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Opal

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  1. Wizards of the Coast Announces One D&D

    in General Roleplaying

    Posted

    The hope was obviously that 3pps would sign onto the toxic GSL to grasp the coattails of the runaway success that 4e theoretically could have been had the success of D&D ever had anything to do with how good a TTRPG it was. 

     

    "Make a better product" often fails - marketing and legal shenanigans are at least as successful. 

     

    And luck. 5e's success was 100% accidental market timing.

  7. Exploding Dice

    in General Roleplaying

    Posted

    36 minutes ago, Duke Bushido said:

    Don't you see?  If you hit, it is also the CH number.  Every single hit you land is going to be a critical hit!

    I don't remember exactly when I noticed that and went to confirming criticals - roll 20, it's an auto-hit, roll again, if it's a hit, it's a crit - '85 maybe? It became official in 3e...

     

    ... only when I did it, a 20 on the confirmation was a "double crit," if you confirmed -  aaand, exploding dice.  :) lollol

     

    (Also, I've seen "20 is an auto hit, but a crit only if you would have hit anyway")

     

    And, no I don't use crits in Champions (nor Hero System, well there was that Robot Warriors.... nevermind)

  9. A Thread For Random RPG Musings

    in General Roleplaying

    Posted

    On 1/15/2023 at 7:26 AM, Hugh Neilson said:

    But I don't think Hero can just make the full rules set open source.  Maybe a stripped down version of the core mechanics,

    Something on the order of the original Champions, Hero 5th Sidekick, or the current basic book...

    ...or, y'know, Fuzion?

     

    (Oh, and you know what would really help? Ditch all those 3pt skills and open-ended skills and just use characteristic rolls.  Science Stuff? INT roll.  Want to be a great scientist? Levels with science INT rolls plus Reputation: Great Scientist)

  10. Wizards of the Coast Announces One D&D

    in General Roleplaying

    Posted

    4 hours ago, Ragitsu said:

    Again: balance is overrated.

    That's a very equivocal statement. I think we'd be hard pressed to peg a consensus on how highly balance is rated in the hobby, at all .  So when you repeat it, you're really saying nothing.

    If you want to make a point about balance, please, just state it clearly.

     

    4 hours ago, Ragitsu said:

    "Magic should be powerful" is (or was) a central tenet of D&D.

    At best, that's incomplete. If you read EGG's extensive advice and commentary in the 1e DMG and various Sorcerer's Scroll articles, it's clear that D&D was meant to be balanced in a baroque way with many factors, including magic being both powerful *and* heavily limited, mechanically, and also carefully restrained by the DM.

     

    (Speculative tangent) 

    Spoiler

    Personally, I wonder if Gygax's idea of balance was even precisely related to game play.  Before Chainmail & D&D, he worked in insurance, which is concerned with statistics that, while they'll quote them like they're about you, are about whole populations.  EGG may have balanced D&D not in the sense of the experiences of playing classes alongside eachother, but in the sense of the imaginary population of each class relative to the other. Thus, Paladin can be strictly better than Fighter, because the 17 CHA requirement means there are far fewer Paladin. Magic-users' dominance at high levels (like 5th) are OK, because so many of the die at 1st level.

     

    Of course, those attempts at balance failed.

     

    4 hours ago, Ragitsu said:

    It ought to be noted that - if anything - it was the third edition of D&D that widened the gap...considerably.

    Can't disagree with that.  In his notorious Ivory Tower Game Design, Monty Cooke (I hope I got his name right - the 3e D&D guy) let slip that they had used an M:tG strategy of including trap choices ("Timmeh Cards") to drive engagement through sysyem mastery.  It worked: 3.x was all about RaW rules and power builds.

     

    (And, that was not the last edition)

    Spoiler

    4e was the odd edition out, it balanced classes and encounters by reducing caster power and magic item impact to reasonable levels, rather than limiting them past the point they were fun to play.  It was so much better than its predecessors it was almost unrecognizeable as D&D.

    And that turned out to be a problem...

     

    5e's imbalance is profound, perhaps the worst ever, if you credit 1e with perfect DMs and 3e with saintly player self-restraint.  It imitates 1e, but without any of its baroque balancing factors, limitations, or encouragement of DM restraint of casters. 

    (It does encourage the DM restrain magic items, tho.)

     

    I haven't seen the painfully-named One D&D ("to rule them all ...and on-line monetize them"), but I've been told the playtest previews include "nerfed" Rogues and "buffed" casters.  

    Doesn't bode well for any poor suckers who start with it and never try anything else.

     

  11. Wizards of the Coast Announces One D&D

    in General Roleplaying

    Posted

    This was nagging at me:

    On 1/15/2023 at 1:04 AM, Ragitsu said:

     

    On 1/14/2023 at 11:49 PM, Old Man said:

    class power imbalances at the low and high ends

     

    In other words, not trying to place manipulation of the fabric of reality through arcane or divine means on the same mechanical level as swinging a sword

    Actually, D&D has always done *exactly* that.  Magic-user and Fighter both being class choices with easy stat qualifications, their respective mechanics are on the same level, so long as the characters being compared have similar exp totals. 

     

    Thus, "power imbalances" is correct.

     

    Contrast that with Hero, where "swinging a sword" - say, being a fencer - would have a minimum cost of 11 pts, while "manipulate reality" - sounds like a Cosmic VPP - starts at 60. 

    (IIRC, I mix up every thing from 1st through 5th edition of Champions, but I hope the point stands)

     

    At the same time, if you play a martial artist with 120 points in manuevers, DCs, levels, skills. and additional STR/DEX/SPD in the same team as a 40apt Cosmic VPP (also 120 points), you're going to be more of a badass in hth, and they're going to be wildly flexible, but you're basically balanced and can belong to the same team without a lot of issues.

     

     

  12. Wizards of the Coast Announces One D&D

    in General Roleplaying

    Posted

    8 hours ago, Ninja-Bear said:

    Now this is a quirk of old style that does bother me. You don’t need to describe how to fight ir cast magic BUT a thief ... the average beginning  player has to describe what he is doing?

    The OG Thief's %s were so low, you might do better describing instead of rolling.

     

    Even more extreme is social interactions scenes:  after that one reaction check, your character vanishes and you're just trying to fast-talk your DM.

  13. Wizards of the Coast Announces One D&D

    in General Roleplaying

    Posted

    4 hours ago, Old Man said:

     

    You could make a statistically reasonable system using d20s, but you'd have to build the bell curve in somewhere else, exactly like how D&D doesn't.  

    D&D does require rather a lot of rolls to get through a combat. Individual turns vary - 1 attack, 1d20, damage if you hit; 1 fireball 5+ d6s, multiple saves.

     

    Not so much out of combat.

    Spoiler

    (Except for 4e group checks & skill challenges).

     

    Maybe that's why D&D is still "a combat game"?

  14. Wizards of the Coast Announces One D&D

    in General Roleplaying

    Posted

    6 hours ago, Hugh Neilson said:

    Like it or not, the D&D mechanics have stood the test of time. We can crow about the huge marketing budget today, but the early editions had no such budget, and D&D somehow rose to the top of the industry and stayed there.

    It's tempting for a serious RPGer to want to look to the content of games for explanations of success.

     

    But, D&D had a unique arc, it made a splash among wargamers initially, because it was quite different, but it became a fad when people started hearing about it in the mainstream.

     

    Not because fledgling TSR had an advertising budget, but because of suicide, steam tunnels, and Satanism.  Yes, any free publicity is good publicity.

     

    And, to this day, D&D remains the only TTRPG with mainstream name recognition.

  16. Wizards of the Coast Announces One D&D

    in General Roleplaying

    Posted

    3 hours ago, Scott Ruggels said:

    OD&D was a tense survival Horror game

    I don't think I ever played it, nor "B/X" which OSR types seem to remember could walk on water and cure cancer. 

     

    But I played 1e AD&D plenty until I found a group for Champions.

    And, yeah, the first few levels, it had a life is cheap vibe, like multiple backup characters would be good.

     

    5e D&D, which I have played a little and run a little more, is also unpredictably, pointlessly deadly at 1st level. Especially the more the party leans toward sword-swingers over spell-slingers.  

    But it drops off quickly as the party's hp and spell slots accumulate.


    The big difference between D&D then & now, as I see it, is casting.

    (Rant warning)

    Spoiler

    Oh, many of the same spells, some nerfed, and similar progression, but, as EGG would have said "unrestrained."

     

    1e, the spells you know are random. To cast, you get a good nights sleep, memorize each spell individually, if you want to cast a spell twice memorize it twice, when it comes time to use a spell, stand up straight and still on a stable surface, take out the material components and mumble, gesticulate, and fondle the components /with total concentration/ for, typically, 6 seconds per spell level. If you're hit for even a point of damage, spell's gone, round wasted.

    And getting new spells? Hope you find MU scrolls and decide to use or copy them.

     

    5e you start with 4 or 5 sells know of your choice and gain one every level. After a "long rest" that doesn't require you sleep, and can't be interrupted by less than an hour of combat (?), you prep level+int mod spells and your "slots" are refreshed you can then cast any spell you have prepared using a slot if equal or greater level (which makes it more powerful). To cast, you use your action which can be before, during, or in the middle of your movement, so nationally takes less than 6 seconds, this happens on your turn, doesn't give any opportunity for interruption, requires only one free hand for a component pouch or a focus, and suffers no penalty for being done in melee.

     

    You have enough spells to get you through a 6-8 encounter day, and have at will attack cantrips as good as weapon attacks if you want to save a slot...

    ...but surveys show the average group typically faces 1-3 encounter days.

     

    So, yeah "tense resource management," not so much, anymore.

     

  21. Wizards of the Coast Announces One D&D

    in General Roleplaying

    Posted

    5 hours ago, Ninja-Bear said:

    everytime some one points out the flaws of (especially) D&D and say Hero is better never really look at the issue and see if Hero really is easier

    D&D's biggest issue isn't that it's hard - it is, especially to run - it's that it's utterly broken to the point fighter and magic-user are playing entirely different games, and the game falls back constantly on the DM to fix it on the fly. ...and one could fill volumes. Its the worst significant TTRPG of all time.

     

    Hero is complex and hard to learn, too, but once you learn it, it's a functional system.

    (I want to say, "except for skills," but that's not the point)

     

    It's just that the vast majority of potential new TTRPG fans have /only/ heard of D&D.  So if they try D&D and, reasonably, find it to be a bad experience, they figure they don't like TTRPGs, and never try Hero or anything else.

     

  23. Wizards of the Coast Announces One D&D

    in General Roleplaying

    Posted

    9 hours ago, MrAgdesh said:

    It's not like D&D where if you buy an "adventure for character levels X-Y" you know pretty much you'll get what you purchased.

    I still drop by D&D spaces, and a very common topic of discussion/hand-wringing is how to "fix" published adventures, customize them to the "OP level" of your party, etc.  You can find major re-writes by fans and influencers on line.

     

    Difference is Hero has (is) tools that let you do that.

     

    I guess this is relevant to the discussion due to D&D's persistent market dominance, and it's tempting to think there was something other than name recognition and timing to explain it.

     

    They are more than adequate explanations, imho.

  24. Wizards of the Coast Announces One D&D

    in General Roleplaying

    Posted

    On 12/8/2022 at 5:20 PM, Scott Ruggels said:

    Absolutely.  D&D is what it is, and will never be balanced

     

    No one else has mentioned it, so:

     

    D&D was reasonably balanced for about 2 years, between the release of 4e in 2008 and the release of Essentials in 2010.  Even then, it didn't return to the profound, perennial imbalance you alude to until the official release of 5e in 2014.

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