Classes with diff. power schedules drawing from same list

[Orion]

To be fair, it's conceptually possible to make buff spells that have to be cast in combat time but are so strong it's worth it. It's a really hard design though, and D&D has never really done it. I'm not really aware of any games that do.

[hyzmarca]

Are you an idiot? If you have at will mage armor that lasts a minute, you cast it every five rounds, if it lasts 1 minute per level, and you are level 5, you cast it every 3 minutes. This is just a thing you declare that you are always doing because if you didn't, you would be an idiot.

Some people might want to do other things besides continually recasting mage armor on the off chance that they're ambushed. Like read a book, or something.

[Kaelik]

Are you an idiot? If you have at will mage armor that lasts a minute, you cast it every five rounds, if it lasts 1 minute per level, and you are level 5, you cast it every 3 minutes. This is just a thing you declare that you are always doing because if you didn't, you would be an idiot.

Some people might want to do other things besides continually recasting mage armor on the off chance that they're ambushed. Like read a book, or something.

I spend entire minutes of my life taking a break from reading. I'm pretty sure that at will casters will somehow manage to make a six second break every 4 minutes.

[Username17]

To be fair, it's conceptually possible to make buff spells that have to be cast in combat time but are so strong it's worth it. It's a really hard design though, and D&D has never really done it. I'm not really aware of any games that do.

A lot of JRPGs manage.

-Username17

[Seerow]

To be fair, it's conceptually possible to make buff spells that have to be cast in combat time but are so strong it's worth it. It's a really hard design though, and D&D has never really done it. I'm not really aware of any games that do.

A lot of JRPGs manage.

-Username17

At the cost of the kind of massive hit point bloat on bosses that is required to allow for powerful buffs that still don't let the party kill the boss in 1-2 rounds. I'm not sure the JRPG model is really portable to a TTRPG.

[hyzmarca]

To be fair, it's conceptually possible to make buff spells that have to be cast in combat time but are so strong it's worth it. It's a really hard design though, and D&D has never really done it. I'm not really aware of any games that do.

A lot of JRPGs manage.

-Username17

At the cost of the kind of massive hit point bloat on bosses that is required to allow for powerful buffs that still don't let the party kill the boss in 1-2 rounds. I'm not sure the JRPG model is really portable to a TTRPG.

The hitpoint bloat isn't a consequence of buffs. The Hitpoint bloat is a consequence of a wide variety of offensive class abilities, spells, and weapons which gradually increase in power.

In Final Fantasy VI, for example, the only offensive buff is Berserk, and that's not too useful because it makes you lose control of the character. Its best use in offensive, as a save or suck spell that forces the enemy to physically attack with a damage bonus instead of casting spells or using skills.

Meanwhile your defensive Buffs are Shell, Protect, Reflect, Image, Vanish, Regen, Float, and Auto-Life.

You've also got Haste, which is neither defensive or offensive, gives you more actions.

Shell and Protect reduce damage from magic and physical attack, respectively. They let you tank more than you otherwise would be able to. They're both a direct buff to defense values.

Image and Vanish both make you immune to physical attacks, but each has a drawback. Images are dispelled if they're hit, making you vulnerable again. Invisibility reduces your magic defense and evasion to 0, making you extremely vulnerable to magic using enemies and instant death spells.

Float makes you immune to Earthquakes. It's either completely useless or completely broken, depending on the enemy you're facing. It's also the only buff that persists outside of combat, and makes you immune to damage floors, too.

Regen is self-explanatory, you automatically recover hitpoints every turn.


Auto-Life and Reflect are the interesting ones, though for different reasons.

Reflect is a double-edged sword. It bounces and spell cast at you only the enemy. This makes you immune to most attacks from low and mid level casters at the cost of being unable to take advantage of healing spells.

Reflect, however, is interesting in that it's mechanics are simple, but gamechanging and should be applied differently in different circumstances.

If, for example, you're fighting an elemental enemy that absorbs its own element, Reflect might be a mistake, since the bounced attacks will heal it. It might be better just to tank its hits in that case.

If you're fighting an party with a healer, you might want to cast reflect on themhim, and forgo magic damage in favor of denying your enemy healing.

And if you're fighting a single powerful enemy, you can increase your magic damage by bouncing multi-target spells off your own party. Since the spell will bounce four times, and hit the enemy four times, when otherwise it would only be hit once.

And later in the game enemies get untargeted damage spells that render reflect useless.



But Auto-Life is the big thing, because it shows exactly how different Final Fantasy is from D&D. Auto-Life does what it sounds like. It automatically resurrects you when you die.

In Final Fantasy, you're expected to die. A Lot. Phoenix Downs cost 500 GP in most games. That's expensive for a low level character, but not entirely outside of your budget. It's much less expensive than your first full equipment upgrade. Life comes online at early mid levels and is used often.
Auto-Life is easier than Phoenix downs, of course, because Phoenix downs require that there be someone alive to use them, with an action to spare. Auto-Life ensures that you'll come back from even a party-killing area attack.



D&D, on the other hand, is rather stingy with combat-time resurrection.
And with Level Loss, you really don't want to be killed five times in a single fight, even if your cleric does have enough spell slots with Raise Dead in them.

For that matter, D&D is stingly with outside of combat time resurrection, too. In Final Fantasy, you'll be okay as long as your allies can drag your corpse to an inn. In D&D, the time it takes a Cleric to rest and refresh his spells would render you unraisable. You'd need Resurrection, a 7th level spell, to bring back someone who is more than a day gone.

[Orion]

Oh, come on, it's really abundantly clear that your KOed allies aren't dead when you phoenix down them.

[fbmf]

The 4E sales debate with Capt. Pike is now here:

http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=55979

Game On,
fbmf

[hyzmarca]

Oh, come on, it's really abundantly clear that your KOed allies aren't dead when you phoenix down them.

Well is, in plot terms they aren't dead. But game mechanically, they are.

In Final Fantasy, it's mostly impossible to come back from plot death. Even in games with ghost or undead party members.

D&D doesn't seperate game mechanic death from plot death, which makes it very difficult to have fun and interesting fights with enemies that can kill you in one hit.

[Echoes]

For that matter, D&D is stingly with outside of combat time resurrection, too. In Final Fantasy, you'll be okay as long as your allies can drag your corpse to an inn. In D&D, the time it takes a Cleric to rest and refresh his spells would render you unraisable. You'd need Resurrection, a 7th level spell, to bring back someone who is more than a day gone.

What the hell are you smoking? Raise dead is castable for days/CL after the subject died. Which means not only can your friends drag you to the inn and raise you tomorrow, they can drag your rotting carcass through the desert for over a week and pay someone in the city to raise you.

[Ice9]

Some people might want to do other things besides continually recasting mage armor on the off chance that they're ambushed. Like read a book, or something.

That only works if the duration is short enough that it might become an issue. Like a minute or less.

And that's much worse. Suddenly, you have to count rounds out of combat because people will be trying to line up their buff durations precisely. Or you determine a SOP, and then it's similar to the "always on" except that occasionally it doesn't last the whole fight. Except with more arguing.

[Zaranthan]

Oh, come on, it's really abundantly clear that your KOed allies aren't dead when you phoenix down them.

It's explicitly stated in FF5. The party tries to use a Phoenix Down and cast Life on a character while said character is TALKING to them. 0 HP is nowhere near dead in Final Fantasy, it's more like "has a nasty gash".

[CaptPike]

Oh, come on, it's really abundantly clear that your KOed allies aren't dead when you phoenix down them.

Well is, in plot terms they aren't dead. But game mechanically, they are.

In Final Fantasy, it's mostly impossible to come back from plot death. Even in games with ghost or undead party members.

D&D doesn't seperate game mechanic death from plot death, which makes it very difficult to have fun and interesting fights with enemies that can kill you in one hit.

are there TTPRG's that work this way? because that would bug the crap out of me.

[Zaranthan]

The trick to doing FF-style KO's at the gaming table is to use other status effects. Let dead mean Dead, but have monsters that can inflict paralysis/unconsciousness/whatever for ten minutes if the target is at low HP (Power Word: Sleep?). Then, let the PCs get ways to remove paralysis/unconsciousness/whatever at a trivial resource cost but significant action cost.

If somebody wants to spend their turn bringing Tordek back into the fight, they can just do that. If not, and the party can survive the encounter without him, he comes back for a negligible cost, possibly just making Monty Python jokes in the woods for a quarter hour and everybody's ready for the next encounter.

[CaptPike]

Are you an idiot? If you have at will mage armor that lasts a minute, you cast it every five rounds, if it lasts 1 minute per level, and you are level 5, you cast it every 3 minutes. This is just a thing you declare that you are always doing because if you didn't, you would be an idiot.

Some people might want to do other things besides continually recasting mage armor on the off chance that they're ambushed. Like read a book, or something.

honestly I find it hard to believe that a wizard would not do this if they value their own life in any situation where they were not 100% sure of their safety.

its sorta like the 5min work day problem. I find it hard to think of a wizard who would NOT want to only do one fight per day if given a choice (assuming they are fighting things that collectively have a real chance of killing the wizard).

[OgreBattle]

To be fair, it's conceptually possible to make buff spells that have to be cast in combat time but are so strong it's worth it. It's a really hard design though, and D&D has never really done it. I'm not really aware of any games that do.

A lot of JRPGs manage.

-Username17

At the cost of the kind of massive hit point bloat on bosses that is required to allow for powerful buffs that still don't let the party kill the boss in 1-2 rounds. I'm not sure the JRPG model is really portable to a TTRPG.

I like how Pokemon does it. depending on how offensive the offense and defensive the defense is Pokemon take about 1 to 4 hits to KO on average. So if it takes two hits to KO an opponent then using swords dance to double your power results in finishing off an opponent in two turns, but now you deal double damage for the rest of the scene.

Tailwind makes your whole team strike first
Reflect/Lightscreen halves attack power
Shell Smash is interesting in that you double your offense and speed but half your defenses.
Then you have battlefield control spells like spikes to punish enemy mobility

One of the reasons this works for pokemon though is you don't know what your opponent is doing then you reveal your moves, so it'd be different for i-go-you-go DnD. But you'd have to figure out some wording for D&D where you can't just swords dance before combat begins then rush in with double attack power, but word it in a way where it must be used with enemies aware of you.
---

You can also design classes/monsters based around using powers that are enhanced by short term in-combat buffs. Say your ninja can make shadow images that last one turn, but can expend the shadow images for 2x 3x more attack power.

[hyzmarca]

Some people might want to do other things besides continually recasting mage armor on the off chance that they're ambushed. Like read a book, or something.

That only works if the duration is short enough that it might become an issue. Like a minute or less.

And that's much worse. Suddenly, you have to count rounds out of combat because people will be trying to line up their buff durations precisely. Or you determine a SOP, and then it's similar to the "always on" except that occasionally it doesn't last the whole fight. Except with more arguing.

Or you simply tell them that they can only cast combat buff in combat, because they're combat buffs, and combat buffs automatically end as soon as combat does.

[erik]

Except that kind of 4th-wall-breaking pisses people off (and rightfully so).

[CaptPike]

Except that kind of 4th-wall-breaking pisses people off (and rightfully so).

even in 4e buffs last 5min outside of combat

[ishy]

why are you assuming that stabbing someone is not a power? that it can not be worded as such.

4e was anyting but stupid, it used a level of logic and rationality that no other edition of D&D used.

having classes share powers like that is only useful if you are not making the system well, if you need half a page for wall of stone you have to share it, when you can do it in 5 lines then you should not.

Rich Baker[/url]]What's the single biggest lesson you've learned about D&D's design and development since the start of 4e, and how are you applying that info?

I chatted with some of my coworkers, and opinions vary. But here's one that I think about a lot, and my colleagues generally agree with me: We have too many powers that are too similar. Listing powers under specific classes might have helped organize the Player's Handbook for the specific task of character creation, but it launched us on a design and development path where we created many similar powers whose only substantive difference is the class those powers appear under. If I told you "I'm thinking of a 2[W] power that dazes for 1 round—which class does that power belong to?" you couldn't begin to guess. Almost anybody might have that power.

In earlier editions, some spells were allowed to appear on multiple class lists. We considered this a moderate nuisance in 3rd Edition, because it was strange that you couldn't describe hold person as a 2nd-level spell—for the wizard, it wasn't. I have belatedly come to realize that overlapping spell lists are a good thing, because they give spells like hold person and dispel magic unique identities in the game. When I play 4e, I don't recognize most of the powers that my fellow players are using, and that's a shame. In retrospect, I wish we'd just created a Powers Appendix of iconic, diverse effects (including martial powers, of course), and granted each class access to different subsets of those powers. The game would be better with a smaller number of iconic and memorable powers even if classes overlapped a bit more.

[CaptPike]

why are you assuming that stabbing someone is not a power? that it can not be worded as such.

4e was anyting but stupid, it used a level of logic and rationality that no other edition of D&D used.

having classes share powers like that is only useful if you are not making the system well, if you need half a page for wall of stone you have to share it, when you can do it in 5 lines then you should not.

Rich Baker[/url]]What's the single biggest lesson you've learned about D&D's design and development since the start of 4e, and how are you applying that info?

I chatted with some of my coworkers, and opinions vary. But here's one that I think about a lot, and my colleagues generally agree with me: We have too many powers that are too similar. Listing powers under specific classes might have helped organize the Player's Handbook for the specific task of character creation, but it launched us on a design and development path where we created many similar powers whose only substantive difference is the class those powers appear under. If I told you "I'm thinking of a 2[W] power that dazes for 1 round—which class does that power belong to?" you couldn't begin to guess. Almost anybody might have that power.

In earlier editions, some spells were allowed to appear on multiple class lists. We considered this a moderate nuisance in 3rd Edition, because it was strange that you couldn't describe hold person as a 2nd-level spell—for the wizard, it wasn't. I have belatedly come to realize that overlapping spell lists are a good thing, because they give spells like hold person and dispel magic unique identities in the game. When I play 4e, I don't recognize most of the powers that my fellow players are using, and that's a shame. In retrospect, I wish we'd just created a Powers Appendix of iconic, diverse effects (including martial powers, of course), and granted each class access to different subsets of those powers. The game would be better with a smaller number of iconic and memorable powers even if classes overlapped a bit more.

a stranger disagrees with me, this is not news.

and I have said that a small list of overlapping powers can work, but it must remain small enough that classes do not either feel the same or just feel like a better or worse version of each other (cleric vs favored soul).

And of course you would have to deal with cases where powers have to be subtly different and just making the power higher or lower level does not cut it.

[deaddmwalking]

I feel bad responding to two of your posts one after the other, but I feel this needs to be said. Get some fucking perspective . You are at least as much a stranger to all of us as Rich Baker is to you. Why should anybody care what your opinion is? It could be because you have 'industry knowledge' that most people lack. It could be that you have an established reputation for critical analysis. It could be that you have well informed opinions with available data to support your position.

Or we could get you. You have 'feelings' that you think should matter to everyone because they matter to you . There are only two people in this world that is good enough for. One of them is you...The other is your mommy.

Either provide a reason someone should care about your opinions or stop sharing them. 'I'm probably wrong, but you can't definitively prove that I'm wrong as long as I'm allowed to determine which evidence is and is not considered' is getting old.

Get some perspective. Stop doing it.

PS - I've written both responses on my phone. I can still correctly express the difference between there/their/they're. Pretending that your poor communication skills doesn't matter because everyone around you is smarter than you and can figure out what you're intending to say is probably the second worst defense you can offer.

[erik]

He doesn't understand the context, that Rich Baker and his colleagues are the people who worked on 4e, and even they regretted writing class-based powers because it didn't work. Not that it matters of course, because who can really be certain of anything?

[CaptPike]

I feel bad responding to two of your posts one after the other, but I feel this needs to be said. Get some fucking perspective . You are at least as much a stranger to all of us as Rich Baker is to you. Why should anybody care what your opinion is? It could be because you have 'industry knowledge' that most people lack. It could be that you have an established reputation for critical analysis. It could be that you have well informed opinions with available data to support your position.

Or we could get you. You have 'feelings' that you think should matter to everyone because they matter to you . There are only two people in this world that is good enough for. One of them is you...The other is your mommy.

Either provide a reason someone should care about your opinions or stop sharing them. 'I'm probably wrong, but you can't definitively prove that I'm wrong as long as I'm allowed to determine which evidence is and is not considered' is getting old.

Get some perspective. Stop doing it.

PS - I've written both responses on my phone. I can still correctly express the difference between there/their/they're. Pretending that your poor communication skills doesn't matter because everyone around you is smarter than you and can figure out what you're intending to say is probably the second worst defense you can offer.

You having data only helps if either you share it or I trust you to use it well and not have any reason to lie or mislead. Neither of those is the case here.

If his reasons were good, I would have listened just like if some random poster had responded with it. I can understand why he said it, there ARE advantages to having overlap between classes but unless you make class features way more important then they were in 3e or 4e then powers are what defines classes so they need to be different (for the most most part) if you want classes to be different.

when have I ever said that my feels should matter to you? I have said them because someone asked me or because I was needed an example.

Will you stop lying about you knowing for sure, with no doubt that 4e failed? if you just said "I think 4e failed" I would not care, even if you said "4e failed (but I do not know for sure because large chunks of data are missing)" that would also be ok. But you all are claiming fasts you can not possbily have and are putting down something I love in the process for no reason.

He doesn't understand the context, that Rich Baker and his colleagues are the people who worked on 4e, and even they regretted writing class-based powers because it didn't work. Not that it matters of course, because who can really be certain of anything?

I know that but does that let them understand the words on the PHB better then me? does it let them see problems with it I do not see? if so why did they not spell them out?

I trust facts, I trust logic, I do NOT trust anyone who wants me to trust them for no reason other then what they do.

[erik]

Goddamn it, I know I was stupid for clicking to read your post. I got sucked back in since it was a different thread than the 4e sales, but you're the exact same kind of dishonestly-stupid here as there.

"Why didn't they spell out the problems"? They did. In that very fucking text block that has already been quoted.

We have too many powers that are too similar. Listing powers under specific classes might have helped organize the Player's Handbook for the specific task of character creation, but it launched us on a design and development path where we created many similar powers whose only substantive difference is the class those powers appear under. If I told you "I'm thinking of a 2[W] power that dazes for 1 round—which class does that power belong to?" you couldn't begin to guess. Almost anybody might have that power.

In earlier editions, some spells were allowed to appear on multiple class lists. We considered this a moderate nuisance in 3rd Edition, because it was strange that you couldn't describe hold person as a 2nd-level spell—for the wizard, it wasn't. I have belatedly come to realize that overlapping spell lists are a good thing, because they give spells like hold person and dispel magic unique identities in the game. When I play 4e, I don't recognize most of the powers that my fellow players are using, and that's a shame. In retrospect, I wish we'd just created a Powers Appendix of iconic, diverse effects (including martial powers, of course), and granted each class access to different subsets of those powers. The game would be better with a smaller number of iconic and memorable powers even if classes overlapped a bit more.

It's not an argument from authority. It doesn't matter that the people are not personally known to you. The argument is laid out right there in english words for all to see. Even the people who screwed up 4e realized that they screwed up and one of them explained why.