Suffice it to say I hate Gnomes and everything about them, names included. Ergo, I never include them in my games.
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Gnomes suffer from stupid writer more than even elves and dwarves.
SpoilerJust kill those little bastards!
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And give me more of those:
But why would anyone pick #3 when #2 is available? Your #3 is basically "#2, but you are penalized/shown the door if you change your mind after character creation."
If someone cares enough about the game to choose their own feats at level 1, then they probably still care enough later to choose their feats as they gain levels. It kinda defeats the purpose of the system, I think.
As a side note, I hope they get rid of dead levels for martial classes. I don't much care for levels where my only benefits are "some numbers get bigger, and I don't even get to choose which numbers."
Dead levels for mundane classes have always frustrated me. Casters get shiny new toys every level.
It strikes me that "specialties" exist not because of game balance, but to counteract choice paralysis for character generation. In 3E and 4E, your first-level character has to choose One Feat out of a list of literally hundreds, and that may well be daunting to a novice player.
3rd Edition is a weird point based/level system that combines the worst of both worlds. With just the PHB and assuming single level characters it works reasonably well, but with 900 classes and who knows how many feats, you end up with a horrible mess.
I wasn't clear - Option #3 would have to replace Option #2... that's what I meant. (Otherwise, I'd be a moron, no?)
I agree, specialties exist exactly for the purpose of avoiding choice paralysis (especially for new players / players who don't care about character creation minigames). But Nu brought up the idea that if you can pick and choose your feats, letting some players do that while others pick a prepackaged specialty could make the game unbalanced.
So I thought a solution to avoid balance issues would be to not let players just pick their feats as they level, but to create their own specialty at the point of character creations which would have to follow some rules and be subject to DM approval.
In that case, I'll just politely say that I am very, very strongly against the idea. I don't like (to put it mildly) to have to pick everything that my character will ever be at level 1 and be punished if I change my mind. It doesn't work well from a player fun perspective or a narrative perspective.
I don't think that's going to help. The bottom line is that whenever some people care about optimizing their characters and others don't, the game will become unbalanced. I don't see that as a problem, though; balance issues are vastly overstated on forums and tend not to bother most game tables much.
Exactly. Forcing new players to pick their feats by hand will not make their characters stronger than if they take a specialization that picks all the feats for them. Most likely they end up even weaker.
So there is no reason to not give them the option to pick a specialization.
On specializations, I'd see it as something like an intro deck for Magic: The Gathering. An intro deck, if you don't know, is simply a pre-packaged deck of cards that you can start playing with out of the box, specifically designed to allow a new player jump into the game as quickly and painlessly as possible.
Importantly for the comparison, the deck isn't optimized to be the best deck possible, or even all that great of a deck. It's designed to be functional, easy to play with, and comparable in power to other intro decks, so if you and a buddy both pick one up, you can play against each other and be somewhat evenly matched.
There are also a few specifically selected "bad" cards thrown in, which either don't fit with the way the deck works all that well, or are just underpowered to start with. The idea is, these are meant to be cards that the new player will realize are bad after just a few games, and then replace with a much better card that they got from somewhere else. Once the player has made that first swap, the deck becomes "theirs", and they are much more likely to look for other cards that might not be pulling their weight.
I think a very similar approach could be used for Specialties. They would be designed so that a player can quickly jump in and start playing a character, and they would be set up so that their character makes sense and works, but the specialties would be purposefully not optimized, with a few strategically placed "bad" feats to help encourage the player to choose something else. Once the player has chosen their own feat and tread off the "beaten path", so to speak, they'll come to see the character as "theirs".
Of course, the approach shouldn't be exactly the same. Some players just plain don't want to mess around with character customization, so the specialties should be set up to be viable, if not optimal. But even those who think they just hate character customization may find that they like it when the introduction to it is more gentle. They might find they want to change just one feat to this other feat, and then get hooked and start looking up more feats they could swap to, until their character is wholly their own. Or they might be happy with that one swap, which is also fine.
Anyways, I just wanted to say that Specialties can and will serve a very vital role to the game. Even if you're a veteran, or a new player who jumps straight into customization, they will have an important impact on the game for you because they will increase the fanbase, and the more people playing, the more likely you can get a group to play with, or one that's closer to you, or has people you like better in it, etc. It also means WotC is more likely to make niche/situational/complex feats that they might not have for fear of a new player grabbing them and having a bad experience because they don't understand why to take it/when to use it/how it works.
I like the core concept, however the idea of having bad feats and such in it is not one I'd support. I'd consider it better if there was an option to go through grabbing feats, with specializations merely being preselected feats, any of which can be swapped out with anything else. As such, that leaves an option of building from scratch, from modifying an existing pattern, or of just picking something. It neatly encompasses a range, and that works out quite nicely.
Having feats that are significantly worse than other feats is probably not desirable, since it's not like feats are something to be collected, like MTG cards are. Still, it would be a bad idea to make the specialties so good that there's not much you can do to improve/change it.
It's a balancing act between encouraging players to branch out and choose their own feats, and making sure the specialties aren't so bad that people who want to just use them don't feel punished for doing so.
That's essentially how they work now, and also what I was suggesting happen.
The optimal solution is every combination of class/background/feats is reasonably balanced against every other combination of class/background/feats. If there are legal combinations that aren't reasonably balanced (whether too good or too bad), there's a problem.
Really, I'm all for simplifying the character creation system and instead emphasizing choices the players make in play. As fun and interesting as Char Op can be, what really matters is what happens at the table.
Eh, I'm ok with this for the pre built packages, but I don't think this should be a design goal beyond that. Just because it's possible to make a crappy build or an overpowered build doesn't mean theres something wrong, it's just life. Too much balancing leads to either power creep or bland sameness where the choices really don't matter. At best, they should aim to balance the prebuilts using incomparables, and otherwise leave the char op people to languish, as they'll break the game no matter what you do. Designing a char op proof game is like designing an idiot proof machine, there's always a bigger idiot, and if there isn't the universe will happily make one.Quote:
If there are legal combinations that aren't reasonably balanced (whether too good or too bad), there's a problem.
I disagree.
Even if specialties had some sort of set bonus (i.e. a bonus that selecting the same feat package would not carry) the impact of splatbooks and even emerging play would make even "the best" feat packages sub-optimal over time.
No reason to intentionally weaken something that is going to be weaker a month after the game is released, if not sooner.
And in the unlikely event that they DON'T introduce stuff that's more powerful, I still think your advice to newbies should be GOOD ADVICE!
The only thing deliberately bad advice teaches is that it teaches people not to trust your advice.
Let the experienced players build the quirky characters. Give newbies something simple that WORKS. If the optimized build is complicated to run then go for simple over complex in the examples. But give the BEST simple builds you can.
Of course the playtest packet's pregen NPCs don't even follow the game rules! Bows with no dex bonus to damage (on an archer!) finesse weapons with attacks based on a low strength value rather than a better dex value. Suggested sorcerer equipment that includes a weapon the sorcerer isn't proficient with. Clerics not proficient with staffs.
So I really don't think these people are going to come up with specialties that are any good. Most of their specialties won't be DELIBERATELY broken bad, they'll do that by accident.
DougL
If all the work is done for the player, then what is there for the player to do?
However, as I pointed out, this is also where the analogy between magic and DnD breaks down somewhat. Magic is a competitive game. If you make your deck better, then you win. If you don't, you lose. Thus, the disparity between a well-built deck and a poorly-built one should be large, to make sure players with better deck-building skills are rewarded by a higher win percentage.
Dungeons and Dragons, on the other hand, is a co-operative game, in the truest sense of the world. You're working together with the other players, not against them, and you're not even really playing against the Dungeon Master, at least not in a competitive way. You don't "win" DnD, after all.
However, this is not to say that there is no merit in the analogy. Many players enjoy the character customization element of DnD, and they all do it to optimize their characters in some way. Some of them optimize for power, to overcome the most difficult challenges. Others optimize for flavor, to make the coolest character that does the most interesting things. Still Others for story, to make a character that will create the most dramatic and memorable moments.
No matter what you optimize for, though, if there is no way to improve your character, then their is no optimization game. If the Archer Fighter has the best feats possible for making a highly effective archer that does really cool things and has tons of character hooks for great stories, then you've essentially removed character creation from the game, because there's very little reason to explore off the beaten path if the gains are so small.
I won't say that Ivory Tower game design is good (and neither does Monte Cook, according to the article), but neither will I say it is 100% bad. It has good intentions, but if 3.5 is the result of that, it's had poor implementation. Specialties are a big step towards rectifying this, solving many of those issues.
It's a balancing act. Ivory Tower game design is one side of it, and a completely homogeneous system where there's no choices to be made is the other. Specialties seem like they could do a great job of bridging that gap. There can still be plenty of pitfalls for players who do optimize, but those who don't have a safety rope that, while it might not be the best, it's good enough that they don't feel overly punished for not being a Ph.D in CharOp.
Yes, but for the player who does want to play a sly thief, or a strong archer, or a wise cleric, there should be ways for them to customize and improve their character.
And yes, actually playing the game is a huge part, which is why it's a balancing act. That doesn't mean you can ignore health of character customization and optimization.
I'd say yes to customize, and ideally no to improve. Ideally what they end up doing is simply another mechanically different but equally viable way of making the sly thief, strong archer, or wise cleric. In practice, they will be able to improve or worsen their character, but if WotC does their job well it won't necessarily be by much.
Incidentally, on account of backgrounds, classes, and races they will have ways of customizing the character relative to the specialty, as the specialty is all of 1/4 of the character.
That is pretty much impossible. The fact is, in order to make feats interesting, they have to be incomparable, that is you can't mathematically decide which is better. Which is better, the ability to cast two cantrips, or the ability to use a reaction to give disadvantage to an attack on an ally. The answer, it depends on the situation or the character you are trying to build.
Just because they are incomparable, however, doesn't mean they are all 100% even. If a fighter with no mental stats over 8 takes the feat that gives cantrips, and takes offensive spells, that's a bad choice, same if a wizard takes the feat that boosts healing.
Different feats will be at different power levels for different characters, and oftentimes a skilled player will be able to gain a lot in versatility for a small cost in power by going outside of their normal feat tree.
In any case, the D&D guys said they didn't want people to have to make all their choices at level one, for feats or multi classing. If you have a specialty, you can jump off any time, and they said you will be able to multiclass later in your career even if you started single classed.
Hmm... I truly do enjoy the specializations and their separate unique abilities, but I also long for the 3e days of detailed customization that complicated feat selection can bring. I like the simplicity but I want more customization than what the system currently offers; particularly I want to be able to change how my character develops as s/he develops.
The first solution that comes to mind is a system of secondary or even tertiary specializations in addition to the primary one. Perhaps at third level, the character gains their second feat from the primary and also is allowed to choose a secondary, gaining its first feat. Every other time after that, s/he gain the next secondary feat in addition to the primary feat. This could also expand to a tertiary specialization.
Or perhaps, in addition to the main specialization, the character is allowed to choose any feat s/he qualifies for at each designated level. These feats would provide any supplemental abilities the character desires to his/her main area of focus.
Concerning optimization, there is one thing I never want to see again, and that is 3.5 style dip whoring.
I personally enjoy optimizing and making powerful characters, but a dip composite Frankenstein fringing on the nigh inexplicable as anything other than a char op thought experiment completely nauseates me. The benefit derived from a class should be proportionate to your level investment in it whenever possible.
Reasonably balanced isn't the same thing as identical, though. Reasonably balanced means that there isn't a single feat or small combination of feats that renders a build substantially more useful than most / all other builds, nor is there a single feat or combination of feats that drastically weakens the build that it was designed for.
Obviously, if I deliberately take a feat my build wasn't designed for, that'll weaken me. This is fine. It's not fine if a feat my build was designed for does the same thing.
Incomparable options can still be balanced or imbalanced against one another. My point is Defender and Arcane Dabbler should be equally viable for both Fighters and Wizards to take. I agree with you that it's impossible without dramatically changing the system as they currently have it, but it has nothing to do with balance.