Posted: Wed Aug 21, 2013 2:27 am
Well, I meant as a substitute for Word, is all.
It still has the problem of doing things I don't entirely understand without me noticing, and which I can only figure out how to reverse with "undo" or by reverting to an older version.Meikle641 wrote:Why not use Open Office?
Well not all melee guys should be simple mode, and not all simple modes should be melee guys, clearly.Whipstitch wrote:Treating melee guys as simple mode hurts the game badly.
You ready to get to writing? Or are you asking someone else to do that for you?Lokathor wrote:What needs to happen is to have them be more clearly labeled as to what is what. To a beginning player it's not nearly so obvious that the Sorcerer is an "experts only" class while the Cleric is the "anyone can do this" class. These are the kinds of things that should have an OOC paragraph or two about them.
Here's a quick shot at it. I mashed together samurai, fighter, knight into the monk style format:codeGlaze wrote:Going off the rails a bit...
If you were going to treat the fighter as a chassis class, why not treat monks, rangers, barbarians, cavaliers... what-have-you as kits or pre-built fighters? New mechanics are simply new possibilities for any fighter to pick from.
I'm saying this should be yet another requirement that classes must meet to be accepted into the Big Book Of Tome Stuff. The same way that they have to have a skill list and a name and stuff.Bihlbo wrote:You ready to get to writing? Or are you asking someone else to do that for you?Lokathor wrote:What needs to happen is to have them be more clearly labeled as to what is what. To a beginning player it's not nearly so obvious that the Sorcerer is an "experts only" class while the Cleric is the "anyone can do this" class. These are the kinds of things that should have an OOC paragraph or two about them.
I can get behind that goal in theory, but in practice I'm rather skeptical that melee characters won't require at least a moderate level of system mastery to be played well virtually by default, like with say, rogues, for example.Lokathor wrote: Well not all melee guys should be simple mode, and not all simple modes should be melee guys, clearly.
Do we have a challenger for the spoilered part of my sig?Sigil wrote:Edit: As an aside, who all has actually said they'd like to start working on another revision? So far I have codeGlaze, Lokathor, and myself.
Wrong sir. I would go so far as to say twice wrong even.Sigil wrote:I think it would be acceptable, for a Tome variant of D&D, to expect all players to have either a moderate level of system proficiency or to be at least moderately dedicated to gaining said mastery. Let's face it, the Tome is only ever likely to be played by people who are already into this sort of thing, or by people introduced to it directly. That is the target audience.
Wrong, sir. Tomes, as written, is exactly as Sigil states. You told him he was wrong then proceeded to point out all the additional stuff that needs to be written in order to prove him wrong.Lokathor wrote:Wrong sir. I would go so far as to say twice wrong even.Sigil wrote:I think it would be acceptable, for a Tome variant of D&D, to expect all players to have either a moderate level of system proficiency or to be at least moderately dedicated to gaining said mastery. Let's face it, the Tome is only ever likely to be played by people who are already into this sort of thing, or by people introduced to it directly. That is the target audience.
But it's not acceptable to expect all players to be former DnD3.5 players and then stop there. That is what's wrong.Bihlbo wrote:Wrong, sir. Tomes, as written, is exactly as Sigil states. You told him he was wrong then proceeded to point out all the additional stuff that needs to be written in order to prove him wrong.Lokathor wrote:Wrong sir. I would go so far as to say twice wrong even.Sigil wrote:I think it would be acceptable, for a Tome variant of D&D, to expect all players to have either a moderate level of system proficiency or to be at least moderately dedicated to gaining said mastery. Let's face it, the Tome is only ever likely to be played by people who are already into this sort of thing, or by people introduced to it directly. That is the target audience.
Here at The Den that's about as mild a statement as you're gonna see most of the time when one person thinks another is inaccurate.calling people "wrong" seems needlessly inflammatory
Yeah that's why I began to make the SRD into a PDF in the first place. It was step 1 in the goal of "be able to make any houserules changes have a complete playable document for them". Going from that, you could make a "Complete E6" book or a "Complete Tomes" book or whatever.Your houserules need to consist of one resource (so include errata in your houserules), and should be as short as possible so players have reliable rules and only one place to check for changes. I rather like that as a design goal for Tome.
This is pretty much one of two situations I meant. The two primary groups of people that are going to play the Tome, even with a comprehensive pdf are:Lokathor wrote: These days I play roleplaying games almost exclusively with individuals that have minimal to none Tabletop RPG experience.
Agreed. A Complete Tome should enable someone who reads the book in toto to understand and play or run the game without needing to consult a separate resource. But the same thing applies to the core rulebook trifecta of PHB, DMG, and MM. Without being helped along by someone who already knows the game, it's hard. This will always be the case with d20. Anything we can do to make it easier is good, obviously.Lokathor wrote:A completed Tome result needs to be perfectly capable of bringing a player with no understanding of the game into the fold.
The Tome as designed by players with system mastery of 3/3.5 D&D for players that had system mastery of 3/3.5 D&D to include the things that were known through said system master into the system by default. What I meant when I said "A class that is completely beginner friendly would likely be the exception, a good one, and that's what you'd want to note for players" is that because the greatest number of players playing Tome are either experienced already or are being mentored, you should not be overly concerned about including lots of classes and options that area "easy" to play like the barbarian. I disagree that we need to make sure that there is a "simple" class of each variety (melee, spellcaster, sneak fuck) for brand new players. If you happen to have easy to play classes that's fine, and you could just make a note in the introductory paragraph to the chapter that "new players may have an easier time playing classes X, Y, and Z".Lokathor wrote: System Mastery should be a nice thing to have, but it should not be required to simply operate the game.
This is the same reason I took the time to make a version of the SRD combat chapter that included the Tome rules in place of the OGL ones. It's also the reason I formatted plenty of things in latex that never got into the final PDF, like a Races chapter that included both the Tome exotic races and the OGL races. And the reason why I designed a weapon system that adhered to the Tome advice about weapon sizes.Lokathor wrote: Yeah that's why I began to make the SRD into a PDF in the first place. It was step 1 in the goal of "be able to make any houserules changes have a complete playable document for them". Going from that, you could make a "Complete E6" book or a "Complete Tomes" book or whatever.
Stating you think someone is wrong isn't particularly inflammatory, it might even be the nicest thing any one has said to me on the Den.Bhilbo wrote: Let me try to be constructive, calling people "wrong" seems needlessly inflammatory.
What did you complete, anything not already in the PDF?Bhilbo wrote:To that end I've started and stopped a couple of times at turning Tome into something far more usable.
I was hoping my comment would be read as tongue-in-cheek, but that was probably a dumb idea since this is printed words.Sigil wrote:Stating you think someone is wrong isn't particularly inflammatory, it might even be the nicest thing any one has said to me on the Den.Bhilbo wrote: Let me try to be constructive, calling people "wrong" seems needlessly inflammatory.
I did one of the things I mentioned above. I cut out most of the stuff that doesn't benefit a player and compiled that into a separate document. I made a section for weapons. I made full write-ups for the OGL races and those in Tome, conforming to the original style instead of with the referential perspective in Tome (e.g. "this is a dark elf that you want to play"). But, I lost the work with a dead hard drive.Sigil wrote:What did you complete, anything not already in the PDF?Bhilbo wrote:To that end I've started and stopped a couple of times at turning Tome into something far more usable.
So is this the newest collected PDF?Judging__Eagle wrote:Btw, I'm printing this off in 4x4 pages per page, double-sided of the "large" version of the rules.
http://code.google.com/p/awesometome/downloads/list
From there.
It's 83 pages, according to the print window, down from the 332 monstrosity, and 42 when printed double sided.
Perhaps the question is "how many pages does it take to make D&D a fun game for everyone who participates?".
I'm going to print off a few copies for some other people that I know, and who game, as well.
They already know that I play "non-standard" D&D, and that one of the heaviest RPers that they know loves the material. After all, surprise, surprise, rules that don't intentionally give an organic character the shaft is liked by someone who makes organic characters.
Hows that coming?Sigil wrote:For now, yeah, thats still the newest PDF. Me, Lokathor, CodeGlaze, and TarkisFlux are slowly building a new more complete one, but the progress is slow as were starting from the ground up, reformatting most of the content and adding in sections that were never formatted before.