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Originally Posted by
1337 b4k4
So is the assertion here that WotC and Paizo couldn't make money without the barrier to entry into the D&D fold being $40-$120?
The assertion is that even Paizo couldn't be the size they are without a lot of really expensive books. Although I do note the 3.X and PF SRDs.
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YMMV, but aside from the magic system (which by default was all sorts of weird), I found building GURPS characters to be simpler than 4e, mostly because GURPS building is classless, and therefore you build your character by thinking about what you want them to do, and taking the skills that do that.
I disagree on two grounds here. I find 4e has more actual variety in action-heroes (it doesn't do anything else) than GURPS because you don't have to have everything working with everything else. And to build a simple character you have most of the work done for you by your class. The only point where 4e is harder is that you need to first decide what you want to do then see which class that matches.
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You would be wrong, because I haven't played 2e enough to have become familiar with it. If you want my credentials, I started with GURPS (of which 3e is a horrible one to start new on because it doesn't make GURPS modularity clear up front), then moved to Vampire, then a home brew system (with 14 stats!), from there I moved on to 4e (of which I'm still in active campaigns), then all the way down to Microlite20, back up to 3.5 (then converted to 4e because the DM wanted to try it out), then finally to OSRIC (1e), then Labyrinth Lord and Dark Dungeons (which is the other ongoing campaign I'm in). So of all the D&D systems, I have the most direct familiarity with 4e, and as I said, it's far too complex for what it needs to be.
All over the D&D family then :) At risk of being annoying, it sounds as most of those games (I don't know DD) are at the wrong end of the spectrum for you. I'd have a look at Spirit of the Century (or even the Fate Core Kickstarter), Dogs in the Vineyard, Dread, and Marvel Heroic Roleplaying. Possibly also Dungeon World.
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Only if your players are assembling new things every round at the table. Incidentally, your second line, about not sweating the small stuff is exactly why I think that 3.x and 4e both are too complex. Because they do sweat the small stuff.
I find that 4e sweats the small stuff less than 1e/OSRIC and a lot less than 3e.
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Originally Posted by
Kurald Galain
I disagree. If a table or rule is commonly misread (including by WOTC's official adventure writers), then that is certainly the fault of the designers and editors, who could have worded it better.
Or the fault of the idiots who released 4e a year early - burning Orcus for being crap after a year and then not allowing any extra time despite the fact they redid from start.
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Originally Posted by
PairO'Dice Lost
That says more about the lack of quality in the WoD systems than about the quality (or lack thereof) of skill challenges. :smallwink:
Possibly. But I'm trying to think of a game that can match 4e's Skill Challenges.
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Given that the point is to avoid combat, you should be able to have short, lethal, decisive combats
Uh-uh. The point of early D&D was short, lethal combats. Which is why calling D&D a combat game is ... dubious. 4e goes for large, cinematic, kinaesthetic combats.
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If you can pin a guard to the floor, or disarm him and threaten him with his own weapon, or push people into another room and bar the door, or other scenario-changing tactics like that, you have many more options for short decisive combats than if you can't do those reliably.
Sheer, utter nonsense. If you want combats to be quick, stick a sword through the enemy. Options take time and add overheads. Shoving a sword through someone takes almost no time at all. If you want cinematic tricks where pushing people into other rooms and barring the door is more highly rewarded than simply sticking a sword through them then you don't want short decisive combats. You want long combats where there is time to do that sort of stunt and where bringing the combat to an early end shortens it and is so rewarding.
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As I mentioned a few posts back, improvisation should not be used to resolve common or expected tactics. "Shove a guy" is not something you should have to make up rules for. While 3e is the only edition with overly clunky rules for some combat maneuvers and conditions, it's also the only edition where "I want to go knock that guy down, take his weapon, pin him to the ground, and scare the crap out of him until he tells me where the villain went" has defined rules rather than being subject to the whims of the DM.
That is 100% because you want something specified that is almost entirely irrelevant. Knocking the guy down and pinning him to the ground works directly towards your end. Scaring the crap out of him works directly towards your end. Taking his weapon is a flourish. There is a functional difference between scaring the crap out of someone when you've pinned them and when you haven't. You're preventing them running away. There isn't between disarmed and pinned and just pinned.
So in 4e you can "Knock that guy down, pin him to the ground, and scare the crap out of him until he tells you where the villain went".
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For every AD&D/4e DM who says "You want to swing on the chandelier to get to those goblins? Cool, roll a Dex check to do that, and if you make it your attack gets a +2!" there's another one who makes it take 5 rolls for little benefit. Basic, common, or iconic tactics shouldn't rely on improvised rules, so 5e should really make a compromise between the clunky 3e rules and the streamlined 4e lack of rules to provide good baseline maneuver rules without making them too complicated.
There isn't a lack of rules in 4e except for disarming and sundering.
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First off, even if you don't care how HP works, you should care about how much damage comes from the fire
Hit points are not damage. Hit points have never been damage. If hit points were damage people would give up armouring fighters and instead armour themselves in the bodies of high level fighters.
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Second, you can have fun, interactive, fast play without abstracting everything away like that. In fact, I'd argue that having defined rules for things is much faster and more interactive than making things up on the fly. As far as faster goes, 3e has rules for how much falling damage you take (1d6/level, minus some d6 if you can Tumble or Jump down), how much damage lava deals (2d6 contact, 20d6 immersion), and how hard it is to push someone 5 feet (beat their Str check on a bull rush), so if an enemy is 4 feet from the edge of a 50-foot tall tower in the Evil Fortress of Evil surrounded by a moat of lava, not only does the DM not have to stop to think about how to resolve everything, but the player can plan it out and roll everything without any of that back-and-forth.
Guess what? In literally every single one of those cases 4e has rules. It simply has 17 skills rather than 32 skills plus four entire skill families (the falling rule is 1d10/level and an acrobatics check to lower).
And if someone is near the edge of the tower in the Evil Fortress of Evil in 4e they are going over. There are forced movement powers all over the place in 4e. It's much easier to push people around. And we have falling rules
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As far as interactive goes, if players know what effect something will have, they can judge whether it's an effective tactics, if the risk/reward ratio is worth it, and so forth, which makes them more likely to come up with and carry out interesting plans. In the above example, the players know that falling onto lava will kill an enemy fairly quickly, and would probably judge that tactic to be worthwhile. If you don't know whether the DM will rule your strategy to be not really worth it (three rolls to push someone, 1d6 fire damage/round from the lava, no falling damage), extremely worthwhile (1 roll to push them, instant death from the lava), or somewhere in between, then you're either likely not to bother if the DM hasn't been improv-friendly before, or you're like to spend time asking how it will work, negotiating about the circumstances, and so forth.
Tell me, was that a pro-4e post in disguise?
One of the purposes of Page 42 is to make things predictable and worthwhile - and it does so for things that the rulebook won't have thought of. With 4e's forced movement you know how far you can push the bad guys and their chance of clinging on. Everything you say helps stunting exists in 4e as part of the rules. No need to stunt, it's all SOP.
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Essentially, all of the arguments people made in favor of giving fighters powers to give them Nice Things (not dependent on DM whim, player empowerment, convenient rules packages, etc.) are also arguments in favor of having defined rules for maneuvers and such rather than leaving them up to improvisation, yet the 4e players here are arguing against those maneuvers while extolling the virtues of 4e's class system.
We have those maneuvers as part of the structure of 4e and part of the powers system. A 4e fighter with sword and shield can take the Tide of Iron At Will power that allows them to push the target five feet back and follow up as part of a normal attack. Bull rush exists as a default action. We don't need a stunting system on top of the powers system.
What you are arguing for is an expected damage from stunts system (page 42), detailed rules round forced movement and plenty of ways of forcing movement (4e has bucket loads of them), and expected outcomes (4e has that nailed down).
There are precisely two things you are asking for that 4e doesn't do spectacularly well. The first is disarming. Which should be vanishingly rare. And the second is the ability to sit down and create a power in the middle of the game. This, I can tell you from experience, would slow things down dramatically; too many players take long enough to pick from the half dozen options they pre-selected. And if something fits the way you behave normally you probably have a power to do that (like Tide of Iron/Bullying with a Shield).