and the fear of having to change for an unfamiliar environment is great. Keep in mind that each DM is a player first and then a GM to other unrelated characters

That... is a game I would never want to be part of. I've been in rotating-GM games, and they can be a lot of fun. But the rules have to stay relatively consistent.

not so much your usual tabletop game

most of the game revolves aroun the characters interacting without a GM ntervention

for example now my character has met a guy who's been harmed during a casual encounter in the afternoon and she's trying to convince him to let her heal him, but he's refusing.

ah damn

superior invisibility doesn't shield from blindsight or true sight

@Zachiel I am quite sure the Draconomicon is 3.5; it was published in November 2003, and 3.5 was unveiled in July 2003.

anyhow, it's not in the permitted manuals list afaik

brb

g'night

Goodnight.

I've got a question about the kickstarter FATE Core preview and its interface with DFRPG. That's not the kind of thing I can ask until the FATE Core is made publicly available, right?

@KRyan Well written yes but in some campaigns it can be might too powerful.

especially in a crowd who doesnt have the wits to minmax.

Some of those maneuvers do more damage than wizard spells of the same level.

and Psionics is barely able to keep on par.

and shouldnt be used for pure blast in the first place.

Blast a little yes. Use the rest of your power to make people do what you want.

@Novian I think saying that people who don't minmax are lacking in wits is kind of narrow-minded about styles of gameplay.

@BESW I think I said it incorrecly

Sometimes I do that.

And Tome of Battle is very different from most of the rest of the 3.5. I won't argue better or worse, but it's a game-changer that came very late in the game, and I can see how some groups might see it as contrary to what they think 3.5 is all about.

What I meant to say is ToB is overpowered in some campaigns. especially if they cannot optimize a character to be as useful or as powerful as the rest.

It isnt a one size fits all book.

@Novian Very true.

Especially in lower power campaigns. It allows the Martial classes to outdo most of the other classes at the same level.

I also disagree with KRyans veiws of the wilder. but Im not here to argue that.

it has its uses.

Wilder is what I use because I didnt like the Psions Wimpiness when it came to close combat and I didnt like Psi Warrior because its lower power points didnt allow it use of its powers very often.

I like playing a Wilder because it lets me shift my role where I want it to be.

that and eventually I can get around the Wild Surges Drawback.

It's very easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the way we like to play is the only or best way to play. It's also very seductive, being right.

I dont play to win.

I play to enjoy the game.

I say that but I still wont play a Fighter.

Fighter is boring to me.

ugh Im looking at the new character that im replacing one of my dead ones with and its flat footed AC is aweful.

his touch is nearly as good as his regular AC.

@Novian I'd argue that the people who cannot build characters at least as competent as Tome of Battle characters have been failed by 3.5

@BESW every single person I have ever spoken to who complained about flavor issues either didn't know how the book worked and had grave misunderstandings of its content, or felt that it was critical to the flavor of D&D that martials suck and wizards rule.

as far as material, it is literally just martial-as-it-should-have-been

it provides flexible, versatile classes that work, as opposed to the majority of those that come before that don't

@KRyan I'm not talking about flavor, I'm talking about exactly what you just said about its material.

Tome of Battle did not make any class obsolete, they already were

I called it a game-changer, which is what you're saying too.

Fighter, Monk, and Paladin are all atrociously poor design

see, I don't agree because I don't see the original classes as achieving what they were stated to achieve

it isn't that it changed the game so much as it made the game function the way the game was described as working

I'm just pointing out that whereas you see this as a welcome philosophy change, I can see that many people saw it as a change from the 3.5 paradigm they were comfortable with.

the game claims the Fighter is a good martial combatant

it's simply wrong about that

it's not a change in philosophy, is my point

the Warblade is exactly what the rules and fluff originally claimed the Fighter was

it was simply that the Fighter never lived up to its description

@BESW: basically, I am really irritated by ignorance being used as a justification for, well, anything

actually, while that's a true statement of my personal opinion, that's not really relevant here

in fact, considering that Tome of Battle eliminates the myriad traps in the system

it's far better for ignorant players

@KRyan [shrug] We've had this discussion before. I don't really have anything to add to it.

have we?

sorry then

it is something I feel strongly about

I've noticed.

what it really comes down to is that 3.5 is an awful, awful system

with only a handful shining points of quality

so when I see people playing 3.5, but banning or restricting those few bits of quality

I agree with you on many of your points, but your value-based conclusions seem to assume that your rubric is objective and that all of the 3.x system should be evaluated on the goals it only took on toward the end of its run.

so, what, we should embrace the stupid, awful ivory-tower design that littered the rules with traps and broken combinations? this is a good thing?

@KRyan That's putting words in my mouth.

well, what philosophical changes are you talking about then?

because that seems to me to be the primary difference here

you have not been specific about that point

Because I was five pages worth of explicit about it a week or two ago.

...or at least, that I remember

sigh

3.x began by trying to retain the basic fantasy assumptions that Gygax and his friends wanted to see, based on the fantasy stories they enjoyed.

A major part of that was the idea that magic is an overlay on top of a martial system, and that thus magic users should be more powerful than their martial counterparts.

ok, so you're saying that this was 1. intentional and 2. considered desirable?

because I do not see evidence for either claim

I don't think it was entirely conscious, but yes --financially.

well, if it was financially desirable for WotC that meant it was considered desirable for the players (or they thought it was)

Wizards had just acquired the brand and was introducing a new dice system to a game with a fanatic pre-existing base. They were going to do their best not to mess with the system where they didn't have to.

while I have met some people who explicitly embrace "wizards should be better"

most claim that somehow Core is balanced and that the extreme disparity between casters and martials is a work of fabrication or deceit

So it's not a matter of "fighters should be weaker," so much as it is "We don't want to piss off the fans who are afraid we'll ruin their game."

(which may have something to do with my aggressive stance on the subject, because I have been faced by particularly hostile members of opposing viewpoints)

Now, I'm saying that's how 3.0 started.

@BESW this implies though, that they at least thought that fans would consider their game ruined if it weren't true

but everything I've heard suggests that while linear warriors/quadratic wizards was a thing in previous editions of D&D, the disparities were never so extreme and the wizard did have to earn it by being weak early

@KRyan It's a very reasonable thing to assume that if you change something, the people who liked it are going to balk. Regardless of what that change achieves.

Yeah, they didn't do a really good job of it.

Remember, they were introducing an entirely new undercarriage in the form of the official d20 system.

so did previous editions explicitly state that "yeah, magic is more powerful, you should play a magic-user if you care about balance"?

I'm not sure, but it's very obvious they had no concern for class balance and magic generally had solutions for everything where martial power did not.

because part of my objection to pre-ToB books is the fact that they state the pretense of equal options, when they are in fact nothing like equal

Let me continue.

ok

This is a progression of changing attitude, and I'm starting at the beginning of Wizards' tenure as Keeper of the Game.

Within a year of D&D 3.0's release, the gaming at large community blossomed: Halo and WoW come to mind. The potential audience for a game like D&D became massive.

But appealing to a new audience is very different from trying to retain a pre-existing one.

3.0 was too new and had too much money put into it to justify scrapping it for a new expansion. Thus, I speculate, 3.5 was born.

3.0 had some obvious flaws, which 3.5 did fix in small ways, but they couldn't do the rehaul it needed. Also, they had no idea what their new potential audience actually wanted.

So as you look at the D&D 3.5 books you see them slowly moving away from magic-as-overlay and draconian class imbalance, and experimenting with new subsystems like Tome of Battle.

Some of the developers seem to have given up on the older material (see: lack of decent high-level fighter feats even after more interest was taken on a mechanical level to shore up class balance).

Others tried to fix it, and still others just started experimenting (ToB is really the first glimmerings of 4e ideas).

(aside: PHB2 does make some attempts in that direction though it's not nearly enough; Dungeonscape provides a high-power ACF, and Champions of Valor presents an ACF that literally gives the Fighter stuff for nothing)

I'm not basing this on what the books say their goals are. I'm basing it on the mechanics within them.

also, I feel like magic-as-overlay was heightened by the experimenting with subsystems

By their works ye shall know them, and all that.

@KRyan ....yes.

yes, there was a general acknowledgement that 3.5 relied on subsystems to function, that the Core mechanic was a good foundation but insufficient for any class

but that wasn't a new fact, just a new awareness

Again, I'm not defending any of these systems, just trying to give context because a lot of these debates seem to fall apart on the idea that all of 3.x was designed with the same goals.

I'm... not still not convinced about the goal-change

particularly if you're talking about 3.5 instead of the entirety of the 3rd edition

Something changed. It was obvious in the 3.0 shift to 3.5, but it kept going.

and my argument is that the change, at least from 3.5 PHB to ToB, is not a change in philosophy, just an increase in experience and understanding of the system

they learned that things they'd tried to do originally hadn't worked

and they learned why they hadn't worked

This is my theory of what it is, and I'm open to different interpretations.

@KRyan I think what they learned was to kill their sacred cows.

but I don't see the goals of ToB as being different from the goals of the martials from the PHB, merely as better at accomplishing the same goals

what sacred cow was killed? having classes based on a bare d20 system? that was a sacred cow?

that seems bizarre to me since they introduced it

The sacred cow of paying homage to the old ways.

what about ToB offends the old ways though?

It's different, that's enough. Martial classes get their own spell-like subsystems.

...so we return to the "oh no they have abilities labeled 1-9, they're spellcasters kill it!"

that's a stupid argument

utterly invalid

they are not spell-like

ToB classes do not play like spellcasters at all

And 4e has nothing to do with TCGs or MMOs, but that didn't stop character assassination based on those claims.

It looks like martial classes got spellcasting in ToB. That's freaky.

ok, but you seemed to object to my aggressive pushing of ToB as not being respectful to others' positions, but we return to the point where others' perspectives are based on misunderstandings, mischaracterizations, and ignorance

why should I respect that?

@KRyan I kind of suspect that you're familiar enough with theorycrafting and optimization that you may be forgetting that most players aren't, and that's okay.

I'm well aware that's OK

in fact, that is exactly why I recommend ToB so strongly

If you despise ignorance, do not meet it with insults and derision.

I can build a Fighter who could destroy a Warblade

but that's irrelevant

what's desirable about Tome of Battle is that you don't have to optimize it

Instead welcome the chance to gently inform, share in a person's discovery of new knowledge, and respect the pace they need to take it in.

and an optimizer can only push it so far

@BESW and I have done that when people seem receptive to it

If a person is not interested in your help, commend them to the Almighty and leave them be.

@TrevorField Welcome!

Looks like you'll need a little more rep to actually talk in the chat, I'm afraid.

Here's the thing: you actually catch more flies with vinegar than with honey, but for people, "a kindly tongue is the lodestone of the hearts of men."

People respond to things emotionally rather than logically most of the time. If ToB is unusual compared to the rest of 3.5, they'll need a bit of time to get used to it. I somehow doubt that most of people you run into who resist using it are brand-new to the system.

Gah! I really want to flood the SE with questions about the FATE Core.

@BESW well said.

@BESW noted. This book has many very interesting beasties. I like them :) if there's a way to convert them more easily than homebrew/inspired, I'd really like that. Hence my question, and guess-answer

@LitheOhm I really doubt there's any formula, but I'd be happy to walk through a custom conversion with you some time.

I've never tried it, but I've got experience in making monsters from scratch in both systems.

@LitheOhm Baha'u'llah said it better, but I've already quoted Him twice in the chat today and the passages on that topic are kinda wordy.

@BESW there was an answer for converting characters. If I end up doing the work for monsters than I'll definitely need help lol. I'd like that

@LitheOhm My pleasure! It sounds interesting.

@BESW definitely :) and well worth the time's contribution to the SE

Was there one in particular that stood out to you?

so far, the Tulgar. Spiritual, tribal, mercenary warriors. I also fancy the drow-morphed things with four arms

flipping through the book I spotted the Tulgar and it caught my interest. After posting the question and getting a few clues from the glossary, I began going page by page. At eighty-four when I stopped.

well, the Lolth-morphed drow. How they have the monsters and their respective lore, the angle they took for the planes in the game seems to make a lot more sense than it did in the smaller 4e book I read

@LitheOhm Oh? How so?

well, the shadow creatures for one. And the Forsaken, for two.

they did away with many of the 3.5 deities in 4e, didn't they?

The explicit 4e pantheon is smaller, but in place of the myriad gods there are now primordials and primal spirits.

And demons and devils and so forth, as in older editions.

And, as always, there's room for deities of whatever flavor the GM likes.

and 'immortal' is an entry to describe certain creatures, like angels and devils

@LitheOhm Right. It means they're native to the Astral Sea.

Well, roughly.

I see. Is "The Hunt" something akin to "The Wild Hunt" creature entry from 3.5? In the 4e Feywild?

Probably. Where are you seeing it?

one sec, gonna grab it. First 84 pages I'm willing to bet lol. Most likely in some creature's lore entry

I know there are references to a wild hunt, but I'm not sure if it ever got really elaborated on.

interesting take on the catoblepas, too

the drow-Lolth-morphed things I saw were the chitine

page 26, Catoblepas

Ahah. The official version of the 4e Wild Hunt is that it's kind of a force of nature.

"When the creatures of the Feywild embark on the Wild Hunt, it is often a catoblepas they seek. The catoblepas' ability to shift between worlds makes it one of the most challenging quarries."

k

People --usually hunters, often firbolg, but could be anyone-- suddenly vanish and are turned into Huntsmen who ride across the planes in pursuit of prey. When the Hunt ends, days or weeks later, they are returned to their origin with little or no memory of the Hunt except the wild exuberance and thrill of it.

It's mostly a Feywild thing, but isn't bound there.

interesting

similar to The Calling from Book of Vile Darkness, but only vaguely

It's largely a firbolg thing, and anyone who gets caught in the hunt can become an honorary member of a firbolg tribe.

....although I'm not sure why you'd want to.

Firbolg are the Feywild parallel of giants and ogres.

Firbolg, like the fire giants?

@BESW kk

They aren't evil, but they're very much savage hunters who embody death and the unforgiving wild.

And the ones that live in the Feydark are evil.

Ah. Norsemen lol

Rather!

do you have the 4e mm3?

Aye.

I really like the premise behind the Tulgar on 194. It's actually what made me go back on my promise to not peruse any more 4e material lol

today I took "dnd-4e" off of my ignored tags list

Heheh.

Welcome to the herd!

:)

what is the difference, when two separate options are below say the "standard action" tab, between a melee attack that is circled and one isn't? Something to do with action points?

The circle indicates it's a basic attack.

It's the default attack; melee basic attacks are what you use to make opportunity attacks, for example.

ahh k

When a Tulgar Savage gets a critical, its Critical Threat feature allows an ally to make a melee basic attack as a free action.

k

When a Tulgar Flesh Hunter makes a charge attack, he'd normally only be able to use Spear, as it's an MBA.

The Hunter's Onslaught power explicitly says he can use that instead.

did they do away with the necessity of combat reflexes?

Yes. "Opportunity attack" is now an action type that you can use once per turn except on your own turn.

k

It's usually provoked by someone leaving an adjacent square without shifting, or making a ranged attack while adjacent to you, but there are also powers with different triggers that you can use to take the place of your opportunity actions.

The Catoblepas Harbinger has one.

k. Auras are very common, compared to 3.5

no longer limited to stench or divinity

Yup!

And they do a ton of different things.

brb, chat won't scroll -_-

k

some trigger actions even involve creatures taking a semi-turn out of their turn, like Banderhobbs. Those entries confused me a bit

Let's see....

if an enemy in range is marked and attacks someone who is not that banderhobb, they shift and make a swallow attack on the creature if they're large or smaller. This is an immediate reaction. So it could theoretically try this on a whole party, if each are in range and they attack something else, before it's second turn in combat?

No.

Let's break this down...

k

First, marks. The Banderhobb Warder has two different standard-action powers that mark a target if it hits. A mark is a generic condition that imposes a -2 penalty to any attack that does not include the person who marked you.

k

Many effects or creatures that give marks also have mark punishment. That's the Swallow power.

misplaced the "end of next turn"

got it

so far lol

Right, so it'd be difficult for a banderhobb to mark the entire party at once.

But here's the clincher: Swallow is an immediate reaction.

yeah. Even a party of four against four warders, as long as each knows to attack the one that marked them previously, they could save themselves

aye

Aside from opportunity attacks, which are counted separately, you only get one immediate action per round.

interesting

That can be an immediate reaction or an immediate interrupt, but once you've taken one you're done.

so it can't use swallow and no escape in the same round

Right.

And it can't use Swallow twice in the same round either.

it can't swallow as a standard, either? Only when the conditions are met?

Right.

The Abductor can swallow as a standard action but not as a triggered action.

makes for more interesting combat than the giant toads outside the moathouse in Temple of Elemental Evil

k

And the Warder's swallow is at-will meaning it can use it as often as it likes so long as the conditions are met.

and it can't try again in any round that the swallow ability isn't recharged yet

this seems to make DM tactics more standardized, from a creature perspective.

But the Abductor's is Recharge 5, 6, which means once it's used the power you roll a d6 at the start of its turn until you get a 5 or a 6, at which point it regains the use of the power.

k

Encounter powers are only useable once per encounter; fairly straightforward.

aye

the number after the attack, ie. melee 2, is the range? What if two numbers are there, like the chitine grunt on thirty-one?

Yes, and let me look.

kk

Actually, that was asked four days ago.

lol, nice

ello

Yo.

@Novian hey

saw The Hobbit today. Was a good movie.

the 4e books don't look as expensive as 3.5. What gives? amazon.com/Complete-4th-Dungeons-amp-Dragons/lm/R3ROD4CJG2F1EU

Aw, hay. I so want to see that, but really won't have time until after the new year.

@Novian nice. We watched the original animated one on DVD a couple weeks ago :)

@LitheOhm is it ok that I hate you now?

Ive always wanted to watch that version again.

@LitheOhm I have two guesses. First, one's current and the other's old. Second, the DDI renders physical books obsolete for access to mechanics.

@Novian hehe. It happens :) at least we've got some adversity ;) it's on Amazon for about ten dollars.

@BESW k. Even when 3.5 was current, books were higher. Course I didn't shop Amazon then, either

Netflix has the DVD...

@BESW that too

Ive never bought a D&D book in my life.

(Netflix just started streaming to Guam earlier this year, and I feel so spoilt.)

Never had the money. never lived near a place that sold em.

@BESW once ya watch everything though it kinda sux having to wait for more.

I.... usually tell my players that if I'm going to GM someone else will be buying the group's books.

@Novian ...everything...? I somehow doubt that.

@BESW I'll have to remember that lol

Well Everything I would care to watch. Foreign films and anime and the like.

off-hand, do you have a link to this DDI @BESW?

wizards.com/dnd/tools.aspx

@BESW thank you much

It's a subscription-based online service that gives you access to a fully updated and errata'd searchable compendium of mechanics, PC and NPC builders, and semi-searchable, downloadable access to all 4e Dungeon and Dragon magazines.

Without a subscription, you can still search the Compendium and it'll tell you what powers have the words you're searching for and which publication they're in.

Heh My freind was just given a box of Dragon Magazines. Some are even 3.0 or older and we havnt looked through em all.

a month ago in fact.

It does not have most of the fluff and worldbuilding, and although it has all the mechanical rules you need the PHB and DMG to really make sense of it.

just a huge box.

@Novian ...so much mold....

nah they had plastic sleeves. nothin fancy but it kept em good.

Yeah, I'm oversensitive to mold and I live on a tropical island.

Plastic sleeves do nothing in a climate where you can leave for the weekend and come back to find your smooth white sheets are now furry and green.

Im allergic to it and I live in a state where the weather cannot make up its mind.

although it does seem to be settling in the general direction of "Freeze your extremities off" Cold

So glad I went to college in a southern state.

Yea Smack Dab in the middle sucks.

Pretty sure I would've turned into a popsicle if I'd been much further north.

Its always either too hot too cold or too something else.

We average a ten-degree span from highest to coolest temperatures.

I think our record low was in the 50s.

(6 degrees, and a low above 10C, for the metrics.)

@BESW kk

"The DDI pitch was that the 4th Edition would be designed so that it would work best when played with DDI. DDI had a big VTT component of its design that would be the driver of this move to get folks to hybridize their tabletop game with digital tools. Unfortunately, a tragedy struck the DDI team and it never really recovered. The VTT wasn't ready when 4e launched, and the explicit link between 4e and DDI that had been proposed to Hasbro's execs never materialized."

enworld.org/forum/…

This is very true.

that explains the lack of a 4e OGL

And for some time even the services I just mentioned were spotty or nonexistant.

and didn't the 3.5 OGL not come out until way later, anyway?

@BESW hm

@LitheOhm Not sure about the timing on that.

after my management class this past term, and a few other things, I've found myself actually interested in the dry nitty-gritty of how/why companies do what they do

I still don't let the builders do everything automatically, but they're very useful. Trust but verify.

my past self would find this current self aspect remarkably boring

@LitheOhm Motives are always at least passingly interesting.

@BESW before I came to SE, I was on a Proboard where we had play-by-post games. I believe the founder of that site said the same

(The builder once let one of my players take dragonborn feats on a goblin, because he'd learned to speak Draconic.)

@BESW quite. Just from my reading material, I learned a lot about different companies and their actions. It took a very example-based approach, and made history interesting to boot. Google, J&J, Pandora, etc

@LitheOhm I believe it's originally attributed to Lenin.

@BESW haha. The kinds of mistakes my spreadsheet would make, at least I don't sell it though

heh

And dice expressions on the NPC builder are... stupid.

@BESW noted. Did they deviate from the 1d6+1 standard?

If I want an average of 29 damage, it'll either go for 26+1d6 or 8d6+1.

That's... not an exaggeration. I've seen that.

yeah, probability. Right.