@SimonGill I can think of a couple shows that have tried, actually, to follow the Doctor Who model. But they were only able to do it through spinoffs, to greater of lesser success, whereas Doctor Who is built it become its own spinoff at any moment.
The closest thing to that which I can think of is the Star Trek franchise's use of the holodeck to provide single-serving "And Now For Something Completely Different But With The Same Actors Because We Are Cheap" episodes.
There are a number of shows that are able to do New Things every episode (Quantum Leap and Stargate SG-1 come to mind), but they all rely on a solid core cast to cajole the audience into each new scenario. I can't think of any other show with the ability of Doctor Who to throw away part or all of its cast at a moment's notice.
I have a personal theory about early deep-space missions going utterly insane (see also: Captain Archer) without holodecks, which justifies Voyager's revelation that the holodeck has an entirely separate power system that is completely incompatible with anything else on the ship.
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the first is that a specific poster (Joer) is frankly objectively incorrect about the balance of the feat/martial content; the comparison he makes to Weapon Mastery ignores the fact that Weapon Mastery is hideously sub-par to the point of total unplayability
The second is that @KRyan's post is seeing downvotes, likely from posters like Joer who have an incomplete or incorrect grasp of system mastery
The trouble I'm having is that writing something to address Joer's comment, which relates to the question, is less "Gareth makes a comment" and more "Gareth writes an essay"
Alright, so then that just leaves me with "I know how to address the complete factual inaccuracy, but doing so would take forever and ever and ever and ever and ever."
It's Joer's claim that @KRyan's feat is unbalanced, and the thrust of his claim is because it grants dependent feats or feat-like benefits
There's a specific hitch with Knockout weapons but let's ignore that for now because it's a wording problem
in terms of balance with the rest of the system and balance within the party/vs. monsters the environment, this claim is incorrect. In point of fact @Kryan's feat is still fairly weak.
First off: it looks to me like the comments are veering far from the original question (and in fact KRyan's answer itself might not be totally germane but it's not totally off-topic either so I'll ignore that).
So if in fact the conversation needs to continue, it should move on from that venue. However...
And the biggest reason is that while it provides immediate and bountiful return on the resource investment (to wit: spend one feat, essentially gain one or two more) what you get /back/ doesn't grant you additional options. It increases the power of options that you have, yes, but in the end all of them boil down to "You deal damage"
And even then it's limited in venue since you need to specialize in order to get access to those bigger numbers that suddenly appear
HOWEVER, I feel that this particular subject is currently relevant. The OP posted a version of their own and asked for balance standards. "
Balanced? Definitely no. It would be better than weapon mastery this way. Every fighting type will take it without a thought. Would you consider such a feat good?" <-But comments like that provide unhelpful information
And they stem from a failure to grasp system mastery
If the OP is looking to judge the balance of their version, then what we're seeing is misinformation being left
The OP will see the comments (while they last; remember, comments are ephemeral here) and the total +4 upvote on the answer, and be able to draw his own conclusions.
You've made it clear you disagree with the comments made, and if the OP or the commenter have further questions they can research, ask another question, or invite anyone involved to discuss it on chat.
Yes. I have Someone is Wrong on the Internet syndrome hard. More importantly, I have Someone Is Giving Bad Advice to a Novice Homebrewer Syndrome VERY hard
Interesting; this is the first time I've seen someone on this site explicitly make the point that, when analysing a 3.x type game, comparing the options of martial and magic classes is arguably a misreading of the system. ToB blunts this point, but it's a late-game outlier in an otherwise fairly consistent pattern.
As an acerbic aside in an off-topic and absurdly lengthy comment thread.
@Lord_Gareth: (I'm comparing this feat to the other options melee types have, not with the options casters have. Comparing it to caster options is methodologically wrong.) You noticed "without any serious optimization" clause? I assume that NPCs are optimized more or less equally to the party (and without broken stuff), and monsters are used as-is. So, without serious optimization your average melee Joe the Steelclad Fighter is invisibility+silence away from surprising just about anyone, and more subtle types like Unarmed Swordsages don't even need that. — Jeor Mattan36 mins ago
It could be argued that denouncing the anti-martial-options trend that is so prevalent throughout 3.x, rather than accepting it as an indication of systemic intent, is a textbook case of the fallacy of authorial intent.
Yeah, I think both are strongly denialist dichotomies.
Wizards repeatedly said they wanted 3.x martial and caster classes to be reasonably balanced against each other, but took no effort to actually achieve it until the system had already run its course.
Which means that if you're a person who has to take extreme views you can either side with what they said or what they did.
Much better. I'm not a theory expert or anything, but it removes one of 3.5's basic balance problems: multiple subsystems and overlays.
All 4e classes have the same basic framework, and are differentiated by class features that add to the framework (or in very few cases, massage it a little) but never abandon it.
I'd suspected as much; I think things like WoW have influenced it in that the classic roles (sneaker, healer, tank and caster) have been replaced with newer ideas for the classes (dps, control, tank, healer)
Every level 1 PC (with some exceptions that are balanced in other ways; see psionics) starts out with 2 at-wills powers, an encounter power, a daily power, and a racial power. They each have a feat, a couple of racial features, and the basic features of their classes.
@Rob In 4e those roles are explicit: defenders force the enemies to make bad choices about who to attack; leaders buff and heal their allies; strikers do strong single-target damage; controllers damage multiple enemies at once and/or debuff them.
Each class can also take on a different role as a kind of secondary specialty, depending on the class features they choose.
@Rob Healing surges are an abstract resource that is the foundation of 4e healing. Your number of surges per day are determined by class and Constitution.
Nearly all healing in 4e is done by allowing the "spending" of surges, which heals you for 1/4 your max health.
Everybody has the Second Wind power, which lets them spend a healing surge. After that you need your leader to use his powers that let you spend more, or you can pick up other powers and items that do the same.
If you run out of powers that let you spend healing surges, it doesn't matter how many surges you have left. If you run out of surges, it doesn't matter how many powers you have that let you spend them.
Generally the powers that let you spend surges recharge at the end of every encounter, while healing surges are a per-day thing.
@Rob Cards are a common method used to track powers, yes.
@Rob 4e has no agro. It has "bad choices."
The one feature every defender class gets is called a "mark." When you mark something, it gets a -2 penalty to attack anyone except you.
Each defender also gets some kind of "mark punishment" which makes enemies think twice about attacking someone other than the defender: fighters get a free attack, battleminds get to reflect some of the damage back at the attacker, wardens can push you around...
So your choice as a bad guy comes down to "attack the squishy, but take a penalty to hit and make get knocked around, or attack the guy with tons of health and high defenses, whose healing surges heal the most hp per surge of the whole group so it's the most efficient use of healing powers."
Most of your powers are combat focused, though there are some interesting interplay powers between combat and social, and the use of skills in and out of combat can be made interesting even if it's poorly executed as-is.
Most powers are Encounter powers, which means you get them back after a five-minute rest.
There are also at-will powers and daily powers, which work as you'd expect them to.
4e also has a strong emphasis on gridded combat, by providing players with numerous abilities that let them move, or force others to move, in order to gain advantages. And the GM is provided a number of terrain hazards and effects to use to make each battlefield geographically unique.
A number of powers also allow the players or enemies to create or adjust terrain.
If a group doesn't like minis on grids, 4e is not for them.
My group is quick to admit that 4e has some major flaws, but its flaws are in areas we personally find more overlookable than 3.5's, which is what we were using before.
I find it very nice because, for example, you can move from one class to another without having to learn a whole new subsystem.
Only psionics really break that consistency.
Instead of encounter powers, they get more at-wills and a number of "power points" that they can spend each encounter to "augment" an at-will to make it the equivalent of an encounter power (eg more damage, or a better debuff). Their power points scale with the number of encounter powers a 'regular' class would have at the same level.
Then everything just gets flavored according to class: a cleric's powers are his prayers and miracles, a wizards' powers are his spells and cantrips, a fighter's powers are his maneuvers and forms.
Yup.
Often a daily will have some effect that lasts the entire encounter, like creating hazardous terrain or giving you the ability to teleport every time someone misses you.
Like, both rangers and warlocks have an ability that lets them choose a target ("quarry" or "curse," respectively) and deal extra damage each time they hit that target.
Rangers can only make one target their quarry at a time. The strategy for a ranger is to make multiple small-damage attacks per round to increase the change you'll hit at least once to get your quarry damage.
What sort of class are warlocks then? I only really know them from Rolemaster, where they were a class that could self-modify (grow limbs, armour, etc) and curse people :)
Warlocks can curse as many targets as they want to spend the actions on, with the caveat that you can only curse the enemy closest to you, so you want to be moving around a lot.
Warlocks move around a lot anyway, because they get concealment (-2 to attacks against them) if they move at least 3 squares in a round.
When a creature cursed by a warlock dies, the warlock gets a bonus based on his pact: feypact lets you teleport; starpact gives you a cumulative bonus to a roll you make before the end of your next turn...
Warlocks are technically strikers, which means DPS. But especially if you go feypact, you can be a potent controller instead.
(Infernal pacts --devils-- are the real DPS powerhouse choice for warlocks.)
Put it this way: one of my players rolled up a feypact warlock. That gave him the at-will power Eyebite. If he hits with it, he's invisible to the target for a round.
Then he took the multiclass feat for paladin, which gave him the paladin's at-will mark as an encounter power. If the target makes any attack that does not include the paladin, it takes damage in addition to the standard -2 penalty from the mark.
Multclassing is now a minor thing you do through feats: the basic multiclass feat gives you training in a skill relevant to the class, and a limited-use version of one of the class's iconic abilities.
You can then take extra feats to replace your class's powers with the multiclass's powers, on a one-for-one-for-one basis. You also qualify as that class for prereqs.
There's another step up though, called hybrid.
At level 1 you can choose to be a hybrid, in which you get the features of two different classes in equal measure, scaled down to be balanced.
You can choose powers from either class to fill your power slots as you level up. It's usually a bad idea because the class features are designed not to synergise much in hybrids, but if you've got a particular idea in mind --especially if it requires having a lot of powers from two different classes-- it can be fun and maybe even powerful.
I did use hybridising to help one player build a character who never made attack rolls; we needed the power spread from two separate classes to be sure he could fill his slots with non-attack-roll powers.
@Rob Yes. The party quickly started optimizing for it; he could really only grant "basic attacks," which for many classes are subpar... but some classes have at-will powers that count as basic attacks.
4e shamans have as their iconic feature the ability to summon a spirit companion. It's a conjuration that they can send out onto the battlefield while they stand in the back (or fight alongside it) and they have powers which originate from the spirit instead of from them.
This guy was a dragonborn with a falcon spirit companion made of black, red, and yellow smoke.
He carried a shield in one hand, and in his shriveled-up other hand he loosely carried a totemic spear (he needed it to qualify for the feat that let him grant attacks to others when he got opportunity attacks; he never actually attacked with it).
(In my campaigns, spirits usually look like 3D tribal tattoos made of coloured smoke.)
Not really. There are classes with a number of summons (a particular kind of wizard and another kind of druid come to mind) but their summons are dailies so you'd have to pop a lot of dailies at once to do it.
There are plenty of powers that flavor their buffs or debuffs as summoning minions to help your friends or harass your foes, but that's purely flavor.
It is possible to stack up a goodly number of animal companions if you try, but it probably comes at the expense of having... yanno, your character make mechanical sense.
The DDI Compendium will tell you which books the stuff is in if you don't have an account, but WITH an account it'll give you all the mechanical details.
I am also about to watch someone winning a Super Smash Bros Brawl tournament using Zero Suit Samus, who is my favourite character in that game and yet is generally rated only B- or C-tier
We have no idea what to do with snow in the UK, we get it regularly in winter, but as soon as it falls we panic and the transport system grinds to a halt. Meanwhile in Moscow it's -15 and they're all "it's just another day..."
@Rob We did. Haven't really had anything significant for almost ten years, which makes me nervous.
But in the 90s we averaged probably two or three storms a year.
Most of them were banana typhoons (only knocked the bananas off the trees), but you can never tell you so gotta prep for them all like they're The Big Ones.
There was a weird storm once that was almost entirely dry: just a lot of wind.
But because it didn't have much rain, it had whipped up the seawater into the air and the salt was driven into the plants, so three days later everything green died.
Also our utilities sucked. Even at the best of times the power plants couldn't make enough electricity for the whole island, so we were on scheduled rolling blackouts most of my childhood.
@Rob Oh, believe you me I milked the "I'm from an exotic tropical island and will contribute to your claims to diversity" theme for all it was worth, and did my best to minimize the fact that I'm a white guy with family roots in Chicago and the Adirondacks.
Then when I got to freshman orientation they thought "GU" was the postal code for the state of Georgia.
In SC I learned that people think Guam is a) off the coast of Peru; b) in the Caribbean; c) in the Middle East; d) a small town in South Carolina; and that I know English very well for a non-native speaker.
Also that my accent is so impenetrable as to be unintelligible, or that I pronounce my syllables so clearly I must be British.
It's strange how much the accents over here vary in such a little distance; Manchester and Liverpool for example, very close but wildly different accents. All those centuries of no transport
@Rob BBC production filmed on location in Rome, cancelled before the end of the first season. Based on a series of books about a Roman policeman who is... less corrupt than everyone else, and how he makes that work for him (or not).
Starred Rufus Sewell.
Very interesting language choices; everything in the background, from newspapers to dialogue, is Italian. Everything in the foreground is English, but with whatever accent the is native to each actor.
It's a translation convention I haven't seen elsewhere.
Aurelio Zen is not a clear-cut good guy. He's just less corrupt than the people around him.
He'll take bribes, but he stays bribed.
He tries to make sure the right people get punished, but he often has to make it look like he framed them... and then he pressures his superiors to give him favors because he went out of his way to frame someone to get the case closed.
