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Juton
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Post by Juton »

@tussock: There is a meme here of 'Linear Warriors vs Quadratic Wizards'. Sure Warriors have been held to a linear schedule, but spell casters haven't (except in 4e). This is a problem in a lot of games, if they can't identify this problem then they can't fix it, which leads to my prediction that casters will be either massively overpowered or they will be limited to doing the same things as Warriors, just with more flash.
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Post by OgreBattle »

fectin wrote:I like that idea of abilities as passive skill checks. Is there something I'm missing as to why that''s bad? Because right now it seems good enough to be worth porting back to 3.x, at least for many skills.
Yeah, that's the part that sounds best to me, it's really intuitive to grasp.
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Post by hogarth »

Juton wrote:A choice quote from this link:
In earlier editions of D&D, and particularly in D&D 4e, character power progression scaled linearly.
No. Maybe it is kind of true for 4e, I haven't played enough to say, but this is categorically wrong for every other edition.
From context, I think he's saying that power progresses at least linearly. There's no version where you don't progress at least as fast as a fighter or thief or whatever.
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Post by Previn »

OgreBattle wrote:
fectin wrote:I like that idea of abilities as passive skill checks. Is there something I'm missing as to why that''s bad? Because right now it seems good enough to be worth porting back to 3.x, at least for many skills.
Yeah, that's the part that sounds best to me, it's really intuitive to grasp.
It's already in 3.x. It's really just DM common sense to not roll for things that you will automatically succeed at anyways.

The example is if you have a Str 15 you don't bother to check to see if you can beat the DC 13 to break the door. You stats are very likely directly added to your d20 roll, which is why they have +1 str as a fighter and +1 str as an orc are worth doing in 5e (and actual mechanics at this point).

In 3.x if you have 15 ranks in say Climb, you don't bother to roll for the DC 5 to climb a knotted rope. If you have 5 ranks and can take 10, you wouldn't even roll for the DC 15 for a tree or unknotted rope because there is no point, you can't fail, even on a natural 1.
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Post by ModelCitizen »

The difference is that in 3e you often reach the threshold of automatic success by accumulating bonuses. Mearls & Monte want to tie automatic success to base rank, which makes a lot of sense.

I liked that scheme when I first read it (aside from the opposed check mechanic, which was utter nonsense). Thinking about it some more I like the idea of automatic success by base skill level, but the rank progression doesn't work. First of all the system would absolutely need fixed target ranks for goddamn everything, or most DMs will arbitrarily set difficulty to exactly your rank. Once skills get crunchy enough to support that, populating the higher ranks with meaningful upgrades will mean telling players they automatically fail at things they should be physically capable of doing. "Sorry, you need Advanced Stealth to dart from cover to cover when the guard isn't looking." Obviously if the Stealth rules are that bad DMs will MTP it like they do now, but again this skill system is less tolerant of MTP than either 3e or 4e.
Last edited by ModelCitizen on Sun Feb 05, 2012 4:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Username17 »

ModelCitizen wrote:The difference is that in 3e you often reach the threshold of automatic success by accumulating bonuses. Mearls & Monte want to tie automatic success to base rank, which makes a lot of sense.
Nah, it's way more complicated than that. Your "rank" is a bonus. Your stats are a bonus too. If either is individually big enough to meet some arbitrary "take 10" threshold, you pass. If neither one is big enough, you have to roll the dice. I'm really hoping that stat threshold for take 10 only show up within skill rank requirement brackets, because the skill ranks are apparently fucking huge.

The way it really works is that every rank gives you like +5 to your skill roll, and your stats add to your skill roll at 1:1. So all that shit that people are talking about how skill progression is flattened or some shit is just shit. If you hand out skill points five at a time, and then only hand them out once every five levels, you haven't made progression any slower. What we're actually looking at is an incredibly swingy and busted RNG from level 1, because the difference between someone with whatever the fuck 2 ranks is called and a stat of 18 and a dude with a stat of 8 is twenty fucking points to begin with.

In short: it's really the same as the 3e system except way more obtuse because your character sheet doesn't combine your skill bonus and your stat bonus into a single number even though they are always combined in actual play and asks you to do a bunch of comparison steps along the way that are functionally pointless.

Seriously, their method of handling Stealth vs. Spot is to compare Skill Ranks, subtract the difference in rank from the DC of the guy with the better skill, have the two players make checks of their stat vs. the DC, then compare the margins of success. That is actually what Monte Cook fucking said. That is exactly the same from the standpoint of who wins and by how much with the same d20 rolls, as simply having both players roll d20 + Stat + Rank Modifier and then run a simple comparison. But no, he wants people to run comparison operations four times instead of only once. For no apparent reason.

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Post by CapnTthePirateG »

FrankTrollman wrote:
ModelCitizen wrote:The difference is that in 3e you often reach the threshold of automatic success by accumulating bonuses. Mearls & Monte want to tie automatic success to base rank, which makes a lot of sense.
Nah, it's way more complicated than that. Your "rank" is a bonus. Your stats are a bonus too. If either is individually big enough to meet some arbitrary "take 10" threshold, you pass. If neither one is big enough, you have to roll the dice. I'm really hoping that stat threshold for take 10 only show up within skill rank requirement brackets, because the skill ranks are apparently fucking huge.

The way it really works is that every rank gives you like +5 to your skill roll, and your stats add to your skill roll at 1:1. So all that shit that people are talking about how skill progression is flattened or some shit is just shit. If you hand out skill points five at a time, and then only hand them out once every five levels, you haven't made progression any slower. What we're actually looking at is an incredibly swingy and busted RNG from level 1, because the difference between someone with whatever the fuck 2 ranks is called and a stat of 18 and a dude with a stat of 8 is twenty fucking points to begin with.

In short: it's really the same as the 3e system except way more obtuse because your character sheet doesn't combine your skill bonus and your stat bonus into a single number even though they are always combined in actual play and asks you to do a bunch of comparison steps along the way that are functionally pointless.

Seriously, their method of handling Stealth vs. Spot is to compare Skill Ranks, subtract the difference in rank from the DC of the guy with the better skill, have the two players make checks of their stat vs. the DC, then compare the margins of success. That is actually what Monte Cook fucking said. That is exactly the same from the standpoint of who wins and by how much with the same d20 rolls, as simply having both players roll d20 + Stat + Rank Modifier and then run a simple comparison. But no, he wants people to run comparison operations four times instead of only once. For no apparent reason.

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I can think of one reason. By throwing out a bunch of shit you can disguise the fact that no one has any idea what the hell they are doing.
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Post by ModelCitizen »

FrankTrollman wrote: The way it really works is that every rank gives you like +5 to your skill roll, and your stats add to your skill roll at 1:1. So all that shit that people are talking about how skill progression is flattened or some shit is just shit. If you hand out skill points five at a time, and then only hand them out once every five levels, you haven't made progression any slower. What we're actually looking at is an incredibly swingy and busted RNG from level 1, because the difference between someone with whatever the fuck 2 ranks is called and a stat of 18 and a dude with a stat of 8 is twenty fucking points to begin with.
Wait, is this a new thing? I was talking about the scheme from L&L a few months back. What you're describing sounds different (and worse).
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Post by tussock »

@'Linear Warriors vs Quadratic Wizards'

Yeh, I should really do a whole thing on that, because it's not true. Kinda weirds me out to see Mike and Monte using the phrase. 3e warriors are totally twice as powerful every couple levels (on average), just like Wizards are. Exponential growth.

The problem is that "hitting things with a sharp stick" becomes an ever tighter niche compared to what the Wizard is doing as you level up. Warriors end up amazingly good at something that's not happening any more.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

Only for the most kited-out of noncasters and even that solely depends on your schtick. A 3.0E-style Fighter Archer is one of those. Along with a Leadership Paladin Charger. And a Warblade that abuses the hell out of the magical item system and the Diamond Mind/White Raven schools. Formerly decent builds like the Frenzied Berserker (unless they went into Leadership + Flying Mount Charge) and the Tripstar have fell to the wayside, along with every other noncaster build that aren't as swollen in this one area of the game.

But even those are a minority of possible builds. 90% of noncasters are stuck on the linear curve, or even less than linear when we throw monster capabilities into the mix.
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In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by Username17 »

ModelCitizen wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote: The way it really works is that every rank gives you like +5 to your skill roll, and your stats add to your skill roll at 1:1. So all that shit that people are talking about how skill progression is flattened or some shit is just shit. If you hand out skill points five at a time, and then only hand them out once every five levels, you haven't made progression any slower. What we're actually looking at is an incredibly swingy and busted RNG from level 1, because the difference between someone with whatever the fuck 2 ranks is called and a stat of 18 and a dude with a stat of 8 is twenty fucking points to begin with.
Wait, is this a new thing? I was talking about the scheme from L&L a few months back. What you're describing sounds different (and worse).
I'm talking about the L&L proposal. And yes, the original tirade is 100% consistent with the descriptions of making skill checks in the previews, so I'm pretty worried.

The L&L describes a challenge as having a mastery level and a DC. For every mastery level the challenge is above you, the DC is increased by a number. It could have changed because they admit that they haven't put much effort into defining exact numbers for things, but let's say it is still 5 like in the original example. Then there is a base DC. The actual DC you go up against is the base DC plus 5 for every level of expected mastery you don't have.

So right away you note that a DC 13 Grandmaster test is really the same as a DC 18 Master test, because in either case a Master needs to roll an 18 and an Expert needs to roll a 23. But really, DC 13 Grandmaster is the same as DC 18 Master and both of them could be written as "DC 28" without a mastery level at all.

The mastery level comparison step is basically pointless. You could just add +5 per mastery level to your bonus and list the higher mastery level challenges with proportionally higher skill DCs for the higher mastery checks.

For opposed checks it's even more stupid, since of course we could just do things 3e style where everyone rolls a d20 and adds their skill bonus and stat bonus and compares their totals (5e is offering much larger skill bonuses and stat bonuses, but the concept would be the same). The Monte Cook plan is for the first player to make a test against a DC, and record the amount you passed or failed by, then you use the first guy's mastery to set the mastery of the check for the second guy and have them roll against that DC, and finally whoever passed their DC by more is the winner.. So you compare skill masteries, you compare your roll to a DC, then you compare his roll to another DC, then you compare your comparisons to each other. And this is still exactly the same as having both players just roll a d20 and add their stat and skill bonuses and then do a single compare at the end.

The only touted benefit for all this extra accounting is that in non-opposed tests the check will "automatically succeed" if certain criteria are met. But so far, all of their solid examples of automatic success have simply been where the bonus to the d20 roll was as large or larger than the effective DC. A codification of "If you succeed on a natural zero on a d20, don't bother rolling the d20". And it really seems like it would be just as easy to have the numbers be in one place and do the "Do I have to roll?" check first.

Fuck, the only reason automagical success is so important a thing to track in 5e is that bonus inflation is so over the top. A character with second level skill mastery and a stat of 18 has an effective bonus of +28 to a d20 roll. That is apparently available at level 1.

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Post by CapnTthePirateG »

New L&L!

In other words, yet another article extolling the damn complexity dial they have expounded upon over and over and over again, and no actual mechanics or even new ideas. Lending further credence to Frank's theory...
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Post by OgreBattle »

FrankTrollman wrote: Seriously, their method of handling Stealth vs. Spot is to compare Skill Ranks, subtract the difference in rank from the DC of the guy with the better skill, have the two players make checks of their stat vs. the DC, then compare the margins of success. That is actually what Monte Cook fucking said. That is exactly the same from the standpoint of who wins and by how much with the same d20 rolls, as simply having both players roll d20 + Stat + Rank Modifier and then run a simple comparison. But no, he wants people to run comparison operations four times instead of only once. For no apparent reason.

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so 5e is going to be more cumbersome than RIFTS
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Post by ModelCitizen »

@Frank: Ok, I'm rereading the two articles Mearls wrote on this and I see where you're getting the +5 per rank now. As far as I can tell though the only time the DC changes based on your rank is in the (terribad) opposed check system. Everywhere else it's auto-succeed if rank > target, DC 15 if rank = target, auto-fail otherwise.
Last edited by ModelCitizen on Mon Feb 06, 2012 4:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by ScottS »

Anyone want to guess how they're going to interpret/implement the 77% "story-based" leaning on that last poll?
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Post by K »

ScottS wrote:Anyone want to guess how they're going to interpret/implement the 77% "story-based" leaning on that last poll?
Oh, that's easy.

It's going to be 77% Magic Tea Party.
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Post by hogarth »

CapnTthePirateG wrote:New L&L!
I liked this quote:
Monte Cook wrote:If 3E style is about character customization and a tactical view of combat, options should allow you to customize characters with feats and skills, plus play with a grid and miniatures (and have rules that support threatened areas, attacks of opportunity, and so forth). But in a 2E-style game, some or all of these options would not be desirable.
Yes, those options (customising character classes, attacks of opportunity, etc.) were so undesirable in a 2E game that they wrote several books introducing those ideas -- suitable for burning or flinging against the wall!

But this was the most dubious part:
Monte Cook wrote:Some choices then—such as whether a character has a long list of skills and feats; or skills, feats, and powers; or just ability scores, hit points, Armor Class, and an attack bonus—are up to the player.
Good luck balancing a long list of skills, feats and powers with a short list of nothing.
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Post by nockermensch »

hogarth wrote:But this was the most dubious part:
Monte Cook wrote:Some choices then—such as whether a character has a long list of skills and feats; or skills, feats, and powers; or just ability scores, hit points, Armor Class, and an attack bonus—are up to the player.
Good luck balancing a long list of skills, feats and powers with a short list of nothing.
This is mind-boggling. I can't see why having skills is even a choice if seemingly "MTPing the non-combat parts of the game" is also on the table.

I can even understand something like this being decided by the DM for the entire game. But if you leave the skills/not-skills choice to the players, how can you make a PC using skills interact with another PC/NPC not using them? The ways I can imagine will force the game to stop at that moment so that the DM/players can calculate the "compatibility scores" on the spot.
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Post by crizh »

CapnTthePirateG wrote:New L&L!

In other words, yet another article extolling the damn complexity dial they have expounded upon over and over and over again, and no actual mechanics or even new ideas. Lending further credence to Frank's theory...
I tell you what, having glanced over that article, I don't hold out much hope for 5e including anybody that has been alienated by 4e.

It's going to take months before the vast majority of players that were driven away by 4e start to participate in the design process by which time it will be too late, major design decisions will have been taken based on straw polls of the opinion of the only people still left paying any attention to what WoTC have to say about anything.

Which is all the 4e fanbois.
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Post by Mask_De_H »

You say that like 4e fanbois haven't already tuned out or are angry that it's not 4e instead of for the conflicting and terrible design choices.
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Re: excluded

Post by Previn »

crizh wrote:I tell you what, having glanced over that article, I don't hold out much hope for 5e including anybody that has been alienated by 4e.

It's going to take months before the vast majority of players that were driven away by 4e start to participate in the design process by which time it will be too late, major design decisions will have been taken based on straw polls of the opinion of the only people still left paying any attention to what WoTC have to say about anything.

Which is all the 4e fanbois.
Whelp, I pulled up my old WotC account to start posting some, so I suspect you'll get a small sampling of the 3.x hold outs right off, if only out of curiosity. It was rather disconcerting to see that no other posters seem to be from noticeably before 4e time though. Coincidentally it took me several minutes to even find the forums there now....

http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/ ... sers_want)

But yes, the WotC boards are just 4e fans now.

[Edit: Url tags not working}
Last edited by Previn on Mon Feb 06, 2012 5:25 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Username17 »

ModelCitizen wrote:@Frank: Ok, I'm rereading the two articles Mearls wrote on this and I see where you're getting the +5 per rank now. As far as I can tell though the only time the DC changes based on your rank is in the (terribad) opposed check system. Everywhere else it's auto-succeed if rank > target, DC 15 if rank = target, auto-fail otherwise.
There are a couple of things you're missing from that. The first is that DC isn't always 15 for "at rank" tests. They have repeatedly used the example of a DC 13 pit jump, which by itself means that DCs vary. The second thing is that attempting things above your mastery is just a DC penalty - presumably the same +5 to DCs you get when you're doing an opposed test against someone of a higher mastery level.

But to look outside the Matrix for a bit: the automatic success of being higher rank is largely a formality. They've never quoted a "base" DC that was more than 15, so after getting the +5 for being higher rank than the challenge, the modified DC would be 10 or less. And you're still adding your entire fucking stat to the roll. So unless your attribute is 8 or less, your rank bonus plus stat bonus would always be large enough to make you automatically succeed on any test where your rank was higher than the challenge value. Making the rank comparison even more meaningless than it looks at first glance.

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Post by fectin »

It's not quite the same as taking ten; the numbers are different if nothing else. Also, it helps play to source material: Legolas doesn't even care about fighting while surfing down the stairs on a shield, because he knows he can do it just by having high dexterity. He couldn't take 10 in that situation from being stressed out in combat. So, making up numbers, lets say he's 5th level, has maxed his dexterity (20, because it's 'low magic' or whatever), and has maxed his balance to eight ranks for a bonus of +13. He's looking at a DC 16 balance check for shield sliding, because that's a convenient DC for this point. Taking ten is objectively better in general, because he can hit a DC of 23. In this instance though, he is "threatened or distracted," and cannot take 10 on his shield-riding, so it is objectively worse for him to do the cooler action (essentially the same problem as critical fumble tables for mundane actions). He still has to roll for some situations, and can get a result as high as 33, but his dexterity score offers a sort of "baseline awesome" guarantee.

Also, I am totally okay with people having aptitudes that are better than 1st level trained characters. That is a non-issue, because 1st level characters are about as well-trained as most two year kids.

I think works out even better on saves: Dwarves get constitution modifiers, and are supposed to just not give a damn about poison. In practice though, it's a piddly +1 to your save, which, as Frank has previously pointed out, is a modifier so small you might forget about it, and they get an additional specific bonus, just so that it's less obvious that high constitution does jack shit to keep you from being poisoned. If you turn your constitution score into a floor on your fort saves, that +2 con is a much bigger deal. Going from 14 to 16 constitution makes you not care about ~20% of the default poisons, and the same is true from 12 to 14 and 16 to 18.
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Post by Username17 »

In 5e, Dwarves only get +1 to Con, but that +1 is also +1 to all Con Checks because you add your entire stat instead of half your stat in 5e. Two players will be 10 points apart or more on their basic save bonuses at first level. The game is broken before a single ability is chosen.

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Re: excluded

Post by Krusk »

Previn wrote:Whelp, I pulled up my old WotC account to start posting some, so I suspect you'll get a small sampling of the 3.x hold outs right off, if only out of curiosity. It was rather disconcerting to see that no other posters seem to be from noticeably before 4e time though. Coincidentally it took me several minutes to even find the forums there now....

http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/ ... sers_want)

But yes, the WotC boards are just 4e fans now.
Go to the previous editions section. There are like 4 of us who post there along with fairly basic "help me make my monk/sorcerer multiclass viable with the parties druid and wizard" posts.
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