More thoughts on 4E and "D&D"
Seebs
D&D with a friend, and I've reached a conclusion:
4E has a number of terminology changes which make it very easy to see
minor changes as major changes, because of terminology shift. I'm not
sure whether this was a good idea or not, and there's certainly some downside
to it, but! It is possible that translating things makes them look less
like huge changes.
Here's an example: Saving throws. In the previous editions, saving throws
were either targets you tried to hit, or bonuses you had in trying to hit
a target set by an attack. In 4E, there are two changes:
1. Fortitude, Reflex, and Will are now "defenses" -- you have a
static Will number, and someone trying to charm you rolls an attack
vs. Will.
2. "Saving throws" are now an unmodified (usually) d20, 10 or higher
to remove an effect, which you make every round at the end of your
turn against most kinds of ongoing effects.
The terminology shift makes this look like a pretty huge change, because
"saving throws" no longer get bonuses for high stats, etcetera.
In fact, though, all that's really changed is that the rule for ending an
ongoing effect is no longer the same thing as the rule for starting an
ongoing effect. This makes bonuses on fort/ref/will more linear in their
effect than they used to be; you no longer have your fortitude bonus applying
to both initial onset and ongoing effects of a poison or disease, but rather,
it determines how likely you are to be affected in the first place. This
reduces the difference between a +2 and a +5 bonus to fortitude -- it only
gets counted once against a given poison, rather than counted multiple times.
The underlying mechanic is pretty much consistent with previous editions, but
more things use "save ends", and the save is now separated out from the
initial attack. Overall, this isn't nearly as big a change as it looks
like if you see only the text "you save on a 10 or better on a d20". The
primary effect of "saves" in 3E is essentially unchanged, with the only change
being who rolls the dice. They just got renamed to "defenses".
I think a lot of things have similar traits -- it's not that there's actually
been a big change, but there's a couple of shifts in terminology which make
it easy to get thrown off. I'm not totally happy about the shift in
terminology, but I think cleaning it up helped a lot.
I'm actually pretty happy about spell(/power) levels now mapping to character
levels rather than being a separate chart of things, and I have no regrets
at all about losing 3E's thing where higher level spells were more likely to
hit.
-s
--
Copyright 2009, all wrongs reversed. Peter Seebach / usenet...@seebs.net
http://www.seebs.net/log/ <-- lawsuits, religion, and funny pictures
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Game_(Scientology) <-- get educated!
tussock
> 4E has a number of terminology changes [...].
>
> Here's an example: Saving throws.
Yes, the 3e "save" is the 4e "attack", while the 3e "duration" is
the 4e "save ends". Personally, I don't find that confusing. Durations
are all about 1d4 rounds, saves are rolled by the caster like an
attack.
Rest-to-reuse mechanic on many class abilities, many others 1/day
only, items often 1/day, free healing after a fight with limited use
per character (one to two times total HP per day). Some at-will spell-
like and supernatural abilities for each class. Unlimited cantrips for
casters, but nerfed spells, often rest-to-reuse. Simplified and
consolidated area of effect and targeting rules.
If someone would rewrite it for me, so some (martial) classes had
all at-will abilities with situational effects, and others had all
flexi-chosen daily (Wizard), and others had all rest-to-reuse
(Sorcerer), it'd be ever so much closer to something I could house-
rule into being DnD (with faster movement, longer ranges, target rolls
saves, better spells, kick-ass magic items, "striker" fighters and
"defender" rogues, actual 1st-3rd level characters, less mooky mooks,
less class overlap, ...).
<snip>
> I'm actually pretty happy about spell(/power) levels now mapping to character
> levels rather than being a separate chart of things, and I have no regrets
> at all about losing 3E's thing where higher level spells were more likely to
> hit.
I still think ADnD has the better balance there: with high level
spells having /nasty/ effects, but high level PCs and monsters almost
always making their saves. Great for mowing down the low to mid level
mooks, not so great for gibbing a Dragon. In 3e terms, use a fixed DC
15 for all saves.
But yes, staying even in power with slowly improving effects is
better than gradually overwhelming most of your opponent's saves with
vastly more deadly ones.
--
tussock
Seebs
> Rest-to-reuse mechanic on many class abilities, many others 1/day
> only, items often 1/day, free healing after a fight with limited use
> per character (one to two times total HP per day). Some at-will spell-
> like and supernatural abilities for each class.
The martial classes look a lot less supernatural, to me, than the other
classes.
> If someone would rewrite it for me, so some (martial) classes had
> all at-will abilities with situational effects, and others had all
> flexi-chosen daily (Wizard), and others had all rest-to-reuse
> (Sorcerer), it'd be ever so much closer to something I could house-
> rule into being DnD (with faster movement, longer ranges, target rolls
> saves, better spells, kick-ass magic items, "striker" fighters and
> "defender" rogues, actual 1st-3rd level characters, less mooky mooks,
> less class overlap, ...).
You realize that Wizards actually DO have some flexibility in their daily
spell choice in 4E, unlike any other class, right?
I don't think I can make sense of rogues as a defender class at all. They're
not armored or durable.
I do not miss the first couple of levels (in 3E play balance) at ALL. I am
totally happy to have those gone; it removes the driving desire to get to
second level at all costs so the mage is no longer likely to be one-shotted
by a domestic pet.
> I still think ADnD has the better balance there: with high level
> spells having /nasty/ effects, but high level PCs and monsters almost
> always making their saves. Great for mowing down the low to mid level
> mooks, not so great for gibbing a Dragon. In 3e terms, use a fixed DC
> 15 for all saves.
I don't like that balance at all. It gets into the same thing that turned
me off GURPS combat; eventually, it's nothing but very rare fight-ending
crits. (Not nothing-but, but it really does get a bit silly.)
I don't like fights where you know for sure by the end of the first round
who won, or where it all comes down to who rolls a 20 or a 1 first. I prefer
the idea that you can't just one-shot people with a lucky spell.
> But yes, staying even in power with slowly improving effects is
> better than gradually overwhelming most of your opponent's saves with
> vastly more deadly ones.
There's a second issue, which is that in 3E, any spells short of your highest
level spells were noticably less useful against comparable-level targets,
because the DC didn't shift. That ended up sort of undermining the idea of
having a ton of spells -- all your low level spells were useless unless the
mooks were low-level too.
tussock
I agree, but ADnD never played that way for my groups. If you
fought something with good saves, you'd avoid targeting them with
spells they could save against (too precious to use that way).
Instead, you disintegrate the pillar holding the roof up. Pin it down
for a few rounds and the grunts can chop it to bits. All sorts of
workarounds come into play, even without 3.5's move to a host of no-
save, no-SR spells.
> I don't like fights where you know for sure by the end of the first round
> who won, or where it all comes down to who rolls a 20 or a 1 first. I prefer
> the idea that you can't just one-shot people with a lucky spell.
If that's your only real option in play, yes. Classic DnD has
enough room in the spells to let the players work around that (plus
plenty of classes who don't rely on failed saves at all). Twenty 10th
level clerics gather around your grand-high poo-bah Fighter and all
cast the Finger of Death? Yea, you die, a lot, so go get someone to
Rez you, and try not to piss off that many Clerics at once next time.
8]
> > But yes, staying even in power with slowly improving effects is
> > better than gradually overwhelming most of your opponent's saves with
> > vastly more deadly ones.
>
> There's a second issue, which is that in 3E, any spells short of your highest
> level spells were noticably less useful against comparable-level targets,
> because the DC didn't shift. That ended up sort of undermining the idea of
> having a ton of spells -- all your low level spells were useless unless the
> mooks were low-level too.
I'm always careful to leave a lot of low CR critters around, it
makes the Fighters and Barbarians feel a lot better too. /Fireball/
should always have a place, long live the terror that was the
Chainmail Wizard.
--
tussock
Justisaur
> On Dec 1, 4:59 pm, Seebs <usenet-nos...@seebs.net> wrote:
>
> > 4E has a number of terminology changes [...].
>
> > Here's an example: Saving throws.
>
> Yes, the 3e "save" is the 4e "attack", while the 3e "duration" is
> the 4e "save ends". Personally, I don't find that confusing. Durations
> are all about 1d4 rounds, saves are rolled by the caster like an
> attack.
I didn't have any problem with this and it was an easy extrapolation
and much like the improvements of ac from 2e to 3e. This part of 4e
was excellent. However, some of the other players are still having
trouble with it.
> Rest-to-reuse mechanic on many class abilities, many others 1/day
> only, items often 1/day, free healing after a fight with limited use
> per character (one to two times total HP per day).
> Some at-will spell-
> like and supernatural abilities for each class.
Er, no. My rogue has nothing resembling any supernatural or spell
like abilities. I'm still somewhat at a loss as to why he can only do
a Handspring Assault once a day though. Wears out his tendons? The
encounter powers I have less of an issue with.
> Unlimited cantrips for
> casters, but nerfed spells, often rest-to-reuse.
Again obviously you haven't seen a wizard in play. Those daily spells
are far more impressive than anything my rogue can do as a daily -
which for him are barely better than his at wills. The overall
balance between classes is still similar to previous editions.
A wizard's at-wills are just as you say, like a cantrip. something he
can do so he doesn't feel entirely useless while a fight goes on.
They also take the place of wands from 3e, but the wizard is less
reliant on magic items. Even their encounter spells are not terribly
impressive, but can be a bit more useful for mob clearing. Then the
dailies are like the big spells, the sleep, fireball, ice-storm, etc.
that they pull out for the big fights. Only in 4e the best ones are
Flaming Sphere and Stinking Cloud so far as I've seen. Those are like
real spells, higher level ones that you only have a few of. Like any
wizard of previous edition they have to rest to regain them.
> If someone would rewrite it for me, so some (martial) classes had
> all at-will abilities with situational effects, and others had all
> flexi-chosen daily (Wizard), and others had all rest-to-reuse
> (Sorcerer), it'd be ever so much closer to something I could house-
> rule into being DnD (with faster movement, longer ranges, target rolls
> saves, better spells, kick-ass magic items, "striker" fighters and
> "defender" rogues, actual 1st-3rd level characters, less mooky mooks,
> less class overlap, ...).
I don't follow here, because this sounds mostly like the 4e I play.
You can take fighter powers that are more damaging, or rogue powers
that are more defendy, or play another class like barbarian that is a
striky fighter, or multiclass from one to the other to get what you
want.
It'd be exceedingly easy to houserule and I doubt at all unbalancing
to allow wizards to flexi all their powers. In fact that's all it
would take is one sentence. Don't tell me you don't have any house
rules in 3e :) I don't see the point in making all their powers daily
though, you'd have to reintroduce 3e wands which then mean they aren't
really daily anyway. If you really want you could say they have to
have their implement to cast that magic missile at will. You could
convert encounters into multiple dailies, letting them blow them all
at once if you wanted. I'm not sure what the number would be 5x
approximately.
Magic items are kick ass - if you find the right ones for your
charcter. Adventurer's Vault much improved that, and should be
considered core IMHO to round out the system with PHB 1 & 2 MM 1, and
DMG 1 & 2. (yes far more books than you needed for 3e, well if you
wanted to play any of the martial classes and be at all competitive
you needed more). A lot of magic items are much more effective in
play than they appear on paper, much the same as powers, classes, etc.
The mooks are the perfect level of mooky. Way hell of an improvement
over 3e, and gets my vote for best improvement of 4e. They are a
threat, and they go down like mooks. Where in 3e you either had
weren't a threat and went down like mooks or were a threat and didn't
go down like mooks. If you want either they are still available, just
use low level minions for the first and standards of similar level for
the 2nd.
As for real 1st-3rd level characters, I believe wotc or someone put
out some instructions on how to do that. Much like 0 lvs in previous
editions. IIRC it was a fairly simple house rule set.
- Justisaur
Bryant Durrell
Justisaur <just...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>Er, no. My rogue has nothing resembling any supernatural or spell
>like abilities. I'm still somewhat at a loss as to why he can only do
>a Handspring Assault once a day though. Wears out his tendons? The
>encounter powers I have less of an issue with.
This is a tricky one for me, too.
I sort of justify it by assuming that my martial characters need the
right opening to pull off the big stuff, and it just doesn't come up
too often, but I'm in the market for a better way to think about it.
--
Bryant Durrell // dur...@innocence.com // dur...@gmail.com
decalod85
> In article <f3c429d1-ade0-4d7a-93da-df628babd...@2g2000prl.googlegroups.com>,
>
> Justisaur <justis...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >Er, no. My rogue has nothing resembling any supernatural or spell
> >like abilities. I'm still somewhat at a loss as to why he can only do
> >a Handspring Assault once a day though. Wears out his tendons? The
> >encounter powers I have less of an issue with.
>
> This is a tricky one for me, too.
>
> I sort of justify it by assuming that my martial characters need the
> right opening to pull off the big stuff, and it just doesn't come up
> too often, but I'm in the market for a better way to think about it.
Here is another thing for Seebs' list of things that people find
un"D&D" like about 4E. Years of conditioning allows me to accept that
there are things a spellcaster can only do once a day, but it feels
mighty foreign for the non-casting classes to have "dailies".
Jasin Zujovic
> If someone would rewrite it for me, so some (martial) classes had
> all at-will abilities with situational effects, and others had all
> flexi-chosen daily (Wizard), and others had all rest-to-reuse
> (Sorcerer), it'd be ever so much closer to something I could house-
> rule into being DnD (with faster movement, longer ranges, target rolls
> saves, better spells, kick-ass magic items, "striker" fighters and
> "defender" rogues,
I find this confusing.
When has "defending the vulnerable party members" ever been a D&D
rogue's schtick?
--
Jasin
Jasin Zujovic
>> Er, no. My rogue has nothing resembling any supernatural or spell
>> like abilities. I'm still somewhat at a loss as to why he can only do
>> a Handspring Assault once a day though. Wears out his tendons? The
>> encounter powers I have less of an issue with.
>
> This is a tricky one for me, too.
>
> I sort of justify it by assuming that my martial characters need the
> right opening to pull off the big stuff, and it just doesn't come up
> too often, but I'm in the market for a better way to think about it.
That's the way of thinking about it that seems best to me, and I don't
see any problem with it.
Especially if you don't have a problem with encounter powers (like
Justisaur says above), I don't see how dailies are different.
I also don't think the rationales required are much different than for
the 3E barbarian's rage.
--
Jasin
Bryant Durrell
Jasin Zujovic <jasin....@gmail.com> wrote:
>Bryant Durrell wrote:
>>
>> This is a tricky one for me, too.
>>
>> I sort of justify it by assuming that my martial characters need the
>> right opening to pull off the big stuff, and it just doesn't come up
>> too often, but I'm in the market for a better way to think about it.
>
>That's the way of thinking about it that seems best to me, and I don't
>see any problem with it.
>
>Especially if you don't have a problem with encounter powers (like
>Justisaur says above), I don't see how dailies are different.
>
>I also don't think the rationales required are much different than for
>the 3E barbarian's rage.
Oh, sure. It's not a huge impediment or anything, just a minor rough
edge for me. And it's a personal thing.
Seebs
> I agree, but ADnD never played that way for my groups. If you
> fought something with good saves, you'd avoid targeting them with
> spells they could save against (too precious to use that way).
> Instead, you disintegrate the pillar holding the roof up. Pin it down
> for a few rounds and the grunts can chop it to bits. All sorts of
> workarounds come into play, even without 3.5's move to a host of no-
> save, no-SR spells.
I don't much like the idea that, when you encounter an epic baddie, the
wizards are totally useless, unless it rolls badly in which case they
pretty much one-shot it.
So I much prefer a model where, in general, spells stay reasonably likely
to hit your primary enemies, and your best spells at any given point will
nearly always have at least SOME effect no matter what.
> I'm always careful to leave a lot of low CR critters around, it
> makes the Fighters and Barbarians feel a lot better too. /Fireball/
> should always have a place, long live the terror that was the
> Chainmail Wizard.
I love me some minions. They solve a handful of mook problems at once, and
are very cinematic.
Seebs
> Er, no. My rogue has nothing resembling any supernatural or spell
> like abilities. I'm still somewhat at a loss as to why he can only do
> a Handspring Assault once a day though. Wears out his tendons? The
> encounter powers I have less of an issue with.
The book says:
If you're a martial character, you're reaching into your
deepest reserves of energy to pull off an amazing exploit.
Cinematic logic, but perfectly reasonable.
> Again obviously you haven't seen a wizard in play. Those daily spells
> are far more impressive than anything my rogue can do as a daily -
> which for him are barely better than his at wills. The overall
> balance between classes is still similar to previous editions.
That hadn't been my experience. They are differently specialized, certainly.
Rogue has a close blast 3 attack that does 2[W]+Dex damage and blinds until
end of next turn. That's not wussy.
> It'd be exceedingly easy to houserule and I doubt at all unbalancing
> to allow wizards to flexi all their powers. In fact that's all it
> would take is one sentence. Don't tell me you don't have any house
> rules in 3e :) I don't see the point in making all their powers daily
> though, you'd have to reintroduce 3e wands which then mean they aren't
> really daily anyway. If you really want you could say they have to
> have their implement to cast that magic missile at will. You could
> convert encounters into multiple dailies, letting them blow them all
> at once if you wanted. I'm not sure what the number would be 5x
> approximately.
The key here, I think, is the intent of moving the game away from "okay,
the casters used their good spells, we have to go rest to restore them".
Encounter spells work well for that, but they do pretty much take us away
from Vancian magic entirely. You can now quest for a reasonable length of
time without having to just do without your casters. In general, they put
some real work into encouraging people to explore more at a time. It is
no longer necessarily the case that your best choice for the Epic
Confrontation is to try to hit it without having hit any other encounters...
Seebs
> Here is another thing for Seebs' list of things that people find
> un"D&D" like about 4E. Years of conditioning allows me to accept that
> there are things a spellcaster can only do once a day, but it feels
> mighty foreign for the non-casting classes to have "dailies".
I guess it does seem a bit foreign -- I just like it a ton better than
them having a character sheet on which the "powers" list consists of:
Basic Melee Attack
Basic Ranged Attack
Seebs
> I also don't think the rationales required are much different than for
> the 3E barbarian's rage.
Ah-HAH!
There WAS such a thing as an "encounter power" in 3E.
So 4E actually didn't introduce anything new, there, they just incorporated
that effect more widely.
Bryant Durrell
Seebs <usenet...@seebs.net> wrote:
>On 2009-12-01, Jasin Zujovic <jasin....@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I also don't think the rationales required are much different than for
>> the 3E barbarian's rage.
>
>Ah-HAH!
>
>There WAS such a thing as an "encounter power" in 3E.
>
>So 4E actually didn't introduce anything new, there, they just incorporated
>that effect more widely.
Good catch!
At-wills have a big obvious precedent in the warlock class, of course.
The whole invocation system (you have to pick from a list, you can swap
invocations out at certain levels) is the precedent for much of the
at-will/encounter/daily system. Fiendish Resilience is one good example
of a class ability which functions the same way as a 4e daily.
It is fairly simple to find examples of people talking about retooling
the entire magic system to be more like the 3e Warlock.
Seebs
> At-wills have a big obvious precedent in the warlock class, of course.
> The whole invocation system (you have to pick from a list, you can swap
> invocations out at certain levels) is the precedent for much of the
> at-will/encounter/daily system. Fiendish Resilience is one good example
> of a class ability which functions the same way as a 4e daily.
>
> It is fairly simple to find examples of people talking about retooling
> the entire magic system to be more like the 3e Warlock.
And now I understand why I didn't recognize it -- I skimmed the warlock
once, maybe. I was too busy to play at the time.
Keith Davies
>
> There's a second issue, which is that in 3E, any spells short of your
> highest level spells were noticably less useful against
> comparable-level targets, because the DC didn't shift. That ended up
> sort of undermining the idea of having a ton of spells -- all your low
> level spells were useless unless the mooks were low-level too.
I wrote an article about this ('Recalibrating Saving Throws', IIRC
title, in my wiki at http://wiki.kjd-imc.org) a while ago. Change saves
to have save DCs of 10 + max(HD/2, ability modifier) [or spell level,
for spells).
This gives a bit of a boost to things at low level, if the initiator has
a good ability score (the save for a first-level spell is likely to be
at least 13), tones things down at high levels (RAW, a ninth-level spell
would top out with a max save DC of about 19, barring the use of Spell
Focus and the like).
Keith
--
Keith Davies "Do you know what is in beer? The strength
keith....@kjdavies.org to bear the things you can't change, and
keith....@gmail.com wisdom to ignore them and fsck off for
http://www.kjdavies.org/ another beer." -- Owen, discussing work
Seebs
> I wrote an article about this ('Recalibrating Saving Throws', IIRC
> title, in my wiki at http://wiki.kjd-imc.org) a while ago. Change saves
> to have save DCs of 10 + max(HD/2, ability modifier) [or spell level,
> for spells).
> This gives a bit of a boost to things at low level, if the initiator has
> a good ability score (the save for a first-level spell is likely to be
> at least 13), tones things down at high levels (RAW, a ninth-level spell
> would top out with a max save DC of about 19, barring the use of Spell
> Focus and the like).
Huh? RAW, a ninth level spell has a save DC of 19 + stat mod. Since you
have to have at least a 19 to cast it, that's at least a 23.
4E's answer is very close to a save DC of 10 + HD/2 + ability modifier. Which
turns out to be pretty reasonable in most cases, I think. It's higish but not
unreasonably so. (Note that average defenses are better in 4e, because you
get best of two mods as your ability modifier, and everything's on the "good"
progression.)
Keith Davies
> On 2009-12-01, Keith Davies <keith....@kjdavies.org> wrote:
>> I wrote an article about this ('Recalibrating Saving Throws', IIRC
>> title, in my wiki at http://wiki.kjd-imc.org) a while ago. Change saves
>> to have save DCs of 10 + max(HD/2, ability modifier) [or spell level,
>> for spells).
>
>> This gives a bit of a boost to things at low level, if the initiator has
>> a good ability score (the save for a first-level spell is likely to be
>> at least 13), tones things down at high levels (RAW, a ninth-level spell
>> would top out with a max save DC of about 19, barring the use of Spell
>> Focus and the like).
>
> Huh? RAW, a ninth level spell has a save DC of 19 + stat mod. Since
> you have to have at least a 19 to cast it, that's at least a 23.
Oops, thinko. Changed what I was going to say, forgot to change what I
did say. Pretend I wrote
... tones things down at high levels (a ninth-level spell would top
out with a max save DC of about 19, barring the use of Spell Focus and
the like, compared to RAW DC of 23+)
> 4E's answer is very close to a save DC of 10 + HD/2 + ability
> modifier. Which turns out to be pretty reasonable in most cases, I
> think. It's higish but not unreasonably so. (Note that average
> defenses are better in 4e, because you get best of two mods as your
> ability modifier, and everything's on the "good" progression.)
Which is to say, 50% +- 5%/2 levels difference (not *quite* the same as
2.5%/level because it doesn't always apply).
Keith Davies
> In article <slrnhharor.12p...@guild.seebs.net>,
> Seebs <usenet...@seebs.net> wrote:
>>On 2009-12-01, Jasin Zujovic <jasin....@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I also don't think the rationales required are much different than for
>>> the 3E barbarian's rage.
>>
>>Ah-HAH!
>>
>>There WAS such a thing as an "encounter power" in 3E.
>>
>>So 4E actually didn't introduce anything new, there, they just incorporated
>>that effect more widely.
>
> Good catch!
>
> At-wills have a big obvious precedent in the warlock class, of course.
> The whole invocation system (you have to pick from a list, you can
> swap invocations out at certain levels) is the precedent for much of
> the at-will/encounter/daily system. Fiendish Resilience is one good
> example of a class ability which functions the same way as a 4e daily.
Incidentally, I remember a lot of division on this one -- lots of people
really liked it because you got cool stuff that never ran out, lots of
people freaked because... you got cool stuff that never ran out.
Bryant Durrell
Keith Davies <keith....@kjdavies.org> wrote:
>Bryant Durrell <dur...@innocence.com> wrote:
>> In article <slrnhharor.12p...@guild.seebs.net>,
>> Seebs <usenet...@seebs.net> wrote:
>>>On 2009-12-01, Jasin Zujovic <jasin....@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> I also don't think the rationales required are much different than for
>>>> the 3E barbarian's rage.
>>>
>>>Ah-HAH!
>>>
>>>There WAS such a thing as an "encounter power" in 3E.
>>>
>>>So 4E actually didn't introduce anything new, there, they just incorporated
>>>that effect more widely.
>>
>> Good catch!
>>
>> At-wills have a big obvious precedent in the warlock class, of course.
>> The whole invocation system (you have to pick from a list, you can
>> swap invocations out at certain levels) is the precedent for much of
>> the at-will/encounter/daily system. Fiendish Resilience is one good
>> example of a class ability which functions the same way as a 4e daily.
>
>Incidentally, I remember a lot of division on this one -- lots of people
>really liked it because you got cool stuff that never ran out, lots of
>people freaked because... you got cool stuff that never ran out.
It's definitely a significant change.
decalod85
> On 2009-12-01, decalod85 <decalo...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Here is another thing for Seebs' list of things that people find
> > un"D&D" like about 4E. Years of conditioning allows me to accept that
> > there are things a spellcaster can only do once a day, but it feels
> > mighty foreign for the non-casting classes to have "dailies".
>
> I guess it does seem a bit foreign -- I just like it a ton better than
> them having a character sheet on which the "powers" list consists of:
>
> Basic Melee Attack
> Basic Ranged Attack
So we come down to preference. When I play a fighter, I don't want to
worry about any resource management other than the number of scalps I
am carrying, or perhaps how many potions of CLW I have left.
Seebs
It is... But it's not a change in 4E, it's a change that occurred partway
through 3.5E when the mechanic was introduced.
Seebs
> worry about any resource management other than the number of scalps I
> am carrying, or perhaps how many potions of CLW I have left.
That leads to an interesting question:
Could someone design a class which didn't have resource management to deal
with but was, in practice, comparably balanced to the standard 4E classes?
Bryant Durrell
Seebs <usenet...@seebs.net> wrote:
>
>I love me some minions. They solve a handful of mook problems at once, and
>are very cinematic.
Minions are so 1st edition it makes me smile, too.
Jasin Zujovic
>> There's a second issue, which is that in 3E, any spells short of your
>> highest level spells were noticably less useful against
>> comparable-level targets, because the DC didn't shift. That ended up
>> sort of undermining the idea of having a ton of spells -- all your low
>> level spells were useless unless the mooks were low-level too.
>
> I wrote an article about this ('Recalibrating Saving Throws', IIRC
> title, in my wiki at http://wiki.kjd-imc.org) a while ago. Change saves
> to have save DCs of 10 + max(HD/2, ability modifier) [or spell level,
> for spells).
>
> This gives a bit of a boost to things at low level, if the initiator has
> a good ability score (the save for a first-level spell is likely to be
> at least 13), tones things down at high levels (RAW, a ninth-level spell
> would top out with a max save DC of about 19, barring the use of Spell
> Focus and the like).
How does it boost things at low level?
At low levels, the DC will be 10 + modifier, while in 3.5 it would be 10
+ spell level (or HD/2) + modifier.
--
Jasin
Jasin Zujovic
>>> Er, no. My rogue has nothing resembling any supernatural or spell
>>> like abilities. I'm still somewhat at a loss as to why he can only do
>>> a Handspring Assault once a day though. Wears out his tendons? The
>>> encounter powers I have less of an issue with.
>> This is a tricky one for me, too.
>>
>> I sort of justify it by assuming that my martial characters need the
>> right opening to pull off the big stuff, and it just doesn't come up
>> too often, but I'm in the market for a better way to think about it.
>
> Here is another thing for Seebs' list of things that people find
> un"D&D" like about 4E. Years of conditioning allows me to accept that
> there are things a spellcaster can only do once a day, but it feels
> mighty foreign for the non-casting classes to have "dailies".
Barbarian rage?
Rogue's defensive roll?
--
Jasin
Jasin Zujovic
>>> Here is another thing for Seebs' list of things that people find
>>> un"D&D" like about 4E. Years of conditioning allows me to accept that
>>> there are things a spellcaster can only do once a day, but it feels
>>> mighty foreign for the non-casting classes to have "dailies".
>> I guess it does seem a bit foreign -- I just like it a ton better than
>> them having a character sheet on which the "powers" list consists of:
>>
>> Basic Melee Attack
>> Basic Ranged Attack
>
> So we come down to preference. When I play a fighter, I don't want to
> worry about any resource management other than the number of scalps I
> am carrying, or perhaps how many potions of CLW I have left.
"I don't want to worry about resource management" is a lot different
than "I don't think non-casters should have daily powers".
--
Jasin
Jasin Zujovic
> On 2009-12-01, Jasin Zujovic <jasin....@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I also don't think the rationales required are much different than for
>> the 3E barbarian's rage.
>
> Ah-HAH!
>
> There WAS such a thing as an "encounter power" in 3E.
>
> So 4E actually didn't introduce anything new, there, they just incorporated
> that effect more widely.
Rage is daily, actually, but the principle is much the same: the
difference between an ability which becomes available after a 5 minute
rest and one which becomes available after a 6 hour rest is a difference
in degree.
--
Jasin
Seebs
> Seebs <usenet...@seebs.net> wrote:
>>I love me some minions. They solve a handful of mook problems at once, and
>>are very cinematic.
> Minions are so 1st edition it makes me smile, too.
But! They have a key benefit: In first edition, "minions" were 1HD
humanoids and you could mow 'em down. But they were also irrelevant
except that they took up space. Now they're actually credible threats.
Seebs
Rage was daily, BUT! You were exhausted "until the end of the encounter"
and couldn't use it again.
So it was a power which you could use only once per encounter, but could
(by mid levels) use as many times as you had encounters.
Keith Davies
Sorry, provides a relative boost to lower-level spells when higher-level
spells are available, in that the difference between them is smaller.
Your first-level spell has a DC of at least 14, your ninth-level spell
has a DC of at least 19, instead of 15 and 23.
Okay, it's not a profound (relative) improvement, and could perhaps be
expressed better as "your low-level spells don't suck so much
comparatively, because your high-level spells suck more than they used
to", but it does smooth out the power differences a bit.
Keith Davies
Which becomes closer to an 'encounter' ability as you gain levels.
Keith Davies
> On 2009-12-01, Bryant Durrell <dur...@innocence.com> wrote:
>> In article <slrnhhb0eh.7p...@kjdavies.org>,
>> Keith Davies <keith....@kjdavies.org> wrote:
>>>Incidentally, I remember a lot of division on this one -- lots of people
>>>really liked it because you got cool stuff that never ran out, lots of
>>>people freaked because... you got cool stuff that never ran out.
>
>> It's definitely a significant change.
>
> It is... But it's not a change in 4E, it's a change that occurred
> partway through 3.5E when the mechanic was introduced.
Certainly. One that caused a pretty strong reaction among us, and could
therefore be considered suspect and possibly undesireable.
Or desireable, depending which side of the reaction you were on.
It was still markedly different, appeared later in the life of 3.5
(along with a bunch of other oddities, or 'variant abilities' such as
Bo9S martial adepts, incarnum, and some other relatively weird things),
when they were starting their 4e research.
Seebs
> therefore be considered suspect and possibly undesireable.
Sure. But we've had strong reactions to a ton of mechanics in the past --
look at the scale of the arguments we saw about whether or not it was
a horrible thing that 3E "dumbed down" the game by making AC go up rather
than down.
There had been assertions that 4E's mechanics had no precedent in published
D&D or near-D&D (e.g., Arduin, Arcanum) rules. But we just found a precedent
for a couple more of them. :)
> It was still markedly different, appeared later in the life of 3.5
> (along with a bunch of other oddities, or 'variant abilities' such as
> Bo9S martial adepts, incarnum, and some other relatively weird things),
> when they were starting their 4e research.
Yeah. And I think that's why 4E "feels like D&D" to me -- it clearly grew
out of stuff that they were working on and publishing.
Jasin Zujovic
>> So we come down to preference. When I play a fighter, I don't want to
>> worry about any resource management other than the number of scalps I
>> am carrying, or perhaps how many potions of CLW I have left.
>
> That leads to an interesting question:
>
> Could someone design a class which didn't have resource management to deal
> with but was, in practice, comparably balanced to the standard 4E classes?
Overall balanced, sure. Just work out how much time you spend using
at-wills, encounters and dailies and give them something comparable to
the average.
Obviously, they'll be less able to focus fire when it really matters,
and they'll be relatively more powerful when everyone's on their last
legs, but the discrepancy wouldn't be any worse than between a pre-4E
wizard and pre-4E fighter (very generously assuming those are balanced
overall).
Of course, the real question is how much resource management is
acceptable, because some will always remain. Ultimately, hit points are
a resource to be managed, for example.
--
Jasin
decalod85
> On 2009-12-01, decalod85 <decalo...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > So we come down to preference. When I play a fighter, I don't want to
> > worry about any resource management other than the number of scalps I
> > am carrying, or perhaps how many potions of CLW I have left.
>
> That leads to an interesting question:
>
> Could someone design a class which didn't have resource management to deal
> with but was, in practice, comparably balanced to the standard 4E classes?
I don't know. Some level of resource management is always required.
Everyone manages their HP and whatever consumables they have.
decalod85
It's layers, man. All chars have some resources to manage, whether it
be gear, HP, retainers...
Spellcasters have that extra mile (in combat mostly) that fighters and
rogues don't really require.
Sometimes you just wanna hit stuff with a sword.
Seebs
> acceptable, because some will always remain. Ultimately, hit points are
> a resource to be managed, for example.
Yeah. Healing surges move some of that management to the fighter, too.
decalod85
Variety is the spice of life. Want some more resource management, but
don't want the full on hassle of a spellcaster, try barbarian. From
there move up to a monk, then a paladin, and so on and so forth.
> Rogue's defensive roll?
Rogues roll with the punches all day long, slippery bastards. Not
like a 4e power at all.
decalod85
> Jasin Zujovic <jasin.zujo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > decalod85 wrote:
> >>>> Er, no. My rogue has nothing resembling any supernatural or spell
> >>>> like abilities. I'm still somewhat at a loss as to why he can only do
> >>>> a Handspring Assault once a day though. Wears out his tendons? The
> >>>> encounter powers I have less of an issue with.
> >>> This is a tricky one for me, too.
>
> >>> I sort of justify it by assuming that my martial characters need the
> >>> right opening to pull off the big stuff, and it just doesn't come up
> >>> too often, but I'm in the market for a better way to think about it.
>
> >> Here is another thing for Seebs' list of things that people find
> >> un"D&D" like about 4E. Years of conditioning allows me to accept that
> >> there are things a spellcaster can only do once a day, but it feels
> >> mighty foreign for the non-casting classes to have "dailies".
>
> > Barbarian rage?
>
> Which becomes closer to an 'encounter' ability as you gain levels.
Don't forget stunning fist, or the innumerable feats added in splat
books that added 3/day type actions.
So we have proven that 4E is derived from 3.x. The designers
quantified the class abilities into powers, and then evenly
distributed them amongst the classes with the same mechanic for
resource management.
This is the sameness of play that I (and others) have mentioned.
The dailies, at-wills and encounter powers for fighters and rogues had
to be invented from whole cloth, I suppose, since I don't remember
most of them and don't have the books.
This is, for me, part of the "alien-feel" that others have touched on.
decalod85
> On 2009-12-01, Jasin Zujovic <jasin.zujo...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Of course, the real question is how much resource management is
> > acceptable, because some will always remain. Ultimately, hit points are
> > a resource to be managed, for example.
>
> Yeah. Healing surges move some of that management to the fighter, too.
You always have some. I would argue that in 4e, there appears to be
very similar amounts of resource management across classes, while in
3.x, some classes have far less or far more than others.
decalod85
> On 2009-12-01, Keith Davies <keith.dav...@kjdavies.org> wrote:
>
> > Certainly. One that caused a pretty strong reaction among us, and could
> > therefore be considered suspect and possibly undesireable.
>
> Sure. But we've had strong reactions to a ton of mechanics in the past --
> look at the scale of the arguments we saw about whether or not it was
> a horrible thing that 3E "dumbed down" the game by making AC go up rather
> than down.
>
> There had been assertions that 4E's mechanics had no precedent in published
> D&D or near-D&D (e.g., Arduin, Arcanum) rules. But we just found a precedent
> for a couple more of them. :)
>
> > It was still markedly different, appeared later in the life of 3.5
> > (along with a bunch of other oddities, or 'variant abilities' such as
> > Bo9S martial adepts, incarnum, and some other relatively weird things),
> > when they were starting their 4e research.
>
> Yeah. And I think that's why 4E "feels like D&D" to me -- it clearly grew
> out of stuff that they were working on and publishing.
And yet again, it explains why 4E doesn't "feel like D&D" to me. I
never really accepted what they did in Bo9S, Incarnum, and some of the
other later books. I did not like the warlock at all. I like Bo9S,
but I like Pathfinder's fighter better.
It also explains why I was accepting of 3.0 when it came out.
"Players Option" seemed like a very reasonable extension of 2E to me.
So when 3.0 was new, and had many things from "Combat & Tactics" and
"Skills & Powers", it was very natural.
Seebs! I understand you! Hell, at one point a few years ago, I was
you.
That does not mean I agree with you about 4e... :-)
Seebs
> So we have proven that 4E is derived from 3.x.
I think so.
> The designers
> quantified the class abilities into powers, and then evenly
> distributed them amongst the classes with the same mechanic for
> resource management.
> This is the sameness of play that I (and others) have mentioned.
That's not accurate at all, though. Powers didn't get distributed among
classes; new powers got invented. Clerics have old cleric spells and some
new powers, but they don't have stuff from non-clerics.
And while they have similar mechanics for resource management, the powers
themselves vary quite widely, meaning that actually playing, as opposed
to talking abstractly about playing, shows them to be quite different.
> The dailies, at-wills and encounter powers for fighters and rogues had
> to be invented from whole cloth, I suppose, since I don't remember
> most of them and don't have the books.
They mostly are invented, although they map somewhat well onto things that
were previously feats or skill uses.
> This is, for me, part of the "alien-feel" that others have touched on.
I suppose. It doesn't really feel alien to me; rogue still plays like a 3.5E
rogue, pretty much, only without the sucking in combat after a few levels.
Hadsil
> So, I was discussing some of the recent arguments about whether 4E is
> D&D with a friend, and I've reached a conclusion:
>
> 4E has a number of terminology changes which make it very easy to see
> minor changes as major changes, because of terminology shift. I'm not
> sure whether this was a good idea or not, and there's certainly some downside
> to it, but! It is possible that translating things makes them look less
> like huge changes.
>
> Here's an example: Saving throws. In the previous editions, saving throws
> were either targets you tried to hit, or bonuses you had in trying to hit
> a target set by an attack. In 4E, there are two changes:
> 1. Fortitude, Reflex, and Will are now "defenses" -- you have a
> static Will number, and someone trying to charm you rolls an attack
> vs. Will.
> 2. "Saving throws" are now an unmodified (usually) d20, 10 or higher
> to remove an effect, which you make every round at the end of your
> turn against most kinds of ongoing effects.
>
> The terminology shift makes this look like a pretty huge change, because
> "saving throws" no longer get bonuses for high stats, etcetera.
>
> In fact, though, all that's really changed is that the rule for ending an
> ongoing effect is no longer the same thing as the rule for starting an
> ongoing effect. This makes bonuses on fort/ref/will more linear in their
> effect than they used to be; you no longer have your fortitude bonus applying
> to both initial onset and ongoing effects of a poison or disease, but rather,
> it determines how likely you are to be affected in the first place. This
> reduces the difference between a +2 and a +5 bonus to fortitude -- it only
> gets counted once against a given poison, rather than counted multiple times.
>
> The underlying mechanic is pretty much consistent with previous editions, but
> more things use "save ends", and the save is now separated out from the
> initial attack. Overall, this isn't nearly as big a change as it looks
> like if you see only the text "you save on a 10 or better on a d20". The
> primary effect of "saves" in 3E is essentially unchanged, with the only change
> being who rolls the dice. They just got renamed to "defenses".
>
> I think a lot of things have similar traits -- it's not that there's actually
> been a big change, but there's a couple of shifts in terminology which make
> it easy to get thrown off. I'm not totally happy about the shift in
> terminology, but I think cleaning it up helped a lot.
>
> I'm actually pretty happy about spell(/power) levels now mapping to character
> levels rather than being a separate chart of things, and I have no regrets
> at all about losing 3E's thing where higher level spells were more likely to
> hit.
>
> -s
> --
> Copyright 2009, all wrongs reversed. Peter Seebach / usenet-nos...@seebs.nethttp://www.seebs.net/log/<-- lawsuits, religion, and funny pictureshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Game_(Scientology) <-- get educated!
They changed the rules. It is true 3E reduced the number of saving
throws than 2E had. 3E does have its own rules that 2E did not.
However, you can recognize the rules. Saving throws were
consolidated. Ability score modifiers were expanded upon. The math
was made easier to roll to hit. With a few exceptions spells are the
exact same and how magic works remained the same.
4E is a complete do over. The only things it kept are ability score
modifiers, the easy math to roll to hit, and labels to name things.
It is a different game.
Gerald Katz
Seebs
> never really accepted what they did in Bo9S, Incarnum, and some of the
> other later books. I did not like the warlock at all. I like Bo9S,
> but I like Pathfinder's fighter better.
Ah-hah! And I've never seen Bo9S, and I haven't yet red Pathfinder. I
haven't read the Incarnum book, but was curious about it.
> It also explains why I was accepting of 3.0 when it came out.
> "Players Option" seemed like a very reasonable extension of 2E to me.
> So when 3.0 was new, and had many things from "Combat & Tactics" and
> "Skills & Powers", it was very natural.
Ah-hah! That would do it, I think there were AoO rules in 2E that I
never used because they were too confusing to me, but I think they prepped
me for the concept.
> That does not mean I agree with you about 4e... :-)
Fair enough.
I think Keith's convinced me that a big part of the problem is that they
did a crappy job of presenting what they were trying to do and how they
did it. If you had a 16-page booklet of "here is an overview of the
basic changes, and why they were made", I think a lot of people would find
it more interesting. Might or might not want to play it, but it'd be
interesting.
There's another aspect of this that's sort of occurred to me. Programming
analogy time!
Long ago, the C programming language was developed at Bell Labs, and it was
successful enough that a bunch of people started implementing C compilers
and supporting it, but of course, no two were quite compatible. A
standardization effort started up, and in 1989, they produced a standard
language (now called C89), which was adopted essentialy universally quite
quickly. It had huge adoption rates because the status quo was pretty
horrible. And a few years later, an amendment came out which fixed up some
internationalization stuff (C89+NA1, also sometimes called C95). Lots of
people support this at least in part.
About ten years after C89, a new and revised/updated spec came out (C99).
C99 is an awesome programming language. It fixes a bunch of holes in C89,
makes it possible to do a lot of things more portably or more expressively,
and so on.
And here we are in 2009, and most compliers haven't fully implemented C99.
Why? It's not that it's not a good language. It's not even that it's not
an improvement -- and a very noticeable one -- over C89.
It's that C89 doesn't suck enough for people to rush to get away from it.
And I think we're seeing a similar thing. 2E had a HUGE number of warts,
quirks, and weaknesses, plus oodles of incompatible splatbooks and variant
rules and such. (I have, somewhere around, a list of rules that double
each stat into two components, each of which provides half of the bonuses
from that stat, etcetera.)
So jumping to 3E was a total, unambiguous, win. No worries. Jumping to 3.5
wasn't a huge shift, but there were some nice cleanup bits; I really like the
3.5 ranger and paladin better than the 3.0, for instance.
Now 4E comes along. We're not currently stuck on a bunch of half-implemented
and vaguely busted rules the way we were right before 3E came out. We have
a basically coherent and consistent combat system available, a system with
way fewer warts and quirks, and there's simply not as much incentive to
"upgrade". And of course, I had a period of being too busy to play, so when
I picked up the books to read them, I didn't have an existing gaming group
to persuade to port over (indeed, I'd just moved, so my gaming group reset
to my spouse), and I had a couple of weeks to spend looking at the rules,
reading them, and thinking about how they'd work.
I expect that 4E will never completely displace 3E, but I think it's still
probably overall a better system -- but, quite possibly, not enough better
to justify dumping an existing game.
I do think I'm going to redo my "chips" rule that I stole from Deadlands,
though. That's my favoritest house rule ever.
Hadsil
> I do not miss the first couple of levels (in 3E play balance) at ALL. I am
> totally happy to have those gone; it removes the driving desire to get to
> second level at all costs so the mage is no longer likely to be one-shotted
> by a domestic pet.
>
That's a matter of personal taste. If it was really such a bother
start at 3rd level. It was never mandatory to start at 1st level.
> > I still think ADnD has the better balance there: with high level
> > spells having /nasty/ effects, but high level PCs and monsters almost
> > always making their saves. Great for mowing down the low to mid level
> > mooks, not so great for gibbing a Dragon. In 3e terms, use a fixed DC
> > 15 for all saves.
>
> I don't like that balance at all. It gets into the same thing that turned
> me off GURPS combat; eventually, it's nothing but very rare fight-ending
> crits. (Not nothing-but, but it really does get a bit silly.)
>
> I don't like fights where you know for sure by the end of the first round
> who won, or where it all comes down to who rolls a 20 or a 1 first. I prefer
> the idea that you can't just one-shot people with a lucky spell.
>
Never been issue with my group. Combats have been quite engaging with
nothing a sure thing. Many combats have looked bleaked but we somehow
manage a victory, often by the use of tactics.
> > But yes, staying even in power with slowly improving effects is
> > better than gradually overwhelming most of your opponent's saves with
> > vastly more deadly ones.
>
> There's a second issue, which is that in 3E, any spells short of your highest
> level spells were noticably less useful against comparable-level targets,
> because the DC didn't shift. That ended up sort of undermining the idea of
> having a ton of spells -- all your low level spells were useless unless the
> mooks were low-level too.
>
> -s
> --
> Copyright 2009, all wrongs reversed. Peter Seebach / usenet-nos...@seebs.nethttp://www.seebs.net/log/<-- lawsuits, religion, and funny pictureshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Game_(Scientology) <-- get educated!
There's a point to that. At that point a prudent spellcaster should
stop trying to be the glory hound to always get the kill. If the bad
guys are always making their saving throws against your low level
spells, use your low level spells for something else such as buffing
other party members. Casting Displacement on the Fighter can be a lot
more helpful than another Fireball. A simple Silent Image spell of an
illusionary wall of stone could make bad guys think you casted a real
Wall of Stone, stopping their firing of arrows or causing them to
waste movement going around it. Even a 1 round "test" to see if it's
an illusion is one round they aren't attacking the party.
Gerald Katz
decalod85
> On 2009-12-02, decalod85 <decalo...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > The designers
> > quantified the class abilities into powers, and then evenly
> > distributed them amongst the classes with the same mechanic for
> > resource management.
> > This is the sameness of play that I (and others) have mentioned.
>
> That's not accurate at all, though. Powers didn't get distributed among
> classes; new powers got invented. Clerics have old cleric spells and some
> new powers, but they don't have stuff from non-clerics.
I didn't mean to put it that way. The powers stayed with their
original classes, and while new powers were invented for all classes,
the most were invented for the fighter and rogue.
decalod85
> On 2009-12-02, decalod85 <decalo...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > And yet again, it explains why 4E doesn't "feel like D&D" to me. I
> > never really accepted what they did in Bo9S, Incarnum, and some of the
> > other later books. I did not like the warlock at all. I like Bo9S,
> > but I like Pathfinder's fighter better.
>
> Ah-hah! And I've never seen Bo9S, and I haven't yet red Pathfinder. I
> haven't read the Incarnum book, but was curious about it.
>
> > It also explains why I was accepting of 3.0 when it came out.
> > "Players Option" seemed like a very reasonable extension of 2E to me.
> > So when 3.0 was new, and had many things from "Combat & Tactics" and
> > "Skills & Powers", it was very natural.
>
> Ah-hah! That would do it, I think there were AoO rules in 2E that I
> never used because they were too confusing to me, but I think they prepped
> me for the concept.
>
> > That does not mean I agree with you about 4e... :-)
>
> Fair enough.
>
> I think Keith's convinced me that a big part of the problem is that they
> did a crappy job of presenting what they were trying to do and how they
> did it. If you had a 16-page booklet of "here is an overview of the
> basic changes, and why they were made", I think a lot of people would find
> it more interesting. Might or might not want to play it, but it'd be
> interesting.
Remember the free 3e conversion guide? How they disappeared from the
bookstores as fast as they arrived? How it was one of their most
popular downloads from their (remarkably good for 1999) website? They
should have taken a page from that book instead of the goofy $20 books
they had in the bookstores.
> There's another aspect of this that's sort of occurred to me. Programming
> analogy time!
>
> Long ago, the C programming language was developed at Bell Labs, and it was
> successful enough that a bunch of people started implementing C compilers
> and supporting it, but of course, no two were quite compatible. A
> standardization effort started up, and in 1989, they produced a standard
> language (now called C89), which was adopted essentialy universally quite
> quickly. It had huge adoption rates because the status quo was pretty
> horrible. And a few years later, an amendment came out which fixed up some
> internationalization stuff (C89+NA1, also sometimes called C95). Lots of
> people support this at least in part.
>
> About ten years after C89, a new and revised/updated spec came out (C99).
> C99 is an awesome programming language. It fixes a bunch of holes in C89,
> makes it possible to do a lot of things more portably or more expressively,
> and so on.
>
> And here we are in 2009, and most compliers haven't fully implemented C99.
> Why? It's not that it's not a good language. It's not even that it's not
> an improvement -- and a very noticeable one -- over C89.
>
> It's that C89 doesn't suck enough for people to rush to get away from it.
I understand what you are talking about. I wrote a lot of code for a
non-compliant C compiler in the early to mid-90's, and my suffering
was great.
> And I think we're seeing a similar thing. 2E had a HUGE number of warts,
> quirks, and weaknesses, plus oodles of incompatible splatbooks and variant
> rules and such. (I have, somewhere around, a list of rules that double
> each stat into two components, each of which provides half of the bonuses
> from that stat, etcetera.)
>
> So jumping to 3E was a total, unambiguous, win. No worries. Jumping to 3.5
> wasn't a huge shift, but there were some nice cleanup bits; I really like the
> 3.5 ranger and paladin better than the 3.0, for instance.
>
> Now 4E comes along. We're not currently stuck on a bunch of half-implemented
> and vaguely busted rules the way we were right before 3E came out. We have
> a basically coherent and consistent combat system available, a system with
> way fewer warts and quirks, and there's simply not as much incentive to
> "upgrade". And of course, I had a period of being too busy to play, so when
> I picked up the books to read them, I didn't have an existing gaming group
> to persuade to port over (indeed, I'd just moved, so my gaming group reset
> to my spouse), and I had a couple of weeks to spend looking at the rules,
> reading them, and thinking about how they'd work.
>
> I expect that 4E will never completely displace 3E, but I think it's still
> probably overall a better system -- but, quite possibly, not enough better
> to justify dumping an existing game.
Pathfinder will probably make that hard, and I think a permanent fork
is now in effect. I think they have done a very admirable job of
cleaning up 3.x, and presenting a good balance without massive
changes.
> I do think I'm going to redo my "chips" rule that I stole from Deadlands,
> though. That's my favoritest house rule ever.
Why not? It's your game!
Seebs
> They changed the rules. It is true 3E reduced the number of saving
> throws than 2E had. 3E does have its own rules that 2E did not.
> However, you can recognize the rules. Saving throws were
> consolidated. Ability score modifiers were expanded upon. The math
> was made easier to roll to hit. With a few exceptions spells are the
> exact same and how magic works remained the same.
There's an awful lot of exceptions -- defensive casting and concentration,
for instance.
> 4E is a complete do over. The only things it kept are ability score
> modifiers, the easy math to roll to hit, and labels to name things.
> It is a different game.
This is simply not true. 4E is no more a complete do-over than 3E was.
It's still fundamentally the same game, although they've toggled on a few
of the optional rules and house rules by default. I've seen many people
advocate getting con score rather than con mod at first level, or average
hit points. That's not new, and at least one of those was in print in
one of the 3E or 3.5E books. "Players roll all the dice" is functionally
equivalent to the shift in how saves=>defenses are understood, so that's
not new. The "10+ on d20" effect-ending is a new mechanic, but not a hugely
surprising one, and part of a general shift away from double-counting
modifiers.
That last bit may be a bit badly worded.
In 3E, if you're attacked by poison, you are likely to have two saves
against it. If you have a fortitude bonus, it applies to both saves. What
that means is that the effect of a +2 or +4 or whatever comes into play
twice. That means that the chances of taking full effect are noticably
skewed. If Player A needs an 11 to save, and player B needs a 16, player
B is a lot more than 50% more likely than Player A to get full effect
from the poison. Player A's outcomes for two saves are:
25% make both
50% make one
25% fail both
Player B's outcomes are:
6% make both
38% make one
56% fail both
(Numbers rounded.)
In 4E, if player A will be hit 50% of the time, and player B 75% of the
time, player B is affected 50% more.
I think this is a pretty big win, because it keeps bonuses more linear
in their effects. (Actually, as long as you face onset even if you make
the original save, arguably the net outcome is sort of the same anyway,
in that either way, B takes 50% more poison effect, but in practice, the
net result of using the same modifiers repeatedly is often multiplicative;
this is more obvious with diseases, where making saves can fend off a
disease so you no longer have to make more saves against it.)
Anyway... No, really, it's not a complete do-over. You still make a melee
attack by adding a bonus from strength to some bonuses from your level,
weapon you're using, and suchlike, to a d20 and comparing it to the target's
AC. You still, if you're using a weapon, do damage based on that weapon type,
plus a bonus based on strength.
There's extra stuff that can change this, but there always has been; look
at Weapon Finesse.
-s
--
Seebs
> start at 3rd level. It was never mandatory to start at 1st level.
True, but that just made character generation even more tedious. :)
> There's a point to that. At that point a prudent spellcaster should
> stop trying to be the glory hound to always get the kill. If the bad
> guys are always making their saving throws against your low level
> spells, use your low level spells for something else such as buffing
> other party members. Casting Displacement on the Fighter can be a lot
> more helpful than another Fireball. A simple Silent Image spell of an
> illusionary wall of stone could make bad guys think you casted a real
> Wall of Stone, stopping their firing of arrows or causing them to
> waste movement going around it. Even a 1 round "test" to see if it's
> an illusion is one round they aren't attacking the party.
This is to some extent true, but I'd rather just have spells have the same
chance of effect regardless of level.
-s
--
Seebs
> original classes, and while new powers were invented for all classes,
> the most were invented for the fighter and rogue.
True. But I don't think it's a big deal; Bo9S didn't somehow magically
make things stop being D&D. Creating a set of combat maneuvers for the
martial types to use doesn't seem to have broken anything, and they did
a beautiful job of making them characteristically different.
Seebs
> bookstores as fast as they arrived? How it was one of their most
> popular downloads from their (remarkably good for 1999) website? They
> should have taken a page from that book instead of the goofy $20 books
> they had in the bookstores.
Agreed. That would have helped some. I ignored those goofy books.
A conversion guide might be harder, with a general shift away from trying
to preserve the 1E spell lists with their original names and levels and
such. But there's a ton of stuff you could convert.
> Pathfinder will probably make that hard, and I think a permanent fork
> is now in effect. I think they have done a very admirable job of
> cleaning up 3.x, and presenting a good balance without massive
> changes.
I'm actually pretty happy about that, overall -- I like both systems, for
various reasons. Overall, I think 4E is better at giving me the kind of
gaming I want from D&D, but Pathfinder doesn't look bad at all.
Rick Pikul
> decalod85 wrote:
>> Here is another thing for Seebs' list of things that people find
>> un"D&D" like about 4E. Years of conditioning allows me to accept that
>> there are things a spellcaster can only do once a day, but it feels
>> mighty foreign for the non-casting classes to have "dailies".
For me the dividing line is based on the question "is something being
consumed?"
After you release a package of magical energy you don't have that energy
any more, swing a sword in a fancy way and you still have your skills and
your sword.
> Barbarian rage?
Reserves of energy, which are built up as levels are gained.
> Rogue's defensive roll?
I'd say this ability relies on having abnormal luck.
--
Chakat Firepaw - Inventor & Scientist (Mad)
Seebs
> For me the dividing line is based on the question "is something being
> consumed?"
>
> After you release a package of magical energy you don't have that energy
> any more, swing a sword in a fancy way and you still have your skills and
> your sword.
But possibly not the energy to keep doing it forever. You might also have
some maneuvers which require more attention, or which strain your wrist a
bit, or...
Keith Davies
>
> And I think we're seeing a similar thing. 2E had a HUGE number of
> warts, quirks, and weaknesses, plus oodles of incompatible splatbooks
> and variant rules and such. (I have, somewhere around, a list of
> rules that double each stat into two components, each of which
> provides half of the bonuses from that stat, etcetera.)
One of the Players Options books (Skills and Powers, I think) from TSR.
> So jumping to 3E was a total, unambiguous, win. No worries. Jumping
> to 3.5 wasn't a huge shift, but there were some nice cleanup bits; I
> really like the 3.5 ranger and paladin better than the 3.0, for
> instance.
Also, pulling things from 3.0 to 3.5 was relatively simple. Even if you
missed something (oops, used 3.0 DR on this monster instead of 3.5) it
was still okay.
> Now 4E comes along. We're not currently stuck on a bunch of
> half-implemented and vaguely busted rules the way we were right before
> 3E came out. We have a basically coherent and consistent combat
> system available, a system with way fewer warts and quirks, and
> there's simply not as much incentive to "upgrade". And of course, I
> had a period of being too busy to play, so when I picked up the books
> to read them, I didn't have an existing gaming group to persuade to
> port over (indeed, I'd just moved, so my gaming group reset to my
> spouse), and I had a couple of weeks to spend looking at the rules,
> reading them, and thinking about how they'd work.
Whether or not 3.x is broken enough to push people (I think it isn't),
WotC also failed to make 4e attractive enough to draw (more) people. I
can't think anyone claims that 3.x is perfect, but a lot of people feel
that 4e is screwy in places they don't accept.
This feeling may be entirely based on perception than objective
analysis... but feelings are emotional and thus often more subject to
impression than to analysis.
IOW, "eww, ick" can prevent "hmm, after examination and consideration it
doesn't suck" from happening.
> I expect that 4E will never completely displace 3E, but I think it's
> still probably overall a better system -- but, quite possibly, not
> enough better to justify dumping an existing game.
If you qualify "better system" with "for some modes of play", I'll not
argue.
Keith Davies
> On 2009-12-02, decalod85 <deca...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Remember the free 3e conversion guide? How they disappeared from the
>> bookstores as fast as they arrived? How it was one of their most
>> popular downloads from their (remarkably good for 1999) website?
>> They should have taken a page from that book instead of the goofy $20
>> books they had in the bookstores.
>
> Agreed. That would have helped some. I ignored those goofy books.
>
> A conversion guide might be harder, with a general shift away from
> trying to preserve the 1E spell lists with their original names and
> levels and such. But there's a ton of stuff you could convert.
Even if you don't convert ("eh, I'll go with the monsters as written,
who cares that the new ones aren't the same as the old ones"), the
existence of a non-crap conversion document is a clear suggestion that
there is at least a moderately strong relationship between the games.
The lack of conversion suggests conversion is too hard, and thus that
the new one is too far from the original.
>
>> Pathfinder will probably make that hard, and I think a permanent fork
>> is now in effect. I think they have done a very admirable job of
>> cleaning up 3.x, and presenting a good balance without massive
>> changes.
>
> I'm actually pretty happy about that, overall -- I like both systems,
> for various reasons. Overall, I think 4E is better at giving me the
> kind of gaming I want from D&D, but Pathfinder doesn't look bad at
> all.
Agree almost entirely (I don't play 4e). A fork is a lovely thing.
Jasin Zujovic
>>>> There's a second issue, which is that in 3E, any spells short of your
>>>> highest level spells were noticably less useful against
>>>> comparable-level targets, because the DC didn't shift. That ended up
>>>> sort of undermining the idea of having a ton of spells -- all your low
>>>> level spells were useless unless the mooks were low-level too.
>>> title, in my wiki at http://wiki.kjd-imc.org) a while ago. Change saves
>>> to have save DCs of 10 + max(HD/2, ability modifier) [or spell level,
>>> for spells).
>>>
>>> This gives a bit of a boost to things at low level, if the initiator has
>>> a good ability score (the save for a first-level spell is likely to be
>>> at least 13), tones things down at high levels (RAW, a ninth-level spell
>>> would top out with a max save DC of about 19, barring the use of Spell
>>> Focus and the like).
>> How does it boost things at low level?
>>
>> At low levels, the DC will be 10 + modifier, while in 3.5 it would be 10
>> + spell level (or HD/2) + modifier.
>
> Sorry, provides a relative boost to lower-level spells when higher-level
> spells are available, in that the difference between them is smaller.
> Your first-level spell has a DC of at least 14, your ninth-level spell
> has a DC of at least 19, instead of 15 and 23.
Ah, that makes sense.
> Okay, it's not a profound (relative) improvement, and could perhaps be
> expressed better as "your low-level spells don't suck so much
> comparatively, because your high-level spells suck more than they used
> to", but it does smooth out the power differences a bit.
One idea I've considered (though never even to the point of working out
rough numbers) is making lower level spells *harder* to resist than
higher level ones.
So rather than choosing between inflicting -2 morale penalty which will
almost certainly be resisted and instant death which might work, you
choose between a fairly certain -2 penalty and rather improbable certain
death.
--
Jasin
Keith Davies
> Keith Davies wrote:
>>>>> There's a second issue, which is that in 3E, any spells short of your
>>>>> highest level spells were noticably less useful against
>>>>> comparable-level targets, because the DC didn't shift. That ended up
>>>>> sort of undermining the idea of having a ton of spells -- all your low
>>>>> level spells were useless unless the mooks were low-level too.
>>>> I wrote an article about this ('Recalibrating Saving Throws', IIRC
>>>> title, in my wiki at http://wiki.kjd-imc.org) a while ago. Change saves
>>>> to have save DCs of 10 + max(HD/2, ability modifier) [or spell level,
>>>> for spells).
>>>>
>>>> This gives a bit of a boost to things at low level, if the initiator has
>>>> a good ability score (the save for a first-level spell is likely to be
>>>> at least 13), tones things down at high levels (RAW, a ninth-level spell
>>>> would top out with a max save DC of about 19, barring the use of Spell
>>>> Focus and the like).
>>> How does it boost things at low level?
>>>
>>> At low levels, the DC will be 10 + modifier, while in 3.5 it would be 10
>>> + spell level (or HD/2) + modifier.
>>
>> Sorry, provides a relative boost to lower-level spells when higher-level
>> spells are available, in that the difference between them is smaller.
>> Your first-level spell has a DC of at least 14, your ninth-level spell
>> has a DC of at least 19, instead of 15 and 23.
>
> Ah, that makes sense.
Oh, and if your Int is even higher (say, 28 or 29) the save for the two
spells will be the same (DC 19), barring Spell Focus. This is less than
the 20-29 of RAW, but it now means that your first-level spell is no
more likely to fail than the ninth-level spell.
I suppose 'equalizes' would have been a better word than 'improves'.
>> Okay, it's not a profound (relative) improvement, and could perhaps be
>> expressed better as "your low-level spells don't suck so much
>> comparatively, because your high-level spells suck more than they used
>> to", but it does smooth out the power differences a bit.
>
> One idea I've considered (though never even to the point of working out
> rough numbers) is making lower level spells *harder* to resist than
> higher level ones.
>
> So rather than choosing between inflicting -2 morale penalty which will
> almost certainly be resisted and instant death which might work, you
> choose between a fairly certain -2 penalty and rather improbable certain
> death.
It wouldn't offend me.
I've also considered an option where level and power were tracked
separately. For example, there could be a very subtle spell (but hard
to cast) called 'pacebreaker' that puts a tiny, tiny electric shock into
the target that stops his pacemaker (twitch muscle that governs the
heartbeat), killing him. Very low power, fairly high level because of
the precision needed. OTOH, lightning bolt is very crude (low level)
but high power (ZAAARCH!).
So, you could have skilled-and-subtle wizards using low power spells,
and crude-but-effective wizards using high power spells (and of course
skilled-and-powerful that combine both). Never got around to diving
into this one much.
Mind you, with the current model for Echelon (with simple and complex
spells) I can probably pursue this a little, without too much trouble.
Complex spells need more training (School Focus talent) but give greater
effect (waive the penalty), while the simple spells generally work (and
thus don't need the specialization) but don't do as much.
This suggests, then, that perhaps complex spells could be cast at some
sort of penalty (to save, to SR check, lower caster level, etc.), but I
don't know that I want to go that route. I like that someone who spends
the effort (and talent slot) actually gets to do others can't.
Seebs
> Seebs <usenet...@seebs.net> wrote:
>> And I think we're seeing a similar thing. 2E had a HUGE number of
>> warts, quirks, and weaknesses, plus oodles of incompatible splatbooks
>> and variant rules and such. (I have, somewhere around, a list of
>> rules that double each stat into two components, each of which
>> provides half of the bonuses from that stat, etcetera.)
> One of the Players Options books (Skills and Powers, I think) from TSR.
Sounds right.
> Whether or not 3.x is broken enough to push people (I think it isn't),
> WotC also failed to make 4e attractive enough to draw (more) people. I
> can't think anyone claims that 3.x is perfect, but a lot of people feel
> that 4e is screwy in places they don't accept.
Yeah. It fixes things that don't look like problems, or at least, which
don't look like problems until you've had them fixed for a while.
>> I expect that 4E will never completely displace 3E, but I think it's
>> still probably overall a better system -- but, quite possibly, not
>> enough better to justify dumping an existing game.
> If you qualify "better system" with "for some modes of play", I'll not
> argue.
It wins noticably for the two things I care most about; dungeon crawling
combat-based adventures, and puzzle/politics play where the characters may
not have the exact same charisma or diplomatic skills as the players. It's
definitely better at both of those.
Hadsil
> Seebs <usenet-nos...@seebs.net> wrote:
> > On 2009-12-02, decalod85 <decalo...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >> Pathfinder will probably make that hard, and I think a permanent fork
> >> is now in effect. I think they have done a very admirable job of
> >> cleaning up 3.x, and presenting a good balance without massive
> >> changes.
>
> > I'm actually pretty happy about that, overall -- I like both systems,
> > for various reasons. Overall, I think 4E is better at giving me the
> > kind of gaming I want from D&D, but Pathfinder doesn't look bad at
> > all.
>
> Agree almost entirely (I don't play 4e). A fork is a lovely thing.
>
> Keith
> --
> Keith Davies "Do you know what is in beer? The strength
> keith.dav...@kjdavies.org to bear the things you can't change, and
> keith.dav...@gmail.com wisdom to ignore them and fsck off forhttp://www.kjdavies.org/ another beer." -- Owen, discussing work
Yeah, fork you, 4E.
:P
On a more serious note, I am sincerely saddened I do not like 4E.
There was potential to what an improvement on 3E could have been.
Pathfinder took a less aggressive path than what probably could have
been done. There are changes but rather minor.
Gerald Katz
Hadsil
> Keith Davies wrote:
> >>>> There's a second issue, which is that in 3E, any spells short of your
> >>>> highest level spells were noticably less useful against
> >>>> comparable-level targets, because the DC didn't shift. That ended up
> >>>> sort of undermining the idea of having a ton of spells -- all your low
> >>>> level spells were useless unless the mooks were low-level too.
> >>> I wrote an article about this ('Recalibrating Saving Throws', IIRC
>
> - Show quoted text -
I can go along with this concept. The devil is in the details for my
personal taste of liking how something like this works, but the intent
I favor. I have no major issue with save or die spells, but not
having spellcasters rely on them above all else is good.
Gerald Katz
tussock
> tussock wrote:
> > If someone would rewrite it for me, so some (martial) classes had
> > all at-will abilities with situational effects, and others had all
> > flexi-chosen daily (Wizard), and others had all rest-to-reuse
> > (Sorcerer), it'd be ever so much closer to something I could house-
> > rule into being DnD (with faster movement, longer ranges, target rolls
> > saves, better spells, kick-ass magic items, "striker" fighters and
> > "defender" rogues,
>
> I find this confusing.
>
> When has "defending the vulnerable party members" ever been a D&D
> rogue's schtick?
Well, for most of the game his only combat thing was to hide until
the monsters engaged the grunts, then get one good attack from their
rear, then have no HP to back it up. Basically, stay the hell out of
combat, you suck at it. 3e gave them good attacks if you could stay
"behind" opponents, and added a few things like slowing and draining
for alternate results of that.
Anyway, run it off the ability to make your opponent want to
attack you and then dodge their attack, while hurting them if they
ignore you. Trip them up if they try to walk away, tangle them in
their own feet, taunt them (marking can be whatever you want it to be,
after all), shift and tumble out of their way when they strike at you.
Be the swashbuckling rogue who frustrates your enemies /and/ the
backstabber who makes you pay for turning away. Evade all the attacks
of 4e as you do the Fireballs of 3e, but lose the ability to strike
hard if they attack you.
Leave the Fighter to be the guy who just deals raw damage, round,
after round, after round. Melee or ranged, mounted charger or dancing
footsoldier, fast or heavy, pushy or dodgy. That's /their/ schtick.
--
tussock
Seebs
> Well, for most of the game his only combat thing was to hide until
> the monsters engaged the grunts, then get one good attack from their
> rear, then have no HP to back it up.
Which sucked and wasn't fun.
> Basically, stay the hell out of
> combat, you suck at it. 3e gave them good attacks if you could stay
> "behind" opponents, and added a few things like slowing and draining
> for alternate results of that.
Which is to say, 3E fixed rogue by making it useful, at least somewhat,
in combat.
> Anyway, run it off the ability to make your opponent want to
> attack you and then dodge their attack, while hurting them if they
> ignore you. Trip them up if they try to walk away, tangle them in
> their own feet, taunt them (marking can be whatever you want it to be,
> after all), shift and tumble out of their way when they strike at you.
> Be the swashbuckling rogue who frustrates your enemies /and/ the
> backstabber who makes you pay for turning away. Evade all the attacks
> of 4e as you do the Fireballs of 3e, but lose the ability to strike
> hard if they attack you.
That actually sounds like a really interesting class, but it does
create a sort of conflict between durability and expected role. That said,
sounds sorta like an interesting option; take evasion and mettle, run
your defenses through the roof, and just avoid being hurt.
> Leave the Fighter to be the guy who just deals raw damage, round,
> after round, after round. Melee or ranged, mounted charger or dancing
> footsoldier, fast or heavy, pushy or dodgy. That's /their/ schtick.
Only it isn't, really, and hasn't been for a long time. The fighter's
schtick is having heavy armor and a ton of hit points.
decalod85
>
> Yeah, fork you, 4E.
>
> :P
>
> On a more serious note, I am sincerely saddened I do not like 4E.
Here's a big "me too" on that. It makes me feel old not to like the
new edition.
tussock
> tussock wrote:
>
> > Well, for most of the game his only combat thing was to hide until
> > the monsters engaged the grunts, then get one good attack from their
> > rear, then have no HP to back it up.
>
> Which sucked and wasn't fun.
EGG thought everyone was exploring most of the time, where the
Thief ruled. No need to dominate that half of the game and combat as
well, as that was where the poor Fighters and Clerics got to have
their turn in the spotlight. 8]
<snip>
> > Anyway, run it off the ability to make your opponent want to
> > attack you and then dodge their attack, while hurting them if they
> > ignore you. Trip them up if they try to walk away, tangle them in
> > their own feet, taunt them (marking can be whatever you want it to be,
> > after all), shift and tumble out of their way when they strike at you.
> > Be the swashbuckling rogue who frustrates your enemies /and/ the
> > backstabber who makes you pay for turning away. Evade all the attacks
> > of 4e as you do the Fireballs of 3e, but lose the ability to strike
> > hard if they attack you.
>
> That actually sounds like a really interesting class, but it does
> create a sort of conflict between durability and expected role.
You might fake durability pretty well with something like a
defensive roll. Say encounter immediate interrupt, gain HP as if
spending a healing surge when an attack would drop you to 0 or less
HP. Depends how good your defences are as to how much you need them,
but you can't push that too far or you get outside their balance
limits.
> That said, sounds sorta like an interesting option; take evasion and
> mettle, run your defenses through the roof, and just avoid being hurt.
Thanks, though it's perhaps a little like the monk, eh. How would
I differentiate them? Monk as more of a controller I suppose, more
offensive lockdowns, holds, trips, throws: getting to the enemy and
disabling them (well, inconveniencing them in 4e), rather than holding
their attention, with pretty good area damage with rapid attacks for
taking down mooks.
> > Leave the Fighter to be the guy who just deals raw damage, round,
> > after round, after round. Melee or ranged, mounted charger or dancing
> > footsoldier, fast or heavy, pushy or dodgy. That's /their/ schtick.
>
> Only it isn't, really, and hasn't been for a long time. The fighter's
> schtick is having heavy armor and a ton of hit points.
Ah, for the days when they had all the best weapons, huge stat
mods, and extra attacks with bonus damage, all that few others had
access to. Grand mastery in twin intelligent longswords. Hell, they're
still pretty good at knocking things down in 3e, if you run enough
encounters to wear down the spellcasters, and use the damage feats.
--
tussock
Seebs
> Thief ruled. No need to dominate that half of the game and combat as
> well, as that was where the poor Fighters and Clerics got to have
> their turn in the spotlight. 8]
Solution: Make the fighter and cleric also useful for something other
than combat.
In short, game design has made progress in the last thirty years. Having
everyone contribute in most-to-all situations is wayyyy better than having
one circumstance for each character to be useful.
> Thanks, though it's perhaps a little like the monk, eh. How would
> I differentiate them? Monk as more of a controller I suppose, more
> offensive lockdowns, holds, trips, throws: getting to the enemy and
> disabling them (well, inconveniencing them in 4e), rather than holding
> their attention, with pretty good area damage with rapid attacks for
> taking down mooks.
Hmm, that's got potential. I do see the point. Some of this is MMO
drift -- I've just spent a couple of years getting used to the idea that
a rogue does a ton more damage than a plate-wearer, but hasn't got any
durability to speak of.
>> Only it isn't, really, and hasn't been for a long time. The fighter's
>> schtick is having heavy armor and a ton of hit points.
> Ah, for the days when they had all the best weapons, huge stat
> mods, and extra attacks with bonus damage, all that few others had
> access to. Grand mastery in twin intelligent longswords. Hell, they're
> still pretty good at knocking things down in 3e, if you run enough
> encounters to wear down the spellcasters, and use the damage feats.
Yeah. I think, though, that I overall prefer separating out the heavy-armor
melee guy from the highest-damage melee guys. It does reflect some
archetype drift, but it balances and plays better, IMHO.
Hadsil
Granted, it has been a very long time, but I don't remember the
thieves of my 2E parties being useless in combat. They went for the
backstab, naturally, but they were also more apt to being gadgeteers
using various magic items, such as wands which in 2E anyone could
use. It is part of the reason Use Magic Device is a Rogue class skill
I'd say.
Gerald Katz
Rick Pikul
> On 2009-12-02, Rick Pikul <rwp...@sympatico.ca> wrote:
>> For me the dividing line is based on the question "is something being
>> consumed?"
>>
>> After you release a package of magical energy you don't have that energy
>> any more, swing a sword in a fancy way and you still have your skills and
>> your sword.
>
> But possibly not the energy to keep doing it forever. You might also have
> some maneuvers which require more attention, or which strain your wrist a
> bit, or...
...or any of a number of post hoc rationalizations that I never found very
good the first time around.
Simply getting a bit tired is, IMHO, a particularly bad explanation for
why you can only do a fancy move once. A power that involves tapping into
your reserves, sure, but not one that is maybe as tiring as a
particularly hard swing. Although it's not quite as bad as magically
knowing the one time during the day you will get a chance to use it.
Justisaur
> Seebs wrote:
> >> So we come down to preference. When I play a fighter, I don't want to
> >> worry about any resource management other than the number of scalps I
> >> am carrying, or perhaps how many potions of CLW I have left.
>
> > That leads to an interesting question:
>
> > Could someone design a class which didn't have resource management to deal
> > with but was, in practice, comparably balanced to the standard 4E classes?
>
> Overall balanced, sure. Just work out how much time you spend using
> at-wills, encounters and dailies and give them something comparable to
> the average.
>
Easy as pie. As I'd mentioned the rogue's dailies & even encounter
powers are barely better than the at-wills. I hardly ever use my
dailies. An extra d6 when you are already using 3 of them and have
+10 to damage is barely noticeable. Even a +1 to damage all the time
would give me far more benefit than loosing all my dailies & encounter
powers. I actually feel somewhat gypped as my round is usually the
same thing and takes all of 2 seconds, while the wizard, cleric,
warlord etc have some real decisions to make and take awhile.
The fighter is a bit more lopsided with some daily powers giving as
much as 6x weapon damage, and if you are fool enough to take a
greataxe or whatever it is that gives d12s... However their at-wills
are very lackluster, and then there's marking to take into account.
- Justisaur
Justisaur
> On 2009-12-01, Justisaur <justis...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Er, no. My rogue has nothing resembling any supernatural or spell
> > like abilities. I'm still somewhat at a loss as to why he can only do
> > a Handspring Assault once a day though. Wears out his tendons? The
> > encounter powers I have less of an issue with.
>
> The book says:
> If you're a martial character, you're reaching into your
> deepest reserves of energy to pull off an amazing exploit.
>
> Cinematic logic, but perfectly reasonable.
>
Not really for me. I need something better than that. It's a flaw
I'm living with.
> > Again obviously you haven't seen a wizard in play. Those daily spells
> > are far more impressive than anything my rogue can do as a daily -
> > which for him are barely better than his at wills. The overall
> > balance between classes is still similar to previous editions.
>
> That hadn't been my experience. They are differently specialized, certainly.
>
> Rogue has a close blast 3 attack that does 2[W]+Dex damage and blinds until
> end of next turn. That's not wussy.
>
That must be much higher level than my rogue, I'd take that in a
heartbeat over anything I've got so far.
And at the same time while my rogue doesn't have that available yet,
Stinking cloud does d10 automatically in a 5x5 square moved wherever
you want it, every round, and prevents line of sight (effectively
blinding) everyone within or through it while you continue to pound
the enemy with magic missiles. In play it is extremely impressive.
Perhaps your wizards are picking the wrong spells or not using them
right... A problem in all editions :)
> > It'd be exceedingly easy to houserule and I doubt at all unbalancing
> > to allow wizards to flexi all their powers. In fact that's all it
> > would take is one sentence. Don't tell me you don't have any house
> > rules in 3e :) I don't see the point in making all their powers daily
> > though, you'd have to reintroduce 3e wands which then mean they aren't
> > really daily anyway. If you really want you could say they have to
> > have their implement to cast that magic missile at will. You could
> > convert encounters into multiple dailies, letting them blow them all
> > at once if you wanted. I'm not sure what the number would be 5x
> > approximately.
>
> The key here, I think, is the intent of moving the game away from "okay,
> the casters used their good spells, we have to go rest to restore them".
> Encounter spells work well for that, but they do pretty much take us away
> from Vancian magic entirely. You can now quest for a reasonable length of
> time without having to just do without your casters. In general, they put
> some real work into encouraging people to explore more at a time. It is
> no longer necessarily the case that your best choice for the Epic
> Confrontation is to try to hit it without having hit any other encounters...
>
I've had just the opposite experience. Wizard blows his daily at the
beginning of the adventure, and we get nearly wiped at the end because
he didn't save his dailies. Same as happened in 3e at mid-high level
with poorly played wizards.
- Justisaur
Bryant Durrell
Justisaur <just...@gmail.com> wrote:
>On Dec 1, 10:22�am, Seebs <usenet-nos...@seebs.net> wrote:
>>
>> Rogue has a close blast 3 attack that does 2[W]+Dex damage and blinds until
>> end of next turn. �That's not wussy.
>
>That must be much higher level than my rogue, I'd take that in a
>heartbeat over anything I've got so far.
Level 1 daily! Blinding Barrage.
It is a bit tricky picking rogue dailies because of the sneak attack
thing. This is a pretty common thing for strikers, though... rangers
are the other poster child. "Twin Strike. Twin Strike. Twin Strike."
--
Bryant Durrell // dur...@innocence.com // dur...@gmail.com
Seebs
> Easy as pie. As I'd mentioned the rogue's dailies & even encounter
> powers are barely better than the at-wills.
Lolwut?
First level encounter powers, maybe.
Sly Flourish (at will): Dex vs. AC, 1[W]+Dex+Cha damage.
Bait and Switch (encounter 3): Dex vs. Will, 2[W]+Dex damage, you then
switch places with the target and can then shift one square (or your
Cha modifier)
Clever Riposte (daily 5): Dex vs. AC, 2[W]+Dex damage, target takes
damage equal to dex each time it attacks you, and you can shift as
an immediate reaction after such an attack.
Cloud of Steel (encounter 7): Dex vs. AC, 1[W] + Dex modifier damage...
... to every enemy you can see within a close blast 5.
The encounter powers and dailies are WAY better than the at-will.
> I hardly ever use my
> dailies. An extra d6 when you are already using 3 of them and have
> +10 to damage is barely noticeable. Even a +1 to damage all the time
> would give me far more benefit than loosing all my dailies & encounter
> powers. I actually feel somewhat gypped as my round is usually the
> same thing and takes all of 2 seconds, while the wizard, cleric,
> warlord etc have some real decisions to make and take awhile.
What level is your rogue? I don't see a fighter 6[W] until the 25th
level dailies... And I see a 6[W] daily for rogue at 19.
Seebs
>> Rogue has a close blast 3 attack that does 2[W]+Dex damage and blinds until
>> end of next turn. �That's not wussy.
> That must be much higher level than my rogue, I'd take that in a
> heartbeat over anything I've got so far.
... Blinding Barrage, rogue attack 1.
It is definitely not possible that this is higher level than your rogue.
> I've had just the opposite experience. Wizard blows his daily at the
> beginning of the adventure, and we get nearly wiped at the end because
> he didn't save his dailies. Same as happened in 3e at mid-high level
> with poorly played wizards.
If your wizard has only one daily, that can happen. Usually, if we're doing
more than a little exploring, though, we don't use the daily in the first
fight. Again, that assumes only one daily... You get more later.
Seebs
> It is a bit tricky picking rogue dailies because of the sneak attack
> thing. This is a pretty common thing for strikers, though... rangers
> are the other poster child. "Twin Strike. Twin Strike. Twin Strike."
Yeah, I'd noticed that. Twin strike is nearly always very good, although
I'd point out that with a high dex mod, it stops being as awesome, because
the lack of your +dex to damage makes it weaker. It is, however, the
Death of Minions.
Bryant Durrell
Seebs <usenet...@seebs.net> wrote:
>On 2009-12-03, Bryant Durrell <dur...@innocence.com> wrote:
>> It is a bit tricky picking rogue dailies because of the sneak attack
>> thing. This is a pretty common thing for strikers, though... rangers
>> are the other poster child. "Twin Strike. Twin Strike. Twin Strike."
>
>Yeah, I'd noticed that. Twin strike is nearly always very good, although
>I'd point out that with a high dex mod, it stops being as awesome, because
>the lack of your +dex to damage makes it weaker. It is, however, the
>Death of Minions.
Indeed.
I should be precise; it doesn't get /sick/ unless you're playing in an
optimizer environment -- the biggest win comes when you're stacking up
non-stat damage modifers via magic items. This is because you get twice
as many uses of each damage modifer when you're attacking twice per round.
I should maybe post about my journey into RPGA organized play over the
course of the last year. It's been a fascinating learning experience
about all sorts of things. Dunno if people would be interested.
Seebs
> I should be precise; it doesn't get /sick/ unless you're playing in an
> optimizer environment -- the biggest win comes when you're stacking up
> non-stat damage modifers via magic items. This is because you get twice
> as many uses of each damage modifer when you're attacking twice per round.
Ahh, good catch. Hadn't thought of that. I didn't think you could stack
those very high, though -- I'd have assumed that they would do the normal
thing of not stacking.
dr...@bin.sh
> I should maybe post about my journey into RPGA organized play over the
> course of the last year. It's been a fascinating learning experience
> about all sorts of things. Dunno if people would be interested.
is it more interesting than alignment wars? have at it.
--
n_n n_n dr...@bin.sh (CARRIER LOST) <http://www.bin.sh/>
|"|n_n_n|"| ---------------------------------------------------------------
| | " " | | "Ryan Dancey put a portable hole inside a bag of holding,
|_|_[T]_|_| and no void appeared -- out of fear of Ryan Dancey."
-- der_kluge
Bryant Durrell
Seebs <usenet...@seebs.net> wrote:
>
>Ahh, good catch. Hadn't thought of that. I didn't think you could stack
>those very high, though -- I'd have assumed that they would do the normal
>thing of not stacking.
High enough. Heroic tier Bracers of Archery are +2 damage to all bow
attacks; stack on the enhancement bonus from (say) a +3 bow, which is
accessible at high heroic. Then add +1 from Weapon Focus. You're at
+6 already, but you're getting it on each attack, so as much as +12.
If you started at 20 Dex, you're up to +6 from Dex by level 10, plus
the +6 from the above-noted mods... but your at-wills other than Twin
Strike are only doing 1W, whereas Twin Strike does 2W, so you've got
equal bonuses and additional weapon dice.
I think there are other twinky things you can do to add onto damage,
but I'm not a super-optimizer so I dunno off the top of my head.
Oh, and you increase the chance you'll get your quarry damage if you're
attacking twice per round, of course. Plus magic item critical damage.
Seebs
> attacking twice per round, of course. Plus magic item critical damage.
And, if you went for sneak of shadows, also the chance of getting your
sneak attack.
I am sort of leaning towards the theory that sneak attack and hunter's quarry
shouldn't stack.
Bryant Durrell
Seebs <usenet...@seebs.net> wrote:
>On 2009-12-03, Bryant Durrell <dur...@innocence.com> wrote:
>> Oh, and you increase the chance you'll get your quarry damage if you're
>> attacking twice per round, of course. Plus magic item critical damage.
>
>And, if you went for sneak of shadows, also the chance of getting your
>sneak attack.
>
>I am sort of leaning towards the theory that sneak attack and hunter's quarry
>shouldn't stack.
Eh, once per encounter it's not so bad.
I have an avenger who took Sneak of Shadows for roleplay reasons, which
is about the goofiest thing in the world. She does carry a crossbow,
but since she doesn't get the sneak attack damage for monsters who
haven't acted yet, it's still kind of pointless. I'm gingerly
considering the virtues of the feat that gives me CA for ranged attacks
vs. flanked monsters.
Loren Pechtel
<keith....@kjdavies.org> wrote:
>I've also considered an option where level and power were tracked
>separately. For example, there could be a very subtle spell (but hard
>to cast) called 'pacebreaker' that puts a tiny, tiny electric shock into
>the target that stops his pacemaker (twitch muscle that governs the
>heartbeat), killing him. Very low power, fairly high level because of
>the precision needed. OTOH, lightning bolt is very crude (low level)
>but high power (ZAAARCH!).
>
>So, you could have skilled-and-subtle wizards using low power spells,
>and crude-but-effective wizards using high power spells (and of course
>skilled-and-powerful that combine both). Never got around to diving
>into this one much.
>
>Mind you, with the current model for Echelon (with simple and complex
>spells) I can probably pursue this a little, without too much trouble.
>Complex spells need more training (School Focus talent) but give greater
>effect (waive the penalty), while the simple spells generally work (and
>thus don't need the specialization) but don't do as much.
>
>This suggests, then, that perhaps complex spells could be cast at some
>sort of penalty (to save, to SR check, lower caster level, etc.), but I
>don't know that I want to go that route. I like that someone who spends
>the effort (and talent slot) actually gets to do others can't.
An idea I was playing with many, many years ago but never turned into
a full system:
Spells don't have levels per se. A good portion of all spells are
learned as an apprentice. There aren't separate spells for burning
hands, fireball etc. It's all one spell "Produce fire" that any
apprentice learns. Casting is sort of a power point system although I
was going to retain a spell slot system akin to what a sorcerer has
now. Shaping and directing the energy of the spell has a certain
difficulty. You have a base energy available based on your level, the
slot used and your skill with the spell, some must be used to overcome
the basic difficulty of whatever you are attempting, anything beyond
this actually powers the spell.
Thus when you first reach the point of being able to shape that fire
into a fireball it's not going to have much left and will do very
little damage. As you improve, though, the fireball is a more
efficient means of using the energy than burning hands and in time the
fireball does more damage.
I was also going to basically scrap the notion of saving throws.
Rather, the defense would be deflecting away magical energy--for the
purposes of affecting *YOU* the energy of the spell would be reduced
by your magic defense. It wouldn't be a roll like SR is, but a
basically fixed amount of energy deflected from each spell. Damage
would still be rolled after figuring out how much got through to you.
Saves would only be meaningful with spells that are inherently a
succeed/fail and didn't get through enough energy to be 100%.
Loren Pechtel
<jasin....@gmail.com> wrote:
>One idea I've considered (though never even to the point of working out
>rough numbers) is making lower level spells *harder* to resist than
>higher level ones.
>
>So rather than choosing between inflicting -2 morale penalty which will
>almost certainly be resisted and instant death which might work, you
>choose between a fairly certain -2 penalty and rather improbable certain
>death.
I like the idea. Perhaps the DC should be 10 + mods + highest spell
level you can cast + levels below highest the current spell is. This
would make your low level spells go through most of the time.
Keith Davies
Whoa, that's harsh. A first-level spell from a Wiz17 would have a save
DC of at least 10+4+9+8 = 31. This rule is a unilateral gift of power
to casters, who really don't need it.
If you must do something like this -- and the concept doesn't bother me
too much, to be honest -- then change it to
10 + mods + highest spell level - casting spell level
... which might be slightly low. Perhaps adapt tussock's suggestion and
target a save DC of 15, for
15 + mods + highest spell level - casting spell level
This gives you 15+mods as the save for your highest level spells, and
better for lower. Since the save check is d20+mods (including base save
advances) this should be playable. It still leaves a first-level spell
from a Wiz17 with a minimum save DC of 27 (insanely hard), but at least
it has only limited effects. The ninth-level spell would have a minimum
DC of 19 (and more realistically it'll be around 23), but this is
probably more reasonable than RAW.
Keith
--
Keith Davies "Do you know what is in beer? The strength
keith....@kjdavies.org to bear the things you can't change, and
keith....@gmail.com wisdom to ignore them and fsck off for
Keith Davies
Go have a look at Elements of Magic. I think it'll play directly into
what you're describing here.
> I was also going to basically scrap the notion of saving throws.
> Rather, the defense would be deflecting away magical energy--for the
> purposes of affecting *YOU* the energy of the spell would be reduced
> by your magic defense. It wouldn't be a roll like SR is, but a
> basically fixed amount of energy deflected from each spell. Damage
> would still be rolled after figuring out how much got through to you.
> Saves would only be meaningful with spells that are inherently a
> succeed/fail and didn't get through enough energy to be 100%.
I'd have to either see an implementation or get this explained again.
I'm a little thick at the moment, not nearly enough sleep last night.
Keith Davies
> On 2009-12-03, tussock <sc...@clear.net.nz> wrote:
>
>> Thanks, though it's perhaps a little like the monk, eh. How would
>> I differentiate them? Monk as more of a controller I suppose, more
>> offensive lockdowns, holds, trips, throws: getting to the enemy and
>> disabling them (well, inconveniencing them in 4e), rather than holding
>> their attention, with pretty good area damage with rapid attacks for
>> taking down mooks.
>
> Hmm, that's got potential. I do see the point. Some of this is MMO
> drift -- I've just spent a couple of years getting used to the idea that
> a rogue does a ton more damage than a plate-wearer, but hasn't got any
> durability to speak of.
Which is -- as Ryk has demonstrated -- part of why many people feel that
4e has drifted farther from its roots. It looked like 3e was drifting
toward computer games largely because it moved to standardized language
and effects (it would be easier to implement because everything was, as
much as possible, precisely and consistently defined). It looks like 4e
is less drifting and more driving toward MMORPGs because they seem to be
incorporating MMORPG concepts and philosophies.
Seebs
> Which is -- as Ryk has demonstrated -- part of why many people feel that
> 4e has drifted farther from its roots. It looked like 3e was drifting
> toward computer games largely because it moved to standardized language
> and effects (it would be easier to implement because everything was, as
> much as possible, precisely and consistently defined). It looks like 4e
> is less drifting and more driving toward MMORPGs because they seem to be
> incorporating MMORPG concepts and philosophies.
But in that case, the notion that it's not following a clearly established
direction of development has just been shot completely, because we commented
at length on that direction back when the first 3E books came out, or even
earlier.
So it really is going exactly where it appeared to be going in 2000, and that
means it IS part of the D&D heritage just as I've said all along, because the
key counterargument was that this direction wasn't part of where the 3E game
was going. But it turns out that it is EXACTLY where 3E was going.
When I went off and played MMOs for a while, I realized that they were
doing a lot of things which overlapped with new development in 3E, so I
anticipated seeing more things that were developed over there brought into
D&D, and it didn't surprise me or upset me, because mostly they've brought
in things which are a big win for gameplay for me.
Chris Berger
> In article <slrnhhgh6h.luc.usenet-nos...@guild.seebs.net>,
>
> Seebs <usenet-nos...@seebs.net> wrote:
> >On 2009-12-03, Bryant Durrell <durr...@innocence.com> wrote:
> >> Oh, and you increase the chance you'll get your quarry damage if you're
> >> attacking twice per round, of course. Plus magic item critical damage.
>
> >And, if you went for sneak of shadows, also the chance of getting your
> >sneak attack.
>
> >I am sort of leaning towards the theory that sneak attack and hunter's quarry
> >shouldn't stack.
>
> Eh, once per encounter it's not so bad.
>
> I have an avenger who took Sneak of Shadows for roleplay reasons, which
> is about the goofiest thing in the world. She does carry a crossbow,
> but since she doesn't get the sneak attack damage for monsters who
> haven't acted yet, it's still kind of pointless. I'm gingerly
> considering the virtues of the feat that gives me CA for ranged attacks
> vs. flanked monsters.
>
reasons. Although I didn't want a crossbow - use Radiant Vengeance
for ranged attacks, and Overwhelming Strike for close range. Was
originally planning on picking up Double Sword for 1d8 light blade
usage and +1 AC, but got shot down by the latest errata. 1d8 is
already pretty weak for an avenger [W], 1d6 just isn't enough. But
eventually figured out I can do it with the same number of feats by
buying a +1 Mage's Parrying Dagger and using a Rapier. Yeah, it's
probably not worth it in the long run compared to just taking a
Fullblade or Mordenkrad, but on top of the Sneak Attack once per
encounter, I plan to eventually qualify for Light Blade Mastery, and
will probably power swap for Low Slash (even though Avengers have
their own minor action attack at lvl 4 as well) eventually. That, and
if I had completely given up on the Light Blade angle after Double
Sword was errata'd (talking about an LFR character, so there's no
houseruling the weapon), then I end up with one of two routes - either
go Daggermaster crit-fisher (yawn!), or else retrain Sneak of Shadows
and play a more generic Avenger with a heavy weapon (also yawn) -
either way, having put 3 pts in Strength that would be wasted.
So, umm... yeah, other than the "please tell me about your character"
thing... Twin Strike... Twin Strike unfortunately *looks* balanced,
when you think about taking it on a lvl 1 character. Having 2[W]
damage instead of 1[W] + 4 doesn't really look like it's overpowered.
You're right though, that once you start stacking on static bonuses,
Weapon Focus, enhancement bonus, power bonuses from other powers, crit
damage due to higher crit chance, items other than weapon that give
untyped or "item" bonus to damage, plus better chance to do quarry
damage - it gets pretty sick. Still, while it's the most damaging at-
will in the game, it still doesn't challenge the good striker
*encounter* powers in terms of damage, so it doesn't ruin the game -
it just seems to make Rangers a little more monotonous than they
should be...
tussock
> tussock wrote:
>
> > EGG thought everyone was exploring most of the time, where the
> > Thief ruled. No need to dominate that half of the game and combat as
> > well, as that was where the poor Fighters and Clerics got to have
> > their turn in the spotlight. 8]
>
> Solution: Make the fighter and cleric also useful for something other
> than combat.
Don't make me argue by dictionary definition. 8]
> In short, game design has made progress in the last thirty years. Having
> everyone contribute in most-to-all situations is wayyyy better than having
> one circumstance for each character to be useful.
Meh. I'm fine with classes that shine in different parts, people
who like the fights can shine in the fights, people who like the
discovery can shine at that, people who like the puzzles can be the
one to do that, whatever they want. Even play a Wizard and change what
you're good at each day.
That attitude is long gone from DnD though. I'd rather have
quicker fights than give everyone something vitally important to do in
them, there's more than that to the game.
<Re: class design>
> Some of this is MMO drift -- I've just spent a couple of years getting used
> to the idea that a rogue does a ton more damage than a plate-wearer, but
> hasn't got any durability to speak of.
Heh, I haven't played them, other than some time in a sci-fi
freebe that taught me how it all came down to one poor party member
would get everyone killed, which totally didn't do anything other than
make you walk for a minute or two. Too many stupid tanks that wouldn't
draw aggro off my cleric, basically.
So, yea, while /I/ would probably prefer a Rogue that did suck
(just a bit) in combat, to be much better outside it, 4e's all about
the combat balance, and I can totally play off being a sneaky
backstabber that draws aggro (because I've seen a lot of 3e Rogues get
crumped while trying to do the megadamage flanking trick, and they
have a few things to flat out avoid damage for that very reason).
--
tussock
tussock
> tussock wrote:
> > Well, for most of the game his only combat thing was to hide until
> > the monsters engaged the grunts, then get one good attack from their
> > rear, then have no HP to back it up. Basically, stay the hell out of
> > combat, you suck at it.
> Granted, it has been a very long time, but I don't remember the
> thieves of my 2E parties being useless in combat.
I recall one or two of them cheesing out the XP-for-gp trick that
became their own, and being a couple levels higher than the rest of
the party, three or four over the multiclassers. That helped a fair
bit as time went by, but the good Rogues were still the Fighter/Thief
or Mage/Thief (or Psi/Thief).
Hmm. 3e could have nearly dropped them altogether. 8]
> They went for the backstab, naturally, but they were also more apt to
> being gadgeteers using various magic items, such as wands which in
> 2E anyone could use.
Not Fighters, magic item use of all kinds was still fairly
restricted.
> It is part of the reason Use Magic Device is a Rogue class skill I'd say.
Yea, bit of a skill tax, that. Anyone not take it?
--
tussock
Keith Davies
> On 2009-12-04, Keith Davies <keith....@kjdavies.org> wrote:
>> Which is -- as Ryk has demonstrated -- part of why many people feel
>> that 4e has drifted farther from its roots. It looked like 3e was
>> drifting toward computer games largely because it moved to
>> standardized language and effects (it would be easier to implement
>> because everything was, as much as possible, precisely and
>> consistently defined). It looks like 4e is less drifting and more
>> driving toward MMORPGs because they seem to be incorporating MMORPG
>> concepts and philosophies.
>
> But in that case, the notion that it's not following a clearly
> established direction of development has just been shot completely,
> because we commented at length on that direction back when the first
> 3E books came out, or even earlier.
>
> So it really is going exactly where it appeared to be going in 2000,
> and that means it IS part of the D&D heritage just as I've said all
> along, because the key counterargument was that this direction wasn't
> part of where the 3E game was going. But it turns out that it is
> EXACTLY where 3E was going.
I disagree, in that in 2000 it was a standardization exercise (take
what's there and make it easier to apply consistently and remove
ambiguity) and some simplification (core d20 resolution mechanism). It
didn't particularly change the nature of the relationships between
classes.
4e, OTOH, falls back on MMORPG concepts and philosophies to a large
degree. Obviously, or MMORPG terminology wouldn't be used to describe
the game elements. It shifted from the archetypes used in previous
editions to those matching more closely to the MMORPGS -- you clearly
recognize this, demonstrated by your statement that your experience with
MMORPGs made it easier to adapt and accept the changes here.
It appears this is where D&D *went*, but I do not believe this is where
D&D was *planned to go*. Pathfinder is a clear indicator that another
path could have been taken by WotC, successfully.
> When I went off and played MMOs for a while, I realized that they were
> doing a lot of things which overlapped with new development in 3E, so
> I anticipated seeing more things that were developed over there
> brought into D&D, and it didn't surprise me or upset me, because
> mostly they've brought in things which are a big win for gameplay for
> me.
"Overlapped with new development in 3e", in leading up to 4e, should be
taken as an indication that that was where 3e was planned to go. I
think they went "holy shit, WoW makes *mad* amounts of money compared to
us, let's see if we can bring some of them over by incorporating
elements from MMORPGs". Which is of course their right, but I can't
agree that this was what they were planning in 2000.
Consider, a friend of mine got knocked up and ended up married to an
asshole. This wasn't where she was *heading*, it's just where she ended
up. "Destination" and "intended destination" don't necessarily have
anything to do with each other, and major course changes late in the
trip are just that -- major changes, so you end up somewhere (something)
else.
Seebs
> That attitude is long gone from DnD though. I'd rather have
> quicker fights than give everyone something vitally important to do in
> them, there's more than that to the game.
One of the things I really like about 4E: For reasonably comparable
circumstances, I'm finding that fights go faster. Obviously, not quite
true at first level, because most creatures aren't one-shotted by normal
weapon damage, but in general, I find that I can use more monsters and
have more interesting tactics and still have fights go faster.
I do like the idea of having everyone genuinely contribute to every
scenario, but that leaves plenty of place for specialists to shine.
> Heh, I haven't played them, other than some time in a sci-fi
> freebe that taught me how it all came down to one poor party member
> would get everyone killed, which totally didn't do anything other than
> make you walk for a minute or two. Too many stupid tanks that wouldn't
> draw aggro off my cleric, basically.
Yeah, it took a while for me to learn the secret of WoW: Never group
with anyone who can't spell. Seriously, saves a TON of frustration.
> So, yea, while /I/ would probably prefer a Rogue that did suck
> (just a bit) in combat, to be much better outside it, 4e's all about
> the combat balance, and I can totally play off being a sneaky
> backstabber that draws aggro (because I've seen a lot of 3e Rogues get
> crumped while trying to do the megadamage flanking trick, and they
> have a few things to flat out avoid damage for that very reason).
I find that making other characters less sucky out of combat helps some.
My problem was usually that whoever sucked in a given part of the game
would tend to lose interest during those parts without a lot of extra
work -- giving them all involvement has helped a ton.
Seebs
>> So it really is going exactly where it appeared to be going in 2000,
>> and that means it IS part of the D&D heritage just as I've said all
>> along, because the key counterargument was that this direction wasn't
>> part of where the 3E game was going. But it turns out that it is
>> EXACTLY where 3E was going.
> I disagree, in that in 2000 it was a standardization exercise (take
> what's there and make it easier to apply consistently and remove
> ambiguity) and some simplification (core d20 resolution mechanism). It
> didn't particularly change the nature of the relationships between
> classes.
It certainly TRIED to! They made a big deal about how the INTENT was that
fighters would no longer be also-rans at high levels. That was explicitly
stated as the intent -- and this group was full of people bitching that
D&D was being "dumbed down" to support video games.
> 4e, OTOH, falls back on MMORPG concepts and philosophies to a large
> degree. Obviously, or MMORPG terminology wouldn't be used to describe
> the game elements.
Well, it isn't in-game.
And, interestingly, I first heard that terminology used to describe RPGs
before there WERE any recognizable MMOs. The holy trinity of
fighter/cleric/wizard existed long before MMOs did.
What MMOs brought to the table was, after a number of trial and error
projects, some notions of how to *balance* these so that they actually
worked and played off each other, and people could play any of the
core roles and still have fun.
> It shifted from the archetypes used in previous
> editions to those matching more closely to the MMORPGS -- you clearly
> recognize this, demonstrated by your statement that your experience with
> MMORPGs made it easier to adapt and accept the changes here.
Archetypes have been shifting and shuffling around all along. 3E made
rogues much better in combat than they had been in any previous edition,
and I don't think that was unintentional at all. Similarly, high level
fighters had a TON more options in 3E than they did in 2E.
So again, this is a shift that was clearly happening already. Things
like Bo9S, again, show a serious effort in the game design side of the
world to try to give fighters more powers that allowed them to participate
materially even in high-level fights when partied with casters.
> It appears this is where D&D *went*, but I do not believe this is where
> D&D was *planned to go*. Pathfinder is a clear indicator that another
> path could have been taken by WotC, successfully.
And yet, while it's certainly an interesting system, I don't think it's
as fundamentally successful. Pathfinder's getting pretty close to the
localized maximum for that philosophy, but in terms of the things that
make D&D continue to totally stomp GURPS for playability, I don't think
it's as good as 4E is.
> "Overlapped with new development in 3e", in leading up to 4e, should be
> taken as an indication that that was where 3e was planned to go.
Yup.
Again, the fundamental shifts in 3E were:
* trying to create a game where the classes were balanced by having
comparable power and utility, rather than a game where they were
balanced by having magic-users need a ton more XP to gain levels.
* trying to streamline and simplify rules with more use of formal
terms and less explaining the outcomes of every individual thing.
The only thing 4E did that I think is going against the direction of 3E is
that I think they migrated from trying to model everything to trying to
model outcomes rather than internals. Imagine that you're trying to do
a rendered movie, and in the movie, you have a car going along a road. You
CAN, if you want, design the entire engine, with thousands of polygons
going into creating intricately detailed pistons, which are completely
inside the engine, which is completely hidden by the hood. Or, you can
skip over that and just model the outside part of the car.
4E's gone a long way towards modeling the outside part of a car and
saying "cars can usually go at about freeway speeds" rather than trying
to calculate torque and rolling friction. On the whole, I think that's a
better choice for a game.
But in terms of the foundational philosophy, this seems to me to be exactly
where 3E was trying to go -- a game where the fighter doesn't become
irrelevant at higher levels.
tussock
> So again, this is a shift that was clearly happening already. Things
> like Bo9S, again, show a serious effort in the game design side of the
> world to try to give fighters more powers that allowed them to participate
> materially even in high-level fights when partied with casters.
Bo9S was the ongoing project that would become 4e ported back to
3e. SWS was a later version of the project ported to a more generic
d20. I like SWS (the characters feel like starwars more than previous
editions), I don't like Bo9S (the characters don't feel like DnD, to
me, particularly with the magical effects (which they dumped for
martial characters in 4e)), all rather like the other 3e book I didn't
like, Incarnum (which may have been a first draft of 4e, though they
never said as much).
> Again, the fundamental shifts in 3E were:
>
> * trying to create a game where the classes were balanced by having
> comparable power and utility, rather than a game where they were
> balanced by having magic-users need a ton more XP to gain levels.
A level is a level is a level. Failed at it, they didn't see how
powerful they'd made high level casters, but the high level game was
still a good improvement over earlier editions, IMO, people just
expected it to be as balanced as the low and mid level stuff in 3e,
when it wasn't even close.
> * trying to streamline and simplify rules with more use of formal
> terms and less explaining the outcomes of every individual thing.
Trying to rebuild DnD as a coherent system, rather than a
collection of arbitrary judgements collected in rule-form. I think
they needed less text because of that, though they did also cut back
on the fluff for reasons of space and the growing font (though not the
vacant pages of 4e books).
> The only thing 4E did that I think is going against the direction of 3E is
> that I think they migrated from trying to model everything to trying to
> model outcomes rather than internals.
Exactly my problem with the game, and a real change away from all
the RPGs I've played to the ones I read and put away never to see
again. Slackware, not Ubuntu.
Though, come to think of it, Ubuntu is kinda popular, eh. Teach me
to use metaphors. 8]
> But in terms of the foundational philosophy, this seems to me to be exactly
> where 3E was trying to go -- a game where the fighter doesn't become
> irrelevant at higher levels.
I don't think so, they did a /heap/ of stuff that made high level
spellcasters more powerful. No more casting time 9 vs speed factor 0
weapons on d10 initiative, no more auto failure on a hit, no more 3+
days to recover your spells after you go nova, more freedom with open
slots and every Wizard learning every spell they wanted and more spell
slots too. Hell, Clerics got 8th and 9th level spells (a few of which
are just the old 7th, but there is more power there over all when
someone got me to look at it properly). What the hell did a higher
level fighter get in comparison?
3e was trying to make the game less of a pain in the ass to play.
No limits. Unfortunately, taking the limits off the spellcasters made
all the cool little things they did for the warriors completely
pointless.
Thanks for this thread Seebs, and all the other pro-4e folk, 's
been a fine educational edition war.
--
tussock
Bryant Durrell
Keith Davies <keith....@kjdavies.org> wrote:
>
>4e, OTOH, falls back on MMORPG concepts and philosophies to a large
>degree. Obviously, or MMORPG terminology wouldn't be used to describe
>the game elements. It shifted from the archetypes used in previous
>editions to those matching more closely to the MMORPGS -- you clearly
>recognize this, demonstrated by your statement that your experience with
>MMORPGs made it easier to adapt and accept the changes here.
But that's the point Ryk missed; 4e doesn't actually play like an MMORPG.
It /looks/ more like an MMORPG, because terminology was consciously
adopted, but it doesn't play that way.
Defenders aren't very much like tanks at all. They play differently.
In your average MMORPG, tanks beef up on as much armor as possible and
have the ability to make mobs focus on them. Defenders don't do that.
Remember when there were like ten posts about how 4e fighters could make
a mob attack them? Ryk just assumed that was how it worked, because he
thought 4e was an MMORPG? That's what I'm talking about. 4e defenders
function by making mobs less likely to succeed if they attack something
else, which is way different.
MMORPG healers don't get to do things other than heal. When in groups,
they stand there and heal heal heal. They don't spend a lot of time
debuffing opponents. In point of fact, the old cleric who was stuck
mostly using his spells for healing? That's a /lot/ more like an MMORPG
healer. 4e healers break that mold.
Controllers do not have a cognate in MMORPG terms. In MMORPG design,
you hear people talk about the holy trinity of tank, healer, and DPS.
There are classes that have controller-style spells, but the idea of
a class that focuses on them is novel.
None of this is obvious to the non-MMORPG player, because again, the
terminology is heavily borrowed from MMORPGs.
Bryant Durrell
tussock <sc...@clear.net.nz> wrote:
>
> Thanks for this thread Seebs, and all the other pro-4e folk, 's
>been a fine educational edition war.
Back at you! I've always known there were good reasons why any given
person might prefer 3e and I've picked up a couple more here.
Bryant Durrell
Chris Berger <cber...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I have an avenger who took Sneak of Shadows for roleplay reasons, which
>> is about the goofiest thing in the world. �She does carry a crossbow,
>> but since she doesn't get the sneak attack damage for monsters who
>> haven't acted yet, it's still kind of pointless. �I'm gingerly
>> considering the virtues of the feat that gives me CA for ranged attacks
>> vs. flanked monsters.
>>
>Yeah, I have an avenger who took Sneak of Shadows for similar
>reasons. Although I didn't want a crossbow - use Radiant Vengeance
>for ranged attacks, and Overwhelming Strike for close range.
The crossbow's just because in theory I might be able to plink at
a dazed guy and get sneak attack. Someday. Maybe. ;)
Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)
> On 2009-12-04, Keith Davies <keith....@kjdavies.org> wrote:
>> Which is -- as Ryk has demonstrated -- part of why many people feel that
>> 4e has drifted farther from its roots. It looked like 3e was drifting
>> toward computer games largely because it moved to standardized language
>> and effects (it would be easier to implement because everything was, as
>> much as possible, precisely and consistently defined). It looks like 4e
>> is less drifting and more driving toward MMORPGs because they seem to be
>> incorporating MMORPG concepts and philosophies.
>
> But in that case, the notion that it's not following a clearly established
> direction of development has just been shot completely, because we commented
> at length on that direction back when the first 3E books came out, or even
> earlier.
Except I don't agree with any of those contentions, and didn't when 3e
came out. There was very little, if any, videogame influence on 3e.
Talislanta and other Bard Games stuff, almost certainly; WotC had OWNED
Bard's stuff, especially Tal, and put out a new version of it
themselves, so they were intimately familiar with some of the related
ideas.
--
Sea Wasp
/^\
;;;
Live Journal: http://seawasp.livejournal.com
Justisaur
> In article <aca592e9-9334-455a-a289-5f4cbc4b6...@z35g2000prh.googlegroups.com>,
>
> Justisaur <justis...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >On Dec 1, 10:22 am, Seebs <usenet-nos...@seebs.net> wrote:
>
> >> Rogue has a close blast 3 attack that does 2[W]+Dex damage and blinds until
> >> end of next turn. That's not wussy.
>
> >That must be much higher level than my rogue, I'd take that in a
> >heartbeat over anything I've got so far.
>
>
> It is a bit tricky picking rogue dailies because of the sneak attack
> thing. This is a pretty common thing for strikers, though... rangers
> are the other poster child. "Twin Strike. Twin Strike. Twin Strike."
>
Ah, I probably just skipped it, figuring I was a single target killer
(or it's cha based). The dailies have been very lackluster though, so
I might retrain into that, it probably would be more useful to have
something for when I get surrounded.
- Justisaur
Justisaur
> In article <slrnhhhala.kjs.keith.dav...@kjdavies.org>,
> Keith Davies <keith.dav...@kjdavies.org> wrote:
> Controllers do not have a cognate in MMORPG terms. In MMORPG design,
> you hear people talk about the holy trinity of tank, healer, and DPS.
> There are classes that have controller-style spells, but the idea of
> a class that focuses on them is novel.
Everquest... and City of Heroes. Maybe they don't exist in WoW, and
maybe that's why I don't like WoW. In city of heroes a buff/debuffer
is essential in some areas, actual control is optional, but can make
some things significantly easier.
- Justisaur