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Thread: Unpopular D&D Opinions
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2021-10-12, 05:54 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Unpopular D&D Opinions
Point buy is better than classes.
Why can I see pitchforks in the distance?
Okay, 'unpopular' might be pushing it here. But honestly, while I've liked a few games with classes those have tended to be very narrow and providing the suitable archetypes (like Scum & Villainy). Most of the time I want the ability to build my character as I want, with all the weird things I can think of.
If I'm playing a wizard and want healing spells I should be able to just pick the healing spells (maybe in a logical order). I shouldn't have to multiclass into Cleric (or Bard), or pick a specific character option, just to get them.
Yes it's harder to balance, but I'm actually going to agree with the 'balance is overrated' camp. We do want a rough kind of balance, but we should admit that there's some kind of usefulness in going broad as well as deep. Point totals do that just as well as level totals.
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2021-10-12, 07:48 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Unpopular D&D Opinions
Also any kind of reactions. Anything that requires you to context-switch between players more often than is strictly necessary tends to drag the game down to a crawl, particularly if people end up checking out when it's not there turn, because you get "wait, I had something" rewinds.
I think that's backwards. The game should do away with the Cleric class entirely, as the variety of religions in D&D is orders of magnitude too broad to be represented by a single "holy man" class. Let the priests of Obad-Hai be Druids, the priests of Nerull be Necromancers, and the priests of Boccob be Wizards. You can write a "Priest" subclass if you really want to.
They used to be: been there, done that, got the t shirt. I for one am happy for the change in 5e that makes it different.
It's kind of a stretch to call that a "D&D Opinion".
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2021-10-12, 08:14 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Unpopular D&D Opinions
I used to play the character building pr0n game. And the more buttons and levers, the more research, the more fun that is.
Nowadays I prefer games where it's super simple to pick up and start playing. 15-20 minutes thinking about making a character tops. Because I'd rather be playing than building characters. The time I used to use in character building pr0n can be used to argue on a forum instead.
Edit: There are super simple point buy games. But usually not at all simple, because folks that like point buy tend to want tons of buttons and levers.Last edited by Tanarii; 2021-10-12 at 08:16 PM.
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2021-10-12, 09:12 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Unpopular D&D Opinions
*It isn't realism, it's verisimilitude... seeming to be true within the context of the game world.
"D&D does not have SECRET rules that can only be revealed by meticulous deconstruction of words and grammar. There is only the unclear rules prose that makes people think there are secret rules to be revealed."
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2021-10-12, 09:15 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Unpopular D&D Opinions
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2021-10-12, 09:39 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Unpopular D&D Opinions
Its where you make characters just to make characters, in an infinite loop for that small jolt of satisfaction with each one, not because you'll ever play them.
It's basically an TTRPG form of getting Stuck.
I don't even recognize what pr0n means?
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2021-10-12, 09:43 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Unpopular D&D Opinions
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2021-10-12, 11:15 PM (ISO 8601)
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2021-10-12, 11:49 PM (ISO 8601)
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2021-10-12, 11:52 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Unpopular D&D Opinions
Last edited by Lord Raziere; 2021-10-13 at 12:03 AM.
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2021-10-13, 12:52 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Unpopular D&D Opinions
Ten that to the people making point buy D&D.
It's not about having levers to push, as the rest of my post mentions it's about choice. 3.5 character building was in practice just as complicated as GURPS charger building, but with kits ability to break archetypes.
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2021-10-13, 01:20 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Unpopular D&D Opinions
The worst thing in D&D is the stacking of bonuses and effects.
“The party was flying, invisible and quietened …” should not be the start of any story.
“My Barbarian entered rage, had bullsblood and barkskin cast on him, was buffed by the bardsong, was wearing a belt of frost giant strength and was double wielding two +4 axes of fire …” is too much.
Buffing spells shouldn’t stack
Bonuses should be pick the best, not add them all up.
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2021-10-13, 01:51 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Unpopular D&D Opinions
My somewhat unpopular D&D opinions:
1. Vancian casting (or whatever D&D does that is commonly called Vancian casting) is more unique and interesting than just having an MP pool. It's fine to have classes that work that way too, but I think Vancian should always be a part of D&D.
2. Alignment is mostly fine if you treat it as descriptive, not proscriptive. It isn't necessary at all, but it at least provides a quick, easy way to describe a character's outlook in broad fashion.
3. Forgotten Realms is just fine as a setting. It's a little overstuffed, but you don't need to & probably shouldn't be using everything in the canon anyway.
4. 4e should have been marketed as a separate game without the D&D brand, and 3.5 should have continued for at least a few more years (perhaps with another revision akin to the 3.0-to-3.5 transition).
More to come as I think of them.
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2021-10-13, 02:44 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Unpopular D&D Opinions
That is the consequence of "getting certain choices exactly at specific levels", "options having prerequisites to be chosen" and "certain choices lead to automatic consequences at later levels, powers evolve".
When i started 3.x, that was basically the first time i learned to actually plan ahead character development. In all the other systems i played before either there were no meaningfull choices or you just bought/increased whatever ability intrigued you at the moment or felt natural as character development. You could always pick up the other stuff later, if you wanted. But the D&D 3.0 levelling process with all its heavily restricted and intertwined options somehow managed to make the building far more complex without providing a matching variety in possible results.Last edited by Satinavian; 2021-10-13 at 02:45 AM.
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2021-10-13, 02:52 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Unpopular D&D Opinions
Indeed.
with DnD I'm stuck with variations on rogue, wizard or fighter.
with something more universal, I can make more. I can build a character first and a combat job second. I can build someone with wealth who has human bodyguards to fight for them at character creation. I can make someone with powers without going through a pesky wizard class, I can make a playable demon or vampire without any moral judgments from some cosmos because I can make the fluff to make it good or at least acceptably cursed with awesome, I can make a character entirely around a single power and all its applications, or someone with an amount of skills a rogue can only dream of with skills that can't ever learn without even being anything vaguely thief like, I can make a character that is a species more alien than anything DnD could ever produce as a playable race and do it to match my preferences, and I play all that, without a bunch of hassle involving leveling, classes or races acting as barriers and in-betweens, just all the parts I need to assemble into what I want exactly clearly labeled, no inexact kludges from a bunch of things with fantasy terminology that are not meant to go together.
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2021-10-13, 08:34 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Unpopular D&D Opinions
Tomayto Tomahto
3.5 character building was in practice just as complicated as GURPS charger building, but with kits ability to break archetype
But also calling 3e D&D a class-based system is a misnomer anyway. It wasn't really, except maybe a little bit with the original PHB only. It's a point buy with really complicated pre-requisite rules, and multiple different kinds of points you can spend (levels, feats, stacked spell caster levels, BAB, etc).Last edited by Tanarii; 2021-10-13 at 09:04 AM.
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2021-10-13, 08:51 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Unpopular D&D Opinions
Concur. Play until that plateau hits, and then start another campaign with another one of the group as DM. Or play some one shots.
No, it did not, until after it was published. The term arose during early play, and the first printed TSR ref I could find was in about 1975 in the back of Greyhawk and in some of the articles in Dragon. The role played by the characters were the role of fighting man, cleric, or magic user if you read Men and Magic.
FWIW: proto role playing under Braunstein and Blackmoor campaigns were an outgrowth of miniatures campaigns (at the strategic level) and Diplomacy being fused by the players in that group. Oddly, Dave Wesley has related that he would not call what he was running in Braunstein role playing games (From the recent film Secrets of Blackmoor). it was This Thing. The coining of the term role playing game, for D&D, came after it was published. But it stuck, and people tried to catch that same lightning in other bottles as soon as they experienced it. (See Tunnels and Trolls and original Traveller as but two examples).
Or don't bury them in a back story.I liked it more when as "Team pro-civilization", "Team anti-civilization", and those in between.
Yes, and those who get offended and insist that non humans are really humans are -- wait, RL stupidity, never mind.
The Sorcerer class was a bad idea, and being designed as "Wizards for noobs" didn't help.
I like kenders.
get rid of the horns and the tail idiocy, and I'd consider allowing Tieflings into my campaigns.
Flat out wrong.
The play's the thing.
Yeah. Rude too.In one of the 5e games we have going, we had a player, single-classed rogue, who would take 5 minutes to attack, move, and hide. He left after he cried about getting in an enemy aoe because two party members were near him, and thought we should have avoided him so he wouldn't wind up in the splash zone, and the rest of the party told him how wrong he was.Last edited by KorvinStarmast; 2021-10-13 at 08:52 AM.
Avatar by linklele. How Teleport Worksa. Malifice (paraphrased):
Rulings are not 'House Rules.' Rulings are a DM doing what DMs are supposed to do.
b. greenstone (paraphrased):
Agency means that they {players} control their character's actions; you control the world's reactions to the character's actions.
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2021-10-13, 09:10 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Unpopular D&D Opinions
Kender > Hobbits.
Halflings were a joke before Kender drove them into a better direction. Fully on purpose too, the folks at TSR understood how lame hobbit-halflings were. I get that Kender are a different kind of joke, and total twerps at that. But they were necessary to break Halflings out of the Hobbit mold. Without them we wouldn't have had 3e nimble and lithe nomad halflings, and we wouldn't have had the fairly agile hobbits of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings either. Instead we would have just kept on with pot-bellied walking embarrassments.
Kender, while not the best implementation, were the best thing to ever happen to halflings.Last edited by Tanarii; 2021-10-13 at 09:13 AM.
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2021-10-13, 09:29 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Unpopular D&D Opinions
The difference is that while GURPS has a fair amount of number fiddling, most of what you end up doing is fairly straightforward. Yeah, you end up doing some accountant work, but what you're doing is kinda just what's obvious. "I want to be a good fighter". Okay, you should probably be dextrous, and strong, and be good at taking a hit. And you should be good with a sword. There's a bunch of fiddling with numbers to optimize those factors, but what you're doing and why is pretty surface-level obvious.
3.x OTOH - the book-diving that you need to do to figure out when to take class X to get the prereqs for prestige class Y so that you can get ability Z to get the bonus A high enough to make feat B work well......
GURPS is a math problem, but the equations you're solving are straightforward. D&D 3 is an exercise in combinatorial complexity.
(NOTE: If you assume all GURPS books are on the table, then yeah, GURPS can quickly eclipse D&D. But nobody does that. The default assumption for GURPS is that you start with the basic book, and maybe one or two others that make sense for the game).
100%. It's a very complicated, very coarse, point buy system where each "skill" you buy has multiple values that all intertwine in unpredictable ways.
This is a big part of why I don't like D&D. I have other games that do "complex building" in ways I like better. I have games that actually do "generic system" rather than approximating it. If I play D&D, I do it to get away from that complexity. And the optimization game doesn't bring me joy, nor does the zero-to-superhero advancement."Gosh 2D8HP, you are so very correct (and also good looking)"
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2021-10-13, 09:38 AM (ISO 8601)
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2021-10-13, 09:42 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Unpopular D&D Opinions
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2021-10-13, 09:59 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Unpopular D&D Opinions
I've found that with GURPS the true complexity is in the resolution, not character generation or advancement. By that, I mean do you include all the size and range and relative velocity and lighting and wind speed charts to modify your otherwise simple 3d6-vs-skill check, or micromanage your monthly income checks during downtime, and so on (or of course if using 3e Vehicles determine whether your vehicle has cramped or comfortable seats as the weight and volume differences will effect the vehicles performance).
And agreed -- 3e D&D's complexity is how discrete components combine.
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2021-10-13, 10:15 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Unpopular D&D Opinions
Hobbits in their original fiction were far and away better than Kender in their pseudo-original fiction. I read the Dragonlance stories, and a bunch of the supplemental stories, and the Twins trilogy.
Halflings were a joke -
It was interesting learn, post hoc as he reminisced, that E.G.G. originally didn't want to include them, but during their play sessions before publication a lot of his players wanted one so he caved in and included them in Men and Magic.
Wasn't until the thief class showed up (Greyhawk Supplement) that hobbit PCs came into their own. With a level cap of 4, Fighting Man (Hero) in the original game (3 books) were quite limited in their potential which was, more or less, "realistic" when compared to hobbits in the original fiction.
Kender are a farce taken one step too far, to the point that the joke fails and the audience starts pelting the stage with overripe fruit and veg.
(Yes, I realize that we have different tastes on that ).Last edited by KorvinStarmast; 2021-10-13 at 02:15 PM.
Avatar by linklele. How Teleport Worksa. Malifice (paraphrased):
Rulings are not 'House Rules.' Rulings are a DM doing what DMs are supposed to do.
b. greenstone (paraphrased):
Agency means that they {players} control their character's actions; you control the world's reactions to the character's actions.
Second known member of the Greyview Appreciation Society
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2021-10-13, 10:32 AM (ISO 8601)
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2021-10-13, 10:35 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Unpopular D&D Opinions
It's weird because that complexity is very dependent upon which particular subsystem you're dealing with - the ranged weapon modifiers are way more complex than melee combat, but also way less complex than anything in Vehicles.
GURPS is large and full of multitudes - it's hard to really make any sweeping generalization about it."Gosh 2D8HP, you are so very correct (and also good looking)"
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2021-10-13, 10:41 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Unpopular D&D Opinions
Thankfully a lot of that mess went away in 5e. Especially played as designed, not played-as-forum-optimized (ie play without feats and especially without multi-classing). The rules-interaction graph got severely pruned. And I'll put in my usual pushback against the idea that D&D is a "generic system." 3e tried to be and failed because that's not what it is at its core.
Classes are supposed to restrict. Because that's what all rules do. Rules are a scaffold to assist people; the core state is free-form. But free-form is exhausting and prone to quarrels; rules provide a common language at the cost of restricting the possible. Classes, in particular, are designed to reduce the archetypes available to those that the system
a) wants to support mechanically
b) wants to "tell stories"[1] about
If your goal is "generic genre emulator", then yes. Classes are probably not the way to go. But D&D doesn't claim to be a generic genre emulator. The d20 system did, but that was a framework for building systems. And was an abject failure at truly being generic. Classes do best when they represent strong archetypes fictionally that have clean, coherent mechanics. Class-as-grab-bag-of-mechanical-bits is a flawed use that gives all the restrictions but none of the benefits.
[1] in the broadest possible sense, ie "include in the fiction of the world".
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Unpopular opinion: level-by-level multiclassing was, is, and always will be a mistake for a class-based system. 2e's multiclassing (ie fixed choice, xp split between all classes) is better than 3e (or 5e)'s system; 4e/PF2e's feat-based "multiclassing" is another alternative (with tradeoffs so it's not a clear better/worse).Last edited by PhoenixPhyre; 2021-10-13 at 10:41 AM.
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2021-10-13, 11:00 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Unpopular D&D Opinions
Okay, GURPSa probably a bad example, but it's also the heaviest point buy system I have real experience in, receipt maybe Shadowrun. I'm much more comfortable with stuff like Unknown Armies (which is maybe as complex as D&D 5e).
Also, while D&D might not sell itself as a generic genre emulator, it's certainly how it's treated by many people. Of course the general view here is that doing that is likely to make D&D work a lot less well, because it's not set up to enable it.
I still don't see the need for classes though, especially the messy kludge in modern D&D.
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2021-10-13, 11:10 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Unpopular D&D Opinions
For sure! Unfortunately, it also feels really flat to me. I've tried it, multiple times with different groups. It's never "hit".
I agree it's not a generic system. I don't know that it tried to be. I think a lot of people saw the number of widgets, realized that with combinations they could do many things (even more than the designers imagined, probably), and decided they could use it as a generic system.
100%. Classes create focus.
I actually agree with this.
I think it's a fine example. My point is that D&D multiclassing is as complex, if not more so, than the most complex point buy systems. I don't know of any counter-arguments. And I absolutely think the complexity is worse because it's illogical. Like, a newbie GURPS character and an expert's will look broadly the same. The expert will just be better at allocating points and know a few tricks, all of which make sense.
A beginner D&D character and an expert's will likely look nothing alike, even if they're targeting the same idea. "Don't be a monk, be an unarmed Swordsage" is like the tip of the iceberg."Gosh 2D8HP, you are so very correct (and also good looking)"
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2021-10-13, 11:20 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Unpopular D&D Opinions
I agree with this. Complexity is one thing, but hidden and trap-filled complexity is a pure evil. 3e character building above the very bottom of the optimization range is an exercise in tap-dancing across a dense minefield. Except many of the mines have their triggers well before the actual mine and are on a time-delay, so you tripped it way back when (when you chose to put 3 points into X instead of 4) but it didn't blow up until much later, and now you've got a sharply limited or distorted character.
This also makes it a nightmare for anyone without full system mastery. Which creates a strong barrier to entry and means you end up playing the rules more than playing the game. Instead of using the rules as a scaffold to support the tricky bits (while leaving the rest free to flow), they're now a set of obtuse and strangely-placed hoops you must jump through to get anything done. It's red-tape, the game system. Couple that with lots of small, stacking, conditional modifiers that are necessary to hit arbitrary benchmarks and it's pain.
In theory, you can do all these wonderful things. In practice, the palette is much more limited because most of those wonderful things are dredged in layers of contact poisons or just don't work when you try to use them.Dawn of Hope: a 5e setting. http://wiki.admiralbenbo.org
Rogue Equivalent Damage calculator, now prettier and more configurable!
5e Monster Data Sheet--vital statistics for all 693 MM, Volo's, and now MToF monsters: Updated!
NIH system 5e fork, very much WIP. Base github repo.
NIH System PDF Up to date main-branch build version.
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2021-10-13, 11:38 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Unpopular D&D Opinions
Really, it makes it a pain for tables with mixed levels of mastery. D&D3 works... reasonably well... for players that approach it in a pretty straightforward way. The problem is that the effectiveness cap for high mastery (even without getting into TO levels) is so much higher than the baseline of "person with a reasonable understanding of the system, making choices that appear reasonable".
"Gosh 2D8HP, you are so very correct (and also good looking)"