D&D 5th Edition: 8th Revision and Counting [Archive] - Page 4

1337 b4k4

2013-02-07, 11:06 AM

All this arguing about 15 minute adventuring days is missing a key point-- it's bad design to force GMs to have a certain number of encounters per day. And that's what daily powers do. It works out alright for a dungeon crawl, but what if I'm having a session of political intrigue and want to break it up with a single fight? I have to either accept that my players are going to blow through it, make it higher level and turn it into rocket tag, or add even more fights to a plot that doesn't call for them.

In the last two years of weekly DMing, I think I've had maybe one session where there were more than two fights in an in-game day.

Daily powers don't mandate a certain number of encounters per day, they mandate that you simply don't allow the PCs to always have every power available to them at all times.

If you're going to break up a session of political intrigue with a single fight that will be easily defeated if your PCs have all their resources at their disposal, than it's a mook fight anyway. I mean, on the one hand, we're arguing that high level PCs should be near gods, capable of wrestling a dragon with their bare hands, and then on the other hand, we're upset that a single ambush in town has to be a game of rocket tag. The fact is, if you can single handedly grapple a dragon, there are very few challenges that will be able to pose a threat to you, and that's sort of by design.

And from an in game perspective, just because the PCs have a resource available to them doesn't mean they are allowed to use it. Consider that in the US, someone with a concealed gun has the modern day equivalent of the fireball spell. But if they get challenged on the street by some punks looking to fight, they don't have the option to simply draw and start firing. By law a CCW holder must avoid escalating the situation, and may not use lethal force if lethal force is not warranted for the situation. I would imagine that the same would be true for any society where magic is a common thing. Wizards may have flesh to stone available to them, but using it in a bar fight is going to find them in jail. Especially in a political intrigue type situation, the guy sending lackeys after the PCs is going to spin his lackeys deaths to his advantage

Right, thats exactly what I'm trying to get at. Everything should be balanced towards a single encounter, with specific rules for dealing with the rare situation where the PCs have two encounters in immediate succession.

The problem with this is that your campaign then becomes entirely "encounter" focused and becomes a string of "encounters" and "that other stuff" which is pretty much exactly how 4e plays out a lot of the time. You lose the ability to have meaningful planning on any scale greater than 15 minutes, which ironically means balancing on encounters isn't solving the 15 minute work day it's admitting defeat and embracing it.

If you build around balancing a single encounter, and make resources specific to that encounter, you can have 1 encounter in a day, or 10, and the system will handle it fine.

And as a result it's no longer meaningful if your players have 1 encounter in a day or 10. That is to say as your players chase down the BBEG as he flees from the scene of the assassination, fighting one set of his guards or 20 sets makes no difference to your players.

Zeful

2013-02-07, 11:49 AM

No, it doesn't. It specifically gets away from that.

If you build around balancing a single encounter, and make resources specific to that encounter, you can have 1 encounter in a day, or 10, and the system will handle it fine.

All you need is a rule along the line of "the PCs get 80% of the resources they had available at the start of the previous encounter if encounters occur in quick succession".

Gets the same effect of PCs wearing down as a tough day goes on, without tying it to the day itself.

And now you have no way of forcing the player to flee in a sensible way without dogging them with an army, because otherwise they can rest, regain all their powers, and then fight back, unless the enemy is mathematically designed to destroy them, which essentially means you can't run anything approximating a realistic plot, as your mechanics make the world more reflective of something out of the Power Rangers.

So thank you for proving my point. A day has to be paced in a certain way to force certain actions, rather than it being holistic to the game.

Synovia

2013-02-07, 12:01 PM

The problem with this is that your campaign then becomes entirely "encounter" focused and becomes a string of "encounters" and "that other stuff" which is pretty much exactly how 4e plays out a lot of the time. You lose the ability to have meaningful planning on any scale greater than 15 minutes, which ironically means balancing on encounters isn't solving the 15 minute work day it's admitting defeat and embracing it..
No, it doesn't.

Balancing combat resources around a single encounter has absolutely nothing to do with what happens outside of combat. 4E having issues doesn't mean that any system that uses anything vaguely similar to 4E will have the same issues.

And as a result it's no longer meaningful if your players have 1 encounter in a day or 10. That is to say as your players chase down the BBEG as he flees from the scene of the assassination, fighting one set of his guards or 20 sets makes no difference to your players.
I don't know if you missed a bunch of my posts, but I've specifically stated several times that this is an easy problem to deal with. You simply put in a rule that states something along the lines of

"If you have multiple successive encounters, you can start the PCs in each encounter with 80% of the resources they had in the previous one"

And now you have no way of forcing the player to flee in a sensible way without dogging them with an army, because otherwise they can rest, regain all their powers, and then fight back, unless the enemy is mathematically designed to destroy them, which essentially means you can't run anything approximating a realistic plot, as your mechanics make the world more reflective of something out of the Power Rangers.

I don't know if you're misreading me, or if you're intentionally building straw men here.

Absolutely NOTHING I have said prevents you from being able to force a party to flee without resorting to dogging them with an army.

Zeful

2013-02-07, 01:10 PM

I don't know if you're misreading me, or if you're intentionally building straw men here.

Absolutely NOTHING I have said prevents you from being able to force a party to flee without resorting to dogging them with an army.

Neither. While you may not have said anything that prevents this, the system as you present it does undermine the concept. After all if a 5 minute rest restores their powers, most plots dependant on them running low on resources and reacting to them no longer work mechanically. This includes several campaign openings like prison breaks, washed upon foreign shores, or other scenarios involving escape from the threat of overwhelming force. If the players regain powers after 5 minute rest you either dog them with an army to prevent them from getting those 5 minutes, raising the question of how they got away if they were being chased by so many dudes, or you send Goldar a high-end monster after them to make resting for 5 minutes suicide, which raises the question of how they got away from him if they were under the yoke the entire time.

Daily resource management doesn't have this problem, as the problem can be summed up with "can we beat all of the dudes as we are now" rather than "can we buy 5 minutes of rest after we beat these dudes?"

Encounter-based resources incentivizes skirmish gameplay, which in turn trains the mindset that they don't have to beat the whole army, they have to beat these guys, and then wait 5 minutes. Lather, rinse, repeat. Reducing strategic gameplay for tactical gameplay.

Hell, to end the 15 minute workday is actually kind of trivial, make the players put themselves on a time limit. Reward them in-game for promptness and speed. Then make the challenge to get that reward hard to achieve, creating conflict with what they desire and what they know. Because unless the players specifically know that they only need to work for 15 minutes, they aren't going to immediately think of that as the solution to the problem at hand. Besides that complaint only really works when the system provides a few chances to use an option before it's gone for everything. There's a reason I've brought up Dark Soul's system up like I have been. I mean would you really try to rest if you only burned maybe 5 uses of a lightning bolt spell that has 10 uses? And you had 3-6 more spells available to use that you've only used 1 of each their 3-8 uses?

3.5's vancian system is actually pretty badly designed, that doesn't mean all daily resource systems are going to be identical to how 3.5 did it, does it?

Synovia

2013-02-07, 01:12 PM

Neither. While you may not have said anything that prevents this, the system as you present it does undermine the concept. After all if a 5 minute rest restores their powers,

See, there's the problem. You're basing your entire argument on an assumption that isn't valid.

Talakeal

2013-02-07, 01:23 PM

Any sort of recovery system is going to get gamed by the players. Even in 4E the games I play involve sleeping after every encounter to get dailies back.

I tried many different methods both in D&D and my homebrew to get this to work and I came to the conclusion that you simply can't base recovery of real world units of time (seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, or years) and instead have to base them off game time (rounds, turns, encounters, adventures, campaigns).

Eventually I just had enough with it and gave players a flat amount of spell slots per adventure, and then balance the adventure accordingly. It somewhat limits the stories I can tell, although I can balance that by giving PCs extra consumables for the longer ones, but if the PCs can't handle it then I just wait until they are higher level and run it.

From a flavor text perspective I say that recovering spells requires several days undisturbed meditation in a sanctum as well as certain astrological events to have passed since the last such meditation. That gives it an in character reasoning, but one flexible enough that I can adjust it for my needs at the time.

I allow mages to use spell slots to create gold or magic items at the end, so they are not punished for playing "too cautiously" with their spells. This seems to alleviate most problems, other than the one time the party sorcerer missed most of the session, came in for the last encounter, cast one spell, and then wanted his full compliment of unspent spell slots to create items with.

I suppose you could also balance spell slots based on encounters rather than days as there is seldom an opportunity to rest mid encounter, but then you run into the problem of not being able to partition limits on non combat spells. Still, if you play an action heavy game with no emphasis on resource management this might work for you.

I think the biggest problem with 4E style powers aside from the above is lack of options for everyone. In 1-3E the so called tier 1 classes had hundreds if not thousands of options, and even the lower tiers have several dozen. In 4E I don't believe anyone can have more than a dozen powers to choose from at a time.

Also, I will never be able to wrap my head around daily / encounter powers for non magical classes, that just isn't how the world I live in works and I can't wrap my head around it. Same reason I don't like the War blade, despite liking the fluff and thinking a better version of the fighter is really what the game needs.

obryn

2013-02-07, 01:35 PM

I agree that completely "game-centric" resource recovery is the way to go. Many of the other RPGs I like and admire have gone this route, including Savage Worlds and FATE.

If you're talking about spells and abilities, I think per-encounter, per-session, per-X-encounters, and per-X-sessions (aka per-Adventure) resource rates all make sense. It cleanly eliminates the pacing and 15mwd issues. (The first two also track very easily, which is in their favor.)

Now, it eliminates pacing problems at the expense of simulation, but I have only small use for simulation anyway, so that's a fair price to me.

I think the biggest problem with 4E style powers aside from the above is lack of options for everyone. In 1-3E the so called tier 1 classes had hundreds if not thousands of options, and even the lower tiers have several dozen. In 4E I don't believe anyone can have more than a dozen powers to choose from at a time.
I haven't found this to be an issue, really... I'm thrilled that the full-casters have less flexibility because I think it's a necessary cost of eliminating LFQW. I am likewise thrilled that martial characters have a lot more interesting options and potent ways to change the battlefield. YMMV, but I don't find the "lack of options" which seems to be taken as a given around here. :smallsmile:

-O

Synovia

2013-02-07, 01:46 PM

Also, I will never be able to wrap my head around daily / encounter powers for non magical classes, that just isn't how the world I live in works and I can't wrap my head around it. Same reason I don't like the War blade, despite liking the fluff and thinking a better version of the fighter is really what the game needs.

The world most certainly is built around a daily/encounter type system. You can't max out on the bench and then go do it again 5 minutes later. Its just not possible. Most athletic activities are like this.

The problem with encounter powers in D&D is just an extension of "Fighters can't have nice things". I would guess that your issue is that most of the Melee encounter powers you believe should be at-will, and frankly, I'd agree.

Thats not a problem with the system though, thats a problem with the fighter/etc not having any powers that are worth a damn.

Trip, Grapple, Bull Rush, etc, are all tactical options, and they really should be at-wills. They're the equivalent of cantrips. But, because fighters can't have nice things, they never get the any real daily/encounter/etc powers, so those things get moved up into the slots.

kerplunksploosh

2013-02-07, 02:08 PM

(2nd Ed fan, homebrewed my own, and have read 3 of these threads so far. Cyclical arguments, but fun nonetheless)

Regarding 5-minute recovery and encounter skills: What if it's 5 minutes for your first recovery, 30 minutes for your second recovery, an hour for the third, 2 hours for the fourth, and 8 hours for the fifth, then it resets back? As long as there were stock abilities that weren't encounter-based (probably wizards would be SOL), they could still function without recovery, albeit in a limited fashion.

I've never had much of an issue with Vancian magic or slots, but wizards have always had to find or research new spells, they aren't just given all eldritch knowledge upon levelling. And yes, time of preparing spells was also an issue. Because of this, my wizards *were* underpowered, even though they had more potential than fighters... and people played them for their potential, not their efficiency.

I'm very entertained by adventurely, rather than daily, use of spells. This reinforces the planning aspect that Vancian should be good at...

Also, folks, quit talking about what "would be cool but they're never gonna do". They're making a new system, and creativity = good. Be creative and encouraging! D&D 5th Ed doing poorly is bad for the hobby as a whole. I might try publishing my homebrew sometime, and I don't want anyone to think of roleplaying with a bad taste in their mouth because of a bad experience with 5th.

Thialfi

2013-02-07, 02:13 PM

Any sort of recovery system is going to get gamed by the players. Even in 4E the games I play involve sleeping after every encounter to get dailies back.

I have been playing D&D for 32 years and I don't think we have ever had an adventure where this kind of activity by the players would not result in a very quick TPK.

As a DM, if my players tried this, I would not be subtle with the reminders that their opponents have brains. The players resting gives their enemies time to marshall their forces and come at the players in strength and with a well thought out plan.

1337 b4k4

2013-02-07, 02:13 PM

Balancing combat resources around a single encounter has absolutely nothing to do with what happens outside of combat.

This of course assumes you think there's a difference between combat and non combat resources.

4E having issues doesn't mean that any system that uses anything vaguely similar to 4E will have the same issues.

The same could be said about 3e, and yet here we are having people say how much vancian / daily resources lead to 15 minute work days when it's clear this was mostly a 3e problem and D&D prior to 3e handled it quite well.

You simply put in a rule that states something along the lines of

"If you have multiple successive encounters, you can start the PCs in each encounter with 80% of the resources they had in the previous one"

And when do they get back all their resources? Maybe daily? In which case what have you solved? You've simply changed the combat effectiveness of your party from a linear drop to a sinusoidal drop. You still have a 15MWD problem when if your players ever reach the point where 80% of their previous resources isn't enough for them to push on, they'll stop.

See, there's the problem. You're basing your entire argument on an assumption that isn't valid.

It's not his fault you didn't specify that your per encounter refresh rate took more time outside the encounter than the 10 minutes most such systems use.

If you're talking about spells and abilities, I think per-encounter, per-session, per-X-encounters, and per-X-sessions (aka per-Adventure) resource rates all make sense. It cleanly eliminates the pacing and 15mwd issues. (The first two also track very easily, which is in their favor.)

I don't think it makes sense at all. The closest one to making any sense is per encounter because you can argue that the resources require you to have a moment to rest and catch your breath, but all the other ones are completely variable regen rates that will kill all other pacing. Per session means that one time your party will only be able to cast 1 fireball after 5 hours of dungeon exploring (in game time) and another night, your party will be able to case 1 after 30 minutes of combat with BBEG (in game time) because in real life they both took an entire session. Per adventure either gets into Bofanorc territory or simply becomes DM fiat because if you're characters are burning their resources too fast for the adventure, you have to give them more resources to allow them to continue playing. In all cases though, now the DM has to give more thought to pacing to ensure that resources are consumed at a plot appropriate pace so that they can be regained at plot appropriate times.

Tying resources to (in-game) time means the rules of the world not only make sense in world, but it also means your players have more control over when they get their resources back. The amount of risk your players expose themselves to (vs cost in terms of time and treasure) is in their hands.

I'm thrilled that the full-casters have less flexibility because I think it's a necessary cost of eliminating LFQW. I am likewise thrilled that martial characters have a lot more interesting options and potent ways to change the battlefield. YMMV, but I don't find the "lack of options" which seems to be taken as a given around here.

To me the problem is, 4e didn't add a lot more interesting and potent options to fighters. It gave them more to be sure, but ultimately they all pretty much boiled down to 1[w], 2[w] + minor status for one turn or 3[w] + major status save ends and do damage on a miss. Beyond that, there wasn't a whole lot of interesting choices to be made, and all the other classes were brought down to that level (rather than bringing the fighter up to their level). Even worse was while there might have been plenty of options at level up time as to what states would be applied, once you chose those options, you were more or less stuck with them until the next level meaning that in combat, your choices were still pretty much "I hit it with my axe", "I hit it with my axe harder" and "I hit it with my axe really hard"

Grod_The_Giant

2013-02-07, 02:17 PM

Except that pretty much demands that every day be paced roughly the same or you risk violating player expectations and becoming a "bad DM" because the system actively refuses to model certain situations that should come up.
The system already requires this. Both 3.5 and 4e are balanced around the idea of a certain number of encounters per day-- I think it's 4 encounters/day in 3.5? That's the number that all the per-day abilities are built on. If you don't provide the expected number of encounters per day, you're "violating player expectations." The system "refuses to model certain situations that should come up." (ie, days with fewer than 4 encounters).

Ideally, a system should be able to handle a wide range of encounters/time increment. It shouldn't be possible to blow through encounters greatly above your level by going nova. Neither should it require attrition to challenge PCs.

To address that, I suggest a limit to how many abilities you can use per encounter (or per scene, which I think is a better way of thinking about that sort of division.) This may be in conjunction with a daily limit. (Or, my preference, recharge-over-time, but it works out similarly).

obryn

2013-02-07, 02:57 PM

I don't think it makes sense at all. The closest one to making any sense is per encounter because you can argue that the resources require you to have a moment to rest and catch your breath, but all the other ones are completely variable regen rates that will kill all other pacing. Per session means that one time your party will only be able to cast 1 fireball after 5 hours of dungeon exploring (in game time) and another night, your party will be able to case 1 after 30 minutes of combat with BBEG (in game time) because in real life they both took an entire session. Per adventure either gets into Bofanorc territory or simply becomes DM fiat because if you're characters are burning their resources too fast for the adventure, you have to give them more resources to allow them to continue playing. In all cases though, now the DM has to give more thought to pacing to ensure that resources are consumed at a plot appropriate pace so that they can be regained at plot appropriate times.

Tying resources to (in-game) time means the rules of the world not only make sense in world, but it also means your players have more control over when they get their resources back. The amount of risk your players expose themselves to (vs cost in terms of time and treasure) is in their hands.
As I've said, my goal for D&D isn't simulation. I'd rather solve the in-game problems if 15mwd with a variable refresh rate than try and either insist on time pressure every adventure or incentivize the players for behavior I'd rather disincentivize.

Per Adventure is the wackiest and most variable, and that's why I prefer a Per X Encounters refresh rate if any effects are going to be potent enough that this refresh rate is a necessity. Alternately, you can enforce a minimum "work" requirement before a Full Rest could have its full effect; that'd work, too, and it's what I normally do these days.

For Per Adventure to work, the goal state needs to be clear. For example, my players are plumbing the catacombs beneath the Blue Shrine trying to find an ancient artifact called the Water Drake's Heart. I could set that as a goal and say, "No extended rests until here. Measure your resources accordingly."

To me the problem is, 4e didn't add a lot more interesting and potent options to fighters. It gave them more to be sure, but ultimately they all pretty much boiled down to 1[w], 2[w] + minor status for one turn or 3[w] + major status save ends and do damage on a miss. Beyond that, there wasn't a whole lot of interesting choices to be made, and all the other classes were brought down to that level (rather than bringing the fighter up to their level). Even worse was while there might have been plenty of options at level up time as to what states would be applied, once you chose those options, you were more or less stuck with them until the next level meaning that in combat, your choices were still pretty much "I hit it with my axe", "I hit it with my axe harder" and "I hit it with my axe really hard"
This to me is an improvement from being locked into a feat chain or locked into simple attacking, if we take it as a given that everyone can do cool environmental stuff. :smallsmile: You can make two Fighters who play out entirely differently on the table while filling the Defender role. As with all editions, of course this versatility increases as you get to higher level.

Extra damage is really the least interesting option that most characters can take. The thing is, it's normally in addition to the other cool effects rather than instead of them. But I'm just not seeing where most of the Fighters' powers work out boring in play. At 1st level, they're kind of scaled back, but even by 13th, you can crack people on the head with a hammer and stun them for a round. That's not small potatoes; it's about the most significant condition you can impart to an enemy. A few levels behind that, the Fighter can attack everyone around them and slow them with massive damage. There's also the infamous Come and Get It where the Fighter tricks/taunts enemies and locks them all down. The powers synergize with the class features, and a lot of this is emergent in play.

-O

Talakeal

2013-02-07, 03:09 PM

The world most certainly is built around a daily/encounter type system. You can't max out on the bench and then go do it again 5 minutes later. Its just not possible. Most athletic activities are like this.

The problem with encounter powers in D&D is just an extension of "Fighters can't have nice things". I would guess that your issue is that most of the Melee encounter powers you believe should be at-will, and frankly, I'd agree.

Thats not a problem with the system though, thats a problem with the fighter/etc not having any powers that are worth a damn.

Trip, Grapple, Bull Rush, etc, are all tactical options, and they really should be at-wills. They're the equivalent of cantrips. But, because fighters can't have nice things, they never get the any real daily/encounter/etc powers, so those things get moved up into the slots.

Didn't we just have this discussion? Anyway, yes, if you make all the tactical options at wills and restrict daily and encounter powers to "amazing strike that I put all of my energy into" then yes, the system would be fun and much more logical (although I still couldn't grasp why you would exhaust one daily but could still perform other dailies fine with the same exhausted body part).

The problem is 4e does not do this. You only have a handful of powers, and many of the basic tactical maneuvers are limited to dailies or encounter powers. A fighter who can trip, grapple, disarm, sunder, and bullish at will is impossible in 4e, let alone one who can cleave, whirlwind, spring attack, and do all the other feat based maneuvers of 3e.

Per Adventure is the wackiest and most variable, and that's why I prefer a Per X Encounters refresh rate if any effects are going to be potent enough that this refresh rate is a necessity. Alternately, you can enforce a minimum "work" requirement before a Full Rest could have its full effect; that'd work, too, and it's what I normally do these days.

For Per Adventure to work, the goal state needs to be clear. For example, my players are plumbing the catacombs beneath the Blue Shrine trying to find an ancient artifact called the Water Drake's Heart. I could set that as a goal and say, "No extended rests until here. Measure your resources accordingly."

-O

Agreed, per adventure doesn't work as well if you don't have a clear goal. If I do a sandbox style adventure I usually let them rest whenever they want, but "level" up the monsters each time they do, or provide bonus XP for successive encounters completed without resting.

Indeed, that latter might work as a general rule. The game is balanced against 4 encounters per day right? And it does say to modify CR based on situational advantages, right? Why not simply give reduced XP for encounters with fewer than 4 per rest and bonus XP for those with more?

1337 b4k4

2013-02-07, 03:20 PM

As I've said, my goal for D&D isn't simulation. I'd rather solve the in-game problems if 15mwd with a variable refresh rate than try and either insist on time pressure every adventure or incentivize the players for behavior I'd rather disincentivize.

Of course, if simulation isn't the goal, then 15 MWD isn't really a problem for you since whether they sleep for 8 hours after every encounter or not has no bearing on the plot.

Why not simply give reduced XP for encounters with fewer than 4 per rest and bonus XP for those with more?

Not to sound like a broken record, but that's pretty much how pre-3.x D&D worked. When XP was given for GP more than for monsters, progressing slowly meant reduced GP gain, reduced GP gain meant you were unable to level up as quickly, and wandering monster checks and resource upkeep meant that you faced a relatively steady level of resource drain that would make leveling up even harder as you delayed. The incentive to push forward at less then 100% capacity in early D&D was more XP faster.

This isn't to say that newer games haven't done things more elegantly than early D&D did, but I do find the more I read and play D&D, the more that so many of the problems people have, especially with 3.x were actually already solved or mitigated in early D&D if you simply played by the rules.

Flickerdart

2013-02-07, 03:25 PM

Restricting non-spell abilities to a per-encounter use can have a number of justifications:

The opponents are now familiar with the technique, and will see it coming next time, essentially rendering it useless.
The ability requires momentum build-up in previous rounds and you need to build it up again before you can use it (so for longer encounters, you might be able to get multiple hits in).
The ability requires something like psionic focus that takes a moment to re-establish.
The attack depletes your caloric energy reserves (or inflicts a condition such as fatigued), and you need a protein bar snack to replenish it (or remove that condition) which takes some time.
The attack works similarly to a dragon's breath weapon - a biological function that replenishes itself over time. Just like you can't spit constantly or give blood forever without running out, this ability has a cool-down timer of some sort.
The ability relies on an external power, and you can't risk calling on it too many times for whatever reason (either it gets upset or you will owe it back).
The ability requires a limited physical object - you can't have two guys tied up with your lasso because you've only got the one.
The ability extracts a certain price mentally or physically, and attempting to use it in quick succession is extremely dangerous.
The ability works partly due to shock-and-awe, and overusing it will make it too tacky.

Grod_The_Giant

2013-02-07, 03:28 PM

Of course, if simulation isn't the goal, then 15 MWD isn't really a problem for you since whether they sleep for 8 hours after every encounter or not has no bearing on the plot.
Incorrect. The idea behind the per scene/session/arc powers is a narrative approach to power recharge. The 15 minute workday is a narrative problem. As such, it makes a certain amount of sense to address it from a narrative perspective.

Kurald Galain

2013-02-07, 03:29 PM

Restricting non-spell abilities to a per-encounter use can have a number of justifications:
Sure, but most of these would require additional copmlications in the rules. For instance, if enemies "see it coming next time" then you should be able to re-use it against reinforcements who didn't see it the first time, or re-use it when you're invisible. If you're not doing that, then it's not a justification but just a handwave.

Flickerdart

2013-02-07, 03:36 PM

Sure, but most of these would require additional copmlications in the rules. For instance, if enemies "see it coming next time" then you should be able to re-use it against reinforcements who didn't see it the first time, or re-use it when you're invisible. If you're not doing that, then it's not a justification but just a handwave.
Hand-wave works too. It's just a game, after all; if you give a little bit of explanation, I think players would be more likely to suspend disbelief.

Kurald Galain

2013-02-07, 03:41 PM

Hand-wave works too. It's just a game, after all; if you give a little bit of explanation, I think players would be more likely to suspend disbelief.

I think the opposite. Handwaves show that it's just a game, which goes against suspension of disbelief. Anyway, the 4E philosophy is that this is perfectly acceptable, and the 1E - 3E philosophy is that it's not, so we'll have to see what they come up with for 5E.

obryn

2013-02-07, 03:41 PM

Incorrect. The idea behind the per scene/session/arc powers is a narrative approach to power recharge. The 15 minute workday is a narrative problem. As such, it makes a certain amount of sense to address it from a narrative perspective.
Yep! There's definitely the narrative angle, but I'd go even further and to call it a "game" problem.

Power levels and refresh rates are best viewed, in my mind, as a game issue - you want the game to have specific levels of challenge, and the 15mwd breaks that goal. So, I suggest solving it at the game level, with a game solution.

I don't think there's a "simulation-friendly" solution to daily resources, honestly, outside of the DM putting time pressure on the party every adventure. If you think from your characters' perspectives, it's only sensible they should want to approach every new encounter with maximum at-hand resources. The players may have different goals - table agreements or whatever - but that's moving to the "game" level again rather than the "simulation."

-O

1337 b4k4

2013-02-07, 03:47 PM

Incorrect. The idea behind the per scene/session/arc powers is a narrative approach to power recharge. The 15 minute workday is a narrative problem. As such, it makes a certain amount of sense to address it from a narrative perspective.

So why isn't it addressed narratively by telling the players that no heroes sleep after every battle? Why the need for an entirely new system to address what can easily be addressed simply by telling your players "No, you don't sleep for 8 hours after every combat"? How is me telling my players "No you don't have time to sleep now" any different from you telling yours "No, this scene/adventure isn't over"? Only the per session one is outside the DM control, and that's certainly not a narrative approach unless all of your sessions always end on narrative boundaries.

It's just a game, after all; if you give a little bit of explanation, I think players would be more likely to suspend disbelief.

And yet, a little bit of explanation isn't enough to get players to suspend disbelief that their heroes wouldn't take an 8 hour power nap after each combat.

Don't get me wrong, if you like alternative recharge systems and don't like daily based ones, that's fine I'm not going to tell you you're wrong. But don't try to tell me it's because daily systems always involve your players taking 8 hour naps between combats and then tell me you're just going to handwave the inconsistencies in your own preferred system.

Synovia

2013-02-07, 03:52 PM

The problem is 4e does not do this. You only have a handful of powers, and many of the basic tactical maneuvers are limited to dailies or encounter powers. A fighter who can trip, grapple, disarm, sunder, and bullish at will is impossible in 4e, let alone one who can cleave, whirlwind, spring attack, and do all the other feat based maneuvers of 3e.

Right, but I don't see this as a system problem. The system is fine.

The abilities are the problem. Its more that the specific implementation is the problem. The fact that fighters can't have nice things means that crappy things get pushed where the nice things should go.

Synovia

2013-02-07, 03:55 PM

And yet, a little bit of explanation isn't enough to get players to suspend disbelief that their heroes wouldn't take an 8 hour power nap after each combat.

If 8 hour powernaps make you a better combatant, then intelligent Heros WOULD take 8 hour powernaps after every combat.

The thing is, in the stories, 8 hour powernaps don't make you a better combatant. So thats probably what we should work on fixing.

Frozen_Feet

2013-02-07, 04:05 PM

... And you know why that is? It's because heroes in stories are often under the much-reviled time or situational constraits!:smalltongue:

1337 b4k4

2013-02-07, 04:05 PM

If 8 hour powernaps make you a better combatant, then intelligent Heros WOULD take 8 hour powernaps after every combat.

The thing is, in the stories, 8 hour powernaps don't make you a better combatant.

I don't know what stories you read, but they must be pretty boring if your hero is always at 100% capacity after every encounter.

Synovia

2013-02-07, 04:09 PM

I don't know what stories you read, but they must be pretty boring if your hero is always at 100% capacity after every encounter.
I don't know of anyone suggesting that a hero be at 100% capacity after every encounter.

Except maybe the people who are suggesting we stick with 3.5's 15 minute workday rules.

obryn

2013-02-07, 04:10 PM

So why isn't it addressed narratively by telling the players that no heroes sleep after every battle? Why the need for an entirely new system to address what can easily be addressed simply by telling your players "No, you don't sleep for 8 hours after every combat"? How is me telling my players "No you don't have time to sleep now" any different from you telling yours "No, this scene/adventure isn't over"? Only the per session one is outside the DM control, and that's certainly not a narrative approach unless all of your sessions always end on narrative boundaries.
The goal of a narrative system's rules is to help generate a compelling story. If "sleep after every fight, back to full capacity" makes for a boring narrative, it's disincentivized. So restricting it makes sense if you're using a narrative approach.

And you're not telling your players their characters can't sleep - you're saying they don't get all their sparkly effects back if they do.

Like I said, though, I view it specifically as a game or system problem, and I think that argument's stronger.

I don't know what stories you read, but they must be pretty boring if your hero is always at 100% capacity after every encounter.
It would be, and that's why it shouldn't be rewarded or encouraged.

-O

Grod_The_Giant

2013-02-07, 04:14 PM

In the interests of balance, has anyone played systems where the heroes pretty much are at 100% every fight? Because I have-- 3e Mutants and Masterminds-- and it works just fine.

Kurald Galain

2013-02-07, 04:17 PM

In the interests of balance, has anyone played systems where the heroes pretty much are at 100% every fight?
Sure. It's called 4E.

It works, but it tends to give players the sense of entitlement that no long-term bad things can ever happen to their characters, which does eliminate several plot options.

Synovia

2013-02-07, 04:24 PM

Sure. It's called 4E.

It works, but it tends to give players the sense of entitlement that no long-term bad things can ever happen to their characters, which does eliminate several plot options.

You seem to have a lot of opinions about 4E that you attribute to much wider systems.

You can have long term bad things happen to characters while still having their resources refreshed in every combat.

1337 b4k4

2013-02-07, 04:30 PM

I don't know of anyone suggesting that a hero be at 100% capacity after every encounter.

But that's exactly what an encounter based system does, unless you tie it to a different resource that doesn't renew with encounters, like 4e did tying to to a daily resource, which brings us right back to the 15MWD problem.

And if you tie it to something as hand wavy and abstract as a scene or adventure, then you might as well just say that the DM should rule that sleeping before getting in 8-10 hours of adventuring doesn't restore your powers. Or alternatively, skip pretending like it isn't the DM deciding when players get their powers back and just go ahead and say players get their power back when the DM says they do.

Except maybe the people who are suggesting we stick with 3.5's 15 minute workday rules.

So far I haven't seen anyone in the past 4 or 5 pages argue that we should stick when how 3.5 did it.

The goal of a narrative system's rules is to help generate a compelling story. If "sleep after every fight, back to full capacity" makes for a boring narrative, it's disincentivized. So restricting it makes sense if you're using a narrative approach.
...
It would be, and that's why it shouldn't be rewarded or encouraged.

Ok, now explain to me how D&D (pre 3.x where they eliminated so many of the restrictions) incentivizes sleeping after every encounter?

In the interests of balance, has anyone played systems where the heroes pretty much are at 100% every fight? Because I have-- 3e Mutants and Masterminds-- and it works just fine.

Sure it can work just fine, but it does make for a completely different type of game.

obryn

2013-02-07, 04:38 PM

Sure. It's called 4E.

It works, but it tends to give players the sense of entitlement that no long-term bad things can ever happen to their characters, which does eliminate several plot options.
...No.

Healing surges and Daily powers are both resources that dwindle over the course of the day.

Ok, now explain to me how D&D (pre 3.x where they eliminated so many of the restrictions) incentivizes sleeping after every encounter?
Spells are a daily resource, with substantial prep times pre-3e. Hit points are a worse-than-daily resource, by and large, but can be restored through spells.

Fighters want to have all their hit points. Wizards and clerics want to have all their spells. For a Fighter to get all their hit points, Clerics need to rest twice, at a minimum. (Remember the old SSI gold box games?) Without time pressure - say, if you're exploring a long-lost tomb - full rests before danger are sensible. 1e & 2e are more strategy than tactics, but it's not a good strategic or tactical idea to (voluntarily) face deadly dangers if you're not up to full capacity.

-O

Kurald Galain

2013-02-07, 04:42 PM

You can have long term bad things happen to characters while still having their resources refreshed in every combat.

He specified "at 100%", not "having 100% of their resources". For instance, 4E contains rules that effectively make hunger, darkness, diseases, and other bad things irrelevant to player characters, and it contains a rule that the PCs will always succeed at the non-combat parts of the main plot. This is a rule that most good DMs ignore, but it is nevertheless a rule. So yeah, no long-term bad things because that wouldn't be fun to the players.

1337 b4k4

2013-02-07, 04:45 PM

Without time pressure - say, if you're exploring a long-lost tomb - full rests before danger are sensible. 1e & 2e are more strategy than tactics, but it's not a good strategic or tactical idea to (voluntarily) face deadly dangers if you're not up to full capacity.

There's no such thing as "without time pressure". Wandering monsters and dwindling food, ammo and curative resources ensure this.

Talakeal

2013-02-07, 04:49 PM

Healing surges and Daily powers are both resources that dwindle over the course of the day.

If this is the case you have reduced the impact of the 15MWD but not removed it with the aW/E/D system.

As I said before, when I play 4E the same players who rested to regain spells after every encounter in 3E continue to rest after every encounter in 4E to regain dailies and healing surges.

I never actually played first edition D&D, and I can't remember a time in 2E when the DM used wandering monsters. But I do remember in Baldur's Gate you had a chance of a random encounter every time you fast travelled or rested outside of an inn, and it definetly can put you into a very tight situation where you wasted your resources expecting to rest and then found yourself in an even more dire situation.

Of course, with all the pocket dimensions, teleportation, and even time travel of 3E you can't actually have wandering monsters attack the PCs in their sleep.

Kurald Galain

2013-02-07, 04:54 PM

As I said before, when I play 4E the same players who rested to regain spells after every encounter in 3E continue to rest after every encounter in 4E to regain dailies and healing surges.

Yes, the solution to that is to have dailies and surges recharge after every four combats instead of every day. Because the game was written with the assumption that you'd have approximately four combats per day, and this particular bit breaks down if you don't.

obryn

2013-02-07, 04:54 PM

There's no such thing as "without time pressure". Wandering monsters and dwindling food, ammo and curative resources ensure this.
Much like time pressure, there are scenarios for which this can work and scenarios for which it can't.* These are every bit as arbitrary as per-session resources, and more arduous to track. And I don't think Next is going to incorporate these particular elements of AD&D.

-O

*"Can't" starts occurring around the time you get Create Food and Rope Trick/Secure Shelter, fwiw. Or enough money to buy rations. Or in a town. Or near a town. Or in a dungeon with a secret room. Or in a dungeon with door locks.

obryn

2013-02-07, 04:56 PM

If this is the case you have reduced the impact of the 15MWD but not removed it with the aW/E/D system.
That's 100% correct, and I never claimed that 4e did so.

I think it's nice that you're never worse off than about 75% from full, even with all your Dailies expended. It's healing surges that create the real pressure to rest, IME, more than Dailies.

-O

Zeful

2013-02-07, 05:14 PM

See, there's the problem. You're basing your entire argument on an assumption that isn't valid.

And which assumption would that be exactly? Or are you playing around with the goalposts between posts?

Eh, not like it'll matter for the point I'm going to be making anyway:

In what way can the encounter power system you espouse deal with issues that occur on greater timescales than combat occurs on? Where something might take a full minute of time to accomplish or more (and by more I mean in the realm of orders of magnitude more, so 10, or 100 minutes of time). Because if you actually break down what players tend to concern themselves with at the varying levels of play the game occurs on, you find that you can fill out a game with enough material and systems that combat is only 1/3 of the game. How does your power system deal with that?

Synovia

2013-02-07, 05:27 PM

But that's exactly what an encounter based system does, unless you tie it to a different resource that doesn't renew with encounters, like 4e did tying to to a daily resource, which brings us right back to the 15MWD problem.

This is getting really irritating. This is just not true, and yet it keeps being repeated over and over and over and over again.

Have a rule that allows the DM to reduce resources for successive / time constrained encounters. IE, if the party is harried, they only get 80% of the previous engagement's "resource points" back.

Synovia

2013-02-07, 05:32 PM

And which assumption would that be exactly? Or are you playing around with the goalposts between posts?

The assumption that you get everything back after 5 minutes. The idea that you balance resource usage around a single combat instead of a group of 4 combats does not mean you get everything back immediately. It does not mean that you're at 100% for every combat. It doesn't mean that you're instantly recharged.

Eh, not like it'll matter for the point I'm going to be making anyway:

In what way can the encounter power system you espouse deal with issues that occur on greater timescales than combat occurs on? Where something might take a full minute of time to accomplish or more (and by more I mean in the realm of orders of magnitude more, so 10, or 100 minutes of time). Because if you actually break down what players tend to concern themselves with at the varying levels of play the game occurs on, you find that you can fill out a game with enough material and systems that combat is only 1/3 of the game. How does your power system deal with that?
How does my power system not deal with that? Players having encounter powers has absolutely nothing to do with what happens outside of combat.

What happens outside of combat is DIFFERENT than what happens inside combat.

The point is, continually ambushing the PCs while they rest shouldn't be the only way to control Casters. The game should be built to control Casters to start with, and ambushing PCs while they try to rest should be a special situation.

Moving the goalposts is exactly what needs to happen here.

Anderlith

2013-02-07, 05:35 PM

Ouch, all this about encounters per day seems harsh.

Me & my group have always ran games were we didn't do long rushes through small fights. We've always had just a few fights per day, but it's always taken everything from us.

We'll fight as a small squad in an army, killing tons of undead or something, till some big bad comes & we kill it, then we usually win or withdraw.

Our group usually goes against high ECL enemies & fights. If you redistribute they way it works our playstyle is going to suffer horribly. It's one of the big reasons we stayed away from 4E. All playstyles should be viable. Not just the ones that you think are the right way to play. If the PC start napping after every fight, up the annie & make it so that they wish they could sleep after every fight. They'll wish they could go back to fighting a few kobolds when they have minotaur breathing down their necks.

Synovia

2013-02-07, 05:37 PM

Anderlith

2013-02-07, 05:44 PM

I don't think this would affect your playstyle at all.

Any mechanic that limits an ability by encounter is therefore limiting the usefulness of said ability to the value of the number of encounters that the characters face. If I only have one or two encounters, versus a group that has 6 then I'm at a disadvantage

Grod_The_Giant

2013-02-07, 06:19 PM

Any mechanic that limits an ability by encounter is therefore limiting the usefulness of said ability to the value of the number of encounters that the characters face. If I only have one or two encounters, versus a group that has 6 then I'm at a disadvantage
What? The idea is to make it so power is approximately equivalent regardless of how many encounters/scene you have. It's designed explicitly so that you're not at a dis/advantage compared to the group that had 6 encounters.

Kornaki

2013-02-07, 06:35 PM

The point is that if all you get are encounter powers, then for balance purposes they will only be powerful enough to kill equal CR creatures. If you have daily abilities that are designed to handle four equal CR fights every day, you can blow them on one CR+4 fight and still handle it. By giving everyone encounter powers only, you're telling people they shouldn't be punching above their weight and blowing tons of resources to do it (because nobody has resources to blow).

Whether this is actually a problem or not is up for debate but the change certainly does this

neonchameleon

2013-02-07, 07:02 PM

But that's exactly what an encounter based system does, unless you tie it to a different resource that doesn't renew with encounters, like 4e did tying to to a daily resource, which brings us right back to the 15MWD problem.

I've basically fixed any sort of 15MWD problem in 4e by looking at oD&D and providing the same solution they had; Extended Rests only happen in a relatively secure environment.

In oD&D you didn't rest for eight hours in a dungeon because you'd be taking wandering monster rolls every ten minutes - no one wanted to deal with 48 wandering monster rolls. Ever. And you didn't rest in the wilderness because the wilderness wandering monster table was a whole lot scarier. So to rest and recover you had to schlep back to town.

In 4e I've hard rather than soft coded it as a house rule for extended rests. You need the sort of facilities a friendly town provides (the cleric needs to pray at the temple, the wizard needs a small lab or library, the fighter and rogue can go carousing but need something not that strenuous). You need at least a long lazy weekend for an extended rest.

This has also lead to some of the more memorable adventuring - both the question as to whether to push on just that bit further because it's four days back to town, followed by another few to rest, and someone would probably get all the loot while they were gone. It's also lead to some memorable encounters - notably the following:

The party was coming back from an expedition badly beaten but all alive and successful, and laden down with treasure. So the local bandits (that had given them a lot of trouble five levels ago) decided that now was their best opportunity to take revenge. This lead to the highly memorable spectacle of the fighter (single figure hit points and no surges) hiding behind the invoker and throwing javelins, and the invoker (who was the only one in the party with a surge left) and the warlock (near full hit points) having to tank the substantially outclassed bandits while the fighter hid and threw javelins and the already bloodied bravura warlord kibbitzed with Direct the Strike. And the scariest moment was when one of the skirmishers charged the fighter.

Coidzor

2013-02-07, 07:04 PM

Yes, the solution to that is to have dailies and surges recharge after every four combats instead of every day. Because the game was written with the assumption that you'd have approximately four combats per day, and this particular bit breaks down if you don't.

:smallconfused: Daily limits are bad enough, but you're really breaking suspension of disbelief and delving into the absurd when you're still at half HP and don't have your kit back together after a week of downtime.

Sure. It's called 4E.

It works, but it tends to give players the sense of entitlement that no long-term bad things can ever happen to their characters, which does eliminate several plot options.

That wasn't my experience of 4e at all. :smallconfused: I suppose it's possible that the rules weren't being followed properly, though I'd hope that people bothering to DM a Living Forgotten Realms game could be bothered to follow the rules.

Between having to keep track of healing surges to be healed at all in combat or out and never seeming to be able to top off properly even with short rests (or whatever the term is for the non-extended rest), there was always someone lacking HP when we went into fights. Sometimes to an annoying extent, even though it was Living FR and so the expectation of permanent lethality was low as a matter of course because it's quite annoying to have to keep making new characters when you meet between once and twice a month and have to start over from level 1 each time.

Though, I admit, the starting over from level 1 each time seems to be par for the course for most of the DMs who advocate trying for a high volume of PC deaths.

1337 b4k4

2013-02-07, 07:09 PM

Much like time pressure, there are scenarios for which this can work and scenarios for which it can't.* These are every bit as arbitrary as per-session resources, and more arduous to track. And I don't think Next is going to incorporate these particular elements of AD&D.

Yes, but the number of scenarios where at least ONE of those restrictions can not be applied effectively is so vanishingly small that spending time developing for that corner case is a waste of developer resources.

Further, while I do agree they present a bit more book keeping, I reject the claim that they are as arbitrary as per session resources. They are all resources which are depleted on a regular and predictable schedule and their depletion rate relative to other resources used is in control of the players. And the same type of players who would insist on sleeping after every combat are the same players who when they decide their resources are depleted enough, will simply end the session, insisting that "Yes, the characters really do just sit there twiddling their thumbs, yes we realize we're only 1 hour into a 3 hour session and oh hey look, Halo."

Finally, while they may not include such things in next, their failure to include some form of pressure on the PCs will be to their detriment since it is the removal of those pressures that have led to so many problems people have with D&D.

This is getting really irritating. This is just not true, and yet it keeps being repeated over and over and over and over again.

It's because it is true. Either your players are at 100% every encounter, or there is some other external resource / timer which determines how much below 100% they are for this current encounter. And if you have an external timer that the players can control, then they will game it and all you've done is moved the 15MWD up a level in the abstraction. The only other solution is your next sentence:

Have a rule that allows the DM to reduce resources for successive / time constrained encounters. IE, if the party is harried, they only get 80% of the previous engagement's "resource points" back.

At this point you're basically at "The DM decides when player resources renew", which is fine if that's what you want to play, but then lets call a spade a spade and stop dancing around the issue and tell it like it is: Players controlling their resource renewal makes plots hard, so it's better that the DM determines when players can use their powers to ensure that every battle is exactly as thematically difficult as the DM wants it to be.

The game should be built to control Casters to start with, and ambushing PCs while they try to rest should be a special situation.

The game was built to control casters to start with. Then they published splat books, and then they published 3.x. And so once again, the issues are not with Vancian casting and daily player controlled resources, but 3.x's specific implementation

I've basically fixed any sort of 15MWD problem in 4e by looking at oD&D and providing the same solution they had; Extended Rests only happen in a relatively secure environment.

Indeed, that's pretty much how our DM handles it as well. As I've been saying for the last 5 pages, D&D had answers to these problems, it's just that we've lost them over the years.

Kurald Galain

2013-02-07, 07:16 PM

:smallconfused: Daily limits are bad enough, but you're really breaking suspension of disbelief and delving into the absurd when you're still at half HP and don't have your kit back together after a week of downtime.
Good point. Downtime should be another reason to get all your resources back. The main point is that if there might be an excuse for an extended rest during an adventure (e.g. because it involves travel) that doesn't mean you get to use all your dailies twice.

Between having to keep track of healing surges to be healed at all in combat or out and never seeming to be able to top off properly even with short rests (or whatever the term is for the non-extended rest), there was always someone lacking HP when we went into fights.
That's interesting because that only very rarely happens here. There's also the battle standard of healing, which everybody uses by default, and there's a belt that turns overhealing into temp HP.

My point, anyway, is that so many things are too easy to ignore. Food and drink? There's a low-level magic item that gives an infinite amount, and the rules are so lenient that your character will never starve to death even without that. Darkness? You can't even finish the word before someone yells out "sunrod". Curse, disease, or lasting injury? There's an easy ritual that cures it instantly. Underwater combat? Pretty much every power works exactly the same as above water, and by the rules you can hold your breath ten times longer than combat would last anyway, so you probably won't even notice a difference. And so forth.

There is a huge swath of interesting possibilities for challenges here that are negated easily and completely by some simple trick, and this is pretty obviously how the designers intended it. And no, that doesn't mean that a party should be deprived of food and light all the time, but an adventuring game should at least have the option of having that make a difference.

Grod_The_Giant

2013-02-07, 07:29 PM

By giving everyone encounter powers only, you're telling people they shouldn't be punching above their weight and blowing tons of resources to do it (because nobody has resources to blow).
The circumstance you just described does require players to fight smart if they want to punch above their weight, rather than just blow more resources, yes. But isn't that the point of a higher-CR challenge?

neonchameleon

2013-02-07, 07:47 PM

Yes, the solution to that is to have dailies and surges recharge after every four combats instead of every day. Because the game was written with the assumption that you'd have approximately four combats per day, and this particular bit breaks down if you don't.

The cure is worse than the disease here. Try my solution above some time.

That's interesting because that only very rarely happens here. There's also the battle standard of healing, which everybody uses by default, and there's a belt that turns overhealing into temp HP.

Battle Standard of Healing only heals 1hp per surge spent. (And I'd have no problem saying multiples didn't stack). Not sure what the belt is.

There is a huge swath of interesting possibilities for challenges here that are negated easily and completely by some simple trick, and this is pretty obviously how the designers intended it. And no, that doesn't mean that a party should be deprived of food and light all the time, but an adventuring game should at least have the option of having that make a difference.

In short you say "No Sunrods and the following items don't exist". Also you play below level 8 if you want the stuff sorted by rituals to matter.

Coidzor

2013-02-07, 07:57 PM

Good point. Downtime should be another reason to get all your resources back. The main point is that if there might be an excuse for an extended rest during an adventure (e.g. because it involves travel) that doesn't mean you get to use all your dailies twice.

Why? If there's an extended rest during an adventure then obviously the intent is that you're not running from one battle to the next and so being harried and haggard and still spurting blood doesn't make sense in context.

There is a huge swath of interesting possibilities for challenges here that are negated easily and completely by some simple trick, and this is pretty obviously how the designers intended it. And no, that doesn't mean that a party should be deprived of food and light all the time, but an adventuring game should at least have the option of having that make a difference.

So, basically, you want something like an unearthed arcana with a decent rules set for including such non-focal things with varying degrees of focus and time devoted to them.

Stubbazubba

2013-02-07, 10:09 PM

Wow, a lot of horrible arguments flying around here, I'm just going to take the ones that are still hot and wait for the other ones to recycle again;

I don't know of anyone suggesting that a hero be at 100% capacity after every encounter.
But that's exactly what an encounter based system does, unless you tie it to a different resource that doesn't renew with encounters, like 4e did tying to to a daily resource, which brings us right back to the 15MWD problem.

The point is that if all you get are encounter powers, then for balance purposes they will only be powerful enough to kill equal CR creatures. If you have daily abilities that are designed to handle four equal CR fights every day, you can blow them on one CR+4 fight and still handle it. By giving everyone encounter powers only, you're telling people they shouldn't be punching above their weight and blowing tons of resources to do it (because nobody has resources to blow).

False. You could begin each fight at 60-80% capacity and earn the rest through positioning, set-ups, some kind of rage meter, or building up magical power so you can unleash a huge spell without frying your own brain. There are all kinds of mechanics which brings further tactical depth to the combat encounter and avoids this fixation on logistics and strategy which has no place in an adventure story, which D&D has been selling itself as for over a decade now. It focuses the game on tactics, not strategy, which the combat engine has never been equipped to handle.

There's no such thing as "without time pressure". Wandering monsters and dwindling food, ammo and curative resources ensure this.

Arbitrary, boring reasons that exist purely to force the players into playing logistics, not the adventures they came to have. Again, if the game is about one thing in most players' minds, why are we trying to arbitrarily make it something else?

Earlier you responded to something I said about the system running counter to the flow of the game, and I think you misunderstood my meaning, judging from your examples. I don't think the game should be easy or not require different approaches for different encounters, nor do I think that barging in guns blazing (cause you're at 100%) should often be a viable approach. The point should be to incentivize approaching the situation, though, not just seeking out resource renewal and getting prodded away, finally deciding "K, I guess we'll finish the quest against our better judgment cause the DM has that look in his eye saying 'you rest, you die from monsters, starvation, and running out of arrows, in that order.'"

I know you can add all these arbitrary restrictions on when parties can rest, but now you've got this huge framework (daily abilities, player-activated refresh, PCs want to do that, but to balance it out we have random encounters, ammo, and food, i.e., book-keeping at best, wasting time at worst, see above) just to get people to play the game as intended. You can arrive at that end-state much more elegantly and without forcing logistics and meaningless random encounters, which have only ever slowed good games down, onto your players by simply focusing on encounters. We want them to press on, well then just let them press on. We want them to be challenged more and more as the day goes by, well then make more tactically interesting monsters that require more different approaches than "Dailies, then Encounters, then spam At-Wills til they drop. Pass the beer."

Note that I'm talking about spells, powers, and other flavors of offensive capacity. Defensive capacity is a good candidate for a long-term resource; Damage, at least some damage, could persist until you rest, so the party inches toward disaster throughout the day, but there's no reason to make them less capable of dealing with it at the same time.

In what way can the encounter power system you espouse deal with issues that occur on greater timescales than combat occurs on? Where something might take a full minute of time to accomplish or more (and by more I mean in the realm of orders of magnitude more, so 10, or 100 minutes of time). Because if you actually break down what players tend to concern themselves with at the varying levels of play the game occurs on, you find that you can fill out a game with enough material and systems that combat is only 1/3 of the game. How does your power system deal with that?

...what exactly did you have in mind? Cause I'm not seeing how anything would change. OK, you need to guard this door while the NPC inside completes a ritual that will cleanse the palace of undead. Through the night, you are attacked 3-4 times. I don't see how having all encounter-based abilities changes the story, just the strategy/tactics, which are already a given. Is there an example you have in mind where some story must really change with encounter powers instead of dailies?

Zeful

2013-02-07, 10:39 PM

False. You could begin each fight at 60-80% capacity and earn the rest through positioning, set-ups, some kind of rage meterYou complain about bookkeeping and posit adding a rage meter to play...

Yeah, you seem to be picking and choosing your position and not staying very consistent. Though if your only starting at not full capacity, you imply a very fine gradation of abilities across levels, such that you could actually achieve 60-80% of full capability often enough that such a distinction is valuable, either implying feature creep or adding some kind of cost subsystem that will add more bookkeeping.

...what exactly did you have in mind? Cause I'm not seeing how anything would change. OK, you need to guard this door while the NPC inside completes a ritual that will cleanse the palace of undead. Through the night, you are attacked 3-4 times. I don't see how having all encounter-based abilities changes the story, just the strategy/tactics, which are already a given. Is there an example you have in mind where some story must really change with encounter powers instead of dailies?
You seem to be referring to another argument entirely, as I say nothing about stories in that post.

1337 b4k4

2013-02-07, 11:53 PM

False. You could begin each fight at 60-80% capacity and earn the rest through positioning, set-ups, some kind of rage meter, or building up magical power so you can unleash a huge spell without frying your own brain.

Ok, I see at least some of our disconnect here. If every fight starts at the same power level and you can build past that initial level, I don't consider that starting at 75% and moving to 100%, I consider that starting at 100% and moving to 125%, it's basically semantics. It's also a distraction from the larger point which is that an encounter based system (even the one you describe here) leads to a system where each individual encounter has little or no bearing on how the players approach the rest of their encounters.

There are all kinds of mechanics which brings further tactical depth to the combat encounter and avoids this fixation on logistics and strategy which has no place in an adventure story

Man vs nature / limited resources is a key element in many adventure stories. Hell it makes up about 5 or 10 chapters of Journey to the Center of the Earth. The book Hatchet is entirely built on it. True it has little place in "The Hobbit" but Tolkien fantasy is only one part of the fantasy genre that D&D was built to emulate.

Arbitrary, boring reasons that exist purely to force the players into playing logistics, not the adventures they came to have.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. The various other resources built into D&D were not and are not arbitrary. Whether they're boring or not depends a lot on how they're tracked and used. But further, who are you to say that the players didn't come to have that adventure?

Again, if the game is about one thing in most players' minds, why are we trying to arbitrarily make it something else?

Probably for the same reason that even if most D&D players were trying to play Space Marines and Kobolds with it, we shouldn't turn D&D into a space game, because it's not what the system was designed for. I get that plenty of people want to play other types of games, but that doesn't mean D&D needs to change the system to be the system for those players. To be perfectly honest, trying to embrace systems and stories that it wasn't meant to model is precisely why D&D has fallen apart over the years. There's nothing wrong with D&D being D&D and letting someone else be "non logistical, non dungeon crawl, political intrigue with a fully tactical battle system" fantasy. Hell there's nothing wrong with WotC producing that game. But to call it D&D and to try and stretch D&D into that mold is harmful to D&D as a brand, D&D as a game, D&D as a community and the tabletop RPG industry as a whole.

Draz74

2013-02-08, 12:27 AM

I'm going against the grain, here, but chalk me up as a vote in favor of D&D actually holding onto some Simulationism.

Among other reasons, this may be D&D's best shot at being better than Legend at something. :smallbiggrin:

Agreed, per adventure doesn't work as well if you don't have a clear goal. If I do a sandbox style adventure I usually let them rest whenever they want, but "level" up the monsters each time they do, or provide bonus XP for successive encounters completed without resting.

Indeed, that latter might work as a general rule. The game is balanced against 4 encounters per day right? And it does say to modify CR based on situational advantages, right? Why not simply give reduced XP for encounters with fewer than 4 per rest and bonus XP for those with more?

Say, now there's an interesting.

Coidzor

2013-02-08, 01:10 AM

Man vs nature / limited resources is a key element in many adventure stories. Hell it makes up about 5 or 10 chapters of Journey to the Center of the Earth. The book Hatchet is entirely built on it. True it has little place in "The Hobbit" but Tolkien fantasy is only one part of the fantasy genre that D&D was built to emulate.

Since when has it been an integral part of D&D though? This is the first time I've seen someone make that claim and I've heard the grognards gripe about just about everything else.

kerplunksploosh

2013-02-08, 01:12 AM

I want my Simulationism too. Is this too radical an idea to propose, that possibly 5th Edition could cater to multiple parties? One thing I saw in 4th Edition that I liked was breaking characters down into stages of growth. Heroic, Epic, Paragon, or some such. I think one system is capable of a breadth of experiences, even if some mechanics shift as you level up (a la no longer receiving additional Hit Dice upon reaching Level 10 in 2nd Ed).

Levels 1-5 could be Adventurer levels. Here you are essentially a commoner, and it plays out like 2nd Ed, gritty and realistic. Food is tracked, light sources are an issue, and combat is still swingy enough that even CR-1 encounters may very well kill a PC.

Levels 6-10 could be Heroic, where we first can Create Food And Water, and Permanent Light. A lot of the fiddly stuff isn't really an issue anymore, and the focus can shift from planning how to simply SURVIVE to how to accomplish significant, although not planes-shaking, goals. Still fairly simulistic though. It sounds like most people here would prefer to simply start out at Level 6, skipping that lame fiddly stuff. More power to you.

11-20 would be Epic, and the simulation breaks down a fair amount for the sake of balance. Fighters would throw boulders at the enemy and command armies, thieves can vanish in plain sight and can poison with a kiss, wizards can do whatever they set their mind to, as long as they have plenty of prep time with no one getting in their way.

21+ would be Legendary, the PCs are now ridiculously powerful, challenging gods and whatnot. They're Exhalted. Here's where fighters would eventually need some sort of magical mantle to continue to keep pace with wizardy types.

I don't mind a *very* high level fighter having some inherent magicalness, but I resented, in 4th Ed, my fighter starting out feeling magical.

Coidzor

2013-02-08, 01:19 AM

I don't mind a *very* high level fighter having some inherent magicalness, but I resented, in 4th Ed, my fighter starting out feeling magical.

Magical or supernatural?

Frozen_Feet

2013-02-08, 01:42 AM

Let me talk about a completely different game for a second. It's called Exile 3: the Ruined World. It's a computer game.

In that game, you have food value. Taking a full rest in the game consumes food and time. Getting food costs money. At early parts of the game, your food resources might limit how far you can go, thus impacting which quests you could complete. After the first third, food generation spells mostly nullified the need to take detours just to avoid starvation.

But the time requirement remained, because in that game, passing of in-game time had tangible, and serious, consequences. If you didn't stop the monster plagues afflicting various parts of the world in time, not only would the wilderness be inhabited by more and more powerful monsters, towns got ruined (hence the name) and NPCs got killed, closing off entire trees of sidequests and making previously safe zones riddled with peril. The game never became unwinnable, but it became significantly harder (and more depressing).

Taking your sweet time also had consequences on a tactical level. Sure, I remember pressing the "long wait" key repeatedly to heal to full between encounters, but such "15 minute workday" wasn't always particularly wise, because monsters in a dungeon renewed and your light sources ran out. It was a pretty common occurrence for me to go "oh, my light source ran out while I rested, better light this to... GOOD GODS, where did all these oozes come from?" Choosing the wrong place to rest could actually make a dungeon harder.

Why do I bring this up? Because while the game system was very different from D&D (skill point based instead of class based, spell points instead of vancian), it was pretty clearly rooted in conventions of the genre established by D&D. If you've ever played the game and also read the 1st d AD&D books, you will understand what I'm talking about.

To anyone arguing otherwise: time constraints and wandering monsters have always been part of D&D. They are, to me, perhaps its most iconic feature. Next should include them.

And the kicker is, the existence of wandering monsters turns resting after each encounter from a no-brainer, to one tactical choice among many others. Game Masters who cry foul because their players are making their characters rest when they can are essentially complaining about their players playing smart.

Players (and GMs) complaining about artificial time constraints, on the other hand, are ignoring that such constraints are fundamental to the genre of heroic fantasy! In stories, the heroes can't rest now, because if they do, they lose - the villain gets away, the world ends, the princess will be moved into another castle etc. The contrived circumstances that lead to these situations are what is colloquially referred to as "plot". :smalltongue:

Stubbazubba

2013-02-08, 01:58 AM

You complain about bookkeeping and posit adding a rage meter to play...

A rage meter would be far, far more effective at engaging players than keeping track of rations, if that's the choice. Furthermore, you only have to keep track of a rage meter in an individual fight, it's hardly book-keeping. It's not something you're going to use, then put down and forget, then go back and not remember what level you're at. That's a low cost (in terms of bookkeeping) for high benefit (in terms of engagement and excitement in combat). What kind of payoff does rations or ammo provide?

Yeah, you seem to be picking and choosing your position and not staying very consistent. Though if your only starting at not full capacity, you imply a very fine gradation of abilities across levels, such that you could actually achieve 60-80% of full capability often enough that such a distinction is valuable, either implying feature creep or adding some kind of cost subsystem that will add more bookkeeping.

I'm having trouble parsing this poorly-conveyed rebuttal. There might be something I could talk to you about here, but all I can see is, "[Dismissive positioning], fjklaejlkapjfdhae, therefore, you're relying on feature creep or more bookkeeping, ergo, your idea is bad."

Nevertheless, I'll take a stab: I don't mean at level 1 you start out at 60-80%, I mean when you begin an encounter you're at 60%, whatever that means for your level, and don't have access to all or most of your most powerful abilities. Think Chrono Cross; you have to attack and build up some energy/momentum before you can unleash the big guns. Level has little to do with it, and no, there's no implication of fine gradation.

It could be as simple as; a Barbarian has to fell one foe and his Rage abilities open up; a Fighter has to attack an enemy normally, and more options open up with each hit, some of which form combos or some-such (no more than 3-4 levels deep, ever); a Sorceror only has access to their first or second levels of spells at the beginning of encounter, after casting 1 spell they have access to 3-5, after 2 they have access to 6; a Rogue's abilities are dependent on getting Advantage on enemies, etc., etc. Yes, each class would get new abilities or adjustments as they level up, that's what a class-and-level system is, but I don't see how that's feature creep or more bookkeeping.

This brings the focus in on encounters, where the system shines. The long-term considerations are just not streamlined or engaging enough to warrant the focus being on them, when encounters can be so much more interesting.

You seem to be referring to another argument entirely, as I say nothing about stories in that post.

Care to explain what you meant, then? Cause you give these extremely vague descriptions like "takes one minute or 100 minutes to accomplish," and don't apply that to anything. I tried my best at guessing what was in your head, and now a lesser man might say you're running from your stance, but I don't think that's the case, I just want you to explain the problem so we can talk about it, as I said. Yeah, I guess Trapfinding takes longer than your average combat, but I don't see how combat abilities being on an encounter basis change how Trapfinding works. Can you elaborate?

It's also a distraction from the larger point which is that an encounter based system (even the one you describe here) leads to a system where each individual encounter has little or no bearing on how the players approach the rest of their encounters.

As I've said twice now, I'm not talking about all resources being restored for each encounter, I'm talking about offensive capabilities. HP or other defensive resources should carry over from encounter to encounter so that the PCs have some limit, and those need to be beyond the ability of combat healing to fix. This is expressly for the singular purpose that each encounter can affect you going forward.

But beyond that, you're absolutely right, I think each encounter should not have to be weighed against all future or past encounters, because that's 1) not very engaging, since players don't know what's coming next anyway, and therefore can't weigh it except based on paranoia, and 2) requires a whole bunch of satellite crap like ammo and rations and random encounters to make work anyway, which is a bunch of monotonous book-keeping with no gain other than forcing the players to play through poor strategic decisions or simply a short string of bad luck. Balancing healing, rations, ammo, rest time, spell slots, and innumerable other things for a full adventuring day where you have absolutely 0 idea or control over what that actually entails is a waste of time and player enthusiasm; if you understand your DM/the adventure well enough you'll nail it, if not, it's hit-and-miss, and moreover, none of these mechanics are ever exciting or engaging in and of themselves. It can be grossly simplified to just keeping track of health and healing through the quest, and make offensive capability encounter-based.

Man vs nature / limited resources is a key element in many adventure stories. Hell it makes up about 5 or 10 chapters of Journey to the Center of the Earth. The book Hatchet is entirely built on it. True it has little place in "The Hobbit" but Tolkien fantasy is only one part of the fantasy genre that D&D was built to emulate.

OK, so anything a little more modern? It turns out man vs. nature is actually a big topic in The Hobbit, but adventure media today (Indiana Jones, Uncharted, Tomb Raider, LotR, Star Wars) does not consider rations, except on rare occasions where it's a plot device, not a building block of the genre. But this just leads into another point, which you introduce-

Probably for the same reason that even if most D&D players were trying to play Space Marines and Kobolds with it, we shouldn't turn D&D into a space game, because it's not what the system was designed for. I get that plenty of people want to play other types of games, but that doesn't mean D&D needs to change the system to be the system for those players. To be perfectly honest, trying to embrace systems and stories that it wasn't meant to model is precisely why D&D has fallen apart over the years. There's nothing wrong with D&D being D&D and letting someone else be "non logistical, non dungeon crawl, political intrigue with a fully tactical battle system" fantasy. Hell there's nothing wrong with WotC producing that game. But to call it D&D and to try and stretch D&D into that mold is harmful to D&D as a brand, D&D as a game, D&D as a community and the tabletop RPG industry as a whole.

OK, aside from that last conclusion, I agree that D&D shouldn't try to be something it can't be, that it needs to recognize its strengths and play to them, not be everything under the sun. Well, what it does well is squad-based tactical combat. The ammo, rations, and random encounters part of the game is what drags it down in the eyes of many, if not most players, and they prefer games with narrative and meaningful options before them, where each encounter progresses the plot or a plot, and where their precious gaming time is spent doing something important, not calculating how many days they can spend in the dungeon before they won't have enough rations on the way back and die one day's journey outside of town.

IOW, the tactical, (i.e. encounter-based) parts of D&D are appealing, but most players long ago grew weary of the cumbersome strategic (i.e. long-term logistical) elements and, in fact, have abandoned them. So while D&D shouldn't change to be whatever anyone wants it to be, it should realize that its strengths are what people play from it consistently, not just "whatever it was first designed to do," because it turns out it wasn't designed to do all of that well. I don't much care if it's integral or inherent or whatever else to old school play, it has never done it in a way that engages players like its combat does.

Flickerdart

2013-02-08, 02:31 AM

Don't get me wrong, if you like alternative recharge systems and don't like daily based ones, that's fine I'm not going to tell you you're wrong. But don't try to tell me it's because daily systems always involve your players taking 8 hour naps between combats and then tell me you're just going to handwave the inconsistencies in your own preferred system.
Did I ever say that? No. No, I did not. I merely suggested ways in which one could explain a per-encounter system of powers.

Zeful

2013-02-08, 02:42 AM

I'm having trouble parsing this poorly-conveyed rebuttal. There might be something I could talk to you about here, but all I can see is, "[Dismissive positioning], fjklaejlkapjfdhae, therefore, you're relying on feature creep or more bookkeeping, ergo, your idea is bad."Essentially in order for the numbers you provide to mean anything, the number of abilities must be large, or there is an external cost used to limit powers.

Think Chrono CrossNever played it. Didn't really like Chrono Trigger's combat because of the terrible ATB system.

It could be as simple as; a Barbarian has to fell one foe and his Rage abilities open up; a Fighter has to attack an enemy normally, and more options open up with each hit, some of which form combos or some-such (no more than 3-4 levels deep, ever); a Sorceror only has access to their first or second levels of spells at the beginning of encounter, after casting 1 spell they have access to 3-5, after 2 they have access to 6; a Rogue's abilities are dependent on getting Advantage on enemies, etc., etc. Yes, each class would get new abilities or adjustments as they level up, that's what a class-and-level system is, but I don't see how that's feature creep or more bookkeeping.And this sounds trite and un-fun.

Care to explain what you meant, then?Fine. Some things are not combat and do not work on combat time scales.

Most tabletop games (though this can also apply to other games as well) essentially are three games in one, each one operating on different time scales. Combat is fundamentally different from exploring the dungeon, which is different from wandering around town or to the dungeon. The levels of abstraction are very different between them. Making a system soley for combat, with no consideration to the other scales is neglecting the potential those design spaces have. Designing mechanics that let someone scout ahead, build traps, or even move about the level fluidly is not the kind of thing that should be part of an encounter-only powers system, which if you're building an encounter-only powers system either has to be ignored because it doesn't fit, or requires building an entirely separate system for it as well, which for casters saddles them with up to three magic systems and their resources and rules (and putting an intercontinental teleport in a encounter-based combat system is overkill and castrates any looming threat because they can do it so often and so quickly that can never really be caught out). Which adds even more bookkeeping, what with having to manage so much at any one time.

Cause you give these extremely vague descriptions like "takes one minute or 100 minutes to accomplish," and don't apply that to anything.Well yes. Because I was speaking in generalities rather than restricting myself to examples from one or two systems.

Kurald Galain

2013-02-08, 04:24 AM

Why? If there's an extended rest during an adventure then obviously the intent is that you're not running from one battle to the next
The issue is if the adventure writer did NOT intend it. For instance, in an adventure involving several days of travel, it is reasonable to have only one fight per day for awhile. This gets more than a little silly since it lets players unload all their most powerful once-per-day effects in every battle.

So, basically, you want something like an unearthed arcana with a decent rules set for including such non-focal things with varying degrees of focus and time devoted to them.
I want rules that make things like darkness, starvation or underwater fighting actually relevant. It's okay if high-level characters have a way to bypass that, but low-level characters should have to take it into account. I would prefer this being in the core rules but a module would be an acceptable compromise.

For example, the obvious counter to darkness is carrying a torch. That's fine, but it does have a lower field of vision than a sunny day outside would have. I like this because it makes a battle in darkness play differently, and add a tactical challenge. So let's not have a sunrod that immediately fills the entire battlefield with sunlight, making darkness completely irrelevant.

1337 b4k4

2013-02-08, 09:33 AM

Since when has it been an integral part of D&D though?

Since the beginning. Seriously why do you think there are all the for encumbrance, and resource tracking. Information about how long torches and lanterns last, different types of food with different expiry rates, wandering monsters and travel time rules. Heck, read through anything Gary Gygax wrote about the early game, or just read the 1e DMG. It's very clear that adventuring was (and is) supposed to be dangerous and resource consuming and that sometimes the monsters are the least of your worries.

As I've said twice now, I'm not talking about all resources being restored for each encounter, I'm talking about offensive capabilities. HP or other defensive resources should carry over from encounter to encounter so that the PCs have some limit, and those need to be beyond the ability of combat healing to fix. This is expressly for the singular purpose that each encounter can affect you going forward.

But beyond that, you're absolutely right, I think each encounter should not have to be weighed against all future or past encounters, because that's 1) not very engaging, since players don't know what's coming next anyway, and therefore can't weigh it except based on paranoia

Ok, and how does that solve a 15 MWD then? Why are the players not incentivized to take an 8 hour nap after each fight to regain the defensive resources? Surely having good defensive resources are just as important as having good offensive ones. Especially if you don't know what's coming, how can you know that going forward with only 60% of your defensive capabilities is enough?

OK, so anything a little more modern?

I don't read a lot of modern adventure (to be honest, I don't read as much as I used to) so the most modern one I can think of off the top of my head is Raptor Red from '95. But since you listed video games, the entire survival horror genre is pretty much built on resource management in the face of the unknown. Sure there are zombies, but they wouldn't be any scarier than the hordes in quake if it weren't for the fact that you only have 10 bullets. Oregon trail and it's ilk had pretty big resource concerns although that might not be "modern" enough for you. How about the TV show Jericho? Or the game Fallout? Of course there are all the rougelikes out there as well.

IOW, the tactical, (i.e. encounter-based) parts of D&D are appealing, but most players long ago grew weary of the cumbersome strategic (i.e. long-term logistical) elements and, in fact, have abandoned them. So while D&D shouldn't change to be whatever anyone wants it to be, it should realize that its strengths are what people play from it consistently, not just "whatever it was first designed to do," because it turns out it wasn't designed to do all of that well. I don't much care if it's integral or inherent or whatever else to old school play, it has never done it in a way that engages players like its combat does.

I would argue that the backlash against 4e, the frustration people felt at 3.x and the whole OSR thing and WotC's decision to look back at what the old games did proves you wrong. There is a sizable chunk of players for which what D&D was originally designed to model and did model is engaging, fun and exactly what they want out of the game. Until 4e, D&D didn't do squad based tactics well and the fact that a bunch of modern D&D plays play D&D for squad based tactics I think speaks more to the fact that 4e fractured the fanbase, dropped a bunch of the original fans and replaced some of them with new / different fans then it does to what "D&D Players" as a whole find engaging.

IOW, if they were to turn D&D into space marines and kobolds and still call it D&D, just because the then current paying customers for D&D would be playing it for the spaceness of it doesn't mean that D&D players as a whole want a space game, it just means they fired all their old customers chasing a new batch of customers.

Theoretically, this is what WotC intends to address with the modular system, where by the very core of the system makes few assumptions about the type of game you're playing, the the modules plug in on top of that core to create the squad tactics or dungeon crawling experience players want. Whether they will succeed remains to be seen.

obryn

2013-02-08, 09:34 AM

To anyone arguing otherwise: time constraints and wandering monsters have always been part of D&D. They are, to me, perhaps its most iconic feature. Next should include them.
I think wandering monsters are an iconic feature of AD&D 1e, B/X, and earlier. D&D started moving away from them in 2e, and although they made some cameos in 3e and later ... they're hardly a constant across editions.

-O

Synovia

2013-02-08, 10:45 AM

It's also a distraction from the larger point which is that an encounter based system (even the one you describe here) leads to a system where each individual encounter has little or no bearing on how the players approach the rest of their encounters.

Thats the problem we already have though: Players sleep after encounters specifically so they can start full. Right now starting every encounter at full is the default.

Once players get level 2 spells, and Rope Trick, there's almost nothing you can do to keep them from resting, except ALTERING YOUR NARRATIVE.

Getting around a game mechanics problem with narrative changes isn't fixing anything, so lets admit what the real situation is, set it as a baseline, and get to fixing it.

Deciding that players get spell/etc allotments based on what they'd need for one encounter is the best way to do that. Tweaking the situations where they're harried (which are a minority of the encounters) is a lot better solution than tweaking the majority of the situations and letting the system work on the minority.

EDIT:

To clarify: The majority of our problem is that D&D 3.5 (and most other version) assume that we're going to be doing 4 encounters a day, and set the players resources to what the players would need in 4 encounters. As commonly played though, we rarely have more than 1-2 encounters a day, so the assumption the game is built on gives players (especially spell casters) way too much resources.

Jacob.Tyr

2013-02-08, 10:48 AM

Clawhound

2013-02-08, 10:54 AM

For single-encounters, the problem is then that there is not reason NOT to cast those big spells. We could introduce a reason to NOT cast those spells. There's only so far you can go to justify that, though.

Perhaps higher levels spells should have a requirement, such as casting a lower level spell first, or creating a casting focus, or something clunky like that.

Synovia

2013-02-08, 10:58 AM

Do you all play with such horrid munchkins that they actually do 15m work days? I have never had a party try to pull this, sleeping during a session has been a rarity for me. And if your narrative is so completely devoid of pressure that sleeping every 15 minutes requires a complete rewrite of whatever you're doing, you're probably doing it wrong.

No, players don't sleep after every encounter, but I honestly can't think of any time I've seen players play through 4 encounters before sleeping.

So why are we basing players resources on 4 encounters if almost nobody plays that many?

1337 b4k4

2013-02-08, 10:58 AM

Thats the problem we already have though: Players sleep after encounters specifically so they can start full. Right now starting every encounter at full is the default.

Once players get level 2 spells, and Rope Trick, there's almost nothing you can do to keep them from resting, except ALTERING YOUR NARRATIVE.

Maybe in your games they do. In mine, aside from my players realizing that their characters wouldn't be able to sleep for 23 hours of every day, my players don't have time to spend 8 hours between combats.

As to rope trick, this might be true in 3.x, but it's sure as heck not true in 1e. Per the PHB, rope trick lasts 2 turns per level. 1 turn is 10 minutes, which means you need to be level 3 to have it last a mere hour. 8 hours of rest times 3 levels per hour = level 24 before rope trick can be used to keep your players safe from harm long enough to recover their spells.

Does this mean that eventually, the dangers of sleeping in a dungeon become less of a concern? Sure, but we're also talking level 24 characters. By level 24 I expect them to be running castles and stronghold and not dealing with the minutia of being ambushed in an alley by their political rival's hired henchmen from a tavern.

And let me make this perfectly clear, I don't care how 3.x did it or the problems 3.x had. I agree that 3.x screwed it up badly, and they did so because they eliminated a great number of the checks and balances that had been built into the system previously. Telling me that 3.x did it one way so it can't work is simply not an argument.

I think wandering monsters are an iconic feature of AD&D 1e, B/X, and earlier. D&D started moving away from them in 2e, and although they made some cameos in 3e and later ... they're hardly a constant across editions.

So it's a feature that lasted as a given rule across the first 25 years of D&D (the rules cyclopedia ran concurrently with AD&D 2), poked it's head up here and there for the next 8 years and it's only within the last 4 years that they've been eliminated completely and you don't think that constitutes an iconic feature of the game?

Synovia

2013-02-08, 11:14 AM

Maybe in your games they do. In mine, aside from my players realizing that their characters wouldn't be able to sleep for 23 hours of every day, my players don't have time to spend 8 hours between combats.

I dunno, to me, a game where the players immediately get ambushed after each combat seems awfully trite. Strains the credulity a bit.

Constant ambushes make sense in some situations (like trying to sleep when you're invading an enemy fortress), but in others, like the common tomb-clearing/etc, any decent adventurer is going to back off and rest when he needs to, and getting ambushed in the basecamp or an archeological dig every time they try to sleep just doesn't make any narrative sense.

As to rope trick, this might be true in 3.x, but it's sure as heck not true in 1e. Per the PHB, rope trick lasts 2 turns per level. 1 turn is 10 minutes, which means you need to be level 3 to have it last a mere hour. 8 hours of rest times 3 levels per hour = level 24 before rope trick can be used to keep your players safe from harm long enough to recover their spells.

1E, really?

1E came out 40 years ago. It hasn't been relevant to 75+% of the D&D populace for 30 of those years. 1E was already deprecated when I was born, and I'm not a teenager.

I understand some of you love the old editions, but c'mon, but you can't assume that people are going to know you're using 1E as your baseline.

This is a bit like having a conversation about fuel mileage in modern cars, and you not mentioning that your argument is based around the '60 plymouth in your garage.

If we're going to have a discussion, its going to have to be based around Pathfinder/3.5/4.0 as the baseline, because thats what 95% of the playing population knows, and thats whats relevant.

Saph

2013-02-08, 11:21 AM

I'm kind of split on the 15 minute work day issue.

On the one hand, when it comes to life-or-death combat, the 15 minute work day is fairly realistic. When real-world military units get into serious combat, their typical response once the shooting is over and the area is secured is to head back to base camp. They then do a debriefing, resupply, treat/evacuate their wounded, gather intel for future encounters, and so on. (That said, if real-world militaries had access to healing magic that could fix anyone up to 100% health inside of six seconds it would change things up a bit.)

On the other hand, the 15 minute work day is also annoying. It's hard to keep up a sense of drama and adventure when the PCs are spending 23 hours 45 minutes each day lazing around, not to mention that the GM has to update their adventure (because now an extra 24 hours have passed and things have changed). Worst of all, the characters who don't want to stop and rest (which is likely most of the party) often want to do stuff while the other party members are resting, meaning that the 'rest' can end up taking a lot of game time.

In actual practice in our 3.5 and Pathfinder games, we typically don't do 15 minute workdays, ever. Partly this is because our group plays with changing worlds, not static worlds, and 24 hours prep time for us equals 24 hours prep time for our enemies. Partly it's because we're all experienced enough to be reasonably careful with resources, and most characters of 4th level and up can go for a pretty long time without rest if you're smart about it. Sure, the spellcasters might be running a bit low after 4-5 encounters, but you've got fighters in your group, haven't you? We could theoretically do 15 minute workdays, but to be honest it doesn't seem like a very smart tactic.

1337 b4k4

2013-02-08, 12:41 PM

I dunno, to me, a game where the players immediately get ambushed after each combat seems awfully trite. Strains the credulity a bit.

Constant ambushes make sense in some situations (like trying to sleep when you're invading an enemy fortress), but in others, like the common tomb-clearing/etc, any decent adventurer is going to back off and rest when he needs to, and getting ambushed in the basecamp or an archeological dig every time they try to sleep just doesn't make any narrative sense.

There's nothing straining about adventuring being dangerous and ambushes don't have to be the only way that time constraints are put on you. Intelligent monsters will become aware of your presence, wild animals will get into your food stores etc etc. The wilderness is a dangerous place, and nature doesn't give a dire rat's behind about you and will kill you just a mercilessly as a serial killer. And thats before you add in anyone who might be actively trying to hurt you or someone else.

If we're going to have a discussion, its going to have to be based around Pathfinder/3.5/4.0 as the baseline, because thats what 95% of the playing population knows, and thats whats relevant.

Bull. Absolute and complete horse crap. You don't get to dictate the terms of the conversation or declare that I can only use a system I've already acknowledged was broken and flawed to support my point. The fact is, daily resources and vancian casting can work and can be done right and was indeed done right previously. If you're going to ignore the great body of RPGs that existed before the year 2000, we're done having a conversation here because you're not interested in discussing D&D and it's mechanics, you're interested in declaring how awful 3.x was and how because 4e did everything different that the mechanics that existed in 3.x can't be done.

Synovia

2013-02-08, 12:59 PM

There's nothing straining about adventuring being dangerous and ambushes don't have to be the only way that time constraints are put on you. Intelligent monsters will become aware of your presence, wild animals will get into your food stores etc etc. The wilderness is a dangerous place, and nature doesn't give a dire rat's behind about you and will kill you just a mercilessly as a serial killer. And thats before you add in anyone who might be actively trying to hurt you or someone else.

I completely agree. I just don't think that you should NEED to do that to keep players from blowing away every reasonable CR encounter they face. You shouldn't need to wedge things in story-wise to fix a mechanics problem.

Bull. Absolute and complete horse crap. You don't get to dictate the terms of the conversation or declare that I can only use a system I've already acknowledged was broken and flawed to support my point. The fact is, daily resources and vancian casting can work and can be done right and was indeed done right previously. If you're going to ignore the great body of RPGs that existed before the year 2000, we're done having a conversation here because you're not interested in discussing D&D and it's mechanics, you're interested in declaring how awful 3.x was and how because 4e did everything different that the mechanics that existed in 3.x can't be done.

I'm not ignoring before 2000. It happened. What I'm saying is its really not relevant to the current game, because almost nobody plays it anymore.

obryn

2013-02-08, 01:01 PM

So it's a feature that lasted as a given rule across the first 25 years of D&D (the rules cyclopedia ran concurrently with AD&D 2), poked it's head up here and there for the next 8 years and it's only within the last 4 years that they've been eliminated completely and you don't think that constitutes an iconic feature of the game?
As I mentioned, I think if you do a survey of 2e stuff, wandering monsters are pretty much not a defining or iconic feature. So I'd cut that down to 15 years, which is less than half.

I'll grant that it's an iconic feature of some editions of the game, and specifically some sorts of adventures, which are both quite a bit different.* It has a purpose - and that's time pressure on dungeoncrawls and hexcrawls. It also has a tendency to slow down progress to the more exciting parts of an adventure and not make much narrative sense, which is why it was so often houseruled out even back then.

So no, if I were to list "iconic game features of D&D," wandering monsters would not be in my top 10 or probably even top 20.

I love AD&D, don't get me wrong. But Next isn't (or shouldn't be) an OSR game. It should embrace more modern design, and not rely on picky time or resource tracking to achieve some semblance of balance.

-O

* Such as, free-wheeled, almost point-buy, multiclassing is iconic of 3.x, but I wouldn't call it iconic for D&D.

lesser_minion

2013-02-08, 01:02 PM

So why are we basing players resources on 4 encounters if almost nobody plays that many?

Nobody ever did?

The balancing in 3e was never based on players facing four encounters per day, it was based on the assumption that an encounter of a certain power level relative to the PCs' would cost the PCs about 20% of their resources (and note that it wasn't phrased as "daily resources" either). There is a massive difference.

In fact, one of the other assumptions inherent in the 3e balancing was that the PCs wouldn't decrease in effectiveness as their resources were spent.

obryn

2013-02-08, 01:07 PM

The balancing in 3e was never based on players facing four encounters per day, it was based on the assumption that an encounter of a certain power level relative to the PCs' would cost the PCs about 20% of their resources (and note that it wasn't phrased as "daily resources" either). There is a massive difference.
That's exactly where it comes from, though. 4 encounters/day = 80% resource depletion. 100% resource depletion = you're dead. In practice, the CR/EL system is pretty much busted so it never really works out this way, but...

-O

Ashdate

2013-02-08, 01:23 PM

I would suggest that while it's okay to look to 1st and 2nd edition for ideas, pre-3e systems have simply not had the "spotlight" shone on them that 3e and 4e has, which is to say, "take the mechanics contained within the first editions with an ounce of caution. The internet wasn't around to break them".

On the topic of the 15 minute workday, a system that encourages players to soldier on - without the need for a DM to throw random encounters or threaten the players with plot nastiness - would be best. There's nothing wrong with the occasional random encounter or "you've only got three days to retrieve the McGuffin" plot, but I'd rather the PCs be the ones to decide whether and when they "rest".

The suggestion earlier in the thread that successive encounters (without resting) gives a greater "reward" sounds like a very reasonable compromise between those who don't want game mechanics to determine when rest is appropriate, and those who want to discourage Rope Trick abuse. I would personally add the potential for more treasure/magical items, but I would imagine some pushback on that.

lesser_minion

2013-02-08, 01:30 PM

That's exactly where it comes from, though. 4 encounters/day = 80% resource depletion. 100% resource depletion = you're dead. In practice, the CR/EL system is pretty much busted so it never really works out this way, but...

There is a difference between saying that fighting more than four "challenging and level-appropriate" encounters will probably kill the PCs, and saying that the PCs should fight four encounters per day.

And again, remember that the rules also assume that the PCs aren't getting weaker when they expend these resources. 3e's balancing actually assumed that players would limit their resource expenditure in an encounter.

Note that the fifteen minute workday "problem" was never about novae, which can be stopped easily just by keeping an eye on the action economy -- a solution which, compared with per-encounter limits, also has the advantage of working with a wider range of possible encounters.

In 3e, novae weren't actually that big a problem because there wasn't actually much point to them. Once you've paralysed an opponent, you can just kill them. Winning the fight does not also require you to stun them, daze them, defenestrate them, compel them, confuse them, chastise them, castrate them, exhaust them, enervate them, and distract them with a pole-dancing illithid.

PairO'Dice Lost

2013-02-08, 01:50 PM

That's exactly where it comes from, though. 4 encounters/day = 80% resource depletion. 100% resource depletion = you're dead. In practice, the CR/EL system is pretty much busted so it never really works out this way, but...

-O

Note that he said encounters of a certain power level deplete 20% of your resources--that certain power level being an even-CR encounter. 3e doesn't assume 4 encounters per day, it assumes either 4 fairly nonlethal on-CR encounters per day, or 8 relatively safe below-CR encounters, or 2 fairly challenging above-CR encounters, or one major "boss fight" encounter, or some other configuration that works out to that (like four bunches of mooks, one average encounter, and one hard encounter).

It averages out at 4 encounters because you're expected to face those around half the time, but the system doesn't assume 4 encounters/day at all. If WotC tried to balance some late 3e stuff and 4e around encounters because they thought 3e assumed that, then they misunderstood their own system (not surprising, since the guys who wrote 3.0 were long gone when 4e rolled around).

I'd say that most people who experience the 15-minute workday start tending towards having one really big encounter per day, if the forums are a representative sample, and though that doesn't follow the guidelines in the DMG regarding how often you should face above-CR encounters, the system is built to handle that just fine and can be played that way even if it would be more interesting to mix things up a bit.

kerplunksploosh

2013-02-08, 02:44 PM

Again. Would it be so much to ask for rations, light, and gritty survival stuff to be relevant for levels 1-5? It is something that DOES appeal to me. I'm a weirdo that enjoys planning over combat encounters. I wouldn't dare insist that level 15 players really care about how much food they packed. They're rich, and packed enough grub for the journey. It strikes me as bafflingly easy to separate different playstyles into different levels.

At the 15MWD: Is it really a problem? Some times there ARE no time constraints, and that's just good sense for a party to behave like that, even in a simulistic world. If there are NEVER time constraints, that's just bad DMing. Certain mechanics can discourage that, sure, but there's no cure for bad DMing... is there? I've actually put a lot of thought into role-playing aids for players, but I can't think of anything for DMs.

At Coidzor: Full-on Magic, not merely supernatural. Ok, I was actually a Paladin, but I was using Luminescent Rainbow Glo Radiant attacks at an embarassingly early level. I could have avoided those skills, but as I levelled I helped address party needs. I was expecting a largely-mundane 2nd Ed Pally, which is where the disconnect came from.

I'd suggest collapsing the number of classes to enhance customization. I might focus primarily on advanced martial training, with just a touch of holy healing/protection, and possibly a brief Rage (a la Luke Skywalker, who seems to otherwise fit into Paladin description) whenever something dear to me is threatened. I honestly think 3 base classes are sufficient; fighter, rogue, mage. (Combat, Noncombat, Versatility, respectively)

Kurald Galain

2013-02-08, 05:10 PM

Again. Would it be so much to ask for rations, light, and gritty survival stuff to be relevant for levels 1-5? It is something that DOES appeal to me.
Oh, I completely agree. The system needs decent rules for this; a DM can always opt to ignore them or to give players an infinite light source or something. It doesn't help anyone to write a rules that's technically about starvation but that ensures it will never happen anyway.

At the 15MWD: Is it really a problem?
For all that it comes up in theoretical discussions, there is a clearly visible lack of stories of it actually happening in real campaigns.

Zeful

2013-02-08, 05:31 PM

Oh, I completely agree. The system needs decent rules for this; a DM can always opt to ignore them or to give players an infinite light source or something. It doesn't help anyone to write a rules that's technically about starvation but that ensures it will never happen anyway.

That's one thing I'd do if I ever actually buckled down and wrote my own system (having done a lot of behind the scenes work, I could probably do a bit of it on my own). I'd have the complex rules for leveling up, sleeping, hunger, thirst & hunting the way I want them; then build a bunch of simplified rules as variants for people that don't want those systems but still allow them to benefit from them.

kerplunksploosh

2013-02-08, 05:51 PM

Such rules wouldn't even have to be complex - if you miss a day's rations, you don't get any healing/spells for that day, and lose 1-2 HP for every day after that. Once a party receives access to Create Food and Water, such rules can be largely forgotten, even if they're away from civilization. I just want the option to be present. And, in my personal opinion, this transition from desperate explorers in the wild to Big Damn Heroes makes character growth feel more pronounced.

I think that it also partially resolves the magical fighter problem. It's reasonable to be inherently nonmagical up to a certain level, after which you become supernatural. The threshold for that is open to debate, but in a game that seems to now go up to level 30, 10 might be early enough. I guess I've shared my 2 cents, back to lurking again :)

Synovia

2013-02-08, 07:31 PM

It averages out at 4 encounters because you're expected to face those around half the time, but the system doesn't assume 4 encounters/day at all. If WotC tried to balance some late 3e stuff and 4e around encounters because they thought 3e assumed that, then they misunderstood their own system (not surprising, since the guys who wrote 3.0 were long gone when 4e rolled around).

The problem here is that they base resources around 4 "normal" (on-CR) encounters, so if you aren't going to time-press the party, you end up with one of two options:

1) Give the party a CR+4 encounter and risk killing them. CR+4 encounters are very rocket-taggy
2) Have them blow through the encounter by overusing resources that are geared toward a CR+4/4xCR encounter(s).

Here's an example. Let's assume a typical encounter (CR even) should take 30 spell points to get through. D&D 3.5's approach is to give you 150 spell points a day, and just let you go at it.

The problem is, your average caster will come along, spend 75 spell points to blow through the encounter, and then call it a day.

I'd like to see something along the lines of them giving you 50 total spell points, and giving you back 20 at the end of the encounter. Your 4 CR appropriate encounters would have you fighting at 50/40/30/20. You have a model for fatigue/power loss as the day goes on, without having the problem of the caster just blowing up the encounter.

There's still some incentive for a character to take a nap after the 2nd or 3rd encounter, but that incentive has been drastically reduced.

Saph

2013-02-08, 07:37 PM

Here's an example. Let's assume a typical encounter (CR even) should take 30 spell points to get through. D&D 3.5's approach is to give you 150 spell points a day, and just let you go at it.

The problem is, your average caster will come along, spend 75 spell points to blow through the encounter, and then call it a day.

Do they, though?

When I'm playing a caster, I don't. The people in my main group don't. The ones in my other group typically don't either. Neither do the other various groups I've played with over the years.

I'm sure some groups rest after every fight (law of averages if nothing else), but I'm not sure how common it really is.

PairO'Dice Lost

2013-02-08, 07:57 PM

The problem here is that they base resources around 4 "normal" (on-CR) encounters, so if you aren't going to time-press the party, you end up with one of two options:

1) Give the party a CR+4 encounter and risk killing them. CR+4 encounters are very rocket-taggy
2) Have them blow through the encounter by overusing resources that are geared toward a CR+4/4xCR encounter(s).

These assumptions depend on what you mean by "risk killing them" and "overusing resources." In my games, at least, if the party is expecting to go up against particularly difficult encounters, they don't just walk into the encounter and start the battle music then. They use divinations and other information-gathering resources beforehand, they prepare the battlefield if the encounter is coming to them, they buff up before the encounter, and they heal up and repair after the encounter. CR+4 encounters aren't a TPK risk if the party uses their resources well, and the fact that you spend half your daily spells on a single encounter doesn't necessarily mean you nova'd or overkilled it, it could mean that you planned for it well and were rewarded for your caution.

I'd like to see something along the lines of them giving you 50 total spell points, and giving you back 20 at the end of the encounter. Your 4 CR appropriate encounters would have you fighting at 50/40/30/20. You have a model for fatigue/power loss as the day goes on, without having the problem of the caster just blowing up the encounter.

How does this model handle days with many low-CR encounters? If you're facing 8 weaker-than average encounters that only require the expenditure of 20 "spell points" each instead of your expected 30, you end up with resources of 50/50/50/50/50/50/50/50 for those encounters, instead of the resource attrition expected by that series of encounters.

How does this model handle out-of-encounter resource expenditures? Do you count constructing ships and outposts for allied armies as an encounter, and if so how many encounters is one full day of construction? How about teleporting back and forth between several cities to ferry refugees around? Or trekking through the desert for several hours searching for a hidden city? All of those are things that my party did in the last campaign I played, and all of those "downtime" days benefited from the casters' ability to prepare their resources all at once and ration them as they saw fit, instead of having to space them far apart like a ritual system would require or use them in short bursts like an encounter-based system would require.

How does this model handle resources too "large" to be rationed out per-encounter? Plot-manipulation abilities like long-range teleportation and such would probably be higher than the "50 spell point" limit you want to put on resources per encounter, so...would you be able to "save up" points (thereby negating the benefit of said proposal)? Use a separate resource for those (thereby introducing the equivalent of daily spells anyway)? Something else?

If you're going to try to balance things around encounters, you cannot assume that encounters are the only things happening in an adventure, and you cannot simply remove anything that doesn't fit in the per-encounter bubble. (Well, you can, but the outcry will be massive as we saw with 4e.)

Grod_The_Giant

2013-02-08, 08:00 PM

I recommend doing as Fate does, and arrange things in more narrative terms-- scene instead of encounter, for example.

neonchameleon

2013-02-08, 08:08 PM

Again. Would it be so much to ask for rations, light, and gritty survival stuff to be relevant for levels 1-5? It is something that DOES appeal to me.

As optional rules, why not? You basically need a long sidebar saying "Here's how much a human eats. Here's how much they can carry. Oh, and shoot the Sunrod and Everburning Torch while you are at it." The problem is that gritty survival stuff is great for a sandbox campaign but if you're running anything adventure-pathy it probably isn't what you want, and if you're running anything scene-framed it isn't what you want either.

Honestly, it's one of the things I was hoping for with the supposed modular design of D&D Next. Gritty survival even at low level isn't to everyone's taste (and if I want more of it I have WFRP 1.5E).

Certain mechanics can discourage that, sure, but there's no cure for bad DMing... is there? I've actually put a lot of thought into role-playing aids for players, but I can't think of anything for DMs.

Where to start? And how much do you know about RPGs other than D&D? Because there's a lot of very interesting stuff that's come out recently.

Because there's very little cure for bad DMing, but there is a whole lot you can do to prevent it. In my experience there are three major causes for genuinely bad (as opposed to uninspired) DMing:

DM Power Trip
Easier to say No than Yes
Learning the Wrong Lessons

DM Power Trip is probably the most obvious here. Subcategories of this include the DMPC Fan (and the DM's Girlfriend), the Fetishist, and the Wannabe Author. Honestly this is the category that can be written off - the DM is there with players to feed their ego (or kinks) and should not be left in charge of a game. Most of the truly spectacular bad DM stories come from this category. The rules and the game can't help in these cases - all that can is sitting down and talking to the DM as an adult or if that fails killing them and taking their stuff making sure they don't DM for you again.

Easier to say no than yes. This is a source of a lot of mundane rather than spectacular bad DMing. The PCs come up with something interesting and offbeat and the DM doesn't know how to handle it. So they say "You can't" or otherwise make it almost impossible in order to keep the game running and the PCs on track. And there are cures for this - lots of them. Rules heavy games that provide rules for most occasions are meant to enable saying yes - and so do simple and comprehensive rulessets like FATE (http://www.evilhat.com/home/fate/) (SRD of previous version (http://www.crackmonkey.org/~nick/loyhargil/fate3/fate3.html)). Balance is another tool for saying yes interestingly - it lets the DM pull a fight together that will be fun and challenging in a matter of seconds (literally). Generic scene framing mechanics like Skill Challenges (the guidance is admittedly pretty awful) allow a DM to handle all but the most off the wall PC plans. Pacing mechanics like the Jenga Tower of Dread (http://www.tiltingatwindmills.net/) or the Doom Pool of Marvel Heroic Roleplaying (http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/99611/Marvel-Heroic-Roleplaying%3A-Basic-Game?src=s_pi)/Trouble Pool of Smallville (http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/82573/Smallville-Roleplaying-Game) (16 hours left on the Hacker's Guide Kickstarter (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1116133034/margaret-weis-productions-cortex-plus-hackers-guid)) help keep the DM on track and the game feeling right even when the DM doesn't have a clue what's about to happen.

Learning the wrong lessons. First you don't DM all games the same way. If you were to learn to DM Paranoia and then try to transfer the same tools cold into D&D you'd end up in a hell of a mess. That's an extreme example, but there are plenty of others. And some games simply teach you badly. A textbook example here would be Vampire: The Masquerade. Firstly there's the Camarilla which means that PCs are seldom the important people, and are being watched constantly to avoid breaking the Masquerade. Secondly the game is drowning in metaplot which, in English, means the NPCs do the interesting things while the PCs watch. If the guidance tells you to do things like that of course you're going to end up in a tangle.

Finally there is one thing you can do to help even a new group - and it's something the Red Box with Keep on the Borderlands got absolutely right (and 4e got spectacularly wrong). A superb introductory adventure where for a new DM to follow what is done in the adventure will teach them good habits by example.

Synovia

2013-02-08, 08:18 PM

How does this model handle days with many low-CR encounters? If you're facing 8 weaker-than average encounters that only require the expenditure of 20 "spell points" each instead of your expected 30, you end up with resources of 50/50/50/50/50/50/50/50 for those encounters, instead of the resource attrition expected by that series of encounters.

In this case, "20 spell point encounters" would be trivial enough that the party is using little to no resources. The sort of an encounter where in 4E, the party would just hack them down with at-wills.

The numbers are basically back of the hand, so they'd have to be tweaked a bit.

How does this model handle out-of-encounter resource expenditures?

It doesn't. Out of combat is fundamentally different than in combat. If the rogue isn't using resource picking a lock, or the barbarian isn't using resources moving a big rock, or the cleric isn't using resources blessing people, I don't see any reason the mage should be using resources doin normal every day magey stuff.

Do you count constructing ships and outposts for allied armies as an encounter, and if so how many encounters is one full day of construction?
How about teleporting back and forth between several cities to ferry refugees around? Or trekking through the desert for several hours searching for a hidden city? All of those are things that my party did in the last campaign I played, and all of those "downtime" days benefited from the casters' ability to prepare their resources all at once and ration them as they saw fit, instead of having to space them far apart like a ritual system would require or use them in short bursts like an encounter-based system would require.

Ship building or constructing outposts isn't really a encounter. As far as teleporting back and forth between cities, I'm not generally a fan of that sort of utility. I'd like to get away from the Wizard who can do everything. I think you could deal with a batch of teleports as an encounter though, requiring a gap before the mage could do it again.

Generally, I don't see a whole lot of point in keeping track of it too closely outside of combat though. How many times the mage can teleport isn't really relevant unless the mage is attacked while hes teleporting/right after teleporting.

As far as the desert exploration, I'd like to get away from that being the mage's job. Thats something that should fall under Survival or something along those lines.

I'd like to get away from spells duplicating skills.

How does this model handle resources too "large" to be rationed out per-encounter? Plot-manipulation abilities like long-range teleportation and such would probably be higher than the "50 spell point" limit you want to put on resources per encounter, so...would you be able to "save up" points (thereby negating the benefit of said proposal)? Use a separate resource for those (thereby introducing the equivalent of daily spells anyway)? Something else?

Plot events should be treated as plot events. Spells that cost more than 50 points wouldn't be useable in combat, and would basically force you to start the next encounter (unless given a chance to rest) at whatever the minimum is (20 in the original example).

If you're going to try to balance things around encounters, you cannot assume that encounters are the only things happening in an adventure, and you cannot simply remove anything that doesn't fit in the per-encounter bubble. (Well, you can, but the outcry will be massive as we saw with 4e.)
We can remove them from combat, and still make them relevant.

For example, we could say that for the barbarian, pushing a giant rock away from a cage entrance is going to cost him 10 points. If the trolls come out of the cave and attack while hes pushing the rock, he starts the encounter down 10 points, but gets them back at the end of the encounter. IE, hes momentarily fatigued.

obryn

2013-02-08, 08:19 PM

As optional rules, why not? You basically need a long sidebar saying "Here's how much a human eats. Here's how much they can carry. Oh, and shoot the Sunrod and Everburning Torch while you are at it." The problem is that gritty survival stuff is great for a sandbox campaign but if you're running anything adventure-pathy it probably isn't what you want, and if you're running anything scene-framed it isn't what you want either.

Honestly, it's one of the things I was hoping for with the supposed modular design of D&D Next. Gritty survival even at low level isn't to everyone's taste (and if I want more of it I have WFRP 1.5E).
Yep - and what's more, "refresh rates" should be another fairly modular piece, with extensive notes about how to tweak challenges in such a setup.

Re: grittiness, I agree I'd rather play WFRP for my gritty combat, but I know it's a desired playstyle among a large segment of D&D players. I don't care if it's the default or if it's a module. It'd be awesome if I could switch back and forth depending on the rules of the campaign.

-O

neonchameleon

2013-02-08, 08:23 PM

The problem is, your average caster will come along, spend 75 spell points to blow through the encounter, and then call it a day.

Since when? A 7th level specialist wizard with an Int of 18 (on the low end of expected) can cast:
3 4th level spells, 4 3rd, 5 2nd, and 6 1st - or a total of 18 spells not counting cantrips.

Assume a combat lasts four to five rounds. The wizard shouldn't be wasting limited resources in the mopping up phase. It's just wasteful. Which means that they can't really cast more than three spells during the encounter. If a 7th level or higher wizard is casting half their loadout in a single encounter it means either the encounter is ridiculously powerful and long running with multiple waves (nothing against capstone encounters like this - merely they are atypical) or the caster is being needlessly wasteful.

Now first to fourth level wizards doing this is wasteful but not that unexpected (even if the fourth level wizard should have nine spells prepared). But beyond that? No.

Grod_The_Giant

2013-02-08, 08:34 PM

The wizard shouldn't be wasting limited resources in the mopping up phase. It's just wasteful. Which means that they can't really cast more than three spells during the encounter. If a 7th level or higher wizard is casting half their loadout in a single encounter it means either the encounter is ridiculously powerful and long running with multiple waves (nothing against capstone encounters like this - merely they are atypical) or the caster is being needlessly wasteful.

Now first to fourth level wizards doing this is wasteful but not that unexpected (even if the fourth level wizard should have nine spells prepared). But beyond that? No.
You say "wasteful," I saw "wanting to do something every turn." We play the game to play-- saying "OK, I've done all I need to this encounter, you guys deal with the rest" is boring.

neonchameleon

2013-02-08, 10:07 PM

You say "wasteful," I saw "wanting to do something every turn." We play the game to play-- saying "OK, I've done all I need to this encounter, you guys deal with the rest" is boring.

Honestly, the mopping up phase bores me at the best of times. And the wizard archetype I grew up with was the person who could use magic ... but didn't. Much more lore, knowledge, and guile, and magic was rare and precious. (Cue the "What level is Gandalf?" argument). Besides, to me playing if I chose a class centred round limited resources involves making the best use of those resorces.

And yes, I know it takes all sorts. And think that an AEDU wizard could happily be back-ported from 4e (as could an Essentials Knight, an Essentials Thief, a Cavalier, and an AEDU monk without any seeming out of place).

Grod_The_Giant

2013-02-08, 10:29 PM

Honestly, the mopping up phase bores me at the best of times. And the wizard archetype I grew up with was the person who could use magic ... but didn't. Much more lore, knowledge, and guile, and magic was rare and precious. (Cue the "What level is Gandalf?" argument). Besides, to me playing if I chose a class centred round limited resources involves making the best use of those resorces.

I don't mind if the archetype is about conserving his power; but I do see it as a problem if he can't do anything without it. Swinging a sword, Gandalf-style, using some kind of Dark Knowledge-esque feature to help your allies... anything but just standing there and doing nothing.

Jacob.Tyr

2013-02-08, 10:41 PM

I don't mind if the archetype is about conserving his power; but I do see it as a problem if he can't do anything without it. Swinging a sword, Gandalf-style, using some kind of Dark Knowledge-esque feature to help your allies... anything but just standing there and doing nothing.

Cantrips scaling with level are a pretty good start as a way to participate without blowing your load, as it were. I feel like 5e actually has the wizard down pretty well, none of the spells are horribly overpowered, the cantrips work as a conservative measure that actually is worth doing, and there's enough spell variety to make what spells you learn and prepare actually really interesting. Even the overpowered save vs suck, or instadeath spells are well done in that they require the wizard to concentrate, or that the target be already weakened.

That said, every other class (except monk, which looks like a cluster**** to me), needs more options and dear god give them some choices after level 9. You get a 1/encounter ability as a fighter that gives you a double action. That's it. And you can use it more times per day. That is the only advancement after level 10, and it's so flat and uninteresting that I can't believe it could ever really be considered useful or a good idea.

The wizard is the only class that is well done, and the only options it gets are 4 feats and spells. Just so happens the spells are useful and interesting, while maneuvers and feats are complete ****, as are most of the class abilities. Round to round resource conservation of MDD is awfully done, maneuvers do awesome things like take away 5' of movement from your target, let you charge, or make up for the fact that a 5' step is no longer in game.

That said, I still think they have balance better than it ever was in 3.x.

Grod_The_Giant

2013-02-08, 10:47 PM

That said, I still think they have balance better than it ever was in 3.x.
You can find things lying in the mud at the bottom of ponds with better balance than 3.x.

I enjoy the system, mind you, and my biggest grumbles really aren't rooted in the class-to-class balance, but dear god it's a terribly balanced game.

Jacob.Tyr

2013-02-08, 10:55 PM

You can find things lying in the mud at the bottom of ponds with better balance than 3.x.

I enjoy the system, mind you, and my biggest grumbles really aren't rooted in the class-to-class balance, but dear god it's a terribly balanced game.

To be honest, my favourite part of 3.x was the number of options and choices. Even if you just have the phb you have a ton of options and build potentials in each class.

My least favourite part was that most of those options made you fall behind, and many of them were brokenly overpowered. While the options in the current 5e playtest are far from that varied, most of the non-spell caster ones just give you ways to waste 1d6 damage each round.

Lupus753

2013-02-08, 11:53 PM

To be honest, my favourite part of 3.x was the number of options and choices. Even if you just have the phb you have a ton of options and build potentials in each class.

My least favourite part was that most of those options made you fall behind, and many of them were brokenly overpowered. While the options in the current 5e playtest are far from that varied, most of the non-spell caster ones just give you ways to waste 1d6 damage each round.

Those two parts are very likely related. The more options there are, the more difficult making them balanced is. I'm not defending the 3.X devs, as they still messed up royally in that regard. But it might explain why 4e was relatively limited.

If only I could think of a better option at adding versatility than martial dice.

Kerrin

2013-02-09, 01:52 AM

For the 15 minute work day ... If the characters are spending 23.75 hours every day resting, then the rest of the world keeps on functioning while they're doing so.

I'm not sure why this is a problem.

(Personally, if I were playing in a group where the characters spent 23.75 hours a day resting I'd find it rediculously un-fun.)

PairO'Dice Lost

2013-02-09, 06:45 AM

Ship building or constructing outposts isn't really a encounter.

This right here is my point: you can't fit everything into an encounter-based paradigm If you try to balance things around the encounter, then you either incorporate everything into that system (utility magic and all) or you have a separate system on the side for out-of-combat stuff like 4e rituals. If it's the former case, you've either basically removed all of the "interesting" magic (the utility stuff, the teleports and plane shifts, and so forth) or made them per-encounter and thus spammable and thus abusable. If it's the latter case, there's no reason you can't adapt that system to incorporate the per-encounter stuff for one unified system, and we're back where we started.

There is no strict and easy division between combat and noncombat magic. Much as WotC might like to pretend otherwise, you can find noncombat uses for walls of fire and combat uses for fabricate--and personally, my favorite type of caster is the one who doesn't have any directly offensive spells and has to use other spells creatively instead of just blasting and debuffing as usual. Trying to divide things into "per-encounter" and "other" just limits your options and creativity and usually leads to the removal of the more interesting world-affecting and plot-affecting magic, which (while being hard to balance) is the kind of magic that allows the most player agency and freedom.

As far as teleporting back and forth between cities, I'm not generally a fan of that sort of utility. I'd like to get away from the Wizard who can do everything. I think you could deal with a batch of teleports as an encounter though, requiring a gap before the mage could do it again.

You don't have to have a wizard who can do everything to allow for teleporting casters. The caster in question in that example wasn't a wizard, nor was he technically teleporting; he was a druid with a very narrow earth and plants theme, using master earth for the refugee transport and various wood shaping-related spells to speed up ship construction.

Plot events should be treated as plot events. Spells that cost more than 50 points wouldn't be useable in combat, and would basically force you to start the next encounter (unless given a chance to rest) at whatever the minimum is (20 in the original example).

That's all very well and good, but that doesn't answer how you're going to limit them. Are you going to allow them to be cast at will, with a certain casting time and resource cost per use? Once again, we're effectively back to Vancian casting. Are you going to have them impose penalties for each use? That will impact encounter-based resources quite a bit, so you should probably integrate it more closely. And so on and so forth.

Synovia

2013-02-09, 11:30 AM

This right here is my point: you can't fit everything into an encounter-based paradigm If you try to balance things around the encounter, then you either incorporate everything into that system (utility magic and all) or you have a separate system on the side for out-of-combat stuff like 4e rituals. If it's the former case, you've either basically removed all of the "interesting" magic.

I'm not sure if you're just not reading my posts before quoting them, or deliberately misinterpreting what I'm saying.

I just gave a perfectly valid example of how you keep the interesting magic and have an encounter based system.

Balancing things around a single encounter DOES NOT MEAN ONLY HAVING ENCOUNTER POWERS.

kerplunksploosh

2013-02-09, 11:34 AM

Where to start? And how much do you know about RPGs other than D&D? Because there's a lot of very interesting stuff that's come out recently.

Because there's very little cure for bad DMing, but there is a whole lot you can do to prevent it. In my experience there are three major causes for genuinely bad (as opposed to uninspired) DMing:

DM Power Trip
Easier to say No than Yes
Learning the Wrong Lessons

I've played 2nd, 3rd, 4th (briefly), a d20 Star Wars, Paranoia, and thumbed through Serenity and Exhalted. And of course many computer games, although only some of that is transferable. I'll second the recommendation for Exile III, time done well :)

But with regards to the list you've got for bad DMing, are there any mechanics that can alleviate such problems? You mentioned Heavy Rules (which 3rd Ed would be, but it seemed to reinforce No You Can't... but I'd say that's more 3rd Ed's implementation of rules, rather than simply having rules available), Skill Challenges (contrived, but if it helps DMs, then it's a good mechanic). I don't know about the Jenga Tower or Doom Pool, am interested. It's far easier to adjust player behavior than DM behavior, and frankly some of these problems we're talking about are DM side, not player side. (15MWD, letting casters find any spell they want in their spellbook ;) ) Advice and training modules are good, but they aren't inherent in the game mechanics. Maybe we could approach some problems from this direction?

<>-o-<>

Someone mentioned doing away with spells that mimic skills. Yes. We seem to be trying to make characters all able to participate in any endeavour, while at the same time making players be specialists, 2 seemingly opposed goals. If any one character could do it all, it'd be the wizard, so any spells that mimic skills should have a high cost attached to them indeed... and/or perhaps add a bonus rather than outright perform an action, like the aforementioned Knock = +3 to Locks. Wish I could give credit where it's due there.

<>-o-<>

"Re: grittiness, I agree I'd rather play WFRP for my gritty combat, but I know it's a desired playstyle among a large segment of D&D players. I don't care if it's the default or if it's a module. It'd be awesome if I could switch back and forth depending on the rules of the campaign."

Please don't let me be misunderstood, I'm not talking about gritty combat. I'd be shocked if Warhammer catered at all to people who want to feel like merely human explorers, but maybe I don't know enough about that universe. *nitpick* I think ADOM, Star Control II, FTL, Exile III, Uncharted Waters, and pretty much any game about exploration would have been a much less interesting game if I never had to worry about fuel or other limited resources. I like feeling small and insignificant (not helpless) in a wondrous world before I become big and damn and hero.

lesser_minion

2013-02-09, 11:52 AM

Here's an example. Let's assume a typical encounter (CR even) should take 30 spell points to get through. D&D 3.5's approach is to give you 150 spell points a day, and just let you go at it.

The problem is, your average caster will come along, spend 75 spell points to blow through the encounter, and then call it a day.

Are you really trying to get us to buy that a wizard is better off stunning, paralysing, dazing, and blinding someone rather than just paralysing them and letting someone coup-de-grace them?

Seriously, there is no point whatsoever to introducing a cap on what you can do in a single encounter, because two already exist -- firstly, that there is little point to spending more resources than you have to; and secondly, that there are only so many actions available to burn resources with anyway. It's ham-fisted design that doesn't accomplish anything.

Grod_The_Giant

2013-02-09, 12:40 PM

I wonder how many problems with a set of good guidelines for adjusting encounter difficulty based on resource expenditure?

(And less broken magic, obviously, but that goes without saying)

PairO'Dice Lost

2013-02-09, 01:20 PM

I'm not sure if you're just not reading my posts before quoting them, or deliberately misinterpreting what I'm saying.

I'm doing neither. The post I quoted consisted of the following: a statement that sufficiently-trivial encounters wouldn't require the expenditure of resources, a statement that combat and out of combat are fundamentally different in the sense that basic stuff wouldn't require expending resources, a statement that non-encounter stuff is indeed not an encounter, a statement that you don't like powerful utility magic and that you could frame the example as an encounter anyway, a statement that you don't think out of combat resources require tracking, a statement that exploration shouldn't be a mage schtick (and thus implicitly shouldn't use up resources), a statement that plot spells wouldn't be usable in combat, and a statement that was an example of a barbarian using encounter resources to do out-of-encounter stuff.

Since nowhere in that post was a statement of what sort of out-of-encounter resources one would use to power out-of-encounter utility magic for those of us who don't want to get rid of it, no, I don't think you just gave a perfectly valid example of how you keep the interesting magic and have an encounter-based system.

Balancing things around a single encounter DOES NOT MEAN ONLY HAVING ENCOUNTER POWERS.

Which is exactly why I'm asking what system would power the non-encounter abilities.

Someone mentioned doing away with spells that mimic skills. Yes. We seem to be trying to make characters all able to participate in any endeavour, while at the same time making players be specialists, 2 seemingly opposed goals.

They're not really opposed; it's possible to have a specialist like, say, a 3e beguiler, warblade, or binder who can participate in all types of encounters: each of those classes has something to do in combat, during exploration, in social encounters, regarding intrigue, and regarding stealth, which are the major kinds of obstacles one encounters in D&D, and in some other situations as well (the binder can summon things for out-of-combat utility with several vestiges, for instance). Each of them isn't guaranteed to have a solution to every encounter of any type, nor are they guaranteed to have an amazing option for all types of encounters, but they can all contribute, even if only by having certain skills as class skills.

Skill-replacing spells are easy to fix--the knock-as-bonus-to-Open-Lock suggestion has been around since 3.0 and similar suggestions abound--with the main obstacle being the difficulty of going through every splatbook and changing things, so implementing the less toe-stepping versions of the spells in 5e shouldn't be a problem. Though of course this is WotC we're talking about.

Stubbazubba

2013-02-09, 02:02 PM

Since nowhere in that post was a statement of what sort of out-of-encounter resources one would use to power out-of-encounter utility magic for those of us who don't want to get rid of it, no, I don't think you just gave a perfectly valid example of how you keep the interesting magic and have an encounter-based system.

Which is exactly why I'm asking what system would power the non-encounter abilities.

Most likely at-will for most things, Rituals for magic or other major things, with their time and in-game resource costs, maybe even an XP cost if those prove insufficient. What matters is how these non-combat encounters are resolved, whether its by some new mutation of Extended Skill Tests/Skill Challenges or some other mini-system. If it's the former, then what I said above, if it's the latter, then something else entirely, which will be extremely dependent on the mechanics of said system.

PairO'Dice Lost

2013-02-09, 02:11 PM

Most likely at-will for most things, Rituals for magic or other major things, with their time and in-game resource costs, maybe even an XP cost if those prove insufficient. What matters is how these non-combat encounters are resolved, whether its by some new mutation of Extended Skill Tests/Skill Challenges or some other mini-system. If it's the former, then what I said above, if it's the latter, then something else entirely, which will be extremely dependent on the mechanics of said system.

I assumed as much, but one can't really design an encounter-based system without nailing down where the "other stuff" goes and how it's used, which is why I've been hammering the point. Just saying "it's a noncombat effect, we don't have to worry about it" won't cut it, that leads to the non-systems of "just make a feat/spell for it" of 3e or the "just run it as a skill challenge" of 4e.

1337 b4k4

2013-02-09, 02:12 PM

I wonder how many problems with a set of good guidelines for adjusting encounter difficulty based on resource expenditure?

Actually, I think we'd be better off taking 4e's approach of showing DMs how monsters are built and going even further with it (and no, the 3.x approach of building monsters like PCs is not a good idea). Ideally the monsters book (or pferably DMG) should come with your classic pre-built monsters and then a chapter or two on customizing and building new monsters from scratch, with examples of how the book monsters were built in the same way and how each particular type of power changes a monster's difficulty. Something like s&w's monster builder chart, but bigger and more detailed. Additionally, I think there needs to be guidelines on how interactions between monsters impact that difficulty. Even in 4e while XP totals were a good rough estimate on encounter difficulty, it would have been nice to have more detail.

Now all that may sound like a longer way of saying "how to adjust encounter difficulty based on resource expenditure", but it is different. Your approach assumes that all resources would be equal (or equal enough) that you could determine what is or isn't difficult for a given level of resource expenditure, and that monster or encounter difficulty should be measured relative to the players resources. My version is designed to give monsters a relative difficulty (to each other, not the players), and show DMs how to adjust that difficulty in pieces so that encounters can be adjusted on the fly.

Talakeal

2013-02-09, 02:29 PM

I have a question:

How much variety do players want?

I am several people suggesting that characters keep track of multiple resource systems, some for in combat and some for out of combat.

Is this really ideal? Do you really want multiple resources to keep track of within the same character?

Personally I would prefer more homogeny in that regard, I think keeping all the classes on the same resource mechanic was one of 4E's good moves (albeit with a crappy implementation).

navar100

2013-02-09, 02:37 PM

Why is that worse than punishing the player for having the audacity to play a non spellcaster, like pretty much every version of D&D does?

Who said it is? No one should be punished for doing what their class is supposed to be doing. Spellcasters losing hit points to cast spells sucks. Warriors losing weapons or damaging themselves because they rolled a 1 sucks. (I know, house rule)

1337 b4k4

2013-02-09, 03:51 PM

I am several people suggesting that characters keep track of multiple resource systems, some for in combat and some for out of combat.

Within reason, the number of resources to keep track of isn't as important as both how frequently you need to keep track of them, and how predictably. Part of the reason I don't find tracking rations or spell prep time particularly arduous is that both are tracked exactly once per day and are tracked in a roughly predictable rate (one ration per person per day, 10 minutes per spell level per day etc). This is also why so many people found encumbrance rules to be so annoying, because by the book you needed to add and subtract weight every time you picked up anything. Same with ammo, by the book you would need to track each individual shot. Both of those could be solved by abstracting ammo and encumbrance away like rations do for food. You don't track each individual meal, no need to track each individual shot or treasure item either.

In my games, in the case of encumbrance, I have players calculate their weights around the same time they stop for an extended rest, only then does their encumbrance value change. The only other time is when they start carrying some obviously awkward object (a body, a treasure chest etc). Ammo I've mucked around with, but the version I'm using now is that each combat takes 5 arrows total, no matter how long or short the combat was or how many arrows were actually fired (in the long run this seems to be fair). Outside of combat, arrows are consumed as is relevant for the task at hand (e.g. an archery tournament in town consumes none, but shooting the jewel to open the way, a la Link, consumes 1 (or however many shots are needed).

This same principle is also why I dislike 4e (and 3e for that matter) combat at high levels. At a certain point you have 10 statuses and modifiers running around on 5 different enemies, plus your own modifiers and ongng effects that you need to remember to save for and so on. Essentially each status or ongoing effect is a resource, but they have to be tracked each turn and change unpredictably meaning players have to do that much more work.

neonchameleon

2013-02-09, 11:04 PM

I've played 2nd, 3rd, 4th (briefly), a d20 Star Wars, Paranoia, and thumbed through Serenity and Exhalted. And of course many computer games, although only some of that is transferable. I'll second the recommendation for Exile III, time done well :)

But with regards to the list you've got for bad DMing, are there any mechanics that can alleviate such problems? You mentioned Heavy Rules (which 3rd Ed would be, but it seemed to reinforce No You Can't... but I'd say that's more 3rd Ed's implementation of rules, rather than simply having rules available), Skill Challenges (contrived, but if it helps DMs, then it's a good mechanic). I don't know about the Jenga Tower or Doom Pool, am interested.

All very trad games :) A few rules does make it easier to say yes - but too many rules and you start getting lost because you can't remember which to use. Generally better are almost universally applicable roles - FATE Core has four action types: Attack, Defend, Overcome (prevent something in the environment from being in the way), Create an Advantage (change the environment to suit you). And those cover just about anything - the resolution is effects based rather than process based.

4e has mechanics and guidance but whoever was trying to explain the skill challenge mechanics was having a really bad day. What skill challenges are supposed to be is a DM tool where behind the screen you are able to say "The PCs want to disguise a dragon under a horse blanket as a plague cart so they can take him half way across the city and not be bombed from the air or interfered with on the ground" (real example from my third ever session of DMing 4e - and I had extremely limited experience before that). And then you think that that's about a fourth level skill challenge and takes eight successes before three failures, telling the PCs to roll whenever there's a decision point. I'd gone from near-panic to having the structure of the PCs daft plan framed mechanically in the time it took me to have a mouthful of drink to cover things.

The Jenga tower is completely different. Dread is an awesome game with a jenga tower as the only mechanic. It's a horror game with expected PC death (it's great for one-shots and cons) and whenever the PCs try something challenging the DM tells them to pull one (or occasionally more) blocks. If a player knocks over the tower, their character dies. Sounds like a complete gimmick - but it works well to keep the pacing and the tension, and have the explosive release.

One of the things most modern games do is share out the load much more evenly between the DM and players. Plot points as meta resources the players earn by making complications for themselves and can cash in for benefits as in both FATE and Serenity (and the Cortex Plus family: Marvel Heroic, Leverage, and Smallville) keep the players invested and helping to direct the rain of trouble onto their PCs.

The example in FATE Core is something like:
DM: Where are you when your rivals from the College Arcane try to attack you
Player: (thinks for a second then angles for a plot point) In the baths
DM: Far away from your tools and help? *hands over a plot point*

Now if the DM were to try attacking the PC in the baths as a DM side plan we'd end up in wizwars scry vs countermeasure and paranoia. But by getting the player to suggest it, the player buys in and embraces such underhanded strategy. And once the player has bought in, the scene involving the wizard escaping from an incoming brute squad and wearing nothing more than a towel is likely to be pretty awesome but it works because the setup isn't at all adversarial.

The next thing to encourage player buy-in is have the players write into each others' stories and the game world. FATE Core starts off with each PC starting in one story as a backstory - and being supporting characters in two other characters' backstories. (It doesn't take long - the backstory stories are very scetchy). Leverage starts out with each character having three distinctions - but two were bestowed by the other players based on the introductory adventure. And Smallville starts out by drawing a full scale relationship map step by step including how the PCs relate to each other and who the important NPCs and locations are. (After this the PCs are intended to fight like cats in a sack - the season 1 example PCs include both Clark Kent and Lex Luthor).

Finally the Doom Pool is an almost pure pacing mechanic. It says through the course of a scene how much the villains are expected to change things to their advantage and how hard it is to alter things in the scene itself - or how much things are falling apart. It's a DM-side resource pool that mirrors the players' plot points. Which guides the DM to keep the tension up and how much twisting within a scene to introduce. Also that it's effects based with the PCs expected to judge how much their characters can do but you roll to see if it's successful (Jimmy Olsen might help someone out of a burning car while Superman tears the roof off. Jimmy can't do that but either way the bystander is safe or not). And with extra dice making more complications it ticks up over time until spent.

Leverage also has a pacing mechanic - a number of pre-planned scenes in the heist, with the Mastermind's player actually being the one to set the scenes until they all go off course at the tilt (there's even a table to use for this if nothing emerges organically).

Fiasco does things completely differently from a traditional RPG. It's an entirely DM-less game that's again outstanding for one-shots because it's in the style of heists gone wrong, and as long as the players are willing to go for it I've never known a Fiasco game to go badly. It's set up in a two act structure with two scenes per player per act, and a tilt in the middle, and needs, relationships, objects, and locations determined semi-randomly. I'd say the example in Wil Wheaton's Tabletop (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXJxQ0NbFtk) is a good one - but honestly not that outstanding. (I've had an absolute blast introducing it to two complete newbies today with no hitches at all).

Please don't let me be misunderstood, I'm not talking about gritty combat. I'd be shocked if Warhammer catered at all to people who want to feel like merely human explorers, but maybe I don't know enough about that universe.

The Warhammer universe or the WFRP universe? They diverged way back; the running joke is that in D&D communion wine kills undead, in WFRP it gives you the Galloping Trots. This is not too atypical (http://www.criticalmiss.com/issue8/jameswallisruined1.html). (Note that I'm talking about WFRP 1/2e here. I like both games that make up WFRP 3e but you need to pry them apart with a crowbar as they don't quite fit together).

I don't mind if the archetype is about conserving his power; but I do see it as a problem if he can't do anything without it. Swinging a sword, Gandalf-style, using some kind of Dark Knowledge-esque feature to help your allies... anything but just standing there and doing nothing.

Isn't that what crossbows are for? Or at will spells (one of the things PF got right when updating 3.5.)

This right here is my point: you can't fit everything into an encounter-based paradigm

Of course not.

you've either basically removed all of the "interesting" magic (the utility stuff, the teleports and plane shifts, and so forth)

Most of the "interesting" magic indeed - the magic that was designed to bypass entire adventures.

Trying to divide things into "per-encounter" and "other" just limits your options and creativity and usually leads to the removal of the more interesting world-affecting and plot-affecting magic, which (while being hard to balance) is the kind of magic that allows the most player agency and freedom.

Limitations breed creativity and necessity is the mother of invention. The ability to snap your fingers and teleport or otherwise completely solve a problem by using magic made for that specific purpose is the opposite of creative. It's using prepackaged spells to do what they were intended to do. If you want creative, try derailing a plot with nothing more than Prestadigitation, a polished metal shield, and a light spell. An entire Vancian arsenal just makes things too easy most of the time.

Further intentionally plot-trashing magic encourages the DM to say no because it will trash plots. If the DM knows that the overall plot is likely to be safe other than from some very smart work aimed specifically at the individual plot and engaging directly with it.

The less overtly disruptive the magic is, the more the DM can say yes rather than find way to say no. And so the more all the players and not just the spellcasters are empowered.

Grod_The_Giant

2013-02-10, 12:03 AM

Isn't that what crossbows are for? Or at will spells (one of the things PF got right when updating 3.5.)
Crossbows aren't valid, as you're absolute crap at them as a wizard-- most of your resources have gone towards casting. I entirely support at-will spells, though.

Flickerdart

2013-02-10, 01:08 AM

I haven't taken a look at 5e crossbows so far, but I assume they have the 3.5 problem of being horrible without the kind of feat investment even a regular archer would cringe at.

Oracle_Hunter

2013-02-10, 01:23 AM

I haven't taken a look at 5e crossbows so far, but I assume they have the 3.5 problem of being horrible without the kind of feat investment even a regular archer would cringe at.
Which is ironic, really.
TBH, I'd prefer crossbows in D&D to be Mook Weapons since their whole point is that they are supposed to be used by relatively untrained peasants to take on highly trained knights and warriors -- that is to say, the PCs.

This is, of course, an entirely YMMV point but I've never been happy with how crossbows were made "cool" in 3e (and with Repeating Crossbows back before) because they are like guns. Of course crossbows aren't at all like guns despite "hand crossbows" and the penchant for dual-wielding them in WotC D&D but hey, Rule of Cool eh?

Me, I'd like to see a dedicated Archer class with "sniper support" instead of grafting it onto the Thief who shouldn't be using two-handed weapons in the first place. The 4e Bow Ranger gave a nice example on how you can make a ranged mundane class functional within the relatively close quarters of dungeon fighting -- I'd like more of that.
Not that any of that matters since the "devs" of 5e don't seem interested in spending much time working on mundane classes until the Casters work "properly" -- which means that they'll be getting some attention about a week before release... again :smallsigh:

navar100

2013-02-10, 05:04 AM

Thats the problem we already have though: Players sleep after encounters specifically so they can start full. Right now starting every encounter at full is the default.

Once players get level 2 spells, and Rope Trick, there's almost nothing you can do to keep them from resting, except ALTERING YOUR NARRATIVE.

Getting around a game mechanics problem with narrative changes isn't fixing anything, so lets admit what the real situation is, set it as a baseline, and get to fixing it.

Deciding that players get spell/etc allotments based on what they'd need for one encounter is the best way to do that. Tweaking the situations where they're harried (which are a minority of the encounters) is a lot better solution than tweaking the majority of the situations and letting the system work on the minority.

EDIT:

To clarify: The majority of our problem is that D&D 3.5 (and most other version) assume that we're going to be doing 4 encounters a day, and set the players resources to what the players would need in 4 encounters. As commonly played though, we rarely have more than 1-2 encounters a day, so the assumption the game is built on gives players (especially spell casters) way too much resources.

I keep reading various references to this, but how common is this really? While obviously I haven't played with every group everywhere, with my group of 11 years playing we don't do this. Sometimes we do only have one combat a game day, but usually they require we use everything. For the dungeon crawls (even if not literally) we have an encounter and press on. The concept of resting 8 hours after one combat doesn't even come up. I'm fortunate enough to play in a new second group now. This second group doesn't do it either. Combat happens, we move on. I don't see the 15 minute adventuring day problem. Given that does happen I see it more as an issue of the particular gaming group rather than a flaw of the game.

Morty

2013-02-10, 06:12 AM

Which is ironic, really.
TBH, I'd prefer crossbows in D&D to be Mook Weapons since their whole point is that they are supposed to be used by relatively untrained peasants to take on highly trained knights and warriors -- that is to say, the PCs.

This is, of course, an entirely YMMV point but I've never been happy with how crossbows were made "cool" in 3e (and with Repeating Crossbows back before) because they are like guns. Of course crossbows aren't at all like guns despite "hand crossbows" and the penchant for dual-wielding them in WotC D&D but hey, Rule of Cool eh?

Me, I'd like to see a dedicated Archer class with "sniper support" instead of grafting it onto the Thief who shouldn't be using two-handed weapons in the first place. The 4e Bow Ranger gave a nice example on how you can make a ranged mundane class functional within the relatively close quarters of dungeon fighting -- I'd like more of that.
Not that any of that matters since the "devs" of 5e don't seem interested in spending much time working on mundane classes until the Casters work "properly" -- which means that they'll be getting some attention about a week before release... again :smallsigh:

The problem with crossbows in 3.5 is that the only way to deal good damage as a ranged combatant is to fire a truckload of missiles each round. If it were possible to make a crossbowman who fires one deadly bolt per round, it would be a good way to make crossbows cool without turning them into wooden guns. But it doesn't look like D&D Next is going to do it.

Grod_The_Giant

2013-02-10, 10:55 AM

I keep reading various references to this, but how common is this really? While obviously I haven't played with every group everywhere, with my group of 11 years playing we don't do this. Sometimes we do only have one combat a game day, but usually they require we use everything. For the dungeon crawls (even if not literally) we have an encounter and press on. The concept of resting 8 hours after one combat doesn't even come up. I'm fortunate enough to play in a new second group now. This second group doesn't do it either. Combat happens, we move on. I don't see the 15 minute adventuring day problem. Given that does happen I see it more as an issue of the particular gaming group rather than a flaw of the game.

My worry is less with the theoretical group who rests after every encounter, and more with DMs like myself-- I don't think I've ever run more than three combats in a given adventuring day, and usually the number is considerably less. People stopping a dungeon crawl after every fight is more of a TO problem; DMs wanting to be able to have single-encounter days that aren't boss battle difficulty is an issue.

Kurald Galain

2013-02-10, 02:02 PM

I keep reading various references to this, but how common is this really?

It clearly isn't common. They're the urban legends of D&D. Sure, they theoretically could happen, but in practice almost everybody only has heard it happen to his father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate.

One of the mistakes WOTC has made in the past is base their design changes on memetic complaints by a vocal minority on message boards, rather than on issues that were actually common at the gametable. This, of course, is why Pathfinder sells well despite still having most of the commonly discussed issues that 3E has: most players, in practice, either do not have or do not mind these issues.

PairO'Dice Lost

2013-02-10, 04:21 PM

Most of the "interesting" magic indeed - the magic that was designed to bypass entire adventures.

Limitations breed creativity and necessity is the mother of invention. The ability to snap your fingers and teleport or otherwise completely solve a problem by using magic made for that specific purpose is the opposite of creative. It's using prepackaged spells to do what they were intended to do. If you want creative, try derailing a plot with nothing more than Prestadigitation, a polished metal shield, and a light spell. An entire Vancian arsenal just makes things too easy most of the time.

In my experience, if teleport and similar are trashing your adventures, it's because you're trying to run low-level adventures at higher levels. The game changes with increasing level; fetch quests and overland travel aren't an adventure once you reach mid levels, they're the prelude to an adventure.

There's a reason AD&D branched out into armies, keeps, politics, and intrigue at mid levels; you weren't expected to start off fighting kobolds in dungeons to acquire gold and end up fighting super-kobolds in super-dungeons to acquire super-gold, you were expected to actually advance in capabilities relative to the world as you level. Higher levels give higher-level tools, every spell has a counter (usually at the same spell level), and if you can trivialize things by mindlessly casting spells, your DM needs to step up their game.

I routinely run games for caster-heavy well-optimized parties, and not only am I able to challenge them just fine because I take their capabilities into account, the type of adventure differs based on level. One of the reason many players say 4e feels samey is not due to the class structure or anything else, but rather because they stretched the 3e "sweet spot" of level 7-12 or so out to 30 levels, so instead of the campaign changing and opening new capabilities as you level it's the same type of adventure for the whole run.

Further intentionally plot-trashing magic encourages the DM to say no because it will trash plots. If the DM knows that the overall plot is likely to be safe other than from some very smart work aimed specifically at the individual plot and engaging directly with it.

I dislike the idea of a DM having a plot that's "safe" from the PCs. The DM shouldn't be telling a story that the players go along with, the story is what unfolds based on the PCs' actions. A system wherein adventures are just strings of encounters, that has few world-altering abilities outside of combat to protect the DM's precious story, couldn't be farther from what I want to see in 5e.

Zeful

2013-02-10, 05:33 PM

Higher levels give higher-level tools, every spell has a counter (usually at the same spell level), and if you can trivialize things by mindlessly casting spells, your DM needs to step up their game.
And some would argue that the only way to counter magic was only with magic was part of the problem with higher levels in general. After all, if all high level obstacles require magic to defeat, then there's no purpose to allow characters that do not have magic, and thus cannot defeat any of these obstacles, to advance to high levels.

Which is one of those situations where I'd argue that if the high level game is completely dominated by magic, the designers failed to design magic properly for a swords and sorcery game.

noparlpf

2013-02-10, 05:39 PM

Talakeal

2013-02-10, 06:07 PM

I do agree that mundane characters need better tools for dealing with magic. The mage hunter feats from complete arcane are a good start, but dont go quite far enough (and melee characters are starved for feats as is). Better will saves for non casters is another avenue. Also, I would like to see magic swords that can cut through various forms of walls and force effects.

One house rule I have is that holy water can function as a targetted dispel with a CL equal to the priest who created it, and allow it to work against some spells that are normally immune to dispel such as prismatic sphere and force cage. This helps out in a lot of the inescapable save vs. suck situations.

Combine this and ban or make conservative rulings on broken spells like shape change, gate, genesis, rope trick, shivering touch, fabricate, etc. and a lot of the problems are a lot less severe. They don't dissapear, but they are reduced to the point where you can still play the game as intended.

Zeful

2013-02-10, 06:08 PM

I don't see why high-level fighter-types can't have some anti-magic tools. SR and casting disruption abilities, at the very least. Like, having battled against and alongside mages for so long, they've learned how to fight against magic, if not to use it themselves.

For SR to work, spells and abilities that bypass it must be rare. And casting disruption abilities require that magic take time to cast or else it will be over long before you can use them.

It's better to sit down, and build the obstacles across all levels first, then build the PC's capabilities against these obstacles in a systemic manner first, then build your classes. After all with that kind of frame-work you can get better classes.

Kurald Galain

2013-02-10, 08:01 PM

I do agree that mundane characters need better tools for dealing with magic.

A classic trick is that magic is blocked and/or countered by cold steel. Guess what fighters use...

Zeful

2013-02-10, 09:34 PM

A classic trick is that magic is blocked and/or countered by cold steel. Guess what fighters use...

That's just taking the lazy way out. Don't give magic spells/abilities immunities to mundane capabilities (wall of force should have an AC, hardness and HP per inch of thickness, as well as rules for what happens when it's breached). Make it possible for players to interfere with spells before they fully activate, but after they have been successfully cast. Give all mundane characters a wide range of capabilities to deal with enemies at range, even when they fully spec in melee capabilities. Let mundane characters inflict status effects that have consequences outside of the effect itself to interact with other rules, I mean if an enemy had a solid chance of knocking a flying character out of the air do you think flying would be so heavily used?

In short, design the rules to fit the genre, for both sides of the equation.

Doug Lampert

2013-02-10, 10:11 PM

That's just taking the lazy way out. Don't give magic spells/abilities immunities to mundane capabilities (wall of force should have an AC, hardness and HP per inch of thickness, as well as rules for what happens when it's breached). Make it possible for players to interfere with spells before they fully activate, but after they have been successfully cast. Give all mundane characters a wide range of capabilities to deal with enemies at range, even when they fully spec in melee capabilities. Let mundane characters inflict status effects that have consequences outside of the effect itself to interact with other rules, I mean if an enemy had a solid chance of knocking a flying character out of the air do you think flying would be so heavily used?

In short, design the rules to fit the genre, for both sides of the equation.

Flying should be something used for transport, not tactical combat. And as you point out, this isn't hard to justify (http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2011-05-28).

Either that or affordable mounts that beat the CRAP out of a fly spell and are tough enough that targetting the mount isn't an obvious winning strategy should be fairly common. Seriously, who uses a fly spell in classic fiction? Broomstick, carpet, flying mechanical horse, flying actual horse, flying bed, ext... All of them, but just flying without any item or mount?

Teleporting should either be impossible, or at the least teleporting into a hostile combat zone should be suicide. Maybe all your buffs and other active spells are left behind by the teleport, all your items temporarily disabled (as by a dispell magic), and it takes 3 rounds of standing there sparkling to materialize fully (aka Star Trek) and when you do YOU'RE allways treated as surprised since you are in a totally new enviroment. You teleport to get NEAR the enemy or to get AWAY from the enemy, but not into his bedroom.

I don't want or need a ruleset where any caster of level X+ can teleport and needs to waste three slots every day on teleport defenses, and everyone else is totally screwed because they can't teleport or defend against teleport.

Invisibility should have a set of well known weaknesses that intelligent foes are prepared to exploit (scent, dust, mirrors, whatever).

It's not hard to limit any particular bit of magic, but for EVERY bit of magic you should have a reason, "why is this NOT an automatic win against melee characters of comparable or even slightly lower level" built into the spell, NOT as a special ability or special feat or manuever the melee character has to specifically take.

noparlpf

2013-02-10, 10:19 PM

Seriously, who uses a fly spell in classic fiction?

Superman? :smalltongue:

Zeful

2013-02-10, 10:28 PM

It's not hard to limit any particular bit of magic, but for EVERY bit of magic you should have a reason, "why is this NOT an automatic win against melee characters of comparable or even slightly lower level" built into the spell, NOT as a special ability or special feat or manuever the melee character has to specifically take.

That is not what I was suggesting in the least. I was not suggesting a bunch of feats or maneuvers, I was suggesting just the mechanics to give mundane characters versatility in combat beyond just "I hit things" by giving them the same kind of options as spellcasters. Everything in my example was things that I feel every character should have by default, that don't "upgrade" to that level of effectiveness with a feat, that don't require specific stats to use, and that don't have special resources tied to them. They are like Grapple, Bull Rush or disarming, systems that everyone can use, but that are only really effective for people with actual training.

1337 b4k4

2013-02-10, 10:58 PM

In my experience, if teleport and similar are trashing your adventures, it's because you're trying to run low-level adventures at higher levels. The game changes with increasing level; fetch quests and overland travel aren't an adventure once you reach mid levels, they're the prelude to an adventure.

This. I think the big problem is that we have conflicting desires for PC power level. On the one hand, we're complaining that under the current rules, a level 20 fighter with 20 STR has a 5% chance of failure on things when he should be practically a god and able to single handedly wrestle dragons. On the other hand, we're upset when these same "practically gods" characters are able to act as gods would and don't find a couple of mook henchmen to be an actual challenge anymore.

Grod_The_Giant

2013-02-10, 11:31 PM

This. I think the big problem is that we have conflicting desires for PC power level. On the one hand, we're complaining that under the current rules, a level 20 fighter with 20 STR has a 5% chance of failure on things when he should be practically a god and able to single handedly wrestle dragons. On the other hand, we're upset when these same "practically gods" characters are able to act as gods would and don't find a couple of mook henchmen to be an actual challenge anymore.

Agreed. One of the things 4e did absolutely right was to mark a clear distinction between the different tiers of play. Applied to 3.5, you get something like:

1-6 is gritty mortal heroes, who might be able to affect the course of a nation with a great deal of effort, but who can still be overwhelmed in simple combat by simple soldiers. Their actions are mostly local. Enemies are things like orcs and giants.
7-12 is worldshakes. As a group, they can manipulate kingdoms, bedevil armies, and leave their names stamped across history. Their actions can span the world. Enemies are things like dragons and minor demons.
13-20 are beings of myth and legend. These are the guys who order kings around, destroy armies single-handedly, and shake hands with gods. Their actions can take them across the multiverse. Enemies are things like elder dragons, angels, and demons.

And, you know, if there were rules for E6, E12, and E20 play... that might go a long way towards balancing the different expectations of power level.

(If 5e uses its own power level, you might get something like 1-5 is gritty, 5-10 is big gorram heroes, 11-15 is legends, and 15-20 is myths)

PairO'Dice Lost

2013-02-10, 11:41 PM

And some would argue that the only way to counter magic was only with magic was part of the problem with higher levels in general. After all, if all high level obstacles require magic to defeat, then there's no purpose to allow characters that do not have magic, and thus cannot defeat any of these obstacles, to advance to high levels.

This is true, but it's a known problem that casters and monsters advance in sync while martial types are left out in the cold and it's a known problem that martial types have little to no out-of-combat utility or world-shaping abilities. Bringing up the martial types to the casters' level solves both problems, while removing what I've been calling "interesting" magic just leaves both casters and noncasters weak against monsters and unable to shape the plot.

Which is one of those situations where I'd argue that if the high level game is completely dominated by magic, the designers failed to design magic properly for a swords and sorcery game.

D&D isn't a swords-and-sorcery game. D&D has always been a mish-mash of S&S, high fantasy, heroic fantasy, and postapocalyptic fantasy, with the bits of science fantasy and dark fantasy in 1e giving way to the more epic fantasy of 2e and onwards. It's much more S&S at lower levels, which can lead people to believe that D&D is "supposed to be" S&S if they play mostly at low levels, and it certainly works well enough at low levels--but then, WotC testing the low levels and having no clue about how to make the high levels work is the source of many problems in 3e.

If 5e is to avoid repeating the same mistakes that 3e made, they need to make more explicit tiers as others have mentioned, and--the most important part--the designers need to actually make the gameplay different at different tiers instead of just giving things a new coat of paint and some extra +1s here and there the way they did some parts of 4e and the way they're doing the playtest right now.

Oracle_Hunter

2013-02-11, 12:15 AM

D&D isn't a swords-and-sorcery game. D&D has always been a mish-mash of S&S, high fantasy, heroic fantasy, and postapocalyptic fantasy, with the bits of science fantasy and dark fantasy in 1e giving way to the more epic fantasy of 2e and onwards. It's much more S&S at lower levels, which can lead people to believe that D&D is "supposed to be" S&S if they play mostly at low levels, and it certainly works well enough at low levels--but then, WotC testing the low levels and having no clue about how to make the high levels work is the source of many problems in 3e.
OK, for the sake of elaborating a semantic argument -- can you define your terms? And, for bonus points, explain how Red Box D&D and/or BECMI fit within your chosen definitions of what D&D has "always been?"

Zeful

2013-02-11, 12:20 AM

This is true, but it's a known problem that casters and monsters advance in sync while martial types are left out in the cold and it's a known problem that martial types have little to no out-of-combat utility or world-shaping abilities. Bringing up the martial types to the casters' level solves both problems, while removing what I've been calling "interesting" magic just leaves both casters and noncasters weak against monsters and unable to shape the plot.Many spells were inherently problematic, and short of castrating the entire line of spells to being useless would still maintain those properties. And others were out and out terribly designed. The charisma check on the Planar Binding line is a quick example, it doesn't need to be there, and it's existence takes away from characters that actually want to be faces; deals with angel and demons should be something they get to look forward to taking that path.

D&D isn't a swords-and-sorcery game. D&D has always been a mish-mash of S&S, high fantasy, heroic fantasy, and postapocalyptic fantasy, with the bits of science fantasy and dark fantasy in 1e giving way to the more epic fantasy of 2e and onwards. It's much more S&S at lower levels, which can lead people to believe that D&D is "supposed to be" S&S if they play mostly at low levels, and it certainly works well enough at low levels--but then, WotC testing the low levels and having no clue about how to make the high levels work is the source of many problems in 3e.Swords-and-sorcery has the most overlap with those genres though, making it a great place to start for building a system with elements from all those genres. Besides swords-and-sorcery has a strong tradition of magical/mundane parity, also making it a good foundation for building a game around, even if you later decide to take it in a different direction.

If 5e is to avoid repeating the same mistakes that 3e made, they need to make more explicit tiers as others have mentioned, and--the most important part--the designers need to actually make the gameplay different at different tiers instead of just giving things a new coat of paint and some extra +1s here and there the way they did some parts of 4e and the way they're doing the playtest right now.
The problem with that is that it multiplies the number of games you essentially have to make. Starting with the basic framework you have combat, social and exploration encounters, then you flesh out your combat stuff, your basic dungeoneering stuff, as well as all the overland systems, which has to include elements from your three pillars; and then you add mechanically different tiers of play to this? You're already building 9 separate systems, (though if you're doing a good job there's a lot of overlap between them) multiplying that by each tier you want to put together and have mechanically different enough to play differently explodes the complexity of the system.

PairO'Dice Lost

2013-02-11, 02:17 AM

OK, for the sake of elaborating a semantic argument -- can you define your terms?

Swords and sorcery (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sword_and_sorcery) is the Conan-esque "low magic, wizards are bad guys, heroes succeed against bad odds by guile and strength of arms, with a focus on personal-scale conflict over world-saving"...also known as low-level D&D. Heroic fantasy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroic_fantasy) is S&S but with more black-and-white "with great power comes great responsibility" morality instead of shades of gray and often a larger world focus.

High fantasy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_fantasy) has epic themes like saving the world from a BBEG dark lord and such, and usually takes place in an entirely different world with different laws of nature and such...also known as mid-to-high level D&D.

Post-apocalyptic works (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalyptic_and_post-apocalyptic_fiction) usually involve fallen civilizations, recovery of lost superior technology, breakdown of the rule of law in favor of more local authorities, and so forth...otherwise known as Dungeons and Dragons.

And, for bonus points, explain how Red Box D&D and/or BECMI fit within your chosen definitions of what D&D has "always been?"

BECMI? You mean, the edition where you start off as Conan (BE), then start raising the armies of Gondor to combat Sauron (CM), then ascend to godhood (I), each boxed set of which involves entirely different sorts of adventures than those of the other boxed sets? That BECMI? :smallwink:

The gritty-to-heroic-to-worldshaping power curve has existed from BECMI through 3e, and practically every complaint I've seen about players "ruining" a DM's plot or plot-altering spells being too plot-alter-y or similar has been caused by DMs and/or players not understanding that.

Many spells were inherently problematic, and short of castrating the entire line of spells to being useless would still maintain those properties. And others were out and out terribly designed. The charisma check on the Planar Binding line is a quick example, it doesn't need to be there, and it's existence takes away from characters that actually want to be faces; deals with angel and demons should be something they get to look forward to taking that path.

Oh, I'm not defending the specific design of those spells--many of them, from knock to gate and every level in between, need tweaking for various reasons--I'm saying that their general effects of teleporting, scrying, animating the dead, and similar should stick around due to their iconic nature and player-empowering abilities.

The problem with that is that it multiplies the number of games you essentially have to make. Starting with the basic framework you have combat, social and exploration encounters, then you flesh out your combat stuff, your basic dungeoneering stuff, as well as all the overland systems, which has to include elements from your three pillars; and then you add mechanically different tiers of play to this? You're already building 9 separate systems, (though if you're doing a good job there's a lot of overlap between them) multiplying that by each tier you want to put together and have mechanically different enough to play differently explodes the complexity of the system.

You don't need to do things differently mechanically for each tier; the combat, social, exploration, crafting, etc. minigames can stay the same, it's the content that needs to change with level. Once you get the basic mechanics down for each aspect of play, changing tiers is as simple as introducing content ("Suddenly, a kingdom-building minigame!"), ignoring content ("You're level 10, you don't need to track rations and arrows anymore"), or changing content ("Congratulations, you can now adventure on the planes"), and you only have to deal with individual spells, maneuvers, items, etc. instead of rewriting parts of the game from scratch.

neonchameleon

2013-02-11, 06:23 AM

My worry is less with the theoretical group who rests after every encounter, and more with DMs like myself-- I don't think I've ever run more than three combats in a given adventuring day, and usually the number is considerably less. People stopping a dungeon crawl after every fight is more of a TO problem; DMs wanting to be able to have single-encounter days that aren't boss battle difficulty is an issue.

This. Four fights per day is an utterly ridiculous rate of combat and will end up with a party of adventurers depopulating small towns in short order or turning dragons into an endangered species single handedly.

Honestly I think the best thing to do is the same thing I do in 4e - hack the extended rests. Wizards recovering spells takes a few days with a pile of books and a lab or library. Clerics need to meditiate and fast at the temple. If you can only recover spells when not adventuring a whole lot of problems go away (this incidently was the oD&D solution implemented by force - no resting in the dungeon because you'd face wandering monster rolls every 10 minutes, and no resting in the wilderness because the monsters were a whole lot meaner - recovering spells took getting back from the dungeon to the town).

In my experience, if teleport and similar are trashing your adventures, it's because you're trying to run low-level adventures at higher levels. The game changes with increasing level; fetch quests and overland travel aren't an adventure once you reach mid levels, they're the prelude to an adventure.

It's not fetch quests. It's that the PCs for practical purposes can be in two places at once. Seriously denting an invading army with fry and run tactics shouldn't suddenly become easy in the space of one level. Also when you say the game should change with increasing level, wizards get teleport and druids tree stride while fighters and rogues get

There's a reason AD&D branched out into armies, keeps, politics, and intrigue at mid levels; you weren't expected to start off fighting kobolds in dungeons to acquire gold and end up fighting super-kobolds in super-dungeons to acquire super-gold, you were expected to actually advance in capabilities relative to the world as you level.

This is one thing. The problem is that teleport makes armies almost irrelevant.

I dislike the idea of a DM having a plot that's "safe" from the PCs.

No plot should be. Agreed. But the existance of high level casters changes entirely what sort of plot is plausible within the world.

MukkTB

2013-02-11, 06:42 AM

Have you ever tried E6? You can capture that glorious sword and sorcery / heroic fantasy feeling without ever wondering why a wizard hasn't teleported in and fried everyone for lols before retiring to his astral fortress populated by constructed sex slaves.

Yora

2013-02-11, 07:42 AM

I am currently working on a d20 variant game with spellcasting based on the XPH rules, and while looking for spells to convert in the SRD, I realized that the vast majority of spells in D&D are pretty much exclusive to D&D. The number of generic spells that would be found in any other fantasy worlds, is only about 60 or so. The 3.5e spell index has over 1600 entries.

Creating your own spell lists that are appropriate to the game is something I highly recommend.

And let's face it. Almost all problems with 3rd Editions arise from spells. Almost all feats that are considered dubious are so because there are a couple of spells which can exploit them to results much higher than how the feat interacts with most other spells.

stainboy

2013-02-11, 08:44 AM

It clearly isn't common. They're the urban legends of D&D. Sure, they theoretically could happen, but in practice almost everybody only has heard it happen to his father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate.

A lot of groups do something like 90 minutes of investigation or freeform stuff followed by a single big 90-minute combat, then someone has to go to work in the morning so the DM lets the party get to safety un-hassled and calls the session. That's one encounter per day. It's not quite as bad as hiding in a rope trick mid dungeon crawl (because that one encounter per day is probably an over-CRed boss fight instead just of "the owlbear in room 3A") but it still makes dailies stronger than intended.

Frozen_Feet

2013-02-11, 09:16 AM

Yeah, the discussion about what D&D is should always take into account that D&D has never been about a single genre. Actually, is it just me, have editions starting with 3.0 gotten progressively worse in making it clear that the game changes with level and which classes are present? :smallconfused:

Also, BECMI ruled. I actually think that segmenting the rules into similar neat packages is what Next should do. It would fit their stated design goal of increased modularity like a fist in the face.

Doug Lampert

2013-02-11, 11:43 AM

Yora

2013-02-11, 11:48 AM

Zeful

2013-02-11, 11:58 AM

You don't need to do things differently mechanically for each tier; the combat, social, exploration, crafting, etc. minigames can stay the same, it's the content that needs to change with level. Once you get the basic mechanics down for each aspect of play, changing tiers is as simple as introducing content ("Suddenly, a kingdom-building minigame!"), ignoring content ("You're level 10, you don't need to track rations and arrows anymore"), or changing content ("Congratulations, you can now adventure on the planes"), and you only have to deal with individual spells, maneuvers, items, etc. instead of rewriting parts of the game from scratch.So issues of scale then?

How do you propose to prevent player abilities from being invalidated at higher levels? Because assuming an argument of scale between tiers of play, how are the lower tier abilities going to stay relevant when everything is bigger and badder? Evolving abilities or what?

Please notice that I clearly say NOT a set of feats or manuevers? It's capitalized and everything, it's quoted in your post. I've highlighted it this time.

Yes. I did. And you do know your statement implies that you thought I was talking about making such abilities feats or maneuvers? Or that such abilities are ultimately unneeded, assuming "appropriate" spell design?

Excuse me for being unclear but neither of those assumptions, or any assumption based in mundane characters continuing to get screwed over, was in consideration or assumed to be desirable in my post.

PairO'Dice Lost

2013-02-11, 01:40 PM

It's not fetch quests. It's that the PCs for practical purposes can be in two places at once. Seriously denting an invading army with fry and run tactics shouldn't suddenly become easy in the space of one level.

Scry-n-frying an army might seem like a huge jump in capabilities, but it really isn't. If you look at the thread on defeating an army that JaronK recently started, you can see that there are plenty of anti-army tactics available around level 5-6 (assassination while invisible, flying in and raining death from above, flooding the area with allies, etc.); you don't go from "armies are a threat" to "armies are trivial" in one level, and in fact armies aren't trivialized until around 14th-15th level, which is 3/4 of the way down the path to being a god.

Also when you say the game should change with increasing level, wizards get teleport and druids tree stride while fighters and rogues get

Martial characters not getting Nice Things is a known problem. As I said before, in all edition prior to 4e, when the game changed the monsters and the casters changed and both got new abilities roughly in sync while noncasters were left out in the cold, and it's a lot easier and more desirable to give the noncasters Nice Things to keep up than to remove the Nice Things from everyone else. There are many known solutions, of varying degrees of palatability (my favored solution being to broaden their concepts to allow for good utility at mid levels and make them mythical heroes a la Cu Chulainn or Gilgamesh when the reach high levels) and creating a new edition is precisely the time to implement one or more such solutions.

So issues of scale then?

How do you propose to prevent player abilities from being invalidated at higher levels? Because assuming an argument of scale between tiers of play, how are the lower tier abilities going to stay relevant when everything is bigger and badder? Evolving abilities or what?

The same way invisibility and Wall of Blades scale based on the opposition you're avoiding or countering, and the same way you get more d6s to a fireball and more AoOs from Combat Reflexes based on Dex as you level, and the same way you have feat chains and spell chains (like dimension door to teleport to plane shift to gate) that you can take as you level.

Again, this scaling already exists and has existed in D&D, it's just that while caster and monster abilities have scaled from 1 to 20 the noncaster abilities scaled from 1 to 10 or so and stay there. Adding higher-level abilities (real higher-level abilities, not just low-level stuff with bigger numbers or a palette swap) doesn't require a radical redesign of the system, it just requires a commitment to giving noncasters Nice Things.

MukkTB

2013-02-11, 01:41 PM

What genres can you evoke with just 3.x stuff? Lets assume the DM is allowed to restrict classes and possibly level ranges when attempting to evoke a specific genre. No house rules are allowed.

As far as I can tell D&D can simulate Horror (all the subtypes - cosmic, germane, survival), Aventure, Action, and Mystery. You can twist the dial anywhere between low and high fantasy. You can play at any time between the ancient Greeks and the Renaissance. Once you get past the Renaissance you're in choppy waters. There is a thing called Gaslamp Fantasy that might take you as far as the 1800s. You can make the system work for a decent number of physical locations although Europe is the focus.

D&D doesn't bring much to the table for a non magic setting. Steampunk doesn't translate without changing into Gaslamp Fantasy. Romance is not particularly tenable. Partially because it can get awkward, but also because the social interaction rules are very bare bones and hardly constitute a game by themselves. "I diplomacy her!"

You also can't really get an adversarial game out of D&D. The DM holds all the cards. The rules are way to ambiguous for PVP.

Talakeal

2013-02-11, 03:49 PM

One last thought about having player resources reset every encounter:

You have to make damn sure to keep to the 4 encounters a day model.

Many small encounters will be pointless, they will be over fast and offer no challenge. Also, as the players lose no resources from them they don't serve to "soften up" the enemies, so there is no reason for them in character, and out of character there is no reason for the players to try and "play smart" during them.

If you have only one big encounter the players will use up all of their resources very quickly. After this you will have a fight that is both very dangerous and very boring, as they are slogging through roughly three encounters worth of time relying only on "at will" powers.

Doug Lampert

2013-02-11, 04:03 PM

Yes. I did. And you do know your statement implies that you thought I was talking about making such abilities feats or maneuvers? Or that such abilities are ultimately unneeded, assuming "appropriate" spell design?

Excuse me for being unclear but neither of those assumptions, or any assumption based in mundane characters continuing to get screwed over, was in consideration or assumed to be desirable in my post.

No it does not. YOUR REPLY makes it explicit you think I'm talking about that. But I'm talking about the same thing you were. Since you say that is NOT what you were talking about when I say to change the spells so they have mundane counters and do not require feats or manuevers to counter.

Your NOT in the reply directly and clearly contradicts your earlier post which I was basically in agrement with.

Draz74

2013-02-11, 05:40 PM

Oracle_Hunter

2013-02-11, 07:25 PM

New Legends & Lore (http://www.wizards.com/dnd/Article.aspx?x=dnd%2F4ll%2F20130211) up, basically saying that WotC is aware that Fighters suck if they have to give up damage bonuses in order to use their cool maneuvers. Which is good as far as it goes, which isn't very far. Especially since their only concrete example so far is the Fighter using a bow & arrow to make an AoE attack, like that dumb low-level Rogue power in 4e. :smallyuk:
It is disheartening to see Mearls trot out this chart for Mundanes:
Barbarian = weapon user base combat abilities + rage
Monk = weapon user base combat abilities + ki
Fighter = weapon user base combat abilities + expertise
Barbarian = Monk = Fighter
Rage = Ki = Expertise
I bet you Mearls never thought "Divine Casting = Arcane Casting = Psionic Casting" :smallsigh:

I do have to admit I felt a momentary surge of hope when I saw the section headed "Do We Need Rules for This?" but then I read this:
Last week I mentioned exploration rules, and that brings up a key point for the game. Outside of the basic mechanics for stuff like moving, combat, and casting spells, we're assuming that everything else is optional. Something like the exploration rules, or the shortcuts for handling fights with lots of creatures, are simply tools for DMs to use or adapt for their games.
Emphasis mine.

It would have been great if Mearls had reached the basic conclusion that you don't need rules for everything but instead he seems to have concluded that you need rules for everything but they should be optional which is a recipe for bloat and conflicting rules text as he should know. Amusingly this implies that rules for locating secret doors, traps, and even social interaction are "optional" in his mind which might offend his actual game designers: The Internet :smalltongue:

PairO'Dice Lost

2013-02-11, 07:57 PM

I bet you Mearls never thought "Divine Casting = Arcane Casting = Psionic Casting" :smallsigh:

Why not?

Wizard = basic magical abilities + schools
Cleric = basic magical abilities + domains
Psion = basic magical abilities + disciplines
Wizard = Cleric = Psion
Arcane = Divine = Psionic

If you look at things from that very abstract standpoint, then yes, it's self-evidently correct that every class consists of parts that are shared with other classes plus parts that are not shared with other classes.

The fact that he thinks this idea is brilliant enough to merit sharing with us in L&L as opposed to it being possibly the most basic insight one can have when designing a class-based system, and that he's assuming any given pair of classes can be somehow "equal" despite every edition of D&D begging to differ, is what's really troubling.

Oracle_Hunter

2013-02-11, 08:13 PM

If you look at things from that very abstract standpoint, then yes, it's self-evidently correct that every class consists of parts that are shared with other classes plus parts that are not shared with other classes.

The fact that he thinks this idea is brilliant enough to merit sharing with us in L&L as opposed to it being possibly the most basic insight one can have when designing a class-based system, and that he's assuming any given pair of classes can be somehow "equal" despite every edition of D&D begging to differ, is what's really troubling.
Mostly I found his level of abstraction here annoying since it implies that the distinguishing features of each Mundane class should be identical or, at least, not meaningfully different. My point is Mearls would never subject Casting classes to such a rude equivalency but your point is well taken.

I remember when heard Mearls was taking over from Monte Cook and I was pleased. Doesn't WotC have anyone with vision anymore? :smallannoyed:

Draz74

2013-02-11, 09:40 PM

No, they've all transitioned to Pelgrane Press and Malhavoc Press?

J/k, sort of. I'm not sure how much I actually love Tweet and Heinsoo's work, and I think Bruce Cordell is technically still working for WotC in addition to occasional Malhavoc work.

Jacob.Tyr

2013-02-11, 10:30 PM

1337 b4k4

2013-02-11, 10:33 PM

Mostly I found his level of abstraction here annoying since it implies that the distinguishing features of each Mundane class should be identical or, at least, not meaningfully different

{Scrubbed}

Talakeal

2013-02-11, 10:35 PM

I didn't mind the giving up damage bonus to use maneuvers idea... I did mind that the maneuvers weren't worth giving up anything 99% of the time. (I liked charge, I thought that was well done).

One good trick for a game designer is to never act like the player is "losing" something. Instead, they should just allow the fighter to perform one manuever each turn for free, and have some of the manuevers have no effect beyond bonus accuracy or damage. Same end result, but comes across much better in the players eyes.

Jacob.Tyr

2013-02-11, 10:58 PM

One good trick for a game designer is to never act like the player is "losing" something. Instead, they should just allow the fighter to perform one manuever each turn for free, and have some of the manuevers have no effect beyond bonus accuracy or damage. Same end result, but comes across much better in the players eyes.

Yeah but without having to choose to sacrifice something(damage) you're basically just making the fighter have at-will powers. I liked the prospect of maneuvers being more than at-will by having the cost-benefit in there. I liked the prospect of stacking maneuvers by spending more and more damage dice. If we relegate everything to action economy and stick the fighter with at-wills only we wind up with them looking like wizards with only cantrips.

Right now the problem is that the best option I can come up with for a fighter is "Run away, use all MDD on shooting a bow".

Grundy

2013-02-12, 11:22 AM

Yeah but without having to choose to sacrifice something(damage) you're basically just making the fighter have at-will powers. I liked the prospect of maneuvers being more than at-will by having the cost-benefit in there. I liked the prospect of stacking maneuvers by spending more and more damage dice. If we relegate everything to action economy and stick the fighter with at-wills only we wind up with them looking like wizards with only cantrips.

Right now the problem is that the best option I can come up with for a fighter is "Run away, use all MDD on shooting a bow".

Yes, but to paraphrase Walter Slovotsky, the best way to melee with an enemy is if he's chained to the floor, and after you stick a couple of crossbow bolts through him. :smallbiggrin:
Honestly, there's a very good reason for missile weapons, and having them be the top option doesn't bother me, as long as its a meaningful choice.

Synovia

2013-02-12, 12:03 PM

Yeah but without having to choose to sacrifice something(damage) you're basically just making the fighter have at-will powers. I liked the prospect of maneuvers being more than at-will by having the cost-benefit in there. I liked the prospect of stacking maneuvers by spending more and more damage dice. If we relegate everything to action economy and stick the fighter with at-wills only we wind up with them looking like wizards with only cantrips.

Right now the problem is that the best option I can come up with for a fighter is "Run away, use all MDD on shooting a bow".

You're not understanding him.

What hes saying is this:

Bad:
5d6 damage
The player can chose +2 to hit, but must remove 1 damage dice.
The player can chose to add 1 STR damage, but must remove 1 damage dice.

Good:
4d6 damage
The player can chose to add one of the following: 1d6 damage, +2 to-hit, or 1 STR damage.

They're exactly the same mechanically, but the player feels much better about the 2nd oe.

Arbane

2013-02-12, 12:29 PM

What genres can you evoke with just 3.x stuff? Lets assume the DM is allowed to restrict classes and possibly level ranges when attempting to evoke a specific genre. No house rules are allowed.

As far as I can tell D&D can simulate Horror (all the subtypes - cosmic, germane, survival), Aventure, Action, and Mystery. You can twist the dial anywhere between low and high fantasy. You can play at any time between the ancient Greeks and the Renaissance. Once you get past the Renaissance you're in choppy waters. There is a thing called Gaslamp Fantasy that might take you as far as the 1800s. You can make the system work for a decent number of physical locations although Europe is the focus.

From my limited experience, the only genre D&D really does a good job of simulating is ... D&D.

You also can't really get an adversarial game out of D&D. The DM holds all the cards. The rules are way to ambiguous for PVP.

Given how often old-school D&D play WAS adversarial (the phrase 'killer DM' didn't come from nowhere) I find that kind of funny.

Clawhound

2013-02-12, 12:30 PM

When Mearls stated that Fighter = Monk = Barbarian, I took that not as a statement of the obvious, but as a commitment in design goals. I also took it as a public acknowledgement that they had learned something.

To me, having the monk included with the fighter and the barbarian is more revealing. That's a big change for the monk.

Cavelcade

2013-03-04, 03:56 PM

Did the thread just...die? Well, anyway, reading the last few weeks of Legends and Lore articles, the first week was pretty bleh, just stuff about healing (http://www.wizards.com/DnD/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4ll/20130218) and how hard it is to decide what they want to do with it.

Second week is a tiny bit more interesting, with one worrying sentence for me: Thus, a cleric and a druid are on equal terms here. The same would apply to a paladin with a specific focus on healing. (http://www.wizards.com/DnD/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4ll/20130225) So a cleric and druid should be able to heal away fine and still do whatever they want - but a paladin would have to specialise. Seems the usual "melee focus doesn't get things!!!" to me.

The third one basically says people want to play Legolas and they want him to be awesome (http://www.wizards.com/DnD/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4ll/20130304). A noble enough goal.

noparlpf

2013-03-04, 05:49 PM

"After the core rules for the game are done, we really want to stop adding so much stuff to the mechanics of the game."

Wait, wasn't the idea to release a bunch of "modules" with optional rules?

Yora

2013-03-04, 07:01 PM

It's been over a year and the result is still not looking any better than it was back then. I would say, it even is looking less promissing with every version. It's starting to fell like 4th edition all over again.
So instead I feel a lot more like going with E10 Pathfinder and call it a day. There is no need for Paizo to reinvent their game and they seem to be pretty much done with rulebooks now. It's a nice complete and stable system, for which I am expecting a smooth future like for AD&D. It's over 30 years old and even without any new releases or support it's still popular. And it only really went off the center stage because WotC wanted to clear the table after buying out TSR and cut all support. Paizo might at the most do some minor revision somewhere in the next 10 years but keep the game in print and have it as a nice cash cow.
But with WotC, I really getting more and more of a feeling of throwing out something new every 5 years and completely dropping everything they've been doing before.
PF is far from a perfect game or even a really great one, but I know what I have and I know how to make it work for me. I don't feel like chasing after WotCs next great awesome ideas anymore.

Stubbazubba

2013-03-04, 11:55 PM

Jacob.Tyr

2013-03-05, 12:23 AM

The worst sign for Next is the complete lack of attention anyone is paying it anymore. Even here, this thread has sunk down far from the first page for over a week. No one, outside of Wizards' forum and the dedicated 5e ENWorld forum, is even talking about it anymore. The gaming world got a whiff of Next, and has largely moved on.

I started playing Pathfinder again last month, and honestly can't imagine paying money for a game that can do basic things with how much is already out there for free in PF... I hope they figure out a way to deal with this because a gaming world without DnD is going to be strange.

MukkTB

2013-03-05, 01:58 AM

There isn't much to say about next anymore. There aren't any brave new concepts or ideas backing it up. 4E at least came in with this shining idea of balance. There are other roleplaying games out there with unique resolution mechanics and ways to control the narrative.

Scowling Dragon

2013-03-05, 02:24 AM

Yeah. The release of 4e was met with thundering praise, and maddening rage.

Next is being met with: "Eh?".

And thats possibly the worst thing that could happen with it.

JusticeZero

2013-03-05, 02:34 AM

well, i'm watching it.. but if they don't deliver something substantially new from what we've got already, i'm not seeing it as worth moving to. And so far, it's looking like not only an iterative change but a retrograde one in many ways. 4th ed addressed a lot of standing issues that I had.. partly. It pushed me away by making the characters very complex, and by ripping out the details that I would use to ease my load as a worldbuilder - that just makes things hard on me.
I'm looking forward to seeing the system. I'll definitely look through it. But i'm not hearing anything so far that makes me think that they are going to make bold innovations that make the system easier to run and run with creatively.

Morty

2013-03-05, 04:11 AM

I don't feel like chasing after WotCs next great awesome ideas anymore.

The problem here is that WotC doesn't even have great awesome ideas at this point. I get a strong impression that they really don't know what they want to do with D&D Next - and lack of clear vision is a very bad sign for any creative endeavor.
If they want to compete with Pathfinder, they need to make something new, fresh and even revolutionary. If they shuffle things around but ultimately provide more of the same old, people who want something new won't care and people who don't like change and want to stick to what's familiar will see no reason to stop playing 3.5 and Pathfinder.

Yora

2013-03-05, 04:59 AM

The first playtest packages were indeed quite good. The new system for BAB and skills seemed quite great actually. But then they come with skill dice and expertise dice for everyone, and the game seems to get more complicated than older ones.
No thanks.

Kurald Galain

2013-03-05, 06:45 AM

Yeah. The release of 4e was met with thundering praise, and maddening rage.

Next is being met with: "Eh?".

And thats possibly the worst thing that could happen with it.

Indeed. Say what you will about 4E, but it was certainly innovative. 5E is not bringing anything to the table we haven't seen a dozen times before. You simply can't excite people on a new game with an advantage mechanic and with skill dice; they're ultimately not major things.

Rhynn

2013-03-05, 06:46 AM

DrBurr

2013-03-05, 09:44 AM

1337 b4k4

2013-03-05, 09:46 AM

Next does look like it's floundering for ideas. Reading the playtest material, I was struck by the way it harkened back to older editions in a few places, but overall it's a weird mess of "I like this, I don't like that, what are they trying to do?" In some ways, it's really simple - but then incongruous complexity get tacked on in other places.

The good news is that there are a lot of people innovating with D&D out there, in small but striking ways, producing awesome games like Adventurer Conqueror King or Dungeon Crawl Classics. The OGL guaranteed that D&D isn't going to die, even if WotC fails with it. (So long as the OGL is left untouched, anyway.)

If I had to try and predict the future, I would say that D&D Next will be the last edition of the D&D rules set developed and published for some time, whether WotC plans that to be the case or not. I just don't believe, between the OGL, the SRD, the OSR, the internet and the rise of (easy) indie publishing, that selling rule sets is enough to sustain a company anymore. In light of that, I truly truly hope that WotC succeeds in making Next something of a Rosetta stone for D&D, allowing players and groups to shift between editions and play styles easily. For that to work, there really won't be any new and exciting things coming out of the rules, but it would mean that they could spend their time and money producing supplemental materials (adventures, settings etc) targeting Next and those materials would be easily convertible to whatever edition the people are playing. Rather than selling a module or book to only the current players of the current edition, they would be able to sell to all players of every edition.

^ also makes a good point. I said at the beginning of this that WotC appears to be treating this play test like a real beta test, not like the marketing versions that companies like Google use. And game testing and development is a slow slogging process that isn't very exciting or interesting in the early phases. Sure as things start coming together and everything nears ship date it gets more exciting, but early on this stuff is boring.

Alejandro

2013-03-05, 09:50 AM

The problem with Next is its really still in the Conceptual stage and won't be out of it for who knows how long. There constantly tweaking core mechanics trying to "perfect" them which isn't exciting. Really they announced the Playtest and everyone reacted like its the new edition played it saw that it wasn't complete, got bored and went back to playing their normal game.

Perhaps when its nearer to completion they'll be another wave of enthusiasm but don't expect a constant conversation on it save for some pops when there's a new packet or class.

This, in my opinion. I mean, I was there for the first in person play test at Pentacon, and there was an amazing line. But, people were expecting more material than there was, it's not even 5% developed yet.

obryn

2013-03-05, 09:55 AM

Perhaps when its nearer to completion they'll be another wave of enthusiasm but don't expect a constant conversation on it save for some pops when there's a new packet or class.
Yeah, I'm ... well, an anti-fan of how Next's development is going. Like most everyone else, I have a version of D&D I'm happy enough with. (And I have dozens of other, non-D&D games which don't have D&D's baggage.)

But still, I think it's a bit unfair to worry about how enthusiastic the fanbase is right now. Rest assured, the final months up to its 40th anniversary release will pull out all the stops, try to rally the fanbase, try to appeal to more than just us D&D nerds*, and have press releases galore.

-O

* True story - I was the president of a medieval combat pseudo-LARP on my grad school campus that was the closest thing to a gaming club there - which is sad, because Bloomington-Normal has deep roots in the TTRPG industry. During the press for 3.0's release, some marketing folks hired by WotC contacted me to reserve some space for their big "3rd Edition" event, selling a crappy new 3e box set. It was a huge flop; hardly anyone outside the club dropped by despite a full-armored Redgar and all kinds of other stuff. The marketing folks spent their time going to bars, giving away D&D t-shirts and branded bottle openers (I had like a half-dozen at one point, but they're all gone by now). WotC's been trying to appeal to non-gamers for a long time...

Scowling Dragon

2013-03-05, 02:21 PM

I think there are some things they should do:

Don't concentrate on one idea. Throw out TONS of different materials, with different rules styles. See what sticks. Then slowly start wittling it down. Absorbing aspects from some of the games into each other and such.

Frankly dedicating ALL their resources towards 1 style of gameplay is crap.

Or they could just: You know. Combine 3e and 4e and do it well:

Have powers that depend on how well your rested. Just don't make it as choppy and disjointed like the 4e rules.

Construct monsters based on monster style (Stealthy, Brawny, Soldier, SpellCaster, Buffer, And exetera). Not monster type. HOWEVER, have monster types as things that you can attach to the thing (Like Undead traits or Construct Traits or such).

Give Fighting Classes UNIQUE things to do. Like make a better acrobatics stunt system allowing for the cool stuff we see in movies. A more in depth acrobatics would be nice. I think spreading out Attacks between attacking and defending would work pretty cool. Like the Codex Martialis however more fantastical.

Like striking SO FAST you hit away WATER. Leaps that make you fly. Perfect aim, capable of shooting into the smallest hole to inflict massive damage.

Tone down power for casters slightly. I think spreading out spell levels from 1-7 over 20 levels instead of 1-9 will work better. 7 Level spells are pretty epic. But their not so insane they can wipeout an entire castle and such.

Tone down the level of buffs and magic items, make them unessential to the system and BAM.

THERE. Thats I game I would buy since it simply improves on the system I already love with things I think they where getting right in 4e.

And I think it would make 4e-ers happy too. Toned down spellcasters, similar monster system. And fun stuff for martial characters.

Morty

2013-03-05, 02:30 PM

The problem with Next is its really still in the Conceptual stage and won't be out of it for who knows how long. There constantly tweaking core mechanics trying to "perfect" them which isn't exciting. Really they announced the Playtest and everyone reacted like its the new edition played it saw that it wasn't complete, got bored and went back to playing their normal game.

Perhaps when its nearer to completion they'll be another wave of enthusiasm but don't expect a constant conversation on it save for some pops when there's a new packet or class.

The problem is that the playtest packages and development journals we have recieved so far display a distressful lack of direction, fresh ideas and vision. It's not that the game is unfinished - it's that we have no reason to believe it will be worthwhile when it gets finished.

Cavelcade

2013-03-05, 02:52 PM

Like make a better acrobatics stunt system allowing for the cool stuff we see in movies. A more in depth acrobatics would be nice.

I agree with most things in your post, but this thing I agree with the most. This would be awesome.

DrBurr

2013-03-05, 03:15 PM

The problem is that the playtest packages and development journals we have recieved so far display a distressful lack of direction, fresh ideas and vision. It's not that the game is unfinished - it's that we have no reason to believe it will be worthwhile when it gets finished.

Did I not state Conceptual Stage? They pretty much still determining which rules worked in the old systems to make a vanilla game. Don't expect modules or a new combat system cause there not that far into the game. Pretty much they decided to make a new edition and now there just going to spend a year and a half talking about a new edition and what they want and think we want

MukkTB

2013-03-05, 04:32 PM

Well the foundational engine is where you put the innovation. Innovation is not something you strap on as an afterthought when everything else is done.

Morty

2013-03-05, 04:38 PM

Did I not state Conceptual Stage? They pretty much still determining which rules worked in the old systems to make a vanilla game. Don't expect modules or a new combat system cause there not that far into the game. Pretty much they decided to make a new edition and now there just going to spend a year and a half talking about a new edition and what they want and think we want

We've recieved too much mechanical infornation for it to be the "conceptual stage". How can I not expect a new combat system if a combat system has already been given to us and it's about as new as a microwaved meal?

Kurald Galain

2013-03-05, 04:46 PM

We've recieved too much mechanical infornation for it to be the "conceptual stage".
Precisely. The core mechanics and most details of how classes work are already "locked in", based on the information we've received with the last couple of playtests.

Besides, a game design doesn't spend a year in a "conceptual stage". Even a rank amateur can design faster than that, and WOTC is paying their designers for a reason.

Craft (Cheese)

2013-03-05, 05:15 PM

Precisely. The core mechanics and most details of how classes work are already "locked in", based on the information we've received with the last couple of playtests.

Besides, a game design doesn't spend a year in a "conceptual stage". Even a rank amateur can design faster than that, and WOTC is paying their designers for a reason.

Actually, a year of pre-production sounds about right. IIRC, Pixar spends even more time, 18 months, on making the concept for its movies before any actual work on the film begins. Solid pre-production works out your project's goals and lets you spend the production time working only on implementing those goals. Skipping pre-production means you generally wind up tripping over yourself during production, changing fundamental aspects of the work mid-stream and trying to figure out how to take your existing efforts and make it click with the new stuff.

Kurald Galain

2013-03-05, 05:21 PM

Actually, a year of pre-production sounds about right. IIRC, Pixar spends even more time, 18 months, on making the concept for its movies before any actual work on the film begins.
The difference is that maxing a Pixar movie requires several hundred people, whereas designing a RPG requires only a handful. Frankly I find it absurd to spend 18 months pre-production on a rulebook.

Anyway, we do know from designer comments that large swaths of the rules are in fact finished, so the game clearly is neither in pre-production nor in concept stage.

surfarcher

2013-03-05, 05:48 PM

Ran I6 Ravenloft on Next on the weekend and every one of us had a ball. That's thumbs up from 6 people, anyway.

Alejandro

2013-03-05, 05:49 PM

Oracle_Hunter

2013-03-05, 06:07 PM

Actually, a year of pre-production sounds about right. IIRC, Pixar spends even more time, 18 months, on making the concept for its movies before any actual work on the film begins. Solid pre-production works out your project's goals and lets you spend the production time working only on implementing those goals. Skipping pre-production means you generally wind up tripping over yourself during production, changing fundamental aspects of the work mid-stream and trying to figure out how to take your existing efforts and make it click with the new stuff.
While RPGs are not multi-million dollar movies, it does look like WotC skipped the pre-production stage of 5e :smalltongue:

No, WotC made some bad errors by promising a playtest of 5e and trotting out a warmed-over combat system and nothing else. It over-promised to the Base and that means they were set-up for disappointment. Disappointment begets disinterest and as a result WotC has effectively wasted all the money they put into this playtest if they had hoped it was going to draw new interest to their D&D brand.

Oh well. It means more customers for me :smallbiggrin:

EvanWaters

2013-03-05, 06:09 PM

They really shouldn't have announced DDN until they were much further along with it. We're looking at no real new D&D product until 2014 (probably Gen Con), and while Wizards can probably sustain itself just with Magic revenue alone because that game is HUGE, it's a bad position to be in. 2e had a few "final" products to ease into 3e, 3e had late-game stuff, 4e's getting screwed. There are the re-releases which are nice, and the PDFs which are something they should have- well, they should never have pulled them in the first place, but yay learning from mistakes.

I expect they may have intended to have something ready by this year, but something convinced them to throw out a bunch of things and start over. (This may have happened around the time of Cook's departure.) And honestly, the goal of trying to make an edition "for everyone" is not helping.

There's just so much baggage with people now saying that it's not D&D without the Great Wheel, without nine alignments, without Vancian casting, without (insert favorite sacred cow here.) What the game is, is being defined increasingly narrowly and that gives you less design space.

Stubbazubba

2013-03-05, 09:15 PM

The problem with Next is its really still in the Conceptual stage and won't be out of it for who knows how long.

The apologists will always run to this defense, but the tone taken in the playtest packets and developer journals and such indicates otherwise; they're locking in class mechanics and numbers-scaling, they said they wanted to get low level done well before moving on to high, and they've moved on to high, so based on their own statements, they're well out of the "conceptual" stage. The "concept" for Next is "one system to rule them all." Unfortunately, that means nothing. To boot, every piece of innovation they have spit out (Dis/Advantage, Expertise Dice, new Skill paradigms, etc.) contradicts that concept.

There constantly tweaking core mechanics trying to "perfect" them which isn't exciting.

Didn't you just say they were in the conceptual stage? At what part of the conceptual stage do you typically "perfect" your core mechanics?

Really they announced the Playtest and everyone reacted like its the new edition played it saw that it wasn't complete, got bored and went back to playing their normal game.

That's one theory, but here's another: They announced the playtest and everyone reacted like the core mechanics would take innovative steps to improve the experience, played it, saw that that wasn't the case, didn't feel like the experience was improved, got bored and went back to playing their normal game.

Perhaps when its nearer to completion they'll be another wave of enthusiasm but don't expect a constant conversation on it save for some pops when there's a new packet or class.

You mean like how Guild Wars 2, the Avengers, and many other successful entertainment properties have had throughout their years of development recently? Mostly what WotC is proving is that they don't have the business savvy to run a great marketing campaign during development, nor do they have the technical and artistic chops to deliver a great product.

navar100

2013-03-05, 11:25 PM

I think general enthusiasm is just not there. With TSR gone and WOTC announcing they're making a 3rd Edition, everyone was cheering. Everyone was looking forward to something new. Everyone jumped on the 3E bandwagon because D&D was back.

Same thing with 4E. As much as I like 3E I acknowledge the reality that some people are way less than thrilled with it as I am. However, even I was enthusiastic about 4E at the time when told it was being made. I wasn't tired of 3E, but I was looking forward to new stuff for the sake of new stuff. We know of the result.

With 5E, there's no market for enthusiasm. All the p'ed off fired 3E customers are either sticking with their 3E books or live happily ever after in Pathfinder. All the 4E fans are happily playing their 4E games shouting off the roof tops in glee because it's so perfectly balanced for their tastes and easy to DM. (Sincere, no snark sarcasm intended.) Everyone has a D&D they're happy with. WOTC wants to have its cake and eat it too by getting back the fired customers while keeping those whom they kept. However, the fired customers have no need to come back and those who stayed have no need to reinterview.

I couldn't say what WOTC should/could have done to generate enthusiasm. There's an inherent piqued interest for something new that would be 5E, but to get and keep the cheering crowds requires a lot more Something than what they're doing now.

Rhynn

2013-03-06, 12:03 AM

I think general enthusiasm is just not there. With TSR gone and WOTC announcing they're making a 3rd Edition, everyone was cheering. Everyone was looking forward to something new. Everyone jumped on the 3E bandwagon because D&D was back.

I don't really recall it this way. Heck, I wasn't even active on any kind of RPG discussion groups back then, and even I pretty much went "money-hungry bastiches razzafrazzin brzzlnffl" all on my own. So did my players.

5E's "main goal" (unify all players of all editions) struck me immediately as completely insanely over-ambitious. That's on the level of "I'll pluck the moon from the sky and eat it with some red wine because it is made of cheese!" It's just not possible to make a game that's like OD&D/BD&D and 4E at the same time, or even AD&D and 3E at the same time. The earlier games rely on a level of simplicity that 3E and 4E just can't work with. So you get what we have now - 3E mechanics with some old-school flavor (obviously they're backpedalling from 4E - that's what 5E is all about, after all, the apparently shockingly bad financial performance of 4E, which is also why there's no "final books" for it in production, they literally cut off the whole line so stop hemorrhaging money into it).

The quest to reach grognards or the OSR (http://theosrg.blogspot.fi/) (which is obviously actively there; they've reached out to several big OSR bloggers) is futile, frankly. They've already got their preferred edition, anything WotC offer is going to be a compromise and thus less good for their purposes, and the real innovation is coming from within the OSR (Dungeon Crawl Classics, Adventurer Conqueror King, Stars Without Number, etc.).

Stubbazubba

2013-03-06, 01:01 AM

Which begs the question; couldn't WotC stop trying to put all their eggs in one basket and just start developing multiple lines? They could use the same setting, or develop multiple settings, and then just release different games? It might just be a touched-up version of each old rulebook, or it might be an incremental adjustment on those old systems, with descriptors like D&D Tactics (4e?), D&D Classic (2e?), etc. Then support each of those lines separately?

Here's the problem with this: Assuming the "player base" is 100 people large, and 25 prefer 1st Edition, 25 prefer 2nd, 25 prefer 3rd, and 25 prefer 4th, then you will sell 25 copies of each of these books (at, say, $35/pop), giving you net revenue of $875 each, or a total of $3,500. In the old model, your development costs for 1 book could be as high as say $1,000 and when 100 people bought it you'd still make a hefty profit. But if only 25 are going to buy it, then you have to divide your development resources, as well, meaning you can only spend $250 on each book or line to make the same profit. In short, there's a fixed development cost for each line, and running multiple lines simultaneously multiplies that cost, with no guarantee, and in fact even an implicit understanding, that your fanbase doesn't want all of it.

Is that a valid worry, though? Yeah, some players will only play one system, but many play multiple systems. If you sell 1 book to 100 players, you might make $3500, but if you sell 1 book to 100 players, 2 books to 50 players, 3 books to 25 players, and all 4 to 10 players, you've now made $6,475, almost twice as much. So that gives you some wiggle room on the development costs, though you've still got to cut those down somewhat.

I dunno, I'm just musing, but I think breaking D&D into smaller games is a worthwhile idea, I just don't know how feasible it is, financially-speaking, for a company on as short of a leash as WotC.

Rhynn

2013-03-06, 02:30 AM

WotC's business model has seemed, from the start, to be foisting new books on a largely static customer base. They keep trying to make tabletop RPGs more mainstream, but that era is gone and probably not coming back. (And that's not a bad thing. TTRPGs don't need to be widely popular, just like playing roguelike CRPGs doesn't need to be. Heck, neither even need big corporations with giant production values.)

So they've been trying to sell a new full set of books to the same customers. Which also helps explain the number of books that offered more rules, because "everyone needs more rules", but not everyone needs a particular adventure or setting.

If you look at older editions (although there were quite a few), the big focus before AD&D 2E was adventure modules. But not everyone is going to want every module, so each sells to a smaller crowd, making less profit for your work. This was probably exacerbated by the move over the mid and late 80s into plot-based, narrow adventures that were harder to integrate into any specific campaign, and the focus on campaign worlds and their exclusive and particular natures. AD&D 1E modules were mostly not set in any particular world, and were absent such references. 2E adventures (I wouldn't even call them modules) were intricately location- and setting-tied, which made a lot more work to port over - if you even felt you could or should.

WotC could, and maybe should, just run 2 (or more) lines of new D&D, in styles old and new, and then focus on selling settings and adventure modules that they spend less money making. Frankly, since 3E (or maybe the 2E revised books), D&D books have become almost garish, and I have to imagine all that art and design costs a fair bit. It's just not that necessary. Most RPG books look just great without full color on every page, etc.

The big problem with the notion of "one edition to rule them all" is that if you make a game that is equal parts OD&D, B/X or BECMI, AD&D 1E, AD&D 2E, 3E, and 4E, most players are only going to like less than half of it. That's not a very good ratio - especially when what they like already exists as a game of its own.

Kurald Galain

2013-03-06, 06:33 AM

Ran I6 Ravenloft on Next on the weekend and every one of us had a ball. That's thumbs up from 6 people, anyway.I'm sure you did. However, you need to look at the bigger picture. The question isn't "is this game fun", the question is "is this game so much more fun than the games people already own (or that are available for free, like 3E/PF) that people will pay money for it?"
I suspect that you also would have had a ball if you had used the 2E, 3E, or 4E ruleset.

To be fair, 'locked in' on a playtest does not mean much in terms of permanence.I'd say it does. Between the first few iterations of the playtest, there aree large radical changes; and between the later iterations, there aren't. The design team needs to move forward, and the way to do that is to have certain building blocks fixed and build upon them.

Which begs the question; couldn't WotC stop trying to put all their eggs in one basket and just start developing multiple lines?It strikes me that they're doing precisely that, by bringing earlier edition books back to the market. On the one hand, that's great for the fans. On the other hand, it shows a lack of faith in 4E and 5E that they're willing to compete against it.

Morty

2013-03-06, 06:58 AM

I agree that WotC's approach to please everyone is what will most likely cause 5E to please noone. I believe that in any creative endeavor it's very important to know exactly what you want and then work to achieve it. With 5E, WotC seems to either not know what they want or want to do everything at once, and neither attitude is likely to result in a functional game.
I think that an approach to a new edition of D&D that would actually have a chance of working is to look at 3E or 4E, decide what went wrong there and try to make a system that does right what the previous game did right but removes that's wrong. I'm not a fan of 4E, but that game had a goal and achieved it, it just didn't work as well as they hoped for various reasons. But at least they weren't afraid to do new things they believed would benefit the game, which is what 5E sorely lacks - they seem really afraid to move away from the "iconic" things even if it means that 5E will be same old with some new features tacked on. Then there's of course the fact that those new features aren't very good.

Tehnar

2013-03-06, 07:27 AM

noparlpf

2013-03-06, 07:44 AM

I think its much simpler then that. The design team is simply incompetent.

Just look at the first playtest package. For such a simple document, that a team of designers have been working on for I don't know how many months that the end result looked like it did, speaks volumes about their incompetence.

And I'm not talking about the mechanics, its just the number of inconsistencies, basic math errors, and piss poor editing that shows their lack of skill and / or dedication to the project.

Months? When I first went through it (after the fiasco that was the initial release, with their site not working all day and whatnot, and a lot of people actually getting it from other players who had managed to get it before the site started having trouble and had re-uploaded it somewhere), I assumed they had woken up, realised they had promised a playtest packet by that day, didn't have time to sober up, and just shat out whatever they could and gave it to us.
Probably not literally. But even drunk I wouldn't make those kinds of mistakes. And the overall quality felt like something they'd only spent like, three days tops working on.

Edit: The main difference between amateurs and professionals here doesn't seem to be qualifications, it's who gets paid. So there's part of the problem.
I think WotC would be better off writing a 3.6 and a 4.5 instead of 5e. Spend a solid six months doing nothing but trawling the big forums to see what most 3.X fans like and dislike, and what they want, and what most 4e fans like and dislike, and what they want, then put that to use revising instead of trying to come up with a new edition. (I'm not sure if enough people play older versions and would be open to change for it to be worth it to revise those too.)

Synovia

2013-03-06, 08:26 AM

]I think that an approach to a new edition of D&D that would actually have a chance of working is to look at 3E or 4E, decide what went wrong there and try to make a system that does right what the previous game did right but removes that's wrong.[/B] I'm not a fan of 4E, but that game had a goal and achieved it, it just didn't work as well as they hoped for various reasons. But at least they weren't afraid to do new things they believed would benefit the game, which is what 5E sorely lacks - they seem really afraid to move away from the "iconic" things even if it means that 5E will be same old with some new features tacked on. Then there's of course the fact that those new features aren't very good.

I just don't believe this is possible. The stuff that 4E players think is great is exactly the stuff that the Grognards think is wrong.

Martial powers led to interesting 4E martial characters. Grognards call it "weaboo fighting magic" and want it gone. You can't build a system than neither group is going to be pissed off about.

Rhynn

2013-03-06, 08:45 AM

Grognards call it "weaboo fighting magic" and want it gone.

:smallconfused:

They don't. That's what 4chan /tg/ 3E players called The Book of Nine Swords. Way to present a straw man argument though!

Synovia

2013-03-06, 08:52 AM

:smallconfused:

They don't. That's what 4chan /tg/ 3E players called The Book of Nine Swords. Way to present a straw man argument though!

I've seen 4E called "weaboo fighting magic" by more than one Grognard, so its clearly not a strawman.

Also, "That's what 4chan /tg/ 3E players " is the "No True Scotsman" fallacy. You should avoid fallacies when accusing someone of using one.

obryn

2013-03-06, 09:00 AM

:smallconfused:

They don't. That's what 4chan /tg/ 3E players called The Book of Nine Swords. Way to present a straw man argument though!
So... are you arguing that it was whole-heartedly embraced by the entrenched OSR crowd? :smallconfused:

Or the folks who were running 3e using the same default assumptions they used in 1e/2e?

-O

Morty

2013-03-06, 09:07 AM

I just don't believe this is possible. The stuff that 4E players think is great is exactly the stuff that the Grognards think is wrong.

Martial powers led to interesting 4E martial characters. Grognards call it "weaboo fighting magic" and want it gone. You can't build a system than neither group is going to be pissed off about.

Perhaps I wasn't clear. I wasn't saying that it's possible to make a game that would please both 4E players and 3E players - my argument was that WotC should pick one of these paradigms (and by extension, the group the follows it) and stick to it. This way they might actually get a game that the 3E fans or 4E fans would buy. And maybe they'd also draw players who like the ideas behind one of those editions but are turned off by design mistakes.

Rhynn

2013-03-06, 09:19 AM

Also, "That's what 4chan /tg/ 3E players " is the "No True Scotsman" fallacy. You should avoid fallacies when accusing someone of using one.

That's where the term came from. That's not a fallacy, that's an etymology.

So... are you arguing that it was whole-heartedly embraced by the entrenched OSR crowd? :smallconfused:

No, I'm saying Synovia's argument was reductive and insulting. "4E had martial characters right and grognards just hate it."

Synovia

2013-03-06, 09:33 AM

No, I'm saying Synovia's argument was reductive and insulting. "4E had martial characters right and grognards just hate it."

Are you really arguing that the issue the grognards had wasn't due to the power structure? Because that seems to be 99% of the complaints to me.

The rest of the complaints are "I don't understand this system, so I'm going to call it video-gamey"

Synovia

2013-03-06, 09:36 AM

That's where the term came from. That's not a fallacy, that's an etymology.

Arguing essentially "only the people on 4chan" say that is the fallacy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

There are plenty of examples on this forum, enworld, brilliantgameologists,etc of grognards complaing about 4E and fighter powers.

noparlpf

2013-03-06, 11:43 AM

Scowling Dragon

2013-03-06, 11:58 AM

Are you really arguing that the issue the grognards had wasn't due to the power structure? Because that seems to be 99% of the complaints to me.

The rest of the complaints are "I don't understand this system, so I'm going to call it video-gamey"

WOW. Wonderful method of thinking:

"I like it. Others don't. Therefore they are just stupid poopy head grognards"

Self congratulatory, denies any possibility of being wrong, and insults everybody else.

Fantastic. Im going to ignore you now.

FatR

2013-03-06, 01:03 PM

The problem with Next is its really still in the Conceptual stage and won't be out of it for who knows how long.

The real problem is, their conceptual space is not exciting at all. Every single thing Next even attempts to do had already been done in DnD or its direct derivatives, and most likely several times over. Without the DnD brand slapped on it, Next wouldn't have drawn more attention than an average retroclone, and probably less than most of them. There is nothing among the concepts we've seen that justifies reinventing the game once again. In fact, I have a strong suspicion that they have no real concept of what they even want to achieve, beyond the vague idea of making the game simpler and more accessible, and are trying to de-facto crowdsource the development.

noparlpf

2013-03-06, 01:07 PM

The real problem is, their conceptual space is not exciting at all. Every single thing Next even attempts to do had already been done in DnD or its direct derivatives, and most likely several times over. Without the DnD brand slapped on it, Next wouldn't have drawn more attention than an average retroclone, and probably less than most of them. There is nothing among the concepts we've seen that justifies reinventing the game once again. In fact, I have a strong suspicion that they have no real concept of what they even want to achieve, beyond the vague idea of making the game simpler and more accessible, and are trying to de-facto crowdsource the development.

But they're not, they're mostly just doing what they feel like and not paying attention to what people are saying. Comments like "we've been moving ahead while you all have the last iteration of the playtest" (paraphrased) suggest that they're just showing off what they have already but don't really care what we think of it.

FatR

2013-03-06, 01:11 PM

Are you really arguing that the issue the grognards had wasn't due to the power structure?
The power structure of 4E is probably the biggest issue with 4E, yes. However, you're grossly misinterpreting what the people's problems with it are. Here's a hint: there don't seem to be much intersection between the crowd who likes Bot9S and the crowd who likes 4E.

Ashdate

2013-03-06, 01:26 PM

I'm reminded of a quote by Mark Rosewater (http://www.wizards.com/Magic/magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/mm/218) (at least, I believe it was him), who said:

If you make a game that everyone likes but no one loves, it will fail.

So here's the million dollar question: we (likely) all play some edition of D&D (be it 3.5, 4e, or otherwise); what do you love about those games? And what do you love about DnD Next so far?

obryn

2013-03-06, 01:29 PM

There's a new podcast out. Among other things, the Warlord is a topic of discussion.

And basically, R.I.P. Warlord; it's becoming a Fighter specialty, because the developers think it's basically a fancy Fighter. (As opposed to paladins, barbarians, and rangers, because)

This more or less cuts off my serious interest in Next at the knees. Not that it wasn't on life support already, mind you. I'm still getting the core because I want to see how WotC does a B/X retro-clone after hundreds of thousands of dollars are pumped into it, but beyond that, I'm pretty much done.

-O

Synovia

2013-03-06, 01:32 PM

WOW. Wonderful method of thinking:

"I like it. Others don't. Therefore they are just stupid poopy head grognards"

Its too bad I neither said, implied, or meant anything like that.

Here's a hint: there don't seem to be much intersection between the crowd who likes Bot9S and the crowd who likes 4E.
We disagree about that. My experience says otherwise.

Maquise

2013-03-06, 01:32 PM

Could somebody give me a TL;DR breakdown of how things are going? I'm not sure based on trying to read the thread.

Kurald Galain

2013-03-06, 01:35 PM

Could somebody give me a TL;DR breakdown of how things are going? I'm not sure based on trying to read the thread.

"Badly" :smallcool:

Synovia

2013-03-06, 01:36 PM

Could somebody give me a TL;DR breakdown of how things are going? I'm not sure based on trying to read the thread.

WOTC doesn't seem to have any clear focus on what they're trying to do, and Next just seems like a mishmash of stuff that we've seen before. They're trying to please everyone, and instead disappointing everyone.

PairO'Dice Lost

2013-03-06, 01:41 PM

The power structure of 4E is probably the biggest issue with 4E, yes. However, you're grossly misinterpreting what the people's problems with it are. Here's a hint: there don't seem to be much intersection between the crowd who likes Bot9S and the crowd who likes 4E.

And it's not even like there are massive irreconcilable differences, either, just small objections to certain mechanics or the "feel" of those mechanics; a lot of people who like ToB but dislike 4e do so because maneuvers are refreshable while exploits aren't, so something as simple as adding a refresh mechanism to encounter powers might have been able to draw in a lot of those fans.

The same few topics tend to be brought up in the edition wars over and over again (martial dailies, warlord healing, changed fluff, crap noncombat mechanics, boring items, identical power structure, etc.) so WotC could potentially have done 5e by starting with late 4e, tweaking the few major dealbreakers for 3e fans, and bringing back a lot of pre-4e fluff, and they'd have been fine. Add a refresh mechanism for encounter powers, turn the warlord's healing into temporary HP, differentiate the martial power structure the same way Essentials and psionics differ from the norm, make the Bael Turath origin for tieflings setting-specific and refluff them and devas into AD&D-style tieflings and aasimar, and so forth, and voila, a "compromise" 5e that people might actually like.

Heck, Essentials was already making 4e resemble 3e more and was bringing back some lapsed players, and all of the prior editions have basically started out by taking the end-of-edition books (Unearthed Arcana in 1e, the Players Options line in 2e, the Tomes of X in 3e) and incorporating a lot of those mechanics in the next edition, so I have no idea why they didn't go that route.

And what do you love about DnD Next so far?

...

...

*crickets*

And basically, R.I.P. Warlord; it's becoming a Fighter specialty, because the developers think it's basically a fancy Fighter. (As opposed to paladins, barbarians, and rangers, because)

I'd say that actually a good move on their part, conceptually, in that merging warlord and fighter gives the fighter a schtick besides "weapon style guy" or "pseudo-tank" and helps avoid falling into the Big Dumb Fighter trap. Now, they should actually merge them instead of making the warlord a side note, but this being WotC of course they managed to screw that up.

obryn

2013-03-06, 01:44 PM

Here's a hint: there don't seem to be much intersection between the crowd who likes Bot9S and the crowd who likes 4E.
Eh? I run 4e regularly, as my D&D of choice, and I think Bo9S was probably the best, most innovative book released for 3.5. (I'm also a fan of the flavor in PHB2, Complete Mage, and Complete Champion - basically latter-era 3.5.) It's sharp, clean, strongly conceptual, and mechanically tight. Basically, all the same features I prize in the better 4e classes.

I don't really want to run 3.5 now, but I might play in it, given time and opportunity. And whether or not Bo9S is allowed is a strong indicator of whether or not I'd expect to enjoy the game.

-O

obryn

2013-03-06, 01:45 PM

I'd say that actually a good move on their part, conceptually, in that merging warlord and fighter gives the fighter a schtick besides "weapon style guy" or "pseudo-tank" and helps avoid falling into the Big Dumb Fighter trap. Now, they should actually merge them instead of making the warlord a side note, but this being WotC of course they managed to screw that up.
"Killing the Warlord and taking his stuff" is not in any sense fixing the Fighter's own conceptual niche.

-O

MukkTB

2013-03-06, 01:46 PM

I just don't believe this is possible. The stuff that 4E players think is great is exactly the stuff that the Grognards think is wrong.

Martial powers led to interesting 4E martial characters. Grognards call it "weaboo fighting magic" and want it gone. You can't build a system than neither group is going to be pissed off about.

Replace 'Grognard' with '3.x players' or 'players of older editions' and you wouldn't be so offensive. Calling anyone who doesn't like your edition best insulting names isn't going to make you many friends. It is especially true in your case where the insults have negligible impact on your main point anyway.

Scowling Dragon

2013-03-06, 01:46 PM

Its too bad I neither said, implied, or meant anything like that.

You called me a Grognard:

The stuff that 4E players think is great is exactly the stuff that the Grognards think is wrong.

You did not say "3e Players" or some other players. You specifically divided people into two groups:

4e Players who liked Fighter powers, and Grognards. Therefore implying that all that dislike 4e are just grognards.

You may have not meant it, but thats how grammar works.

Its like saying

"The stuff that makes mountain dew delicious is exactly the stuff that idiots say tastes bad"

Martial powers led to interesting 4E martial characters. Grognards call it "weaboo fighting magic" and want it gone.

Here you again didn't say "Opposition" but"Grognards".

Am I a Grognard because I though the implementation of fighter powers was lazy, and clunky?

Synovia

2013-03-06, 01:48 PM

Replace 'Grognard' with '3.x players' or 'players of older editions' and you wouldn't be so offensive. Calling anyone who doesn't like your edition best insulting names isn't going to make you many friends. It is especially true in your case where the insults have negligible impact on your main point anyway.

I play predominately 3.5. So 4E isn't "my edition".

Grognard:

grognard (plural grognards)
An old soldier.
(games, slang) Someone who enjoys playing board wargames, particularly the counter-heavy strategy board wargames from the 1970s and 1980s.
(games, slang) Someone who enjoys playing previous editions of roleplaying games when new editions of the game are available. [quotations ▼]
(computer games, slang) Inside the computer game development industry, a game fan who will buy every game released in a certain genre of computer game (RTS, or computer role-playing game, etc.).

Seems to fit perfectly to me.

Grognard isn't an insult. Its a term with a specific meaning.If you find that meaning insulting, thats your problem.

Synovia

2013-03-06, 01:52 PM

Here you again didn't say "Opposition" but"Grognards".

Because Grognard is exactly the right word. Grognard means "Old guard" basically. Its not an insult. Its a precise term for people who prefer the older edition.

If you're going to have a conniption, atleast know what you're fighting against.

Kurald Galain

2013-03-06, 02:00 PM

Heck, Essentials was already making 4e resemble 3e more and was bringing back some lapsed players,

It was, but it also alienated numerous 4E players. That is strong evidence to the notion that you really cannot make a game that appeals to fans of every single edition.

obryn

2013-03-06, 02:05 PM

Am I a Grognard because I though the implementation of fighter powers was lazy, and clunky?
No more than I'm some kind of storygame swine for thinking it was a great stride forward, bridging the gap between traditional and new-school games by assigning narrative control to players in a concise and easy-to-understand format. :smallsmile:

Without going into this, it should be noted that 4e holdouts like myself are, in fact, going to be "grognards" in some sense when Next is released. And I'll take the "4e grognard" label gladly. :smallwink:

-O

FatR

2013-03-06, 02:12 PM

And it's not even like there are massive irreconcilable differences, either, just small objections to certain mechanics or the "feel" of those mechanics; a lot of people who like ToB but dislike 4e do so because maneuvers are refreshable while exploits aren't, so something as simple as adding a refresh mechanism to encounter powers might have been able to draw in a lot of those fans.

This is by no means a small matter. Not only this change requires reworking literally half of 4E, but also represents a fundamental paradigm difference. Bot9S silently admitted that the old resource attrition model of adventuring doesn't, in fact, work anymore (health is recovered from wands, running out of spells only ever happens at low levels) and attempted to make a system for martial classes that took this into account. 4E tried to force the resource attrition model. The problem is, resource attrition is a flawed paradigm for a high adventure game and is even worse for pure dungeon exploration. In fact, one of the things Next should have been doing, but fails to do, is exploring ways to create an appearance of danger without directly incentivising 5-minute workdays and forcing GMs to choose between TPKing the party and making the enemies into scripted mobs.

Scowling Dragon

2013-03-06, 02:26 PM

Because Grognard is exactly the right word. Grognard means "Old guard" basically. Its not an insult. Its a precise term for people who prefer the older edition.

If you're going to have a conniption, atleast know what you're fighting against.

I was 12 years old when I picked up 4e and 4e was the first P&P RPG I ever played. :smallannoyed:

Seems to fit perfectly to me.

Grognard isn't an insult. Its a term with a specific meaning.If you find that meaning insulting, thats your problem.

It has multiple meanings that could be interpreted as insulting.

And as I showed above, doesn't really fit.

Just use a different term next time.

Its like if I said: "Your So Gay!" As in "Happy".

PairO'Dice Lost

2013-03-06, 02:47 PM

"Killing the Warlord and taking his stuff" is not in any sense fixing the Fighter's own conceptual niche.

"Fixing" the fighter's conceptual niche? No. Giving him something new and different instead of relegating him to the AD&D weapon-styles-and-no-other-customization fighter WotC went with? Definitely yes.

Like I said, I don't expect WotC to do it well, but currently the 5e wizard and cleric each have multiple paths you can take to drastically change the class's playstyle (evoker vs. illusionist vs. utility wizard, warpriest vs. trickster vs. blaster cleric) while the fighter and rogue have fairly rigid styles with minor differentiation; merging the fighter and the warlord would broaden the fighter's options and hopefully break him out of that mold.

It was, but it also alienated numerous 4E players. That is strong evidence to the notion that you really cannot make a game that appeals to fans of every single edition.

It certainly wouldn't bring in everyone, the same way plenty of AD&D players ignored Players Options and didn't like those mechanics making their way into 3e, but I think making 5e an Essentials-ified 4e with a more backwards-compatible flavor would be their best shot at making a game both 3e players and 4e players might like; the way they're actually making 5e doesn't really stand a chance of that.

This is by no means a small matter. Not only this change requires reworking literally half of 4E, but also represents a fundamental paradigm difference.

No more than introducing psionics or Essentials fundamentally changed the entire 4e paradigm. There are plenty of ways to add a "refresh" within the system without changing things too much: allow martial types to use any encounter power they know with any encounter slot instead of making each power 1/encounter, giving them a feature like "adrenaline surge" or something that lets them spend a daily to recover two encounter powers, give them "stamina points" to let them augment at-will exploits into encounter exploits, etc.

Same thing with martial healing--most people complaining about the warlord being "unrealistic" do so because they feel that once you're down, the warlord shouldn't be able to give you a pep-talk and have you be perfectly fine, as opposed to the warlord giving you a pep-talk to let you temporarily ignore wounds or something like you'd see in an action movie. A small change like "if Inspiring Word is used on an target with 0 or fewer HP in combat, the healing is treated as temporary HP" and giving out-of-combat Inspiring Word use a more medical flavor would go a long way to satisfying the 3e complainers, while hopefully only mildly annoying the 4e fans because the impact of the warlord's healing is basically unchanged (if you survive to the end of combat you can heal up as normal, it would only come up in more prolonged encounters).

Small changes in the presentation of the mechanics like those could allow 3e fans to accept more 4e mechanics in 5e despite not liking them in 4e. And yes, some changes would require reworking a good portion of 4e, that's kind of what a new edition usually entails...and it would make the 4e-5e transition closer to the easy, mostly-compatible 1e-2e transition than the flame-wars-infested 3e-4e transition.

Bot9S silently admitted that the old resource attrition model of adventuring doesn't, in fact, work anymore (health is recovered from wands, running out of spells only ever happens at low levels) and attempted to make a system for martial classes that took this into account.

Mmm, no, the problem there is that giving out healing wands like candy and adding a bunch of extra spells per day was probably a bad idea, not that resource attrition "doesn't work anymore." The "old" attrition model worked just fine in AD&D when you couldn't store any arbitrary spell in a wand for cheap (or buy a handful of them for cheap) and when you had around 4 spells per day per spell level at best instead of 6-7 plus consumables.

That, and the 5-minute workday and caster supremacy and other problems that 4e attempted to fix were only problems because of a few basic 3e design decisions (easy consumable access, making it trivial to cast in combat, full-casting PrCs, giving casters many more spells, removing spell trade-offs, and more); AD&D shows that you can in fact have a relatively balanced game with the classic D&D structure, and 4e could have just as easily turned out to be AD&D balance + 3e mechanical clarity and lack of fiat instead of what it was.

Resource attrition is not an inherently flawed paradigm; it's only flawed if your designers don't understand how to make it work. I mean, seriously, if WotC's answer to the problem of "the casters rest 8 hours, cast all their spells in 5 minutes, and rest again" is to give everyone daily powers, of course their resource attrition model is going to suck, because they obviously don't know what they're doing. That doesn't mean it's an unworkable paradigm.

Clericzilla

2013-03-06, 02:58 PM

obryn

2013-03-06, 03:18 PM

"Fixing" the fighter's conceptual niche? No. Giving him something new and different instead of relegating him to the AD&D weapon-styles-and-no-other-customization fighter WotC went with? Definitely yes.
The same could be said, though, about boiling the paladin, ranger, and barbarian down to their essences and throwing them under the Fighter heading, though.

It's clear that's not the direction they're heading, though, given the rest of the podcast. If it were, it would be a lot more understandable: scale back to the "basic 4" classes and make everything else an offshoot.

As it stands, the Warlord has every bit as distinct a thematic niche as the other three, but those three have standalone classes.

-O

PairO'Dice Lost

2013-03-06, 03:33 PM

The same could be said, though, about boiling the paladin, ranger, and barbarian down to their essences and throwing them under the Fighter heading, though.

Personally, I'd merge the barbarian with the fighter/warlord as well, since it doesn't have anything unique at this point (more damage in the heat of combat+hard to kill easily fits within the fighter's domain), so yes, the same could definitely be said about that. :smallwink:

I definitely agree with your points, and I don't think merging the two is a good idea in general; I'm just saying that, given that the current 5e fighter sucks and WotC can't make a good "basic" fighter class to save its life, merging the warlord with the fighter to broaden its scope a bit and add some depth isn't a terrible option for them at this point.

Clawhound

2013-03-06, 03:43 PM

obryn

2013-03-06, 03:44 PM

A few quick questions for everyone!

Can people give me a rating on the Barbarian (1 Horrid, 5 Awesome)?

How about the Rogue (1 Horrid, 5 Awesome)?

Also does anyone know what they are going to be doing with the dead levels of each class?
Boy, it's difficult to say, given that the general consensus around these parts is that when the game as a whole ain't so great, the "greatness" of the original components is difficult to evaluate. From my perspective, every class so far is lackluster and uninspiring. Specifically for your questions:

Rogues are tied into a kind of jacked-up skill system. So there's that.

Barbarians are basically Fighter++ at this point, and will probably be messed with.

But really, why not just get the playtest packet and check it out? Make up your own mind. It's not like it costs you anything. :smallsmile:

I definitely agree with your points, and I don't think merging the two is a good idea in general; I'm just saying that, given that the current 5e fighter sucks and WotC can't make a good "basic" fighter class to save its life, merging the warlord with the fighter to broaden its scope a bit and add some depth isn't a terrible option for them at this point.
We'll have to agree to disagree here. :smallsmile: I think a "Fighter" can be a pretty great archetype, and I actually think between 4e's Fighter and the Bo9S Wardude, there's even good antecedents from recent editions. I think it can manage this without getting the Warlord squashed in the process, too, and furthermore am disappointed (though not shocked at this point) that they're not going to do it.

-O

Morty

2013-03-06, 03:57 PM

I've been doing some research. I start down the road of inspirations to the fighter class by looking at myth, legend, adventure stories, etc., then walk those paradigms forward to D&D. In every instance, and I mean EVERY SINGLE ONE, some class other than Fighter gets the goodies.

If you are going to redesign fighter, something has to give. Either you need to step on some very vocal toes and give the fighter some amazing and even magical stuff (even if it's not outright magic), or just admit that the fighter is a lost cause.

Personally, I'm for a fighter that splits into distinct but amazing subclasses. Paladin, archer, swordmage, warlord, and psychic warrior are all aspects of fighter. They are all Hit Things + Armor + Something Cool. They are no more further apart than illusionist and necromancer, or healing cleric and battle cleric. That way, folks who like their non-magic fighters get their desire, while those who want more magical fighters get their desire as well.

This approach leads to two problems: first, how are you going to fit all those subclasses into the core rules? There's only so much wordcount. Second, it means that some concepts will be left out in the cold.

Personally, I think the Fighter's biggest problem is, ironically, D&D's focus on combat. A Fighter is someone who fights, but in D&D from 3rd edition onwards everyone does. Everyone is supposed to contribute to combat equally. In most other systems, fighting is just one of many skillsets. So what do we do with a person in D&D who can only fight?

navar100

2013-03-06, 03:59 PM

Eh? I run 4e regularly, as my D&D of choice, and I think Bo9S was probably the best, most innovative book released for 3.5. (I'm also a fan of the flavor in PHB2, Complete Mage, and Complete Champion - basically latter-era 3.5.) It's sharp, clean, strongly conceptual, and mechanically tight. Basically, all the same features I prize in the better 4e classes.

I don't really want to run 3.5 now, but I might play in it, given time and opportunity. And whether or not Bo9S is allowed is a strong indicator of whether or not I'd expect to enjoy the game.

-O

Yet I love Book of Nine Swords and loathe 4E and the lack of a refresh method in 4E is part of that reason. There are other reasons, but that's among them and relevant for the Book of Nine Swords/4E comparison. You can say the original point is not 100% true but it is certainly not 100% false either.

EvanWaters

2013-03-06, 07:58 PM

One good trick for a game designer is to never act like the player is "losing" something. Instead, they should just allow the fighter to perform one manuever each turn for free, and have some of the manuevers have no effect beyond bonus accuracy or damage. Same end result, but comes across much better in the players eyes.

True, but the problem you run into is that in most cases "more damage" is going to be the preferable option. You have to give them a consistent reason not to pick that.

And man, the way they've been talking about the Warlord and martial healing is pretty much giving the finger to the 4e crowd. It's like they don't get why people liked that edition at all.

surfarcher

2013-03-06, 11:02 PM

I'm sure you did. However, you need to look at the bigger picture. The question isn't "is this game fun", the question is "is this game so much more fun than the games people already own (or that are available for free, like 3E/PF) that people will pay money for it?"
I suspect that you also would have had a ball if you had used the 2E, 3E, or 4E ruleset.

I've DMed constantly since 1981. The only edition I could simply not stomach was 3.x.

Yes, this playtest is still somewhat raw. That's obvious.

But it seems to take all I loved about the various editions, condense them into their simplest form and build a base form that. And form there layer up options (complexity) on top of that.

TBH it feels like by beloved BECMI with the broken bits fixed and a wealth of optional add-ons.

Still a long way to go. But our players want to finish our I6 Ravenloft oneshot and then port our 4e campaign to it.

Stubbazubba

2013-03-07, 01:02 AM

Could somebody give me a TL;DR breakdown of how things are going? I'm not sure based on trying to read the thread.

Remember how everyone predicted it would fail for trying to be all things to all people? Pretty much. The general consensus is that it's got some good spots, but overall not a significant improvement on anything that came before, and therefore, not worth buying into.

Rhynn

2013-03-07, 01:04 AM

And man, the way they've been talking about the Warlord and martial healing is pretty much giving the finger to the 4e crowd. It's like they don't get why people liked that edition at all.

The thing is, not enough people did like that edition, by all appearances. I think 4E is great for what it does (although it's not quite what I want done). I would effin' love a turn-based CRPG based on it (alas, never to be), because it's the most finely-tuned turn-based combat D&D has had.

But the history of 4E looked like a desperate scramble of revision after revision, and not just "fixes and tweaks" like 3.5 - Essentials was specifically an attempt to get more people with different tastes (or, rather, people who haven't played D&D/RPGs, I think) to play. The "X Power 2" book series wasn't ever even finished. It looked like WotC saw their sales failing (and probably Pathfinder in particular eating up their audience), scrambled over and over to come up with something new, and finally decided to stop putting money into developing 4E products and get out a new edition that would "reunify" D&D players. That's the drum they've been beating ever since announcing D&D Next.

But to me that says that, ultimately, D&D Next is going to be a money-making scheme, not a labor of love like old D&D editions (up to AD&D 1E) were. (Yes, I think my current preferred edition - 2E - was less a labor of love, and in many ways, it shows. I prefer the rules, but dislike the style. The 1E PHB and DMG are hands-down better books in my estimation.)

I was impressed with the playtest material on finally downloading it last week - it's certainly more my current conception of D&D (which has changed over the last 15-20 years, to be sure) than 4E and 3.X are. I think the fact that the playtest adventures are very old modules almost directly ported says a lot about where they're getting the influences.

But even if I end up liking 5E, I just don't think they're going to pull off their goal. I don't really mind. There's plenty of D&D being published by others, with a lot of different ideas. Besides, an RPG doesn't need to have material published for it constantly. Many of my favorite RPGs haven't had new material in 10-20 years, and that's just great. And so long as PDF versions of old editions are available, even new players can get into them.