Can someone who's following the development of the MCDM RPG explain what the frick are they doing? Psionic fire vs elemental fire? The need to add "hellfire" to the game to future proof it? They got 4 million to develop a D&D alternative and this is what they come up with? I've watched the new Q&A cause I'm interested in RPG development, and they look like they're floundering.
>Psionic fire vs elemental fire?
Psiconics don't tend to be magic and if its a game that has some sort of anti-magic and magic ?resistances then that split would matter.
>The need to add "hellfire" to the game to future proof it?
Same thing again. Just a damage source that doesn't interact with other resistances for thematic reasons.
Their patreon shit is all up on kemono though so just go look there.
>Psiconics don't tend to be magic
There's only a difference if there is a difference. In some settings it's the same thing. If you zoom out it's all some sort of wacky mind powers.
>There's only a difference if there is a difference.
And they are differentiated
>D&D alternative
>D&D
>Literally anyone being surprised it's shit
It's like watching someone eat shit and then complain it tastes like shit.
Why would I complain it tastes like shit when I wasn't the one eating shit?
These grifters and uninspired hacks are moving on from the cash cow that was the 5E consumer base because that consumer base is moving away from 5E. They are self deluded enough to think that their own inane ass drippings are worth anyone’s time and attention. These wienersuckers are part of the whole 5E cultural shit show and deserve to go down with the mothership.
Why does the guy on the right look like a fricking zombified Max Payne?
Oh frick, I see it.
The man has the face of a british royal who has been subsisting on orphan blood for the past 50 years.
Why the frick anyone should care, youtubeman is literally remaking 4e in 2d6. If you're vaguely interested save yourself the trouble and go for the original deal.
Not 100% true. It's 2d6 4e, but with Into the Odd's ACless combat.
Why's that creature on the left look drunk and the one on the right look undead?
Right guy is suffering under the enchantment Necrotic Constipation
>frick marry kill
50% chance it's a good system.
10% chance it end up being a reskin of an existing system.
25% chance they hire a skilled game designer to make the whole thing from scratch 6 months before it's suppose to release.
85% it gets no support after release (i.e. no more than two underwhelming supplements)
Honestly Colville has the capability and resources to put together a game worth playing but he's given himself a big task and he's surrounded himself with sensitivity readers. It's an uphill battle but not an impossible one.
>Frick
Colville
>Marry
Kingsmill
>KIIILL!!
That Zombie looking motherfricker
>sensitivity readers
Who cares, they're not going to touch game mechanics and Matt's prose writing is ass even before they look at it.
>I get the sense that Colville is a big ideas guy
This is unfortunately true. He's always been an ideas guy, and that's why he was always better at giving general DM advice than actually leading a creative project. He needs restrictions, oversight, and frankly editing that I'm worried he won't seek out of his own volition.
>25% chance they hire a skilled game designer to make the whole thing from scratch 6 months before it's suppose to release.
only if they fire the one they already hired and start over
Frick Colville because he looks soft, marry Dael cause I'm not gay, kill butthole eyes cause I don't like his mug.
It's kind of mesmerizing how defeated all three of them look. I can almost hear that one sad Spongebob tune just by looking at the image.
Yes. They look like the full weight of actually having to design a good game suddenly hit them and they are having to come to grips with the fact that they are creatively bankrupt morons who who never truly about ttrpgs, just posers right the pop culture wave of 5E
I watched the QnA. Colville says 'futureproof' when talking about adding an additional elemental subtype to fire. But it's not like the subtypes will be locked down after this, or they will incur technical debt if they add one later.
He probably just meant 'thinking ahead' and misspoke.
In terms of why the subtypes are important and how they're different, I guess we'll find out when they reveal more about the magic system.
I get the sense that Colville is a big ideas guy and needs Intracaso to ground him. He probably got really into the weeds designing a magic system with way too many moving parts.
I mean it is future proofing, that's the whole purpose of a Tag system. You make a core "fire" tag that says "hey, fire stuff works like this, it lights unattended objects on fire and creatures underwater take half damage" or whatever and then all future stuff that does regular fire you just give the "fire" tag instead of needing to CONSTANTLY add rules text repeating the same general behavior. Then you can have a special fancy tag for "hellfire" and say "this is magic fire from hell that burns the soul as well as flesh, hellfire ignores fire resistance and works even underwater and can't be doused except with holy water" and then six years later when you add a new class you can just give them the "hellfire" tag for a spell that does hellfire.
Mutants and Masterminds works the same way with Descriptors being assigned to powers and if you power stunt something in the moment or come up with an effect on the spot you don't need to spend 20 minutes figuring out how it works because it inherits the descriptors of its base power, same with tags in 4E or PF2E.
https://2e.aonprd.com/Traits.aspx?ID=72
Colville and his staff are very proud of admitting they've never played or been interested in either edition of Pathfinder and he's a major advocate for 4th Edition, so he's probably just mining 4e for ideas unaware that the current largest D&D alternative already did the same shit half a decade ago and he's really convinced it's something new and interesting.
Even back in 3.5 there were specific tags and descriptors for spells, it's just they were a lot more loosey-goosey most of the time so you didn't get much out of it, the most common use of descriptors was stacking bonuses (I change my spell to be [cold] because I get a bonus to DC and caster level for everything cold) or immunities (undead are blanket immune to anything with [mind-affecting] or [poison])
https://www.d20srd.org/srd/magicOverview/spellDescriptions.htm
I think this list of spells concept is not very immersive or elegant.
It's elegant when there are fricking hundreds of abilities and spells.
MtG may have jumped the shark now with keywords like "Committed a Crime", but keywords like "Flying" are super elegant. Once you know what it means for the context of the game, it's very easy to read and just know intuitively from there on. Same with "Vigilance" and "Frist Strike", shorthand for rules that invoke what the rule does in a reasonably immersive manner - for instance, a massive frickoff Dinosaur with "Trample" means your creatures are gonna get squashed underfoot as the Dino comes for you.
This kind of keywording is very, very helpful for a wargame with a shitton of effects going off, like 4e. Sadly, though, that gives an insight into the kind of game he's making...
>You can absolutely run epic games with heroes exploring dungeons, but this game is not about dungeoncrawling. You don’t track torches or rations or worry about running out of light.
>You can plunge, heedless of danger, into a dark and haunted forest, but this game is not about exploration. No hexes to explore.
>By focusing on the core fantasy of epic heroes fighting monsters and tyranny, we think we can deliver a better experience for your friends and your table.
It sounds like you might have already seen it, but MaRo gave a super good talk at GDC about exactly that, how if the mechanic "makes sense" based on what players already know, it makes teaching it and understanding it infinitely faster and easier.
Yeah you can sit down and have a new player introduced to magic the gathering's evergreen keywords in a few minutes. "This guy can fly. You need wings or reach to block him. This guy has trample, you need to block all his damage or he stomps all over your little blocker. This snake has deathtouch because it's poisonous, if he bites you, you die. This guy has vigilance, he can attack and still block. This guy has first strike, he goes first. This guy has haste, he can attack right away."
If every single card with flying needed to have the full rules text of flight written out on it every time imagine how miserable that would be, that's basically the situation 5e is in where they have a bunch of pseudo-tags but no actual keywords so shit has to be constantly repeated.
>You regain this ability each time you finish a short or long rest
probably appears 500 times, holy shit just give it a name. Same with "you can use this ability a number of times per long rest equal to your proficiency bonus", come up with a fricking term for that and just SAY that's what something is.
It's weird because they do essentially have a tag system when it comes to status effects. So it's not like they were ignorant of the concept or anything. They just didn't use it. Heck they didn't even just say "2/LR" or anything.
Amusingly, an issue 4e didn't have because everything was organized fairly neatly and had keywords for some of the semi-common things that might pop up, like Reliable(not expended if you miss).
>immersive
kys
>he's a major advocate for 4th edition
According to him, Matt has played tons of and enjoyed every edition of D&D, he just comes across as a 4e enthusiast because it's out of the ordinary to defend it.
4e was good and accessible IF you had access to the character building app/website
The game ran pretty smooth, was simple enough for total noobs and tried some new stuff. I think 5e still builds off a lot of it though and is less reliant on an app/character builder so i prefer that
Being obsessed about random stuff that everyone else don't even see as a problem is by fare the number one reason people decide to make their own systems...that's why most of them are just "d&d but" (and why nobody play them when they can just play d&d)
This will tell you all you need to know about MCDM RPG.
In short, Matt Coville is NOT a real game designer, his takes are all entry level, and none of his mechanics are unique or insightful, they are all formulaic, as if you just sat down and decided to think through making a TTRPG, step by step, with zero vision or originality.
>long-winded youtube essay kvetching with an AI voiceover
ew, I stepped in shit
Your video is shit and you are moronic if you think his monster book isn't an actually interesting take on making encounters (even if I don't make use it myself).
How is it interesting?
>17 subscribers
>AI voice
>pip pip I'm so classy and intelligent
>can't even get to the point in the first minute
Come on, Black person. You can do better than this.
Are you some kind of moron? Have you been diagnosed? Why don't you tell us the actual arguments you're trying to go on about instead of linking your failure youtube channel with the abortion of a Microsoft Sam dub.
I actually watched the video. It is shit. You had few points and you stretched them over several minutes of sub-/misc/ b***hing.
There's no playtest document out publicly so we can't really say much about the game beyond his dumb meme mechanics.
Everyone in this thread could trivially go and read the playtest rules.
Are there publicly playtest rules for this, or are you thinking of the CR project the put out it's public playtest today?
No, and no.
>Are there publicly playtest rules for this
Technically no, but there is if you YarHarFiddlyDee the Patreon, which is specifically for "people who want to watch the sausage get made."
Though that's less a beta playtest and more like alpha or indev.
>pay for my Patreon to review my shitty D&D 4e homebrew!
No.
the playtest packet is 80mb so you can't attach it to a post, you'll have to download it separately
https://gofile.io/d/dZVppt
It's worth checking the survey results to see the direction they're going as well.
Wow that's quite disappointing. I hope the have much more done internally.
I'm glad to see they have done away with the Auto damage thing they were talking about the last time i paid it much attention. And I don't dislike kits but i think they are putting far to much mechanical weight on the kits, but maybe seeing an actual list of kits and classes would change my opinion there.
It does look very 4e, but... so i'm not that interested.
>ai slop
this could've been text
I wouldn't read it, but I could at least scan through it to find some sort of point
instead, I polluted my life with more AI trash for a few seconds
>In short, Matt Coville is NOT a real game designer
what is a "real game designer"
the man has been running and playing and thinking about and writing and making videos about role playing games for ages
and he's clearly playtesting and discussing and iterating on the design. how is that "as if you just sat down and decided to think through making a TTRPG, step by step, with zero vision or originality"?
I don't like the direction his game is taking (his emphasis on "heroic fantasy!!" bordering on marvel cinematic universe is almost exactly the opposite of my own preferences) but I can't say he isn't thinking deeply about the design of the game
and why are you so angry at someone who's making a game you don't have to play?
Why spend this much time and energy responding to a self advertising homosexual whose entire vid is dismantled by saying “idk TalkingTabletop you seem upset and are just arguing semantics”
>Why spend this much time and energy
it's either that or doing my job
I get paid either way
That, as the kids say, is a mood
>the D&D killer
I think it already exists, albeit with some flaws of its own.
Unironically yeah. If the man would just hire an editor it'd have a lot more broad appeal.
Colville is a fricktard full of himself
No wonder he's going 200% moron now that people gave him money for a game considering him some kind of fricking guru
i checked out when they kept spouting CINEMATIC as if this would somehow make the actual rules good or bad. some of the ideas tied to the dice rolling were interesting iirc but i cba to actually find out because the rest is ass
The more I see abut their decisions the less appeal the game has for me.
Armor as HP is terrible design and I will die on this hill.
>Armor as HP is terrible design and I will die on this hill.
Armor as dodge is terrible design.Armor as DR is obviously the best for simulation, but it's fricking annoying to play. Armor as HP is best compromise.
Everyone misses the armor as AC isn't dodge, probably because Armor class is a shitty term, it is a combination of how well you dodge (dex) and how well your flesh is covered (armor bonus). Armor as AC is how well can you avoid being hit at all. I'm not a huge fan either but it is much better than Armor as HP.
Armor as HP isn't a compromise. You have to either justify why someone doesn't just swap out damaged armor for fresh sets, or take it into account and design around it. Either way it gets more complicated than armor as DR.
>Armor as AC is how well can you avoid being **meaningfully** hit at all
Forgot a word
Nobody said the armor gets damaged. The extra hitpoints represent every individual hit taking a lower percentage of your total health.
They're not the armor's hitpoints that are used up once they break through your shell. That's moronic, why would you think that?
When you get hit by a 10' axe wielded by a fire giant I don't see why your armor wouldn't get shredded
You should totally houserule that. Your players will love it.
The entire reason AC is a weird abstraction of avoidance and protection in D&D is because fleshy creatures like humans can't survive even a single sword strike. But dying to one hit isn't fun, so you abstract it out. Armor being hp would only make sense if it's a setting where people are robots with easily replaceable parts or something, because it's going in the complete opposite direction and making HP into literal meatsack points, which is what every other rpg has tried to avoid with good reason.
It's called stamina in this game.
Every hit is a glancing blow and a bruise, until the last one. Wear some thick padding and they'll bruise a little less.
>It's called stamina in this game.
Not according to the rules shared above.
>HEALTH
>Your hero’s survivability is represented by your Health. After any damage you take is reduced by damage immunity or other effects, your Health is reduced by an amount equal to the remaining damage.
Ctrl+f "stamina"
The word stamina doesn't even show up once.
If AC was just called something like Defense Value (DV) or Defense (Def) from the beginning people would probably be less moronic about it.
>Armor as DR is obviously the best for simulation
Disagree. Armor, especially metal armor, is meant to negate a hit. A weapon's job is to find the weak spots in the armor, not damage the wearer through the armor.
>A weapon's job is to find the weak spots in the armor, not damage the wearer through the armor.
not really, if you're smashing somebody with a poleaxe you're not doing fricking meme-tier anime "HEH, I AIMED FOR YOUR WEAK SPOT!" bullshit, you're caving in their skull.
If you're bracing a pike against charging cavalry you're not aiming for their weak points, you're using momentum to impale their fricking horse on your weapon and if you hit their chest they're gonna get impaled or sent flying.
In a grappling situation where you wrestle a knight from his horse and are trying to shove a dagger down his visor or past his gorget, sure, but that's not the combat 99% of TTRPGs are simulating, and there's almost always separate rules for grappling and pinning
>In a grappling situation where you wrestle a knight from his horse and are trying to shove a dagger down his visor or past his gorget, sure, but that's not the combat 99% of TTRPGs are simulating,
Dagger through a chink was literally the only way through full plate armor except blunt force in a melee in foot (i.e. 99% of TTRPG battles). Either way, even in cases where you do impale someone through armor, that's a case of binary penetration, not overcoming damage reduction.
If you want simulation, a fight between two heavily-armored dudes on foot HAS to be either a grappling match or a hammer duel, because their swords aren't doing shit except rattle their helmets.
>Armor as DR is obviously the best for simulation
Disagree. Armor, especially metal armor, is meant to negate a hit. A weapon's job is to find the weak spots in the armor, not damage the wearer through the armor.
Armor providing 2 "ac's" is the best. Over=full hit, under=glance, way under=miss
Don't steal my mechanics.
That's how shields work in HackMaster. and if you take to large a blow to the shield it can splinter.
Honestly this is what Touch AC *should* have been developed as and used for in 3.5 instead of just being a way for wizards to autohit every enemy with their spells. Most attacks should have effects or riders for whether or not they made contact with you or penetrated your armor and you could have differential states for different outcomes.
Picture a flaming sword, a classic magic item. You roll to hit and get a 15 against somebody with 16 dex and a breastplate. Their touch AC is 13 so you make contact and the fire scorches them, but your sword is useless against their armor and bounces off. It's not just a "miss", it's a glancing blow and they take the fire damage from your flaming property.
Same with stuff like poisoned weapons or acid or witcher-esque oils. Waving your holy avenger in the face of a vampire should have them recoiling in horror and burning even if you don't punch straight through their Adamantine full plate.
You can go even further and include shields as an intermediary between the two values, if you have +3 dex and a +2 shield bonus then an enemy getting a 15 to hit you with his flaming sword is deflected by your shield which takes damage and might catch on fire.
Now, obviously with this much autistic detail you would want to massively lower hit point inflation to make sure combats don't go too long. You'd want like AD&D hit point totals, combat should be quick and lethal and people actually getting hit through their armor should kill them pretty quick, even an ancient dragon in AD&D has fewer than 100 HP. But I think it would actually be fun to differentiate between attacks you simply dodged or the enemy simply missed, attacks that would have hit but were batted away by a shield, attacks which struck your armor but were blocked, and attacks which penetrate and hurt you. In a way it's kind of like 40k having the hit roll, wound roll, and saving throw all be separate, if fricking wargame can model that so can an RPG
>Everyone misses the armor as AC isn't dodge, probably because Armor class is a shitty term, it is a combination of how well you dodge (dex) and how well your flesh is covered (armor bonus). Armor as AC is how well can you avoid being hit at all. I'm not a huge fan either but it is much better than Armor as HP.
It's a terrible combination cause completely dodging a blow is qualitatively different than getting hit and absorbing the damage. And D&D also has fricking DR already, which acts like how armor is supposed to act, making it all the dumber.
>Armor as HP isn't a compromise. You have to either justify why someone doesn't just swap out damaged armor for fresh sets, or take it into account and design around it. Either way it gets more complicated than armor as DR.
So the players change sets after combat (if they can afford another armor set, and can carry it), and add the HP of the new sets, it acts like a turbo healing potion, I don't really have issues with it.
The biggest problem with "armor as AC" is that it does a poor job simulating how armor acts vs many small attack. You can die a death of a thousand cuts, which armor should stop, but then you're just back to DR which requires subtraction with every damage roll which just slows everything down and is annoying. So, it's a compromise.
*"The biggest problem with "armor as HP" I meant. But actually armor as AC can't stop many small cuts either, so it has the exact same issue.
Really Armor should work closer to in 3e where it is static AC with a bonus for dex when applicable. If it were to be more "realistic" you would have an active defense dodge/parry roll that couldn't be lower than armor value.
Mutants and Masterminds has a dodge/parry active defense done for avoiding hits in the first place and then a toughness roll for shrugging off things that actually make contact with you, that's probably the most satisfactory way to do armor I've seen. It also means you can have attacks with alternate resistances as a normal part of gameplay , like a lightsaber that cuts through anything would be alternate resistance dodge or parry, you can do mental attacks that are alternate resistance will, you can have some attacks that always automatically hit as long as certain conditions are fulfilled like a gaze attack or Gae Bolge type causality bending, etc.
The game also doesn't have hit points so you don't run into the issue of armor as HP meaning you want a bunch of spare suits of full plate to use as pseudo healing potions. The times I've ran it people seemed to like it. There's also an "impervious" effect that renders you immune to damage below a certain threshold but once it reaches that threshold it penetrates fully, which I like better than flat DR
>it acts like a turbo healing potion
That also brings up another point i hate about armor as HP. unless you are tracking meant and armor points separately, adding complexity, then all magical healing is repairing your armor.
Some of that issue also comes from people treating HP as how much blood you have, when it was originally meant to be a combination of luck grit toughness and blood.
It's part of the reason why i prefer systems where either the successes in your dice pool or margin of success contribute to your damage, and much smaller HP/wound totals.
With dice pools you can also have armor contribute to a def pool and each successful def die cancel a successful atk die to get DR with less math, just cancel die 1 for 1 then apply damage if any.
I'm really enjoying the way the guy on the right's face gets less impressed looking.
Did colville ever say when the next ratcatcher book will come out?
christ wtf is happening to the dude on the right it looks like his soul is getting drained out
The last time I saw someone like that they died of their cancer a year or two later. But then again Steve Buscemi exists and only recently stopped looking like he was half nosferatu so maybe that's just how he looks. The background and lightning does him no favours though, and I unironically think he should smile more.
he looks fine imo. its all terrible lighting and heavy shadows on him and as that other anon said, frowning is not his best vibe
Unless it's a game about being a firefighter, having multiple different fire elements sounds unnecessarily complicated.