's what they're doing. See the Lago threads for angry fan reaction to that move.

Yes, because we all know that there doesn't exist any kind of lock more complicated than the default one. And once you've climbed a tree, that's equivalent to being able to climb a sheer rock cliff, because they're both climbing. I for one, can't imagine a world where the emperor's vault is protected by a more complex lock than the village alehouse. It's unfathomable.

It's entirely unreasonable to ever expect a DM to include any challenge that isn't spot on level-appropriate, because every encounter in an adventure for 4th level characters must be a 4th level encounter with 4th level DCs. My DM was the same way running for 3E. When we were level 5, every encounter we face had to be against CR 5 opponents. After all, when we're level 5, no other foes exist that aren't also level appropriate for level 5 characters.

But skill checks were totally up for grabs, because the designers of 3E fortunately never wrote any kind of correlation between skill DC and level. So my DM would just pick something from the table, cause he was too stupid to know if a DC 40 was impossible for 1st level characters, or that a DC 15 was easy for 20th level characters. Back in 2nd edition before we had a Challenge Rating or monster level of any kind, he'd routinely throw dracoliches at 1st level parties, because back then setting your challenges level appropriate wasn't as big a deal. It was a much simpler time back then and I long for those days. Everything is so rigid nowadays, where the DM is encouraged to throw winnable but challenging encounters at his PCs, and the book expressly forbids any kind of deviation from that. The last DM I knew who tried to do that had his hand broken and his DM screen shredded by Mike Mearls' squad of hired muscle.

[ubernoob]

Sliding DCs for unopposed checks are generally a silly idea. If the game tells you that your character is getting better at something, but then raises all the benchmarks as you advance so that your success chance never changes, the designers are engaging in intellectual dishonesty. If they think that having to roll for piddly nonsense like picking locks, poking the floor for trapdoors, etc., is awesome and fun, and want to keep that relevant over the entire level range of the game, then they should just freeze the skill ranks and DCs at lvl 1 and spell out that that's what they're doing. See the Lago threads for angry fan reaction to that move.

Yes, because we all know that there doesn't exist any kind of lock more complicated than the default one. And once you've climbed a tree, that's equivalent to being able to climb a sheer rock cliff, because they're both climbing. I for one, can't imagine a world where the emperor's vault is protected by a more complex lock than the village alehouse. It's unfathomable.

It's entirely unreasonable to ever expect a DM to include any challenge that isn't spot on level-appropriate, because every encounter in an adventure for 4th level characters must be a 4th level encounter with 4th level DCs. My DM was the same way running for 3E. When we were level 5, every encounter we face had to be against CR 5 opponents. After all, when we're level 5, no other foes exist that aren't also level appropriate for level 5 characters.

But skill checks were totally up for grabs, because the designers of 3E fortunately never wrote any kind of correlation between skill DC and level. So my DM would just pick something from the table, cause he was too stupid to know if a DC 40 was impossible for 1st level characters, or that a DC 15 was easy for 20th level characters. Back in 2nd edition before we had a Challenge Rating or monster level of any kind, he'd routinely throw dracoliches at 1st level parties, because back then setting your challenges level appropriate wasn't as big a deal. It was a much simpler time back then and I long for those days. Everything is so rigid nowadays, where the DM is encouraged to throw winnable but challenging encounters at his PCs, and the book expressly forbids any kind of deviation from that. The last DM I knew who tried to do that had his hand broken and his DM screen shredded by Mike Mearls' squad of hired muscle.

Serious question: Are you trolling?

The whole argument against sliding DCs is that it breaks immersion. Having different static DCs so you can by the book go from being able to climb a tree to being able to climb the sheer ice face going "No hands, ma!" is actually what people want. Varying difficulties that mean anything in world only happen if you have fixed DCs.

[mean_liar]

Now you're (EDIT: Swordslinger) just being an ass.

Sliding DCs are fine, but only as benchmarks, not objective measures. It's one thing to say, "Lockpick checks at level 12 are DC X", it's an entirely different thing to say, "Lockpick checks at level 12 should be DC X for a moderate challenge" and then have a corresponding Lockpick table where DC X has an entry reading, "complex non-magical lock".

No one is arguing that there ought to be 1 success DC regardless of challenge, but to have every DC tied to your level is insulting. It's also annoying when you're trying to do things that aren't in the "made just for YOU" adventure path, since every challenge has a mechanical measure ("you're dealing with a lock appropriate to a levlel 6 character") and no thematic benchmarks to go alongside that ("...which means that it's a decent but not expensive lock").

[K]

Swordslinger has to be trolling because no one could be that stupid. I mean, I have too much faith in humanity.

Seriously. No DM is so stupid that he wouldn't know what DCs the PCs can reach. He also can't be so stupid at to toss dracoliches at 1st level characters in any version of the game.

He's strawmanning us. Congrats guy who joined the Den to troll us. Hope this works out for you.

[Zinegata]

I've seen enough complaints about DMs who just pick stuff from a book without checking if it's level-appropriate to think the incident may have happened.

But that's a function of having a DM that just completely doesn't know the rules.