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Post by inflatus on Apr 22, 2012 7:36:34 GMT -8
I know that I am late to this party but would like to dance just the same. I just finished watching the video of Mike Mearls and Jeremy Crawford doing a Q&A during PAX East 2012. I have not played D&D since the Second Edition, so my knowledge is based on others’ comments. I found a few systems over the years and played those, mostly GURPS. I do have a few opinions and questions about D&D Next. When Mike and Jeremy spoke of taking the older versions of D&D and coming up with the core reasons that make it Dungeons and Dragons, then putting it into the ruleset of D&D Next I was intrigued. The way that I understood this is that they are going to revisit all previous editions and find out what made them Dungeons and Dragons at their core. Then, with all of that information they want to be able to bring that feel to the newer edition. That sounds exciting. However a question I have is about combat. I have never played the 4th edition but have heard that combat can take hours to complete and DM’s generally run one combat per session. I have read where some have tried to cut that time down, but certain allowances had to be made to do so. Will the next iteration address the long combat issues? Another question I have is with party dynamics. I would like to see something that redefines how players create a party. Will it be possible to make characters that do not resemble a MMO raid party? I think that combat dictates how players make characters and select traits. I would like to see the emphasis on role playing. I will say that if D&D Next arrives with those core reasons that make it Dungeons and Dragons, I shall have it. A reason that I enjoy tabletop role playing games is that it is rooted in imagination. I want to reinvigorate my imagination. youtu.be/Yoa_xQTya8Y
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Post by CreativeCowboy on Apr 22, 2012 9:52:55 GMT -8
I will say that if D&D Next arrives with those core reasons that make it Dungeons and Dragons, I shall have it. A reason that I enjoy tabletop role playing games is that it is rooted in imagination. I want to reinvigorate my imagination. youtu.be/Yoa_xQTya8YTHIS, & WIN. I just want to emphasize your statement inflatus. I have a negative view 5e development (though 5e is obviously a good idea if it involved scaling back rules rather than installing more, punitive rules) and I have expressed myself elsewhere. A game cannot rule imagination with more rules and charts!! Hey Mearles, we need charts! Sorry... I hope I am proved wrong when HJ does an unboxing for me.
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Post by inflatus on Apr 22, 2012 15:34:10 GMT -8
creativecowboy- I am hoping that they do scale it back and give the DM more involvement in the story. I have heard from some of the play testers that D&D Next will be less about combat and miniatures and more about story.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 22, 2012 16:32:06 GMT -8
For me even now 4e is more about story then it is miniatures and combat. I played in a session this past Friday and DMed on this Saturday where the minis never came out in four hours of play per session.
Our party spent the entire four hours taking turns describing what we were doing with a few dice rolls and alot of inter-party role play in the first. The thief was searching the eerie mansion we had found ourselves in and eventually got trapped, my fighter got pissed drunk and then decided to go piss off the extremely powerful wizard we had subdued the last session and interrogate him, meanwhile our mage and Dragonborne were searching a library and trying to concoct a ritual to undue a curse upon the mansion. The session was a blast.
The game I DMed was similar but was also full of puzzles that the party solved through a mix of dice rolls and discussion. There was an especially emotional discussion between our barbarian who has recently learned her family is actually alive, and her desire to avoid them due to some painful and dark secrets of her past relating to the primal elements that we are exploring. Some interesting choices led the party to an elemental temple where I happily split the party in a series of death trap cum element related puzzles they had to solve to escape.
There were actually some short fights in both, but they were done without minis and completed with only a few dice rolls and alot of narrative explanation. And even without the minis my character nearly died in the former, and one of my players nearly lost his life in the latter.
All the books do is give me options, that's all the books for 5e will give me, I will take what appeals to me, use what I think is cool, and dump any rules or concepts that I feel drag down the game. Its how the game is meant to be played after all, WOTC isn't supplying rules so much as guidelines.
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Post by CreativeCowboy on Apr 22, 2012 22:51:59 GMT -8
creativecowboy- I am hoping that they do scale it back and give the DM more involvement in the story. I have heard from some of the play testers that D&D Next will be less about combat and miniatures and more about story. Cheers! I have heard that, rather than remove some of the rules as written that have grooved the game (feats and skills and such), they intend to write more (in favour of the DM). Thus WotC will still maintain D&D as a system rather than as an individual experience. (It's like a Google satellite shot of a dense power grid of cables running in every direction, which obliterates the village you Googled to see underneath it.) My game is, at the moment, hack and slash leveling up at low levels. We never, ever use a battlemat. We have a mapper with quad paper, to whom I give the visible dimensions of the room upon opening the door if the room is visible, which is what the other players huddle around together rather than peer over a table from their seats. I use 3.5 but either without much rolling for skills or defaulting myself back to rolling stat abilities for skill success. I hope 5e returns things like monster availability, morale checks, XP for GP and individual monsters, save or die, class specific level progression, Bard as multiclass, Thief (and thief specific percentile skills) and Assassin class, abstracted round + segments, weapon speed and proper encumbrance. For starters, I hope the accumulated player skill at the table is REQUIRED in 5e more so than character dice roll on the table. I would also like to see more stereotyping of NPCs. Bring back the Elf class! I have a player playing a (non-magical - Plot HOok!) Elf cleric in /my/ game. A cleric! Ha. Naturally NPCs believe he is a magic-user pretending to be a cleric for some odd ball reason... I hope they keep the 3x improvements of Target number ACs, BaBs, Saving Throws, and monster stating. For innovation: I would like to see the dump stat removed. For example, I use WIS to determine order of declaration in initiative. Declaration around the table determines (simultaneous) action. The group with higher Wisdom /knows/ what the other group is about to do. This is a stat relevant to everyone now. I also have Intelligence rolled to save a character from a player's bad decision. If the CHARACTER succeeds, the DM gets to save the character from the player. Basically the character does not listen to his dangerous inner voice. This may sound like it never gets used but it can be relevant to everyone without retconning sudden knowledge in DM monologue or stopping a player with "No, the PC wouldn't do that." Sure, there's a chance he will listen to the player in such a situation. Anyone may call it out at the table but only the player rolls for his PC. For removal: ECL and balance features. Rules do not protect players from douchey DMs, inexperienced DMs or just plain bad DMs. Play, and playing together, does that over time - only - IMHO, of course. But I hear and read Mearles' tattoos of codify, rulify, specify, stultify, solidify... That's not my fluid D&D. I understand WotC wants to sell me the official trademarked and patented D&D game system - unlike what Gygax was trying to express in the entirety of AD&D 1e. But a store bought game out of the shrink-wrap, like any video game, is not my game either, or does it carry the idea of what makes an RPG, IMHO. If my Dragon Age video game/system does not work out of the box, I call it broken. When the same thing happens in an RPG, I call it an RPG. The people who complain broken systems in RPGs acculturate arguments should not be playing RPGs – AD&D 1e page 110. The (new) Edition Whose Name Shall Not Be Spoken (TnEWNSNBS) may turn out to be a fantastic, AMAZING game. But at that point, it is no more D&D than Cowboys and Indians is Monopoly.
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Post by ayslyn on Apr 23, 2012 8:06:00 GMT -8
However a question I have is about combat. I have never played the 4th edition but have heard that combat can take hours to complete and DM’s generally run one combat per session. I have read where some have tried to cut that time down, but certain allowances had to be made to do so. Will the next iteration address the long combat issues? 4e is much more... Tactical than older editions. 5e will be modular, so that you won't require a battlemat, but if that's your thing, it will be easy to use one. This is a social issue, and not a game on A game cannot rule imagination with more rules and charts!! Any number of successfully played games prove you wrong on that point.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 25, 2012 15:25:07 GMT -8
I hope 5e returns things like monster availability, morale checks, XP for GP and individual monsters, save or die, class specific level progression, Bard as multiclass, Thief (and thief specific percentile skills) and Assassin class, abstracted round + segments, weapon speed and proper encumbrance. For starters, I hope the accumulated player skill at the table is REQUIRED in 5e more so than character dice roll on the table. That is pretty much a list of things I don't want to see. Morale checks are essentially shifting common sense and narrative to a dice roll/chart. If it makes sense for your goblins to run from a fight then they run, if your band of orcs would die rather then run then let them do so. And the party should never have them, their morale should again be based on how they are playing the characters, not what a roll says. XP has never been a part of my games because I see it as a pointless number. I am a very narrative driven DM so for me the party levels when it makes sense storywise, not when they have killed a certain quota of monsters. And tieing XP to gold again makes no sense storywise, the riches of the game comes from the story, not the loot. And save vs die was and always will be one of the worst concepts ever for a story based game IMHO. Anything that kills in one hit, or that can kill you simply by you making a single mistake, is just punishing the players. As for the Bard, Thief, and Assassin thing... I would personally rather see a classless system, that won't happen with D&D of course. The bard before 4e though was a horrible class, he was the downside of the Jack of All Trades/Master of None dichotomy. In most cases a character that did nothing but handicap a party since all the other classes did his jobs better than him. The percentile thing for Thieves only makes sense if strip all the other skills out of the game, and then you are left with the question of why they still have them then. As for the Assassin, why make such a specific class when they can instead streamline down to a smaller number of broad categories and then allow you to build themes on top of them. Honestly Rogue, Mage, Warrior are all you really need as bases, and then you build up from there with powers, feats, and skills that fit the feel you want from your character. Rather then picking assassin from a list of classes grab the rogue template and then place your stats, skills, and feats in a way that gives you the kind of character you want. Perfer a more upfront and personal killer to the traditional stealthy one, take a fighter as your base. In either case I think the more "classes" you have, the less people think of the character as a person and the more they think of them as thier class. For innovation: I would like to see the dump stat removed. For example, I use WIS to determine order of declaration in initiative. Declaration around the table determines (simultaneous) action. The group with higher Wisdom /knows/ what the other group is about to do. This is a stat relevant to everyone now. The dump stat is not an official thing, it is merely a term used by min/maxers. WoTC can't make that go away, it has existed since original D&D, through AD&D and up till today with different names. As long as a player focuses on one or two stats over the others you will always end up with at least one dump stat. And some of us actually create them for the purpose of RPG. My fighter is very strong, dexterous, and charming, but he isn't very bright or wise. Not because I was trying max anything, but because I want him to be a swashbuckler who acts rashly and without thinking, relying on his speed, his smile, and his blade to win him through. While those of a more studious nature are trying to decide on a course of action he is acting. I also have Intelligence rolled to save a character from a player's bad decision. If the CHARACTER succeeds, the DM gets to save the character from the player. Basically the character does not listen to his dangerous inner voice. This may sound like it never gets used but it can be relevant to everyone without retconning sudden knowledge in DM monologue or stopping a player with "No, the PC wouldn't do that." Now I might be misunderstanding this one, but anytime someone other than the player has the ability to dictate what that player's character would or wouldn't do I see that as a huge negative. I especially see it as wrong if a dice roll decides it. The player's character is theirs, it is the only thing they control, no one else should be able to touch that. If my Dragon Age video game/system does not work out of the box, I call it broken. When the same thing happens in an RPG, I call it an RPG. The people who complain broken systems in RPGs acculturate arguments should not be playing RPGs – AD&D 1e page 110. I disagree, a game that doesn't work out of the box is broken plain and simple. Poor design is poor design. If you create a rule set for RPGs that doesn't work then you have created a shitty RPG, the more work the players and DM have to put in to make your game work for them the worse your game is. I should not have to invent rules to make a game playable, house rules should be a matter of clarification and flavoring the game for personal taste, not corrections of a poorly designed and broken baseline. Now I do agree that the holy grail of balance that they felt was so important for 4e needs to go, its why it's so hard to actually threaten a 4e party, and also one reason why the combat takes so damn long. I'd also like to see the different classes actually play differently, something I think you might be referring to more in the start of your post. If you have to have classes then a thief, a fighter, and a mage should all play uniquely, not just be the same character with differently named powers/abilities. I'd also like to see any charts, tables, etc go away as well. Make the math simple, keep things streamlined and easy. If I can't rule on something without looking at a chart or opening the book then you have to many rules.
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Post by CreativeCowboy on Apr 25, 2012 23:55:41 GMT -8
I agree. Now I might be misunderstanding this one, but anytime someone other than the player has the ability to dictate what that player's character would or wouldn't do I see that as a huge negative. I especially see it as wrong if a dice roll decides it. The player's character is theirs, it is the only thing they control, no one else should be able to touch that. ... Now I do agree that the holy grail of balance that they felt was so important for 4e needs to go, its why it's so hard to actually threaten a 4e party, and also one reason why the combat takes so damn long. I'd also like to see the different classes actually play differently, something I think you might be referring to more in the start of your post. If you have to have classes then a thief, a fighter, and a mage should all play uniquely, not just be the same character with differently named powers/abilities. I'd also like to see any charts, tables, etc go away as well. Make the math simple, keep things streamlined and easy. If I can't rule on something without looking at a chart or opening the book then you have to many rules. In AD&D 1e morale checks were not against the players' morale. They were an impartial scale signifying the knowable risk players faced when attacking a larger group of opponents than they might otherwise handle safely. The will to fight players, rather than placing a bunch of 1 HP minions, was the tipping point in favour of these "unbalanced" encounters. Minions/lack of impartial NPC morale checks frame the encounter as an adversarial GM vs player, IMHO. It mixes blood into everyone's water at the table. / The Intelligence check is something I like because of the player team cohesiveness it represents. A player wants the character to do something guaranteed suicidal.... All characters/players are silent at the table unless directly at the scene or know of the un-intelligent plan. If the table is "in the scene," other players can grapple or intitiate other actions against the player's PC. Yelling "Stop!" is good too. But that's only if they are in the scene. A PC (not the player) gets a D20 roll against INT to save himself from stupidity. A player character whose player explictly says "my PC commits suicide" gets no INT roll. At that point, something is wrong with the game; my GMing; the player; or a combination of these elements and is a separate issue for deeper reflection. In any case, the PC dies from suicide if that is the player choice. No save possible. Examples of stupidity include the player declaring the PC at the party van walks down the obviously trapped hallway and another player saying "no, you wouldn't do that!" [Roll INT - before the death traps spring but roll Save if after] Player declares his PC doing something dangerous, like jumping across the described Grand Canyon, without fully comprehending the language at the table, in which case someone or the GM says, "PC should get an INT roll." [PC saves, triggering the GM to ask do you want to commit suicide? The players not in the scene get to say: that's the freakin Grand Canyon, man!] The GM should NOT say "no you wouldn't do that stupid thing and I won't allow it." Even for the best reason perhaps, I would be writing a novel and not playing a game were I to do this. It is important to note that my house rule is framed by the people with whom I play: never before played RPers whose first language is generally not English. Your Mileage May Vary in interpreting this rule at your table for sure. My point was about dump stats. tentagil have you ever played a stupid, goofy PC with a 15 or higher INT? You know the idiot savant guy the party usually turns to like a Rain Man type? There are more than one way to un-skin a PC than just the stats. Wiry little fighter dude who looks like a skeleton with his shirt off wearing cut offs but who can lift a ton. You know the type: the dangerous guy no one wants to get into a brawl with because he's Wolverine with nothing to lose... [Stat: 18] Carry capacity? Hell man, that's freakin will power and raw power on a fine abstract edge! Like the 10 year old girl who was just in the news for setting a weight lifting record.... let me source that article (because it blew me away): www.buzzfeed.com/whitneyjefferson/a-10-year-old-girl-just-broke-the-world-weightlift Not that you need buzzfeed at your gaming table because it's shared fantasy right? This 10 year old is not Conan but is still awesome, no? Don''t let the character sheet keep you down...
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