In non-class based RPGs, do you prefer to max out skills one by one, or to gradually increase multiple skills over time in a way that makes sense?
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In non-class based RPGs, do you prefer to max out skills one by one, or to gradually increase multiple skills over time in a way that makes sense?
It's almost always better to improve one skill, usually your main combat one, as much as possible.
This will mean you'll suffer for other skills, but it can help you survive long enough to actually buy the other stuff.
In the context of OPs game (WFRP 4e), I can say as a player that combat skills and attributes are always the first thing to be advanced, including other skills that keep me alive (cool, endurance, dodge, perception, intuition). Unless the GM made it sound like the next session is entirely social.
>combat skills and attributes are always the first thing to be advanced
I can't think of a single system where that's not the case.
In WoD:Vampire bypassing the combat is often better than being good at combat.
At best you're just delaying your own victory by putting your exp somewhere else.
This sucks for a number of reasons because
>It's true
>It makes everything boring as shit
and worst of all
>It's accurate to reality
Versatility is king in real life.
It's really not, unless you're already an expert in one field. Dabbling only works if you have an anchor skill.
In life you need to be prepared for anything. This goes double if you make a habit of setting out on dangerous adventures.
Most people can get by knowing a few specific skills and a variety of low-level 'professional' skills at default or default+1.
>This goes double if you make a habit of setting out on dangerous adventures.
People who do dangerous shit are often highly trained and under the thumb of the people who trained them.
You don't take an average joe and teach them to be a spy. You take someone who's an expert and make them an expert and also a spy, because their ability to do their fricking job is directly related to your need for them in the first place. Hell, spycraft is in of itself an expertise skill.
Again, you take experts and make them dabblers, because their expertise makes them important and useful to you. An anchor skill is fundamentally important to being tasked with anything of significance, because when the chips are down, the dabbler won't know how to pick that specific lock or tap that specific network.
Spycraft wouldn't be a single skill in any system. It'd be like a dozen.
Yeah, but if you're, say, doing a heist, you don't have four jack of all trades. You have four specialists who share a number of general skills and may be able to cover for each other in a pinch. You have one guy who runs cover for your plans, a second guy who takes care of electronics or locks, a driver, and probably a fence/money launderer. If you're thieves, everyone needs to have passable firearms ability, but none of you needs to know how to use more than the gun you're bringing to the event.
In fact, gathering a bunch of specialists allows everyone else to learn their specialty a little faster, because they have an expert on hand to do instruction with.
Movie heist robbers have a pretty varied skillset as well, depending on the movie. Their specialty is usually just a little icing on top.
Latter/depends
In my experiences in GURPS so far, characters tend to start with their primary combat skill in spitting distance of the campaign maximum anyway, and the focus is more on fleshing out techniques or new abilities rather than pushing the skill the last 2-4 levels.
In my saturday game there's a guy sitting at SL 16 when some people are up near 19. he just makes up the difference with reckless attacks and ignoring the consequences with massive frickoff armor.
So heavily 'it depends' I suppose.
I always increase only the skills I actually used that session, in proportion to how much I used them.
Maxing out one by one in a way that makes sense.
This question is actually a big math problem on whether or not there's multiplicative scaling
The most common example you see in video games and board games is number of attacks/attack speed multiplying against damage
It is better to increase 10 damage and 10 attacks to 20 damage with 20 attacks than to increase it to 30 damage with 10 attacks or 10 attacks with 30 damage
The other scaling factor can be viewed as ammunition, where your spell charges or mana costs are limiting the total amount of damage you can deal, and this is often worth increasing
Anyone who thinks there is any other answer to this thread is simply wrong
What kind of lame fricking games are you playing? This is true in exactly one case, and one case only: A game with no mechanics of any kind other than dealing straight unmitigated DPS to single targets with guaranteed hits.
But enjoy your wiki-sperg DPS whiteroom.
I'm actually the DM and if you don't set your char up in a way your party is minmaxing I'm going to TPK you
I'm a candyland DM with loot but my encounters are Dragons and Liches and shit
Dude, he's fricking correct and using damage as an example.
The mathematics of how stats scale are super important to which of these options are correct. In shadowrun 5e, it is -always- correct to maximize what numbers you can at chargen, as buying high skills and stats with priority is way less intensive than karma.
I'm not saying "Doing math bad."
I'm saying that in games with more mechanics than "Do attack, damage happen," optimizing for theoretical maximum DPS in whiteroom conditions isn't going to get you very far.
A guy making two attacks at a given skill for 10 damage does more damage than a guy making one attack for 16.
Until you run into a dude with twelve armor.
Doing 30 damage with one attack is better than attacking four times for six.
Until you need to wear down active defenses or work through multiple enemies faster.
And these, too, are just tame, basic examples.
But yes, maximizing DPR is how you win at games with simple, straightforward combat resolution and little else to do.
Checked
Oh
The main group I DMed long term in the 90s, they just wanted to kill shit and play Zelda. When we started we took turns being the DM and then they decided to make me do it every game because my ideas were like metroidvania fetch quests whereas they were like hey there's a red dragon on top of this mountain
My DMing approach to non-combat resolution is on par with what you see in SMT where if the alignments don't match I'm not even going to allow a negotation. I am much stricter on alignment than other people, I think.
Well, I'm not really talking about non-combat resolution. I'm talking about combat resolution that isn't bad.
D&D is one thing, but in a lot of games, just straight trying to maximize damage means you'll still fall pray to edge cases.
Like, random GURPS example, a guy has 12 HP. If I hit him twice for five injury, that's better than hitting him once for eight, right?
Well, if he takes over half his HP in injury from one attack, he has to make a test to see if he's knocked over from shock. The 'lower' absolute but higher single damage could also be useful for crippling limbs, or penetrating armor.
But two attacks could be more ideal for wearing down someone's defenses if they they have a high parry score, or to set up feints to slip past, even if it won't penetrate their armor as well.
You've got to be doing the math, but you've also got to be asking yourself what you'll do when the situation you optimized for isn't happening. You could get separated from the party, you could fight an enemy who's too resistant to your usual gimmick, you could get the weapon you dumped all those skill points into knocked out of your hand, now what the frick is the plan? Maximizing one MMO rotation that does maximum theoretical DPR will not see you through.
But in D&D et al, where the core combat resolution has nothing going on except 'roll to beat his AC, then do your damage,' yes, you can maximize for damage per round to good effect, because the amount of damage you'll do against a given AC is a straightforward calculation, and there are very few vagaries to consider beyond that.
But that's not how I view things. I view them as resource management where if you do things in a specific order and the dice roll statistical averages that the party will barely survive when they clear the dungeon, and if they aren't figuring it out, then improvise some crutch. Throw them health pots and scrolls in a chest, have some giga NPC bail them out. I remember one encounter where they fricked up killing a vampire and the vampire simply asked them to leave and never come back after they were completely disarmed and injured
So you demand they minmax but then won't let them lose anyway?
I mean, I'm glad you're having fun with your friends, but that's just antithetical to the entire point of playing the game to me.
Most of my D&D career was 2.0 in the 90s and we had very generous -10 bleedout rules. I am very generous at letting a party bail when things go wrong and would usually hand them OP things with charges. I didn't want to kill my friends, I just wanted to make them feel challenged. My cleric NPC was an elf princess who didn't fight at all and served 3 functions: Heal, Purify food and water, and giga smite the undead. One of her personality traits was that she was terrified of undead and would use overwhelming force on low level skeletons and shit.
Yes
Increase HP and AC and Wis just increases how many turns you can get before you start bleeding
Charisma and other RP checks are just decreasing how many encounters you must deal with before you have time to sleep and heal
The time I wiped my long standing campaign, here's the jist of what happened. None of the guys wanted to play a Cleric so I self-inserted an NPC because the DM manuals tell you point blank you have to make the game a lot easier if you can't heal at all. I made them fight the BBEG Lich when they weren't read and my NPC fled and told them to flee, and my party was meatheads and tried to fight. I set the encounter up so that if you hit his resistances or missed it hurt him but did 0 dmg and just made him very angry. I set the lich up with enchantments and spells so he had fire resistance, level drain, and -10 AC
My script was for the party to run and when the Lich ran out of spell charges was going to stop chasing, but they had never fought something that powerful before and got bopped.
That's mainly because Shadowrun has garbage chargen that creates characters of widely disparate power using different, or sometimes the same methods.
I could create a dwarf worth 1100+ karma in priority system or sum to 10, but with karmagen everyone starts with what? 800?
I've not seen a tabletop yet that doesn't have at least two garbage systems, so I think the point stands.
If you have any kind of point-based advancement system, you should also use the same system for chargen. That's a lesson Shadowrun learned for 4e and then forgot again. Priority encourages min-maxing since you can buy attributes and skills at a 1:1 ratio, whereas later on it's 1:n. You just have a nice day in the foot if you don't min-max. The other encouraging factor for min-max is bad advice spread by forums and reddit on how to scale skills for encounters.
The Dark Eye 4.x had the same issue in its chargen. They changed to XP (or "adventure points") for everything with 5e.
>I've not seen a tabletop yet that doesn't have at least two garbage systems
I mean, we were talking about Shadowrun here.
It works that way in risk of rain which is a very fun video game and the math is more complex. I believe that in that case its better to have an equal number of attack speed bosts and damage boosts even if the damage boosts are significantly larger than the speed boosts, because the cost of squaring it off with extra speed boosts is much higher. Also armour factors in, flat damage reduction heavily favours single hits over high rates of fire
For vidya you do have a point - the game mechnics work certain way, there's certain challenges and enemies to overcome, if you crunch the numbers right there should be one optimal way to progress.
For pen and paper, that's not necessarily the case, the game mechanics still work certain way, but the challenges you come across are at GM's discretion, therefore can (and often will be) adjusted depending on what GM thinks is "fair".
most systems I've run into, it is vastly optimal to mainline one skill in chargen then buy the rest.
I'm going to be honest with you anon, I have been running games for over 15 years but never been a player in one for long enough for character improvement mechanics to actually come in to play.
Your DM must be very stingy or you do stupid shit that gets you killed all the time
When I was an active DM I would try to time it so players got 1 EXP Lvl in (D&D 2.0) in 4-8 hours of gameplay. A lot of campaigns don't get to the point where your casters are tossing around Wish, Resurrection, and Meteors like they're Magic Missile, but mine have
Anon I'm forever GM and never get to play in anything long enough to advance a character.
Anyway I don't have a preference as long as people aren't making characters that are completely dysfunctional. Played in a VtR game briefly and I was the only person who thought to make a character that could drive a fricking car I picked a super lame cat so they would all feel like dorks turning up to be bad assess and clambering out of my hatchback.
WFRP 4e? Preference for 45 in WS or BS, and 15 skill ranks in a melee or ranged skill to start. Then I can advance in the other stay alive skills and whatever I actually want to do.
Making lopsided characters is just begging your GM to frick you. Slow and steady and versatile wins the race in the long run.
while nice in theory, this consideration is by and far away secondary to which is a more efficient usage of your chargen points.
sometimes it's far, far more practical to build high. Especially in systems where chargen resources are different from progression resources.
>efficient usage of your chargen points
Then think of it as paying extra for versatility. Still well worth it.
no it's not, it will take fricking decades of play to get your stats up high, but diversifying will only take a couple months.
You're playing now, not a couple months from now. As I said, high numbers are not strictly beneficial.
Level all relevent skills to my character to a point of competence, then bring them as high as I like one-by-one in order of importance.
I kind of miss the point of the story. I was minmaxing as the DM against them on things like saying hmm, Mike the Wizard is too reliant on fire magic and all of them in general just sit there and do nothing expecting my NPC to turn and do everything for them when they're dealing with the undead
The encounter was just supposed to be a roadblock to getting the things they needed so the Oracle of Delphi could cast resurrection on a party member who got fricked by bad rolls. Once he died and they were bent on bringing him back, I let them go on the sidequest but jacked the difficulty of encounters
The campaign lasted like 3 years and was set in a mix of D&D and Ancient Greece.
I split my points between planned and reactive. I have an ideal target in mind, which some points are dedicated to achieving, but I also understand that I don't know everything in the campaign, so I keep some points available to shore up blatant weak points that keep arising.
To give you guys a better timeline, I played the same campaign every 1-2 weeks on Saturday in middle and high school and it kind of took up all my spare time with grid paper and a calculator. It took 2 1/2 years before I finally killed someone and like another 6 months before I wiped them. Then we started back at level 1 trying to do a sci fi setting and were arguing over things like how much a bullet and laser should do for damage. I remember pretty clearly I kept telling them 1d20 damage for a laser is a bad idea and it should be more like 2d10 or 3d8 and then Goldeneye and Quake came out and we stopped playing D&D
You know, with this context, alright. It's not like I can fault the fun you had with your friends at that age. And honestly I always find stories about how people played RPGs as kids pretty fascinating. So I'mma thank you for that.
At the same time...I'm baffled as to why exactly you're contributing your thirty year old recollections about a game that never had the mechanics the thread is about.
It doesn't? I know AD&D 2.0 has less options for mechanics than other tabletop RPGs but it's not like there's nothing
I did some DMing in the 2000s but those were only like 5 sessions deep max and since 2010 I've only been a PC in online campaigns
While my familiarity is poor, I'm pretty sure no edition has been a classless point buy game, no.
Oh, I read that so many hours ago I forgot all about it and just started thinking about ways to spec your characters in general terms
My experience in classless RPGs is more in elder scrolls than tabletop and the way experience works in those games you are shoehorned into using one damage type, maybe two at most
It got pretty close in 3.5, where you could play point-buy characters using generic "fighter mage thief" classes.
yeah i remember when 3.0 came out me and a lot of other DM boomers refused to switch
for me it was two problems
the HP curve on the monster manual made no fricking sense anymore, things spiralled up so fast it made things inflexible on what level and population party could fight something
i also didn't like what they did to the AC. i never had a problem with THAC0 and who did
It might also be worth mentioning we were all final fantasy junkies and that influenced my DMing quite a bit
Here's a bag of holding at level 1 and so much enchanted israeliteelry and clothing that you actually have options for gear
The other big rule variant we used was that after several months they tried to convince me to change the rules to an MP system under the basis that only FF1 used spell charges and FF4 and FF6 were clearly better and I met them halfway and let them generously trade high level spell slots for low ones and use many spell slots to get a high level one. So they could minmax by studying the appropriate spells and swap amulets to faceroll what they knew was coming up
What system are you talking about?
I don't usually max anything all the way out because that gets prohibitively expensive due to diminishing returns (which is how it should work in any properly designed game), but depending on the system I'll try to get 50%-75% of the way there before I start making serious investments into anything else. Having an entire party of characters who are kind of adequate at doing a thing is generally less useful than having one guy who's actually good at it.
It's good to max out one or two skills and have three other skills on standby just in case.
In any RPG, I prefer "skills" to be active abilities instead of static modifiers.
Does the nomenclature really matter that much? They're called talents there.
>Does the nomenclature really matter that much?
When two two things with different terms do the exact same thing, it absolutely is important. Redundancy is indicative of laziness.
A fine example, I was too lazy to proofread my post and put in the word "two" twice. I've proven my own point.
>When (two) things with different terms do the exact same thing
Within the rpg in question, they do not duplicate.
Good for that individual RPG then, whatever it is.
In many cases, stats/attributes and "skills" share the same function. Which is why I worded (
) the way I did. If your/OP's example is an exception, then there was no need for (
) to cry about me making distinctions between terms the way they did, because I wasn't insulting the example or saying anything applicable to the specific example.
>Good for that individual RPG then, whatever it is.
IKR? It's not like this very thread started with an example that has been named above.
>It's not like this very thread started with an example that has been named above.
All right, so since it's an exception to what I said, then there was no need for (
#) to cry about me making distinctions between terms the way they did, because I wasn't insulting the example or saying anything applicable to the specific example.
Should I repeat myself again, or have your tears stopped inhibiting your ability to read?
Also, your shit is going backwards. The active stuff is talents, which has already been said. But deflect harder if you need to.
I make notes which how much I used the skills or had encounters that support a raise and spent the points accordingly
Sounds autistic and annoying.
I'm a cynic. If I'm playing in a game, I try to identify what combination of abilities will get me the greatest advantage, then go with that. No matter what they say, no GM is ever going to mechanically encourage suboptimal builds - the closest they'll get is reward you for reading their minds as to what they'll let you get away with, but you can do that with a functional character just as easily.
It depends on how steep the increasing XP cost is and how tolerant the GM is.
Basically I evaluate my last session and from there choose a couple skills my character would need to increase. I then increase those skills. I won’t increase skills that wouldn’t make sense for my character of course.
I noticed this thread hasn't archived yet so I wanted to throw out one of the more interesting Homebrew D&D things we did as a minor
One of the people in my group suggested we could make the game harder if we took Phoenix Downs from Final Fantasy, so we fricking did it. The potion would revive you from negative -9 to -1 HP to 1 and you skip a turn.
I'm sure you can see why this lets me a lot more flexible with what I can do in 2.0 because as long as they don't eat a full wipe they're fine for the next room