5e D&D is Vaporware

[Stormgale]

Sorry for the delay Kaelik:

Making an at will action denial leads to the following gameplay loop:

Player: deny action
Monster: Unable to act
Repeat

Combined with minor action attacks it basically means that the class no longer has combat strategy

And actually yeah all of those are math things, the assumed progression curve of damage and effect and how it affects combat is mathmatical in 4e, why combat is so Balanced and fun for everyone with little in the way of single outliers (most Super builds involve combination of multiple effects across 16 or so levels to attain that level of power, but I digress)

2:W at wills at level 20 with stat mod are against the math, also having them replace daily's ensures that the battlemind can function without having to worry about managing resources, even the godly twin strike requires 2 seperate to hit rolls and does not allow for str to damage.

The base math of 4e if I remember correctly is that in 2 Turns a Striker should be killing a standard monster (ranger damage at level 20 is about 40-50 (twin strike = 2d10 +10*2 = average 30 + 1d10+17 from a minor action attack = 17+30+9=56, standard monster has say 100 hp from memory)
(The math on the static = 4 enhancement 4 from bracers, 2 from feat bonus and 7 from primary stat + 9 damage total is from 2d8 hunters quarry)

The bane guard is a defender, so it follows it should take much longer for them to kill an enemy:

Bane guard at level 20

Standard action: Black petal swirl = 2W + charisma(2d10+17 damage) = 27 damage
Minor: Raise the Scabrous Banner = 2W + charisma (2D10+17) = 27 damage
Total damage 54

So mathmatically a bane guard does 2 less damage than a ranger, one of the best DPR classes in the game... as a defender

[Username17]

Making an at will action denial leads to the following gameplay loop:

Player: deny action
Monster: Unable to act
Repeat

Combined with minor action attacks it basically means that the class no longer has combat strategy

Wow. Just wow. You have no idea what you're talking about, do you?

• 1. The ability you are complaining about has an attack roll and does not always succeed.
  2. The minor action attacks are Encounter Powers, and most of them don't do damage. So there is no way you're going to be able to kill all your opponents if you are spamming Wicked Glare every turn.

You fuckers have been bitching about this class for about three years now. I am honestly astonished that in all that time you haven't winnowed your complaints down to things that are not objectively false.

-Username17

[John Magnum]

the assumed progression curve of damage and effect and how it affects combat is mathmatical in 4e, why combat is so Balanced and fun for everyone

It's a LITTLE embarrassing to just recite press releases. Especially when they're objectively false. And you should have at least a LITTLE twinge of doubt when spewing lines like that after the MM3 monster math revision.

[virgil]

I can think of one time where I had fun with a 4E game, and that's the Crucible of the Gods from FourthCore. However, knowing myself and my players, I could've very easily substituted the system for something like OSH and have just as much fun; showing that the adventure and group made more of a difference than the system.

[Windjammer]

I looked at the baneguard quite some time ago, and seemed to remember that its damage output early on is far better than any other 4e PC class. I also seem to remember that being one of the class's design criticism.

But then it struck me that even if Frank had increased the damage output of the class by a couple of notches compared to any other 4e class, that would not be a negative on the design itself. It seemed as if he'd looked at monster hit points, saw how terribly inflated these were, and then said: ok, now let's design a class that matches these hp scores without combats being super long.

What WotC did instead was to keep the damage output roughly the same since 2008 and incrementally decrease monster hp. You can see it in the progression from Monster Manual 1 to 2 to 3 (solo design especially, also defense scores lowered).

(Entire post premised on vague recall, but its point being that I find criticism or praises of the baneguard a bit inconclusive unless the design intent behind the class and of its individual powers is taken into consideration on the way.)

[Kaelik]

Making an at will action denial leads to the following gameplay loop:

Player: deny action
Monster: Unable to act
Repeat

Combined with minor action attacks it basically means that the class no longer has combat strategy

Well, A) no, because between step two and repeat, the Monster makes a Saving throw, and if it fails the saving throw, then you don't repeat, you use some other at will that does damage.

B) So? If you have more enemies than PCs, an extremely common occurrence in 4e, all you do is remove yourself from the combat, at the expense of removing an enemy, which might not be very effective.

C) The entire point of the baneguard is to use at wills for all your standard actions, that means in some sense, that over the course of the combat:

5 Baneguard encounter powers + 10 Baneguard at wills = 5 Encounter powers + 5 at wills.

Since the Baneguard generally has much weaker encounter powers, it needs to have stronger at wills than most other classes. I say most, because it doesn't have stronger at wills than all classes.

And actually yeah all of those are math things, the assumed progression curve of damage and effect and how it affects combat is mathmatical in 4e, why combat is so Balanced and fun for everyone with little in the way of single outliers (most Super builds involve combination of multiple effects across 16 or so levels to attain that level of power, but I digress)

1) Pay attention to my argument. I have been arguing that due to different methods of resource management fully in line with the math of 4e, the Baneguard is not out of line with those progressions presented by other characters.

2) Why the fuckity fucking fuck fuckstan are you trying to sell me 4e? No really. There is no reason for you to put a stupid sales pitch into the discussion. That is so retarded, that even if it were actually true it would be violently out of place in this discussion.

2:W at wills at level 20 with stat mod are against the math, also having them replace daily's ensures that the battlemind can function without having to worry about managing resources, even the godly twin strike requires 2 seperate to hit rolls and does not allow for str to damage.

1) HAHAHAHA. Everyone gets 2W at wills with stat at level 21. Who gives a flying fuck in Baneguards get it one level sooner because they get new at wills at level 20 where other classes don't. Also, pretty sure Psions get more than 2W at level 20.

2) Yes, the battlemind, by which you meant Baneguard has a different resource management system than other classes, just like the Ranger, Twin strike Fighter, Hammerbros Fighter and Psion have different resource management systems.

Yes, Twin Strike has two attack rolls, so? It's average damage is still higher, and therefore, just as much a problem by this metric.

So mathmatically a bane guard does 2 less damage than a ranger, one of the best DPR classes in the game... as a defender

Well, I'm sure that I can build a Ranger or Fighter that does more damage than that, but even still, so? Frank was unable to correctly predict whether 4e would release a bunch of feats that make Twin Strike more powerful, or nerf their monsters. (Well, technically they did both.) If you are making a class that will not get support, you have to predict power creep.

[sake]

Also, pretty sure Psions get more than 2W at level 20.

They actually really, really don't... Psion upper level at will powers are all asstasic shit that doesn't scale properly in damage or effect, it's one of the causes that lead to the 'Dishearten and Mind Thrust... FOREVER!' problem and why simply nerfing those two at-wills doesn't fix anything besides bumping them down to the second worst 4e controller. And this wasn't just a psionics problem either, the Runepriest's At Wills all lacked their lv21 damage boost line as well. I kind of suspected they were trying to test/float out the idea that only strikers should get the lv21 boost, just like how they were testing out the 'Mother May I?' style of zone effects in the PHB3.

[Korwin]

Anyone here heard from 13th Age?
Apparently its in Beta atm. The awful crowd substitutes it for 5e and seems to like it.
Reading their sales pitch and ignoring the 4e fanboyism, it still sounds nice. As first impression.

[Seerow]

Any game that advertises itself as "Rules light and story oriented" as its major selling point gets an automatic red flag from me.

[koz]

Any game that advertises itself as "Rules light and story oriented" as its major selling point gets an automatic red flag from me.

This, and the fact that one of its first comments is a self-proclaimed Paizil who claims that the d20 rules 'get in the way', and thus would prefer this system makes me more than slightly concerned as well.

[Leress]

Anyone here heard from 13th Age?
Apparently its in Beta atm. The awful crowd substitutes it for 5e and seems to like it.
Reading their sales pitch and ignoring the 4e fanboyism, it still sounds nice. As first impression.

There really isn't much information about it that I saw on the site

13th Age is a love letter to D&D: a rules-light, story-oriented RPG that honors old school values while advancing the OGL art. Players create unique heroes using flexible interpretations of familiar D20 character classes. New indie-style rules connect each character’s story to the Gamemaster’s customized version of the campaign setting.

What does "indie-style rules" even mean?

[hogarth]

Reading their sales pitch and ignoring the 4e fanboyism, it still sounds nice. As first impression.

Lots of games sound pretty good if you don't actually read the rules or play them.

[koz]

What does "indie-style rules" even mean?

'Utter shit', 'not worth reading', 'ignored in actual play' all seem like viable candidates, though in this case, I think it means 'not made by a big-name designer'.

[Korwin]

Aw, here is the awfull advertisement.
Pardon for the pun. Couldnt resist.

[sake]

If each minion has 6 HP and you do 36 damage to one of them, remove 6 minions from the table and figure out a way to narrate how you were just awesome.

Okay... I generally liked 4e and even the SA forum, but that's got to be one of the stupidest PnP concepts I've ever seen. Some one actually felt minions needed to be even more worthless and die faster? What happens if you play a blaster wizard that throws down a giant burst effect that does 36 damage to five minions at once? Does every single minion in the entire dungeon then just burst into flames?

[wotmaniac]

What does "indie-style rules" even mean?

supposedly-"meaninful" melodrama wankery?

[Seerow]

If each minion has 6 HP and you do 36 damage to one of them, remove 6 minions from the table and figure out a way to narrate how you were just awesome.

Okay... I generally liked 4e and even the SA forum, but that's got to be one of the stupidest PnP concepts I've ever seen. Some one actually felt minions needed to be even more worthless and die faster? What happens if you play a blaster wizard that throws down a giant burst effect that does 36 damage to five minions at once? Does every single minion in the entire dungeon then just burst into flames?

Sounds like in Wheel of Time, the thing Rand did at the start of The Shadow Rising, when he uses Callandor to make the thing that goes through all of Stone killing off all sorts of shadowspawn even where he can't see.



Not that I justify this being a normal occurrence, or the logical end of a Fireball effect. But a spell powerful enough to wipe out an entire dungeon of minions is something that's been done.

[Dirkradhammer]

Anyone here heard from 13th Age?
Apparently its in Beta atm. The awful crowd substitutes it for 5e and seems to like it.
Reading their sales pitch and ignoring the 4e fanboyism, it still sounds nice. As first impression.

I'm in the 13A playtest.

Being that I'm under an NDA, the boundaries of which I'm uncertain of, I can't go into too many specifics, but I can say that it resembles a rules-light-er (that is, not exactly rules-lite) 4E.

Explicit combat roles for PC's are gone.
Movement is abstract, so square counting is gone.
Skill system is like a cross between 3rd edition and FATE aspects (Bwuh??? That's what I said. And what I'm still saying)
The playtest only extends to level 5, but so far scaling looks retarbad. Static damage modifiers increase exponentially.

[Mask_De_H]

Are Tweet and Heinsoo two of the competent (or at least not incompetent) 3.X designers?

And "indie style" probably means "cribbing from FATE or OSH (which...cribs from FATE)".

EDIT: Right on the FATE part, wrong on the competence apparently.

[Username17]

Heinsoo (along with Robin Laws) made Feng Shui. He has my respect as a designer and a human being. He also has a big "what has he done for me lately?" sign on his head, because he was the lead man for 4e D&D's initial release. We know he didn't get his way on everything, the design he presented had [W] notation multiplying bonuses and powers just in general did a fuck tonne more damage at higher levels (described by other designers as "Heinsoo craziness like 6d12 damage"). And we know that big sections were written by other people, like how Skill Challenges came from Slavicsek. But let's be honst here: he is the guy who was nominally in charge for that debacle, and he was the guy who was forced to commit WotC Sepukku because of 4e's failure.

-Username17

[Stormgale]

Making an at will action denial leads to the following gameplay loop:

Player: deny action
Monster: Unable to act
Repeat

Combined with minor action attacks it basically means that the class no longer has combat strategy

Wow. Just wow. You have no idea what you're talking about, do you?

• 1. The ability you are complaining about has an attack roll and does not always succeed.
  2. The minor action attacks are Encounter Powers, and most of them don't do damage. So there is no way you're going to be able to kill all your opponents if you are spamming Wicked Glare every turn.

You fuckers have been bitching about this class for about three years now. I am honestly astonished that in all that time you haven't winnowed your complaints down to things that are not objectively false.

-Username17

About 50/50 of them do damage, which makes the ones that do something as simple as giving combat advantage strictly inferior.

And yes the attack roll than miss but when combat strategy has boiled down to: Ensurie roll 1 (the petrify) does not miss, then who cares about roll 2 you no longer have a strategy, the core of game design is ensuring there is no dominant strategy (which that is)

Kaelik:
Psions 1: dont get 2W at will because thye are casters, and I double checked the battlemind and they only get 2W damage from augmenting their powers (encounter power equivalent)

I simply took the best 2 damage related powers from the bane guard at level 20 and the standard ranger turn (twin strike/Minor action attack). I tried to avoid using feats beyind the basic math fixed and ensured they would have basic item parity

[Username17]

About 50/50 of them do damage, which makes the ones that do something as simple as giving combat advantage strictly inferior.

Does it hurt to be that fucking stupid? Shadow Cut is a single attack that makes an attack roll to do [W]+Dex Mod damage. Hostile Diversion automatically succeeds and it marks the target and gives Combat Advantage to you and all your friends until the end of your next turn. Combat Advantage is +2 to-hit, and the game's math assumes you'll be hitting about 50% of the time otherwise. Hostile Diversion is thus about a 20% increase in your attack effectiveness this turn and the next, as well as a 20% increase in the effectiveness of all the attacks by your friends.

If you follow up Hostile Diversion with a big attack or two, or one or more of your friends (of which you supposedly have four) attack the target, Hostile Diversion's DPR is better than Shadow Cut's. It's situational, you bumblefuck. But it's trivially easy to construct a situation in which Hostile Diversion comes out on top of Shadow Cut on offense alone. Indeed, since Shadow Cut is basically just a bonus basic attack as a minor action, if the whole party just sits there and spams the target with basic attacks, Hostile Diversion is 20% better than Shadow Cut is. If, on the other hand, your friends are busy attacking other opponents, Shadow Cut does more damage.

Basically you couldn't have possibly picked a shittier example that more exemplified you being a poseur who has no actual concept of how to compare things. You picked two abilities where the situational tradeoffs to make one better than the other or vice versa are trivial even without knowing what the opposition even is, and declared one to be "strictly" better than the other. You sir, have lost the internet.

-Username17

[John Magnum]

the core of game design is ensuring there is no dominant strategy

Eugh. No. There is ALWAYS a strategy that is maximal, by being better than equal to or incomparable to every other strategy. In most games, for combat at least there is actually a finite possibility space. There's finitely many possible ways for the field of battle to be arranged, finitely many possible states for your character, his or her allies, the enemies, etc. And you have a finite pool of moves available to you. So there's actually a finite number of strategies, total, meaning that at least one is maximal.*

Now, you may mean that the core of game design is ensuring that there is no unique maximal strategy. That seems like what you would mean by "dominant". I'm still not sure I agree with this, but it's at least not blatantly possible. However, you have NOT demonstrated that this strategy is uniquely maximal, or indeed maximal at all.

By dominant you could mean that the strategy achieves a sufficient threshold of viability across an extremely wide range of encounters. It actually is desirable to avoid a design such that a single obvious tactic is extremely (even if not maximally) effective across an extremely large variety of enemy encounters. It's not necessarily the core of design, but it's a very good design goal.

Someone remind me, is "Ensure roll 1 does not miss" trivial to do round after round in 4e? I'm not familiar off the top of my head with just how badly leaders let you fall off the RNG. I assume that it actually IS trivial to make it so that your attacks always hit, but that's a deficiency in 4e's math, not the Bane Guard.

---

*There's various wiggle room to say that there are actually infinitely many possible strategies. You can have arbitrarily many enemies on the field, or a sufficiently clever MC can write arbitrarily many tactically distinct enemies. I'm skeptical that this is meaningfully feasible in 3.5, but it's not completely out of the realm of possibility.

A game constructed to explicitly support infinitely many strategies would be very odd. Although either the effectiveness of the strategies would be unbounded, which might be amusing but would be pretty bad for longevity; or all but finitely many would be arbitrarily close to some effectiveness limit which would not be hugely distinct from the finite case.

[Kaelik]

And yes the attack roll than miss but when combat strategy has boiled down to: Ensurie roll 1 (the petrify) does not miss, then who cares about roll 2 you no longer have a strategy, the core of game design is ensuring there is no dominant strategy (which that is)

Once again. That's not an optimal strategy. Apparently your biggest problem is that you are stupid, and can't see that it's not an optimal strategy to use that at will all the time (at level 29, so obviously it's not an optimal strategy at level 1-28 either, because it's not even an option).

I simply took the best 2 damage related powers from the bane guard at level 20 and the standard ranger turn (twin strike/Minor action attack). I tried to avoid using feats beyind the basic math fixed and ensured they would have basic item parity

But here's the thing, people playing the Ranger will not try to avoid feats. They will not have item parity. Instead, they will use all the little ranger specific feats, or feats that benefit Twin Strike more than other at wills, and items that do the same. And they will use all those things that the Baneguard does not have access to because it doesn't get progressive supplements that power creep it's damage.

WotC figured out that their initial math created a boring unfun game, and tried to fix it. The Baneguard had to predict that they would fix it, since they were already power creeping everything at an accelerated rate to fix that mistake.

If we look at the classes in the game, we have the Ranger and two Fighter builds and an entire party of Clerics that focus on using at wills with all their standard actions, thus having no more resource management than the Baneguard. We have the Ranger and a Fighter build, so a Defender, because you want to throw a fit about meaningless names, who do more damage than a Baneguard with their at wills.

We have a level fucking 29 ability that still isn't the optimal solution, which isn't to say that at level 29 Twin Strike isn't the optimal solution, because it is.

So exactly what "math" problems with the Baneguard make it a bad class but not The Twin Strike Fighter and Ranger, the Hammerbros Fighter, The Orbizard Wizard, The Yogi Hat Ranger, The Orcus Slayer, The Astral Seal Friendship Team, and all the 4e builds that are of comparable power that I don't know about because I don't keep track of 4e optimization.

I'd rather have a player playing a Baneguard if I were DMing than at least four of those because it violates the math of the game a lot less than most of them.

[ScottS]

Heinsoo (along with Robin Laws) made Feng Shui. He has my respect as a designer and a human being.

...But, but: google the phrase "potentially slightly tedious", then come nerdrage walk with me? (both at the absurd delicacy of the line itself, as well as the general content of the interview)

I wasn't a huge 3e buyer (only had games at the start of 3.0, start and end of 3.5 essentially, and didn't look at most of the splats until right before 4.0), so I wasn't that familiar with his work outside of D&D or even anything beyond, say, the FRCS (which was alright). So my unfortunate first impression of the guy comes from going back and reading 4e preview articles (during the inevitable "WTF happened" rejection phase starting 2009 or so).

Obviously he had an interest in hyping the product, but my main beefs with the guy are a) he shilled 4e in exactly the same passive-aggressive way as the rest of the team (e.g. counting arrows in your quiver is "tedious", but having every action in the game be based on exception-based status-effect-and-bonus-humping spellcasting is somehow liberating...), and b) he claimed that 4e was going to cure even more cancer by smuggling in some unspecified "indie-style" game mechanics (which I guess was supposed to mean the skill system, because leaving game functions poorly-defined so that players can word-associate off of the skill names and thereby BS using their cheesed-out skills as much as possible, is friggin' awesome state-of-the-art RPG gameplay...)