The Gaming Den

So in one of the latest go arounds about Fighters and the ways that people demand that they suck, we had a little side discussion about the fact that some characters actually need to suck. That is, Fighters aren't shitty because they can't hold their own in a combat minigame (although that is tangentially true in 3e D&D and its variants), but because they can't do anything to affect the plot. And while that fucking sucks, it is also true that having characters who are castrated in precisely that fashion is terribly useful, even unfortunately necessary. Because some people are learning the game, and actually do want and need to be dragged along for the ride while other characters advance the plot and solve problems interrupting this to periodically roll dice and kill monsters or say their name like a pokemon. Seriously, there are children and girlfriends and people new to the game or gaming in general and they can't handle plot affecting powers. They don't understand the game's cosmology, the world's map, or the society's economy. Maybe they will soon, maybe they are just trying the game out and for now they don't want to know. But regardless, giving them the power to reset time portals or spin straw into gold would literally only confuse them.

But that should not mean that every sword-based character is an "easy mode" that exists to be tossed to the new player. It is entirely reasonable for experienced characters to want to play a knight riding a horse, and they shouldn't be talked to like they were retarded just because they want to do that. The thing is that people who say that you could have knights become lords and command armies and rule towns and stuff are actually right to a point, but there have to be actual rules for doing that which are built into the actual classes or it just isn't going to happen. Also, as things continue to expand, you will eventually need to transcend things that can be accomplished by being a lord, a king, or even an emperor. But that's what transformation levels are for.

Basically you have logistic levels, and people on Easy Mode just want abilities that let them not have to deal with things. People who want a medium difficulty want powers that directly affect the logistic level they are in but are still relatively simple. People who want advanced classes want to be playing logistics and dragons.

Perhaps surprisingly, this means that there are probably some sword based characters that are more "advanced" than some of the sorcery characters. Consider the archetype of the Wizard and the Knight when they get up in level and get their own stronghold. The Wizard is going for a Wizard Tower, right? It's basically just him and his toad chatting it up about whatever their research is doing. Meanwhile, the Knight has become a Mesne Lord and he has a Keep. He has tenants, and products, and developments, and so on. He has a lot to keep track of, because instead of playing Ars Magica downtime, he is playing SimCity (or more likely something like the Cities and Knights of Cataan development tracks).

-Username17

I think this ties in with the need for clearly defined Tiers of Play in the next D&D if you want to continue to have 20+ levels.

I seriously want the Players Handbook so say something like D&D Heroic with a blurb from the designers in the front explicitly stating "This covers levels 1 - 10; you can expect to play characters similar to Aragorn and King Arthur and Parn. Then D&D: Mythic and D&D: Legendary or Ascended or something with lvls 11 - 20 and 21 - 30, with specific examples of the kinds of characters the designers envisioned at each tier.

Speaking directly to your swordsman, I could see an easy-mode development track where he seriously just gets to sword things in the face with bigger and bigger numbers. That's boring, but okay. Add another track where he swords things in the face at a slightly less rapidly expanding rate and also becomes liege lord,cool. But what do you expect to see for Swordy McFacestabber in the Ascendant tier?

This is definitely true, and it isn't just children either. I've seen adults who could not really handle a 4E Fighter. They pretty much used only at-will powers and often forget to mark foes if they weren't reminded. And we're not even talking logistics at that point, just basic tactics.

Ideally, there'd be an "easy mode" option for every major category. Such as:
* Berserker - You are raging all the time. Hit foes for lots of damage - you automatically cause other effects like fear and resist incoming crap. Tome Barbarian is close, actually, just needs everything to be automatic.
* Sneak - You are always difficult to detect or target. Backstab damage is based around how long you've been "studying the battlefield", so that you still contribute when you waste several turns sneaking around the periphery for no damn reason.
* Warlock - Blow stuff up. All your spells are usable every encounter, and they have side effects that keep you from screwing up. Used your most powerful lightning bolt on a single mook? That's ok, the lightning will arc to some other foes.

You do have to be careful though, because literally calling it "EZ-Mode" will create a stigma against playing it; which would only enhance possible elitist behavior.

virgil wrote:You do have to be careful though, because literally calling it "EZ-Mode" will create a stigma against playing it; which would only enhance possible elitist behavior.

The Tome Barbarian has such a tag and I haven't seen any stigma against it. Just pitch it as "The no-nonsense action class, for real men!" and the target demographic will eat it up.

virgil wrote:You do have to be careful though, because literally calling it "EZ-Mode" will create a stigma against playing it; which would only enhance possible elitist behavior.

I specifically call tome barbarian 'Easy Mode' and several of my players still wanted to take a grab at the class. People like to roll boatloads of dice when they deal damage.

The argument for the existence of the Kiddie Classes is not a bad one.

You should put it along side basic concepts of a modular rules set like -
1) An adventuring party does not need to have every class in the rules set
2) A character does not need to have every ability their class could take from the rules set.

Then you can do several things.

1) You can have your "introductory" or "low accounting" barbarian class along side the others, whatever. It is a tool in your tool set, use it if you need to, remove it if you don't like it.

2) The ideal version of this class has it's various ability sets labelled "intro" and "advanced" or something so that someone can still call themselves a barbarian and take more complex abilities.

3) Point 2 again, but this time the idea is that the class is also meant to draw in beginners but then give them somewhere "advanced" to go WHEN and IF they are ready.

And if you really wanted to you could stick beginner, moderate and advanced or whatever tags on to every damn class, ability, item or even monster in the game. You could even swing it so that there was an explicit understanding that if the GM doesn't use "advanced" monsters/encounters/whatever you won't NEED "advanced" characters in your party to provide support and transport and crap.

Hunters in WoW are EZ mode.

Having roles that a casual player can pick up, and remain effective, is good.

Heck, that can even be their role. They're good at Phsyique Combat, or Glyphomancy Mentalism; but they gave up property, and other probably other stuff.

In a game with as complicated tactical positioning as D&D, I think that it's a mistake to make the beginner class the 'melee' guy.

The beginner class should be a ranged shooty guy type, that way they don't have to worry so often about all of the shit that melee guys do and don't have to coordinate as well. Go light on the AoEs though.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:In a game with as complicated tactical positioning as D&D, I think that it's a mistake to make the beginner class the 'melee' guy.

The beginner class should be a ranged shooty guy type, that way they don't have to worry so often about all of the shit that melee guys do and don't have to coordinate as well. Go light on the AoEs though.

That's a valid point, and there should indeed be an easy mode class that is a sniper. Many are the times I have seen a new or uncertain player decide that what they really want to do is climb a tree or hide in the corner or something, and shoot enemies from kind of far away. It's actually a fairly reasonable tactic, you know, in the real world and shit. It's not super well supported in 3e D&D, but it could be. And you could give players a character that did that and they would be happy.

But seriously, about 80% of DM's girlfriends that I have seen in play have wanted to be an ax wielding barbarian. "Thog Smash!" is simply a very viscerally appealing tactic and it is one that immediately makes itself understandable as a method of helping things along to players who might not understand the politics or cosmology that surrounds them.

Ferret wrote:Speaking directly to your swordsman, I could see an easy-mode development track where he seriously just gets to sword things in the face with bigger and bigger numbers. That's boring, but okay. Add another track where he swords things in the face at a slightly less rapidly expanding rate and also becomes liege lord,cool. But what do you expect to see for Swordy McFacestabber in the Ascendant tier?

Well, at some point you get to be Ares. Honestly, Warrior and God of War are both pretty easy conceptually, it's getting from one to the other that is difficult. Let's consider the "getting places" minigame of plot advancement that you sometimes have to do. Now the following list is not intended to be "in order" of level or anything, it's just a list of stuff you'd have to do:

The Place is...

• Hidden in the woods.
• Far away.
• In a treacherous swamp.
• In an area that is very cold.
• In a desert.
• Surrounded by high walls.
• Underground.
• Secretly in the city.
• Across the river.
• Across the chasm.
• Across the ocean.
• Atop the mountain.
• Poisonous to the lungs.
• On fire.
• In another world.
• Under the sea.
• Floating in the sky.
• Draining to living things.

And so you'd have logistical abilities that let you deal with those sorts of things. And yes, D&D-style scry+greater teleport does solve most of them. Which does not mean you can't have that, but that people should probably get that when they are Ascended rather than getting it at seventh level. You want people to be spending some time raising ghost ships and flying around on giant hawks.

The thing is that the players like Trevor don't really want to be the guy who is relied upon in order to get the party through the swamp. That would end up with the rest of the party looking expectantly at Trevor and going "ahem" a lot until he remembered to invoke his swamp guidance. He just wants his character to be hearty and not personally have to deal with whatever the heck it is that happens when you get malaria.

-Username17

Judging__Eagle wrote:Hunters in WoW are EZ mode.

Having roles that a casual player can pick up, and remain effective, is good.

Heck, that can even be their role. They're good at Phsyique Combat, or Glyphomancy Mentalism; but they gave up property, and other probably other stuff.

All the pet classes in WoW are EZ mode. There are a number of reasons for this, but the reality is most of the combat happens over there, you are over here and the consequences if it all goes tits up is that your dog is dead for about 5 seconds.

There is probably a lesson here to do with the sniper class thing.

cthulhu wrote:All the pet classes in WoW are EZ mode. There are a number of reasons for this, but the reality is most of the combat happens over there, you are over here and the consequences if it all goes tits up is that your dog is dead for about 5 seconds.

Best summary of Hunter/Warlock ever.

Seeing as it's all a revamp of EQ anyway, yes, the Pet Classes are OP.

Simply having more actions and targets than a single character gives the player of said class a decided edge. I remember being able to weather encounters on my lowbie hunter that would have gacked my druid.

So thinking about logistical levels a bit more, I think they can be vaguely be classified by what you need to be doing. That is, a low level character can pretty much have their adventures spoon fed to them. They happen to b in town, and the adventure shows up. Sure, you might have to track the goblins who have kidnapped the mayor, and you might have to break down a door to get into room where the evil cultists are preparing their icky stuff, but the characters pretty much can stay at the inn and go to the adventure. A thing I find particularly interesting about this is that even easy-mode characters don't really need to be coddled. Sure, they can't be given abilities that work like previous editions of Trap Finding (where you have to remember to declare that you are doing it or it doesn't work), but by and large if you have the ability to get through doors with a lockpick or a fist you don't need a lot of prompting to do that if there is a door in the way.

At these early levels of spontaneous adventure the only things that need to be segregated away for the advanced classes are the abilities that are cosmology dependent (like dispel magic or aura perception), or the ones which have unintuitive mechanics (like the aforementioned Trap Finding). But of course, many things could be switched to passive or more intuitive subsystems. If the Indiana Jones clone simply has a chance to find traps that the MC rolls, then Trevor won't have to remember to say "I search for traps" every time there's an important door or chest. Heck, that's probably a good idea anyway. But of course, cosmology dependent abilities will still have to go to people more familiar with the game. Trevor wouldn't know what to do with Psychic Senses or Magic Dampening. So while you can (and probably should) put some sort of cosmology related powers into the low levels, it is those powers that will ultimately be reserved for advanced classes.

That may seem like it is inevitably going to lead to all the advanced classes being magical and all the easy classes being physical. But it doesn't have to be. There is still plenty of room for someone to play a Pyromancer (easy) who doesn't get any metamagic effects at all and just burns things. Trevor understands setting shit on fire, he's twelve. Similarly, there is also room for characters who have cosmology relevant abilities that are fully mundane. Not just stuff like Trap Finding that has historically been heavily micromanagement dependent and newly introduced things that will be similarly micromanagement dependent like smoke bombs, but also social abilities such as secret languages or allies, and non "magical" but still cosmology dependent abilities such as computer hacking or steam engineering.

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But where does it go from there? Well, the first place it goes is somewhere else. That is, the characters will be confronted with n adventure that they have to mount an expedition to go to. This means that players will need to plan and keep track of mules and stuff. So abilities related to the extended camping trip would be relevant. But so too would abstract information gathering abilities. Knowing that the Ghast Fens get very cold could get the characters to pack winter blankets, which would be invaluable in keeping them alive when it does in fact get super cold, for example.

It is here that the players like Trevor really break off from the rest of the pack. They probably don't want to play logistics and dragons, but even if they do they likely lack the actual lifetime experience to really understand the needs and the hardships of carrying more stuff. So what they want (whether they know it or not) here are abilities that that let them ignore phases of preparation. So the Pyromancer would be able to spontaneously maintain his body temperature and the Berserker would be able to hunt as he went along.

-Username17

Is Trevor now the new stand-in for the 'DM's Girlfriend/Little Brother' characters?

I would what would happen if Trevor and Steve met.

Trevor would likely cry and get disillusioned. Or the DM would hit Steve with a folding chair.

Trevor is the best case for interacting with Steve. Trevor hasn't read the monster manual or the setting all the way through. As far as Trevor is concerned, every monster and even NPC with class features is Steve until they show up twice in this campaign. Trevor doesn't know that to kill trolls you have to immerse their unconscious corpses in fire or water. To Trevor that is basically exactly as arbitrary as the fact that you need to pound a Tendridiculous with hammers to keep it from getting up.

Since Trevor's character may as well be played by Keanu Reeves whenever the monsters show up, it doesn't matter how your game world handles conceptual space. He isn't going to be able to accurately string together clues if conceptual space is strained, but he wouldn't be able to if conceptual space was not. It doesn't matter how accessible the backstory of your game's vampires are to Trevor, because h has not read it. So everyone and everything is Steve even if it's well defined.

-Username17

The fact that Steve himself apparently occupies multiple points of conceptual space (at least one each of meatspace and in-game) makes this string of posts even more awesome.

Steve?

Steve is the name being used for a monster that's completely new, preventing the player from being able to predict anything about it. The existence of Steve makes clues about what you're about to face mostly meaningless.

I'm a monster, rawr!

My name is Steve btw.

virgil wrote:Steve is the name being used for a monster that's completely new, preventing the player from being able to predict anything about it. The existence of Steve makes clues about what you're about to face mostly meaningless.

Steve was the name for the resident douchebag in your gaming group on the old boards. Ways of dealing with him included saying "Don't be a douchebag, Steve", hitting him with the folding chair, and sleeping with his relatives, unless you were unfortunate to be one.

When I said 'Steve' I was actually referring to Steve the Crap-Covered Peasant. And I wasn't talking about a hypothetical, I was trying to awkwardly slam two TGD-specific memes together for hilarity.

But AFAIK, Steve is the TGD-specific meme of the hypothetical one of a kind monster, from here and here.

Starmaker wrote:

virgil wrote:Steve is the name being used for a monster that's completely new, preventing the player from being able to predict anything about it. The existence of Steve makes clues about what you're about to face mostly meaningless.

Steve was the name for the resident douchebag in your gaming group on the old boards. Ways of dealing with him included saying "Don't be a douchebag, Steve", hitting him with the folding chair, and sleeping with his relatives, unless you were unfortunate to be one.

That makes a hell of a lot more sense, now. I seriously thought the question was: "what happens if our new player meets an asshole player?"