The End of 4e D&D.

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Alansmithee
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Post by Alansmithee »

* Christmas Tree Effect (they actually promised to solve this!)
* Linear Warriors vs. Quadratic Wizards
* A lack of a skill challenge system
* Empty Levels
* RNG deviations

Thanks for all the replies everyone. I'm still trying to get a hold of a lot of the system.

What did they screw up mechanically? I haven't read about skill challenges yet, but the idea at least seems solid. And it seems there's a ton less empty levels (from what I understand, you get powers or feats every level). I'm not familiar with the Christmas Tree effect, so I don't know if they addressed that or not. And wizards and warriors both advance at the same power level (generally), so it seems that was fixed.

I'm trying to understand more why people don't seem to like it here. Before I always enjoyed the commentary about RPGs here (and remembered reading when Frank & K made the tomes which I thought were quite well-done). And I remember a lot of complaining about how unbalanced things were, and how there was so much crap broken in 3.5 that either had to be houseruled, banned, gentlemen agreement-ed, or just handwaved to even make a playable game. So I had assumed many people would be pleased with the vast increase with balance.

The abilities casters had in 3.x were nice, but the D&D designers don't seem able to balance them. And I'm not sure if they CAN be balanced. It's kind of a defeatist attitude, but otoh I don't mind a game where people think that a magic item granting +1d8 dmg on a charge is extremely good at around 10th level. I see the war game/board game comparisons being valid, but shouldn't combat in D&D strive for that anyways?

I guess I just don't see anything in the system stopping people from doing all the RPG stuff, with the added bonus of more balance. Magic items are underwhelming, but it also means you don't have to worry about them breaking the game. Or that if you make something, it will really stand out. Nothing is generally gonna get 1-shot (either PCs or NPCs) so you don't have to worry about 1 unlucky roll dooming someone.

I'm not trying to convince people, I'm just trying to understand the misgivings. I joked (and still do) about how MMO-like the game is (which is obviously where they got a lot of their "inspiration"). But after talking with a couple of friends, I thought it looked pretty interesting. I just want to know if after a couple months of actually playing it I'm gonna regret buying books, so I'm trying to possibly save myself money now.
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Maxus
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Post by Maxus »

The Christmas Tree effect is when you have a character walking around with two magic rings, a magic amulet, a magic hat or crown or small boxed tied to the front of their head, magic gloves, magic shoes, magic pants, magic belt, magic armor, with a magic cape or robe worn over this, and carrying magic weapons. According to the DMG, much of this will be glowing in different colors.
Last edited by Maxus on Wed Jun 02, 2010 4:04 am, edited 1 time in total.
He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.

--The horror of Mario

Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
Alansmithee
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Post by Alansmithee »

Maxus wrote:The Christmas Tree effect is when you have a character walking around with two magic rings, a magic amulet, a magic hat or crown or small boxed tied to the front of their head, magic gloves, magic shoes, magic pants, magic belt, magic armor, with a magic cape or robe worn over this, and carrying magic weapons. According to the DMG, much of this will be glowing in different colors.
Hmm...they kinda missed the mark fixing that one.
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Psychic Robot
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Post by Psychic Robot »

You may find this and this useful reading material.
Count Arioch wrote:I'm not sure how discussions on whether PR is a terrible person or not is on-topic.
Ant wrote:
Chamomile wrote:Ant, what do we do about Psychic Robot?
You do not seem to do anything.
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Crissa
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Post by Crissa »

You know, I think I already linked to those. Hrm.

-Crissa

Stupid code
Last edited by Crissa on Wed Jun 02, 2010 5:29 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Maxus
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Post by Maxus »

Alansmithee wrote:
Maxus wrote:The Christmas Tree effect is when you have a character walking around with two magic rings, a magic amulet, a magic hat or crown or small boxed tied to the front of their head, magic gloves, magic shoes, magic pants, magic belt, magic armor, with a magic cape or robe worn over this, and carrying magic weapons. According to the DMG, much of this will be glowing in different colors.
Hmm...they kinda missed the mark fixing that one.
Oh, yes. But it's okay, because I just LOVE trading in equipment for equipment with a slightly bigger number on it, so the marginal increases add up to me staying competitive! It's an experience I can't get in any video game!
He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.

--The horror of Mario

Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
Zinegata
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Post by Zinegata »

It's kinda hard to not have a Christmas Tree effect when having magic items is simply better than not having them... and you're gonna get tons of said items anyway.
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Post by TheFlatline »

Back to an earlier topic in the thread...

What, precisely, is the problem with the 5 minute workday? It seems to be some kind of boogeyman. I've never seen it in actual play outside of some very intentional situations.

I mean, we reach the 5 minute workday in one of two ways:

1. The DM throws life-or-death, extremely difficult combat at the party as the first encounter of the day, tapping everyone out.

2. The players go hog wild and blow all their resources, necessitating rest faster than normal. Or, as a subset, the party, being the unheroic wusses they are, know a big fight is coming up, and instead of pushing through the intervening challenges conserving resources, they decide to rest at the last possible moment.


Point one is intentional, and point two can easily be trained out of players by giving mid-rest encounters where the players are tapped out of resources and are caught out of armor or whatever, or making it clear ahead of time that there is no time to rest.

The first point, specifically the DM being a dick, is endemic to having someone run the game. You'll never get rid of the DM throwing too-hard encounters at you through rules sets. It seems like the "elimination" of the 5 minute workday is designed to mitigate this, but it seems like a rules solution to a personality problem.

Resource management was one of the more interesting parts of 3rd edition. Broken? Yeah sort of. By level 6 the entire game changes and shifts to wizards being the rock stars of D&D, but still for a while there knowing what spell to drop when, and having to parcel out your resources, was a huge draw for me.

It seems like a problem that doesn't actually exist in my experience. I guess I'm taking a Microsoft "it's not a bug, it's a feature!" approach, but really, it seemed like 4th ed wanting to kill off the 5 minute workday was not fixing a problem, but breaking something that was a reason to want to play.
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Post by Username17 »

Alan wrote:What did they screw up mechanically? I haven't read about skill challenges yet, but the idea at least seems solid.
OK, now for the response: every version of skill challenges is fucking garbage, and anyone who paid money to have writers and designers produce this shit should be so angry that they should turn into some kind of multicolored hulk variant and go on a rampage. However, hyperbole aside, you are well within your rights to demand an analysis, so let's give you one.

First of all, I want to mention that it is possible to have different design ideals. It's all well and good to say that you prefer a curved RNG (Random Number Generator), but if something is supposed to be really swingy then rolling a d20 rather than 3d6 could hardly be called a flaw. So to evaluate whether Skill Challenges do indeed suck monkey ass, it is necessary to step into the shoes of the designers and determine what they were supposed to do. It is only then that you can determine whether they truly fail or simply succeed at design goals the reviewer does not share. The concept of the Skill Challenge is that it should hit the following design ideals (according to the designers of the challenge):
  • Be an easy plug-in to handle anything that isn't a combat.
  • Get everyone involved.
  • Be comparable to combat in that they involve a lot of choices and actions.
  • Be like Combat in that they have a lot of drama.
  • Be more interesting in result than simply rolling a skill check and succeeding or failing.
And they don't do that. Like, at all. So they fail. Not on the criteria of "Does Frank like this mechanic" but on the criteria of "Is this mechanic a good mechanic for doing the things this specific mechanic is supposed to do?" From the beginning, the way they have worked is that players can use various skills against DCs set by the level of the challenge and the relatedness of the skill, and if they succeed the result is added to the "successes" pile and if they fail the result is added to the "failures" pile. And as soon as either pile fills up, the challenge ends and delivers a result of "success" or "failure."

What this means is that even before we look at the DCs or the numbers involved, we note that the Skill Challenge system is already a failure, simply by nature of the way it has been set up. Since the challenge terminates when someone wins or loses, it can't generate a result more interesting than simple success or failure. It can't even be as interesting in result as a simple skill challenge - because you can't generate "succeed by more than 5" results or the like. Furthermore, since every time anyone tries anything they risk adding to the failure pile if they fail - it does not meet the "get everyone involved" criteria. If the Half Elven Diplomancer has a +16 and you have a +15, you are literally hurting the party's chances of success by attempting to act at all. The "correct" action is to allow the player with the best bonus to act over and over again until he wins or loses it for the whole team - which may require 14 straight rolls while everyone else is free to completely ignore the proceedings because they can't do anything except hurt the team's chances by performing any actions.

But sure, let's look at the specific changes through the years. The first version had an additional subsystem where everyone rolled skill initiative. Which did... nothing at all. There wasn't another team, and you were still limited by the number of actions taken in total by the entire team - so there was no point in going around the table in some specific order while everyone said "Pass" except the Bullysaurus who used Intimidate 9 times in a row. Also, the DCs were so ridiculously high that the PCs would essentially never ever pass even if they played it exactly right and everyone except the guy with the best allowed skill bonus passed. Also, the margin of failure you were allowed was actually higher on the supposedly harder challenges, which actually made them easier. That is, on the simplest Challenge you needed to succeed on 80% of your rolls, and the more involved challenges had you roll more dice but only need to succeed on 70.5% of your rolls. So that was total math failure. Like, if anyone capable of even middle school algebra had looked at those numbers for more than a couple minutes the problems would have been so glaringly obvious that it's difficult to imagine them getting through design. And since they were basically impossible as written, even a minimalist playtest should have caught the bug "the players never ever succeed at these damn things" right away even if no one could add.

But yeah, that was so egregious that they errataed it pretty much right away. They did so by dropping the DCs so low that the Half Elven Diplomacer basically (and at many levels actually) could not fail his rolls. Which meant that as long as the Fighter didn't do anything stupid like ask to take a turn, the party always succeeded. Um... yeah? But you'll note that they reduced it to a boring rubber stamp: you shake the most skilled player at the problem and eventually you win after much die rolling. But the die rolling is all a formality. Any gamist design goals were automatically failed, because the game portion was just a formality. And they fixed the Complexity thing by having the challenges terminate after the same number of failures no matter how many dice you were rolling, but even asking for an 85.7% success rate for the highest complexity challenges really wasn't a big deal when a skill specialist succeeded on literally 100% of his rolls.

Thereafter they produced a number of Skill Challenge variant rules that were released either inside or outside the DDI firewall (Mike Mearls alone wrote ten of these inside the DDI firewall, in addition to the ones he made for general consumption). These included various special events that happened on 1s or 20s or allowed people to spend action points for stuff, or had people forced to put two or three small skill challenges back to back. But none of that shit mattered, because the dice rolling didn't matter. Well, the morphing challenges mattered a little bit, because as soon as you stopped wooing the princess and had to start jumping over the barrels thrown by the giant monkey you had the Diplomancer pass and the Bullysaurus make Athletics tests that always succeeded instead. But I won't dwell on these over much, because while they made over a dozen of the damn things, each one was specifically the work of a lone designer without the benefit of a playtesting staff. So failure here is perhaps to be expected - maybe even excused.

And then they brought out the DMG2. It leaves the cornerstone unchanged. The correct strategy is still - of course - to just have your most relevantly skilled character do all the talking. But it introduces a lot of hand waving that might obscure that fact for some people. And of course the advice and DCs set make it truly obvious that they have no idea what they are doing. For example, they suggest that you allow a number of skills equal to the number of players +2 - which considering that the players are going to be shaking a specialist at the problem is exactly backwards! A larger party has more skills to select from, so they can throw a character forward in good conscience even with a smaller allowed skill pool. A smaller party has less skills on their combined roster, so they need there to be more skills that could work to not get collectively boned. But the basics haven't really changed: a Halfling Rogue has a +11 or +12 on their Thievery skill at 1st level before spending any resources on that at all. The Skill Chalenge DC for a test that allows Thievery is 10. They could literally rolls a -2 on the d20 and still succeed. The entire process is a pointless formality. All the challenge morphs that happen at each failure where you get attacked and stuff don't mean anything, because you cannot fail! This doesn't really change. At 28th level when our Halfling Rogue's Epic Thievery bonus has risen to +30 on level advances alone, the DC is only 28.

But they do mix it up. A bit. They suggest forcing players to stop using a skill after they get a certain number of auto-successes. But since the tests are so easy that it doesn't really matter, it doesn't really matter. Sure, the Elven Orbizard doesn't have as good an Arcana test as the Halfling Duelist has a Thievery test. He doesn't succeed on a natural roll of negative 2. But he still succeeds at a natural roll of 1, so honestly who gives a crap? They also give some advice on limiting Aid Another, which is comedy gold since you can "take 1" and succeed on those stupid things without falling on Aid Another even once. Then there's a whole thing on stages of failure where you can put tremendous amounts of work into making up exotic things to torment your players with for each of the three failures that it is mathematically impossible for them to accrue if they follow the script. That one is pretty puzzling. But the big idea is branching or progressive challenges - where the allowed skills change in the middle because the challenge is actually two or three different challenges end to end. This is not really different from simply telling one of the players that they are limited to 3 skill rolls except that it is a lot more work for the DM. For a "Branched Challenge" for example, the DMG2 is seriously asking the DM to draw up 7 different skill lists, of which only 3 will actually be interacted with by the PCs, and which I hasten to add will still be passed by one of the players rolling a d20 a few times in a row and saying "I succeed" without even looking at the damn die.

Indeed, the one and only thing that presents an opportunity for the players to even think about failure is the idea that you might want to take everyone's choices away and force everyone to roll the same skill with no player declarations at all (providing success either if one player succeeds - which is deep waste of time, or if a majority succeeds, where players hurt the party's chances just by not staying home). But of course, once you do that you instantly fail all design goals, because the challenges become completely noninteractive.

So yeah: after announcing that they had fixed Skill Challenges more than a dozen times over the las two years, it still doesn't live up to any of their design goals and is a gigantic waste of time.

But Could You Do Better?

Sure.

Imagine for the moment that instead of having each player's success or failure adding to the party's total (thereby giving the entire challenge a cap on the number of actions that each player used up as they attempted to do anything to advance the progress meter), you simply capped the number of rounds, and let the number of successes accumulated in that period be just a number. Boom. That change alone improves challenges in the following ways:
  • The players are incentivized to "get involved" because they don't get anything for standing aside.
  • The results become more dynamic than the simple success/failure allowed by Skill Challenges out of the book, because a simple two round challenge would provide results between 0 and 10 instead of a simple on/off.
  • The allowable DCs open way up. Because if one player is so good at one of the tests that they succeed on natty 1 - so what? It's just one success per round, the rest of the party still needs to - and thus gets to do things.
  • All those "secondary skills" actually matter. If you can take an action that will open up an extra round or which will vastly reduce the DCs of the rest of the party it's worth risking a higher DC or taking an action that won't add any hits to the success pile.
  • The challenges are over in a reasonable amount of time. I don't know about you, but I find it easier for five people to roll three dice than to have one person roll 14 dice. Easier to keep track of the final tallies too, since each player is in charge of a number they can count on their nipples.
And yeah, there are a number of other changes you can make that will improve things. I mean for goodness sakes, call an individual roll a "hit" or a "miss" and not a "success" or "failure." Why? Because you call the aggregate event of all the rolls together a "success" or "failure." Never use the same word for an increment towards a goal and the goal itself - it's pointlessly confusing. Once you've stepped away from the "team champion" model of challenges, you don't need to adjust the number of acceptable skills to the number of players at the table - it's all just ratios anyway. Just pick a fraction of the skill list to use in each challenge and accept that on average some percentage of the players will be Diplomancers in their element and the rest will be essentially defaulting. And since you now have firmly defined rounds, you can seriously just throw down Progressive Challenges based on the round, rather on the number of hits, and that wouldn't even feel forced.

Like I said earlier, making a Skill Challenge system that doesn't suck ass is a matter of an afternoon spent with a pocket calculator and a couple of very basic design decisions. Seeing them devote nearly 2 years and nearly 18 thousand words in their second hardcover book on the subject only to have it still be a nonfunctional mess is... embarrassing. I feel badly for them. Because that kind of lack of talent takes physical effort.

-Username17
Lago PARANOIA
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

The 5-minute workday has a ton of problems associated with it, but probably the biggest problem is that it breaks suspension of disbelief.

Like really, right here's your problem:
TheFlatline wrote: Point one is intentional, and point two can easily be trained out of players by giving mid-rest encounters where the players are tapped out of resources and are caught out of armor or whatever, or making it clear ahead of time that there is no time to rest.
This is actually really dumb. How the hell would you justify this with in-game logic?

Familiar: 'Why are you continuing to press on in this thousand-year old abandoned dungeon even though the cleric is out of spells and the fighter is at death's door?'
Wizard: 'Because if we teleport back to the inn and get some sleep we'll get attacked by enemy ninjas in our sleep!'
Familiar: 'Even if you somehow survived the dungeon, wouldn't you be in even worse shape for the inevitable ninja attack completing said dungeon than if you went right now?'
Wizard: 'Shut up! It's not HEROIC ENOUGH.'

When you use that as the threat for the PCs not to do something really obvious, it steadily becomes more and more ridiculous as time goes on. There's no reason why the PCs wouldn't treat adventuring as cautiously as possible, it's just pure metagaming goodness. Unless you want to treat every adventure as some kind of dire crisis where the PCs only have 6 hours to run through a gauntlet of 3-5 challenges! Which just breaks suspension of belief after awhile (see below).


Now I'm feeling you on the idea of using exertion of resource management to make subsequent encounters more difficult, but there are many issues with how D&D implements this.

1) First of all, the encounters per resting period is way, way, WAY too fucking difficult, especially at low level. If you actually run a low-level 3E or 4E character through the recommended 4 or 5 encounters you're going to lose a couple of people, if not have a TPK.

2) It forces the DM to throw in 'filler' encounters for no reason. I as a DM personally hate the idea of having to implement a random bear attack or thieves' guild ambush just so PCs get their daily-recommended encounters for the session. If an encounter is seriously 'thwart an assassin's attack on the king' then I don't want to force the PCs to enter a tournament or keep them up farming twenty bear asses because otherwise they'll have cheated themselves out of a workday.

3) Even if you do implement the filler encounters, the D&D workday structure still doesn't follow source material. Seriously, how many series do you have where the heroes regularly face four harrowing challenges before completing the adventure? Not that many. Because unless you're running a pure action movie where the heroes are invincible, that's just way too much shit to pack into a day's worth of time.

4) It forces the DM to make subsequent encounters easier in order to maintain balanced encounters. People generally agree that the fight against the Big Bad of the adventure should be the hardest, right? Well, he can't really be made to be all that difficult if you went through a gauntlet of the castle guards, the necromancer's skeleton minions, his Mage Council, and then the necromancer's dracolich. In relative terms you can still make the necromancer the 'hardest' fight of the day if your DM is really that skilled in implementing balance, but in absolute terms the necromancer is probably going to be the easiest encounter.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by TheFlatline »

FrankTrollman wrote:
But Could You Do Better?

Sure.

Imagine for the moment that instead of having each player's success or failure adding to the party's total (thereby giving the entire challenge a cap on the number of actions that each player used up as they attempted to do anything to advance the progress meter), you simply capped the number of rounds, and let the number of successes accumulated in that period be just a number. Boom. That change alone improves challenges in the following ways:
  • The players are incentivized to "get involved" because they don't get anything for standing aside.
  • The results become more dynamic than the simple success/failure allowed by Skill Challenges out of the book, because a simple two round challenge would provide results between 0 and 10 instead of a simple on/off.
  • The allowable DCs open way up. Because if one player is so good at one of the tests that they succeed on natty 1 - so what? It's just one success per round, the rest of the party still needs to - and thus gets to do things.
  • All those "secondary skills" actually matter. If you can take an action that will open up an extra round or which will vastly reduce the DCs of the rest of the party it's worth risking a higher DC or taking an action that won't add any hits to the success pile.
  • The challenges are over in a reasonable amount of time. I don't know about you, but I find it easier for five people to roll three dice than to have one person roll 14 dice. Easier to keep track of the final tallies too, since each player is in charge of a number they can count on their nipples.
And yeah, there are a number of other changes you can make that will improve things. I mean for goodness sakes, call an individual roll a "hit" or a "miss" and not a "success" or "failure." Why? Because you call the aggregate event of all the rolls together a "success" or "failure." Never use the same word for an increment towards a goal and the goal itself - it's pointlessly confusing. Once you've stepped away from the "team champion" model of challenges, you don't need to adjust the number of acceptable skills to the number of players at the table - it's all just ratios anyway. Just pick a fraction of the skill list to use in each challenge and accept that on average some percentage of the players will be Diplomancers in their element and the rest will be essentially defaulting. And since you now have firmly defined rounds, you can seriously just throw down Progressive Challenges based on the round, rather on the number of hits, and that wouldn't even feel forced.

Like I said earlier, making a Skill Challenge system that doesn't suck ass is a matter of an afternoon spent with a pocket calculator and a couple of very basic design decisions. Seeing them devote nearly 2 years and nearly 18 thousand words in their second hardcover book on the subject only to have it still be a nonfunctional mess is... embarrassing. I feel badly for them. Because that kind of lack of talent takes physical effort.

-Username17
I'd be seriously willing to play with that challenge system in a D&D game.

It makes your Diplomancer still important: he's a steady, reliable source of progress, but it also lets the rest of the party either take a wild stab or do other things that they might excel at in order to make the Diplomancer work better or longer.

I like it a lot. It's almost like a sub-game, where the goal is to cooperate with each other in the most efficient way possible. But it's a sub-game using underlying rules for skill checks.
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Post by TheFlatline »

Lago PARANOIA wrote:The 5-minute workday has a ton of problems associated with it, but probably the biggest problem is that it breaks suspension of disbelief.

Like really, right here's your problem:
TheFlatline wrote: Point one is intentional, and point two can easily be trained out of players by giving mid-rest encounters where the players are tapped out of resources and are caught out of armor or whatever, or making it clear ahead of time that there is no time to rest.
This is actually really dumb. How the hell would you justify this with in-game logic?

Familiar: 'Why are you continuing to press on in this thousand-year old abandoned dungeon even though the cleric is out of spells and the fighter is at death's door?'
Wizard: 'Because if we teleport back to the inn and get some sleep we'll get attacked by enemy ninjas in our sleep!'
Familiar: 'Even if you somehow survived the dungeon, wouldn't you be in even worse shape for the inevitable ninja attack completing said dungeon than if you went right now?'
Wizard: 'Shut up! It's not HEROIC ENOUGH.'

When you use that as the threat for the PCs not to do something really obvious, it steadily becomes more and more ridiculous as time goes on. There's no reason why the PCs wouldn't treat adventuring as cautiously as possible, it's just pure metagaming goodness. Unless you want to treat every adventure as some kind of dire crisis where the PCs only have 6 hours to run through a gauntlet of 3-5 challenges! Which just breaks suspension of belief after awhile (see below).


Now I'm feeling you on the idea of using exertion of resource management to make subsequent encounters more difficult, but there are many issues with how D&D implements this.

1) First of all, the encounters per resting period is way, way, WAY too fucking difficult, especially at low level. If you actually run a low-level 3E or 4E character through the recommended 4 or 5 encounters you're going to lose a couple of people, if not have a TPK.

2) It forces the DM to throw in 'filler' encounters for no reason. I as a DM personally hate the idea of having to implement a random bear attack or thieves' guild ambush just so PCs get their daily-recommended encounters for the session. If an encounter is seriously 'thwart an assassin's attack on the king' then I don't want to force the PCs to enter a tournament or keep them up farming twenty bear asses because otherwise they'll have cheated themselves out of a workday.

3) Even if you do implement the filler encounters, the D&D workday structure still doesn't follow source material. Seriously, how many series do you have where the heroes regularly face four harrowing challenges before completing the adventure? Not that many. Because unless you're running a pure action movie where the heroes are invincible, that's just way too much shit to pack into a day's worth of time.

4) It forces the DM to make subsequent encounters easier in order to maintain balanced encounters. People generally agree that the fight against the Big Bad of the adventure should be the hardest, right? Well, he can't really be made to be all that difficult if you went through a gauntlet of the castle guards, the necromancer's skeleton minions, his Mage Council, and then the necromancer's dracolich. In relative terms you can still make the necromancer the 'hardest' fight of the day if your DM is really that skilled in implementing balance, but in absolute terms the necromancer is probably going to be the easiest encounter.
I asked because I haven't particularly encountered the "problem". I appreciate the feedback.

However, I have to ask, after hacking through half of said thousand-year-old dungeon filled with eldrich horrors, would you really teleport back to town and give all the baddies a chance to... well... prepare specifically to TPK you? My point was if the PCs decide to set up camp inside the dungeon to refresh their spells, then hell yes they'll get harassed during the night. If they port back to town, then the dungeon will either be ready for them, have killed off/moved the princess, or have vacated the dungeon entirely and left the PCs looking like idiots.

I'll agree with point 1, survival rate for level 1-2 is absurd. You go out generally, have 1-2 encounters, maybe more if the dice like you that session, and you go home. But you're supposed to be crap. That's understandable.

The rest of your points fall down to a basic assumption about the adventuring day/dungeon/challenge. If you play with no regard to what's coming up, all of your points are valid, especially the BBEG being the absolutely easiest of all the encounters. However, if you play *knowing* that you're going to need probably half your resources to overcome the BBEG, and you have a full castle to tromp through, you're going to have to be a lot more careful storming the gates, killing the guards, and fighting their way to the BBEG.

I'm not even sure what you mean by filler encounters. Sometimes one fight a day is all the story calls for. Sometimes there's a need to get into fights more often. When given the option it's understandable the players will want to have a 1 encounter workday, but since the players are heroes, how often *should* they have that kind of initiative? Your example of an action movie even supports my concept. Can you imagine Rambo radioing out to get picked up by a helicopter and ported back to base so he can rest for 8 hours? No... he's under practical considerations to get the job done.

I guess neither myself nor any of my gaming friends ever had it occur to us that the opportunity to stop and port back to town in the middle of a siege was a viable option, and we planned accordingly.

Which lends to my point that the 5 minute workday in relation to players is a perception rather than a problem. The only real problem I still see in regards to a 5 minute workday is a DM who doesn't like to pace combat.
Doom
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Post by Doom »

A site used to have a page of rants about 4e. While alot of these have been mentioned here (and a certainly came from folks here), it's worth seeing what others in the Wide World had to say.


The skill challenge system, which was supposed to cover non-combat action sequences, was completely broken as-published, to the point that difficulties were inverted (in many cases it was impossible to accrue four successes before two failures on a complexity 1 skill challenge, while it was often nearly impossible to fail a high-complexity skill challenge). The published examples of negotiation made Fighters completely useless in skill challenges because their lone class social skill, Intimidate, generates automatic failures! Wizards attempted to fix the system with errata three times, creating four different sets of rules in a year, all broken, for this system.

The decrease in rules still leaves exceptions and gotchas lying around like clutter, such as picking suboptimal race class combos (which can destroy your character build forever), or even choosing a +2 proficiency weapon (at least fixable if you didn't mess up your initial stat build).

HP bloat resulting in grinding and "padded sumo" where combat just drags on and on and on... The Monster Manual II attempted to fix this with errata, but the mathematics are still way off. Higher level monsters are often grossly incapable of killing the players and have too much HP, making it a chore instead of a thrilling challenge.

The fluff descriptions of the powers are incomprehensible. The world-fluff is also generally silly - even if some argue it is actually unnecessary to pay attention to the core fluff at all it still feels like a bad writer's fantasy heartbreaker.

Fragile system: Players can easily exploit and break the game by taking advantage of flaws in ranged combat, the healing surge mechanic, and other things.

Tarrasque doesn't regenerate anymore. Fuck you Wizards, fuck you.

The powers themselves are very cookie-cutter in nature, relying on a number of stock effects (such as "Slide", "Slow", "Stun", "Spend a healing surge", etc).

Monsters don't have fluff, they have stupid high lore checks. The most famous being Bear Lore: with an unusually high Nature Knowledge check you can find out "bears use their claws to attack."

Playtest combats carried out by Touhoufags show that a party that knows what it's doing and uses group tactics well will cut through encounters several levels higher than themselves like a hot knife through butter.

Over-reliance on unimaginative 'adjectivenoun' naming conventions, for instance: Darkleaf Armor: Darkleaves from the gravetrees of the Shadowfell give this armor its protective properties..

Lack of non-combat content such as crafting. This criticism refers to the emphasis on combat powers over out-of-combat features. Monsters themselves have no utility or out-of-combat abilities. In the words of one D&D designer: "monsters live for five rounds before they die, so they only need five things to do."

The Mongol dilemma: soldiers on horseback can defeat many of the game's monsters because the monsters don't have ranged attack powers.

Giving a flying monster a bow makes it too hard for a party to kill.

Various broken abilities that demonstrate a lack of playtesting and/or willful disregard for legitimate concerns (i.e.: "Orbizard," Demigod epic destiny, pre-errata Blade Cascade, etc.)

Embarrassingly shallow example encounters. Encounters don't come with predesignated personalities or behavior such as calling reinforcements or fleeing from the battle without the DM creating them him/herself. Instead they seem like XP pinatas.

The economic system has major flaws, such as the manufacturing cost for useful items as stated in the Player's Handbook to be exactly the same as the sale price.

Vastly dissociated mechanics: how do I describe what's going on in a way that makes sense? What does it mean when a monster "marks" an opponent? Is it faerie fire, which somehow still helps tremorsense monsters? Is it tactics, which still works even if there's only one monster in the encounter? And how can a paladin's mark wipe out a fighter's mark? Too many powers cripple the ability to narrate a cohesive scene outside of a completely meta-game interpretation.

Bloody Path has to be one of the worst of these. "Stop hitting yourself! Stop beheading yourself!"

A lack of diversity and interesting classes caused by the standardization of all powers and classes. Game balance doesn't mean making everything the same.

Daily powers that can't possibly use Vancian as an excuse. "I can only swing for 6[W] + Strength damage and mark all nearby enemies once per day!" "I can make a sly maneuver that forces my opponent to jump for cover... once."

Minions can be killed in one hit by any attack that doesn't miss, making them more like pointless peasant fodder than actual adversaries. They make no sense outside of a disassociated mechanics ruleset, and are not natural parts of the game world. "They die quickly because they are supposed to die quickly." And how do they manage to evade a power that is supposed to still do damage on a miss, like a fireball, when they're supposed to be weaksauce?

The various auto-damage abilities make minions worth far too much for their level. A wizard using an autodamage power can kill thousands of minions twenty levels higher than he is, ‘power-leveling’ to high level in a single encounter that makes no sense outside of the rules. Many other classes get similar auto-damage effects.

Solo monsters have insanely large amount of hit points, but ‘solo’ monsters cannot challenge a party single-handedly, due to many character abilities that completely shut down a monster, very low damage dealing capability, and the ‘action economy’…a solo monster only gets one attack a round (plus a move, usually impossible, and a minor action), whereas the party gets 5 attacks plus moves plus minor action--a solo simply can’t keep up, even if it could survive the debilitating special effects or deal enough damage to threaten a character.

WTF is a healing surge? It's a pretty essential part of the mechanics, but the fluff never explains what a healing surge IS nor how to role-play spending a healing surge. The magical healing of a cleric is the same as being screamed at by a warlord...but why?

Many classes are based on mechanics rather than fluff. A class is built around its role (Striker, Defender, Leader, Controller) with the fluff painted over it.

Roles are not protected. Almost every class has multiple area of effect powers, supposedly the domain of the Controller. Defender classes can outdamage Strikers (who supposedly deal the most damage). Numerous classes also get healing, even if they're not Leaders (which are supposedly the healers). There are some classes that have a secondary role, but some that cross-over to other roles aren't listed as having a secondary role as others do.

Use of Dungeons and Dragons terms on things that have nothing to do with their effects or use in 4E. E.G: The 'Sleep' spell doesn't put anything to sleep in 4e terms, 'Disintegrate' doesn't disintegrate, 'Fireball' isn't a ball of fire, spells and rituals named after characters, even though there is no rules for researching spells and rituals, and the spells and rituals existed before the iconic characters did...so why are they named after them?

Elimination of iconic spells, traditional class features, and whole classes in the name of balance. Try playing an wizard that enchants tools or ANYTHING other than throwing evocations around, or an unholy priest necromancer, or a witch with a familiar. Sorcerers, bards, rangers with animal companions, druids, and monks were not available in the initial release; people were upset they had to buy MORE books for these iconic classes that have been with us since 1st edition.

Exception-based design wankery, plus shit like the four different "evil eye" variations. Includes ability non-interaction and "How the hell do I adjudicate this?" Even determining if "Mountain Hammer Smite" can knock open a door requires house-ruling.

Using Page 42 from the Dungeon Master's Guide as a guide for actions the rules don't cover, instead of the DM's own judgment.

Instead of eliminating the 15-minute workday, the devs put everyone on the 15-minute workday schedule.

"Get into a fight, blow all your daily powers for spike damage, take an extended rest, lather, rinse, repeat."

A party of everyone playing the same class is often superior to a party of everyone playing a different class. This is because most classes can do most of what other roles can do, and because 'exception based design' means powers generally can only interact with themselves.

Obvious example, the cleric. In Divine Power (an official splatbook), clerics get an encounter utility power at level 2 that lets them take damage equal to their healing surge value, in return for healing someone else twice that. Put two clerics in the same party and everyone gets healed to full after an hour's downtime, a grievous exploit in a game where the workday is limited mostly by the hit point pool. This isn't the only problematic power; it's a problem with the leader role in general since they have the lion's share of 'you suck for one round but someone else ends up awesome' powers. Lesser examples include parties specializing in a type of damage or bonus and pushing the opposition off of the RNG (the Radiant Whore party is a good example). This leads to the most damning indictment of 4E being more balanced:

While the classes in aggregate are more-or-less balanced (with the exception of some outliers such as the cleric/wizard/ranger/druid. CoDzilla dead in 4E my ass), party configurations as a whole are blatantly unbalanced. A party with three leaders will do much better at low levels than the suggested 'balanced' party of leader + defender + two strikers + controllers. A team of clerics with Recovery Strike/Astral Seal, the Mark of Warding feat, Shield of Faith, Consecrated Grond, and Moment of Glory will pretty much steamroll everything. At higher levels, a team of controllers is basically you telling the DM that you fucking win the game forever. So much for the balanced party.

Ranged and melee characters don't interact very well. Ranged characters can open up the range (taking fewer volume of attacks) and attack from safe spots. Melee characters have more durability and do more damage. Since 4E worships the 'closet troll' method of designing encounters, melee characters are rarely hurt by not having a ranged attacker to begin with. This leads to warlocks being a waste of time when added to a melee party (because even melee controllers will do more damage than this ranged striker) and being a burden on resources because they can't contribute their hit-point pool. By the same token, adding a paladin to a party of wizard / archer ranger / laser cleric / wand bard will only end up with the paladin getting turned to chunky salsa.

The defender role is generally useless. Unless you have some tricked-out build like a Thunderglaive Swordmage, the only thing that really allows a defender to perform their role--especially at really low and really high levels--is the DM humoring them. Even defenders that can effectively inhibit one monster such as the swordmage can't really do anything about the other four monsters just swarming past them and gangbanging the rogue or wizard.

Monsters within the same species often have unique, but inexplicable powers, such as each Cyclops having a power called "Evil Eye" that does something completely different for each type of cyclops. And one of the evil eye powers gives him a bonus to ranged attacks... better than someone with depth perception. wait, wut?

Monsters mostly play about the same. A high level lich, supposedly an undead powerful wizard, only has one reliable attack, and an aura, plus a single unreliable/recharging power. An orc, half a dozen levels lower, has an attack power, and an aura. Adding to this is not much else changes, either, despite the level difference (for example, the orc and lich differ in hit points by 2, and in expected damage by 2.25 against same-level opponents).

Defenses don't level appropriately, causing characters to always be vulnerable in at least 1, if not 2, defenses.

The skill system has been simplified so that now a single skill covers a sometimes ridiculous range of abilities. For example, "Bluff" covers the ability to lie, use ventriloquism, cooking a gourmet meal, to create a disguise, to write a forged document, selling items, and most recently due to PHB3, to assist in casting magic rituals.

Skills automatically increase by level, whether the player/character uses the skills or not. So, the higher-level albeit unstudied fighter will roll better on Religion checks than a cleric, and the fighter will be able to discuss in detail gods and religions the fighter has never seen or heard of. The fighter will also be better on Arcana checks than lower level wizards, better at Thievery than rogues, and, well, everything. Universities can just hire one high level, but otherwise retarded, fighter to lecture all classes in all departments.

Spotting traps requires a different ability score (Perception: Wisdom) than disarming traps (Thievery: Dexterity), so Rogues can't spot level-appropriate traps.

Religion is based on intelligence in 4e, so a cleric can't answer level-appropriate questions about his own god or religion.

"Charisma is a dump stat" for 3E has been replaced by "Intelligence" is a dump stat for 4e, since you can use either intelligence or dexterity for defense, and the latter has several other bonuses not granted by intelligence.

Instead of one dump stat, you now have three, because each defense uses the better of two attributes. An intelligent and agile warrior (say, Intelligence 20, Dexterity 20) doesn't avoid blows any better than an intelligent and very clumsy warrior (Intelligence 20, Dexterity 8). An intelligent character still has high defense, even when unconscious. Does any of this make sense?

The three 'tiers' of character levels (1-10, 11-20, and 21-30), aren't different from one another. Powers just have increased damage and bonus to hit, but don't actually change. The stock effects that differentiate powers, like 'Slow', don't change. The difference between a low and high level Wizard's Magic Missile is damage and to hit bonus, nothing else. Since higher level monsters have more hit points and better defenses, and Wizards don’t even get more low level spells to cast as they gain levels, the end result of gaining levels is nothing.

Although players can find that low level combat is easy to manage, higher level combat becomes very difficult to manage even with the help of visual aids like combat cards, a white board, a game table, a status effect chart, an initiative chart, a combat map, status effect markers, marking icons, miniatures, and a DM Screen of charts.

Higher level characters each have a host of unique special powers, including a number of 'interrupts', causing many fights past level 10 or so to be complicated interrupt-fests, with even interrupt-interrupts, and such.
Status effects also get out of control at higher levels; a monster can easily have half a dozen effects, each granting situational +2 or +1 or -1 or -2, in addition to marks and quarries, in addition to dazed/immobilized/slowed/restrained/combat advantage, in addition to bloodied, in addition to possible special power effects.



Effects are not streamlined. Some end at the beginning or end of a turn while others end on a save that could happen at the beginning or end of a turn, making it very difficult to keep track of, and sometimes there are 'after effects' with more rules.

Damn near every attack/power adds another effect you have to keep track of -- every enemy needs post-it notes for the heap of status effects that requires bookkeeping.

WotC churned out dozens of splatbooks, requiring a gamer to spend hundreds of dollars to play in their favored setting, access new features, or to expand upon their class, or even to use many classes. Mistakes have led to considerable errata, meaning you need to go online to get the errata--not all of the errata is added to the recent printings, either.

Character power effects are very difficult to remember, even though they're all "damage + possible effect", the names have nothing to do with the effects. For example, Steel Serpent Strike doesn't deal poison damage, isn't "fast" in any way (other than the fluff), and doesn't require a steel weapon to be used. Gamers must keep "Power Cards/Sheets" to remember what their powers do.

The level 7 rogue power "Sand in the Eyes" is particularly problematic. You need to have a light blade in your hand to throw sand? You can be in the belly of a purple worm, and STILL use this power to blind the worm...even if you don't have any sand.

Ritual system is completely unusable outside of a few effects. The overall power level of rituals is kept to a 'Harry Potter' level, creating internal ridiculousness when combined with the economy system (scrying on a creature costs 100,000 gold pieces). Moreover, the casting time of rituals (rarely quicker than 10 minutes) makes rituals even more useless.
Someone forgot to give a hardness score to objects. This leads to extreme silliness like a squad of 10 children being able to punch through castle walls faster than you would flinging rocks from one catapult at it.
Taking 20, an integral part of the d20 system, is removed from the rules. Either this means that the game seriously expects you to keep rolling a d20 until you get a 20 or you're only allowed to make one check on anything that doesn't have a 'retry' option (such as defeating Arcane Lock) ever.

Completely unbalanced distribution of elemental effectiveness. Radiant damage is by far and away the most useful damage type to specialize in (with thunder and frost damage distant seconds) while poison and necrotic are a complete waste of time. On the flip side, players will always pick resist 5 necrotic over immunity to psychic damage if you could only have one or the other. Everyone get thar laser swords and put on Skull Masks or GTFO.

Next to the skill challenge and ritual system, the magical item system is the most broken subsystem in the game. Some highlights:

4th Edition characters are overly dependent on their magical items. At higher levels, you can't even start to fight without being blinged out up the ass since magical items are more important to your damage output than your class, your feats, and your powers. Monsters do not need magical items to bring a similar level of pain. This has the effect of making PCs look like pussies for needing their bling while not actually making them interesting since the best items in the game are manipulations to a combat roll.

One of the design goals was to reduce dependency on magical items, to prevent the Christmas tree effect that plagued 3rd Edition characters. 4th Edition added many more item slots than 3rd Edition has.

Magical item dailies makes 90% of magical items almost useless out of the box. A 15th-level character might expect to use three magical item dailies in a day (4-encounter workday). A 15th level character will have around 8 magical items that use dailies. Most magical items have no effect if you don't burn a daily. This wouldn't be so bad in theory if the magical item dailies had a wide-range of utility, making your character a sort of Inspector Gadget who had to carefully ration their power, but they tend to be bullshit effects like 'become invisible for six seconds as a standard action' or 'gain temporary hit points equal to your healing surge'. These are the effects of 18+ level items. This leads to wide swatches of players picking the exact same sets of magical items for the rest of their life.

Utility magical items are worthless, due to a combination of low actual utility, their overpricedness, and the fact that the magical item daily system makes them compete with combat magical items.

The wealth accumulation system is ludicrously arbitrary and unbalanced.

The DM rolls for magical items without any regards towards whether the magical items are better than what the players currently have or are even USUABLE. The DMG makes some vague mewling about getting Christmas lists from players but doesn't make it clear how much players are supposed to get items they like. In combination with the above points two 'organic' parties who went on exactly the same adventures and built their characters exactly the same can have wildly varying power levels.

Complete disconnect between high-level NPCs' feats and their actual abilities. Szass Tam is probably one of the strongest wizards in Faerun but he can't even reliably one-shot a 1st level goblin. Not to mention the fact that he has no apparent abilities other than his monster entry, which lists nothing but combat powers. How the fuck is he supposed to engage in classic wizard tomfoolery like mind-controlling the mayor or getting skullcap massages from succubi?

Arbitrary (read: lazy) separation of powers from their environment at large. A halfling can push a 100,000kg dragon 30 feet backwards with a 13th level power yet is not allowed to use the same power to knock a statue out of the way.

'One True Race' for many class combinations unless you want to take a significant penalty. Halfling fighters and half-orc wizards are shitty in 4e, but that's hardly news. Dragonborn being discouraged from being ranger archers is bad enough. Everyone BUT elves being discouraged from being ranger archers is unfuckingacceptable. This is made worse by racial feats being intentionally designed by that rat bastard Andy Collins to be more powerful than general feats.

The 'more monster races' 4E constantly crows about is not actually more races. While the 3E ECL system was woefully unbalanced, we would've preferred for the game to, you know, make playing hill giants and nymphs playable. 40 different Rubber Forehead Alien races is not a meaningful choice, and it's an insult to our intelligence for the game designers and fanbois to advertise this. This is fucking Dungeons and Dragons, not Star Trek: Voyager.

The tactic of monsters swarming one PC and gangbanging them is dominating. Because of their low damage output and the relative ineffectiveness of defenders, monsters are encouraged to ignore the tactical situation and try to pile all of their attacks onto one PC. The only reason for monsters to do otherwise is if they're tied up by the terrain or another power or (more likely) the DM is humoring them.

Paragon paths and epic destinies don't transform your character enough to have enough a noticeable effect on gameplay. Getting 5 minutes worth of regeneration, a +1 bonus to attack/defense/damage, and 2 extra healing surges a day, which is what you can expect after 9 levels of this shit, does NOT make you a fucking demigod. Wolverine wouldn't wipe his ass with that weaksauce celestial ascension and that sadsack routinely gets beaten up by the lolis. Note that demigod is considered one of the most powerful epic destinies in the game.

Very narrow, yet very fragile system. A "+1 to everything" power is mathematically the most game-breaking ability you can get (CF Demigod, Weapon Expertise, etc), and building a character with a -1 to everything (i.e., picking something besides the one true race/class combo, eg 'half-orc wizard' instead of 'gnome wizard') is a horrible mistake.

Even if you know what you're doing as a DM, it's a VERY, VERY slow game that feels less akin to roleplaying fantasy and more like being that kid you used to see at school who spent his time counting bugs. ALL THE TIME.

4E completely missed the point why we hated 'Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards' by implementing 'Linear Warriors, Linear Wizards'. The problem wasn't just that the previous setup was unfair, but also because Linear Warriors were BORING. So while WotC 'solved' the balance problem, it was at the cost of making the classes equally boring. 2E-3E's setup of only having a third of the classes interesting at high levels sucked, it was definitely better than having none of the classes interesting.

4E took very great pains to take world-affecting abilities out of the hands of the players. Diplomacy doesn't do anything without the PCs sucking the cocks of the DM anymore, almost no one gets an ability that lasts longer than 5 minutes, high-level magical items don't do donkey dick, no rules for acquiring armies or building castles or any of that shit without DM permission (you CAN get some overpriced fixtures though if you own Adventurer's Vault 2), rituals are nerfed to high heaven, and so on. How the fuck are you supposed to play an earth-shattering, world-changing hero with these kinds of limitations?

Of course, this assumes that 4E isn't being duplicitous about letting you have the opportunity to play earth-shattering, world-changing heroes like it advertises on and in its books in the first place. Exalted, for example, pretty much coasts on being able to play said heroes... but as WotC no doubt learned from 3E, actually writing such rules to make such a thing happen is soooooo hard! All that math and rules cross-referencing and playtesting and shit! It's much harder to break a game where the most awe-inspiring thing a warrior does is [7W] + strength damage. So let's implement rules that reflect heroes suitable for boring bodice-rippers you find in an airport while just SAYING your heroes are epic and and awesome and all that jazz! This is exactly why 4E haters are so unimpressed by the 4Erries continually crowing about a more balanced gameset.



PS: Can someone tell my why the Tarrasque not regenerating is a rage-inducing thing?
Kaelik, to Tzor wrote: And you aren't shot in the face?
Frank Trollman wrote:A government is also immortal ...On the plus side, once the United Kingdom is no longer united, the United States of America will be the oldest country in the world. USA!
Lago PARANOIA
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

TheFlatline wrote: However, I have to ask, after hacking through half of said thousand-year-old dungeon filled with eldrich horrors, would you really teleport back to town and give all the baddies a chance to... well... prepare specifically to TPK you?
TheFlatline wrote:If they port back to town, then the dungeon will either be ready for them, have killed off/moved the princess, or have vacated the dungeon entirely and left the PCs looking like idiots.
That's exactly what I mean about having to continually resort to contrivances in order to uphold the narrative logic of the multi-encounter workday. Yes, it makes sense that if the adventure is 'storm the castle and rescue the princess' then diddling around won't get the princess rescued. But having to make every single adventure into a timed mission, especially in a game which fetishizes personal power advancement and treasure, is just absurd.
TheFlatline wrote:However, if you play *knowing* that you're going to need probably half your resources to overcome the BBEG, and you have a full castle to tromp through, you're going to have to be a lot more careful storming the gates, killing the guards, and fighting their way to the BBEG.
What's the practical difference in subverting the multi-encounter workday by resting repeatedly or just intentionally dodging all of the encounters?

From a game-balance perspective, there isn't one. Either way you are artificially reducing the workday. The only difference is a narrative one, which has its own problems I already talked about.
I'm not even sure what you mean by filler encounters.
If the game is balanced on an assumption of players regularly doing X encounters in a day then regularly neglecting to do artificially lowers the difficulty.

The standard response to that is to up the difficulty of the encounters that you do run through. But once you're doing that, why are you even doing 3-5 encounters in a day? As noted, 3-5 encounters a day is artificial and generally doesn't follow how things are done in derivative works. When characters are forced to do it it's so rare that it's often made into a plot point.

You should be planning for regular 1-2 encounter workdays and implementing extra encounters as punishment for bad planning or aggressiveness or just bad luck. Which makes 3E/4E a bad system for not recognizing that the short workday is the correct way to do things.
TheFlatline wrote:but since the players are heroes, how often *should* they have that kind of initiative?
If the choice is risking an easily-avoidable TPK or doing yet another in a string of dumb adventures, you should not be startled that the fact that a lot of parties will decide that risking their lives to save one princess when the orc armies are mobilizing to the south and the dwarves dug too deep to the north is not a wise one.
Your example of an action movie even supports my concept. Can you imagine Rambo radioing out to get picked up by a helicopter and ported back to base so he can rest for 8 hours? No... he's under practical considerations to get the job done.
That's precisely what I mean in that action movies have to pretty much make their heroes invincible in order to support their plots. In Die Hard, even though the movie makes a big deal about Bruce Willis' injuries and he's limping at the end of the movie, he can't have taken any major injury to the point where he's unable to run or shoot a gun. The heroes running out of bullets or taking a glancing blow to the shoulder never seriously puts a damper in their performance. It's just there to artificially raise the stakes.

In a TTRPG, the PCs don't have this luxury. If you decide to press on even though the ranger is out of magical arrows and the fighter is at <1/2 health with no healing spells in the background, there's a really good chance that you will die and the princess will not only die anyway but you won't be around to do anything about the pending orc or demon invasions.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
Lago PARANOIA
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

I talk about alternatives to the fixed-encounter workday in this thread:

http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=50605

For the record, I prefer a compensated fixed-encounter workday of around three.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
Danchild
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Post by Danchild »

At the same time characters have the luxury of teleporting back to town, they usually have access to the luxury of divinations, callings, animations and item creation. In my experience GMing this level of play, the PC's spend as much time setting up countermeasures against their own tactics as they do adventuring. For the majority of combat encounters, the PC's spent more time planning than rolling. With spellcasters in the party only major fights took longer than 5 minutes. My players seemed to be happy with that setup. It meant that they could get back to civilisation faster and spend precious game time on fun things like worldbuiling and the like.

Of course, that was 2nd and 3.x. I did not realise until 4e was released that I had been doing it all wrong.
Username17
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Post by Username17 »

Very interesting list. I can identify line items in it written by Lago, Roy, and even myself. Where is it from?
Doom wrote:PS: Can someone tell my why the Tarrasque not regenerating is a rage-inducing thing?
The "point" of the Tarrasque (such that there ever was a point), was that it was an unstoppable juggernaut that could only be slowed down, and even then not by much. The 4e Tarrasque, while probably infinity times more dangerous to party members because of its earthbinding aura, can be stopped by a couple of 3rd level halfling outriders. It will take them a long time, because they have to chew through Resist 10 and 1420 hitpoints - but as mounted archers they actually can just keep moving ahead of it and throwing rocks. It'll take like 7 hours, but they can do it.

Meaning that the basic Tarrasque adventure of "OMGWTF the Tarrasque is coming to destroy our town and the militia cannot stop it!" is toast. The militia just needs two guys, two horses, and two bows. The problem is solved before the sun sets, so the PCs don't even have a chance to show up.

-Username17
MfA
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Post by MfA »

Alansmithee wrote:I'm trying to understand more why people don't seem to like it here.
It's boring.
RandomCasualty2
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Post by RandomCasualty2 »

FrankTrollman wrote: The "point" of the Tarrasque (such that there ever was a point), was that it was an unstoppable juggernaut that could only be slowed down, and even then not by much. The 4e Tarrasque, while probably infinity times more dangerous to party members because of its earthbinding aura, can be stopped by a couple of 3rd level halfling outriders. It will take them a long time, because they have to chew through Resist 10 and 1420 hitpoints - but as mounted archers they actually can just keep moving ahead of it and throwing rocks. It'll take like 7 hours, but they can do it.

Meaning that the basic Tarrasque adventure of "OMGWTF the Tarrasque is coming to destroy our town and the militia cannot stop it!" is toast. The militia just needs two guys, two horses, and two bows. The problem is solved before the sun sets, so the PCs don't even have a chance to show up.
Well in all fairness, the Tarrasque has never worked, in any edition.

The 4E one is probably the most successful one. I mean sure, while horse archers may be able to stop it eventually, it's trampled your city to dust by then. It can also burrow with a speed of 8, meaning it can pretty much just go right through the ground if you start harassing it with arrows and burst up in the midst of the city.

Also remember that epic creatures get 3 healing surges per day, and that's quite a bit of healing.

Also because this is 4E and it doesn't really make sense, the Tarrasque also has a very high stealth score (+23 base dex check) meaning it could pretty much gain cover from some trees in the forest and sneak up on people.

Compared to the 3E and prior edition Tarrasque which was beaten by like.. anyone with flight, the 4E Tarrasque is relatively dangerous.
Last edited by RandomCasualty2 on Wed Jun 02, 2010 8:06 am, edited 2 times in total.
Alansmithee
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Post by Alansmithee »

Doom wrote:A site used to have a page of rants about 4e. While alot of these have been mentioned here (and a certainly came from folks here), it's worth seeing what others in the Wide World had to say.

snip lots of stuff
Well, that was an interesting read. I didn't go to the links initially because I had hoped for more a summation. I read about 4 pages of the first one but it seemed quite circular, and had tons of flaming (not that I mind, but didn't really give me a succinct picture of the problems).

Some of that stuff, I guess I don't care about. And some of that stuff I noticed, but had hoped got better/would be counterbalanced by the good. Honestly, I think I was just dazzled by the character builder/monster maker/compendium my friend showed me.

I do think that I better understand how it could be doing badly, though.
Danchild
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Post by Danchild »

https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http ... TombT3.pdf

A link to the Tomb of Horrors 4e excerpt. Scary for all the wrong reasons.

I once had high hopes for 4e. I thought the game would be an improvement on the previous edition. I now realize it is a horrid simulacrum, crafted from the remains of something I once loved.

Fuck you WoTC. Fuck you to hell.
Lago PARANOIA
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

I never really cared much for Tomb of Horrors. Granted, it should be a slam-dunk marketing opportunity--perversely, people enjoy it more the more unfair and ridiculous it gets. So you think writing something like that would be really easy. But nope.

I'd be a lot more pissed if they released a bastardized version of Red Hand of Doom. Now that adventure deserves some respect and some proper attention.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Crissa
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Post by Crissa »

You'll have to actually say how they screwed it up. Not everyone knows the ins and outs of the stats, let alone what they mean in 4e.

-Crissa
areola
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Post by areola »

Danchild wrote:https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http ... TombT3.pdf

A link to the Tomb of Horrors 4e excerpt. Scary for all the wrong reasons.

I once had high hopes for 4e. I thought the game would be an improvement on the previous edition. I now realize it is a horrid simulacrum, crafted from the remains of something I once loved.

Fuck you WoTC. Fuck you to hell.
I saw it but I am unfamiliar with the original TOH. Can you highlight the difference between that particular encounter with the original one?
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TOZ
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Post by TOZ »

I just saw another random mob that autoattacks. If that's all the book is, I question the labeling of 'Tomb of Horrors'.
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