Who is left to rebuild the D&D franchise?

[Ferret]

what about Monsters Do It Differently?

Monsters take 10 on attack / defense rolls.

Players rolls it out.

Your player is rolling something any time he attacks or IS attacked, but you don't have to worry about monster rolls except when it's a BBEG.

[souran]

what about Monsters Do It Differently?

Monsters take 10 on attack / defense rolls.

Players rolls it out.

Your player is rolling something any time he attacks or IS attacked, but you don't have to worry about monster rolls except when it's a BBEG.

As a person who is normally the game master I VETO this action right now. Its been proposed before. It sucked before. It still sucks now.

The person behind the screen is playing the game as well. The game cannot suck for them. I realize that this is mostly a player centric board but seriously the game cannot suck ass for the person playing the game master.

If you automate most of the game masters rolls then nobody will want to do it. It has to be just as much fun to get to control the orcs horde / zombie apocolypse / whatever as it is to pwn it in the face with your hero.

One of the things that Lago's 5e should point out that it is keeping from 4e is how EASY the game is to game master, even with little to no preperation. As opposed to say 3.x where if you didn't rebuild every monsters and npc to be as uber as your heroes they got insta gibbed or SODed before they got an action. It better than 1e/2e because at least 4e made an attempt to say what was level appropriate and what where "cool" combinations.

Anyway, no more ideas that make being the game master boring as fuck. The game master is a player too. Being team monster has to rock as hard as being the heros.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Like I said, it doesn't really matter which way you choose. You can make it so that the attacker decides the attack to have the excitement of gambling and tradition. You can also make it so that defender rolls so people feel like they have control in their outcome and to force people to pay attention. Whichever.

I personally prefer to have the defender roll, because people are more invested in determining whether they get turned into a frog or fall asleep rather than if they kill Mook #138. But unlike sharply reducing hit points or moving towards Winds of Fate I won't draw a line in the sand over this.

However, there should only be one roll to determine an attack outcome. 4E re-introduced the idea of fighting 8-12 monsters with a variety of unique abilities in an encounter and even though it was implemented poorly I have a taste for it. We're not going back to the days where 3 trolls were considered a swell encounter.

And with this, having to do 30 rolls in a turn makes the game move way too slowly, even with math wizzes. ESPECIALLY if you have to trade data.

Attack vs. defense rolls are right out for 5E. They work for Shadowrun, but they'll eat up too much time. Damage rolls should be deader than disco. There's no need to roll damage.

[souran]

Attack vs. defense rolls are right out for 5E. They work for Shadowrun, but they'll eat up too much time. Damage rolls should be deader than disco. There's no need to roll damage.

I agree with part of that. It is slow if you have to compare to determine hits and misses. However, we can give attackers a random element in their DAMAGE and the "attacked" person rolls a defense roll.

So when the attacker strikes with a longsword they roll there 1d8 like they have been doing for thirty years for damage. This is suplimented by your fixed damage score. Yes it would need to be reduced to accomodate the fact that you have a random damage element.

The defender rolls their defense (and in the case of aoe attacks a single roll modified by each characters defense score) and the damage is then adjusted upward and downward based on some factor.

The attacker and the defender roll their dice at the same time.

Our steps for resolving an attack look like this:

Step 1: Attacker Declares the target or Targets of the attack.
Step 2: Attacker Reveals his "Attack score"
Step 3: Defender Rolls to determine his Defense.
(Sub Step: Defense is determined as d20 + Appropriate Defense statistic)
Step 4: The attacker determines his damage
(Sub Setp: Damage is the result of the damage roll + static damage mod
Step 5: Damage is dealt.
Substep a: Compare the Defenders Defense Score to the Attackers Attack Score.
Substep b: If the defenders score is higher the attack deals 1 less point of damage and an additional 1 less point for every 2 points by which the defense exceeds the attack (note we need a rule to generate misses).
Substep c: If the Attackers attack score is higher than the defense score the attack deals the attackers damage + 1 additional point of damage for every 2 points by which the attack exceeds the targets defense.

Note steps 3 and 4 can be performed in parrallel. Therefore the defender can be rolling his defense while the attacker rolls damage.

The defender will be the only one rolling d20. The other player is rolling a d6 or d8 or d12. At high levels it might be 3d6 which would be bad but at high levels there is going to be a slowness to allow for BIG NUMBERS.

Another way of breaking it down:

Attacker: Declare attack, roll damage, add roll to damage
Defender: Roll defense, add roll to defense , compare attack and defense, determine the differance between attack and defense, divide differance by 2 (x), add damage input from attacker, subtract damage from hp.

This is compared to your previous method of


Attacker: Declare attack
Defender: Roll defense, add roll to defense , compare attack and defense, determine the differance between attack and defense, divide differance by 2 (x), add damage input from attacker, subtract damage from hp.

The added steps are roll damage, add roll to damage
which can be performed in parrallel with the defenders rolls. Therefore there should be an almost zero time adder at the table.

[Lago PARANOIA]

However, we can give attackers a random element in their DAMAGE and the "attacked" person rolls a defense roll.

... which will slow things down.

Seriously, what's the fetish for rolling damage? You're rolling it indirectly, why do you need to roll it even more? I don't mind kicking in a random die of damage now and then (such as throwing in an extra d6 for 'Wild Strike' or a critical hit), but for the basic resolution step? Why is that there, other than for tradition?

If you really are wedded to having a five-step resolution process, you may as well let the defender/attack roll, too. Seeing if something hit is always more exciting than determining some extra vanilla damage.

[shau]

what about Monsters Do It Differently?

Monsters take 10 on attack / defense rolls.

Players rolls it out.

Your player is rolling something any time he attacks or IS attacked, but you don't have to worry about monster rolls except when it's a BBEG.

In addition to what souran said, this causes some pretty severe gameplay problems. Your advocating a system in which people with high AC are never hit. Furthermore, people with low AC are always hit. Players will get upset when the guy with 22 AC is invulnerable and the guy with 20 AC might as well have AC 0 for all it matters.

[souran]

Lago

The attacker needs to feel like they do something for their attacks. Otherwise they basically have an idea of how all their attacks are going to go when they add them up on the character sheet.

Seriuosly, the system you are proposing means that a good "ranged" player would NEVER ROLL DICE IN COMBAT. They wouldn't even be getting attacked and so they wouldn't even need to bring dice to the game.

Right now in D&D it always feels like every player is one the offensive all the time because the attacker rolls ALL the dice associated with attacking.
When its not your turn you sit around it take it and that sucks and otherwise there is no real reason to even sit at the table.

The system you are proposing would feel like the players are always on DEFENSE because thats the only time the player does anything.

Rolling dice is viceral. Its real and it ties the player to the actions result. The game should have this effect regardless of if the player is being attacked or doing the attacking.

By having the player roll some damage we keep them invested in the outcome of their action while at the same time giving whats actually the more important chunk of the action to the defender.

One side effect would seem to be that the DM could pass most of the processing of attacks off onto the players when its the monsters turn. The dm tells the player the attack score and total damage and they can do the computation while the game master resolves the next combatant.

Anyway, I think that if the player doesn't roll dice when they take an action they will feel disconnected from that action. That would really suck for combat. I think it would make your 5e seem really boring .

[Lago PARANOIA]

So. Marketing towards kids.

I'm not a professional marketing guy, like I've said repeatedly, so I'm sorry if this is going to sound sparse compared to my idea to advertise to nerds. I didn't really get into nerd hobbies until my mid-teens, which may qualify me as a kid. I dunno.

The first thing is your boxed set. Frank is absolutely right in that you need to get something out which can be bought with one or two weeks' worth of allowances. Unfortunately, that means decreasing the quality of the materials. Eep. So, let's see where we can advertise and where we can cut costs.

- The first thing you should worry about is miniatures. Everyone knows what a board game is and the exciting ones for kids (Battleship, Chess, Mouse Trap, Monopoly) have a bunch of them. The boring adult ones like Scrabble and Pictionary don't have figurines.

I recommend having a bunch of unpainted plastic minis. The DragonStrike ones were too large and fragile in my opinion. The figurines were way too prone to break. And while I appreciate that the minis were color-coded, they didn't take it far enough. The heroic minis should be white. The monster figurines should be a rainbow of colors.

So, boards--

You know what? What I'm pretty much recommending is DragonStrike with some improvements. So let's cut the crap and make it so, with my changes/comments/kudos.

0) You should not have to write anything down. DragonStrike got this absolutely right. Hit points should be adjusted by a clip for both the Dungeonmaster and Player. This means keeping hit points in the single digits (which you want to do anything, see below). People do not write treasure or spells or whatever down. They use a damn card. Monsters have their statistics on a card. Character sheets are slightly bigger cards.

1) You should not have to use addition with your dice. This means that a fighter should use a black d12 to attack in melee and a wizard uses a blue d6 to attack. You're going to use this game for first-time players and they don't want to have to do arithmetic in the middle of the game.

2) Everyone should get a deck of cards with their abilities. Everyone should get from around 5 to 8 one-use cards for an adventure. That includes the fighter. I know that grognards are addicted to the idea of spamming a basic attack, but seriously look at a videogame or a CCG. People are used to having their characters have a variety of abilities. Seeing someone able to play a card which takes out a corridor while they don't get anything is bullshit.

3) DragonStrike used a 'Feat of Strength' and a 'Feat of Dexterity' to determine non-combat rolls, where if you wanted to do anything that wasn't covered by the rules (like swinging across the room while grabbing a chandelier) you would do those. Now while those in my opinion are great ideas to ease people over from board gaming to roleplaying, DragonStrike didn't take it far enough. Going back to the 'everyone gets a deck' idea, some of the cards should be only used for non-combat actions. They should be something like 'you get insight into what you need to do next' or 'you get to use two black dies for your next feat of strength and take the best result'.

4) DragonStrike is too difficult for newbies. The time limit in that game is too strict--now while I appreciate putting a time limit in this game to prevent things from stalling, the rules for constructing an adventure in that game seriously said to imagine the players doing everything perfectly and then giving them three extra turns when coming up with your own time limit. That's messed up.

5) DragonStrike had one too few boards. A forest, a cavern, a castle, and a town were good ideas. But they also needed to have an 'island' board and also a 'temple' board.

6) Color-coding. It's very important. A rainbow of skittles always looks like more than a single color of it. The hero figurines should be white. The monsters should come in a rainbow of colors, perhaps color-coded according to role.

7) Leveling up. The game should seriously have a level-up mechanic, in order to convince people to invest time into the game and stick with it rather than forgetting about it once the adventure is over. In order to reduce the amount of math new players have to do, a set should have three separate cards for each character, representing their hero 'leveling up'.

8) Archetypes: If you've played DragonStrike, you'll notice that the cards are REALLY SIMILAR. The dwarf, the fighter, and the thief play too much alike and they're three of five classes. That's crap. You need five archetypes:

Barbarian, Wizard, Paladin, Druid (for summoning), and Bard. Yes, bard, because every group has one of 'those' guys.

9) Artistic style. Now while I love the badass PG-rated grimdark style of the DragonStrike board, that shit is just way too 90's to fly nowadays. I suggest something slightly more cartoonish and heroic. Less Warhammer and more Avatar: The Last Airbender. You don't have to go all full-out anime style even though this generation is more accepting of it than ours.

10) Excellent grind.

If the game catches on, release expansion packs. More character archetypes/levels (that must come with their own figurine and deck), more monsters (to go along with the players leveling up), and more treasure. The 'treasure deck' that players draw from should have a minimum size to them so that players will buy treasure cards to stack their deck with. At the end of an adventure, force players to discard unused treasure. They discard treasure until they have three or fewer pieces, then have to roll to see which one they discard.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Otherwise they basically have an idea of how all their attacks are going to go when they add them up on the character sheet.

No, they will. It's just like an attack roll; you don't know exactly how your attack is going to perform at any given point against level-appropriate opposition, but you know how it's going to perform. You know ahead of time that an attack bonus of +18 will pretty much crush a 1st-level opponent while an 8th level opponent will be barely scratched by it.

Seriuosly, the system you are proposing means that a good "ranged" player would NEVER ROLL DICE IN COMBAT. They wouldn't even be getting attacked and so they wouldn't even need to bring dice to the game.

If you're regularly playing the game on 'invincibility' mode (because if you don't get attacked, you're invincible) then your game is fucked anyway.

Anyway, I think that if the player doesn't roll dice when they take an action they will feel disconnected from that action.

I don't remember players of wizards whining in 3E that they don't touch the dice, but whatever. Attacker rolls.

But there will still be no damage roll, though. That thing is obsolete.

[MGuy]

However, we can give attackers a random element in their DAMAGE and the "attacked" person rolls a defense roll.

... which will slow things down.

Seriously, what's the fetish for rolling damage? You're rolling it indirectly, why do you need to roll it even more? I don't mind kicking in a random die of damage now and then (such as throwing in an extra d6 for 'Wild Strike' or a critical hit), but for the basic resolution step? Why is that there, other than for tradition?

If you really are wedded to having a five-step resolution process, you may as well let the defender/attack roll, too. Seeing if something hit is always more exciting than determining some extra vanilla damage.

Reason I'm advocating weapon damage rolls:

1 People like rolling dice. Adding a single extra roll to the grand damage scheme doesn't seem too harmful. If you really wanted to balance out the slower time then I'd once again suggest having the attacker make the roll.

2 It sells dice. The more different dice your game uses the more dice you get to sell. People love buying special dice.

3 It doesn't extend time by much. You have just one more variable number on the stack, and its just for weapon damage, I'm not advocating rolling for Sneak Attack or even spell damage.

[Crissa]

Personally, I roll my damage dice at the same time as my attack. It's not like my attack roll changes the number or type of dice I roll in D&D.

-Crissa

[Lago PARANOIA]

Look, if the damage roll is supposed to be meaningful then we're back to the old crap where attack scales one way and damage scales another way and we're back to padded sumo or rocket launcher tag. It's possible to balance both so that the curves overlap, but no one has ever gotten it right. You may as well be wishing for a pony. I doubt my own numbers and I tried to keep the curves as flat as possible.

If the damage roll isn't meaningful (it's a static algebraic expression that hardly ever changes like d8+4 at level 2 and d8+6 at level 20) then it's just a time-wasting formality. You already frickin' rolled to see how much your damage diverges from the average. It was part of your attack roll.

You want to roll an extra die because you fetishize the idea of rolling lots of die? Fine, we roll a bell curve of 3d6 for your attack stat. Or hell, why even do 3d6? We do 4d6 or 3d10. The probability curve isn't as easy to grok but if you've gotten that down we've indulged your obsessive-compulsive need to roll shiny rocks while not affecting the math of the game. Merry Christmas, fuckholes.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Lago, wouldn't it make sense to have only a damage roll, rather than a given attack always dealing exactly the same damage every time?

[Lago PARANOIA]

Lago, wouldn't it make sense to have only a damage roll, rather than a given attack always dealing exactly the same damage every time?

The given attack doesn't deal the same damage every time. You do more or less damage depending on how much you succeed on the roll.

Damage needs to be small. If it's not then you have runaway hit point inflation and you're forced to use critical existence failure or to do division. If damage is small then the effect of the d20 attack roll will have the same variance of damage range as the old-style damage roll. If you do 8 base damage to someone upon rolling a ten (which I've already said is really high and should be lower), then you do from 4-12 damage.

You can't reverse-engineer a damage roll the same way.

[MfA]

How you going to keep it small without division or a table?

[Lago PARANOIA]

By making the damage small and then greatly restricting the bonuses people get?

If I had my way here would be the damage bonuses that people received:

- Base Weapon Choice (which would be compensated for by handing out an attack penalty/reduced attack bonus)
- Size Bonus to damage, compensated for by a size penalty to attack.
- Class Features
- A Minority of Certain Powers, like Wild Strike
- Critical Hits

[MGuy]

You want to roll an extra die because you fetishize the idea of rolling lots of die? ~Merry Christmas, fuckholes.

No... This is not the idea. The idea is that people like rolling dice. If you are going to sit here and tell me that rolling a practically meaningless thing such as defense "gets people involved" and shit on the very idea that someone rolls a SINGLE damage die (at max diverging damage by 6 on a weapon that uses a d12) then you can go fuck yourself. If you really think rolling something is meaningless you would reduce your system until there is no rolling at all. By allowing for there to be any rolling you acknowledge the obvious fact that people enjoy rolling some kind of dice. I've merely suggested you add a damage dice so the attacker can feel like he's doing something other than announcing an attack, you get some mileage out of the tuns of variant die you probably bought, and makes room for critical and faults to do something (auto max and auto minimum damage). And only by adding ONE die.

[Lago PARANOIA]

By allowing for there to be any rolling you acknowledge the obvious fact that people enjoy rolling some kind of dice.

No, by rolling for dice I acknowledge the fact that people like a chance for certain actions to fail or succeed. Rolling dice in of itself is a meaningless gesture; it is what generates the column of random results. I'm interested in the creation of the RNG, not the thrill of rolling shiny rocks around.

I think it's weird and a little feeble how many people are engaging in dice idolatry for its own sake. No one has told me 'your RNG isn't wide enough to account for the swinginess of D&D', they've told me 'people are addicted to the tic of rolling shiny rocks around and you can't deprive them of that'.

In the very near future of this game D&D will have to get used to being played mostly on computers. Since people will still have to decide when to roll and what, you're not even going to get the visceral so-called thrill of rolling dice. It's just an extra gesture that has no purpose other than to slow the game down.

[MfA]

By making the damage small and then greatly restricting the bonuses people get?
...
If I had my way here would be the damage bonuses that people received

That's fine and well, but you were compromising and using the measure of success on the attack roll to partly determine damage right?

Attack-defence on a D20 is too big a number to use outright. So ... what you going to do?

- cap it (might as well make it fixed then)
- divide it (not a big deal, but supposedly subtracting two digit numbers is too hard for some)
- do a table lookup
- ?

[MfA]

In the very near future of this game D&D will have to get used to being played mostly on computers. Since people will still have to decide when to roll and what, you're not even going to get the visceral so-called thrill of rolling dice. It's just an extra gesture that has no purpose other than to slow the game down.

In that case simplifying the math becomes a masturbatory exercise which only serves the designer's yearning for simplicity, since needing to subtract slightly higher numbers won't slow the computer down. Even without the dice, there is a visceral thrill in numbers getting higher as you level ... and for no number more than damage.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Keep hit points fixed and damage that's not a function of attack almost completely fixed.

It's not capped or fixed. If the base damage that someone deals is 6 points on a 10, then their range of damage is 1 to 11 depending on the d20 roll. It really might be better to use a bell curve roll depending on how people feel about the swinginess of combat. I'm okay with both d20s and 3d6.

If you do the 4E thing and have the RNG go on a treadmill (so that every level you gain +1 to attack and defense, but so did your opposition), you have the effect of critters at your level taking 3-5 rounds of fighting on average to disable you or be disabled.

You don't need to cap or divide anything. If you're fighting something 3 or 4 levels above your range, they can barely hurt you and you can take them out in 1 or two hits. The reverse is also true. That's intentional.

Now I know the numbers I introduced don't reflect my desired outcome, but that's because I didn't know what 'traditional' D&D modifiers to keep and which ones to cut.

[MfA]

With a D20 and bonuses you are going to be looking at an average damage of around 10 in that case ... that's a lot for a game with hitpoint tick boxes.

[Lago PARANOIA]

In that case simplifying the math becomes a masturbatory exercise which only serves the designer's yearning for simplicity,

First of all, keeping things simple as necessary is not masturbatory. It's a principle of any good design. Final Fantasy 6 uses 4-digit hp and damage values even though the RNG of that game could easily support 3-digitness without even changing the mechanics. The fact that they still use 4-digit hit points is just bad design. It's not crippling and the whining they'd get from fans for changing this isn't worth the hassle, but it's still bad.

Making numbers bigger than they need to be because the human brain is addicted to 'OMG 100 damage is better than 10 damage' is masturbatory.

since needing to subtract slightly higher numbers won't slow the computer down.

It's not going to be all done by computers. The game will still need to be able to be played on hand, because people still seriously play Monopoly and Scrabble the traditional even though computer versions of those games have been out for more than 20 years.

When you're playing by computer, even though you've taken care of much of the math you will still need to be able to go through decision points quickly. If you're playing by hand you will need to have the math be manageable.

[Lago PARANOIA]

With a D20 and bonuses you are going to be looking at an average damage of around 10 in that case

No, because your level-appropriate enemies increase at the same rate that you do. The RNG is from 1 to 11, but the average damage is 5.

You start with at level 1 with an attack bonus of +6 and an AC of 16, with your average damage 4 or 5. But a 'mook' class enemy you face has an AC of 13 and an attack bonus of +3. This means that per round you can do from around 0 to 10 damage to the enemy per attack depending on what you got on the attack roll.

[MfA]

Your restricted list of damage bonuses was still extensive enough for me to judge it in the range of ~5 too. If the max damage bonus is kept around 2 then sure, it doesn't matter.

The problem with having such a big swing on the D20 damage with such a small range of bonuses is that it becomes impossible to have heavy and light hitters ... minimizing to hit on "light hitters" doesn't work, because missing more than 50% quickly gets too annoying to play (hell I think 50% is pushing it).

So damage penalties will be standard then? (If there is no room to increase the range at the top, there is always the bottom.)