The Gaming Den

Within AD&D, 3e, the Tomes, TNE ramblings and hell even Pathfinder there is the potential for an edition which can move the game significantly forward while still having mechanics familiar to the player bases of those games in a way 4e never was ... a grognard's 5e so you will.

Whether that familiarity is important enough to justify compromising game design is of course debatable, but that's not what I want to talk about. I just want to try to identify what problems remain after Tomes, which of those are fixable with evolutionary means and what those means might be.

As minor problems I'd classify for instance aspects of the skill system, fear mechanics, grappling, some broken spells, charisma not being important enough, crafting discriminating against non casters and finding a good way to deal with fractional BAB/Saves without needing a calculator.

As unfixable problems while keeping the mechanics familiar I'd classify for instance Five Moves of Doom, paradox of choice and too much rolling/interrupting. It can be mitigated, for instance additional classes could use WoF mechanics, you could give only a single extra attack from BAB, make haste/speed work differently and remove celerity, contingency, foresight, cheap ways to quicken spells ... but ultimately people will expect the Vancian casters to have Five Moves of Doom and roll lots of d6s for damage, and the fighters will need their AoOs (they are of course a 3e invention, but I think a still necessary one ... they were the natural replacement for simultaneous actions, which I don't think we want to bring back).

So, in my opinion fixable Problems :

- Rocket launcher tag.

- Focus fire, for when for some reason rocket launchers don't kill at once.

- Pure damage has been boosted to near rocket launcher status in and of itself, which is necessary to avoid padded sumo.

- It's smart to use your most powerful abilities on round 1, which creates a lack of dramatic build up in combat.

- PrCs while fun for us lego enthusiasts, and a great way to sell books, were too constricting.

- Too many bonuses and item slots.

- Slaughter is the default option in combat.


Potential solutions :

The first 4 can be solved by CAN. Rocket launcher tag would be prevented by SoD's having negligible chance of affecting an equal CR opponent on the first round. Focus fire could be prevented by letting damage give a large temporary CAN penalty, this way spreading out damage diminishes the offensive potential of your opponents (the equivalent of suppression fire). Low CR opponents would be taken out by finishing moves depending on CAN not by whittling away their hitpoints to 0, so no padded sumo. Damage could then be decreased and function not as a rocket launcher for martial combatants, but as a way to bring an opponent down on his condition track to make powerful abilities more likely to affect him.

Although I'm not a fan of the word CAN ... maybe Morale? (A bit iffy for mindless opponents, but meh.)

Paths are probably a better replacement for PrCs, something which just comes in addition to normal class progression rather than replacing it. Maybe even a generic gestalt path for dual progressions for which no specific path has been created yet.

For too many bonuses, you can remove all the standard bonus items and compensate for that elsewhere and then reduce the item slots ... but it doesn't help with the bonuses from buffs ... a limited set of buff slots perhaps? Or is that too MMO?

To prevent slaughter just allow massive amounts of negative HP before someone dies and provide more alternatives for the true killer SoDs which just take opponents out of the fight ... make slaughter an evil choice rather than a smart choice.

Any more problems you think are fixable? Opinions on why some of these might not be problems at all ... I'd love to hear it. General opinions on how stupid me and my opinions are, not so much ... but certainly expected :/

Any more problems you think are fixable?

Legacy stupidity like the percentage chance you roll to determine which color your Fire Shield is and how it's still harder to cure a round of stun than to bring someone back from the dead. What the fucking hell? This isn't a Denizen magic a Magic of Blue joke - that's an actual percentage roll in fucking Core for what the spell looks like, with no further effect.

Stupid overly-complicated resolution of anything that does multiple types of damage against vulnerabilities, resistances, and reductions. Resolving Flamestrike against something that has the Cold Subtype is protected by Resist Elements: Fire and Fire Shield (protecting against fire) turns "9d6 save for half: into an exercise in pointless complexity and undefined order of operations. Sadly, multi-damage typed attacks aren't even rare, as stuff like using Energy Substitution on Flame Arrow to stack multiple extra d6s on your archery is pretty good, and as I've found out Rainbow Blast is outright Win on a Tome White mage.

To catch all of these, you would need to go down the 4e route of ditching all of the spell lists and rewriting everything from the ground up - but of course that approach runs entirely counter to your wish for a "grognard 5e" game so it's gonna be a nonstarter.

For band-aids on these examples I suggest letting Lesser Restoration relieve stun and picking something like "any attack is only one damage type - the attacker may choose to make the damage any of the valid types"
or
"if you have resist Fire 5, then you resist 5 damage from any attack that does any amount of Fire - even if that fire damage is less than the amount of your resistance. So if you get hit with a flaming sword that deals 10 slashing and 3 fire (13 total), you resist 5 damage and only take 8)"
or
any number of similar simplifications of such things.

****

Also, Tome Armor badly needs a full-out T2.0 rewrite, but that rant is beyond the scope of my available time. So here's the short version: Flavor = Win. Mechanics = sorry, but they don't even come close to what we want them to do.

***

And nobody has yet come up with a diplomancy fix that people can live with. I say ban the skill entirely. The options are just Intimidate and Bluff - deal. This would necessitate rewriting Charm and Wild Empathy - but that's not so bad, as players already want Wild Empathy to actually have a chance to work in combat time

Energy resistance and DR needs a full rewrite. I would accept something easier to adjudicate or less stupid. I'd love it if it was easier to adjudicate and less stupid, but I'd accept just one or the other.

-Username17

Why is DR stupid? if I might ask? It seems pretty simple from what i remember.

DR 3/- means everytime someone hits you for damage you take 3 points off the damage total

DR 3/Silver means unless it's silver you take 3 points off, if it's silver, you take full damage?

Is there more to the mechanic I'm not remembering?
Fluff wise, it can be instant regen (like say trolls, or vampires) or it can be hardened armor (like Stone Golem)

Josh_Kablack wrote:Resolving Flamestrike against something that has the Cold Subtype is protected by Resist Elements: Fire and Fire Shield (protecting against fire) turns "9d6 save for half: into an exercise in pointless complexity and undefined order of operations. Sadly, multi-damage typed attacks aren't even rare, as stuff like using Energy Substitution on Flame Arrow to stack multiple extra d6s on your archery is pretty good, and as I've found out Rainbow Blast is outright Win on a Tome White mage.

I see your point, combining flat bonuses and percentage bonuses will cause a headache even when order is specified ... worse if not. Not exactly a world shattering thing to fix though. Wouldn't rank that higher than say the fear mechanics.

To catch all of these, you would need to go down the 4e route of ditching all of the spell lists and rewriting everything from the ground up

Why? You could just go through it with a fine tooth-comb and fix it case by case ...

In programming I know that throwing away everything and starting over is always satisfying when you have hacked at the code for far longer than you would have liked ... but rarely does that approach end up with the best functionality with the least amount of time, it's really more about writer's egotism than anything else. By starting with a clean slate you just create a whole new set of bugs, annoyances and limitations to be yet discovered ... instead of fixing the ones you know about.

What's the specific trouble with Tome armor? I've seen this mentioned a couple times, but I've never seen it elaborated more than "change it!".

Josh_Kablack wrote:Also, Tome Armor badly needs a full-out T2.0 rewrite, but that rant is beyond the scope of my available time. So here's the short version: Flavor = Win. Mechanics = sorry, but they don't even come close to what we want them to do.

What do you mean? I'm not that familiar with the armors other than that they scale by BAB or skill ranks.

FrankTrollman wrote:Energy resistance and DR needs a full rewrite. I would accept something easier to adjudicate or less stupid. I'd love it if it was easier to adjudicate and less stupid, but I'd accept just one or the other.

What is it you don't like? The fact that it tends to scale poorly and multiple damage types jump out at me. Am I missing something else?

Before I go further. CAN someone help me with CAN? A quick for dummies version could work, or a link to a thousand page thread explaining it. Either way.

To fix a lot of this, all that has to be done is go through the spells with a fine tooth comb. Every spell. Thats a big all, but its also something that I think would be mandatory for any new edition. IIRC thats the reason tome was started. Its a bitch to re-balance everyone down to fighters, so everyone is brought up to wizards. Tome was created to be a "3.75" edition of sorts, and so this was an acceptable idea. BUT if you are going full blown 5e, you need to do the hard work.

For prestige classes. Instead of 20 levels of the game, and every base class is 20 levels, I would like to have classes be as long as they need to be. Then make loads of classes. Some might be 3 levels long, some might be 20. No awkward "I need to take toughness for this class, but toughness blows now because improved toughness is out" situations. If your barbarian prestige class is printed in book 1 and it totally sucks and you fired that writer, you can put out "Berserker" in book 3 and it will be a defacto replacement.

I could live with the "Your first 10 levels give bullshit bonuses that literally and explicitly don't matter at level 11-20 and you take a totally new class" ideas as presented in the talks about mundanes in high level games. I don't love the idea, but I could deal.

Too many bonuses and item slots. I say something like use as many items as you want. None give bonuses, only active abilities. "I got shoes that let me walk on water. Now I walk on water". Not "I got shoes that give +X to something". I'd also advocate a "You take the highest applicable bonus" system. You have a feat giving +2, a party member gives +5 to all adjacent allies. You have a +5, not +7. Types and stacking is simply removed unless explicitly stated "This one power breaks the normal rule and can stack with one other thing."

Slaughter is the default. I would simply say nonlethal is the default assumption unless combating an unintelligent foe. To deal lethal damage you might even impose a -4 penalty on the attack roll or something. Unintelligent foes always deal lethal, but also always take the -4.

The scale and power of the abilities granted by the Tome armor are all over the place.

Krusk wrote:Before I go further. CAN someone help me with CAN? A quick for dummies version could work, or a link to a thousand page thread explaining it. Either way.

The idea is that you have a number that determines how awesome you are. Your target has a number too. When it comes time for you to attack your enemy, the difference is your Combat Advantage Number (CAN). Situational, conditional, and positional advantages can also give you more CAN. When you have a lot of CAN, you get critical effects on your attacks.

This does several things. First of all it allows for a great deal of scaling of higher level characters with a lot less crazy hit point and damage inflation. Because higher level characters automagically do a shit tonne more damage when attacking lower level characters, they don't need to be doing more damage all the time and monsters of their level need less hit points to survive. Net result: numbers can stay smaller and more manageable if you use a CAN. Secondly, it makes it so that bullshit monsters can't insta kill sleeping dragons. The CAN boost doesn't have to be enough to allow climb dogs to mercy kill wyrms.

There's a lot of specific discussion about specific implementation. But at it's core that is what it is: a way to include guard dropping backstabs without the kind of titanic number inflation that usually entails.

BUT if you are going full blown 5e, you need to do the hard work.

Agreed.

-Username17

sabs wrote:Why is DR stupid? if I might ask? It seems pretty simple from what i remember.

There's a whole bunch of non-interacting different types and some of them are completely useless (e.g. DR/magic). And spells bypass it completely for no particular reason (e.g. a spell that summons a non-magical spear bypasses DR but a regular spear doesn't).

And the amounts they give out to PCs are insultingly puny in general (although that could be fixed with Tome versions of PC classes).

Thanks.

CAN is a really neat idea. Problems I can see with using a system that uses it.

You have to track the differences between people's CAN. I feel like the end result of this is an awkward "I have a 5 combat ranking, you have a 4 lets go to the chart to see what you need to hit me and how much damage it deals" bog down that table top war games get. Is there an obvious solution to this problem I am missing?

Well one solution is always "make the DM work harder".

Presumably CAN is a little like AC, not exactly knowable (maybe use bluff/sense motive if players want to determine CAN for an opponent?). So the exact effects (and table lookups) can be left to the DM.

MfA: no making the DM work harder is not a acceptable solution.

In my opinion, the amount of work put in by the DM should be about the same put in by a player. This is an ideal situation but usually not likely because a lot of players go with "I waste her with my crossbow."

I'm a big believer in DM automation ... I wouldn't want to track initiative, spell durations etc etc etc without a computer.

Cynic wrote:In my opinion, the amount of work put in by the DM should be about the same put in by a player.

W-W-W-WHAAAAAT?!?!
care to elaborate on that a bit? that's some kind of crazy that I've never even heard of before. even if all you're running are canned starter-modules, the DM is still gonna be doing more work than any one player (well, either that, or the game is gonna suck ass).

sorry -- I just had to get that out.
thanks.

I was thinking a lot of DR should actually be a vulnerability.

So, werewolves. If you're really determined and good with an axe, you can kill one. But a silver dagger causes tissue death, burns them, etc.

(Side note: There's an urban fantasy series by Ilona Andrews that has lycanthropy as a virus. It hotwires the subjects hormones and neurochemical messages and, like, half of them go feral (referred to as "loup") and will go around alternately and randomly killing, eating, and raping people. The ones who don't make it a point of maintaining control. The flip side is...the virus can be taken out by contact with gold, silver, and copper, and the destruction of a virus releases some nasty-ass toxins and all. You can kill one if you're good, but silver or something like that makes it a lot easier.)

So, the fey should get fucked up by iron and things with iron in them.

DR/- could be a percentage, I guess. 10 percent? 50 percent? 75? I suppose that could scale.

Energy resistance could go likewise, except Energy resistance has the option of going to 100% resistance--also known as 'immunity'

Lots of DR acting as a backwards vulnerability has always bothered me.

Replacing DR/ER with percentages is a bad idea because they would no longer grant immunity to things. Fire Resistance 10 means you can sit down in a fireplace but even Fire Resistance 75% gets hurt in the fire and that's dumb. Similarly, things with DR are immune to mook armies on purpose.

BearsAreBrown wrote:Lots of DR acting as a backwards vulnerability has always bothered me.

Replacing DR/ER with percentages is a bad idea because they would no longer grant immunity to things. Fire Resistance 10 means you can sit down in a fireplace but even Fire Resistance 75% gets hurt in the fire and that's dumb. Similarly, things with DR are immune to mook armies on purpose.

Damn. That is a conundrum, isn't it?

I think that I'm going to treat the idea of CAN within FAR's resolution system as being something that kicks into play when trying to affect things above/below your tier; affecting things below is always easy; affecting things above is only possible to specialists in a field.

So, the Mortal fighter who gets Mastery/Zenith in Technique/Physique/Unarmed can hope to hurt, or hit a Heroic enemy; while a heroic character rolls a dice to see how many successes they get on lower-tier targets.

Conundrum?

%damage modification seems cool at first glance, but when you have to multiply or divide by an inconvenient number, it gets a bit intimidating. I personally don't have trouble actually doing the math, but I don't feel that I really get anything out of using it instead of a +- modifier in the right place.

It seems clear to me that damage multiplication should go and be replaced by addition and subtraction.

RadiantPhoenix wrote:Conundrum?

%damage modification seems cool at first glance, but when you have to multiply or divide by an inconvenient number, it gets a bit intimidating. I personally don't have trouble actually doing the math, but I don't feel that I really get anything out of using it instead of a +- modifier in the right place.

I was thinking the same thing, but tt's not terribly hard to figure 10 percent of something. Or 50 percent. Twenty-five and seventy-five are a bit trickier but manageable. But, if percentage-DR were used, I'd say pick some easy-to-figure numbers--25, 50, 75, and 90 percent reduction. 25% would probably be the bare minimum you'd notice or care about, so no need to bother insulting folks with shit like "5% decrease" and telling them they should care about it.

Side note, the percentage marks (reduction levels? Resistance levels?) can just let you ignore some damage for energy. You have 25% fire resistance? Congratulations, you ignore fire damage unless it's more than ten points.

Maxus wrote:Side note, the percentage marks (reduction levels? Resistance levels?) can just let you ignore some damage for energy. You have 25% fire resistance? Congratulations, you ignore fire damage unless it's more than ten points.

That is painfully counter-intuitive.

MfA wrote:- Rocket launcher tag.

It takes high level spells to be rockets, high level people should be functionally immune to spells, by virtue of saving on a 2+. Wizards clear the field of mooks (because they save on a 14+, not because they have 1 HP), the team fights their champions together.

- Focus fire, for when for some reason rocket launchers don't kill at once.

Leave it be. You spread out and engage all them to stop them focus firing on the team Wizard, they do the same to protect their Shaman. Wizard locks down the Shaman, Rogue sneaks through and ganks him. When there's just one foe, they should be saving on a 2+, and have area effect attacks, and good AC, and a big bunch of HP, otherwise they're just a gentle speedbump.

- It's smart to use your most powerful abilities on round 1, which creates a lack of dramatic build up in combat.

That's an encounter design thing. Limit the uses of "most powerful" abilities per day, and give lots of easy encounters, players can no longer use their best stuff until they know the fight is worthy of it.

Player controlled difficulty by encounter design. Good topic, newer modules are shit because every fight is full on, and thus gets nuked, so you need nukes to compete, and endurance means nothing. Bla bla bla.

- Too many bonuses and item slots.

No stacking, not ever. Caps on ability boosts.

- Slaughter is the default option in combat.

Monsters should do more that makes them worthy of slaughter, it's cathartic, and you get to keep their stuff.

Archmage wrote:

Maxus wrote:Side note, the percentage marks (reduction levels? Resistance levels?) can just let you ignore some damage for energy. You have 25% fire resistance? Congratulations, you ignore fire damage unless it's more than ten points.

That is painfully counter-intuitive.

Probably right, though I should have amended that to 'mundane fire damage' or some such.. But I'm not seeing too many other ways to handle energy resistances and have them matter. Having Fire Resistance 25 and getting hit with a red dragon's breath weapon makes a difference of "there's a few charred tatters of meat still on the bones." vs "all the soft tissues got burned off". Then it's supposed to bump up to flat immunity.

I'm open to better ideas, myself.