Why Frank's Tomes Have Not Caught On (In Some Circles)

[Captain_Bleach]

Despite Frank handling many of D&D's (and Shadowrun's) fatal design errors, his work seems to be largely obscure/ignored on the popular d20 sites, like EN-World and Wizards of the Coast. I have a theory as to why:

1196300821[/unixtime]]

1196300014[/unixtime]]

1196298869[/unixtime]]The person in that thread you quoted wasn't a newbie.

Doesn't make Frank any less of a dick.

It think you read too much into what is said and not what the meaning of what is being said. Obviously he wasn't going to kill his family...hyperbole was used in that case to stress a point that a Paladin's spell casting wasn't very good.

And I think that this may be why Frank has not caught on to many WotC forum-goers. His disrespect (on the Internet, at least) scares off easily offended gamers from looking at his brilliant work. Such is Frank's curse; to be a great game designer, yet when faced with people not as good as he is making fatal errors in RPGs, he has to resort to swearing.
Kind of like many socially awkward artists; the public reviles the person, but feels inspired by the work. Not saying that Frank is socially awkward, he just pushes away gamers on the Internet with what he says, whether it is denouncing "sacred cows" or "If you are serious about Paladin spells, I will kill your family" bull.

Link to the "Paladin" quote (near bottom of first page):
http://bb.bbboy.net/thegamingden-viewth ... postnum=25

[CalibronXXX]

1196543409[/unixtime]]easily offended

and the internet are not compatible. If a stick is seriously shoved that far up their ***, then there is not much help for them.

I personally try to be polite and keep profanity to a minimum, but if someone cannot cope with vulgarity then they have a problem functioning in this day and age.

I doubt anyone's going to stop you if you want to completely re-write all the flavor text in the Tome's say that they are "PC", but it'd a big waste of time.

Additionally, people don't avoid the Tome's because there's cussing in them, and precious little of it at that, but because it is straight up more powerful than half of the PHB classes; and I'm sure you've realized that a massive amount of people still cling to the delusion of some internal balance in D&D.

Edited to keep the Cap'n from getting his panties in a bunch.

[Voss]

That and because a lot of people just reject anything that isn't official. Particularly if they're hanging about the official sites.

But yeah, Tome fighter > regular fighter = bad is pretty much the reaction.

And, yes, Captain, you are saying that Frank is socially awkward. Or at least a meanie who swears.

[Captain_Bleach]

That's the thing. People get so easily offended these days (watch the news) that this is no exception to the Internet. In addition, first impressions mean a lot, and if the writer of something somehow offends a large portion of the demographic he is trying to appeal to, it is guaranteed that his work will quickly lose its spotlight.
So what if there are "official loyalists," swearing at them for being wrong, however justified, is not remotely likely to make them go "You are so right, how could I have been so misguided?" It almost never works.
@Voss. I don't think that he is socially awkward. I think that he has a swearing problem when it involves message boards and WotC, because let's face it, WotC wishes to profit off of the delusional who believe that everything is balanced in D&D and that Fighters are balanced. And how else would they stay in business?

P.S. Frank will be the person that he is, stating what is wrong with the game using whatever vocabulary is at his disposal. The fact that the WotC boards have a "swearing is not allowed" rule makes many of the users have thin skin and go crazy over swear words. In short, the Tome series will not catch on in the WotC forums as many users will remember him as "the guy that liked to complain about the rules/swear a lot."

P.P.S. Also, what function does the Fighter serve in an "official-only" game with the Warblade?

[Leress]

Bleach, you should actually check what Frank has type on those various sites. As Calibron said, most disregard the Tomes because it seems like a completely overpowered set of supplements. Frank is not afraid to ruffle feathers, it was abrasive but it had more substance than anything else. He doesn't disrespect anyone that I have seen, he calls people on their shit. It seem that many have misinformation about Frank and get second biased tales of him without actually checking up on it. I have read many of the older post of Frank's and K's stuff and really it looks like many are taking what is said personally (which is strange since it doesn't actually have anything remotely close to an insult).

Bleach, check the treads on WOTC about the Tomes and you could get a gauge on what many on the WOTC board think of them. There are also misconceptions of Frank (like his gauge is the Transmutation specialist)

[Captain_Bleach]

I will do that.
He is quite different than what I expected. Quite more level-headed than I expected. Of course, seeing as Frank's posts on WotC were all deleted, I had to go by other message boards.
Overall, I think that Frank did the controversial; he made online supplements that did not balance things against the PHB, but said that the PHB was not balanced, and set out to fix D&D, regardless of what other players said. I find that admirable. I guess that's just what it comes down to; I can't stand his writing style, but he is spot on most of the time. It is like eating a chili pepper; it tastes good, but it burns.

[Maj]

While I have some measure of respect for Frank and K's abilities in the area of game design, I'm too jaded to care anymore. After railing about empty levels and useless abilities, I read some of the Tome stuff and realized that there were still abilities that wouldn't do much of anything in the games I'm used to playing in. And in some cases, there were fixes that I just really didn't like.

Which taught me something: Even the awesomest designer can't make D&D perfect. They can just make it perfecter.

So I'm gonna make the rules that work for me and play that way, and that's that. And if I'm playing with someone who has rules that work another way, that's cool; I can adapt, but that's not gonna change my home game much.

[Koumei]

I think you passed then, Maj. You realised what's important:

To fix your own games so that they work for you, and that making up something which will only work for your games, and only using it in them, is a-okay.

I think that's pretty much the ideal way to go.

[Captain_Bleach]

1196553576[/unixtime]]I think you passed then, Maj. You realised what's important:

To fix your own games so that they work for you, and that making up something which will only work for your games, and only using it in them, is a-okay.

I think that's pretty much the ideal way to go.

Right on.

[Username17]

Especially in the 1980s it was fashionable to believe that you could make a perfect game system, one which was itself merely a mathematical story resolution system which could be used to resolve the action of whatever story happened to be the one being told. This is attractive as a notion, but ultimately it's fatally flawed. The rules of storytelling which govern a romantic comedy are not especially compatible with the necessary genre conventions of a murder mystery or a heroic epic.

And while sometimes that particular heresy is revisited (for example by FUDGE), the fact is that it is the conventions of storytelling which demand game mechanics and not the other way around. And the implications of that are far reaching and profound.

When you design a game, you are attempting to curve fit a portion of the folk process to a mathematical regression. Ideally then the game you have designed should be able to accept a wide range of inputs in the form "Once upon a time..." and give genre acceptable results straight through to the part where they lived happily ever after. And it should be able to do so in a fairly straight forward by-the-book fashion. Any time the Game Master is forced to throw his hands up and ignore the rules to do something else to stay in genre is a place where your rules should have said something else than what they actually say.

---

Now this means that designing a game well actually means straight up admitting that there are stories that your system doesn't tell. If you design a system poorly you can claim to cover more genres and then you'll just create more times that individual games will have to ignore the rules in order to stay in genre for whatever story they think they are telling.

So by resolving contradictions in the rules you are actually straight up telling people whose interpretation of the game calls for different resolutions that they have to go get a different game. Fixing rules is actually about the cruelest thing you can do. It's like breaking up with someone through Facebook. You just made a cogent and impersonal argument for why some perfectly nice person is worthless and their opinion is not worth arguing against directly or even listening to.

People get offended when you present a unified rule system vision, not because you called them names - but because you directly and dispassionately dismissed them as even being worthy of insults. People get more angry when you smile and walk away than if you get in their face and yell. The so-called "polite" path is far meaner than any amount of swearing and spitting you could hope to utilize.

---

D&D claims to offer a place for people who want to play knights and samurai running around in a fantasy world stabbing things in the face and navigating through pre-Rennaisance societies. It also claims to offer a place for men of magic to crush the laws of physics beneath their heals and rival the gods with their minds and staves. These two ideals are not the same story, and cannot really coexist side by side.

So if you rectify things, you're essentially telling people that they are playing the game wrong. You're insulting them. It doesn't matter that you don't know who they are and don't care - that actually just makes things worse. When you make some part of D&D make sense, you're going to have to kick Sir Bors or Gilgamesh out of the Fellowship - those people aren't in the same story and they can't really play side by side in any meaningful way. And yet, whichever one you write out of existence, you just wrote a story where you gratuitously killed their favorite character because you didn't even care.

---

People aren't mad because the Endsof the Matrix rant has some swear words in it, they are actually relatively few and far between. They are angry becuase the stories they want involve people getting brainfryed when they want them to and not at other times. In short, what they want, what they really want is for something which is completely inconsistent that simply conforms to their personal tastes of genre conventions on a moment by moment basis. What they want isn't a cooperative storytelling game at all - it's a novel. A novel that they write.

And so when you make something coherent, when you take their novel away, you are giving them a rejection slip for the story they are writing. You haven't sat with them at their gaming table, you don't know what their stories actually are, and you're giving them a rejection slip anyway.

And that is why I piss people off. My message is actually pretty horrible. It's that resolutions to problems aren't simple. It's that actually solving things requires a lot of work and analysis that most people lack the skill to do temselves. And worst of all, I'm telling people that their personal preferences are wrong and backing it up with logical and mathematical arguments which are really quite hard to follow.

I am saying that subjective problems have objective answers. And while I hold out the very real possibility of alternate sets of objective answers to the same questions - I'm not actually bothering to provide them in any fleshed out and usable fashion. And since the number of people who can actually generate those answers are very few in number - basically I'm just telling people with different preferences that the game they are looking for doesn't exist and probably never will. And that is a horrifying prospect. And I get flamed for suggesting it.

-Username17

[Captain_Bleach]

I take back calling you a "dick." You have far more patience than the average RPG message board user.
It is really just the writing style. I'll stop dwelling on it and move on. In short, your supplements have brought a semblance of coherence and joy for a sizable portion of RPG fans. For that, you have my thanks.

P.S. I really like the FUDGE game. I found a pdf on their site, but I plan on getting a book copy as printing the pdf off will be as expensive as hell.

[Captain_Bleach]

D&D claims to offer a place for people who want to play knights and samurai running around in a fantasy world stabbing things in the face and navigating through pre-Rennaisance societies.

Which RPG system would fit this best? FUDGE, d6 Fantasy, or something else?

[Catharz]

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It is really just the writing style.

I find that hilarious, because it was Frank's and Lago's writing styles more than anything else that brought me to this board. I really missed that combination of logic and abrasiveness when it left the WotC boards for good. It makes arguing with them a lot more entertaining too.

[JonSetanta]

Frank's method is comparable to Spyder Jerusalem pointing a "prolapse" gun at someone's ill-logic game design. It's not pleasant to watch.

[Captain_Bleach]

1196568383[/unixtime]]Frank's method is comparable to Spyder Jerusalem pointing a "prolapse" gun at someone's ill-logic game design. It's not pleasant to watch.

But you can't help but watch on in fascination...

[Crissa]

Fudge, D6... Whatever. They're pretty much interchangeable because it's die vs die. As long as the dice are the same size, it's the same thing. Heck, except for the setting books, specific written skills and 'Feats' - d20 would be in the same place.

Once you start adding in more rules, you go the direction of BESM or GURPS - which have a game curve, and then you build a character design system for your game.

The next step is simplified D&D - without the A, without the d20 - or Champions, in which you make specific characters for the campaign - that's basically what classes are, pre-built characters - and you have simple rules for resolution and you handwave what you don't have rules for. In this case, everything except combat, and you choose a system that resolves combat with how ever much detail you want.

And then you could go the way of Rolemaster or NetHack, which has rules for when you get hit on the head with a drawbridge or stabbed with a rusty spoon.

But even then, I'm making a subjective choice to call one system more complex a choice than another. The first game systems I played didn't even have simple resolution tables; they had steps and angles that no algebraic or calculus could explain to balance the ends out. And really, that's okay, if you accept that there are limits. No one even plays those systems anymore - and only a few have relations that are still published.

I think there could be many solutions to D&D. The problem is that they keep looking for another mechanic without realizing that it's probably better not to add new mechanics without throwing out some old ones first - like they did in the change to 3.0.

Frank's Tomes are too powerful of characters, too quickly, for my taste. Too many options open up.

But to have less, you have to throw out even more of the setting.

If you're running around stabbing things, obeying the laws of physics - you cannot have class balance with another class that is then devoted to making fun of those laws.

-Crissa

[RandomCasualty]

1196547253[/unixtime]]That and because a lot of people just reject anything that isn't official. Particularly if they're hanging about the official sites.

But yeah, Tome fighter > regular fighter = bad is pretty much the reaction.

That's pretty much it in a nutshell.

It's really hard to get DMs to use noncore material that isn't their own when you're a player. Your DM has to come across the Tomes and like them for them to get into your game, because if you suggest them as a PC, they're likely to get a cursory glance and be labeled as munchkin and tossed.

I mean really, when have you ever seen any non-official rule for D&D ever get widespread attention?

[JonSetanta]

1196570905[/unixtime]]
Frank's Tomes are too powerful of characters, too quickly, for my taste. Too many options open up.

But to have less, you have to throw out even more of the setting.

If you're running around stabbing things, obeying the laws of physics - you cannot have class balance with another class that is then devoted to making fun of those laws.

-Crissa

The first statement I oddly disagree with, at times. Classes link the FnK Fighter appear disappointingly limited to me. I'd rather pick Swordsage over that, and even then... yerrrgch.

The last statement, well... Correcting that problem is probably one of the biggest influences on the Tome series' existence, and an opinion (fact?) that I would personally confront the backwater Wiz board Fighter fans to support.

[Username17]

1196557193[/unixtime]]

D&D claims to offer a place for people who want to play knights and samurai running around in a fantasy world stabbing things in the face and navigating through pre-Rennaisance societies.

Which RPG system would fit this best? FUDGE, d6 Fantasy, or something else?

That's the 5000 XP question, isn't it?

Certainly not D&D. D&D as a whole involves Spellweavers who can individually lay siege to the MErchant Republic of Venice and probably win. And they are only slightly overpowered for their reported CR of 10. We all know that nothing stops a Shadow Uprising short of divine intervention or a gateway to the land of Efreet.

And while one can make a cogent argument that the magic & monster system of D&D is completely batshit and the game engine can survive without it - it is still true that a d20 character is inherently capable of destroying a huge number of characters who are of lower level, and therefore middle ages social systems simply cannot hold. There's no place for weak old men who happen to have the hereditary rulership of kingdoms and empire - that is simply outside the simulation.

D&D is about champions fighting mightily and the tribe of the losing combatants running for the hills while the victors cut them down from behind. In short, it's about ancient civilizations: the Celts, the Greeks, the Aryans.

---

To actually determine what you'd want as a game system, you'd have to determine what kinds of stories you actually wanted to tell. And honestly, I don't think most people can agree on that.

But imagine for the moment that you did have a solid idea for how you wanted it to play out. Then you'd run the: Game Design Flow Sheet. And you'd see what you could come up with.

Do you want people to be seriously injured or kiled practically everytime they get hit with a big hammer? If so, are the players supposed to avoid confrontation most of the time? Ask yourself a bunch more questions along hose lines to narrow things down a bit.

Then you'll want some gme system in which ordinary people are capable of on some level competing against mighty champions because social organization is supposed to mean something. At the same time, you'll want the mighty champions to have a substnatial bulge on individual people running around to drive home the futility of lone peasants standing up against the system when lords have armor and good food.

You'll probably want a dice and target number system because it's mch harder to push people off the RNG in those. You'll also want to have a static TN and a system by which players can get bonus dice because that's much more tractable than variable TN.

But you can't just grab Shadowrun or nWoD and rub the serial numbers off because those games have extremely skeletal and shitty melee combat systems. Shadowrun has the excuse that people are expected to fight with guns almost exclusively so having a complicated system of maneuvers and position would be a waste of time as only one person in any combat is likely to bother trying to use them. nWoD actually intends people to fight with swords, it's just very poorly designed in a lot of ways.

In short: unless you intend to run your samurai and ninja as characters from Samurai Deeper Kyo or Naruto (in which case you'd use Feng Shui and move on with your life), the system you're looking for does not to my knowledge actually exist.

-Username17

[Captain_Bleach]

1196572074[/unixtime]]
I mean really, when have you ever seen any non-official rule for D&D ever get widespread attention?

Frank and K's Tomes.

Also, thank you Frank for answering my questions. I am looking at the FUDGE pdf, and I am enjoying what I see. I may try to run it when I get the chance.

[Voss]

I don't think its as widespread as you think it is. Some folks on other message boards are aware of it, but it isn't something most of them talk about.

[Judging__Eagle]

Well, I essentially killed a campaign that someone else was running to show how much better the Races of War and Dungeonomicon stuff was than the Core stuff.

Probably not the best thing to do, but when my Archivist was about to outcombat the Warforged Fighter/Barbarian/WF juggernaut; I knew that thins were wrong, but I wasn't sure why until I read RoW.

After that I got pissed at how much the PHB barb sucks balls at you know, melee combat.

Then I pretty much told the DM that I was sick of the rest of the party being (for the most part, only the Cleric and then after 6 lvls of suck, the Ninja were viable at their level), cohorts to the other people who had real characters.

[Captain_Bleach]

1196625071[/unixtime]]Well, I essentially killed a campaign that someone else was running to show how much better the Races of War and Dungeonomicon stuff was than the Core stuff.

Probably not the best thing to do, but when my Archivist was about to outcombat the Warforged Fighter/Barbarian/WF juggernaut; I knew that thins were wrong, but I wasn't sure why until I read RoW.

After that I got pissed at how much the PHB barb sucks balls at you know, melee combat.

Then I pretty much told the DM that I was sick of the rest of the party being (for the most part, only the Cleric and then after 6 lvls of suck, the Ninja were viable at their level), cohorts to the other people who had real characters.

What caused me to turn to the Tomes was when I was the DM, the party fought against a Very Old Red Dragon. The Barbarian used an Adamantine grappling hook to hook onto the dragon's leg and began to use another grappling hook to hook onto the face, all while the Dragon was flying. The Rogue prepared to dive from the top of a tower and plunged onto the Dragon's back for Sneak Attack goodness.
Then the Cleric casts Finger of Death; Dragon rolls a natural one, and dies. No flash, no flare, just a declaration of "I cast 'Finger of Death,'" and the dragon is dead.

[Koumei]

Some DMs currently allow F&K stuff I use. For instance, one DM in a "multiplayer, but everyone has their own thread" game is fine with my Dungeonomicon Monk/Jester with RoW feats, though that may be linked to the "You won't be sitting alongside another PC and showing them up". But one of the other players does think the Monk is too much at higher levels, what with every attack being a SoD or whatever.

Basically I went through the list and we found most abilities that are "just fine" and a couple that are "probably too much in what we'll call a casual game, where the monsters aren't the hardcore ones, the DM isn't out to get you, and the Wizard, Cleric and Druid are being decent but not choosing the tasty stuff."

You know, the type of game where the Rogue is okay despite not candle-casting, taking Epic Feats and flask-throwing. But he might be using magic elfblades.

Another DM likes Epic games and loves Dicefucks. He's a great player and DM, he just *wants* things to be good enough that F&K stuff isn't necessary. So, rather than use the Spherelock, he just tries to make the Warlock good (that is, take the feat of "I take 1 less Con damage", go into Hellfire Warlock with substitution levels, use Eldritch Glaive and scrolls of Body Outside Body, and basically focus on dealing many dice of damage in a round).

Likewise he doesn't use the Wish economy, and his Rogues apparently do fine without doing "the standard routine". Having said all that, he still does agree that many classes are exceptionally weak.

But while he lets me take Conduit, and thinks LA is a crock of shit, he feels the RoW feats are too good (perhaps that's specifically "too good in the hands of someone who isn't actually a fighter type"). I think it's the "take 10 on attacks, Save-or-Suck on every hit" and the "Here, have Uncanny Dodge!" stuff.

[CalibronXXX]

Does he understand that those feats have delayed progression for non-fighter types?