The Gaming Den

Mistwell wrote:I guess you guys missed the new Ravnica setting and new races in it?

Centaur, Loxodon, Minotaur, Simic Hybrid, Vedalken?

Pretty sure that is 5e, not 4e, which is what this thread is dealing with?

saithorthepyro wrote:

Mistwell wrote:I guess you guys missed the new Ravnica setting and new races in it?

Centaur, Loxodon, Minotaur, Simic Hybrid, Vedalken?

Pretty sure that is 5e, not 4e, which is what this thread is dealing with?

See recent comments from Lago and Frank Trollman in this thread. Responding to what they were saying, which was about 5e.

Oh, okay. Well in that case even then it's not quite correct. They are talking about races that are new to DnD in general, and both the Minotaur and Centaur have been in past editions. The Centaur was playable in BD&D, AD&D, and 3e, while the Minotaur was playable in AD&D and 3e. None of the Ravenica races were of course, so it can add those three for finally utilizing the fact that WoTC owns an entire fantasy setting with multiple worlds that they never leveraged for some reason.

Also, describing Ravnica: City of Guilds (copyright 2005) as a "new setting" is pretty strange.

-Username17

New to DnD at least. And extremely underutilized for it. Seriously, eight guilds available, but Mearls and co. (Who even is left, Perkins and Crawford?) could only do three of them? It’s not like any of them are even difficult to think of ideas for, each having a general theme that can be related to dnd classes.

The amazing accomplishment of 4th edition was getting everyone to actually read and play by the written mechanics because numbers were put inside of boxes

It wasn't well balanced but that is a feat

saithorthepyro wrote:New to DnD at least. And extremely underutilized for it. Seriously, eight guilds available, but Mearls and co. (Who even is left, Perkins and Crawford?) could only do three of them? It’s not like any of them are even difficult to think of ideas for, each having a general theme that can be related to dnd classes.

pretty sure there are 10 guilds in the d&d5 ravnica book.

I forgot to include one relevant word. Sub-classes. Ten guilds, only 3 subclasses

saithorthepyro wrote:I forgot to include one relevant word. Sub-classes. Ten guilds, only 3 subclasses

Certainly, Guilds of Ravnica is an amazingly slapdash product, and the "player facing" content is both poorly researched and less than minimal. So there's the section on classes in the guilds, which you'd think would be an extremely low hanging fruit place to put in a subclass for each guild. Obviously it doesn't do that, and instead tells you which guild you could skin the classes that already exist. And they get that part wrong! It tells you that there are no Wizards in the Selesnya Conclave.



What player facing options are added are literally just one Cleric Domain and one Druid Circle. The Cleric Domain is "Order" and could plausibly be used by any of the White Guilds (although they only mention Azorius and Orzhov, having perhaps forgotten the giant "Law and Justice" banner that Boros carry around). The Druid circle is "Circle of Spores" and is very specifically Golgari. And that's fucking it.

Now personally, I would think that if you were going to make the point that Gruul and Rakdos don't have "Wizards" in their ranks, that you'd make the class they actually do have, which is "Shaman." And in in a Ravnica context, "Shamans" are more blasty than "Wizards." Instead, we are told that Gruul casters are all Clerics and Druids.



Why would these guys have direct damage spells?


So really I would expect such a book to throw down "classes" that exist in Ravnica that didn't already exist in 5e. Most prominently that's Shaman, but also Soldier, Knight, Warrior, and Advisor. And while Berserker and Assassin exist as Subclasses, it really wouldn't be much work to make class-level versions of them that actually did things that Ravnica Assassins and Berserkers do. That there isn't at the very least one subclass presented for each color (let alone each Guild) is insulting. I genuinely don't understand why anyone thought it was acceptable to turn in a draft like that.

Anyway, the bottom line is that Guilds of Ravnica is a ridiculously poorly researched and under-designed book whose lead designer is also the lead editor and it fucking shows.

-Username17

I'm actually surprised Wyatt is involved, I could have sworn he was one the folks that Hasbro fired during the 4e era, and I didn't remember him being involved with the core 5e books. As is yeah Ravenica is very disappointing of one of the three 'big' books released in 2018 for WOTC (Ravenica, Eberron, Mordenkain's Tome of Foes). Doesn't help that Unearthed Arcana has been getting worse and worse as time goes on. Half of it is just previews of material released in the official books (Previews that can get nerfed in the actual books), there have been several months where there have just been nothing, in 2019, there have been only three Unearthed Arcana thus far. Febuary-March was a two part revamp of the Artificer.....and then May's was another revamp of the Artificer. Yet to see if June's will be anything, maybe we will get another Artificer. But yeah UA has become a mess even to the people willing to give it a chance.

James Wyatt was moved from the D&D department to the MtG department in 2014. He has spent the last five years making MtG art books. He also makes D&D web enhancements that provide extremely half-assed ports of various MtG planes into D&D. But he does that from the Magic department as a Magic promotion, not from the D&D department.

His involvement in the "design" of the Ravnica D&D book is as someone from the Magic brand looking in. Jeremy Crawford is the D&D team guy, and is both the lead designer and the managing editor. This is really a garage product in the classic sense of the term.

The fact that it wildly fails to meet any possible minimum specifications you might have for such a product isn't really surprising.

-Username17

I'm curious: in your opinion, how much of 4E D&D's failure was attributable to it coming out in the worst economic crisis in decades? Granted, the changes to the rules alienated older players, but as we can see from 5E D&D the newbies don't care.

120 dollars for the core books + dice is a pretty huge ask if you're a new player who has never played before. And of course organizing and playing over the Internet was much harder to do in 2008 than in 2015, so you were asking people to spend that much money on a game they might not get to play. Combined with the economy totally shitting itself and youth unemployment in the United States cresting 25%?

Lago wrote:I'm curious: in your opinion, how much of 4E D&D's failure was attributable to it coming out in the worst economic crisis in decades?

Like, basically none of it. The entertainment industry is essentially impervious to recessions, and global box offices show a continuous rise through the entire period and you cannot see the great recession at all in that data. Dungeons is the cheapest hobby, cheaper than backpacking, going to the cinema, or even World of Warcraft. If there was any effect at all of a global economic downturn on D&D sales it should have been to push sales up as people substituted more expensive hobbies like Yugioh or drinking in bars for cheaper hobbies like RPGs.

The concept that the economic downturn had anything to do with the failure of 4e or the collapse of nWoD or the collapse of Catalyst Game Labs has always been laughable. Those excuses do not fly. Those companies did badly because their products were bad. Full fucking stop.

-Username17

When I played in college we'd have like one or two people who bought the books and the rest who borrowed or pirated. Divided by at least five people across a dozen sessions, it's a really cheap hobby in terms of entertainment per dollar.

A recession might hurt companies selling miniatures or rules supplements but a good core RPG book really aught to do well in hard times.

And, since I was in college at the time - we all pirated 3.5 for my campaign, then bought 4E when it came out, then stopped playing because we weren't having any fun.

But it was cheaper to stick ro 3rd edition...

I too pirated 3.5 but was so impressed with it I bought a 4e book when it came out.

Foxwarrior wrote:I too pirated 3.5 but was so impressed with it I bought a 4e book when it came out.

Yeah 4e is the edition I actually spent some money on

I still like the core rules of 4e more than editions previous or afterwards, all of the PC monster spell content that interacts with it has wonky numbers

skill challenges can be reworked easily into threat tests mentioned on here, DC's being written to scale with level was dumb and it's easy to give an example of "DC 10 to climb a wall of dicks"

The failed design behind Defenders and Leaders has been discussed, but have we talked about the failed design behind Controllers?

The Controller role is defined by screwing up the DM's plans. Because 4E D&D revolves around its combat engine, this means action denial. Because 4E D&D has a simple combat engine, this generally means preventing the DM from taking a turn or rendering the turns the DM can take being useless (because they're blinded, are taking a -10 penalty to attack rolls, soforth).

Fair enough, but this design philosophy as implemented by 4E D&D runs into two problems. And this is before we get into some balancing problems like Saving Throw Penalty stacking.

A) Being an effective controller means stopping the enemy from taking meaningful turns at all. There's not really any controller concept in 4E D&D of draining enemy resources or enabling/disabling alternate victory conditions or even making the enemy easier to hit (that's generally a leader thing). It's just shutting things down. For example slow and even immobilized is generally a meaningless status effect unless you're able to pair it with a Burst 3 and a Slide 4, then it becomes a total shutout.
B) If you've ever played any competitive video game before, nothing pisses off players more than not being allowed to take meaningful turns. This even applies to a DM.

This creates the hilarious failure state of controllers where if they're too good at their job they break the game and piss off the DM. However, the balance between 'ineffective resource muncher' and 'encounter-crushing lockdown munchkin' is really fine in 4E. Even if you avoid obvious cheese like saving-throw penalty stacking, there are still effects like 'use Enlarge Spell with Dark Gathering' that just chew up the DM's turns and make it impossible for them to do anything.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:The failed design behind Defenders and Leaders has been discussed, but have we talked about the failed design behind Controllers?

The Controller role is defined by screwing up the DM's plans. Because 4E D&D revolves around its combat engine, this means action denial. Because 4E D&D has a simple combat engine, this generally means preventing the DM from taking a turn or rendering the turns the DM can take being useless (because they're blinded, are taking a -10 penalty to attack rolls, soforth).

Fair enough, but this design philosophy as implemented by 4E D&D runs into two problems. And this is before we get into some balancing problems like Saving Throw Penalty stacking.

A) Being an effective controller means stopping the enemy from taking meaningful turns at all. There's not really any controller concept in 4E D&D of draining enemy resources or enabling/disabling alternate victory conditions or even making the enemy easier to hit (that's generally a leader thing). It's just shutting things down. For example slow and even immobilized is generally a meaningless status effect unless you're able to pair it with a Burst 3 and a Slide 4, then it becomes a total shutout.
B) If you've ever played any competitive video game before, nothing pisses off players more than not being allowed to take meaningful turns. This even applies to a DM.

This creates the hilarious failure state of controllers where if they're too good at their job they break the game and piss off the DM. However, the balance between 'ineffective resource muncher' and 'encounter-crushing lockdown munchkin' is really fine in 4E. Even if you avoid obvious cheese like saving-throw penalty stacking, there are still effects like 'use Enlarge Spell with Dark Gathering' that just chew up the DM's turns and make it impossible for them to do anything.

Sooo, you never played 3rd edition where wizards were throwing Color spray/sleep/web/solid fog/black tentacles/forcecage/freezing fog/avasculate/ray of stunning? Neither of which demand any extras to completely shut down most team monster.

And if team monster happens to have a counter/immunity against any of the above or just gets lucky, then it's often the wizard player who gets pissed off because their turn was "wasted". So the line was as thin as it gets before 4e. Either team monster was shut down or the player felt "ineffective".

At least 4e did an effort of standardizing monster saves while 3e had stuff like the purple worm having a whooping +4 Will save and 4 touch AC meaning even lv.1 wizards could easily stunlock it.

In the context of a D&D-themed tactical boardgame, I don't think that the very idea of controllers is bad design. Status effects and battlefield control effects are both things that you can do in such a game, with enough meat to them that they could plausibly be an entire character's shtick. And if that's what roles are - collections of actions that you could base an interesting character on - then controller fits the bill.

If roles are instead supposed to be, "Components of a functioning party," then controller fails as a role. D&D-themed tactical boardgame encounters can be reasonably be broken down into the question, "Turns to TPK party > turns to TPK monsters?" The two sides of this inequality are the only parts of party composition that need balance, and even then only if one side has diminishing returns. By this metric the only coherent role in 4E is Striker, since it directly lowers the number of turns to TPK the monsters. The other three are all trying to increase the number of turns to TPK the party, but the designers don't realize that this is what they're doing, so the classes do so extremely clumsily.

But most games fail to define whatever classes or roles it has in terms of how they interact with the game's victory conditions, so requiring that seems like way too high of a bar.

There was some argument years ago where the idea that you can perform some set of moves, even between your party members, to trounce every encounter was to be considered bad design. I could agree with that. The idea that a player can, with help, keep a single creature from doing a thing for a turn or two seems pretty acceptable to me as long as the same tactic can't be blindly used for most encounters without thought.

To practice arguing in good faith my best interpretation of what Lago is saying here is that if you create a situation where every encounter is made into a situation where the GM, or especially the players, can't do anything then you've done a bad design thing. In 3e there are a lot of easy ways you overcome various forms of cc with different monsters and stuff but 4e also suffers from everything being pretty samey as far as enemies go (or at least that's what has been reported) so once you have a stunlock that works on some set of creatures chances are it works on 99% of what you face.

The core problem with the "Controller" is that the design team hadn't agreed with each other what they were supposed to be controlling. In the original 4e PHB, the iconic controller power is supposed to be fireball - a power that does bullshit damage over a semi-large area.

Because a lot of the authors thought "control" meant "Crowd Control" rather than "Battlefield Control." That structural incoherence meant nothing would ever or could ever make sense, let alone be good.

-Username17

Thinking about it, in MMORPGS they don't (or most probably can't) support controllers. There's status effects, but bosses are plain immune to most of those, fuck you.

So that leaves only 3 roles in most MMORPGS:
-Tank that specializes in attracting enemy attacks and surviving said attacks.
-Damage dealer that, well, deals damage.
-Healer that, well, heals damage.

And all three can inflict their own sort of buffs/debuffs on things that aren't immune, often other players or mooks. The priest is throwing blesses and curses between heals, the mage has freezing slows and whatnot, the rogue has poisons, even the tank fighter can throw stunning shield bashes and slowing harmstrings. There's indeed no dedicated controller but everybody can control to a degree.

Including simple aoo damage, even fighter gets pseudo whirlwind attack while rogue gets fans of knives and whatnot.

My MMO experience was exclusively in City of Heroes - which was notable only for coming out at about the same time as WoW, but having been developed separately, didn't follow the same 'holy trinity' concept.

There are ways to make the concept work, I think, that just break from the concept.

1) No dedicated striker/damage role. Everyone does similar damage, but that's not the primary role/contribution. Your tank does damage, your battlefield control does damage, your buffer/debuffer does damage. (CoX did have dedicated damage characters, but they were kind of terrible.)

2) Damage mitigation is as good or better than healing. Your buff/debuff character grants temporary hit points or damage resistance (or reduces enemy damage or to hit chance), and that's good enough that no one drops.

3) Bosses vulnerable to 'softer' controls. You can't stunlock or hold a boss, but you can slow their movement rate with a tar patch, or taunt them to wail on the tank relatively ineffectively, or reduce their hit chance. Immobilize them for a round. Essentially, you have some villains subject to binary controls (stunned/not stunned) and some that are not (a 'stunned' boss just hits with -2 or disadvantage or whatever). Part of what makes it more palatable to the user is that they can see, without having to make a knowledge roll, whether that's a boss monster or not.

3a) The City of Heroes model had minor bosses take two hits of a hold to lock them down, and archvillains vulnerable to those effects 1/3 of the time, but I don't think that model is particularly portable to the tabletop - a DnD boss fight doesn't last enough rounds for that to be viable.

4) Give players enough abilities to do something interesting. Rangers get tanglefoot bags as a standard part of the kit. Rogues get silly grappling hook maneuvers. Fighters get enough mobility to actually get to the enemies. You have abilities that are appropriate for a platoon of hobgoblins or for the fire giant king, and you have to make choices between them when the fire giant king is leading the platoon of hobgoblins.

5) Having some role cross-pollination is not a bad thing. The tank character can have some small buffs (leadership) and battlefield control (an AOO stops an enemy's movement.) A controller can throw out living darkness that slows enemies and affects their hit chance with a small debuff.

6) Everybody gets at least a little AOE damage.

7) Buffers cannot use their powerful ally buffs on themselves - you can catch yourself with your AoE buff or your aura, but you can't cleric-zilla yourself. That helps promote some teamwork.

These are, of course, all elements of my heartbreaker that isn't even really started.

(Also notable - the Controller archetype in CoX was extremely powerful once it had access to its capstone ability - pets. Control/buff/debuff/pets could get very silly, when those powerful ally-only buffs could be applies to the pets.)

COH didn't really have raid progression in the same fashion that WoW did and as such builds tended to focus more on fucking around in various ways rather than being laser focused on a particular role. And in WoW crowd control certainly does waffle between OP and unnecessary like Lago was talking about with 4e, which is why the idea that control could in any way be considered a protected and co-equal role at the raid level basically died out in early Vanilla. That's because unless every enemy has some sort of invulnerability or nasty booby trap gimmick that triggers upon death the most effective status is still typically good ol' fashioned death. So there's often a progression in WoW where crowd control is used as sort of a crutch while learning encounters but as people became more proficient and better geared there's usually a tipping point where just flat out brute forcing things to death becomes viable again if not outright preferred.* So it's a lot easier to just give Holy Trinity members some crowd control and keep things interesting that way than it is to make sure every boss has a good reason to bring along an overly specialized mez dispenser that can't do much else.

*Interestingly, I'd note that in a sense that WoW tanks and healers are actually a form of control and as such more subject to diminishing usefulness than people often realize. In fact, back in the day my old crew became the leading progression guild on our backwater server because we upended the usual wisdom and absolutely refused to coddle or tolerate prima donna healers and tanks just because those roles were ostensibly more valuable. Or, to put it another way, the value of a quality DPS player is that they help kill things faster and finish the damn raid in time for dinner. Whereas the value of an exceptional healer or tank is that you get to bring along less healers and off-tanks.