>Characters lose their turns if they suffer damage
 It's All Fucked Shirt $22.14 |
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It's All Fucked Shirt $22.14 |
ITT: Game mechanics that immediately turn you off a tabletop system
>Characters lose their turns if they suffer damage
It's All Fucked Shirt $22.14 |
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It's All Fucked Shirt $22.14 |
>you must roll a dice
Whats wrong with dice? what other system introduces difficulty rating and variance?
Poker cards are pretty great.
Poker dice.
>D20
>DnD-adjacent
>"Casters" being a separate thing instead of magic (if it's part of the system) being something everyone can access.
What games do this? I've seen a couple of that let's you stun characters if you reach a certain damage threshold, but nothing that auto loses you a turn for suffering any damage at all.
These cover it for me. I think I'd ad
>Levels
But those basically only exist in class based systems.
>Based on DnD 5e or is a 5e conversion
>Friend interested in running a game
>Nice
>He wants to run a scifi game with no magic
>Cool
>He wants to use DnD
>Says he would just have everyone play a fighter
>System uses Classes
This. Classes are so fricking archaic it's always a clear sign the designers have no fricking idea what they're doing and are 25 years behind the curve. Customizable character options like Genesys's talent pyramids are infinitely superior to classshit.
While they're fine in moderation, I hate having to reference tables during combat or social encounters to determine the result of a roll. The die is there to facilitate faster resolution, so having to roll and then refer to one or more tables to figure out what your roll means is hogwash. To be clear, this is different from random encounter tables or loot tables. I'm talking about when you need a table to determine what the basic result means. If you've reached that point, then you've overcomplicated your action resolution system.
Sparingly referring to a table for class/ character features is fine so long as you don't have to do it for every little thing though.
>Classless point-buy
>Narrative mechanics
>Metacurrencies
>I hate things that are good and correct
Classless point-buy almost invariably results in a monstrous skill floor because a huge amount of the system function has been offloaded to the end user. The other two horribly mangle immersion by divorcing the gameplay outcomes from any diegetic basis.
The point being made is that the casters can only get slightly higher DPR at exorbitant resource costs. While the CoDzilla does technically exist in 5e, it's only good for one or two fights instead of bulldozing more combats than a highly optimized ToB-enabled dipstack.
While the battlefield control setup still works wonders, it's even more harshly reliant on the "martials" to finish the combat between DPR figures, Concentration being overused, and save-every-round norms.
Depends on the edition, really. 3.X has rather thorough establishment of it as some manner of "life force" with all the XP cost and level loss mechanics.
>Classless point-buy almost invariably results in a monstrous skill floor because a huge amount of the system function has been offloaded to the end user.
Thankfully, classless point-buy can always be supplemented with class templates by the gm (Or if the system is good, core-books) for new players to make sure they have some baseline compentecy before giving them free-reign on advancement to fine-tune their character the way they want.
Classes are good for a one shot style system, where long term progression isn't important, or in a setting that has a lot of flavor as a way to get players invested in it by offering classes that are super tied into setting specific lore. D&D half-asses the second because it's trying to come across as generic fantasy, but classes like Druids, Warlocks, Bards and Monks are all too specific to fill that niche (I'd argue the division between Clerics and Palidins as well)
thankfully you don't have to supplement because classes do not ensure competency and usually do the opposite.
>class templates by the gm
Still an end user.
>Or if the system is good, core-books
Then it's classed point-buy.
If, at any point, something is fielded expecting the players have something they don't, then the game will not work properly. That is the problem, a total lack of character generation rails means there are NO sound expectations, meaning the end users need to have a well-done Session Zero establishing expectations AND the system mastery to meet them.
Training times survived into the 3.5 DMG as an option that'd impose a week or two past four years of downtime for a 20th level character, to my recollection, doubled without a higher-level member of the class to learn from.
Nta but picrel is the rule
What a shit rule. The last thing the game needs is another money sink to frick over martials.
It fricks casters as well so nothing changes.
No it doesn't, casters have much less expensive required gear.
I take "you can mandate" as denoting it optional, given the awkwardly-written modularity.
Literally no part of this is true. You've never tried a classless system.
I'm one of the somewhere-above-medium wit near-nogames who digs at the math vastly more than playing. Almost everything I talk about I have not played a game with, instead staring at the numbers.
And what the most utterly fundamental facts of how the numbers work says is that balancing classless point-buy is one of the most nightmarish things in existence, which due to the nature of WHY that's a balance problem means extreme variance in capability based on how one distributes points.
This in turn guarantees that no small amount of the end users will frick up their campaigns catastrophically in failing to keep the playgroup on the same page for BASIC MECHANICS. Especially as you add progression scale.
It's quite easy to balance a point buy system, actually. And class-based systems include some of the worst examples of poorly balanced games in existence.
>It's quite easy to balance a point buy system, actually.
Not if you want any meaningful breadth of content or depth of scaling, because the ways to frick up distribution of points necessarily grow far faster than the number of efficient distributions.
>And class-based systems include some of the worst examples of poorly balanced games in existence.
Which arise specifically for shitting on the principal of being class-based by constantly gutting the limitations of one group of classes while pouring ever more level-independent progression into them. I am a GiantITP poster, I am DEEPLY familiar with martial/caster disparities.
Because people spend points differently. The long-time player may be better than the newbie who earnestly tries to make a good fighter off a third the points spent on it because the former knows the ideal ratios for the target parameters while the latter naively crowbars abilities together in ignorance of their underlying math and action economy friction.
No, with breadth and depth of scaling. Without qualification or caveat.
No, they'll both make effective fighters. Your experience is limited to bad systems with trap options.
In a well-designed game the newbie's approach makes them hard to counter, but this still has many qualifiers about actually using the different base values properly instead of mistakes like overspending on shoring up the weakness of an approach when you're already paying to support a different approach with a better return-on-investment for that.
With so few constraints, it doesn't matter how expertly you avoid any individual option being a trap, because there will eventually come the time when a combination that looks reasonable to a player is so inefficient that it cripples their character. Whether that be moronic hyperfixation on maximizing a very specific output or trying to do too many things for your point value and ending up inadequate at any of them.
You don't play classless systems. This is just a bunch of vague bullshit that doesn't actually mean anything.
>You don't play classless systems.
Have you not been paying attention to the reply chain?
>This is just a bunch of vague bullshit that doesn't actually mean anything.
No, it's high-level generalities of why classless point-buy is inherently a goddamn minefield of game design.
If you mean Prowlers and Paragons, what comes up on a quick search shows it to be exactly the sort of threadbare system that simply denies having the complexity for outcomes to diverge. Frick's sake, it uses degrees of NARRATIVE CONTROL!
I'm talking about things like "GURPS is fundamentally incapable of having a sensible barrier to entry" and "The 3.X content mill really only works with mostly-insulated chunks" here.
Pretending to be stupid isn't a convincing argument, sadly
No, it's not high level generalities of anything.
>"GURPS is fundamentally incapable of having a sensible barrier to entry"
>"The 3.X content mill really only works with mostly-insulated chunks"
What do either of these even mean?
Nope. In prowlers, both hyper specialist and hyper generalist characters can be effective.
What do you mean? The same mechanics apply to everyone in a given system. How would they frick this up?
yep, you've never tried a classless system.
>metacurrencies
>special symbol dice
>"narrative control" mechanics for players
>fail forward
>dozens or hundreds of feats
symbol dice
ouch!
or hundreds of feats
and what? just let players do whatever they want?
>PC: "I fill his lungs with melassas."
>GM: "do you have a feat for that?, cause if not, you can't do it."
Uh, no? How did you reach that conclusion?
>Narrative control mechanics
>Failing forward
The frick are these?
>Dozens/Hundreds of feats
If theyre more for customizing your character with little flavor abilities or proficiencies its fine. If it's "You cant scratch your ass without the Ass Scratching feat" then it fricking sucks
Can't rightly remember what the first one is, but Failing Forward is the concept of having the PCs get the bare minimum of continuing the GM's game even when the players are fricking up on either their choices or dice rolls that involve their choices.
He is probably referring to either pbta systems allowing player input on the setting at chargen or maybe genesys/fate/40k rpgs fate points or similar allowing player to declare a minor fact or change an outcome with meta currency.
Probably just a control freak who should have just written a novel instead of running.
>Genesys/fate/40k rpgs fate points or similar allowing player to declare a minor fact or change an outcome with meta currency.
I personally find this incredibly fun, but am mindful that you need people who are respectful of the game and narrative, and know how to add something to an encounter without breaking it.
I agree. If you have a good gm and players, the limits are easy to agree upon.
My biggest problem running thw system are people accustomed to boiler plate rpg combat and mechanics. They seem to forget that they can do something besides move/attack when outside that type of system.
control mechanics
The ability for the players to introduce elements into the scene on their own without having to play mother-may-I with the GM. It is typically limited by the previously mentioned metacurrancies, like Fate Points or something similar. Sometimes such narrative control is failure minor, like saying that this alleyway has a drainage pipe you can climb to make your way to the roof easily, or forcing a guard to leave their post to take a piss so you can sneak by. Player-manufactured coincidence to grease the wheels of a scene. Other games, like Blades in the Dark, go more heavy into this and have outright flashback mechanics where you can retroactively enforce that actually you prepared something days ago for this *exact situation* and thus resolve the current problem with "planning" because your character is smart, but without you the player having to actually put the work in for it.
Narrative control mechanics only really work for specific kinds of games, something where character power is very low or where combat desperately needs to be avoided is a good place for them but something like, say, a Mystery focused game would absolutely be diminished by the players being able to just insert clues of their own imagining into the scene.
Ah yeah, so something like Hero Points in Mutants and Masterminds and similar. Again, I think all comes down to your playgroup, because I can see shitheads abusing it but on the flipside Ive had people "change the narration" in a way thats fun or perhaps lets me introduce a minor plothook or storybeat in a clever way. L5R was good at that with the oppurtunity system where you could fail a check but still squeeze some kind of minor narrative progression or kernal of information from otherwise failed roll
> Again, I think all comes down to your playgroup, because I can see shitheads abusing it but on the flipside Ive had people "change the narration" in a way thats fun
Yep. Its always worth remembering that the difference between a playgroup acting in good faith and on the same page is astronomically different from even a group where only a single player is either tonally dissonant or actively a shitter. Players and GMs that are working towards the same ends make for smoothly run, fun games. Games where someone is trying to 'beat' the other people at the table, or be subversive, or even just trying to be more comedic or more serious than anyone else at the table wants from the game can really frick things up for everyone.
As someone who has made and released RPGs, one of the hard lessons to learn is that there is no amount of rules you can introduce that will stop a bad player from being a bad player. It cannot be on you, the game designer, to babyproof the playpen so that nobody can have their fun ruined by a player active in bad faith. It's simply not within your control to do so. You can root out mechanics that create situations that *encourage* bad player behavior, but not prevent the players from engaging with the game that way in the first place.
It's always better to put your focus on giving good groups the opportunities to shine rather than trying to lock everything down for everyone for fear of someone being a dick.
Usually the GM still has veto, especially if it's something powerful like randomly "finding" a clue for the central problem or making professional guards frick off for no good reason. Also it costs more metacurrency the stronger the effect.
>Failing forward
What honestly should just be a good GMing rule of thumb that sometimes gets enforced mechanically because people at bad at running the game. Put simply, any time you roll the dice in a fail-forward system, something happens. You never, ever end up in the same state as you started. Even on the worst failure you roll, SOMETHING changes. In a binary success system like DnD, you roll to climb over a fence. You fail, so you do not climb the fence. You are back where you started, and your only option is to just *keep trying* until eventually you succeed, which is lame as frick. In a fail forward system, if you try to climb the fence and fail you either make so much noise that you alert the guards who come to investigate (which means they open the gate to come outside and look around, thus giving you a way inside after you beat them), or you get over the fence but you fall and hurt yourself on the other side because you fricked up, etc. You are penalized in some way for failure, or new complications are introduced that will make a problem for you later, but even a failure moves your character/the scene 'forward' in some way.
This is not inherently a bad idea, but again it needs moderation and mostly should just be something that lives in the GM's head. Every GM has, at some point in their career, blocked the way forward with some kind of puzzle door or the like and slowly realized that now the session has ground to a halt because their players just cannot solve the damn thing. They fail, and their failure leaves them no option but to try again until they DON'T fail, and only then can the session continue. No one has fun there.
Yeah 100% agree, and thats what I *thought* it was, but its something I never had a problem with (though of course its a case by case basis.)
As you said, if you wanna roll to climb a fence and you fail 5 times or youre in a puzzle your players just CANNOT wrap their heads around, Id argue its your OBLIGATION as the DM to move the game forward in SOME WAY. Obviously in some systems and settings, getting stuck for a bit is fine, and even part of the fun, but the game grinds to a halt and your players are frustrated, I dont understand the animosity towards a style that lets them make *some* soet of progress, even if its baby steps.
>I dont understand the animosity towards a style that lets them make *some* soet of progress, even if its baby steps.
2 reasons: the systems that mechanicize fail forward are often very heavy-handed about it, outright mandating it in all situations where you pick up the dice which can create confusion in situations where its not clear how fail forward even could be applied. Given that these are often also systems that tend to be mechanically lite, it can easily come across as the game throwing up its hands and saying "I don't have any ideas, YOU fricking figure it out."
The second is more of a tone issue, in that some of these games that focus on narrative control and failure forward are... for lack of a better term really goddamn smug about it? Like, its not just that they say that this is how the game works or these are what the rules are, but the language of the book says that this is the objectively correct way that all games should be run, regardless of system, and you have come to them on hands and knees because you (fricking simpleton that you are) were too unenlightened to figure this out on your own.
Blades in the Dark has a huge problem with this, there is a page of that book that almost literally says "Players don't actually enjoy making plans for something like a heist, and if you think you do you are wrong. I, the game designer, have decided what you enjoy doing FOR you, and you will do things my way instead. The correct way." Which can easily be extremely offputting and puts players that disagree with the game designer into a defensive, combative posture towards the entire game because the rules text just picked a fight with you for no reason.
page number?
I am of the opinion that dnd is worse, as you fail backwards in many situations.
Like climbing you brought up. Dnd and many systems like it have rules along thw lines of passing moves you a small amount, while failing means you could lose all progress. At worse it is neutral, like picking that lock, but often a failure brings straight consequences with nothing gleamed or gained. Traps for instance, if you fail to identify it, just go off a d the only information you get is out of character knowledge or general vagaries your character has to justify to have seen before. Combat is largely the same.
This leads people to create hyper specialized autist player characters that are devoid of a reason to exist besides their niche they fill.
gleaned. not gleamed.
When I started DMing for 5e, I remember feeling really confused about skill checks, in that unless they had very obvious immediate consequences (say, failing an acrobatics roll to walk across a tightrope 60ft in the air) then you could just spam the skill check until you succeed. It's so fricking stupid, there's literally no point to making it a skill check, then. Just tell the PC he succeeds eventually, without any roll.
Then eventually I ran a game of Call of Cthulhu and saw the mechanic for pushing skill checks, and I've used it in D&D ever since. Now, if it's a skill check with no immediately obvious consequence for failure (say lockpicking a door) and you fail, then nothing happens. BUT, if you choose to try that skill check again, then you're pushing the check and if you fail a second time, THEN a consequence happens (you jam the lock, making it impossible to use, or you make so much noise that you alert guards on the other side of the door, etc.) That way, If my players fail something relatively risk-free once, they're incentivized to either rethink their approach and try something else, or to push their luck and see what happens. It's a very simple fix, that solved this problem entirely for me.
Good houserule.
I was confused too about skill checks, until I read the PHB and DMG and read that passive skills were a thing. Which sure everyone uses passive perception but passive insight and investigation is amazing as it allows people who have high insight to gain info that other characters lack or even passive athletics allows a strength build to actually feel strong.
Its basically the same rule as in 3.5 which is taking a 10 in a non hostile environment. So if the DC is 15 and you got a +6 then you just do it but if someone got a +4 they gotta roll. This enforces that the characters are specialized and I like it.
Failing forwards is when failure progresses the plot
>Fail to unlock door
>Guards discover you and one of them just so happens to have the key on him
Also known as "lazy writing" and "getting in the way of the emergent story". You see this in shitty tv/movies all the time. Things just happen because plot! What a curious thing to import to a game.
Good Lord you must hate 2d20 systems
Which is completely justified
Just say 2d20.
>Hit Points
Simply this, i'm not even against the concept just add some effect on top of them other than being an expendable pool of quantum damage taken. GURPS and BRP ones (eg: runequest) have an acceptable usage of HP. I prefer systems that don't use them though (eg: Hârnmaster).
>Metacurrencies
I'm not against the notion per se, just make them something with a very focused scope and/or with cost-benefits attached (eg: conan2d20 momentum/doom). Given the choice between two games i automatically lean more on the one that doesn't use metacurrecies though.
>Classes
Again i'm not against this but the only permutations that i find acceptable of class-based games is lifepaths (eg: wfrp, sotdl, the burning wheel, traveler) or templates (brp professions for example). Having a rigid chassis that encapsulate the character progression may be expedient for niches protection but definitely something i don't like.
>Proprietary/exotic props
I may squint my eyes a bit if the game has multiple props (eg: savage worlds using chips, pocker cards and polyhedral dice) but using proprietary/exotic ones (eg: fate using fudge dice, dcc using that weird chain dice, genesys using their remapped ones) is where i draw the line. Games that use simple d6 are my favorites.
>!D&D
As in "yet another totally-not-d&d but better, trust me dude" heartbreaker types, examples are PF, 13th age, SotDL, OSR in general. Even non-d20 system qualify for this, for example Design Mechanism's Classic Fantasy or GURPS Dungeon Fantasy.
>"Powered by", "d20 system", "5e compatible", etc...
I find splatbook for existing rulesystem ideal but hammering an established rulesystem in different niches and sell it as a standalone product doesn't fly with me, i got burned in the d20 system era.
Could you actually elaborate on what you mean by what you consider an "acceptable" use of HP? I'm a little interested.
Basically what i said: Having wounding effects on top of the point pool exhaustion. In gurps for example the proportion of damage output vs the hp total will trigger effects like shock penalties, incapacitations, bleeding, etc... in short damage as an inconvenience other than "i'm x hp near to ko".
Hitpoints in the context of the classic dungeon crawlers is fine, because it treats how much punishment you can take as a resource, much like how supplies are also resources to tick off. But in those dungeon crawlers, you didn't have hitpoints coming out of your ears, and stepping into a trap could very easily make you lose your life if not leave you at the mercy of the next strong wind that blows your way.
Saying that the outcome of an attack is, "You do 8 damage". It's something, but nothing really changes aside from subtracting a number from the total.
>there are rules but only for character generation and combat
If I need to pull the whole game from my ass anyway why don't I just do that instead of paying you for the privilege of pulling the game from my ass "using" your totally rad system?
>critical fumbles
>DM:"you fall prone and hurt yourself, roll for damage"
remember, always play casters
This is literally not a thing in D&D, the playerbase is just SO fricking stupid that they've made it a thing because haha funny YouTube in(ternet)cel(ebrity) does it.
There are still like 100 other reasons to never play martials in that dogshit system though.
you would be surprised the amount of tables that play with critical failures
but let me rise one up better
>if your character dies, no matter the average level of the party, you start a new character... AT LEVEL ONE
>you start a new character... AT LEVEL ONE
This is incredibly based and redpilled.
Starting at level 1 would be so abused at our table. Both in game to justify builds from leveling up fast, and also as a protest against shit in game.
He is making a joke about the creator of Dragonball dying from a brain bleed, most likely caused by a fall.
I'm not crazy about turn losses as a general mechanic in RPGs. Pathfinder 2e's action system is a step in the right direction, with stuns usually only making you lose one of your three actions.
These are especially bad when a more competent character rolls extra dice. The swordmaster winds up *more* likely to cut off his own hand than the peasant boy.
I think fumbles are good when they're something tacked on to a risky maneuver. A standard attack doesn't risk a fumble, but sprinting along a tight rope while firing arrows does.
Our GM's homebrew system does it in a way I like honestly.
>Conflict resoltution, to make a long explanation short, depends on rolling anywhere from 1-6 d6s against a target number
>If you fail completely, you get a Threat, ie something bad happens, either you get whacked, lose something, or just get into a disadvantageous position in general
>if you only get 1 success, the GM may tack on a threat if they feel the fiction calls for one, but is not required to
>on the other hand, if one of your dice rolls on the target exactly, you get 1 Advantage, which is basically a positive effect determined by the player(or the GM if the player would like to defer to the GM on it)
>could be anywhere from tripping them, hacking a limb off if you have the right tag on your weapon, maybe uncovering a hidden treasure or passage, etc
>they explicitly do not cancel each other out
>you also cannot use an Advantage to cancel out getting a Threat, nor can the GM use a Threat to decide you don't get to have an Advantage
Fumble rules in d20 are idiotic and dnd players are too stupid to understand why. It’s fricking stupid. They work fine in 3d6 or similar systems with a 1% or less chance of a fumble but with 5% intervals that happens 1 in 20 times you do anything
>Game is not a Wizard-Simulator, but magic is still the largest part of the rulebook.
See DnDogshit 5e and how spells are over 100 pages in a 300 page player's handbook. Instant sign the game designers are absolute hacks who don't know how to design a good system without literal cheat-codes to circumvent that system. It's absolutely amazing how in DnDogshit 5e, magic becomes the source of and primary solution to like 99% of problems after level 6 or so. In a 20 level game. I know normies are moronic and barely think, but holy frick how did the designers get away with such objectively awful game-design...
true
The worst thing is, DnD 5e isn't even to blame for this. 3.5 was a poorly made system that fell ass-backwards into this design, and 4e TRIED to steer away from it. The fanbase rebelled, because 200 pages of highly restrictive specific spell lists was what they WANTED. Dnd 5e is the result of a company with no spine bowing to their customerbase and serving them the slop they asked for as a path of least resistance.
DnD 5e is a bad system, but BLAMING DnD 5e for these problems shows a lack of historical knowledge.
It's been brought up before, but one of THE big problems with D&D is lack of historical knowledge. As much as people like to mock newer players about "NAT 20!" and being overly obsessed with characters having legendary backstories and adventures, that's all been Chinese Telephone'd from stories AD&D grogs told.
We definitely used to joke about how bloated 3.5 was at the end, along with stuff like the Weeaboo Book of Fightan Magic, but doing a Kindergartner's version of gatekeeping has made people forget about dumb shit from their own era of the game.
In 3.5 you can at least make fun and goofy shit. 5e is the castrated variant.
This is THE main reason I stopped playing D&D. I want to play characters that have cool weapon fights and action scenes... but every time I've tried to play non-casters in D&D it turns into "stand around with my thumb up my ass while the casters throw cheat codes at the non-combat problems". They flatout tell me not to roll skills, because those rolls could fail, while their spells just work.
Then combat happens and I'm again left with my thumb up my ass at mid and high levels while enemies can just fly or teleport away or turn invisible or tons of other magical bullshit I have NO COUNTERPLAY to without begging the DM for magic items... meanwhile the casters just have to build halfway decently and can keep up just fine.
Unironically D&D needs to just get rid of martials completely and admit it's a fricking wizard simulator. Maybe change the name to Casters and Cumjars or some shit. (It certainly spends enough time jerking off castergays to fill a few cumjars.)
You want 4E.
>Anon hates the newest version of Casters and Cumjars
>DnDrone tells him to play an older even worse version of Casters and Cumjars
The absolute state of DnD brain-rot on display here.
Yeah, and he was right. 4e actually had a fix for what you're complaining about.
The only "fix" for D&D problems is to stop playing D&D and play better games. Anything less is like trying to fix a decapitation wound with band-aids.
Play 4e.
4e was so bad even the barely-functional DnDrones hated it. At that point you might as well just go play a videogame instead.
How is it my problem some fricktard who can't add two numbers together hated a game that asked him to do basic math?
they hated it for being mechanical/combat focused, when anyone still bothering to play 3e sees RPGs as a physics problem involving peasants and time displacement
>D&D players don’t like games because they’re good
>except when the game they don’t like is D&D, then it’s because it’s bad
Do they have taste or not? You can’t have it both ways.
4E is literally a different game from what he's complaining about.
>Then combat happens and I'm again left with my thumb up my ass at mid and high levels while enemies can just fly or teleport away or turn invisible or tons of other magical bullshit I have NO COUNTERPLAY to without begging the DM for magic items... meanwhile the casters just have to build halfway decently and can keep up just fine.
Dont even get me started on this. Im in Curse of Strahd right now and actually had to get very confrontational with my DM about this shit. EVERYTHING in that fricking setting has nonmagical or nonsilver resistance (or fricking immunity) unless youre running around stabbing feral dogs.
>Oh but anon thats just to keep things challenging.
No. Frick off. Even if me and our barb were doing full damage to some of these creatures the encounters would still be nothing to sneeze at and we'd be barely squeaking by.
I love the flavor of martials more than being some homosexual wizard but jesus christ its not enough for casters to be lightyears ahead of martials, no I also have to either suck wiener for a silvered weapon or beg my DM for a magic weapon so I am ALLOWED to participate.
Frick this shit.
Why wouldn't your DM just give you a silver weapon? That seems like the immediate obvious fix for this.
>"You have to le find it anon" 🙂
>Le Barovia is really mean and terrible anom you gotta earn it 🙂
Again. I normally wouldnt give a single frick. Genuinely. But if I *started* this campaign with a +1 weapon then MAYBE Id be ON PAR with our casters. MAYBE.
Jesus. Yeah, that's less the system's fault (not that it doesn't have a mountain of faults) and more to do with your DM being a smug wienersucker who sounds like he just gets off on making the game miserable for his players. I'd ditch that table immediately if I were you.
That IS the system's fault, though, for not baking in basic assumptions about gear.
How? What exactly the system-level solution for this should be? Abolishing the concept of gear-based weaknesses/resistances? If you have a DM who intentionally puts impassable obstacles in front of you, what difference is that going to make?
>What exactly the system-level solution for this should be?
WBL
5e has WBL, it's in the DMG.
It's just that nobody ever uses it, because it's hidden in the DMG, and nobody reads the DMG.
Not in the same sense I'm talking about.
I'm pretty sure that 5e doesn't have prices for magic items and no rules for items available by settlement population, so even if you had infinite money you still wouldn't be able to solve this problem.
Fricking lying piece of shit. Xanathar's guide got it on page 133 and 126 both for rolling for how much it is along with base prices. Just say you don't play the game, Xanthar's guide been out since 2016.
Xanathar's guide is not the DMG or the PHB. It is an entirely separate splatbook, which was released after the fact, as a suplement. It's contents are entirely optional.
The whole group now need to purchase a third overpriced hardback to get access to official rules supporting something that is merely winked at in their current CORE rules, and I'd constitute that as literal (yes literal, not figurative) pay to win in book form.
Man, I'm glad I frickin dropped DnD when 4e wasn't my thing.
>the whole group now needs to purchase something literally only the DM needs to reference.
Let me guess, you'd argue that the players should be able to dictate prices too "because the book says so".
The same thing the solution ALWAYS is with DnDogshit problems.
Have you tried not playing DnDogshit?
The problem isn't just the fact that the player isn't getting the gear they need, its that the caster players don't have this concern at all.
Consider, for example, if wizards and sorcerer were dependent on higher level wands and staves to be able to cast higher level spells. You hit level 5 and learned fireball? Congrats, but your staff is only capable of casting up to second level spells. You need to craft, buy, or find a staff that is capable of channeling your powerful magic otherwise you are not able to operate at your full strength.
You may cry bullshit, but martials are *already* in this position. A level 10 fighter who has no magical weapons or armor is going to get fricking *destroyed* in any on-level fight because they do not have the fighting strength needed to do their jobs. As-is, a level 10 wizard can be bare-ass naked and still throw down their most powerful spells, their only weakness being a marginally lower AC, which is a problem that can be *solved with more spells*.
>You hit level 5 and learned fireball?
That's the problem. They just magically learn Fireball out of the ether. Sorcerers maybe, but wizards are literally supposed to be learning this shit academically and copying it into their own book. Where'd they learn it from? Nowhere, it just popped into their head. The fighter didn't wake up one day with a magic sword under his pillow.
I agree that spellcasters are favored and overpowered as hell, but ngl if my char is being held back by a massive power imbalance that could be solved by the DM doing the standard intended way of dropping in-game clues that there's a relic silver sword hidden in a tomb nearby that the party can go on a side quest to retrieve, and he just refuses to and instead just goes "find it yourself homosexual :^)" with no direction, then I'm not going to be mad at the system, I'm going to be mad at the DM. It may be a symptom of a systemic problem, but in that case the DM is the one making it infinitely worse and more miserable than it needs to be, for no reason. If there is a game imbalance causing a player at the table to be miserable, and the DM isn't immediately doing something to solve it, then that's a shitty DM.
How does the DM know when he's supposed to give the fighter magic items? Are there any rules at all in the book regarding this?
When the fighter is having a terrible time at the table, specifically because of the lack of any magic items, seems like it should be obvious to any DM.
that is not an objective metric and is not a valid answer.
Have you been tested for autism?
Yes and while I do have a MILD form of it, it does not invalidate my point. Take my point as its own, please.
haha autistic
Fair enough, I actually respect the genuine answer, so I'll give you your argument - the structure of a TTRPG session is roughly half on the system and half on the DM. I already agreed that 5e has mountains of system problems, and that this specific issue is also related to them (my previous posts specifically acknowledged this). But being a good DM requires more than autistically adhering to RAW and going no further than that, you need to be able to adjust things for the benefit of fun for your players. Especially in 5e - one of the system's most glaring issues is that half of the rules in the book just defer to the DM's judgment. Anything that has gaps or isn't cover "DMs should figure this out". If you, as a DM, don't have good judgment to fill those gaps, then regardless of how good or shit the system is, you have no place DMing it. Hell, if the system is shit and full of problems, you're still a shitty DM for knowingly running it, without compensating for its problems when it causes problems for your table.
If a player at your table is actively having a miserable time because they don't have the gear they need to fight the encounters in the setting you put them in, and all they can do is watch the rest of the party do everything, and literally all that's required from you to solve this is to give them a silver weapon (reminder that giving out loot and magic items IS your job) and you refuse to do so, for seemingly no reason at all, then you absolutely are a shitty DM. Even if the system is also shitty and to blame for this. If I'm that player, I don't care about the system's faults in that scenario, I will be pissed at you.
You can't run a system that is built around deferring to YOUR judgment, and then pass the blame for your bad judgment back onto the system.
Based, frick the guy clowning on you for actually belonging here
There are loot tables you're supposed to roll on.
which will never guarantee the fighter gets any items at all. great job.
you forgot the part where with casters you can just pick spells "because it sounded cool" and half the time blunder into something stonking while a fighter has to weave past a billion trap options just to maybe have a chance on their turn to deal as much damage per round as a fireball on a target that made the save
The amount of pitfall feats and styles for martials in 5e is fricking *insane*
I am a 3.5 player. That game sucks, I'm comfortable acknowledging it sucks, I still like it. I am BLOWN AWAY by how little the designers of 5e learned from 3e.
I'm playing a 5e campaign right now and I thought "oh arcane archer is an available subclass. Surely it must be better than the 3e version". No. It's so much fricking worse. 3e AA was a notoriously shit class, and they made it less impactful. How?
5e is the definition of trying to appealing to everyone by sanding down the edges so nothing sticks out that might poke people. It is an edition designed by cowards. Something like 60% of the content of 5e is only available in the form of 'Unearthed Arcana' articles that are explicitly optional playtest material, frontloading their defense for if any of it turns out to be crap or broken. "This is the only extra content for this edition we are going to print, but we TOLD you not to use it so if its shit its your fault for including it in your game".
But if you go to one of the online sites that compile 5e's options and filter those things out, the game is anemic as frick. You HAVE to use this 'playtest' material or each class has only like 3 archetypes to pick from and there are only 15 feats in the whole edition. And even with UA added in, its not like you are spoiled for choice.
>5e is the definition of trying to appealing to everyone
Except for 4E players. Then they just tell you to go frick yourself.
4e broke the fanbase and didn't sell well. Trying to bridge that gap and appeal to the grognards of the much more successful 3.5 edition era was the only sound business decision they had.
The smart thing to do would have been to lure people back into 5e with something closer to 3.5, and then weave in the 4e improvements and better class design a little at a time with splats so that by the time you were done you could mimic 4e combat design in 5e if you wanted it and ignore it if you chose instead. Change what people consider to be 'dnd' gradually instead of alienating players with too much at once. If the 4e inspired classes are genuinely better and more fun to play, they will out-compete the legacy class design and you will see that reflected in the community.
>4e broke the fanbase
Yes.
>and didn't sell well.
No.
You can't have one without the other, anon. The idea that a huge chunk of the fanbase rejected 4e and the idea that 4e met its sales goals are incompatible. Every person who didn't make the jump from 3.5 to 4e is a lost sale, money left on the table as far as WOTC is concerned.
Casters can also afford to pick spells that just sound cool because they often get so MANY of them. As long as you have a couple of reliable bread and butter spells to fall back on, you can afford to be kooky with a bunch of the rest because it doesn't meaningfully impact your overall power. Sure, some choices will be more optimal than others, but a wizard with Fireball and Fly can afford to pick a lot of other dogshit on their spell list because they already have some things that they know will work basically every time.
A fighter, meanwhile, has very few options to work with and has to hyperfocus on one or two of them to make them anywhere near good. It's not just about magical gear either. Consider your average fighter. At level 1, he has a sword that he can swing for 1d6+2. At level 10 he has a +3 sword, now he can swing for 1d6+5. Sure, he can swing twice in one round now, but that damage is still *pathetic*. He's basically required to find some autistic hyperbuild to find extra sources of damage just to be even remotely competent, otherwise his only contribution to most fights is having enough HP to survive the monster's attention long enough for someone else (probably a wizard) to solve the problem for him. Because you aint going to be doing diddly to a high level enemy with a measly 9 damage a swing.
>otherwise his only contribution to most fights is having enough HP to survive the monster's attention long enough for someone else (probably a wizard) to solve the problem for him. Because you aint going to be doing diddly to a high level enemy with a measly 9 damage a swing.
And that's not even a real ability of the fighter, it's just the GM taking pity on him and playing badly on purpose.
If the monsters just want to ignore the fighter and kill the wizard there's nothing the fighter can do about it by the rules. They just walk past him and at most he can use his one reaction to try and hit one monster for another 9 damage.
Fireball is one of the worst spells in the game. Why would you bother with hitpoint damage when you have access to effects that end fights?
>How? What exactly the system-level solution for this should be? Abolishing the concept of gear-based weaknesses/resistances?
Sadly there isnt really one outside of maybe WBL or the DM saying "this is fricking here's a silvered weapon." My complaint is less "Get rid of equipment based resistances" and more "They should be MUCH rare at low level play."
Go look at the stats and goodies of a Night Hag. Its absolutely insane that a level 5 average party can fight such a thing when many players agree the creature can mop the floor with an 8th or 9th level party if played intelligently.
Giving CR 3 creatures (when most people start the game at 3) nonmagic weapon resistance basically tells the playerbase "Dont fricking bother with a martial unless youre a dedicated tank."
Its just bad game design.
Fair enough, that's a good argument. On that front, I agree the balance there is awful.
This could be balanced with more magic resistant/immune monsters but the designers hate and fear this.
Yeah, 5e is so fricking boring with resistances. 90% of the time it boils down to
>Past level 4, all creatures have BSP resistance.
What's even the point?
No, obviously. The system expects martials to have access to certain weapons and items at certain levels. So why isn't that in their class features, the same way wizards get access to certain spells at certain levels?
Dungeon World, GURPS, and HERO all have solutions to this that I've played. Which is making magic items part of character progression. Shitty GM's seethe at this because those systems
1) All have some varient of "The GM should never permenantly take away their magic weapon, but if they give it away voluntarily it's gone for good"
2) It's a meta-concept which some people in this thread b***h about, where character advancement forces the world to warp to give the character something (It's ok when old-school D&D does it though!)
It's strange that it's not a more common solution given how many GM's I've played with like to pull the "Oh magic items should ~~feel specul~~" bullshit, then either go along with D&D's loot treadmill of ever increasing +'s or are stingy like that one anon's GM and frick up game balance. A magic item that's part of my progression, that I bought with my own character points and is an iconic aspect of my character, feels way more special because of it.
Though if I'm forced to DM 5e, I houserule a mechanic where WBL progression is handled as a second type of exp (Because that's what it functionally is), and is spent to tell me what magic items they want and I'll put it in the next session as either loot or a piece of enemy equipment. This avoids one thing that really annoys me, where players are carrying around tons of money, invalidating any "We need to gather funds to do X" challenges, but also behave like misers since they need a town's GDP to buy the next step up of gear, and also removes the idiocy of "Magic item merchants".
I hadn't played a system that handles it like that, so it's genuinely useful to know. That does sound like a significantly better way to handle it. And your 5e houserule sounds solid, and I might appropriate it as well. Thanks anon!
design a game such that characters don't need to use gear at all if they don't want to.
>It's not the system's fault that casters get everything for free but non-casters have to play "mommy may I?" and beg the DM for magic gear to even just barely keep up with the casters.
No... that is 100% a system problem. The DM is shit too, don't get me wrong, but it's still fundamentally a system problem.
The worst part is theyre genuinely wonderful people and whole through my b***hing I make him sound like a dick, it really is more of a pitfall of the system and the fact that people who designed the monsters are frickwits.
Theres way too many things that low level (3-4th level) can encounter where the martials might as well be glorified temp HP for the casters. Its insanely unfair. The worst part about it is it makes ylu look like such a whiney b***h because "WAHHHH GIMME A MAGIC SWORD WAHHH" when its more akin to "Oh we're going kayyaking? Yeah hey can I have a fricking paddle? Oh no youre gonna make me paddle with my fricking hands thanks."
The tools to make the problem you are facing more bearable and more interesting exist within the system. Your DM is the one who is withholding those options from you.
Why don't the rules say the fighter gets magical items to keep him relevant?
Because the wealth by level table was considered a tool of the bourgeois and removed in 5e in favor of "frick it, DM decides"
But 3.5 also doesn't say the fighter gets magic items. In fact, no edition of D&D has rules that grant fighters magic items as they gain levels as a class feature.
But D&D 4 had the wishlist for it.
Not as a class feature.
4e also had inherent bonuses as an optional rule that mostly eliminated the need for mandatory magic items in the first place.
>In fact, no edition of D&D has rules that grant fighters magic items as they gain levels as a class feature.
3.0 OA samurai was just a fighter that literally had a magic item that levels with you class feature.
>Over the course of a typical campaign, a party finds treasure hoards amounting to seven rolls on the Challenge 0-4 table, eighteen rolls on the Challenge 5-10 table, twelve rolls on the Challenge 11-16 table, and eight rolls on the Challenge 17+ table
theoretically the rules are
quest or dungeon complete -> roll treasure horde table -> roll several magic items
so you would get a bunch of +1s
however this is dependent on both luck and the constant 5e "lol these aren't rules! they're suggestions :)" so god knows if you'll ever get a +1
Of course there's no guarantee that you won't get a bunch of caster items and no martial items. Never mind that casters don't need magic items to be effective. That's why martials should have magic items as part of their class features.
The issue I find here is, that's way too streamlined and hipnew. Does the magical weapon just appear in their hands now? Besides that, it also takes the "adventuring for treasure" part out of the "adventure for treasure".
Magical Items finds are also supposed to be randomized somewhat, making players adapt on the fly, or rely on a particular approach, or potentially make light work of a particular task. The surprise element is a neat change of pace, and since magical items can take quite a few forms, you may end up finding uses for them that are unconventional. Ideally.
For me, the draw of the Wizard was having to work to find more spells, fill out the book, but they just magically learn a couple of new spells, as per their class features, so the whole questing for more knowledge part feels like an extra, rather than a goal, like I could theoretically learn a new spell, since that's how Wizards in lore work, but because I get so many anyway I don't need to beg the DM for any more.
>Does the magical weapon just appear in their hands now?
Buy it at the shop or have it custom forged. Average gold rewards at certain levels that translate directly into more power.
It's what Pathfinder 2e does and is considered a standard part of their kit. Unlike 5e where some DMs might give the party only a single +1 weapon by level six that they have to share, all based on the DM's whim.
The magic weapons in PF2e also increase the damage dice used so you're using a 4D12 Greatsword at high levels combined with multiple attacks. Has lead to martials being stronger than casters.
You can flavor the magic item acquisition however you like. It need not be any different than how it already happens in your games.
It doesn't take that out at all. You have to adventure to gain the levels that give you the items.
Also, you don't have to eliminate random magic items, and no one suggested doing so.
Isn't the game made in such a way that you can play 1 to 20 without a single magic item, supposedly?
I don't know if that's a dev quote or if it's in the books or what.
I theory, yes, but in practice a game without magic items would favor spellcasters. Martial feats and martial class features multiply the value of magical armors and armor, but for spellcasters it's basically just more ammo, magic items give them good actions to take when they run low on spells.
People talk about damage resistance but that's less of an issue in this edition, you can use a nonmagical silvered weapon and deal full damage to a pit fiend. It's certainly better than trying to play AD&D or 3e or 4e without magic items.
A lot of this can be solved by also making wizards le find spells. It wouldn't even be hard to make clerics find spells either, especially in a place that's supposed to be cut off from the divine. You ain't getting nothing if you don't find a hidden reliquary with enough residual divinity to transfer.
It costs 50 gp to silver a weapon in the PHB. I haven't run 5e in years but I remember that detail specifically since it was usually a low level reward I'd give to martial characters.
They all have sacks of silver coins in their pockets, just ask the blacksmith to melt them down and make a mace out of them.
>beg my DM for a magic weapon so I am ALLOWED to participate.
>Frick this shit.
This is a major complaint about DND for me. Loot is a major part of how your character develops and advances. So much so that the game expects you to have a certain amount of wealth by level. Like a level 8 fighter has a +10 to hit, and if expected to have a +3 weapon.
But none of that is in the player's hands. The DM gets to decide a huge chunk of your character's development with you playing mother may I. Like you have an idea for a cool knight who figures with his lance or a kick ass spearman? Too bad, the DM only gave out magic swords, either abandon your planned character or suck.
Unless you're a caster then you just get to pick whatever spells fit your concept.
yeah, the game's shit
https://minmaxforum.com/index.php?topic=1533.0
You guys haven't played that shit, or, you DM personally has it in for you. Trust me, I just magically know it's one of these two things with no in between.
5e martials are cracked. They run the fricking game over with a +1 weapon. The problem isn't the "balance", but how much of the game's rules are about the pages of goodies casters get to pick from compared to the literal - not figurative - footnote that all the skills get.
There's a class about survival and tracking, and the rules for those things are again a literal footnote, making the class in question pointless other than to make the DMs job harder to now have to invent their own survival rules because an entire class was made to satisfy a single paragraph.
The rules for travel, survival, exploring, managing resources, questing for materials, they basically don't exist. if you hire some guys, the rules for that are ass. Negotiating is in there, but it's super basic, and because skill points don't exist anymore and skills are in effect classlocked, only a few characters will ever make use of negotiations in the way the game expects of it's players.
>5e martials are cracked
I bet you play evoker wizards lmao. Hold person is a level 2 spell.
Hold Person is pretty alright. It's annoying at early levels for sure.
The other option was that your DM was a shitstain. It seems more likely, but it's also a common false complaint that casters rule and That Guy threads were near daily for 8 years, so the atmosphere weighs a little on the side of making shit up if you catch my drift.
In 3.x, casters were a bit over the top, but the big problem really was build traps and dead end feat chains.
I will admit, though, 5es lack of magical items and weapons outside of expensive suplement books, with casters basically getting shit for free from the PHB, is far from ideal. A lot of the additional content for 5e is class archetypes, which are nice, but martials are still going to have to beg and be a thorn in the DMs side to make the most out of their abilities.
I retain the belief that the biggest issue is the lack of actual meat to the game, with flashy looking powerfantasy wank and pages of caster goodies in place of real rules.
>I will admit, though, 5es lack of magical items and weapons outside of expensive suplement books, with casters basically getting shit for free from the PHB, is far from ideal. A lot of the additional content for 5e is class archetypes, which are nice, but martials are still going to have to beg and be a thorn in the DMs side to make the most out of their abilities.
Having gotten into the hobby during the 3.5 years, it will never not be extremely deeply weird to me just how fricking LITTLE DnD 5e is. Lots of class archetypes, but basically no extra classes. Feats being treated like an optional side rule you are not really expected to use, so there are not even that many of them. Magic items being few in number and not even having costs for the mostpart because its entirely up to the GM whether you get them or not so you can't even buy them despite them being essential.
As much as people shit on Critical Role as a kneejerk reaction to normies invading the hobby, if you look at DnD 5e basically everything thats actually *interesting* in it or desirable turns out to have been a Matt Mercer creation. And that's just wretched. DnD 5e without Mercer's official homebrew would be the blandest fricking thing ever.
>"You haven't played shit"
>*Immediately proceeds to make it ABUNDANTLY obviously that he's the one who hasn't actually played very much*
Like clockwork.
You have no idea what strong martials look like.
Strong "martials" have more caster levels than Martial Levels, lol.
It's really sad how in 5e, Paladin 2/Sorcerer X is infinitely better than straight Paladin.
Maybe not entirely. I've seen Rogues that can be built to be quite strong if they can find ways to reliably drop sneak attacks every turn. But Rogue is like the one martial class that actually gets additional damage as a class feature. Even a 3 level dip into rogue for an extra 2d6 on a qualifying attack is huge compared to what most martials get without insane cheese builds.
A Strong Martial is a 20 Fighter who gives everyone else a fat die to add to their d20 result. A better Bard than a Bard, because 5e.
Another is a Rogue who does better healing that the Cleric, because 5e.
The objectively best class isn't even a power caster like Wizard or Cleric, it's Bard, the nothing support class, who as it turns out is everything except a Bard, because 5e.
It's cool to see what the playerbase came up with, but it's also really fricking stupid.
>kills your "strong material" instantly with a single spell
Tehee whoops should have been a caster.
That's 3.x
5e is the other way around. Remember, bounded accuracy caused all of the numbers to humdrum out to "safe" values, so the only one who's dying to a single spell is ironically a caster.
moronic, I know. Wizards used to have the best initiative scores in 3.x, too. I miss those days.
5e Wizards don't kill you with spell damage. They kill you by turning off your ability to do anything at all, off of one failed save. Hold Person is a second level spell that doesn't even need to be upcast. Martials are weaker not because of some numbers, but because everything they do has to go through the system of "damage" and "hit points" and wizards get to skip both of those. They're worse at the system but don't have to interact with that system.
Hold Person is the spell that a lot of people use as an example in this argument, and it's a strong point, because on paper it's the perfect "frick martials" thing.
The problem with the argument is the basis for it: PvP. It's why I suggested earlier that anon didn't play games (kind of a shitty thing to just throw out, but it's hot now).
Hold Person has NO EFFECT on well over half of the things the PCs are expected to fight. It's concentration, it breaks with one successful save but at least at the end of the turn. In the context of actual player use, it'll be on a key enemy, likely a key enemy with a gang of shitlings, who each get to attack the caster of Hold Person. In a "My PC vs your PC" hypothetical, it's the God spell that breaks caster/martial balance, but in actual, real, proper play, it's a powerful, but risky spell to use.
Also, you aren't going to be casting it on martials. This is beside my point anyway, because my point isn't what martials are weak to, but rather what casters get that martials don't. It's why I half agree with you, but not fully.
Hold Person isn't even a good control spell in 5e since the target is going to get at least 2 chances to end the spell before the caster gets to capitalize on it. Martial Characters in 5e are really important to a team's comp as they're the people who can actually capitalize on the bullshit control options of the casters. Any well-built fighting man will have at least double usually at least triple the damage output of a caster if neither are burning resources on the turn. Typically, the best characters in real play are gish types that can both create their own openings with the busted low level control spells and capitalize on them. High Level anything in 5e edition is typically overrated nonsense that suffers from being too specific to be valuable or too late to matter and even the good ones turn into less of the caster's tool and more of the entire party is thinking about and will point out when its useful.
You are probably the second guy in this thread to actually get that in 5e you can't ignore martials because for once they have enough damage to matter. I've spent a lot of time trying to convince guys there that maybe throwing all you have at a wizard, including stuff wizard is explicitly resistant to, while ignoring fighters isn't optimal play.
Nobody has being telling you to ignore fighters, and if they have they're moronic. The point I was trying to make was that Casters are technically better targets for control spells, and that is in fact a fact that can be observed and studied factually as a matter of fact.
That isn't me saying "Ignore the fighterz guyz ello ell!".
The mistake you're making is reading "technically more effective" as "optimal".
Optimal play is all over the place, because unless you've been reading the DMs notes or are playing a narrative system you aren't going to know what encounter the next rooms over have in store. I've even said in this very thread that it's probably a better idea generally to use control on martials just because it's more likely to work out than be a waste, but the *fact* remains that control spells are technically more effective on casters.
And let me be ultra, super, hyper crystal clear on this: The initial statement I was arguing against was that 5e suffers from caster supremacy, including and chiefly, balance disparity in direct power compared to martials. I disagree especially with the power imbalance part of that claim, but, ulitimately, agree that martials still feel totally shitty and weak to paly in 5e, because they just lack options and decisions to make.
>I disagree especially with the power imbalance part of that claim, but, ulitimately, agree that martials still feel totally shitty and weak to paly in 5e, because they just lack options and decisions to make.
Well that's the issue: the scenario in which martials and casters are "balanced" is a fight to the death against ogres in a featureless concrete room, mandatory for five times a day. But that's also the best possible scenario the martial can ever get; any possible change from that is better for the caster and worse for the martial.
Trolls? Wizard does fire damage, fighter is screwed. Ledges? Wizard can Fly, fighter is screwed. Trapped? Wizard can Misty Step, fighter is screwed. Ghost? Rust Monster? Poisoned? Fear? Exhausted? And on and on.
It's like saying Angel Summoner and the BMX Bandit scored the same number of points at Supercross. Yes, and that should tell you something.
A +1 weapon is negated by giving every monster 3 x fighter's number of attacks per round hit points. Maybe not even 3, depending on what his attack bonus is.
A +1 weapon is magical. That's the important part.
Not really. You can overcome non-magical resistance to deal the pathetic amount of damage you normal do. Amazing.
Meanwhile, the monsters get innate abilities that just end you.
Considering that martials don't have to spend resources on their damage, meaning they can dish it out every round if they want to, that's not bad. That's actually good.
Given that they get multiple chances to deal at least some damage, that's also good.
A spell typically comes with a save, even some damage dealing spells do. Spell attacks sometimes get multiple strikes. Generally, though, spells are less consistent at damage over the duration of combat, and are often situational in their best use cases, while normal weapon attacks need only come from a +1 weapon to almost always be good.
A Cleric must spend at least 4 turns getting all of their damage online, and essentially blow out a chunk of their spell slots for the day. A Fighter can cruise on slightly less damage per round, that isn't confined to a 20ft space, for the whole adventuring day.
One shouldn't really be trying to deal the most damage evar as Cleric anyway, but it's cool that it is situationally technically possible.
As for monster innate abilities to end martials, most of those abilities are actually most survived by martials, and most lethal to casters. It's kind of by design, not that I think it's good design or anything, but it's intentional.
wow you actually pulled out the "muh limited spell slots" desperation move, kek
>Pathfinder
Yeah, caster supremacy is real, for 3.x, as I've been saying.
BUT, 5e is the 15 minute adventuring day edition, so the "muh limited spell slots" argument actually checks out.
5e is moronic like that.
3.5 is also the 15 minute adventuring day edition moron
jesus i'm so tired of arguing about shit that has been solved for 20+ years
OK, nobody refered to 3.x editions as having 15 minute adventuring days, that's just not the case and you know it isn't.
And you haven't been arguing about anything that's been solved for 20+ years. 5e isn't that old.
Wait....
>128/10/46
Aw frick.
Yes. It is the case. Cast all your spells, Rope Trick, do it again. 3.5 literally invented the 15 minute day. That's where the phrase comes from.
Not the peasant railgun threads again?!
That wasn't me, and he agrees with you, he just wants you to use greentext instead of doing what /jp/ and /LULZ/ do.
I'm getting dogpiled hard, but I just wanna break bread for a second and say frickin same!
no one's dogpiling you schizo
You're as fighty as 10 people, dude, which I do appreciate.
nah.
That's a blast from the past.
LMFAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
But it's true!
lol
>Will save
yeah, see
3.x was caster edition, and I've been saying that from the start.
5e is not that edtion. 5e doesn't have will saves.
Keep up. Or don't, I dunno.
and in 5e, the only spells that matter target charisma, intelligence, and wisdom saves. None of which martials get proficiency in. moron.
>Int saves
Not many of those.
>Cha
Also uncommon, usually to do with forcing a plane shift or forced teleportation.
It's entirely possible that some PCs will never have to make either of these saves in an entire campaign.
>Wis
These are common. Curiously, they belong on spells best suited to stopping casters, which is why casters typically have good Wis saves.
It's a b***h basic game design triad (not a good thing per se):
>Give casters heaps of toys to use at any range
>Provide spells which stop the casters doing squat, just run circles around the melee fighter instead
>Give casters better saves against such magic, since they're the prime target
At later levels, when Wis saves become much more dangerous, Martials are given specific features expressly for Wis saves or condition resistance against conditions typically associated with Wis saves, such as the Fighter being able to re-roll Wis saves, the Monk being able to purge Charm and Fear, the Rogue having slippery mind, etc.
Con and Dex saves are also common saves. They are tied much more closely with direct damage, and these are the saves that casters aren't always good at. As a (perhaps imperfect) example, Fireball against three martials may not even down any of them despite being a well used fireball on paper, but an inoptimal fireball against a single caster is much more likely to down them outright, making it technically the superior use of fireball. Because DnD.
Fortunately, Casters have the range to stay out of direct harm more often than not, so a stray spell, or monster save ability, wont usually take them out in one shot.
It's a second time I'm seeing this argument, so I'm going to give it a quick response - Otto's Irresistible Dance. It basically takes out average fighter out of action for several turns and it's designed against melee combatants instead of casters.
For a longer response, the issue with your argument is the idea that everybody is trying to keep one close to one, very specific paradigm of play. You are assuming that everybody is having exact same priorities and following the exact same strategy. At this point a lot of things you suggest border on metagaming, like people using fireball for sniping lone casters despite having multiple enemies bundled together to hit.
People in real life don't do things poorly on purpose. If you're not playing your character in the most efficient way possible, you're a bad roleplayer.
lazy bait
I'm right, and if you had a counterargument you had have posted it.
Point is that if your supposedly optimal play depends on your opponents following exactly one script and taking exactly the risks you want them to take, such a plan can be destroyed instantly by your opponent just deciding to play against your expectations.
Somebody deciding to play it safe and attack martials with wisdom targeting attack isn't playing suboptimally, they are just minimizing the risks. Tasha's Hideous Laughter cast on fighter for guaranteed battlefield removal would destroy any battle plan hinging on the spell being cast on a party's cleric.
Good thing it doesn't depend on that, then.
Making up an imaginary argument that nobody presented and defeating it isn't impressive.
Then tell me, why do you assume that fighters, who are shit at resisting effects targeting mental stats even with their rerolls, won't get targeted with them?
Wow, another thing I never said.
Maybe you should take a breather and try actually reading some posts other than the ones you wrote.
I'm the one "making that point", so I'll respond.
I'm not saying Fighters wont get targeted. That's a misread on your part, which is fine, mistakes made.
What I AM saying is, the ideal target of those types of spells are casters.
That does not mean that it is a waste to use them on Fighters. It does not mean that you should only target spellcasters. What it means is, objectively, they are more effective on casters, but it is harder, and a greater risk to attempt, when trying to cast such spells on casters. Risk/Reward, as the saying goes.
That said, I think one should still be throwing out Wis save spells on Martials, because you're less likely to waste your own turn trying for something ambitious.
Oh, I didn't see this one, I'll respond to this, too, since I imagine it was aimed at me.
>Point is that if your supposedly optimal play depends on your opponents following exactly one script and taking exactly the risks you want them to take, such a plan can be destroyed instantly by your opponent just deciding to play against your expectations.
Fair to say.
>Somebody deciding to play it safe and attack martials with wisdom targeting attack isn't playing suboptimally, they are just minimizing the risks.
Also fair to say, and I'd dare to agree with this framing.
>Tasha's Hideous Laughter cast on fighter for guaranteed battlefield removal would destroy any battle plan hinging on the spell being cast on a party's cleric.
Tasha's Hideous Laughter is another one of those spells that's better to land on casters, but safer to land on Martials.
It's not removal outright, since there's a save, but it'll do just about as good, as long as nobody attacks the Fighter. Because attacking the victim lets them save again immediately, with advantage, that gives the Fighter in this example a good chance of breaking free. Even if they don't, they have the HP to survive a bunch of attacks. It's best to let them laugh as the spell intends.
Problem:
>Concentration
If you land this spell on a caster instead, like a Wizard, not only have you gotten lucky, but the Wizard may not even survive long enough to live through even a turn of laughter, even if they pass the save after their turn in the round from being hit once. Their low HP just makes the spell a settup for a kill, even if it only lasts for a single round.
As much as I've been saying this is b***h basic design, part of me does slightly like how these spells are smart to use in multiple situations against different enemy types, with their appropriate risks involved, left down to player choice on how to use it. I think it may be one of the few things in 5e I even like.
Optimal play doesn't depend on your opponents following a script. Tasha's laughter being cast on a fighter would not destroy any plans. It just makes the fight easier for your enemies since you basically wasted an action and a spell slot taking the least important character out of the fight.
Otto's dance is a 6th level spell, with 30ft range, which ends on a successful save. Wizards get access to this at level 11. They have 1 spell slot for 6th level spells.
Fighters get Idomitable at level 9.
Monks can easily engage from outside the spell range. Also, Wis save.
Rogues can easily engage from outside the spell range.
Barbarian's can too, and Berserkers are immune to being charmed, which the spell specifies as a measure of immunity. Berserkers suck, but it's there.
Rangers are trash, you don't need the dance to deal with them, but ironically, the companion archetype is a counter, since the companion can still attack in the Ranger's stead.
It's a powerful spell, but "several turns" is some youtube video nonsense. Clever settups make it godly, but it's short range alone is a sizeable flaw.
Also, it's still better against casters. It's not intuitive, because it doesn't prevent spellcasting, but the fact that it makes the victim easier to attack and worse at dex saves, and even spell attacks, a caster who gets unlucky for even one turn can die as a result of this spell, where an unlucky fighter gets to live for a few turns.
>the issue with your argument is the idea that everybody is trying to keep one close to one, very specific paradigm of play.
5e is kind of like that, unfortunately. It's a huge part of the criticisms I have of the system.
Yeah. You can either play correctly or you can die at level 1. I know which I prefer.
>At this point a lot of things you suggest border on metagaming, like people using fireball for sniping lone casters despite having multiple enemies bundled together to hit.
If I had an rpg and I can use it to shoot 5 infantrymen or a mobile SAM platform, I'm going to shoot the thing that fires high payload explosives
How is not playing your character as if they're moronic metagaming?
>It's metagaming to kill the wizard
This is the 5e mindset in action.
My whole point is that designing your strategy around the idea that only the wizards will be targeted by disabling Wis save attacks is dumb. I don't play DnD. Is it really true that even in 5e taking out a single wizard is worth ignoring the rest of his party?
>I don't play DnD. Is it really true that even in 5e taking out a single wizard is worth ignoring the rest of his party?
In DnD, HP climbs into close to triple digits.
Characters are fully combat effective as long as they have at least a *single* Hit Point left. In other words, two Fighters, one at their full 100+ HP and the other at just 1 HP, both still attack at full effectiveness, deal damage at full effectiveness, avoid blasts as if fully energetic, resist mind assailing magic at the same level of mental fortitude, and even brace against attacks at the same level of effectiveness.
The ONLY difference between a 100HP Fighter and a 1HP Fighter is that one is likely to go down this round.
Because characters are at full combat effectiveness so long as their HP isn't literally zero, it is paramount to press down and eliminate one enemy creature at a time. This is harder to do against Martials because they have larger HP values, where as Casters, like Wizards, have much, much smaller HP values. Wizards are, on average, 40% as tough as Fighters are.
Wizards typically have the most tools in the form of spells they've learned. They can resolve many different situations with their magic, in and out of combat. Losing a Wizard's input in combat is dire, because their mere presence enables their allies so much.
Losing a Fighter's input is a bit of a setback, but because they're so durable, it's unlikely they'll be the first to fall, unless of course the Player at the helm is unfathomably stupid or astronomically unlucky.
And a clarification:
>My whole point is that designing your strategy around the idea that only the wizards will be targeted by disabling Wis save attacks is dumb.
That wasn't what was being argued to begin with, maybe somewhere it got muddled. It was a clarification that Wis resistant casters are technically better targets for control spells, but their higher resistance makes it a risk. It's a choice.
You can greentext, you know?
as if I would ever quote your text, subhuman.
Nah, just stopped lurking for the PSA.
I don't even know nor care about whatever argument you morons are having. Hopefully you're having fun or something.
the image was easy to read, idk what you're on about
Not a single 5E martial holds up to ToB.
>Magic items with a price point
>Magic items without giving an average price for them
I think Ive come to the conclusion that I just cannot stand class based systems anymore (5e being the obvious popular example) and how many will tie really basic concepts to stats or "build paths" that result in a subpar character.
Oh you wanna make a strength based fighter thats also got a silver tongue? Well have fun, youre either going to end up with a Fighter who is going to be dogshit at fighting cause you wanted points in being good at this other thing that isnt fighting. If you wanna play a character like that you should play X class instead dummy!
I'm more than happy for making a character who has flaws and weaknesses, but too many class based systems demand you make really serious mechanically debilitating choices for something that might be more of a flavor or roleplay aspect of the character.
That happened to me when I played Pathfinder 2e for the first time and rolled an Investigator (already a subpar class infamous for having to invest into more stats than most) who had high charisma (a stat that was mechanically useless but made sense roleplay-wise). The character ended up being weaker and more fragile than even casters and STILL was a worse face than the Bard who pumped everything into charisma just because it's what the class uses for casting
Meanwhile, in a good system : put some ranks in might, toughness, agility, and charm. done.
>catastrophic spell failure tables
If you dislike casters that much, just don't let people play them. Only people epic nat 20 normies like "player rolled the funny result, deleted own party or permanently fricked up the setting"
>combat mechanics that boil down to "you and the opponent roll your 'fight people' pool until someone dies".
"B-but you can choose a full defense or to run away, there are real combat mechanics" shut the frick up a bread sandwich is not a real sandwich.
>Variation of THAC0
Warning flag that the designers are just blindly copying old-school systems instead of looking at what made those good. Modern DND made a lot of frickups but changing the way AC was calculated wasn't one.
>reference to Lovecraft in something with alignment, morality, or metaphysical good and evil.
You failed to understand the point of Lovecraft's works and why his horror doesn't t work in a modern zeitgeist.
>The church is le evil
Redditor detected.
>advertises "fast and lethal combat"
Instant tell that the game is being designed by brainlets who think they're badass because they've gotten six characters killed by goblins.
tell me about games with good combat mechanics aside gurps that is
>GURPS
>good
It's literally one of the ones I'm complaining about in the "roll your same fight pool until someone dies". The entirety of GURPS's complexity is in character creation, and playing your character after is completely braindead.
Systems with fun combat:
>D&D 4e
>Lancer
>Gubat Banwa
>Kamigakari
>Princess Wing
>Legend of the Wulin
nta but deadlands classic and riddle of steel have pretty fun combat systems
I don't know the walker in the dark seems pretty damn evil to me. Hell most of the other gods are pretty damn evil. They don't really do anything good for others they're just selfish and stupid. The ones who are intelligent like the creeper in the dark are fricking dickheads who just frick around.
The only good characters in lovecraft original works (everything else is fanfiction) are either A: Other humans or B: Actual deities from our IRL religions who like people. Or the talking cats.
NTA, but the issue with Lovecraft's horror in setting with objective, materially provable morality is that good 80% of his horror is about specifically confronting reality where there is there is no material proof of your moral system working but plenty of amoral bastards so powerful your whole worldview seems irrelevant.
DnD seems even more shit that I heard from people playing it. I'll stick to my weird niche games then.
What's your opinion on Nechronica's combat system?
>What's your opinion on Nechronica's combat system?
NTA. Nechronica has a great combat system that is wholly unbalanced. It's very fun, tactically deep, with many interesting decisions to make, but ultimately the game tends towards low AP chain attacks with bonus stacking. Junk/Stacy/Thanatos with Monofilament, Even Unto Tartarus, Made to be Broken, Unfazed, and God of Death gives you a 1 AP 0~1 range Melee Attack 1 + Dismember + Chain Attack 1 at +2 that works even if the part's destroyed, and you can attack Tartarus and Hades. I outright ban builds like that because it's difficult for anyone to compete unless they go full cheese themselves with things like Meat Snake or Ball & Chain.
Good point. Buff stacking is super OP on low AP attacks. I feel like the issue is with Dismember being too OP.
Original poster here, Nechronica is a ton of fun, and I wish I could convince a single person I know IRL to play. They just google the name and start looking at me weird. Honestly, I'm beginning to come around to a bunch of JP rpgs. I don't like the (often mechanically mandated) super episodic nature, but most of the ones I've tried have really solid combat systems.
>the only possible meaningful outcome from shooting at/near someone is hurting them
I played a game where suppression and pinning were really important and it changed me as a person.
Anything that relies on rerolls, particularly via metacurrency, sends up huge red flags.
Dice pools.
Any dice whose increments don't divide 100 into an integer.
Binary pass/fails.
Roll plus/minus attribute.
Roll twice, take highest/lowest.
Pigeonhole class systems like "the magic guy for all magic", "the weapons guy for all weapons", instead of classifying aptitudes sensibly.
Pigeonhole classes that are disparate in how complex/vacuous they are and in how effective they are over the course of a minimum level to maximum level campaign progression.
But what system do you play as a conclusion?
The ones I make, which are too "gamist" for everyone.
Which are? Post them, unless of course you don’t actually play games.
>Dice pools.
>Binary pass/fails.
>Roll plus/minus attribute.
That covers like 99% of all RPGs ever made. What games does that leave you with?
Who knows?
It's not like literally anyone can look up and study probability and experiment with game mechanics in this hobby.
That would require a sense of agency, and independence from the slop corporations and amateur developers pump out that just reuse the same thing under different serials.
It's a fricking mystery.
nobody's ever going to play your dead game
I don't give a shit what morons think, especially when bringing up problems from the so-called "greatest games" was always met with "rewrite what you don't like" from said morons, so shove it up your ass.
>+10 base attributes divided into +20 skills.
Do you really need that many different numbers for extremely specific stuff that you're probably gonna roll once in a campaign? Why can just simply... group some of them?
>preparing fireball
don't talk about optimization ever again.
>Rules lite
>PBTA
That's about it. I'll try anything once.
>gridless
>hexagon tiles
>"Why would you want to play with Squares? Hexes are superior in every way!"
They are.
Don't like em
Hexes are great until you get someone using them for human structures with right angles. Use squares for inside and hexes for outsiide.
>he doesn't know how to draw a rectangle on hexes
Oh yeah also casters get all the best item creation feats, and craft is Int-based, so even if you let the players craft their own magic items the casters still win lol
How come every single one of these threads become bashing on D&D? Do you people not play other games?
Most of the actual complaints aren't DnD specific. But ok, state a cancerous mechanic that is completely alien to any iteration of DnD that hasn'talreadybeen stated
.
People play other games out of the spite for D&D.
Simple: most people get introduced in the hobby through D&D and most of these fellows that end branching out to new games do so because of some perceived idiosyncrasy with d&d abstractions, mechanics and/or common adopted playstyles. It's not complicated to unravel anon.
I don't want to play another game that doesn't have the issues of D&D to begin with, my kind friend. I want to play D&D but with better rules. Trying Shadow of the daggerhearted Pathfinder DC20 edition, yes, but no good games, no, that's cheating. The quest for a good D&D has been ongoing for 30+ years now, I'm in no hurry.
yikes.
>Hey ranged class/person with a ranged weapon or similar, you have to buy or get your bullets/arrows, but we got rid of magic reagents because they are a mess to track
I don't even...
I can't tell if this thread is full of no-games or if neckbeardia and guardbro are in here shitposting
Concession accepted.
I don't know what you and I were arguing about but I just read through this thread. Its cancer.
Yeah, you're definitely not the same guy, you're so subtle and convincing no one could possibly suspect anything!
The first part of this thread has well thought out posts written by people with experience with the hobby, but its gotten increasingly shitposty in the past couple hours.
What it actually has is a bunch of pretentious shit that sounds believable and is wrong.
Randomizing my options. I usually see it in videogames, but the one that comes to mind for tabletop is in D&D3.5, one of the classes from Tome of Battle literally draws its melee maneuvers randomly from a deck at the beginning of the fight. Can't stand that shit. The most egregious videogame example is probably Crisis Core, with super moves and summons tied to a literal slot reel.
>roll under
Reminder that XP is the very definition of a meta-currency.
>Metacurrency is a type of player resource that is spent and exchanged at the player level without any kind of resource exchange manifesting in the game world.
Checks out.
Though it's not typically exchanged and only ever amasses.
Then again, if a monster could drain your xp and reduce your level would that make it so xp is no longer a meta currency?
No it isn't and you know perfectly well what people refer to when talking about metacurrencies. Your sophism is the same as stating that cooked food and shit are the same because they're both basically processed nutrients and yet you rightfully don't expect anyone sane of mind to eat a fricking turd.
>Food analogy
lmao. You gain a currency that exists outside of the game and you use it to gain things in game.
While there is at least a narrative sense I you would have to apply that to "luck" points as well
>muh food analogy
Yes, an analogy for a stretched definition, that's all i need to throw in the trashcan your garbage opinion. No, repeating the same vague bullshit another time isn't a retort.
>You are wrong because... you just are!
Only high quality discussion is allowed here
>You are wrong because... you just are!
Literally yes, you're just pulling a Diogenes with a vague definition . Nobody cares homosexual, people that have a problem with metacurrencies obviously aren't referring to xp.
But XP is a meta currency (that's my definition!) and nobody has an issue with XP. Even point buy during character creation is also a meta currency that a lot of people enjoy.
Sure, keep shaking that plucked chicken and screaming "ackchyually that's also a metacurrency!", you're just arguing semantics with plato's ghost, nobody asked.
It's a metacurrency. Seethe.
Not that homosexual, but does the hostility towards metacurrencies extend to Warhammer's fate system? By default it's a number of rerolls every session (or a small bonus to a single roll, or a number of other similar effects) and can also be permanently burned to save a character from death. Is it solely the fact that it is a resource that is out of the game that is a problem for you, or specifically the 'narrative influence' aspect.
Everything currency in a game is a metacurrency. A game is a meta construct.
Nta but a currency is meta if it's not part of the setting.
If a whatever fate-point can save a character from death, any enemy you face could have their own with the same rule, as if they were also protected by a DM.
No organic solution to this outside trusting the DM
"this mook died for good cause he already used his extra life fixing the time he fell into a well in his youth"
"this mook you killed just used his extra life, he miraculously survive and you cannot kill him again until he get a fair chance at a comeback or retreat"
It's meta.
Honestly i don't have an issue with them, i just don't like metacurrencies generally speaking, like i always have the impression they are a workaround for unforseen issues in game design and not something purposely engineered.
Generally speaking i think the narrative influence ones are the worst types but it also depends on the game, for example they may have perfect sense in a gmless kind of game.
Referring to your example i can certainly see the thematic importance fate points have in wfrp and i do think they are somewhat well executed (for instance the fact that you can't gain new fate points, it's a finite resource you're going to eventually run out) but honestly, instead of a fixed number of points i would have found more apt a solution similar, for example, to the EABA system where Fate is a standalone trait that gets invoked (for example you failed a roll and the you roll on Fate to push) to increase success odds alongside risks adding on top of that the progressive trait exhaustion over use.
it's a metacurrency, sorry.
>character creation in a game with 'normal' humans does not boost male human strength scores or does not penalize female human strength scores
Redundant skill systems, like in Vampire the Masquerade or Call of Cthulhu. Oops, I accidentally specialized in Etiquette instead of Politics and made a bungle out of myself at the ballroom gathering! Oh right, I should have known to put points in Subterfuge instead of Stealth to trail my mark. Frick off. Warhammer Fantasy manages to do a bundle of them without them feeling like needless padding to justify skillmonkey builds.
gurps defaults
This is honestly the only one in the thread that I truly agree with. I don't care about so many things people have listed here, but this is fricking awful.
>Try to play BRP
>Put points in listen
>Only ever get called to Spot
>Can I Spot the tracks?
>No that's Sense.
>Oh then can I Sense to follow the tracks?
>No that's Track and Navigation.
>Okay but can my Track at least tell me what kind of prints I'm following
>No that's Insight
>Can I at least tell my party about my methods?
>Sure! Just roll Teach...
Arguing about classes and classless systems in a vacuum is pointless. You have already began talking in circles.
Something not yet covered as far as I can see
>Extreme power increases
One thing I hate about DnD is how your character might be “a veteran for 20 years” and be a level 1 fighter, but over a month fighting monsters and bandits he levels up to a level 5 fighter who could handle a party of level 1 players, and in a year he’s a level 20 fighter after slaying the lich and able to frick up small armies. I don’t mind high power but I always found the idea that a lifetime of training makes you a starting character and a few weeks or months in game makes you orders of magnitude more powerful.
Personally, not much pisses me off. Most game mechanics out there are fun to play and just encourage different styles.
I personally love both classes and classless games. I think classes have a nice packed up flavor that helps contain players expectations and progression planning, i.e., they know they're niche. Many of my players like it as well because they LIKE leveling. Classless games are also quite fun as players explore many more combinations of 'character types', but I've also found that players do next to ZERO planning of their characters in these types of games outside of big narrative objectives.
Like, players plan more out mechanically in class based games in my experience since they can see where their character may end up. This planning tends to inform narratives as well and players tend to just like it.
Then again, I like videogame mechanics in my games. I find them easy to communicate to players as they've ALL already bought into them before (For example, I've never played with anyone who complained about hit points before because literally everyone I play with has and does play videogames). If anything I find players want MORE videogame mechanics integrated, they want hit points, endurance points, mana points, etc. and don't get held up on the meaning of these things and don't need in game breakdowns or integration.
The "D&D" ability scores. If I pop open a character sheet and see "Strength, Dex, Con..." I generally know this isn't a game I'm interested in playing. I don't think they're necessarily a great stat spread, even for D&D, and if you're making a non-D&D compatible system I don't see why you'd ever use them unless you're just trapped in that D&D thought-space.
What would you use as an alternative stat spread
It depends on the system, and that's the thing. For instance, if I crack open some sci-fi espionage game with a ton of page space dedicated to interviewing and hacking and sneaking, etc. and it's using the D&D stat spread, my first thought is "really? You needed three physical stats for this?" I think, big-picture, when I see the D&D attributes in a game that isn't immediately D&D-adjacent, it just smacks of having not taken a step back and considered what your game actually needs and what it doesn't.
If we're talking about feedback for D&D in particular, I've always been baffled that Strength and Con are split. Conan 2d20 is an example of a game that I think remedies that by rolling them both together under "Brawn." If we're talking "generic" stat-spreads that I like better than D&D's, I have a particular affinity for World of Darkness' stat-grid. For those who aren't familiar, you've got two axes: Physical, Mental, and Social on one, and Power, Finesse, and Resistance on the other. Combined, those make for 9 total stats. For example:
>Physical Power = Strength
>Physical Finesse = Dexterity
>Physical Resistance = Stamina
I think it does a good job of covering all your bases if you want a general-purpose stat spread, and the fact that you know the two aspects that go into every stat makes it very clear which attribute does what. Then of course you've got systems that don't necessarily have an analogue to D&D attributes at all and work just fine; things like most GUMSHOE games, for instance.
Basically, I don't like it very much in the context of D&D, and outside of the context of D&D I think it just pegs your game as failing to step away from D&D.
Health and Physical Attack Damage being rolled under the same stat is a terrible system for a Wargame, which is what D&D ultimately is mechanically and has never gotten away from. It's a concession towards balance that has ultimately lost all meaning as everything is now a bloated HP bag due to bounded accuracy.
The WoD stat grid does sound like a good concept, though I'd prefer to just toss out Social attributes entirely.
>Health and Physical Attack Damage being rolled under the same stat is a terrible system for a Wargame, which is what D&D ultimately is mechanically and has never gotten away from. It's a concession towards balance that has ultimately lost all meaning as everything is now a bloated HP bag due to bounded accuracy.
I fundamentally disagree. If the game is built around
>BruteForceStrong&PhysicallyDamagingWithWeapons&Meaty&Heavily Armored&Instant Death/Poison resistant
>LoreKnowledgable&Impactful&Slow&Squishy
>DungeonCapable&Quick&Mobile&LightlyArmored&ExplosionResistant
>WildernessCapable&Supportive&Slow&FairlyArmored&MindControlResistant
then even having more than those 4 as stats is goofy, unless it's supposed to represent something not a part of those class divisions, like Charisma in old editions determining the total number of followers you could acquire, how often things you encounter might be hostile instead of neutral, and how well you could broker negotiations.
In fact, if those are the class division, I'm not even sure why to bother with stats for them, except I suppose to determine how good or bad someone is at things that aren't their primary job.
Personally, if I was going to start all over from the ground up, I'd make it 5 stats, the 4 class ones and charisma, 2d6+3 to all of them but charisma, then +1d4 from class to the class specific stat, and 52 minus your other scores for charisma (mechanically so people with very shit characters can hire more help, lore wise if you're more normal you're more relatable to your hirelings and if you're worse than normal you're nonthreatening and pitiable.)
>In DnD, HP climbs into close to triple digits.
MODERN D&D. In TSR editions, Hit Die stopped increasing at 9th.
no one's gonna play your dead game incel
>Chutzpah
>DPS
>Promo
>Special Defense
>Soul
>Luck
>Political Compass
>Anal Circumference
I've never played the game but I totally have a solid idea of whether it's complex or not guys! Also complexity is good for some reason! No I won't support my assertions with any reasoning at all, j-just trust me! I'm not crying, you are!
When the rules have zero procedures and it's just
>char gen
>conflict resolution
>now make up a fricking session 🙂
(This is me just being honest)
>Game requires you to buy booster packs or an extra product in order to actually enjoy it
(Also, expansion packs can be nice, but if I have to buy five of them just for your game to be good I hate it.)
>Power systems where the GM has to ban half the options for the game to be playable
>Systems where they have like 60 skills but you're only intended to use like 10 of them at a time so the GM has to cherrypick which ones will be useful
>Systems that claim to be universal and have bland, flavorless, generic options to accommodate every single type of game possible
>Any sort of math that goes beyond addition or subtraction, if I have to do algebraic equations just to determine my modifiers your system is shit.
>Systems that just go "lol range and movement are whatever the GM thinks is fine :)" frick that shit
>Races/Species/Ancestries receive stat boosts and/or penalties. this shit leads to min-maxing homosexualry frick you D&D and your even shittier clones like gayfinder for making this a thing
>Skills can be raised to insane values or otherwise have no hard cap on their modifiers, frick you 3.X for making this a thing.
>Having no hard cap on stats/no way to punish morons who make shitty meme builds
>System has no mechanics to reward good roleplay
>system's mechanics are entirely divorced from character-driven roleplay, meaning that people are incentivized to make statblocks instead of characters
>System has rules for mass combat
>Literally any type of summoner playstyle, frick summoners I want them to die.
>Character options are hard tied to alignment, and the system has alignment at all (frick you PF2e, alignment is archaic dogshit that exists only in D&D and D&D clones and serves to restrict how characters behave to a 3x3 grid instead of letting them do things like real people and have the world around them react accordingly).
How should a system reward good roleplay without it being "GM's discretion"?
>system's mechanics are entirely divorced from character-driven roleplay
>Character options are hard tied to alignment
Pick one or the other, schizo anon. Either you want limitless roleplay, completely freeform in the hands of the player, or you want the mechanics to guide your roleplay.
>He can't think of any way to guide roleplay besides alignment
That guy's a pretentious twat, but you're infinitely more brainrotted for thinking Alignment is the only way to mechanically support roleplay.
He's saying that you can't complain about a lack of roleplay-driving mechanics while also complaining about roleplay-driving mechanics. I certainly think it's possible to enjoy roleplay-driving mechanics while still hating alignment, and it's silly for anon to pretend otherwise, but I don't think he's unaware of other RP mechanics, I think everyone is just trying too hard to score a "gotcha".
You certainly can complain about both.
Name a single tabletop rpg you play so I can roast your dogshit taste.
>Playbook
>Bespoke Micro RPG/Zine