I'm not sure how they found me, but I'm not surprised.
Some time I need to sit down with the chat and see if we can't brainstorm snappy intros for a half-dozen tweets that I can't nail down on my own, but which feel like they could be Campaigned By.
Don't forget the disclaimer that role and circumstance justify some massive modifications to those numbers, but those are the baselines.
IE, if you punch in a brand-new blank monster on the Monster Builder, you'll probably get those kinds of numbers.
Hm. Today on rpg.se, I have been told me I'm explaining the obvious and shouldn't be making things so complicated, and on another question I've gotten downvotes for not explaining enough.
The balance is preserved.
Okay, I'm off to give a client a bill that's about $1,200 more than he expects. Wish me luck.
Textbooks about Russian history often discuss the importance of trade routes "from the Varangians to the Greeks," which allowed ships to pass from the Baltic to the Black Sea using a network of waterways and portages. I'm interested in some of the practical details of that journey.
During the pe...
@AlexP Seems interesting, though I don't have access to most academic resources right now (need to get my university ID and proxy access working again), and a glance at Google Scholar shows most resources for this are in Russian.
@JonathanHobbs When the American Declaration of Independence was written, all the men signing it were basically begging Britain to do its damndest to hang them as traitors.
If you look at the signatures on the document, most of them are very small and cramped.
But John Hancock, the President of the Congress which drafted the Declaration, signed big, bold, and right in the middle of the space for signatures, with flourishes and underlining.
It was a brave act, and his name has become associated with signatures and the act of signing one's name, especially when it obligates you to something.
Going from 3.5 to 4e was a bit of a shock; it's a lot more focused. It knows what it wants to be, and if that's what you want to play then it's great. Otherwise it's not good fit.
I am trying to get some of my group to look into pathfinder but with the recent re-issue of 3.5 books with errata incorporated I don't see it happening
And going from a system with the years of expansion material that 3.5 had to a new system is always going to be a bit rough, if the expansion material is part of your gamestyle.
4e's got plenty of lovely expansion material now, so that's no longer an issue (and it underwent its own half-update like 3.0 to 3.5, which ironed out a lot of kinks).
We much preferred 4e to 3.5, but eventually we realized that the fundamental problems we had with 3.5 were with D&D, not with any particular edition of it.
D&D just isn't the kind of game we want to play, so we stopped trying to force it to bend to our playstyle and started looking for systems that were shaped like our desired game experience already.
That is making me curious as to what you lot considered the problems
hmm ok, I can't really 'place' what you describe myself, our gripe was just the lack of freedom in 4e (everything is streamlined, little place for DM ruling)
Subsystems: 3.5 (and its predecessors) fell prey to subsystems for two reasons. First, every time something needed to be simulated with detail, a new subsystem was invented to handle it. Second, many of those subsystems were class features. ESPECIALLY magic.
(I'm copy-pasting from an earlier explanation I gave.)
Because D&D is a system in which choice is power, whoever has the most subsystems with the most choices is the best.
A fighter is inherently weaker than a wizard simply because the wizard has access to more choices than the fighter. This is due to the inherent assumption that martial ability is a base state to which other abilities are added.
4e threw that out with the powers system, which I loved. Martial ability was now on par with magical ability because in the metagame they were on the same level field, just flavored differently.
@BasJansen I have not found that to be the case, but it's hard to argue specifics because there's no such thing as D&D (meaning that each group's experience may be so utterly different from another's that comparisons become difficult if not meaningless).
Second point: Goblin dice took me a long time to catch on to; they're very insidious.
The basic idea is that in combat, it doesn't matter if one particular swing kills a goblin or not; you've got so many rolls that eventually the goblin goes down.
This is fine and dandy in its place, but the d20 system uses goblin dice (a single swingy die to determine a single outcome) EVERYwhere, regardless of whether it's appropriate.
Goblin dice are totally inappropriate the way they're used out of combat in 3.5. Diplomacy is the most common complaint here: a single die roll determines something very important.
4e attempted to fix goblin dice with the skill challenge, and while it's a good idea you really need a modification like Stalker0's to make it work the way they'd like it to.
(The skill challenge, constructed properly, mitigates goblin dice out of combat in a manner similar to the way they work in combat, so that's nice. Still not great, but much better.)
Hmm, my personal view on that (in diplo's example) was that the roll just reflected how well you manage to tailor the speech to the recipient, you still will have a high diplo result with a low roll but high skill
Lastly, lies: D&D, for a wide number of reasons from personal blindness to economic necessity, has a long and proud tradition of claiming that its systems can be used to achieve any game experience you might desire.
That is, it claims to be a universal RPG system when it is, at best, a decent combat system with some non-combat utility thrown in as an afterthought.
4e is probably one of the best, tightest crunchy combat systems around. But making it do anything except that becomes an exercise in how much the group can ignore the system and do their own thing around it.
So I spent about eight years trying to make 3.5 support narrative games that it claimed to be able to do, but which it was really incapable of doing. My successes were in spite of the system I was using.
Then I moved to 4e, and it was glorious in its not-3.5-ness, but it still made promises it couldn't keep. It was still heavy on the goblin dice and the combat, and narrative action needed to take place around the system rather than within it.
Now I understand that I was expecting D&D to do things D&D doesn't do, can't do, doesn't want to do, and that the fact the game kept insisting it could do these things makes me a little bitter. Because I believed it.
So I've moved on to FATE, and my group is loving it, because FATE is a system that supports the game experience we want to have. D&D isn't inherently bad (although it has some abysmally stupid elements kicking around), but it isn't what it told me it could be, and it's not what I want.
One of my players was overjoyed that not only does Fate process attack and damage from the same roll, it also rewards you for rolling higher than the target number, and the reward increases in direct proportion to how much better you rolled than you had to.
Personally, I just found that when you spend at least 75% of your character creation/advancement on combat, it becomes the default mode of problem-solving and I wanted to tell stories where that wasn't the case.
@BasJansen What I actually like about Pathfinder, as opposed to 3.5, is that you still have a ton of character creation and customization options, but rather than have them spread over hundreds of prestige classes in dozens of splatbooks, you can do an awful lot of customization with alternate class feature, right in the core classes themselves.
So you can have the class features you want straight from the get go, and not feel like you need to slog through 5-6 "boring" levels to get to the prestige classes you want.
Though all in all, I also go for the narrative style @BESW mentioned. Though my own FATE campaign was unfortunately aborted after two sessions.
And before we really wrapped out heads around the narrative mechanics.
Yeah, I wouldn't switch mid-game. But I've been very pleased with it as a 3.5-replacement. I've played both a Bard and an Oracle (~= Favored Soul) and was pleased with the levels of customization, especially since I'm hardly a good optimizer. It felt like the rules went out of their way to allow me to add my own flavor, rather than being entirely neutral on the matter.
@AvnerShahar-Kashtan That's bound to happen. The only thing I didn't like was they didn't really capture how tired they made them. They only slept like 2 hours a day if I remember right.
Any of the above rps I will do... Though I am in the mood for animals. I have no limits, I prefer you don't either. My skype is lilgerndt, thats what this will be over.
Any of the above rps I will do... Though I am in the mood for animals. I have no limits, I prefer you don't either. My skype is lilgerndt, thats what this will be over.
