13th Age - Anyone Tried It?

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hogarth
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Post by hogarth »

Cyberzombie wrote: Whether you're marking charges off a wand (3E), burning surges (4E) or chain drinking healing potions (D&DN), PCs just don't care about out of combat healing of hit points.
Well, as Frank pointed out, there certainly are people who believe "fighting men shouldn't get nice (healing) stuff because REALIZARM!" and hence dislike healing surges. I'm not sure why Frank was trying to defend those people, though.
Last edited by hogarth on Tue Mar 18, 2014 1:07 am, edited 1 time in total.
Lago PARANOIA
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

Look, Healing Surges were stupid for a variety of reasons.

1.) Some classes were more efficient with healing surges than others. It worked exactly like having a class feature of 'add +75% to everyone's hit points'. Which doesn't sink the idea on its own, but because healing surges were a semi-finite resource you had the ridiculousness of additional healers sometimes reducing the effectiveness of the party.

2.) The fungibility of healing surges exacerbated the alpha strike 5-minute workday problem. You could either do one battle/day with 3x your normal healing or spread that shit out over four battles with reduced hit point margins. Gee, which one would a rational, non-railroaded party pick?

3.) Because of effects 1 and 2, leaders at levels 1-11 (where 95% of 4E D&D games take place) completely wreck havoc with role protection. Granted, the real clincher was 4E D&D's ridiculous No Self Buffs paradigm, but even without them you were extremely incentivized to have your party consist entirely of Leaders.

Healing surges broke what difficulty there was in the game in fucking half. The difficulty of the game, especially at low level, was inversely proportional to how many leaders you had in the party.
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.
Sakuya Izayoi
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Post by Sakuya Izayoi »

Surges remind me of the Call of Duty singleplayer. The first time you get through a pack of terrorists with the screen going red a few times, you feel like Arnold. And then, after a few more times, you realize that the regeneration makes all encounters that don't kill you effectively identical. Whereas a game like Doom can create unique encounters through the use of space, environment, available resources, and enemy compositions.
Last edited by Sakuya Izayoi on Tue Mar 18, 2014 4:32 am, edited 1 time in total.
John Magnum
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Post by John Magnum »

While I do think it's pretty neat having non-regenerating health in shooters, I don't understand how games with regenerating health are somehow unable to utilize space, environment, and enemy compositions.
-JM
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Post by Sakuya Izayoi »

John Magnum wrote:While I do think it's pretty neat having non-regenerating health in shooters, I don't understand how games with regenerating health are somehow unable to utilize space, environment, and enemy compositions.
It was a shoddy metaphor. I like the health systems of Halo (the first one) and Escape from Butcher Bay, which both utilize regeneration to an extent. So in the interest of not derailing this thread, I will concede your general point.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

If I was going to redo healing for D&D or D&D-like systems:

1.) First order of business, put everyone on an exponential damage track + soak like in Shadowrun. People have fixed or nearly-fixed hit points.

2.) Most healing effects actually grant temporary hit points. Temporary hit points can either cause you to exceed your maximum hit point or not. It needs to be cosistent.

3.) When you take damage and you're 'permanently' healed, it first reduces your maximum hit points proportional to how much you were healed. You get back maximum hit points by resting.

4.) After the three previous caveats are established, you can decide to implement an additional death spiral punishment for having low hit points or you can compensate adventurers for daring to adventure at low hit points by giving them luck bonuses or rage bonuses or whatever the fuck. You could even do both if you wanted -- maximum hit point reduction from healing increased your combat bonuses but only partially offset penalties from missing hit points. This might be getting too complicated.
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 RadiantPhoenix »

No to #3. Just make permanent healing rarer and/or more limited if you want that.
Last edited by RadiantPhoenix on Tue Mar 18, 2014 5:38 am, edited 1 time in total.
...You Lost Me
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Post by ...You Lost Me »

#1 doesn't fit the greek-hero style fantasy game that I envision D&D to be. Leave that to SR, AS, and DMH.

#3 is terrible
DSMatticus wrote:Again, look at this fucking map you moron. Take your finger and trace each country's coast, then trace its claim line. Even you - and I say that as someone who could not think less of your intelligence - should be able to tell that one of these things is not like the other.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

Look, if you don't want people completely recovering from combat and/or getting sloppy when the odds are tilted in their favor you need to have some kind of attrition system. If you don't want people to bail out of an adventure that goes sour first chance they get for extended wound-licking then you need to railroad the adventure Die Hard-style, have it come out of some other gameplay resource (i.e. resting costs a fixed amount of resources no matter how wounded you are), or you need to compensate them with some form of gameplay carrot.
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 RadiantPhoenix »

Lago PARANOIA wrote:(i.e. resting costs a fixed amount of resources no matter how wounded you are)
"Permanent healing starts with the Heal spell (the version that heals all your hitpoints), and nobody gets that at-will"
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Post by OgreBattle »

...You Lost Me wrote:#1 doesn't fit the greek-hero style fantasy game that
Ironically that's what Exalted kinda uses for their Big Damn Heroes setting. Still why would you consider that kind of rules system innapropriate for greek hero fantasy?

4 system SAME uses that system too, maybe it's time to revive those threads again.
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Post by ...You Lost Me »

The 10 HP thing isn't my problem, and neither is the soak roll: it's the explosive-scaling successes-to-damage that I have a beef with. If you're putting that in the game, then you have to use a resolution system with small variances (like dicepools and not d20's). And not having a high-variance action resolution system really hurts the concept of being heroic and pulling off lucky supermoves.

Dicepools are in SR and AS because the characters are supposed to feel like people. SAME doesn't do explosive damage, so it's fine. I've never played Exalted, so I don't know what that's about.

Lago, if you limit healing enough, then people can't heal up between every combat unless they rest for the day, which will mean they're incentivized to take daily rests without jumping through THAC0-like hoops in order to utilize their basic resources.
DSMatticus wrote:Again, look at this fucking map you moron. Take your finger and trace each country's coast, then trace its claim line. Even you - and I say that as someone who could not think less of your intelligence - should be able to tell that one of these things is not like the other.
Kaelik wrote:I invented saying mean things about Tussock.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

...You Lost Me wrote:The 10 HP thing isn't my problem, and neither is the soak roll: it's the explosive-scaling successes-to-damage that I have a beef with. If you're putting that in the game, then you have to use a resolution system with small variances (like dicepools and not d20's). And not having a high-variance action resolution system really hurts the concept of being heroic and pulling off lucky supermoves.
This is like 14 kinds of wrong but is also beyond the scope of this thread.
Lago, if you limit healing enough, then people can't heal up between every combat unless they rest for the day, which will mean they're incentivized to take daily rests without jumping through THAC0-like hoops in order to utilize their basic resources.
I am openly contemptuous of anyone's ability to square the circle in this way. If not 3rd Edition D&D, then 4th Edition D&D should have put the nail in the coffin in the idea that you can control healing by limiting player access to healing. I mean, shit, have you never played a 2E or 4E D&D game where a large plurality of the players decided to play some kind of healer?

If you want to limit the amount of healing people have over a discrete time period then you need to tie it to the amount of health they originally had. Tying it to some other resource like gold or time or spell charges is just asking for trouble.
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 Sakuya Izayoi »

Part of where I feel trying to model attrition falls flat is that, typically, RPGs support two modes of play:

A) Dungeon crawling. Unless you have one of those "fun" dungeons where the door locks behind you magically as you enter, you can 15-minute work day it all you like. Maybe someone takes the MacGuffin you wanted while you slept, but that's GM fiat.

B) Railroad. The dungeon entrance disappears. The building gets set on fire, and you get attacked at every choke point during the escape. These might actually drain you of resources, but on the other hand, all the possible encounters exist behind the screen. The GM could easily dial back the amount of quantum ogres that ambush you on your way along if you're depleted.

I think, for real attrition, you need battles of attrition. Say, the game gave the simulators for doing something like, making war against an entrenched goblin camp. There are some NPCs with you holding the line, bu they refuse to charge in blindly. You have the opportunity do run various sorties on the goblins as a small squad: destroy supplies, burn palisades and rock lobbers, gank scouting parties, assassinate officers, etc etc. All of these have explicit damage or debuff effects upon the camp itself as a fractal of the goblin force. If you try to 15-minute work day the goblins, then they'll keep pushing you back until they're at the gates of civilization. If you have solid mechanics like that in place, then it doesn't matter if the attrition is based on surges, Vancian casting, or what have you.
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Post by Cyberzombie »

Sakuya Izayoi wrote: I think, for real attrition, you need battles of attrition. Say, the game gave the simulators for doing something like, making war against an entrenched goblin camp. There are some NPCs with you holding the line, bu they refuse to charge in blindly. You have the opportunity do run various sorties on the goblins as a small squad: destroy supplies, burn palisades and rock lobbers, gank scouting parties, assassinate officers, etc etc. All of these have explicit damage or debuff effects upon the camp itself as a fractal of the goblin force. If you try to 15-minute work day the goblins, then they'll keep pushing you back until they're at the gates of civilization. If you have solid mechanics like that in place, then it doesn't matter if the attrition is based on surges, Vancian casting, or what have you.
The problem with this is that it requires some complex scenario to make it to work. D&D really needs to support the dungeon crawl, as that is the heart and soul of the game, and the only way I think it can do that is by outright dumping the attrition model entirely. Mages getting spells per day might as well just be considered a minor flavor restriction and not be considered a central balance point.
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Post by ...You Lost Me »

Lago PARANOIA wrote:This is like 14 kinds of wrong but is also beyond the scope of this thread.
Please show me your magical system that uses D&D damage dice and not dicepools and yet somehow magically works with explosively-scaling damage.

And if the answer is "use dicepools, but only for damage" you should do the world a favor and never apply to work in the RPG design industry ever.
I am openly contemptuous of anyone's ability to square the circle in this way. If not 3rd Edition D&D, then 4th Edition D&D should have put the nail in the coffin in the idea that you can control healing by limiting player access to healing. I mean, shit, have you never played a 2E or 4E D&D game where a large plurality of the players decided to play some kind of healer?

If you want to limit the amount of healing people have over a discrete time period then you need to tie it to the amount of health they originally had. Tying it to some other resource like gold or time or spell charges is just asking for trouble.
No, the reason 3e and 4e failed to fix healing is because the designers are bad, not because it's impossible. You may have noticed those games have a plethora of other bad things. For example, skill challenges aren't broken because they are impossible to design correctly, they're just broken because Mearls cannot design correctly. The 3e fighter is unable to contribute to combat not because it's impossible to write a fighter that does that, but because the writers sucked.

If you want to limit the amount of healing people have over a discrete time period, you should make it not retarded. Your method is retarded, should it shouldn't be used.
DSMatticus wrote:Again, look at this fucking map you moron. Take your finger and trace each country's coast, then trace its claim line. Even you - and I say that as someone who could not think less of your intelligence - should be able to tell that one of these things is not like the other.
Kaelik wrote:I invented saying mean things about Tussock.
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Post by Cyberzombie »

...You Lost Me wrote: For example, skill challenges aren't broken because they are impossible to design correctly, they're just broken because Mearls cannot design correctly.
I'd say skill challenges were just broken in concept. You can't write a universal system to handle all manner of random noncombat tasks and expect it to be interesting. Sure, you can fiddle with the math to change party success rates, but it still ends up being a boring depthless subsystem where you roll the best skill you have over and over again.
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

Cyberzombie wrote:Sure, you can fiddle with the math to change party success rates, but it still ends up being a boring depthless subsystem where you roll the best skill you have over and over again.
Unless you, for instance, disallow repeated skill use, or even just implement a cumulative penalty for repeated skill use.

Seriously, if you haven't yet, check out the relevant AOFD thread.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

...You Lost Me wrote:Please show me your magical system that uses D&D damage dice and not dicepools and yet somehow magically works with explosively-scaling damage.
Nice strawman, bud.

Okay, let me break this shit down for you. You said and I quoted:
If you're putting that in the game, then you have to use a resolution system with small variances (like dicepools and not d20's). And not having a high-variance action resolution system really hurts the concept of being heroic and pulling off lucky supermoves.
1.) Are you familiar with Mutants and Masterminds? Now, are you familiar with the Toughness and Condition chart? Imagine if instead of, or in addition to, the conditions you get for failing a damage roll hardcore enough you also lost hit points. I've been preferring dicepools lately, but a d20 could totally work with the idea. MnM spaces the conditions from bruised to unconscious by multiples of 5, but if you wanted more variance you could introduce more breakpoints. Or, hell, you could just do a straight-up damage subtraction roll.

2.) High variance action-resolution is way too broad of a statement. Just in 3E D&D, action-resolution can consist of: the underlying conditions of the mechanics, the tactical positioning system, the resource management system, the attack roll, the damage roll, and any additional game effects that you want to layer on top of it like the Massive Damage rules.

3.) I'm not even sure how the packaging of the current or proposed D&D health system(s) have anything to do with feeling 'heroic and pulling off lucky supermoves'. On a meta level. I mean, we're not even talking about how 3E and 4E D&D people don't even bring up their games' hit point systems when arguing about which game has more interesting fighters. It's not even obvious whether we should use this aspect of game mechanics to implement that feel. Yeah, I agree with you that mechanics define how games can and should feel, but I also feel that it's often a mistake to implement a mechanic to enforce a certain feel of the game. If that's too abstract, look at the recent Torchbearer thread to see how that shit can go awry. Yes, the inventory limits and check system do a bang-up job at making dungeon crawling feel dangerous and bleak and harried, but it's unclear if it's at the cost of doing violence to WSoD.
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.
...You Lost Me
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Post by ...You Lost Me »

1.) Are you familiar with Mutants and Masterminds? Now, are you familiar with the Toughness and Condition chart? Imagine if instead of, or in addition to, the conditions you get for failing a damage roll hardcore enough you also lost hit points. I've been preferring dicepools lately, but a d20 could totally work with the idea. MnM spaces the conditions from bruised to unconscious by multiples of 5, but if you wanted more variance you could introduce more breakpoints. Or, hell, you could just do a straight-up damage subtraction roll.
So your ideas are a) looking things up in a table, or b) doing subtraction?

Because if you don't understand why those are terrible ideas (and why we don't do them anymore) then maybe you shouldn't be talking out your ass. I was generous and assumed you were thinking of doing something not retarded, but if this was your grand idea...
2.) High variance action-resolution is way too broad of a statement. Just in 3E D&D, action-resolution can consist of: the underlying conditions of the mechanics, the tactical positioning system, the resource management system, the attack roll, the damage roll, and any additional game effects that you want to layer on top of it like the Massive Damage rules.
Are you dumb? The action resolution mechanic is the mechanic that resolves the actions. That is d20 + X, where X is your bonus.
3.) [nonsense] Yeah, I agree with you that mechanics define how games can and should feel, but I also feel that it's often a mistake to implement a mechanic to enforce a certain feel of the game. If that's too abstract, look at the recent Torchbearer thread to see how that shit can go awry. Yes, the inventory limits and check system do a bang-up job at making dungeon crawling feel dangerous and bleak and harried, but it's unclear if it's at the cost of doing violence to WSoD.
I'm saying that a high chance of rolling nat 20's and a high chance of rolling nat 1's is important for D&D. If your action resolution system does allow for similar chances to get similar successes, it has failed because people won't want to play it.

Implicit in that is that if you force players to jump through annoying hoops (like multi-round subtraction or table-lookups) then your system has also failed.
Last edited by ...You Lost Me on Wed Mar 19, 2014 9:36 am, edited 1 time in total.
DSMatticus wrote:Again, look at this fucking map you moron. Take your finger and trace each country's coast, then trace its claim line. Even you - and I say that as someone who could not think less of your intelligence - should be able to tell that one of these things is not like the other.
Kaelik wrote:I invented saying mean things about Tussock.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

So your ideas are a) looking things up in a table, or b) doing subtraction?
Uh, yeah? Like 95% of the games do one of these two things for the health system. Yes, even games like World of Darkness, where their tick mark system is a form of fancy subtraction. I don't exactly see why this jejune insight is so offensive to you. Other than the fact that simple things tend to shock and baffle simpletons.
I was generous and assumed you were thinking of doing something not retarded, but if this was your grand idea...
:noblewoman: You poor thing. Let me help you out. People with IQs larger than that of raw cabbage have this technique called 'citing examples'. We do this sometimes to demonstrate the feasibility of a project. And here's the tricky part: this does not mean that we are specifically endorsing a course of action every time we use this esoteric technique. We are raising possibilities to stimulate discussion.
Are you dumb? The action resolution mechanic is the mechanic that resolves the actions. That is d20 + X, where X is your bonus.
Stop being so dense. 'Resolving the action' consists of a lot of steps, from targeting to ticking off resource check boxes to checking for interrupts to whatever. Any of these steps can be tweaked to give the game a more heroic or action-y feel. There's nothing sacred about any combination of these steps being specifically tweaked for this.
I'm saying that a high chance of rolling nat 20's and a high chance of rolling nat 1's is important for D&D.
What exactly is important for it? The possibility of burst damage? Making it so that people don't experience or inflict RNG lockout? Or just the visceral feel of throwing a die and having it land on a big number? Be more specific.
Implicit in that is that if you force players to jump through annoying hoops (like multi-round subtraction or table-lookups) then your system has also failed.
That's hilarious. You're hilarious. Have you actually played D&D before, Mr. 'I want to get the feel of the game right?'
Last edited by Lago PARANOIA on Wed Mar 19, 2014 10:48 am, edited 1 time in total.
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 Korwin »

...You Lost Me wrote: Because if you don't understand why those are terrible ideas (and why we don't do them anymore) then maybe you shouldn't be talking out your ass. I was generous and assumed you were thinking of doing something not retarded, but if this was your grand idea...
We dont do substrations anymore?
You have HP and get damage? Or do you mean we dont do D&D anymore?

I mean yes, you could add the damage you took and are KO, when your damage reaches your HP total, but then you need to substract when you get healing...
...You Lost Me
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Post by ...You Lost Me »

Lago PARANOIA wrote: Uh, yeah? Like 95% of the games do one of these two things for the health system. Yes, even games like World of Darkness, where their tick mark system is a form of fancy subtraction. I don't exactly see why this jejune insight is so offensive to you. Other than the fact that simple things tend to shock and baffle simpletons.
Oh right, since we do subtraction and addition anyways, we can just take damage, add reflex save, subtract HD, add your opponent's fortitude (to a max of their will), subtract your AC, and add your--OH WAIT, I just realized something. Just because we have to do something bad in order for the game to function, doesn't mean it's OK to do that bad thing more often.

Subtraction and table references slow game time ridiculously. Doing subtraction once every attack is a necessary evil, but doubling the number of functions a player has to do with every attack is stupid.
:noblewoman: You poor thing. Let me help you out. People with IQs larger than that of raw cabbage have this technique called 'citing examples'. We do this sometimes to demonstrate the feasibility of a project. And here's the tricky part: this does not mean that we are specifically endorsing a course of action every time we use this esoteric technique. We are raising possibilities to stimulate discussion.
You really shouldn't start off derogatory and devolve right into word vomit, it looks really bad. You have stimulated discussion; it's the reason I'm discussing with you right now. In fact, discussion is on feasibility, just like you want it to be. So believe it or not, I am discussing the feasibility of your concept with you, except I'm telling you it's not feasible because it's not.

Now you can either show me a system that uses explosive damage without being terrible, or you can quit pretending I'm not contributing to this conversation because I dared to disagree with your half-assed opinion.
Stop being so dense. 'Resolving the action' consists of a lot of steps, from targeting to ticking off resource check boxes to checking for interrupts to whatever. Any of these steps can be tweaked to give the game a more heroic or action-y feel. There's nothing sacred about any combination of these steps being specifically tweaked for this.
Oh for the love of god. Fine. I am now defining blarga as "the interaction you have with the RNG when you want to determine whether or not you succeed at something".

Now your solution requires a low-variance blarga, which is bad because of the reasons I said initially. Yayyyyyyyy semantics.
What exactly is important for it? The possibility of burst damage? Making it so that people don't experience or inflict RNG lockout? Or just the visceral feel of throwing a die and having it land on a big number? Be more specific.
Do you play D&D? Do you recognize that the feel of D&D is strongly tied to the 5% nat 20 and the 5% nat 1? Because it is, and if you use a blarga that doesn't do that, it won't feel like D&D, and people will be mad and not use your system.
That's hilarious. You're hilarious. Have you actually played D&D before, Mr. 'I want to get the feel of the game right?'
Yes, and it would appear you haven't.
Last edited by ...You Lost Me on Wed Mar 19, 2014 6:32 pm, edited 2 times in total.
DSMatticus wrote:Again, look at this fucking map you moron. Take your finger and trace each country's coast, then trace its claim line. Even you - and I say that as someone who could not think less of your intelligence - should be able to tell that one of these things is not like the other.
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Post by tussock »

How did this thread get onto healing?

Anyway. Wearing the PCs down with wandering monsters (and other less-that-boss-mode fights) made sense in a game where you mostly got XP for coin-and-magic treasure or story completion and generally tried to avoid useless little fights with treasure-poor monsters anyway. Attrition (and the time sink) of those fights meant wandering monster rolls got players to hurry up and move the fucking game along already. Worked well, synergy.


Once 3e came around and D&D became about killing every last random-ass wolf that howled in the distance to go up levels faster, and pulling every last tapestry from the walls because they turn into +6 crowns of winning D&D when you get enough of them, attrition doesn't matter. People will fight the wolves and skin them for pelts anyway. Wandering monsters are like random XP showers. Look, a small bird, someone shoot it, if it hurts us we'll just come back tomorrow.


So what 4e did where all the fights were fixed at a fake "almost killing you" difficulty that just went away afterward, and gave out arbitrary fixed treasures, that's what works for XP-for-monsters. No easy fights, just ten fights, then you go up a level for ten more. There's really no point in attrition any more. You enjoy the fights for what they are or you don't play.


But were someone to make a game where the reward is mostly about not fighting too much again, then little fights should totally happen again not just because they're immersive and naturalistic. And they'd really need some sort of limited healing mechanic to make people care about them in the proper way. Not just a lack of reward, but a genuine depletion of your capacity to earn the real one later.

Which would be good. There's no 15-minute adventuring day when the fifth fight is worth ten times as much as the first four, and there's no pissing around or arguing or whatever if that sometimes adds extra low-reward fights. Being smart and avoiding fights becomes self-rewarding, which is again quite immersive and naturalistic. At least unless people can't find the fucking treasure and get bored, which happens.


So easy fights, that you want players to mostly avoid, that's what suits healing limits. Have a multi-layered enforcement that less-than-lethal fights are still bad, without needing them to randomly kill or debilitate PCs in ways that spoil the heroic adventure.
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Blicero
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Post by Blicero »

I got a chance to skim through the 13th Age Bestiary today, and I was surprisingly impressed. Most of the monsters in the Bestiary included are old standbys, but a lot of them look like they could be fun to fight against or run. 13th Age is still full of dissociated mechanics and random Forge-ite interjections and an almost total lack of symmetry between PCs and monsters, but the designers have at least run with these conceits and integrated them into the overall system pretty well. There's still the 4E thing where "ogre with a club" and "ogre with a spear" need two separate writeups, but monster statblocks are super short, so the redundant space doesn't quite want to make you cry. There's also a decent amount of space dedicated to adventure hooks and and encounter building. But unlike the late 3E monster manuals, most of the information seems like the sort of thing an MC might actually use.
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