Powerlevels and Pretension: FatR's own fantasy heartbreaker

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DSMatticus
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Post by DSMatticus »

Well, I think the wizard's problem is more that by level 10 they have 26 spell slots to fiddle with (before their intelligence modifier and school specialization), and every single one of those could contain something potentially useful (grease and color spray are weak by the standards of fifth level wizard spells, but they are both still AoE action denial - disguise self is good utility until the end of time). I am not opposed to preparation in principle, and there are a lot of ways to fiddle with your preparation mechanic to streamline the process at the table, but really 3.5's prepared casters just have so much stuff they can fiddle with in the middle of a session it ends up being better if they deliberately restrain themself.

Retraining that can be performed in the middle of a session creates a similar problem, because a tenth level character will have made a lot of decisions over their career. You really don't want people redoing those decisions in the middle of the session for the same reason you don't want people making new characters in the middle of the session.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

And yet for all this hand wringing over the terrors of letting people fix their characters and prepare appropriately for known threats somehow leading to unacceptable levels of retraining (so lets gimp it into the ground and cripple flawed character builds forever)... the 3.x wizard actually did all that and NO ONE FUCKING CARED.

Oh snap the wizard knew it was going to be a mission vs mindless targets and dumped all his mind control spells? GAME OVER MAN GAME OVER!

Oh shit the wizard has just quietly been changing one of his daily spell preparations every game day since forever? WE CANNOT DEAL WITH THIS NERF IT TO THE GROUND!

What? The wizard felt he needed a change of pace and just changed his ENTIRE daily prepared line up suddenly out of nowhere? BANISH THAT PLAYER AND NEVER LET HIM JOIN US AGAIN!

Seriously. This isn't a potential bogey man to be scared of. This is just regular status quo boring every day not a fucking problem and NOT a sufficient excuse to keep Timmy's failed character build stuck like that for ANY amount of time.

The problem is we only let spell casters retrain with minimal downtime costs. But for some reason the fighter isn't allowed to just spontaneously spend the night training differently to swap out his disarm for a trip. Because fuck him If we let HIM do it then it would just be CONSTANT administration nightmares or something. rite?
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Mechalich
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Post by Mechalich »

PhoneLobster wrote:And yet for all this hand wringing over the terrors of letting people fix their characters and prepare appropriately for known threats somehow leading to unacceptable levels of retraining (so lets gimp it into the ground and cripple flawed character builds forever)... the 3.x wizard actually did all that and NO ONE FUCKING CARED.
Actually, Wizard-style casting was widely regarded as massively overpowered, in large part because of its immense flexibility, and they were constantly trying to nerf the crap out of it throughout 3.X and absolutely did in 4e. PF allows it, because of course they do, but the 'tier' discrepancy is so vast in PF that people have to flatly outlaw tier one casters outright when advertising for PF games.
PhoneLobster wrote:The problem is we only let spell casters retrain with minimal downtime costs. But for some reason the fighter isn't allowed to just spontaneously spend the night training differently to swap out his disarm for a trip.
Disarm and trip should not be things you have to train for, they should be things you just happen to be able to do - 3e turning standard combat techniques into feat-gated abilities was a failure already. But switching from 'sword-master' to 'specialist dragon-slayer' shouldn't be something you can do in a night, or those things functionally don't exist. And it should be an equally hard thing to change specializations of that nature for all classes.

Regardless - continual retraining is a narratively poor choice. You can continually retrain in many MMOs - my Jedi Consular in SWTOR can go from being a badass healer to a rock-throwing death machine in ~2 minutes, inside of an instance, between individual fights as needed - and that totally obliterates any storytelling or tactical options that might be dependent upon said character being only one of those two things. If characters can be all things at all times, you cannot tell a story based around some capability that they don't have, which is a huge storytelling handicap.
Last edited by Mechalich on Mon Aug 15, 2016 1:18 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

Mechalich wrote:Actually, Wizard-style casting was widely regarded as massively overpowered, in large part because
Bullshit. Wizards were "overpowered" because they just get more and better shit and the reality of actual successful reworkings of 3.0 and what everyone on the den seems to want to do is that THAT power level is what people actually want as the STANDARD balance point.

The ONLY people who EVER complained about the wizard changing his spells to deal with a specific encounter were BAD DMS who were WHINING that the player had BEATEN THEIR SHIT RAILROAD by unexpectedly preparing for it.

Lets check that...
Mechalich wrote:Regardless - continual retraining is a narratively poor choice. ... If characters can be all things at all times, you cannot tell a story based around some capability that they don't have
Yep. Aside from a little bit of bullshit about mere low cost retraining being the exact same as "all things at all time" you just pulled the fucking EXACT whiny failed 3rd rate GM complaint of "but the player shouldn't be allowed to do something different or unexpected it will RUIN MAH STORIES!".

So yeah. Fuck you and FUCK your whiny story man attitude. Just. Let. Timmy. Change. HIS OWN. Fucking. Character. You. Fucking. Asshole.

Oh yeah, and PS, let us not forget that while people did whine on about wizards (more in a general sense rather than OMFG he swapped a daily prepared the asshole!), clerics were better AND got to have the ENTIRE cleric spell list ever plus extras to "retrain" to casually and regularly and THAT wasn't an actual practical fucking problem in actual play EITHER.
Last edited by PhoneLobster on Mon Aug 15, 2016 1:45 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Mechalich
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Post by Mechalich »

PhoneLobster wrote:Bullshit. Wizards were "overpowered" because they just get more and better shit and the reality of actual successful reworkings of 3.0 and what everyone on the den seems to want to do is that THAT power level is what people actually want as the STANDARD balance point.
If that's what people actually want, they you can just go play a game of PF that allows only PCs of Tier 1 full caster classes (PF has like 10 at this point) and your problems are more or less solved. I have never seen any evidence that this is something people want and much evidence to the contrary.
PhoneLobster wrote:Yep. Aside from a little bit of bullshit about mere low cost retraining being the exact same as "all things at all time" you just pulled the fucking EXACT whiny failed 3rd rate GM complaint of "but the player shouldn't be allowed to do something different or unexpected it will RUIN MAH STORIES!".
Characters being able to constantly retrain to the optimal loadout against any given foe is the opposite of different or unexpected. If everyone has the ability to change to the optimal build for a challenge it follows that they will always do so in order to minimize the potential for losing and therefore everything will happen exactly the same way. Every MMO raid boss has one optimal strategy and once it's cracked, every just uses it over and over again, so you can fight the same boss hundreds of times and nothing changes.

And players do actually want to play characters who are consistent, and fit to a specific idea on occasion, and they want the game to have sufficient design space that playing a character who didn't pop out of a spreadsheet is viable (also, sometimes players are new and the game needs to allow people who lack system mastery to actually survive and contribute).

The problem of the system as written making martials nonviable compared to spellcasters has multiple solutions. The solution of turning the martials into de facto spellcasters is a solution but it is not the only solution and I certainly don't think it is the best solution. I also think it is the solution that takes a TTRPG the furthest in the direction of being a less-efficient MMMORG emulator and I feel that's the wrong direction to go.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

Mechalich wrote:The problem of the system as written making martials nonviable compared to spellcasters has multiple solutions. The solution of turning the martials into de facto spellcasters is a solution but it is not the only solution and I certainly don't think it is the best solution. I also think it is the solution that takes a TTRPG the furthest in the direction of being a less-efficient MMMORG emulator and I feel that's the wrong direction to go.
You aren't even interacting with the same conversation. You aren't even trying.

Your demand was that people should only retrain on level ups because otherwise they would respec everything every time forever, and fuck you we HAVE that option for major classes in 3.x and it doesn't fucking happen and to the limited degree anything similar does it isn't a problem until an asshole DM whines about it suddenly ruining his "Story" about how he nefariously planned for player B to have no relevant abilities this week and he lacked the system mastery and DMing skill to realise that wizards can respec to some limited degree and stupidly blabbed the details of his planned ratfuck in advance needlessly.

And that WAS what you whined about. YOU complained that your narrative would be ruined because "oh noes" you can't rely on a wizard not having a spell he didn't have last week.

And fuck your talk about MMO respecs and everyone being the same. We HAVE examples of this in the wild in the largest TTRPG community we have and your predictions about the disaster of regular retraining are proven to be wrong something you probably should have noticed before declaring an outcome that has already not happened for decades.

Hell, you even claim that the only way to prevent people using cookie cutter optimized online solutions to character builds is to prevent them from being able to correct mistakes in organic character builds. Are you high?
Last edited by PhoneLobster on Mon Aug 15, 2016 3:15 am, edited 2 times in total.
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DSMatticus
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Post by DSMatticus »

A tenth level wizard has 30-40 choices to make each day. PL is right that this "usually isn't a problem" because people don't actually fucking do it - they change a few spells at a time at most and when anyone tries to do any more than that everyone else yells at them to hurry the fuck up. Which is to say that PL is wrong, and it absolutely is a problem, and it's a problem tables have figured out how to solve - don't actually do the thing the rules allow you to do. But as designers, there are actual solutions to this conundrum beyond "hope your players understand how stupid it would be to actually do the things you're allowing them to do." Like write better rules, rules in which players are never expected to make up to 30-40 choices between "we set up camp" and "we wake up the next morning," which is a real time interval of potentially no more than a couple seconds.

Mid-session retraining is kind of fucking dumb. Preparation is a fine mechanic, but it's best reserved to a subset of a character's complexity in order to limit the amount of realtime it consumes - something players of 3.5/PF figured out a long time ago even if the ruleset hasn't yet.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

DSMatticus wrote:A tenth level wizard has 30-40 choices to make each day. PL is right that this "usually isn't a problem" because people don't actually fucking do it ... Preparation is a fine mechanic, but it's best reserved to a subset of a character's complexity in order to limit the amount of realtime it consumes - something players of 3.5/PF figured out a long time ago even if the ruleset hasn't yet.
Except... they do do "it" and it's fine. Players and GMs with any particular skill will generally discourage it or fit it in various gaps in play, sure, same as they say "we don't have to do a 2 hour long dumpster diving shopping trip EVERY time we get wiff of a marketplace". But still, a moderately skilled wizard player could change their entire spell list, and do it in play between combat encounters without impacting game play at all (which conveniently is the same part of the game that you have that as an option (because I know you would like to silently vaguely imply this is happening during combat or whatever because your entire gambit you are resorting to here is trying to generate a false sense of urgency).

But actually even with skilled players that can do it without significant impact on play, and the acknowledgement that it very rarely actually happens that a player will, in a single spell preparation downtime event, change their entire spell list (or close enough)... it STILL almost never happens.

Why? Many reasons. The important thing about having a cheaply available retrain option is that it is an OPTION and people will only want to take that option in specific circumstances.

There is almost never a reason beyond "assing about" for a wizard to change literally every single prepared spell they have. And when there is such a rare reason, or if there is time for assing about (and I'm sorry but there are actually fairly regular intervals where there is for anyone familiar enough to know most of the spells by name) then fuck it let it happen.

But most of the time the option for retraining WILL be used to just change one or two things because that's all that people actually want to change. The "lets temporarily swap out the fire/mind control/long distance travel utility/ whatever spells for this next encounter/day" thing is what people mostly use it for, NOT because that is the only thing administratively viable, but because that's all they actually want or need from a regular preparation/retrain mechanic, because THAT is working as intended, because that's what it is mostly fucking FOR you dolt.

And while on the topic of how much you should limit a single retrain to... I don't think any hypothetical retrain mechanic should ever limit itself to "just one thing at a time" because frankly on those rare occasions that Timmy comes to a realization that he needs to rebuild his ENTIRE character from scratch to stop sucking then it becomes an unreasonable barrier. But even aside from that you don't need that limit because players don't often want to change out more than bits and pieces as any sort of routine event, and if something about your system would make them want to you have much bigger problems elsewhere in your design.
Last edited by PhoneLobster on Mon Aug 15, 2016 6:15 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by FatR »

Retraining on session is completely unacceptable for gameplay reasons, PhoneLobster. The existing sources of customization for specific threats in 3.X, such as wizards spells, about whom supposedly nobody cared (except only in the bizarro world to which you periodically slide) are already quite sufficient to make tactical-minded players spend half the session arguing about an ideal setup for a single-round victory, instead of actually playing, and I'll sooner smash my PC than add another one. (I'm only not removing wizards entirely, because if 4E taught us something it is the fact that DnD without proper wizards is no longer DnD, but I'm certainly taking measures to make them much simpler to run.) Therefore adding spells and maneuvers should be sufficiently time-restricted to preclude that happening in the middle of adventure, and retraining should only ever happens at level ups, because those are usually done at home anyway, and not at each level up because characters can often go up in level in a middle of a long adventure, and suddenly customizing yourself on the fly to face the expected boss is also unacceptable for thematic reasons, as Mechalich already explained. Besides, making your build anew at each levelup will make levelups much more of a hassle than they already are. I have to warn you that on this particular point my position is not going to change unless the next ten years of gaming somehow convince me that my previous experiences were a rare aberration.

And to Frank: I must say that your last argument partially resonates with me. One thing I sometimes like about Pathfinder is how flexible it is, with the ability to achieve the same concept through various different ways and make almost anything work as long as I'm thinking in terms of concepts and not classes. But only sometimes. Specifically when I'm generating a relatively low-level character as my PC for a long campaign. In every other circumstance, such as generating NPCs or generating any character above approximately level 7-8 I loathe it. And the overall vision that you're advocating here (classplosion with with Paragon Classes that are quite likely to end up mandatory and hell of a lot of feats, possibly selected on every level) don't seem to be any less fiddly and complex than Pathfinder; it's not like you're implying that spell lists beyond daily memorization and magic items should be gone. This is more complexity than I can stand.

That said, let's follow Ogre Battle's advice and postpone the discussion on feats/talents until I write enough spells/maneuvers/manifestations to show what PCs are supposed to be able to do without before feats/talents. Following the previous discussion in this thread I sketched the Wizard class, so I'll probably add it and a sample of spells to the incoming game files update, so people would have something to judge.
Last edited by FatR on Mon Aug 15, 2016 7:59 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

So then back when you threw a fit over (you wouldn't man up and say what) in the good GMing advice thread it was maybe on the "players are being indecisive thats a GOOD sign of player engagement!" point hey.

Well unless you are making shit up with your crazy stories about how players heavily investing in planning for your encounters is somehow a fucking bad thing.

Go figure, I'm pretty sure everyone thought it was the "GM is not god" that had your panties in a (secret) twist.
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Post by FatR »

Stop projecting, PhoneLobster. You're the one throwing fits every time someone disagrees with you on something. Like right now. I didn't know that you also apparently keep a Book of Grudges for such cases, though.
PhoneLobster wrote:players heavily investing in planning for your encounters is somehow a fucking bad thing.
There are games where two real-time hours of planning to assassinate the target in two actions are genre-appropriate, such as Shadowrun and WoD. That's perhaps one of the reasons I'm not currently running them. For DnD, even two real-time hours of spell lists fiddling and magic shopping in preparation for completing adventure in as much time is too much, because it means that a GM may as well take a nap for half the session.

But this made me think. One interesting aspect of such long bouts of planning is that they rarely produce results. The probability of a party's discussion on its battle plan producing a good battle plan becomes inversely proportional to time expended after about 10, at most 15, minutes. Doesn't matter on whose side of GM's screen I am. Now why it is so? There are two noticeable and interconnected reasons. First, an old good option paralysis - a mid-level 3.X party with some full casters in it, access to Magic Mart (without which non-casters don't work), and even a day of downtime before an adventure has an immense amount of choices to make. But why struggling with those choices may be important enough to impede their decison-making process so much? Well, here we come to the the second problem, the inherent gameplay problem of on-the-fly customization. If power level of opponents in the current adventure is calibrated with a party preparing against specifically them, they will stomp a party that did not prepare and does not have a proper ability loadout, at least in 3.X' context, where the difference between preparation and lack of it is immense. If it isn't, then a party will win easily with preparation. But players can understand that if their GM allows them time to prepare, the former is almost certainly the case, unless the adventure is a huge many-session deal, where a diverse array of foes can be expected. Unless you expect your GM to just hand you quick and boring victories repeatedly (which you probably don't, or at least don't want to, because boring victories are boring), preparation before an adventure, whenever it is possible, becomes therefore not an opportunity but an obligation - if you can prepare against a specific threat you'll likely NEED that preparation. And this can be quite burdensome in 3.X already, given all the spells to learn and items to buy or craft. With so much options, it is no wonder that players who aren't absolutely confident in their GM's willingness - and ability - to adjust things on the fly no matter how exactly strong they are, often risk to start running in circles, wondering how exactly much preparation is expected from the party today.

The easier on-session character customization is, the more frequently this problem will arise. If characters can rewrite their charsheets at will, it will arise before every single encounter. Therefore learning new abilities on-session should not be easy enough to happen between routine encounters within an adventure, and reconfiguring yourself on session should not be allowed in the areas where it isn't already a vital part of DnD fluff.
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Post by Kaelik »

FatR wrote:Stop projecting, PhoneLobster. You're the one throwing fits every time someone disagrees with you on something. Like right now. I didn't know that you also apparently keep a Book of Grudges for such cases, though.
To be fair, his book of grudges has horrible accounting, as I found out when he told me he hates me because he thinks I was pro-rape in the pro-rape thread of the past that he can't find because "fbmf deleted it" allegedly to protect the reputation of pro rape posters. :ugone2far:

So I mean, not the most accurate book of grudges.
DSMatticus wrote:Kaelik gonna kaelik. Whatcha gonna do?
The U.S. isn't a democracy and if you think it is, you are a rube.

That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

FatR wrote:Stop projecting, PhoneLobster.
Try to use terms in proper context you could have flung all sorts of dung at me, but "projecting" doesn't actually work here. What you did in the good GMing FAQ is a matter of record, and players spending time planning for an encounter is all in all a good thing, they are clearly enjoying and engaged with the game and as a GM it's pretty much an easy ride while they do so. Everything else you have to say about planning is pretty much you being a whiney baby man of a shit GM.
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Post by Mask_De_H »

There's always having the ability to hot swap a limited number of abilities as soon as they're necessary, FatR. Clerics can already do this by leaving a slot open and taking a fifteen minute timeout. Having a flashback mechanic, where you can spend some mechanical currency to get a useful thing right now has been brought up a few times on the Den.
FrankTrollman wrote: Halfling women, as I'm sure you are aware, combine all the "fun" parts of pedophilia without any of the disturbing, illegal, or immoral parts.
K wrote:That being said, the usefulness of airships for society is still transporting cargo because it's an option that doesn't require a powerful wizard to show up for work on time instead of blowing the day in his harem of extraplanar sex demons/angels.
Chamomile wrote: See, it's because K's belief in leaving generation of individual monsters to GMs makes him Chaotic, whereas Frank's belief in the easier usability of monsters pre-generated by game designers makes him Lawful, and clearly these philosophies are so irreconcilable as to be best represented as fundamentally opposed metaphysical forces.
Whipstitch wrote:You're on a mad quest, dude. I'd sooner bet on Zeus getting bored and letting Sisyphus put down the fucking rock.
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Post by FatR »

Wizards also can. But do you really think preparation full casters are currently not too complicated to run?
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Post by Mask_De_H »

FatR wrote:Wizards also can. But do you really think preparation full casters are currently not too complicated to run?
The idea would be to hot swap a single ability or ability subset off of a much smaller list than the entire full caster spell list.

For example, you'd have a Utility Slot, which would allow you a choice between Endure Elements, Water Breathing, Babel fish (Tongues + Comprehend Languages), Phantom Steed and Locate Object. So when you suddenly need to get to Ry'leh, you take 15 and hot swap in Water Breathing without having to think "fuck, did I ever scribe Water Breathing/okay, which specific utility spells should I bother remembering to remember?"
FrankTrollman wrote: Halfling women, as I'm sure you are aware, combine all the "fun" parts of pedophilia without any of the disturbing, illegal, or immoral parts.
K wrote:That being said, the usefulness of airships for society is still transporting cargo because it's an option that doesn't require a powerful wizard to show up for work on time instead of blowing the day in his harem of extraplanar sex demons/angels.
Chamomile wrote: See, it's because K's belief in leaving generation of individual monsters to GMs makes him Chaotic, whereas Frank's belief in the easier usability of monsters pre-generated by game designers makes him Lawful, and clearly these philosophies are so irreconcilable as to be best represented as fundamentally opposed metaphysical forces.
Whipstitch wrote:You're on a mad quest, dude. I'd sooner bet on Zeus getting bored and letting Sisyphus put down the fucking rock.
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Post by Username17 »

I think it's tautologically true that character ability reconfigurement that is sufficiently time consuming to negatively impact that storytelling game is something that negatively impacts the storytelling game. How much character reconfigurement is required to meet that threshold is almost certainly different for different people and different situations. I find it obvious that making an in-character decision to take a concealable pistol to sneak into the building versus taking a machine gun and assaulting the building is part of the story and totally legit. On the other hand, I find it equally obvious that respending all your forest survival skill points on desert survival as soon as your character walks into the desert is a giant waste of everyone's time and cheapens the decision to spend skill points on forest survival in the first place.

But I find the fact that there are differences between players in addition to situations is very important. It means that I genuinely do think there is a place for a character like the Wizard who does more reconfiguring and a character like the Berserker who does less.

I don't think it's contentious to say that D&D goes overboard with Wizard reconfiguration, but the concept is sound.

As for mid-life crises prestige classes, I think they should be:
  • Mandatory.
  • Happen at the same level for everyone.
  • Be convergent rather than divergent options.
When you hit paragon level, everyone should get a paragon class. But also, if the Knight wants to go into Witch Queen, I think they should just do that. The Paragon classes shouldn't be thematically locked into upgrades for specific classes, they should be level appropriate concepts that characters can jump into as needed.

Image
Hit paragon level and went directly from Knight to Witch King.

-Username17
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Post by FatR »

I've uploaded updated documents by the same link.
https://yadi.sk/d/iLt9OCTusGGRg

Besides small updates, typo fixing, etc in old documents, a document on moster types and a small sample of monsters is added. Also, a magic overview, a sample class (Wizard) and a small sample of simpler spells to write, namely direct damage spells, are provided to give readers an idea what scale of abilities is being envisioned.
Last edited by FatR on Wed Aug 24, 2016 9:35 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by FatR »

One problem (or maybe benefit) of being away from my home PC and having no Internet connection for a few days is that it gives time to think, instead of typing away more content.

And I was thinking on the following.

At the moment my system already has four Defenses due to distinction between Fortitude and Internal Fortitude. As I write monster statblocks, I notice that the fifth defensive stat de-facto appears – the perception stat. And of course, presumably the wisdom-based anti-fasttalk stat would be de-facto the sixth defensive stat in case I ever get to putting the social system together.

Adding this together I started to wonder if I just should say “fuck it” and make six Defenses official.

Fortitude is going to be split into Fortitude itself and Block (Strength), the latter being the one modified by armor and shields. Will is going to be split into Will itself (now Intelligence) and Perception (Wisdom). Composure (Charisma) will be added for social situations.

Normal physical attacks would be contested by the highest of Block, Reflex and Fortitude, so that will give us the place to write “AC” something on the character sheet, like that: AC X (Block Y, Reflex X, Fort Z, Will A, Perc B, Comp C).

This system of Defenses would also solve another problem I noticed when I started entering specific numbers into the system, but which is evident in 3.X as well – Dexterity must be artificially and clumsily shafted by making it not contribute to damage of Dexterity-based attacks (unlike Strength) because otherwise it, just like in WW games, becomes a god-stat that contributes to both attack and defense, while Strength and Constitution contribute to only one of those. Unless Strength is given a defensive stat of its own, it should be merged with Constitution, which won’t remove the need to have separate Defenses for cases when you’re shot by an arrow or drink a cup of poison.

Stealth attack attempts in this system would be Dex-based attacks aimed against Perception Defense of the enemies in the area (all of them or the current opponent, depending on attack), using the existing extreme critical system to confirm against, say, Fortitude whether you managed to pile hurt on the enemy after disappearing from his sight.

I wonder if these ideas have the right to live or if I was just overthinking things out of boredom.

Another thought that went through my head was also dispensing with separate BAB and attribute check progression and just give everyone Base Action Bonus equal to Hit Die. Probably while separating what attribute checks currently do into attribute-based tasks (equivalent of old untrained skills) which everyone can do and skill-based tasks (equivalent of old trained-only skills).

Yet another and separate problem I’m thinking about is progression of BAB vs. Defenses. Making BAB increasingly outpace Defenses is logical solution in the world of bloating hit points, but not at all recommended in the world of oneshot attacks, and here I am undermined by my own basic design decision of merging ACs and saves. Making an attack run through the gauntlet of the second Defense to produce a true oneshot will clearly not help if the disparity reaches half RNG. So far I’ve been setting Good/Bad Defenses to full/three-fourths HD, so +20/+15 by the 20th level. I wonder if I should keep that anyway in the light of the fact that no edition of DnD has yet managed to keep damage values within reasonable boundaries once a bit of optimization was applied, I’m unlikely to achieve that feat, so damaging attacks will be nuclear anyway by level 20 and it is okay for Defenses to keep up or almost keep up.

Finally, I think of shifting Hit Dice for pretty much everyone down one step, making d8 instead of d10 the most common hit die
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Post by FatR »

I'm glad to present the next iteration of my rules blueprint, and probably the last before shifting regular posting to the homebrew forum.

https://yadi.sk/d/iLt9OCTusGGRg

Besides various fixes throughout the existent chapters and application of the changes contemplated in the post directly above, a sampling of monsters, classes, spells and martial powers was added. Many things in this sampling, such as the sorcerer class or the provided martial Discipline are quite incomplete - for now they serve as examples of ideas that apply in different tiers of play, rather than something that is supposed to be ready for immediate use, though if anyone can spot something obviously broken, I'll still be glad to know about that.
FatR
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Post by FatR »

Any comments, anybody?

Also, as it must have been noticeable, I'm tinkering with default DnDland fluff as well. If someone is interested, I can clean up my cosmology file and add it to the folder as well.
Last edited by FatR on Wed Dec 07, 2016 5:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Mask_De_H
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Post by Mask_De_H »

FatR wrote:Any comments, anybody?

Also, as it must have been noticeable, I'm tinkering with default DnDland fluff as well. If someone is interested, I can clean up my cosmology file and add it to the folder as well.
I'd be down for the cosmology file, since free floating mechanics without equivalent challenges/expectations are hard to comment on outside of fluffy yay/nay feelings.
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FatR
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Post by FatR »

Sorry for not updating for so long, if anyone follows. That was totally for respectable real-life reasons and not because I played through the Soulsborne series for most of the winter.

That said, following my intentions voiced a bit before, I added a high-level look at the presumed cosmology and four brief 2000-word samples of settings optimized for four different tiers of play.

Also, enough crunch has accumulated to make the game sufficiently whole for playtesting it, at least as far as the first two tiers are concerned (writing high-level content is not only harder, and more time-consuming, but I'm also reluctant to get too deep into it before checking how the stuff works in play). I've cut some half-written materials from the files I'm presenting now, but they already include the classic DnD four of fighter, cleric, mage and rogue classes already present, as well as classic races, rules necessary to generate and play a character, and most subsystems that existed in 3.X. plus some more. We'd be converting our group's current long-running compain as soon as I write necessary campaign-specific materials and finish converting staple DnD spells.

Some revisions to older rules were done since the last update too. Stuff like rules for vehicles and attacking body parts was added. Martial classes were revised further away from their ToB inspirations, with removal of de-facto duplicating resource-management mechanics and leaving only managing fatigue. The next big subsystems to be added probably would be an attempt to make exploration more meaningful and a rulership/domain system. The social system is in the works, but it is probably my biggest stumbling block on the conceptual level, a suitable middle ground between Magical Teaparty/Waste of Space and Mind Control Lite still eludes me.

You can find files at the usual place:
https://yadi.sk/d/EDAdisq63HWXjA
Last edited by FatR on Mon May 01, 2017 10:40 am, edited 2 times in total.
FatR
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Post by FatR »

Another question arose in the process of reading various forums. I've noticed that at least some people intensely dislike the idea of "action debt" on which immediate actions work in ToB and consequently in this DnD fork, that is of being penaltised in the next round for taking an immediate action in the current one. The obvious alternative is to make swift actions useable for the entire round starting from one's turn, instead, which will allow to reduce the number of distinct action types in the system, but in all likelyhood will make PCs overtly cautious, saving up their swift actions in case they need to invoke an active defense against an incoming SoD (I guess as Defenses now replaced saves it should be "DoD" instead) or something equally dangerous instead.

Personally, I'd still prefer to keep the "action debt" system, but I wonder what the Den thinks about this.

Also, besides making some corrections and additoons here and there, I've uploaded the document with NPC classes to the storage. It ended up rather short. The idea of 20-level NPC classes never seemed sane to me.
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Post by MGuy »

In the system I'm making there is no way to get an action now that you pay for with later actions. I don't think that I set that up because I hate the concept but more because it was tedious. It read as tedious on paper and I'd assumed that would translate to trouble in play. Instead there are a set number of actions that everyone is shackled to. There are the regular move, standard, and free. Then there are opportunity actions. These are your reactive actions (attacks of opportunity) and they are also necessary for people to augment attacks and abilities, to trigger defensive abilities, etc. I them have some classes/ability sets that have more or less of certain types of abilities. For example there's a support knight class that starts out being able to apply shield bonuses to allies and ends up throwing whole metaphysical barriers for people and gets less offensive styled abilities.
Last edited by MGuy on Sat Apr 22, 2017 11:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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