D&D 5e has failed

maglag · Post by **maglag** » Sun Jun 07, 2015 7:07 pm

C'mon Frank, that would assume the Wotc people were telling the truth in that report, when you plenty of times have shown they lie all the time. I'm talking about the actual rules similarities between 4e and ToB, not what the writers claim they did.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sun Jun 07, 2015 7:54 pm

maglag wrote:C'mon Frank, that would assume the Wotc people were telling the truth in that report, when you plenty of times have shown they lie all the time. I'm talking about the actual rules similarities between 4e and ToB, not what the writers claim they did.

The actual rules similarities between Tome of Battle and 4e are actually pretty slim. The 4e designers didn't start claiming that Tome of Battle had anything at all to do with 4e until they realized after the fact how popular it was. And then their take home message wasn't "people like the power schedules in this book" it was "people like combat maneuvers to have stupid names." When they announced that they had too learned from Tome of Battle, their big presentation to show they had done so was to preview some abilities named shit like "Order of the Golden Wyvern." And when that went over like a lead balloon full of herpes, they chucked the preview names in the toilet.

You are just fucking wrong. ToB was not inspirational substrate for 4e. Tome of Battle is what 4e could have been if Mike Mearls hadn't been allowed to throw a temper tantrum about daily use limits.

-Username17

souran · Post by **souran** » Sun Jun 07, 2015 9:01 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:
You do if you're WotC. Remember that Tome of Battle and Tome of Magic were both made from half-finished subsystems that had been scrapped while they were working on 4e.

See, we think that what people should be doing is to put out books with things they might do in the next edition and get public feedback on them. That would make sense! But historically what they have actually done is to release books that contained things they already decided to not do. We think they should be focus grouping their new edition, but they are just deciding between throwing dead-end design work away or selling it for real money.

The truth is that Paizo probably can't get meaningful feedback from their message board. It took like five years before you could really openly admit that the Pathfinder Rogue was shitty without getting drowned in a sea of butthurt that the mods would openly encourage. Putting up previews of next edition mechanics in books wouldn't get them the kind of crowdsourced mathhammering that it could - because they burned that bridge a long ass time ago.

So really, if Paizo releases a bunch of half finished ideas, what that means is that some developer made the call that it was time to stop working on those ideas. And of course, once things stop getting worked on, they might as well be published, because it's that or leave money on the table.

-Username17

This is the most convincing argument I have heard since the release of unchained for a P2E. If Unchained is NOT a book of things that Pazio might do in the next edition but a book of things they have already decided they won't do then it makes more sense. Including its exclusion from further use in PFS and the next round of Adventure Paths.

Insomniac · Post by **Insomniac** » Mon Jun 08, 2015 12:42 am

Unchained does seem to be a company scribbling on cocktail napkins for an edition change, and then charging people, to use a Franktrollman term, real money for it. Aspects of Complete Psionic, Magic of Incarnum, Tome of Magic and Tome of Battle absolutely were that.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Thu Jun 11, 2015 5:10 pm

souran wrote:Tussock I can verify you are wrong on most of the things you have said (You can go to page 101 of the 2E players handbook [blue and grey original version]) and see that saves are not formula based. You can open up skills and powers and read about how the skill system presented there is still a roll under system that is nothing like 3E skills.

Wizards: +2/5, or +3/10 vs Death.
Warriors: +3/4, or +2/2 vs Breath.
Rogues: +1/4, or +2/4 vs Spell.
Priests: +1/3, and +1 at 7th. Really good base save vs Death.

Wands + 1 = Spells. It's a different progression to 3e, stepped rather than regular, the base numbers are better for the slow progressions rather than the fast ones, but it is a formula. The 2-level Warrior, 3-level Priest, 4-level Rogue, and 5-level Wizard steps are a feature from OD&D, where they used the same table for saves and combat, but the Fighting-Man climbed it fastest.

Player's Option: High Level Campaigns features a proto-3e save system with relative levels of caster vs victim setting your odds, and also another system of just giving save penalties vs higher level casters. Which is what 3e used 5 years later (as higher DCs, only based on spell level and stat and feats and other things that conspired to make saves impossible and character level much less important).

The skillNWP system in Skills & Powers changed it from rolling under you stat with a fixed per-skill modifier, to rolling under your ranks, modified by +/-5 by key stat, and +/- up to 8 for circumstances. Which is obviously what they based 3e on (that and the easier, regular stat mods from the Basic line). It's from 1995 and it's written to be similar to the base 2nd edition NWP system rather than the next edition's that didn't exist until 2000, but it's what they used for 3e (3e adding a level-cap to your ranks in response to playtesting).

Every signal says they are not thinking about a 2E.

Of course it does. They always do. Edition changes are normally announced after they are done writing them. 5e D&D is an exception where they had to stop printing 4e books for the three years it took them to design it, which was an acceptable choice given that 4e books had to be close to losing money already. Pathfinder RPG had the excuse of not having anything else to sell, and needed the buzz.

But Pathfinder is selling well. They'll do at least two years of development with playtesters under vicious NDAs before they tell anyone (that's what is happening now, IMO), and will want to leave room to scrap a bad design and start over while still selling books for a living.

In the final year of developing the current Pathfinder RPG, they fiddled with huge numbers of things, but the basic structure cannot change during that process or it doesn't even work.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Fri Jun 12, 2015 9:16 am

I could see them pulling an "Ultimate Edition" like Palladium where it's more a consolidation of years and years of errata than a new edition. The "Unchained" options could even be presented as archtypes or variants as Ninja was.

Krusk · Post by **Krusk** » Sat Jun 13, 2015 9:34 pm

http://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/ph_errata

Errata for PHB. It seems to be mostly similar to 4e errata, meaning action types change and powers do new things now.

nockermensch · Post by **nockermensch** » Sun Jun 14, 2015 7:15 am

Krusk wrote:http://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/ph_errata

Errata for PHB. It seems to be mostly similar to 4e errata, meaning action types change and powers do new things now.

Overchannel (p. 118). The feature doesn’t benefit cantrips.

They keep doing the thing where anything interesting is removed. Evokers aren't a great class, but with Overchannel they could deal some nice consistent damage with their cantrips all day.

CapnTthePirateG · Post by **CapnTthePirateG** » Sun Jun 14, 2015 2:37 pm

Interesting that a lot of this is excising references to 3e rules that snuck in.

MfA · Post by **MfA** » Mon Jun 15, 2015 11:04 am

At least you can hide when they can see you again.

ScottS · Post by **ScottS** » Tue Oct 27, 2015 7:20 am

ScottS wrote:
Lago PARANOIA wrote:So, any evidence as of yet to people turning on 5E D&D?
Second place on Roll20.

5e winning the numbers game now (with all the previously mentioned caveats; also not sure if this is the first quarter it's happened).

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Tue Oct 27, 2015 12:07 pm

Having looked up some 5e rules to figure out how to minmax tales of the sword coast legends, because their documentation is so dumb that I thought reading an actual D&D book might be easier, I am now worried that 5e might be the perfect storm of bad.

And by that, I don't mean that it is worse than 4e, I mean that it is just shitty enough with enough DM fappery that all the DMs who fap to themselves will only run 5e games instead of 3e while praising it, and it just not shitty enough that people who want to play 3e, and would never play 4e or 2e, might genuinely settle for 5e, and that is conflux with end up fucking hobby even more than it is already fucked.

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Tue Oct 27, 2015 3:34 pm

Kaelik wrote:And by that, I don't mean that it is worse than 4e, I mean that it is just shitty enough with enough DM fappery that all the DMs who fap to themselves will only run 5e games instead of 3e while praising it, and it just not shitty enough that people who want to play 3e, and would never play 4e or 2e, might genuinely settle for 5e, and that is conflux with end up fucking hobby even more than it is already fucked.

This is also my worry because I have in the past settled for 5e because my DM didn't feel up to the effort of 3e but still wanted to run something.

Krusk · Post by **Krusk** » Wed Oct 28, 2015 1:52 am

Kaelik wrote:Having looked up some 5e rules to figure out how to minmax tales of the sword coast legends, because their documentation is so dumb that I thought reading an actual D&D book might be easier, I am now worried that 5e might be the perfect storm of bad.

And by that, I don't mean that it is worse than 4e, I mean that it is just shitty enough with enough DM fappery that all the DMs who fap to themselves will only run 5e games instead of 3e while praising it, and it just not shitty enough that people who want to play 3e, and would never play 4e or 2e, might genuinely settle for 5e, and that is conflux with end up fucking hobby even more than it is already fucked.

There are murmurings of this within my group by one of the three people who ever gm (including me).

Your exact scenario, in that gm fappery + obscure rules +lazy.

It's better than 4e, and "easier" and rules are "make it up" enough that casual people don't see how terrible it is at first glance.

AcidBlades · Post by **AcidBlades** » Wed Oct 28, 2015 3:14 am

We can always find solace in the fact that bad DMs will gravitate towards 5e because of this.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Wed Oct 28, 2015 3:17 am

A lot of people roleplay based on what's written on their character sheet though. Getting to write "Alchemist" or "Psychic Warrior" or "Ninja" on their sheet being 100% of why they picked that class. D&D5e will need more classes, or at least archtypes, to win over those folks from Pathfinder or D&D3.5

CapnTthePirateG · Post by **CapnTthePirateG** » Wed Oct 28, 2015 3:30 am

Don't forget that people WILL swallow the marketing lines hook, line, and sinker. We already see people claiming that 5e is impossible to minmax and super simple.

But we know that necromancer wizard > other characters, and that every single class has its own wacky subsystem of tokens that don't interact with other tokens and multiclassing turns into a clusterfuck of trap options.

Is Tales of the Sword Coast actually worth getting?

Axebird · Post by **Axebird** » Wed Oct 28, 2015 5:45 am

CapnTthePirateG wrote:Is Tales of the Sword Coast actually worth getting?

...the Baldur's Gate expansion from 1999?

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Wed Oct 28, 2015 11:54 am

AcidBlades wrote:We can always find solace in the fact that bad DMs will gravitate towards 5e because of this.

The points is that 3.5 makes bad DMs into less bad DMs, where 5e doesn't and tells them to be even more terrible.

CapnTthePirateG wrote:Is Tales of the Sword Coast actually worth getting?

Absofuckinglutely not.

malak · Post by **malak** » Wed Oct 28, 2015 12:57 pm

CapnTthePirateG wrote:Is Tales of the Sword Coast actually worth getting?

They released a preview version for pre-order people on steam and it seems it led to record-breaking refund requests...

So no.

nockermensch · Post by **nockermensch** » Wed Oct 28, 2015 8:23 pm

http://store.steampowered.com/app/325600
Just check the reviews. I found myself wondering which denner had written each one there.

AcidBlades · Post by **AcidBlades** » Wed Oct 28, 2015 8:35 pm

Is it really that hard to emulate Neverwinter Nights or Baldur's Gate and not have it suck?

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Wed Oct 28, 2015 8:36 pm

nockermensch wrote:http://store.steampowered.com/app/325600
Just check the reviews. I found myself wondering which denner had written each one there.

Well, the second review compares the game to ordering sushi and getting a live salmon and a bag of rice.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Wed Oct 28, 2015 9:27 pm

AcidBlades wrote:Is it really that hard to emulate Neverwinter Nights or Baldur's Gate and not have it suck?

Literally rereleasing Neverwinter Knights would be a better game, but I want to know why the godfuck damn can't we have a turn based game based on actual D&D mechanics?

Would the world fucking end?

FYI, there is Temple of Elemental Evil, and a, I'm sure little known, PSP game called Dungeons and Dragons: Tactics, that both use the 3.5 ruleset with various crippling limits. Outside of those two fucking games, apparently people are allergic to turn based because as soon as they had the computing power to go real time they did, even though every part of every D&D edition since 2000 has been basically incompatible with real time gaming.

MGuy · Post by **MGuy** » Wed Oct 28, 2015 9:36 pm

nockermensch wrote:http://store.steampowered.com/app/325600
Just check the reviews. I found myself wondering which denner had written each one there.

Is this game built for 4th ed because the first review sounds like someone complaining about playing 4th