D&D 5e has failed

[DSMatticus]

"I'm a fox trapped in a man's body" does not seem any more insane than "This cracker becomes the flesh of a middle-eastern jew who died 2000 years ago when I eat it." or "Invisible sky man hates you for something your ancestor did, but he loves everyone and will forgive you if you ask correctly."

Well since you are addressing this to the TGD crowd of hardcore atheists who say the same thing about religious people all the time...

Although I vaguely recall DSM being wrong about this a long time ago in the agnosticism direction.

My position has always been weak atheism and that trying to answer questions whose answers have no testable implications is meaningless dickwanking. I can't prove that the claim "like, what if, this is like, totally a dream, man" is false, but writing that fact into my model of the universe as true has the exact same implications as writing it into my model as false; it changes nothing. An interesting consequence of a claim being untestable is that the observable world continues to function in exactly the same way if that claim is true as if it is false. Untestable claims are fundamentally meaningless, which is exactly what makes them untestable to begin with.

So I piss on most religions for the obvious reason that they contain false claims and contradictions. And I piss on theists in general because they are asserting as true arbitrary theories without any evidence. And if you asked me to undertake the monumentally impossible task of comprehensively listing everything I knew about the universe, answers to questions like "is this a solipsist hell?" or "does god exist?" simply would not make an appearance. Because they're stupid meaningless questions and answering them doesn't actually tell anyone anything.

@TiaC and Grek: you are talking to someone who is totally comfortable saying religion is just a particularly infectious shared delusion. If anything believing that you have the soul of a fox is less crazy than the stupid shit people believe in the name of religion and substantially less harmful. But still definitely crazy.

You will note that African Americans have higher unemployment rates, not lower. Also, it has been demonstrated that between two identical resumes for two fictional people the one with the less "ethnic" name is far more likely to be given an interview for a position.

Thoughts on this study?

Kaelik nailed the problem.

The implication of the "resumes and ethnic names" observation is not that employers are less likely to hire you if you have a black name, it is that employers are less likely to hire you if you are black - the name is simply a signal that tells people that without them seeing your face, which makes it possible to do studies using fictional people's fictional resumes.

The conclusion of this study is basically that all of those employers who tossed out resumes based on how black the names were won't hire minorities with white names either. Surprising, am I right?

[deaddmwalking]

Affinity Bias is a well-known and documented fact. People tend to like people that are 'like them'. You've probably said something to the effect of 'if they had another three people like me, we'd be in great shape'.

If I were a hiring manager, what causes me to 'see myself' in another person might not be limited to just skin tone. Someone mentioning that they have a child in 2nd grade would immediately strike me as something we have 'in common'. Usually, people prefer to associate with people that they feel they have a lot in common with.

Interestingly, there are some times where people are biased against their own group. For example, an overweight hiring manager is not more likely to hire overweight people.

[infected slut princess]

I worked at this large company many years ago and they had an interesting finance & accounting department. It was dominated by Asian and Indian women. A few of them were fat, but mostly they were smart and pretty. THe dumbest girl there was definitely this blonde whitey with an annoying voice, and a bunch of douchebags said she was totally hot. The Controller was a bad-ass Indian chick with lots of gold jewelry and she told me that that Indian and Asian girls tended to be best, and whiteys were less good, especially the female whiteys. They didn't have any black people in finance/accounting. But the general counsel was a black dude, and there was a black dude in sales and a black dude in IT. Overall, the group most discriminated against was definitely obese people. Both slim people and obese people would rather spend 8-12 hours a day around slim people than obese people. So the best thing you can do to avoid discrimination is not be fat and stupid.

[ACOS]

Okay, we've got a look at some of the magic item pages:
Apparently, we needed something that could produce 2 gallons of mayonnaise at a time. Also, has anyone ever actually even seen an Apparatus of Kwalish in a game? Why the hell does this deserve page space?
Also, I guess stuff like Sovereign Glue and Universal Solvent are now on par with 9th-level scrolls and major potions.
I'm so very confused.

[Prak]

The inclusion of mayo on the Alchemy Jug is very bizarre to me. I could see having it as an example, but, no, it's specifically mayonnaise. For no reason.

However, a person on Kinja made a good point. May is around 80% oil, so if you could de-emulsify the mayo, it would give you more oil than the oil option would. I mean, it's olive oil, probably, but if you're just slicking something up...

I have actually seen an apparatus of kwalish in game twice. Once when a friend was playing a character based off of Burt from Tremors, and once when I was playing a goblin artificer. Both times we entered the game with it. Though mine got demon wings applied to it in short order.

[hogarth]

Also, has anyone ever actually even seen an Apparatus of Kwalish in a game?

Once, in a Pathfinder Society scenario. There's also one in the World's Largest Dungeon.

[Username17]

Early in Dungeons & Dragons, upgrading to Mech-based combat was considered as one of the standard things to do upon getting to high level. And by early, I mean that this was supported in the 1976 book Eldritch Wizardry, alongside other radical inventions such as Psionics, Demon Lords, Mind Flayers, and the Druid Class.

The original mechs were the hut of Baba Yaga (a house on chicken legs), the apparatus of Kwalish (a barrel that folds out into a lobster submarine), and the mighty servant of Leuk-O (a 9 foot tall robotic power suit made out of plastic and titanium that has buttons that make it fire missiles and lasers). Of the three, the lobster crawler has had the most traction because it's the most fun and also because it traverses underwater terrain that characters would otherwise not be able to go to.

TL;DR: The Appartus of Kwalish is one of the oldest and most iconic D&D items and predates a lot of stuff like the monk and barbarian.

-Username17

[ACOS]

I just found it a bit odd that they're willing to spend page space on a Jules Verne style legacy robotcrab that is interesting to fiddle around with exactly once; but can't be bothered with giving us more actually useful stuff ... you know, like stealth rules and meaningful reasons for clerics to exist.

Fuck it - Grognardia it is!

[ACOS]

Well, unless I miss my guess, it looks like the guys that were supposed to be doing D&D's digital thingamajig - and then promptly canceled - are going to be telling their side of the story in a way that doesn't technically breach their NDA:
http://www.trapdoortechnologies.com/morningstar/

This might be interesting.

[mean_liar]

Well, unless I miss my guess, it looks like the guys that were supposed to be doing D&D's digital thingamajig - and then promptly canceled - are going to be telling their side of the story in a way that doesn't technically breach their NDA:
http://www.trapdoortechnologies.com/morningstar/

This might be interesting.

I hope you're right. I love insider tales.

[Ferret]

I think you're more likely to see them explain the process by which they "find new magical tools" i.e. go to support a different ruleset. (where the magical tools referenced in their blog post is synonymous with the license/rules for 5e)

How hilarious would it be if Pathfinder said 'yeah, go for it?"

[Mask_De_H]

I want to open up a traveling sandwich shop inside of a robot lobster barrel in 5e now.

[Dogbert]

How hilarious would it be if Pathfinder said 'yeah, go for it?"

Especially because Mearls dragging his feet to release the GSL was the last nail in the coffin of Erik Mona's relationship with WotC.

History repeats itself.

[Krusk]

What are the odds pathfinder picks them up...

[Dogbert]

They don't need to be "picked" since PF has its own version of the OGL, all they'd need to negotiate is for IP-specific traits from Paizo (and if they're ambitious, other 3PP).

[Lago PARANOIA]

The latest buzz on the 5E D&D DMG is that a lot of the promises and coming attractions Mike "MC Killzalot" Mearls made over the past two years aren't coming true and the book uses the word 'optional' more often than Joseph Smith used the phrase 'and so it came to pass'. The actual source of this leak is a bookstore owner in Italy who broke the early release exclusivity deal in order to give us this deadly information. I don't have any reason to really doubt the guy since I doubt that someone with a 12-year old account on certain boards would resort to this kind of trolling. But still, I'm holding off judgment until I can see for myself.

At any rate, the current party line for 5E D&D apologists is that the modularity promise is technically fulfilled by having a bunch of optional rules.

Well, gee whiz, you know what other edition had a bunch of optional rules and is thus much more modular than 5E D&D could ever hope to be? And to boot, this modularity is absolutely free pending an Internet connection?

[OgreBattle]

What exactly is taking so long though? There's already folks on TGD that produce pretty detailed rules or entire playable games on their free time as a hobby, so why would the guy who is doing the current edition of THED&D tabletop RPG be so far behind schedule?

[Username17]

What exactly is taking so long though? There's already folks on TGD that produce pretty detailed rules or entire playable games on their free time as a hobby, so why would the guy who is doing the current edition of THED&D tabletop RPG be so far behind schedule?

Writing prose is faster than writing rules. I could do a 500 word challenge every day and still write other things. I if I wasn't writing other things, I could probably be doing 4-5 five hundred word challenges a day. Weekeneds included. And that's with having a job at an A&E department. Rules are more difficult and take longer per word.

In addition to that, finishing rules is slower than starting rules. Putting a few things on a chart can be done as fast as you can physically type the words, but infilling that chart requires a fair amount of thinking and comparison. Consider this little piece from After Sundown 2:

Specializations: Bad Weather, Aggressive Driving, Cross Town Traffic, Navigation
Roll...
Agility + Drive to perform precision stunts in a vehicle.
Perception + Drive to avoid crashing when confronted with hazards.
Get...
1 hit to drive in heavy traffic, above the speed limit, or in poor conditions. 10 seconds
2 hits to drive above the speed limit in poor conditions. 2 minutes
3 hits to disregard traffic lanes and drive around cars and pedestrians. 2 minutes
4 hits to perform insane stunts such as jumping a car across a chasm 30 seconds
5 hits to drive on things that are not road-like, such as the roof of a train. 3 minutes
6 hits to jump a car off a cliff to ram a helicopter in flight. 10 seconds

That difficulty chart took nearly 10 minutes to write even though those six entries are less than a hundred words. But if I'd just shat out the things that came quickly and easily, I'd have a couple entries down in less than a minute and then plow on to other things.

Mike Mearls writes over twenty thousand words a week. That's impressive, and I respect that. But he only does that because he doesn't finish things. He never mathhammered skill challenges, he never even finished a draft. He wrote literally dozens of skill challenge variants, but they were all vague generalities and partial examples. There was never any complete rules there. Because that's fast to write.

Now that Mearls is being held accountable for a complete edition, he can't write it as fast. And he's still cutting corners. He probably thought that because he can write over twenty thousand words per week that he could write a third of a complete DMG in six weeks. But he can't. Because a third of a DMG isn't like writing a series of rambling essays about optional skill challenge variants. Or rather, his is, but that's not considered sufficient by pretty much anyone. So his product is late and fails to meet design specs.

-Username17

[CatharzGodfoot]

http://www.trapdoortechnologies.com/morningstar/

This looks an awful lot like this: http://www.somethingawful.com/news/lead-loremaster/

With writing like that, I can't honestly say I'm surprised they got dropped.

[momothefiddler]

With writing like that, I can't honestly say I'm surprised they got dropped.

Were they expected to write anything in English? I'm assuming they were only ever responsible for code and visuals - not even illustrations - and all the images and actual rules+fluff would come from the game designers? I'm just not sure why their ability to spit out engaging fiction is relevant here.

[Ferret]

Ugh, their dribbling bullshit updates are seriously off-putting to me. Last thursday's indicates they're going to do a kickstarter or some other kind of crowd-funding to finish their product.

Which could have been boiled down to a sentence or two. Likewise their first update - could have been condensed to a sentence or two about why they lost the license or why they can't talk about it, hey we're gonna do a kickstarter and finish the product, whatever.

This story time bullshit is just irritating.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Ugh, their dribbling bullshit updates are seriously off-putting to me. Last thursday's indicates they're going to do a kickstarter or some other kind of crowd-funding to finish their product.

[OgreBattle]

goddamn Inafune

[Ferret]

Ugh, their dribbling bullshit updates are seriously off-putting to me. Last thursday's indicates they're going to do a kickstarter or some other kind of crowd-funding to finish their product.

From their last update:

"Carefully, he draws his finger across the map connecting dozens of villages and towns along the great merchant's roadway. "We are storytellers. Let's gather support from our friends along the way - promise to share with them the wonders of our invention in return for their aid on our journey."

[angelfromanotherpin]

The DMGNext just came into my store. The first thing I notice is that weapons and armor totally have bonuses, just like we were told that they wouldn't.