@Zachiel Ok so the Gold dwarf has bonus feats listed. Do I pick one of those, a regional bonus feat and my 1st level feat or how does that work?

you have one feat at the first level, all the regional feats that aren't in that short list are out for you. Otherwise you can choose one of thise or a non-regional feat.

@Zachiel I knew I was limited to the list of the region I came from. What about the racial feats that were listed? Are they just bonuses I can get using my level or regional feat?

which racial feats?

Hammer Fist, Metallurgy, Skyrider, Stoneshaper.

I was going to take Metallurgy.

@Aaron they're not bonus feats, they're feats only golden dwarves have access to. You need to buy them with your one-feat-every-three-level

@Trajan Ok. Then I think my chara is ready :)

(including the feat you gain at 1st level)

I don't know if this was shared in here, but... This seems like an interesting story to work with.

It makes me think of Suicide Bunnies

I wonder why Wizards doesn't just continue to release supplements for 3.5 and 4E...

I'm glad they don't. I have no need to have new material making the one I use obsolete

Yet I wonder the same

Economics.

They don't have the manpower to support more than one system at a time.

what they are doing is the easy thing, releasing their old stuff in digital form

Their primary revenue from 3.5 was selling new content, and they were running out of new content people were interested in buying--also, the wider RPG was experiencing trends different from the 3.5 paradigm.

Hasbro bought Wizards and if D&D didn't start making more money they were gonna shut it down. Since 3.5 was losing steam, they came up with 4e: a new system (and thus a whole new set of splatbooks) with online subscriptions to boost revenue.

However, this split the audience and many 3.5 fans moved to Pathfinder or continued to use their already-paid-for 3.5 books.

4e made enough money that D&D didn't get the axe, but it's also on the way out as a revenue source.

I think there is also a feeling among some of the newer generation of 4e developers that 4e isn't D&D to them.

D&D Next was originally intended to try winning back the fans of previous editions without alienating the 4e fans, so that Wizards will have a larger audience to buy their new content.

specifically mearls

(that's a sense though, not a fact)

In theory, D&D Next will be like publishing new content for all the D&D editions at once.

But without needing to devote manpower to each separate edition.

In practice, of course, that's the pipe dream of an idiot.

But it's the only solution they can come up with to appease the Revenue Gods.

and this is where the digital content library comes in. They think they are at once creating markets for the new rule set and at the same time creating a market for the old content in digital form

The modern RPG environment is increasingly focused on niche games that focus on a specific gameplay experience.

whether they are or not is a huge question

Hasbro won't let D&D survive at niche market revenues.

So Wizards is forced to make D&D take the shape of niche market games (catering to specific playstyles) without losing their monolithic "flagship" status that brings in the big bucks because they're what everybody plays.

Hence their need to identify what is essentially "D&D" that they can retain (and thus retain their brand recognition as The RPG) while simultaneously learning how to provide a customizable experience (in order to, within a single system which a small number of developers can maintain, replicate the wider RPG market's multi-system experience).

They are, effectively, trying to encapsulate the breadth of the entire RPG marketplace within their own franchise, so that people buy their new stuff instead of trying other games.

You really have to admire the scope of their vision.

It takes some gigantic brass clangers to even come up with it, much less think you can accomplish it, and sell the idea to the bosses.

@shatterspike1 I recently came across the idea of "mature" game engines.

That is, the point at which an engine's potential has been explored, and any new content released for it may be creative, but probably won't be innovative.

@BESW So 3.5 is one of those, given the area has been mostly explored.

Fight, the 3.PF engine seems firmly mature. New content is made for use in the system, but new ideas for the system aren't really coming anymore.

Once an engine has matured, its economic viability relies on how many people are content with its mature state--and as it gets older, more people will feel like they've milked all the experience they want out of the engine and are ready to move on.

A canny publisher never lets their engines mature.

They could always branch out

4e was a way to further grow the not-quite-yet-mature d20 System engine, and 3.5 was left behind.

Or "A canny publisher is already moving to a different engine"

A mature engine is one that is losing customers.

You know, give spell creation rules on 3.5, monster template guidelines, that sort of thing.

@shatterspike1 They did both of those back in 3.0.

Really? Which books?

Epic Level Handbook and Savage Species respectively. Interesting reads, but proved that the game developers didn't really know what they were doing.

Epic Level Handbook only had those rules for Epic Level Spells.

@shatterspike1 Nuh-uh

Spell seeds were explicitly back-engineered from the core non-epic spell lists, and then forward-engineered into generic templates for any spell, epic or not.

The claim is made right there in the spell seed chapter.

Whether you believe them or not is up to you. I'm not sure I do, but it sounds nice and it is the official claim.

4e matured some time after the Essentials releases started, and D&D Next is past due, from a "never have a mature game as your flagship" standpoint.

such a shame the industry doesn't have more players...

@shatterspike1 The industry's got plenty of players. It's Wizards that seems to only have one KIND of player on its staff.

@BESW I'm having a bit of a hard time finding the "or not" part of the book.

@BESW I was under the impression the industry was so small that it tends to die out every decade or so

@shatterspike1 It's been years, let me see....

"Behind the Curtain" sidebar, page 91, and the first paragraph of "SEED DESCRIPTIONS" on page 92.

I'm trying to find another citation, too.

Anyway, both of them make it clear that the seeds are based on extrapolations from non-epic spells.

The sidebar in particular talks about "lowest-level representatives" of each seed.

Oh wow... well this would make non-epic spellcasting even more hilariously broken than it already is.

Yes. Yes, it would.

As I said, both the spell design rules and the monster design rules really only prove that the developers had no unified vision--or even much of a clue.

It's sad when the industry giant with millions of dollars has far less of a clue than a tiny one or two man indie operation.

I can almost forgive 3.0.

It was practically a brand-new thing.

The d20 System changed the face of RPGs, and they were at the untested forefront of the endeavor, so not having a clue kind of comes with the territory.

@shatterspike1 not really. there is so much going on, so many moving pieces, so many freelance contributors. A game like D&D is a massive undertaking

it's like building a fully functional Cessna vs building a model airplane

And yeah, when you've only got three guys on your team communication and ideas are going to be moving more quickly and with less intermediary input.

Anyway, I have to go for now.

When you've got a larger team, and the bank looking over your shoulder, and the pressure to put out a lucrative game rather than a good one....

yeah, and the pressures for D&D are not just about getting the mechanics right. So much of their brand is pure production quality.

the art especially, but also the settings and making sure setting material is consistent with the wider stories they are telling across the brand

@waxeagle [psh] [snort] [BWAHAHAHAH]

I know what you mean, but... [falls over]

not saying they succeed...

Dear Wizzes: try getting guys who can draw extremities. Oh, and faces.

lol

@BESW Yes.

Also, protip: When designing the cover of a manual to look like an embellished old-fashioned tome, avoid the temptation to instead make it look like the overenthusiastic collision of a hobby shop sale and a scrapbookers' convention.

(Seriously, those 3.5 core manuals had a nifty concept, but someone needed to take a firm hand with the designer and say "cool it, man, you're done already.")

store.steampowered.com/livingroom/SteamOS

^ Steam OS announced

yay, new bronze badge.

Grats.

@Trajan ooh which one?

I got one the other day no one had gotten yet :)

@waxeagle Quorum

@waxeagle ooooh shiny ! which is it ?

powers

Cool.

Cant even find it in the badge tab.

It's a tag badge

@Trajan ah yeah, you've got to click on the bronze tag badges

Here: rpg.stackexchange.com/help/badges/112/powers

cool !

@Trajan yeah, depending on the tag, the number of answers required is quite a bit harder than the score requirement

Dungeon World has D&D-style stats, really? Oy, I am not a fan of that.

@AlexP It's made on purpose. It's the game where you play D&D adventurers after all

@Zachiel Like, the actual adventures?

@AlexP It's a dungeon crawling game for the most part, with some moves for managing map-wide travel and some others for telling you what happens in town. It's even designed to get played with D&D maps, provided you leave some unknown rooms and branches here and there

@AlexP but I said adventureRs

Hello @Agradine

Hello!

Since you have 100rep only and being the first time I see you around I'll suppose you're pretty new.

Yeah, been on the site for about a week. It's a neat place, wish I'd found it sooner

Question you may or may not be able to answer: is it frowned upon to post answers on older questions (like, from years ago) if I feel the answer might add something that hasn't been mentioned to somebody who might stumble across it at a later date? Or is the intent more to directly answer the question for the person who asked it?

It's actually appreciated: there's even a necromancer badge for that

but

if you want just to add something to an existing answer it might be better to leave a comment under it

I must stop starting to reply without reading all the question first...

Makes sense

Sorry, wrassling with pbworks. Never set up a campaign wiki before. These things are always harder than you initially think they'd be

@agradine I made a website for a campaign once. After stopping looking for something fantasy I settled on a free minimal template and did it. Some fields never got compiled.

RPGnet complains about Next:

> Meanwhile the people who left the group founded companies, ran kickstarters, had those KS's funded, designed their own games, beta tested their own games, and now Numenera AND 13th Age are in stores, meanwhile at Wizards it's the job of Team B (that's you, Kenny) to do all the hard work of game design because Team AlphaStrike took two years to decide how "orky" an orc should look like and discuss feelings. What are they, Congress?

I've yet to find a reason to choose Next over 3.5, though to be fair I haven't looked too closely

I guess that's the big probloem of Next. Almost nobody cares.

I did the same thing with 4e (and there were awful announcments from the 4e devs that made me believe 4e was a complete mess right before the launch)

So I still have hope for Next but I'll be 2-3 years late on it like I was on 4e, if it's good.

I was super excited about 4e at launch. Even ran that test adventure with the test characters. I'm still very positive on the powers system as whole, and 4e makes monster design SOOOOO much easier. It's just everything that 4e tried to do outside of combat that eventually soured it for me.

I agree with you - now. The skill challenges aren't that exciting, mainly because of bad math and the intent of the designers being unclear.

@agradine so skill challenges? they have improved and its an entirely optional aspect of the system if you are creating your own adventures.

My problem wasn't so much with the skill challenges as designed, but the skill system itself. I loved the granularity of 3.x's skill ranks. The whole trained/untrained was probably my biggest 4e turnoff

Ah, true, there were those "I only need 6 ranks in tumble" things that made you able to branch a little more. I liked they had less skills. Only one roll for stealth means I don't have to take the worst of two rolls and the opponend didn't have two chances of spotting me

Of course in 3.5 the magical modifiers are so high you don't really have that problem

I think I'm the only person in the world that didn't like the skill combinations. It's not even that I didn't like them... they make perfect sense and speed up gameplay. I think I just liked having LOTS of skills. Silly reason, but it's also true that we found reasons to make spot and listen or hide and move silently distinct.

One skill combination I did like was Streetwise though.

@agradine I think these particular skills aren't really good divisions. If you want to have lots of skills, create an interesting niche for player-authored skills that can actually do stuff.

@agradine Lots of skills can be a great thing... but 3.5 did it pretty durn poorly. By restricting skill points through minimal points for most classes, eating them artificially through cross-class halving, and tying the ability to get more points per level to a skill that the rest of the game considers largely useless, they made skill granularity an obstacle rather than a tool.

Which is a good point. Obviously if we had started with Perception and then it got broken up into Spot and Listen, I'd be like "why the hell would you do that?" It's just one of my grognard-esque nitpicks with how 4e handled pretty much anything outside of combat

Hide / Move Silently in particular seems designed to punish you.

I could understand having slightly overlapping skills -- I don't mind "be stealthy in an environment" vs. "avoid notice in a crowd" being two different skills, for instance.

And yeah, search/spot/listen/hide/move silently/lockpicking/disable device/escape artist/forgery/tumble... how many skill points do I need to be a good "guy who can ghost into any place he wants"?

It's the "this skill is crappy without the other one" issue.

Having to Search and then Disable Device is another example.

@agradine I can't argue with that; 4e sat down and asked "What do I want to do well?" and answered "Tactical combat simulation!"

I always considered it as "stealth is really useful but also really difficult to pull off, which is why we require two seperate rolls and double the skill points" but I guess that's where the whole skill challenge/compound skill checks comes in. Again, I see the point in most of the combinations, but not all of them.

It also would be less of a problem if unskilled characters weren't awful at their abilities. E.g. if my untrained Spot check was worth something at level 5, still.

Everything else got sacrificed as necessary, and 4e makes no bones about it. If tactical combat simulation isn't what you want out of an RPG, 4e will tell you upfront that you should go look somewhere else.

Which I find refreshing, compared to 3.5's attempt to convince me that its system could do anything I wanted equally well.

@AlexP that was the one thing I disliked most about attaching levels to skill checks; there was little point in specializing, because you could never really get that much better than someone untrained. I LIKED that I was required to actually keep up with my skills

@BESW That's a non-negotiable element of the books, on account of the D20 strategy.

@agradine Are you familiar with our @Magician's article on goblin dice?

but then my favorite characters were always intelligence-based rogues

I am not, and the article is unfortunately blocked by my work's web filter. I will make a note to look it up later.

The basic idea is that the d20 is good when you're making lots of rolls to accomplish something and it doesn't really matter how many times you fail at it.

That is, when trying to kill a goblin.

Doesn't matter which attack kills the goblin, you're rolling so many one of them will.

@agradine But then once you've raised up your 12-15 skills, you can still only do, like, four things. I mean, I get that most other people in your party can't do anything with their skills, so that is an advantage comparatively (except for wizards, who don't have to).

But the d20 is so swingy (has a range of equally-likely results that is very wide compared to your modifier) that the fewer rolls you're allowed to make to accomplish something, and the more penalizing failure is, the less appropriate a d20 is to make that roll.

Makes sense

Since D&D skills usually only ask you to make one or two rolls to determine an outcome (outside of 4e skill challenges, which mitigate the issue slightly), and failing one roll usually means the whole attempt fails, this is a very very bad application of goblin dice.

Oh yeah, definitely

@BESW Although sometimes that is "solved" by just letting you reroll until you succeed. In which case the rolls were kinda silly in the first place.

Skill challenges do a decent job of mitigating it, once you work out the kinks in the math (there are a lot of excellent fan-made versions).

@AlexP And this is the other way of mitigating it, often expressed as "everyone roll to get the job done and see if the fighter rolls a natural 20 even if the trained guy rolls low."

One reason the Fate die system appeals to me is that its curve is so aggressively peaked around +0 that your modifiers become supremely important, rather than the die roll being the most important determiner of the outcome.

I always liked introducing compound skill checks any time a "failure at this skill takes grinds the story to a halt", with the caveat being more checks = more time. And adding in real consequences for taking the time to do so. And avoiding as much as possible situations where failure at a skill check grinds the story to a halt

I'm also playing in Eberron 3.5, so Action Points also help mitigate the "if the rogue can't open this lock we're screwed"

@agradine This last one is crucial. Fate actually takes the time to tell the GM to only ask for rolls if failing them would be interesting.

That's not a terrible idea

> The worst, worst thing you can do is have a failed roll that means nothing happens —no new knowledge, no new course of action to take, and no change in the situation. That is totally boring, and it discourages players from investing in failure—something you absolutely want them to do, given how important compels and the concession mechanic are. Do not do this.

Yeah no, I'm totally down for that

Of course, Fate (as that quote points out) is designed to incentivize failure.

I'm still not sold on the die roll being less important than the modifier, but then I have been fully indoctrinated to the d20 at this point, and I like the tension that kind of swinginess can create.

D&D has no system support for making failure interesting or dramatic. D&D punishes failure.

I would definitely want to check out Fate though

@agradine I don't think the d20 is a bad die.

I just think that the d20 System uses it poorly in non-combat situations.

Haha, I would never suggest that

Hey my icon finally changed!

@Aaron Grats.

@agradine It's available as a pay-what-you-like (including free) pdf download.

After roughly 9 years of trying to force D&D 3.5 and 4e into the shape of game I wanted, I'm very happy to have found that Fate is already that shape to start with.

Fascinating. I always like reading about new systems. I never really get around to actually PLAYING them but they always have interesting ideas to cannibalize.

I'll definitely give it a look-see. Incentivizing failure is always a good thing

@agradine d20 System mechanics are (generally) designed so that rolling 10 lets you do something of average challenge for your level. This means that by design, 45% of the time you're expected to fail for no reason except that the dice didn't like you.

Obviously this isn't the case because it's not balanced that neatly or strictly and you can always optimize the rolls you want to be good at.

But that "45% failure" is core to the System's ethos, and it is a fetishization of the d20's swinginess.

Which would be fine if D&D offered, at its core, interesting consequences for failure. But you're right, by RAW it generally doesn't

And if you implement the natural 1/natural 20 rules (3.5 has them optional, 4e doesn't use them at all), the raw die roll becomes even more important compared to your modifier because 10% of the time your modifier doesn't matter at all.

But then again, I actually like how important that makes the die roll, which was the point to my earlier comment about die sizes. I love the tension that comes from any d20 die roll, because it's so swingy

Ah, must dash. Glad to have you in the chat, hope to see you around later.

Yeah good chat, and thanks for the resources