The Gaming Den

Whatever Jr. wrote: ↑

Sun Oct 24, 2021 8:49 pm

Kaelik wrote: ↑

Sun Oct 24, 2021 7:15 pm

Mechanical difference is important but not the sole thing, thematic difference is also important. If you are a class system there is a very good reason to have say, the Barbarian using a rage mechanic be a different class then the Ninja using a rage system where the rage is called "Poise" or whatever and the class has a completely different theme and different abilities.

At that point, you might as well have the two classes work at least slightly differently. Perhaps the Barbarians spend their rage points, while Ninjas need to keep building up poise to higher thresholds to unlock new Steps.

You COULD do that, but I'm not sure deliberately having ninja mechanics work different then Barbarian ones if they are both resources build up classes is a good thing.

It might be good, it might not, it depends on whether having the Ninja be different is useful for the design, not just good to have more.

I have uh.... a number of classes in F&F, and they all have different resource management systems, but if I was designing a class that used a similar one to the Monk, I wouldn't intentionally make their stances operate slightly differently just to be different!

So... if you've changed the mechanics enough to warrant calling one thing 'Rage' and another thing 'Poise', is that a good cue to make them different classes?

The Adventurer's Almanac wrote: ↑

Sun Oct 24, 2021 10:53 pm

So... if you've changed the mechanics enough to warrant calling one thing 'Rage' and another thing 'Poise', is that a good cue to make them different classes?

Poise might be LITERALLY identical to rage. You might have a Rage of 0-theoretically infinite that goes away when you are out of combat and you spend rage to activate abilities but with a specific benefit of being at 0 Rage and Poise 0-theoretically infinite that goes away when you are out of combat and you spend poise to activate abilities, but with a specific benefit of being at 0 Poise.

You might have Poise be gained slightly differently then Rage, but this would not constitute a "different resource management system" they would still be the same system even if they provide different benefits and activate different abilities because the Ninja class and Berserker class are different classes that do different things in and out of combat.

I am all for a Sorcerer building up Rage points to do... something different than other Arcane casters.
There might be a PrC that does such a thing, but that's a step too far.

There are a lot of reasons you might implement multiple classes. Just because someone asserted it should be done a certain way doesn't mean you can't do so for other reasons.

Hmm. Sorcerer base class by RAW has nothing to offer other than spells and spell slots, maybe a Ragemage PrC would be an interesting divert from just 20 levels of "ah! I get another spell added and x more slots", but there is no official Tome proposal.

I'll check the archives. Kaelik probably did something about the lack of content, but IMHO I don't think just taking Spherelock solves the issue.

My concept of "arcane caster that does spells better or different when angry" would be the equivalent of (sorry, anime reference for easy trope) any Dragonball character that is dripping with bloody wounds, infuriated to their limit after a push-pull struggle, and unleashes an atmosphere-disrupting blast in the final moment that disintegrates the enemy.

I like the Stunlock Holmes example as a thought experiment. In my interpretation that fight scene just shows he has a really high DEX, that's flavored as being because he's smart, but realistically the whole "predict things with perception" is really WIS. That of course makes him a Monk, who are a WIS class because they're religious, and- oh hell, the bullshit can just go all the way down.

It's almost as if Monk thematics (imitation Shaolin masters) were bad design for the last 35-40 years.

Going by the 10-minute version, Holmes is a Tome Fighter who murmurs "Discombobulate" whenever he uses Foil Action (and spams it every chance he gets).

I believe the discombobulate move is Combat School, surely it's the handkerchief that's Foil Action.

JonSetanta wrote: ↑

Mon Oct 25, 2021 4:07 am

Hmm. Sorcerer base class by RAW has nothing to offer other than spells and spell slots

Radthemad4's bookmarks show 8 different sorcerers, maybe one of them would strike your fancy.

That said, spells are a great kind of class feature, there are even a few spells that are more interesting than a standard fighter's entire class... So getting to pick a bunch of spells and cast them as needed is really all you need to have a fun time. But prestige classes and feats still exist if you need to have a more pervasive gimmick.

Foxwarrior wrote: ↑

Mon Oct 25, 2021 7:26 am

JonSetanta wrote: ↑

Mon Oct 25, 2021 4:07 am

Hmm. Sorcerer base class by RAW has nothing to offer other than spells and spell slots

Radthemad4's bookmarks show 8 different sorcerers, maybe one of them would strike your fancy.

That said, spells are a great kind of class feature, there are even a few spells that are more interesting than a standard fighter's entire class... So getting to pick a bunch of spells and cast them as needed is really all you need to have a fun time. But prestige classes and feats still exist if you need to have a more pervasive gimmick.

I'll check it out.

On the topic of unarmed strikes being available to anyone, (just so, well, you don't have to take Monk levels for the Wuxia action) has anyone made a Tome feat for exactly that ability?

There was a scaling version of Improved Unarmed Strike, if that's what you mean.

Huh. I tried Googling this forum for that kind of thing and found... Nothing.
Do you have it bookmarked or something?

But while I was searching for older creations I did notice Prak's Speedster (something I was thinking of making into a 5-level dip class, along with one for each trope such as Brick/Tank and Glass Cannon, but I immediately scrapped the plan), and strangely... A Paragon class, which I've been developing a convergent end-result lately in another thread.

No bookmarks. I use Google's main site with 'site:tgdmb.com' and that usually works. This forum's built-in search function has been useless since the last update.

Ahhh hidden search code. I only learned the + and - in school.

If you don't want to learn the terms for search, you can use advanced search. On the Search page, there is a link to settings on the bottom right corner; advanced search is also an option from there.

A thing I find terribly amusing about D&D and spinoffs like Shadowrun and Traveller is that they list mental and physical attributes as being the same sort of thing while at the same time being clearly aware that they're not. A creature with 30 Strength is like, a cow or a small pickup truck robot, a creature with 30 Intelligence is a god emperor of some society.

They are the same sort of thing mechanically. Like how phys att and spec att in pokemon is the same kind of thing. Ttrpgs just have to deal with what that implies to the setting (and player expectations). So the game mechanics only deal with what the attribute numbers mean for the other bits in the combat engine but, alone, don't determine what this implies in the wider world of imagination land.

Riiiight, but... then you get into the "btw, when writing content, don't ever tie SoDs to Strength because the DCs will be way higher than any mental stat-based DCs" stuff.

Foxwarrior wrote: ↑

Wed Oct 27, 2021 10:46 pm

Riiiight, but... then you get into the "btw, when writing content, don't ever tie SoDs to Strength because the DCs will be way higher than any mental stat-based DCs" stuff.

Sure but that's a balancing decision. A STR bonus is still an attribute bonus. No matter what implications you give it afterward. So lets say you have fire resist and electric resist. Both are resistances. But there're a whole lot more instances of fire damage than electric damage so you end up seeing way more things with fire resist.

The problem with RAW STR boosting is mostly, from my experience, size increases, but this was fixed in the Tome errata.

I will write it again, class ability save DCs should be level based, not stat.

I got rid of attribute changes based on size myself. There's probably something that you could do with it but in practice it became too cumbersome for me to keep them.

5e literally just has "+1d4 damage" from the Enlarge spell, which is fine except for the requirement of more rolls per attack every round, but it's a good direction.

Higher level monsters such as ancient dragons and various giants have high STR and CON built into the statblock, and aside from great natural armor (also scales with level) DEX tends to be low so it doesn't blow the RNG through the roof.

But in 3e mechanics, figuring out the effective Spell DC (assuming a base of 4 + 1/2 level + 10) would pretty much be derived at later levels by using either FnK Tome or Kaelik's version of stat growth, take the number value from what's assumed to be the primary casting stat bonus, and add it.

What does PL think the actual problem with attributes is? He seems to say they are fundamentally unworkable, a drag on the ultimate goal of something or other, but I can't quite divine why. All I see is criticizing a bunch of specific implementations and then criticizing the measures to work around specific implementation problems by claiming it's a fundamental problem with the concept that makes good implementation nigh impossible. But what is that problem? Is it just that it's too hard to get right? That there is a theoretical attribute arrangement that gets the trade-off between simplified decision-making and flexibility/customization just right and is the superior concept but is just unrealistically difficult to get right? Or is it that no matter what, attribute systems inject something into the design that creates the problems we call implementation problems? If so, what is the something? I just can't tell.

I'm intrigued by what we can learn from just having 2-3 dozen totally independent stats that are each direct inputs to a roll with no derivation, but I'm not sure what design space that really opens up. Chargen is not the game, the game is played the same whether you use attributes + derived stats or all independent stats, so the only benefit I can see of the latter is the freedom to make any unique, weird arrangement of stats that strikes your fancy. There's no guarantee there that it will actually support any more character concepts, since the mechanics of the game limit and dictate which options with what numbers will succeed and which won't no matter how you come up with the numbers you're plugging in. The freedom to create a multitude of non-viable builds isn't appealing to me and seems more like the chargen system has failed to produce outcomes that can play the actual game.

The mechanics of the game create the acceptable ranges for the statistics. Whether you assign each statistic individually or have attributes that contribute to several statistics, so long as the end results are within the appropriate range, the chargen system is working in that it produces outcomes that can play the actual game. I assume this is the mechanical goal of the chargen system's design. The only question is whether independent stats or attributes accomplish that goal better or in ways that benefit the game overall more.

So to have a working chargen system, in fact to have any chargen system, you cannot just have players assign whatever value they want to every statistic, or they'll just max every statistic, assuming there is a max. So there is some kind of constraint, some kind of budget. Spending the budget on stats independent of each other will require more constraints to ensure that the resulting builds are, in fact, viable. You don't want your entire game to be the 3.5 skill system. So you have to sacrifice customization for workability here, too, e.g.: Everyone picks 2 good saves; 2 high skills, 3 medium skills, and 4 low skills; and 4 weapon or magic proficiencies, for example, where you're distributing pre-determined numbers across options. That's still fairly customizable, even though you can't customize your level of specialization. If you open it up to futzing with the individual +1s, especially if they can do it between categories of statistic, you have to ensure that the budget or other restraints holds things in place in the viable zone. The more customization you want, the harder it is.

Attributes don't change that much. They just create another layer to the distribution scheme. You still have to figure out what the viable limits are and then ensure that high or low, the outputs are within those limits. You can still assign things from an array, you just do attribute first, which then trickles down to the other categories, and then you assign the array bonuses for the other categories as above. They'll be smaller because the attribute is already doing some of the work, but that's the only difference. Or you can make it more flexible, trading each +1 here for a +1 somewhere else. And the same warning applies: the more divergent things can be and the more fungible points are between categories, the harder it will be to keep the output in the viable zone.

And that's it, that's all independent stats vs. attributes really has to be. Everything else: the way stats are tied to race, the way they interact with class abilities, all those are potential pitfalls for either setup. Creating broken builds just based on statistics is possible in either setup. The designer has to know how each statistic is going to be applied no matter how you get those statistics and constrain chargen options to mitigate that risk. That's all the same.

Attributes do add a negligible extra step of addition in calculating stats vs. just a flat number. If that came up in combat encounters, it'd be a concern, but it should just be an issue in chargen, where it's not an actual issue. You also have to decide what to bundle together for your stats, and there are lots of ways to do this wrong, but I'm yet to hear an argument for why doing it at all is actively worse than not, other than the parade of how not to do it. On the other hand, you gain the ability to have a default catch-all when nothing more specific applies and a handy way to quickly differentiate individuals in broad strokes: you know that if a character is stealthy they're probably also more acrobatic and better pickpockets, whether or not they are called a Rogue. It can enable customization in chargen while leaving other categories more streamlined.

I'm just not seeing the damning, inherent failure of attributes. Certainly their implementation can be awful, as can class design, action economy, and all kinds of other aspects of a game, and some of the most popular ones are chock full of awful design decisions. That does not mean that classes or action economy are necessarily bad choices for a TTRPG. The same way for social systems, or HP, or grids, or whatever else PL applies the Parade of Bad Examples to Conclude Concepts are Bad shtick to.