4e is now dead to me.

[the_taken]

1196899499[/unixtime]]

1196898907[/unixtime]]I suggest this because I am a very bitter individual and Mike Mearls is a douche.

:disgusted:

[Voss]

Speaking of whom, the douche speaks:
http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t ... r][br]Skip down to the second post. Its formatted. And readable. But there is a lot of blather.

And a lot of the following posts are unintelligible, because their hands and mouths are filled with cock. In one case, literally (well, ok, not quite).

[RandomCasualty]

1196907704[/unixtime]]Speaking of whom, the douche speaks:
http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t ... r][br]Skip down to the second post. Its formatted. And readable. But there is a lot of blather.

And a lot of the following posts are unintelligible, because their hands and mouths are filled with cock. In one case, literally (well, ok, not quite).

I especially liked this quote.

The Diplomacy skill and similar abilities are no more abusable than they are in 3e.

Yeah, I feel better already. Oh wait...

[Jacob_Orlove]

Roleplaying is not some sacred hobby that requires a minimum mental or creative requirement.

While I agree that a lot of the AD&D and older players can take this to extremes, I'm honestly fine with a game that has minimum mental and creative requirements. I'm not sure I can even express how awful the alternative would be.

[MrWaeseL]

Chutes & Ladders d20

[Leress]

Candyland d20

This quote just hurt my soul...
1st post on page 2

I think I have a new deity for my next campaign - Mearls, god of balance and wisdom.

Looking down from Olympus
On a world of doubt and fear,
Its surface splintered
Into sorry Hemispheres.

They sat a while in silence,
Then they turned at last to me.
"We will call you Mearls,
The god of Balance you shall be."

[Voss]

Is there any recorded case of someone choking to death on cock?

Because bad gay poetry and deifying a game designer should lead to some sort of death.

[cthulhu]

1196908484[/unixtime]]

I especially liked this quote.

The Diplomacy skill and similar abilities are no more abusable than they are in 3e.

Yeah, I feel better already. Oh wait...

Comedy gold.

[Catharz]

If I was Mearls, I'd be scared. Fans like those are the type to kidnap you, or kill people to 'impress you'.

It's not the disgruntled rules lawyers he has to worry about...

[Captain_Bleach]

1196915690[/unixtime]]If I was Mearls, I'd be scared. Fans like those are the type to kidnap you, or kill people to 'impress you'.

It's not the disgruntled rules lawyers he has to worry about...

It's either psycho-fans that inflate one's ego, or D&D-fans like us.
That's a tough one...

[RandomCasualty]

1196898907[/unixtime]]
Seriously. The system should be divergent because you're only ever going to see level 30 even in the crazy land of the super epic.

Now one could jolly well do this by having Hit Points increase proportionately faster than damage output; or by having attacks hit less often for higher level characters; or any of a number of other schema.

This is what 2nd edition did pretty much, given that your damage pretty much never went up in 2nd. You got a max of 2 attacks and no other bonuses.

[tzor]

1196913084[/unixtime]]Chutes & Ladders d20

Don't laugh, I've seen some old 1E dungeons that were like that. The trap didn't lead to a closed pit but down three levels of the dungeon. Trying to find a way up and out was an adventure all in itself, assming you could survive being way over your head.

[Falgund]

It reminds me of Eye of the Beholder ...

[Captain_Bleach]

That game sucked. The first encounter, my Half-orc Fighter died from a kobold who could somehow shoot around corners.

[Username17]

1196961186[/unixtime]]It reminds me of Eye of the Beholder ...

It should. Eye of the Beholder was from the old days when more powerful monsters lived on lower levels of the dungeon and wouldn't bother to open doors or go upstairs. So a major trap was the sloping passage which secretly took you to a deeper level of the dungeon such that when you reached the end you would face more powerful monsters who had better treasure.

And no, I'm not kidding.

---

In any case, my particular broadside against Mike is not that particular rant about how he doesn't want to put a lot of effort or thought into the campaign world even though he's the fucking designer - although that is plenty bad. I was actually referencing the earlier rant in which he said that making a system which used DR in addition to scaling damage and hit points was too difficult.

Seriously? I mean, he's not batting an eyelash at the idea of having bonuses and DCs for attack rolls going up by level. He's not ven seriously questioning the idea that damage is increasing on a per-level basis or that this damage reduces an ever increasig body of hit points. How is adding a variable where higher level and/or better equipped characters take less damage (in addition to dealing out more damage and having more hit points) suddenly going to break the mathematical back of the camel?

I'll tell you what's too complicated. It's having characters having (or not having) a +3 sword. And a belt which may or may not increase your strength bonus by +2. And possibly being of a race that gives an additional +1 to your Strength and/or to-hit modifier. That's too complicated, because a fucking player character can get up in the morning and have +/-6 on the d20. That literally doubles his offensive output against an opponent who would be struck on a 15+ and it's changing the damage rolls as well. Holy crap. And Mike Mearls is throwing even bigger equipment modifiers in at higher levels.

DR isn't hard to evaluate. It's really not, it reduced damage received. You can factor it into your damage projections fairly easily.

----

You're going to want a basic weapon attack to land on about a 10+. Why? Because then an extra bonus or penalty makes the smallest proportional difference and thus has the least impact on average combat length. And you're going to want to minimize the number of ways to push yourself off the random number generator.

A magic sword should not be a +3 sword. It should just be "Magic". All Magic weapons should provide a +2 bonus. No more, no less. Better Magic weapons should just do cooler things.

-Username17

[virgil]

That is pretty bad, his unwillingness to put detail into a campaign world. I know more than a couple DMs that unless one is shoved under their nose, they too won't be bothered to actually design a coherent/consistent world, making the entire game be a series of vaguely related fights. Although there is many a gamer that would assume the official setting to be as legal as the rules for attacking with a sword, thus making things difficult if the setting isn't that good to begin with.

[tzor]

1196968121[/unixtime]]It should. Eye of the Beholder was from the old days when more powerful monsters lived on lower levels of the dungeon and wouldn't bother to open doors or go upstairs. So a major trap was the sloping passage which secretly took you to a deeper level of the dungeon such that when you reached the end you would face more powerful monsters who had better treasure.

It was probably taken from the multi player graphic ASCII game "Island of Kesmai" in 1985 where there was a sloping passage from the first to the second level. This proved an interesting Escher situation as all the levels in IOK were mapped onto a single two dimensional matrix so the sloping path was really a linear path from the one level block to the other level block.

[Username17]

No. The AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide had a section on Dungeon Design (random and otherwise). The Sloping Passage is right in there with the Staircase and the Trapdoor.

Also, in AD&D Dwarves and Orcs had a percentage chance to detect sloping passages. It's supposed to be a big deal that you'd worry about all the time. Holy shit, what if we accidentally went to the floor where bad ass monsters live?

-Username17

[Crissa]

The sloping passage was prior to that, in Gygaxian trap era. But that is a good note of it.

Still, Frank, you forgot faeries and centaurs. How could you forget faeries and centaurs?

-Crissa

[Username17]

"Sprites" are on there as well as "Loci" - between the two of them the fairies are pretty well covered.

As to the Centaurs - I didn't forget them I just honestly don't know what to do about them. Centaurs really don't fit into most fantasy worlds. You can't just throw one off as an off-hand comment. The Greeks used them as a metaphor for the first invasion of horse-people into Helenistic lands, and they are an extremely major historical and social point for them. But they don't really exist in other cultures because they had very different experiences with the arrivals of different tribes and used different metaphors for the whole thing.

Hell, in Aryan history the invading barbarians with horses are the direct ancestors of the current inhabitants. They don't have Centaurs. They don't have anything which is especially like a centaur.

But Beast-People in general are extremely common in a variety of mythos. Minotaurs should probably be on there just because they are very important in Magic:tG. Possibly Satyrs too, although I think that they could easily slide or be folded into the Broo.

Birdmen are another problem. Aven, Raptorans, Aarakocra, Caelumites, Avariel, etc. It's very common in fantasy settings, and it's even common on Assyrian Walls. I'm not sure whether to fold them in as a playable race or as mighty creatures that come in at about level 6.

Also Naga. It's a tough call whether you want snakes with human heads, hot women with snake tails, or just snakes with one or more normal snake heads. You can seriously make a case that the Naga shoudl just be intelligent spellcasting hydras.

-Username17

[JonSetanta]

How dare you forget the faeries!
You should clap a hundred times for the sprite-orphanage you just killed with your disbelief.
Those... poisonous, invisible, biting little faeries...

[Captain_Bleach]

1196976959[/unixtime]]
Birdmen are another problem. Aven, Raptorans, Aarakocra, Caelumites, Avariel, etc. It's very common in fantasy settings, and it's even common on Assyrian Walls. I'm not sure whether to fold them in as a playable race or as mighty creatures that come in at about level 6.

Also Naga. It's a tough call whether you want snakes with human heads, hot women with snake tails, or just snakes with one or more normal snake heads. You can seriously make a case that the Naga shoudl just be intelligent spellcasting hydras.

-Username17

If you introduce bird-people as a playable race, be prepared for the powers of flight; pit traps will not have as major an impact; so will melee-only monsters with no means of flight.

For Naga, it depends on what the gamers want; some prefer the hot women with snake tails, some would prefer snakes with human heads, and some would prefer snake bodies with many human heads.

[Koumei]

Human-headed snakes just look strange. I think it's a matter of the head looking too heavy for the body to move around.

Much as I'm a fan of the hot women scenario, my vote would be "It looks like an actual snake." and can grow extra heads, maybe by feats, maybe as part of the "gaining levels" process. Or maybe it can have any number of heads and they don't do anything.

But serpent-based things rule. I like using the Yuan-ti in games when I DM.

[Captain_Bleach]

I have also been toying with an idea that I saw in Super Mario d20: instead of making new varieties of monsters (Flind Gnoll, Greathorn Minotaur), other varieties would be higher-leveled or templated versions. For example, Paratroopas or Seraphim Angels, they would be higher-leveled versions of the "base" creature. It would cut down on the mass variety of new monsters in the world (aarakocra, kenku, etc.) and just say "they're basically another race of 'insert creature here.'"
Mario d20 Link here.

[Crissa]

Centaur go back farther than Greek; and figures have been recovered from tribes of the far north as well. But we only have tales from Greek and Romans that survived. They might as well have been a mythical horse-riding or horse-emulating culture that just happened to show up repeatedly until the late bronze age, before no longer impacting.

Greeks also had more than satyr: They had faun, silenoi, and maenads. The latter might merely be a political grouping of elementals and fey, because every time they're encountered the individual is a different 'race'.

But when I see D&D, I want more than humans and humans with funny ears or heights - I was faeries and centaurs and birdmen and merfolk and minotaurs. I don't care if the race of animal-headed people is all one race with just different animals as individuality; I just want them around. Far more than I want angels or lizardmen, but ohwell.

Of course, that brings into the problem the definition of those, and I see races should have mechanical differences not just a bonus to some stat or skill.

Maenads get an elemental trait, beastmen get an animal affinity, centaur get shot on the run while birdmen and faeries can fly, but not carry others. Birdmen get aerial combat while faeries ... I dunno, but we ought to think up something that makes them more than minute fireball blasters.

And lastly, if size affects melee, it needs to affect magic as well.

-Crissa