@AlexP Ugh. What would have the DM done, had the player rolled a 20?
@JonathanHobbs When they've started selling WotC stuff at near-US prices, probably due to some magical deal they made, new books suddenly became about 50% cheaper than the old ones.
Which was particularly striking when they were splat books from the same line, and stood side by side. $70 for Complete Divine, $40 for Complete Mage. (It was actually 4e books, but I can't remember the names at all)
I'm new to RPGs and I'm interested in having a discussion of some game design topics I need help with. I've learned that subjective discussion questions are off topic here. I'm willing to join a forum, but there are so many and I really don't want to join a bunch that are inactive or not really...
the highest upvoted answer is for a site that doesn't have a real homebrew forum so much as a general game-design forum, used more for making your own games than for 'brewing existing games
one, "is there a good forum for discussing 3.x" is an extremely broad question with no real way of adjudicating the quality of answers
it's exactly the sort of shopping question we don't want
secondly, yeah, it pretty much was a duplicate: there are very few places where people play, but don't discuss, or discuss, but don't play. In fact, there's only one that I know of, and that's this one
if a question would get the same answers as another question, seems like a duplicate to me
@KRyan they're only duplicates if they're also the same or very similar question, and "where can I find other people to play with?" and "where can I discuss this game with people?" are radically different questions, even if they might lead to almost entirely the same sites
both questions having the same answers is a really good indicator they're probably the same question, it isn't a reason on its own to close as a dupe
@JonathanHobbs I'd argue that it would be better, from the perspective of the site, if the original question had simply been broader and encompassed both things, and thus the site would be better served by editing the original question
but I'm not sure where that falls on our respect for the original poster
anyway, the question still should have been closed for being ridiculously broad, I’d think
@KRyan i guess that's possible! I erred toward not voting to close (and not voting at all, in fact) since I have a very vague idea of the discussion landscape available.
(lacking that knowledge, I am unaware of how broad it is, and it was likely there might be likely only a limited number of active forums)
@JonathanHobbs I mean, just in general, there's no way to pick a site because no quality is sought aside from being "good," so the only way to have a single, correct answer is for that answer to be comprehensive, which is... patently absurd
the number's finite, sure, but that's a mess of a question
@KRyan create an excellent canon answer covering the bases.
i don't think it's appropriate here though since they are different questions, and probably should be kept separate, even if they do coincidentally end up with similar answers.
they aren't asking about two sides of the same thing, just two different things. they just happen to be two sides of the same thing because currently the sites for discussing these things are also the sites where people look for other people to play with.
@KRyan We tried this on B&CG with "Okay, let's only explain the attack phase once," and it made the site feel unwelcoming and the questions kinda unmanageable.
There's also a specific case where there were two similar questions about the same MTG card, asking about different aspects of it. Both had 90% identical answers, because both simply had to explain the attack phase, the stack and casting, and where the relevant part of the card fit into the picture. Both, incidentally, covered the other as a result.
They were closed as dupes at first, then the community decided to reopen them.
since... well, they are different questions, and the answers are different to each, even if the answers incidentally answer the other question.
I think I've basically gained no points in the last month or so. I just keep seeing questions I kinda want to answer but, enh, not entirely. Mostly because my answer would be slightly contrarian and an answer to the question but purposefully swimming against the grain of normal D&D advice (which is something that works sometime but not always, and is a lot of effort).
I posted a thing on meta about the privileges page for 10k tools (and how it doesn't really say where they are), in case anyone has anything they feel they want to add to it
Keeping true to form, I deliver to you yet more musings on the feel of Next.
Not too much to say about this one. The circular logic of keeping Vancian casting in D&D because it's D&D is mildly sigh-worthy. The point on "narrative cohesion", and rogues losing it because they couldn't sneak attack golems in 3.5...
It is entirely backwards. Given the definition of sneak attack as anatomic strikes, it was perfectly coherent to not be able to sneak attack golems, and therefore to use golems when possible. It was boring for rogues to not be able to use their big class feature.
Restrictions on sneak attack weren't removed in 4e because that made for better "narrative cohesion". They were removed because doing so improved the gameplay.
> In the last column, we defined feel as a quality that matches your mindset, thoughts, and decisions as a player with your character’s mindset, thoughts, and decisions.
I'm pretty sure there are, like, five pretty good words for that already. Starting with "immersion" (which is a word I kinda hate, but plenty of people have used it successfully to write about stuff).
Incidentally, I'm pretty sure FR is gonna be their default setting.
> You can also use the language of the rules to precisely describe your character’s mindset and approach to spells. If you have only one 3rd-level spell left to cast, it makes sense for your character to say something like, “I can cast fireball or fly once more before I need to rest and regain my power.” The mechanics describe the world in terms that make sense to your character.
Like, Exalted tried to make this a thing. But it requires, well, actually fluffing up your mechanics and being willing to make a setting where "His power level is over 9,000!" is a thing a character could say.
"My invisibility spell sucks because it's impossible to make a spell that does something as well as a person can do on their own with hard work and training."
"That's strange. It's almost like one of the Laws of Magic is 'thou shalt not aggravate the thieves' guild.'"
> many people come to D&D having read plenty of books and seen many fantasy movies [...] as a result, the feel of magic in the game might be off for them. However, even as we stick to our guns and maintain D&D’s identity through the feel of the game’s traditional spellcasting mechanic, we can keep the needs of these other players in mind—for example, by creating options for groups that want to use spell points in their game.
Because The Hobbit and Harry Potter are all about spell points.
Yeah, that whole bit reads like "Vancian casting is D&D, but a couple decades ago we tried this other thing called spell points to satisfy you savages, so you can have that, too. Eventually."
This whole article is literally, "Mechanics affect the fiction. So we will make our mechanics just like they were in the past in order for the fiction to be the same. Because we want the fiction to not deviate from however the mechanics forced it to be previously."
There's actually a vague thought I was hoping to bounce off of you guys. 4e was unashamed of being a game. The very narrative cohesion Mearls talks about was a secondary concern there. Narrative arose out of rules, the end result of play. In a given round, you thought of which power to use to achieve tactical goals, not of how much you hated your enemy or how slippery your sword handle was with your sweat. Afterwards, though, you could look back and see heroes fighting villains.
Game rules succesfully encouraged the creation of narrative. By demanding players and characters think the same, you're preventing the game mechanics from doing their job. The burden of creating heroic stories falls back on players.
I definitely wouldn't say never thinking about the fiction beyond the game mechanics until you're done with a scene is a good thing. That kills the whole point of the game for me. (And I'm not saying this as an "immersionist," at all.)
@AlexP Hrm. You're right, I've phrased it poorly. You don't have to wait until the end of the fight to enjoy the fiction. You experience the fiction as by-product of play, even if you don't consciously set out to create it (which you can). The mechanics of 4e are evocative enough to facilitate this.
@Magician Yes. That and 4e accepted the fact that the game's role is to be the game, not the story. 3e has no division between "the mechanics of a spell" and "the fluff of a spell", because both of those are described as one thing: "the rules text of a spell." 4e went to great effort to create a divorce between "rules text" and "flavour text", made the rules unadulterated mechanics, and created entirely mutable flavour text to make it make sense.
That gave it its philosophy: make the rules fun, and then make them make sense
the fun value was above the sense value and simulation was of low concern
not that they wanted to sacrifice sense for fun, but they were willing to push the boundaries, like creating non-Euclidean geometry because it was just easier to deal with mechanically
In this philosophy, suddenly miraculously the entire story could happily be stripped out and you would be left with the same game. Refluffing was easy - it was okay to be a wizard who shot his spells with a bow and arrow, or turn your divine cleric into a rambling monk with no divine presence whatsoever - because none of that was important mechanically and all you had to do was make sure your mechanics still made enough sense to keep your group happy
all of the gods could be entirely replaced, the alignment system removed, the canon descriptions of every class and race ignored
(even paladins and clerics work the same as everyone else, and there are no special caveats about losing their powers - the book offers the alternate flavoursome option of your order or other faithful mortals hunting you down)
@trogdor which is a pity, because I think they must have sacrificed them to the Goddess of Game, and the Goddess smiled upon them, and 4e was made, and it was good.
MTG's Mark Rosewater has written the article about that time he and everyone else on the team got called into the president's office (and dressed down super-hard and basically forced to completely reorganize their design process) like five times now.
That really depends. "Here's how we restructured the way we do everything in order to make a better game than the one you played five years ago (maybe the one you walked away from)" is actually a fine article.
It's not like people haven't lived that and felt the mistakes firsthand.
I'm sure there's risk to saying anything, but, well, I think there's risk to saying anything.
I think I'm just gonna go back to laughing about how the latest feel article is just tautology central. Its thesis seems to be "Let's make the D&D where you're still stuck with lots of quirky D&D things but now there's even more pressure to talk about them in character."
I think it seemed like a plan that was good in foresight: surely there's something you can plug everything into, right?
working out what that is isn't easy. It sounds possible, so long as you're going for some particular area, but they're going for every area and appear unable to learn important lessons
@AlexP paizo called out crap levels, rearranged how powers are distributed between classes, gave races a net gain in points (minor but fun change: you're gaining, not just purely making sacrifices), and did away with some crazy out-of-control stuff like polymorph
at least that is the stuff that immediately strikes me
oh and they called out (implicitly) the idea of low-level casters being able to just run out of spells and becoming punching bags.
WotC played around with many of those things, too, in the end days of 3.5. Complete Mage had reserve spells, that granted wizards at-will effects as long as they were prepared, for instance.
The wizard can choose to not use the big spell, and continue enjoying at-wills. Which, yeah, is crap compared to having at-wills and encounters and dailies, but whatchagonnado.
> many people come to D&D having read plenty of books and seen many fantasy movies [...] as a result, the feel of magic in the game might be off for them. However, even as we stick to our guns and maintain D&D’s identity through the feel of the game’s traditional spellcasting mechanic, we can keep the needs of these other players in mind—for example, by creating options for groups that want to use spell points in their game.
ok, so harry potter wasn't mentioned, a worse thing was mentioned
"you've probably read or seen something with a different magic system that you like, so we need to appeal to you too!"
Spell points kinda make sense if you think of them as relating to the fictional thing-that-is-happening in the same way hit points relate to the fictional thing-that-is-happening.
Characters in other media clearly don't have hit points.
@JonathanHobbs I very much took that as "We'll have a variant class or two that has this instead." Based on something from an earlier article, I thnk.
I just can't get over how that article is one giant tautology party.
It's all about how the players think of fiction in earlier-versions-of-D&D terms so really this next game is about creating that feel by being like earlier versions of D&D.
I'm just gonna repeat this quote forever and ever and ever:
> You can also use the language of the rules to precisely describe your character’s mindset and approach to spells. If you have only one 3rd-level spell left to cast, it makes sense for your character to say something like, “I can cast fireball or fly once more before I need to rest and regain my power.” The mechanics describe the world in terms that make sense to your character.
user61230
@AlexP To tangentially address your question, I ask you another (because I don't actually know): What does BWG mean when it says "routine tests always count for advancement"?
@Emracool So, things either advance "as stats" (always based on difficult + challenging tests).
Or "as skills" (routine + one of difficult OR challenging at lower tiers, difficult + challenging at higher tiers).
So, advancing B6 Will to B7 requires, like, 3 difficult and 2 challenging.
Advancing B6 Greed to B7 requires any two of {6 routine, 3 difficult, 2 challenging}.
IIRC.
user61230
7:52 AM
Ah, that makes sense. I think the answer to your question may be along the lines of "adventuring is as much about that which you cannot do as it is that which you can."
Probably 70% of the answer to my BW question is just in Adventure Burner. But it's a very important question for understanding the system as a whole, so I figured we should support it here. Also, on top of that, since I'm the one actually asking it, I'm trying to force people to go above and beyond AdBu in my framing of it.
@Magician that was nice, but on a slightly related note, that was one of the only things that kept casters from killing every non caster opponent they ran into
what I liked about 4E was the fact that balance was much more stable
even if that was partly because all the classes played in similar ways in terms of general mechanics
it was nice that casters no longer gibed similarly leveled, any-non-casters, (or even other casters), but were also not subject to some of the limitations 3.5 casters had
I have to admit though, when I say "much more stable" in comparison to 3.5, that doesn't say too incredibly much.
there were definitely still quite a few ways I found to break things
> So we’re not sure how to handle the fact that a quarter of people who have jobs today make so little money that they also receive some form of public assistance, or welfare – a proportion that’s much higher in some of the fastest growing sectors of the workforce. Or that 60 percent of able-bodied adult food-stamp recipients are employed.
@JonathanHobbs <-- By the way, this is the USA. For some perspective, Australia - a country that is actually socialist - has somewhere in the range of 10-20% of its population on some kind of welfare. (We have a lot of different public benefits, so it's hard to fully quantify)
i.e. we are the people who believe in redistribution of wealth, and who like the idea of people being supported by the government to some degree.
Most of the answers to this (ancient) question try to find rationalizations and justifications as to why specific D&D settings don't fall to the trap that the D&D mechanics lay for them.
Anyone has (or has links to) well thought-out, logical explanations for why magocracies and theocracies are not the dominant forms of government of D&D worlds? I'd also be really interested in similarly deep explorations/explanations of how these two forms would work in a D&D setting.
In my opin...
What's missing, to my eyes, is a good metagaming/metastory answer saying that what is good for gaming (magic-on-demand, constant growth in personal power, an adventuring ecosystem) isn't necessarily good for stories (a believable, coherent setting with working social and economic assumptions).
Take opera, for instance. The plots of operas are, if judged on their narrative merits, extremely simplistic, even stupid. But it won't be judged on the same terms as a play, or even a musical, because the genre conventions determine that the story is there purely as a framework to carry the music, so it doesn't matter.
Likewise in many roleplaying games. The world needs to be just believable and coherent enough to carry the personal stories of adventure, no more.
I'm new to RPGs and I'm interested in having a discussion of some game design topics I need help with. I've learned that subjective discussion questions are off topic here. I'm willing to join a forum, but there are so many and I really don't want to join a bunch that are inactive or not really...
