The Gaming Den

So I was at my local game store today, and I took a quick skim through the Heroes of the Feywild book. I was noticing that quite a few of the wizard powers were cribbed from Dragon Magazine (Hi, Winged Horde) and Arcane Power (Visions of Wrath says hello). This seems to be a theme with essentials reprinting the PHB powers and making meaningless changes. Are they even trying any more?

They've more or less said they're working on 5E now.

Not to be overly snarky, but the 4e PHB, MM, and DMG is ample proof that there weren't a lot of ideas to start with.

I mean, once I figured out that I could write a script to generate powers (and power names) in under ten minutes, I knew that the system was designed by some profoundly uncreative people.

While I agree with you, CapnThePirateG, it might be less running out of ideas and more of a complete lack of coordination between their errata, online offerings, and book formats.

Winged Horde and Visions of Wrath are very popular Wizard powers. However, they weren't in any book. Also, winged Horde received errata, too. Even if 4E D&D did have its act together in the rules department, the fact is that there are like four separate 4E D&D fans:

[*] People who use offline rulebooks and offline rulebooks alone.
[*] People who have the Rules Compendium but no online errata.
[*] People who use the online character builder almost exclusively.
[*] People who have the offline character builder, which stopped being updated on October 2010.

And when you throw a Dungeon/Dragon subscription into the mix, especially one that's intermittent, things get really ugly. The current state of affairs is a mess. I'm not surprised at all that they would blatantly reprint some powers, because a lot of them just don't reach the intended target audience.


If I was in charge of 5th Edition D&D, here's exactly what I'd fucking do to keep my fanbase on the same page more-or-less:

[*] Minimize the use of errata. Seriously. If it doesn't cause the game to immediately implode, such as Orb of Imposition or Armor of Shared Valor, just ignore it.
[*] Make back issues of Dragon and Dungeon free. Any issue that's older than six months you offer for free. This is to minimize the gap between plugged-in Internet junkies and people who are totally off-line.
[*] Have a frickin' SRD. Pepper the SRD with select expansion options from the rulebooks now and then. You don't have to give them the whole enchilda (more like 10% of it) but you should keep the idea of having it being a living document so that people are aware that things are happening to D&D and if they like certain material they should give it a go.
[*] You can't have an offline and an online character builder. By the time 5E D&D comes out almost everyone will be able to access to an Internet connection so you can fully go online if you don't want to come across as needlessly miserly. Of course you will still end up dropping some of your customers like little Trevor and military guys who are overseas but it's the price you pay.

hogarth wrote:They've more or less said they're working on 5E now.

Wait, did they straight up say "they're a 5e in the works" or is this just based off the Mearls columns?

Well, the Monte Cook hiring, the complete freezing of future 4e D&D supplements, and the Cook's articles that sound a lot like testing ideas for an Alpha version of a new D&D edition are really strong indicators that a new edition is on the works.

Thought that "4e was out of ideas" was obvious after they announced a book with a Vampire class as it's main selling point.

The new book has The Berserker. Which is actually kind of neat. A defender that turns into a striker.

(of course very little of it is original, but it's an improvement on the original Barbarian.)

God, the barbarian.

It shouldn't be just a 'merely' above-average striker, it really shouldn't. The class has great feats, great magical support, excellent class features, encounter powers that are just slightly weaker than a ranger's, and some pretty solid paragon paths.

The problem is their daily powers. The rages aren't bad, but oftentimes they're just straight-up worse than encounter powers. To make them significantly worse if you try to crunch them (either by switching to a new one or using rage strike) you're even worse off. It works just fine for an extended workday but for a compressed one not being able to spam daily powers really, really hurts the class.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:God, the barbarian.

It shouldn't be just a 'merely' above-average striker, it really shouldn't. The class has great feats, great magical support, excellent class features, encounter powers that are just slightly weaker than a ranger's, and some pretty solid paragon paths.

The problem is their daily powers. The rages aren't bad, but oftentimes they're just straight-up worse than encounter powers. To make them significantly worse if you try to crunch them (either by switching to a new one or using rage strike) you're even worse off. It works just fine for an extended workday but for a compressed one not being able to spam daily powers really, really hurts the class.

Well yes. I think the Berserker is better than the original Barbarian because it's looks more fun to play, not more powerful; deciding when to switch from defender to striker adds a little more tactical complexity to the class and you alter your play based on situations.

But yes the original Barbarian is underated, especially the Thaneborn, because so many of its riders add to allies riders and damage. Put one in a melee heavy party and you have a striker with high burst damage who is almost effectively a second Warlord. (The problem is they become boring fast as all you do is spam the same powers every combat with little need or ability to respond to different situations.)

Coolest thing I recall in that book, was the whole Pixie, being a playable race. Albeit some cool stuff they can do is restricted in 4th edition fashion, but it's otherwise..different.

As for ideas, they seemed pretty dead the moment they decided to churn out essentials, abandoning their prior line of 4th edition, and hoping to basically start anew. Expecting old fans to pay for that crap, or losing them to buying their products (save maybe the monster vault, or magic item book for what magical items should've been to begin with).

K wrote:I mean, once I figured out that I could write a script to generate powers (and power names) in under ten minutes, I knew that the system was designed by some profoundly uncreative people.

Not only that, but you could take that output and feed it straight into a video game, and it would work, and the computer could run your character for you. At least to me, it has the same kind of mechanical feel as a bad jrpg.

CapnTthePirateG wrote:

hogarth wrote:They've more or less said they're working on 5E now.

Wait, did they straight up say "they're a 5e in the works" or is this just based off the Mearls columns?

"in the works" is really broad. Obviously they're doing preliminary research for the next edition, but development could still take years.

Vebyast wrote:

K wrote:I mean, once I figured out that I could write a script to generate powers (and power names) in under ten minutes, I knew that the system was designed by some profoundly uncreative people.

Not only that, but you could take that output and feed it straight into a video game, and it would work, and the computer could run your character for you. At least to me, it has the same kind of mechanical feel as a bad jrpg.

You both realize that the same holds true for 3.X, right? Template scripts aren't a great indicator of a system's worth. It'd be easy to write one for 3E, or a great number of systems. That doesn't make the system bad; it means you can write a script. Good for you?

Yep wrote:You both realize that the same holds true for 3.X, right? Template scripts aren't a great indicator of a system's worth. It'd be easy to write one for 3E, or a great number of systems. That doesn't make the system bad; it means you can write a script. Good for you?

That is absolutely and unquestionably false. The vast majority of effects in 4e, enough that you wouldn't notice if the rest went away, can be expressed roughly like this: "ranged 10, constitution vs. reflex, damage 1d10+con and vulnerability to fire". Compare that to the spells in the 3.5 players' handbook, or the things that feats can do; adding anything to a 3.x video game is a nontrivial exercise in game engine scripting and requires the ability to hook into nearly any event in the engine. 4e powers, by comparison, are assembled from a completely standardized - and thus boring and easily automated - set of bins.

I anticipate the day when video games can allow you to go, "I put a gold piece on the cargodrop hatch of my airship, cast Major Creation to turn it into multiple cubic feet of gold, then throw the lever to drop this multi-ton object which has less volume than some adult humans, onto the building below, breaking open the roof and the first three floors, at least."

Or even, "Dimension Door." or "Plane shift!"

Vebyast wrote:That is absolutely and unquestionably false. The vast majority of effects in 4e, enough that you wouldn't notice if the rest went away, can be expressed roughly like this: "ranged 10, constitution vs. reflex, damage 1d10+con and vulnerability to fire". Compare that to the spells in the 3.5 players' handbook

That's largely true of 3.5 actually. Granted there's a few things added solely for the sake of complexity, like scaling spell range, but Finger of Death, Destruction, Holy smite, Blindness, Stinking cloud, Fireball or sleep aren't fundamentally different from 4E powers in terms of format. The only real difference is that the 3E versions inflict much more severe status effects that generally last the entire battle.

The 3E spells that do get really complicated, like polymorph or planar binding are generally the broken ones anyway.

The rest of the 3E spells are generally taken up with either specific rules that should be best handled by a general universal mechanic (like growing to fill an area too big for you with righteous might) or pointless filler like fireball telling you that fire burns stuff.

Re: Swordslinger's kind of dumb argument: Basically all figments and all enchantments are too complex for a simple script, as are most summoning spells.

Why are we arguing about this? The points were that 4e combat doesn't require much in the way of situational variation and that the powers are super boring. Are those in dispute?

A Man In Black wrote:Why are we arguing about this? The points were that 4e combat doesn't require much in the way of situational variation and that the powers are super boring. Are those in dispute?

Everywhere but this message board, yes.

A Man In Black wrote:Re: Swordslinger's kind of dumb argument: Basically all figments and all enchantments are too complex for a simple script, as are most summoning spells.

Not really. Charmed and dominated can just be status conditions and those spells give you that status condition. Figments can largely be defined by keyword and the actual spell text can just be "creates a single figment of large size with visual components only."

Summoning is just generally telling someone to go look up some crap in the monster manual. In fact 4E summoning was a lot more involved since most of the summons had their own unique stat block for some reason where 3E just told you to look up a dire rat in the MM.

Why are we arguing about this? The points were that 4e combat doesn't require much in the way of situational variation and that the powers are super boring. Are those in dispute?

The point is to say that having simple scripts isn't what made 4E powers boring. It was just the fact that the scripts themselves weren't very interesting.

Swordslinger wrote:Not really. Charmed and dominated can just be status conditions and those spells give you that status condition. Figments can largely be defined by keyword and the actual spell text can just be "creates a single figment of large size with visual components only."

But the script can't usefully command those charmed or dominated creatures or create situationally useful figments, so that's a useless script.

Summoning is just generally telling someone to go look up some crap in the monster manual. In fact 4E summoning was a lot more involved since most of the summons had their own unique stat block for some reason where 3E just told you to look up a dire rat in the MM.

Since 3e summons aren't necessarily player-controlled (and may indeed be intelligent and reacting to the situation on their own), then no, you can't build a script around them.

The point is to say that having simple scripts isn't what made 4E powers boring. It was just the fact that the scripts themselves weren't very interesting.

Okay then.

A Man In Black wrote: But the script can't usefully command those charmed or dominated creatures or create situationally useful figments, so that's a useless script.

I'm not sure what you mean by script then. I assumed you meant just a very short 1-2 sentence description, of which charm or dominate could be: "Int vs Will, Hit: target gains the Charmed status condition for X amount of time"

Commanding the creatures goes in the description of those status conditions, similar to how you look up what dazed means somewhere else.

For figments, honestly most of that is up to the DM anyway. The only predictably useful figment I've seen in 3E is the illusionary wall, because you can set it up where your friends can see through it and the enemy can't until it moves up to it, so it amounts to a poor man's invisibility. But as far as how the enemies will react to your illusory black pudding or hill giant, the rules don't dictate it, nor have any illusion rules I know ever dictated it.

Swordslinger wrote:I'm not sure what you mean by script then. I assumed you meant just a very short 1-2 sentence description, of which charm or dominate could be: "Int vs Will, Hit: target gains the Charmed status condition for X amount of time"

Commanding the creatures goes in the description of those status conditions, similar to how you look up what dazed means somewhere else.

So you're saying that the script forks for every single possible set of enemy abilities? Well then.

For figments, honestly most of that is up to the DM anyway. The only predictably useful figment I've seen in 3E is the illusionary wall, because you can set it up where your friends can see through it and the enemy can't until it moves up to it, so it amounts to a poor man's invisibility. But as far as how the enemies will react to your illusory black pudding or hill giant, the rules don't dictate it, nor have any illusion rules I know ever dictated it.

So you're saying it's too complex and arbitrary to script? Well then.

A Man In Black wrote: So you're saying that the script forks for every single possible set of enemy abilities? Well then.

Huh?

Now you're making up nonsense. That's like saying there can't be a script for fireball because the player has to make a choice for where to place it. It's just part of the PC's action where he chooses what the monster does when he dominates it. 4E in fact has that status condition where another controller just chooses what you do, and that's pretty much it.

I don't see why that requires a long description just to say that.

So you're saying it's too complex and arbitrary to script? Well then.

Not really, I'm saying that it's arbitrary to really rely on mechanics at all for it, no matter how long they are. You can write a 5 page description of what figments do or a 5 sentence description and you're still going to be left with the fact that they're as strong as the DM allows them to be. This is because aside from illusory barriers to block sight, figments don't actually do anything mechanically.

We shouldn't be arguing about this at all. Cantrips and Orisons alone [Things like Create Water and Prestidigitation] already can't be scripted. The premise that it can fails before we even get away from the basic stuff.

MGuy wrote:We shouldn't be arguing about this at all. Cantrips and Orisons alone [Things like Create Water and Prestidigitation] already can't be scripted. The premise that it can fails before we even get away from the basic stuff.

In 3E and 4E, no less. Doesn't stop people from creating a generic make-a-power/spell/ability script.