Utsanomiko wrote:No, I think finally wiping the slate clean and starting at the basics, without a compulsion to be congruent with previous editions that ran under different systems, was the best option. I don't see the reason to be attached to third to that degree any more than 2nd or first.
Wiping the slate clean is a tactic that works
if you are willing to replace the things you took out. Otherwise you are left with an incomplete game. Going back to basics assumes you want to go back to playing a basic game. I don't.
Also, Illusion and Conjuring has been included with Arcane Power. Maybe in a few years fourth will become bloated too and I'll have to become a huffing grognard when 5th doesn't use the same math.
I must have missed that. It has been a while since I looked through that thing-- needless to say I don't own the thing because I decided it would be a wasted purchase.
I disagree that 3rd had actual desirable options, in practice. It presented the appearance of it, especially with all the numbers assigned under the hood, but nothing visible or accessible to the casual player.
Desirable by whose standard, fuckwad? The point is that they were actually
there, and could have just as easily been fixed rather than being removed. An option that doesn't exist is less desirable
by definition than one that just doesn't work. Try to keep up.
Flat-footed is crucial to your enjoyment? Racial penalties harm your ability to roleplay? Magic Missile not hitting automatically breaks your suspension of disbelief? You really want to paint this kind of picture of a 3e roleplayer? I've already heard these complaints, told to my face. I wasn't impressed by them then.
*Yawn* Come back when you have a complaint that actually applies to anyone here. Otherwise, see Kuja's post. That was pretty much my reaction as well, especially as pertains the way the classes are set up. I never liked the way classes tend to define a character. In this edition its more true than ever--
and its a stated design goal! Just considering combat for a moment, it used to be that a wizard could choose to focus on nuking the field (playing the "controller"), save or die spells (playing the "striker"), buffing (the supporting leader-ish role), or subterfuge (for avoiding combat entirely) depending on what spells you chose. That's almost all of the current "roles" right there. That gave you the freedom to chose what made sense for
your character, both in the way you wanted to fight and in the way you wanted to roleplay. No such luck with $ed; a wizard is a controller, and your imagination does not figure into it.
And before you repeat yourself about how bad 3ed was, remember that I never said it was perfect. Just that it wasn't as bad as this.
Maybe *you* avoided those bad builds with your deft skill/feat choices and multiclass dabbling; the rest of us had to listen to you players talk about builds the whole game while we just try to play a core class that sounded good on the first read-through.
Actually, I couldn't care less about builds. I care about the
character concept, in the same sense as a writer or author would. In fact, I normally play single class characters because the options available in any given class are good enough for most (though not all) characters. But nice way to latch onto the one word and miss the point: no matter how much planning I put into the character advancement and build, I was never lacking for tactical options.
It was until 3rd sprinkled in some sporadic knowledge and social skill checks and suddenly WotC has this d20 'Do Anything' universal system that they can market to every dope with Adobe Acrobat and an armchair to sit in and write up feat progression charts. I've seen systems that have a good amount of weight in its non-combat rules, d20 isn't it. The current DMG has plenty of rules for social conflicts, exploration, investigation, encounters exclusively using skills, and campaign-spanning quests. We spend about half the time out of combat, interacting or doing other challenges, in our local games. Some people just see the new books with up-front guides telling them how to do things without pure guesswork and they shit a brick that they're being told what to do, regardless of every damn page that shows how to adjust it or run with their own judgement.
Now, tell me why making D20 more universal is a bad thing? Just because 3ed did a poor job of it doesn't mean that they were wrong to try.
And really now, you can't expect me to believe most people don't just sideline the ruleset when they're running in town and talking to people; it doesn't matter if they've got 12 separate social skills to pick from or whether they've been lumped into three. Whatever happened to people gloating about how much they'd homebrew their own situational tables and economy charts? This is the same crap as when 1st and 2rd Edition were retired; it's crap, but it's not your childhood's crap.
And as has already been pointed out, if you have to homebrew something extensively to get it to do what you want, it isn't worth buying. Any game can be houseruled, but the very fact that a game
must be houseruled means the developers failed at something.
I'd call it parsimony. They only served a purpose if you wanted more things to keep track of than enjoyable, and weren't noticeable to anybody who spent less that five hours a day studying the books. The proper fix to junk like daily-only spells and ECL was making them not be in the game, in my option.
What is enjoyable to you is not what is enjoyable to me. Sure, I studied the books. You kind of have to no matter what game you are going to play, so I don't see what your point is. It certainly never took five hours a day to figure out what I wanted to do with it. Besides, as has been mentioned, studying the books is its own pastime, one which some people find enjoyable in its own right. Are you now the authority on fun?
I don't think you even know what arbitrary means.
Arbitrary from a roleplaying perspective, idiot. See above. There is no reason that any given class should be restricted to its stupid tactical role besides game balance reasons. Hence why I call it
arbitrary.
Third Edition and previous ones are chock full of game design decisions that make no sense for what they're trying to achieve other than 'it sounded like a good concept.' Why did magic-users get hundreds of super-powered spells and fighters get a couple techniques? Because it sounded like a good concept. Why did Dwarves and Elves only get to be certain classes up to certain levels, while Humans got nothing else to show for their supposed resourcefulness? Because it sounded like a good concept. Why do players spend two hours creating characters at level one, when a badger can kill them in one hit? Because it sounded like a good concept. Why does a Beholder come with a potentially absurd amount of allies and drops a holy shield? Because it sounded like a good concept. Why should there be rules for epic level adventurers when the system makes it unplayable? Because it sounded like a good concept.
You don't like 3ed.
We get it already. No one said it was the pinnacle of perfection for roleplaying games, only that it was better than $ed. Any one of those things you mentioned could have simply been fixed rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater. What's your point?
Dungeons and Dragons is a GAME. It is three to seven people pretending to be characters that adventure together as a complimentary group. The rules exist solely to facilitate that. Not to look good on paper, not to simulate how well a real Ogre could resist a real sleep spell and its duration, not to make some characters better at adventuring than others. If you make every class a combat classes with combat abilities who regularly engage in combat and advance via combat experience, you need to make them all good at combat. If you want each character to have a set of skills unique and useful to the party, you need to give them a set of unique and useful skills to chose from. If you want players to earn a satisfying amount of treasure that they'll use, you need to plot out what's a satisfying amount of usable treasure. If you want them to consistently survive at a given level versus challenging fights that aren't too random to consistently rate as 'easy' or 'lethal', you gotta give both sides the tools to survive and threaten eachother in a transparent manner. If you want each player to feel like an equal member of the group with a character that contributes to the party in its adventures, and that their build choice wasn't 'bad' in some manner unseen for 5 more levels, you gotta design them with that shit in mind too.
It's a game and it's supposed to be playable. Not realistic or overly-complicated.
3ed is bad. Gotcha.
Did it ever occur to you that not everyone necessarily plays the same way you seem to think the game
should be played? For example, my friends and I often play games where we have a less than ideal team structure, because it is often more fun roleplay wise. No cleric? That's fine! Makes injuries more dramatic! No fighter? Better use our wits rather than rush into fights! That kind of stuff. And that's not mentioning horror games: fair fights? No such thing!
Having a battlemat and a character build that can be summed out outside of numerical-analysis and 'it lets you be this class without having that crap' is not a wargame. Having haggling split into 'barter' and 'bribe' doesn't make a system inherently better at social RP.
No, but playing as if the game is just a vehicle for getting you from fight A to fight B isn't a far cry from one either. To me, combat is fun, but its a means to an end not the end unto itself. The end of course is fun, but if combat is the only fun thing in a game I might as well use my money on video games rather than dicking around with dice.
It does at least make the player look between the two and use them more strictly. Roles are just basic game analysis; they're there in 3rd, they just don't tell you, and let you make them become better than everyone else's role or do nothing well.
Wrong. To me, role is something I define according to the story at hand, not something you can spoonfeed as part of the system. This is exactly the attitude I was talking about that I don't want to see instilled in new players, because it tends to turn them into insufferable powergamers.
Which is exactly what you say you don't like about 3ed.
I like the parts where you keep painting me as some combat-only 'wargamer' when my other preferred RPGs include one with a 100% random character generator (including class, stats, and warts) and one where melee combat and persuasion are equally-complex skills leveled up by how many points you earn for 'good group participation'. D20 is a system where combat is a huge expanse of special rules and effects, monsters with huge stat blocks and spells with whole other rules, while negotiating with the Dwarf King is still a single old Charisma roll plus skill bonus, plus the DM putting on a Scottish accent. Fourth edition levels the disparity out better to keep the rules in use for various situations. Not as much as other games, but I like the variety.
If the glove fits... you should listen to yourself sometime. All you keep talking about is the marvelous streamlined combat options the characters have, and how all the non-combat stuff of the previous editions were bloat and unnecessary to the game. I don't give a fuck about what other games you like are, when it comes to DnD the only thing you seem to care about is how many wonderful combat powers you can get off to. The only reason D20 sucks at things that aren't combat is because the idiots at WotC happen to have a similar attitude to the game as you do. Otherwise, there is no reason $ed couldn't have expanded on what 3ed started with making the game more universal.
Oh, and BTW, I like the parts where you accuse me of being a powergaming asshole with exactly zilch evidence. Hypocrite.
Tell them to shave their necks. I still don't see what's keeping you from roleplaying elves and dwarves going on adventures.
Those people happen to be my friends, so fuck you asshole. 3ed DnD happens to be the game they want to play, and they would rather get their monies worth out of it than learn something new. I can try to change their minds, but I can't force them to change games because
I want to. Or did you miss the part where roleplaying was a social activity?
Nothing is stopping you from adding Craft: Cooking if needed, or giving out more feats and skill choices at the start, or making grapple complicated, or letting Duane's ranger advance into an Arcane Psionic Bowmaster though a paragon or epic path. Hell, it's easier to plop that stuff in now with the rules working together with a purpose, and not have to worry that suddenly he can kill every enemy within 10 levels of him in two rounds and now you need to throw eight class profiles onto a new boss that won't kill everybody else.
Again, the need to houserule something is what makes a game
worse, not better. Its more work that I have to do that the designers were too lazy to do themselves.
For example, I don't remember seeing a single bit of illusion magic in there. What the fuck? You really think that is a sign of good game design? Really?
