D&D 5E Magic Items in D&D Next

SkidAce · Jul 10, 2012

Crazy Jerome said:
None of that means the system would be supporting the playstyle. In the same way that I once cleared a city lot with grass up to my waist, using nothing but a slingblade. Doesn't make my slingblade a lawnmower.

True....but you were still getting the grass cut.....

/running with it.

Minigiant · Jul 10, 2012

Mercule said:
Interesting. I'm finding it appropriately balanced. If the players are smart, no worries. If they're dumb, they have problems. It's definitely much more forgiving, IME, than AD&D was, though.

Never said it wasn't balanced.
I said it encouraged a certain playstyle

Nonsense. I ran a number of very epic campaigns under AD&D, which could be much more "gritty scaredy treasure hunters" than 3e or 4e. I also ran and played in a number of very deadly campaigns.

Just because you can play a certain way, doesn't mean the game doesn't encourage a certain style of play.

AD&D encourages cautious play. You could chose not to and your DM could play softed to let you play more reckless but it nudges you to cautiosness by default.

You could play 4E cautiously too but the game is made in a way you don't have too.

Nope. It had darn well better handle it without breaking, though. 3e and 4e really didn't without risk of breaking. In my AD&D games, it wasn't unusual for the PCs to have only one or two magic weapons, between them, at 5th level. Many module hoppers had an arsenal by 3rd. The system handled either style well. In 3e and 4e, I never could get the rare magic item thing to work without throwing off the math and screwing the players or changing the monster stats. The earlier editions were flexible, but shallow and questionably balanced. The later editions were better balanced and unified, but brittle. I'd like to see 5e carry the flexibility of AD&D, but have the unity (which helps to bring balance) and d20.

Once you bring the flexibility back, GM skill level matters more. I don't have an issue with that. In part, that's because I think the defining feature of a TTRPG is the GM. Aside from electronics, that's a major part of what differentiates TTRPGs from a WoW LAN party. Hopefully, a unified system brings not just balance, but lowers the entry requirement for being a good GM. The GM should still be responsible for ensuring the tone and style of the campaign happens, though.

In order for D&D Next to be a unity edition, it needs to be DM-neutral.

To do this it either has to:
Promote no style of play.
or
Promote all styles or play at the same time/frequency.

This is why I think there should be a "How to play a High Magic game" and "How to play a Low magic game" pages.

Ratskinner · Jul 10, 2012

Patryn of Elvenshae said:
That says to me that all challenge numbers (however they are expressed) are tuned higher - if the designers were being "honest," then they would say that an ogre is a viable challenge for 4th-level characters, but because it's a forgiving system, they actually list it as 6th-level.

Otherwise, how can it be forgiving? Or is there another way of reading forgiving that I am missing?

Not forgiving to the characters, forgiving in the math. That is, 3e/4e only work well with opponents within say plus or minus 3 levels/CRs. That gives a relatively narrow range. The Bounded Accuracy system has the goal of making monsters viable over a much larger range of PC level. Thus, you can shake up the encounters a lot more and the monsters will still be hittable, or vice versa, so will the characters. This means that you don't need to worry so gull-darn much about finely tuning your ACs and DCs and whatnot. So a 5th level monster is still worth something against 11th level PCs and a 5th level PC still has a fair chance to hurt an 11HD monster.

If you make the system "forgiving" enough, you don't have to worry so much about making sure that each encounter is exactly this many XP and is composed of monsters of only these levels. This worked (others may disagree) very well in earlier editions, which had a lesser version of it unintentionally. I can't speak for all the old-timers out there, but I just don't recall any DMs complaining about having the inability to judge and predict the difficulty of their encounters with their parties until 3e came along.* The never-ending escalation of ACs and DCs means that monsters a few levels too high become effectively invulnerable, and monsters a few levels too low represent no credible threat at all.

*Special exceptions granted for 6th grade DMs who were working their own adventures for the first time with the red box or 1e.**

**Not that I was one of them.***

***Or put a blue dragon in a dungeon for first level characters when I did.

Lanefan · Jul 10, 2012

Minigiant said:
Heroic- 10 HP, Elites get mastwork shortpears

Mastwork shortpears?

I know what you were trying to type, but what you actually did type is far more amusing...

Ratskinner said:
Not forgiving to the characters, forgiving in the math. That is, 3e/4e only work well with opponents within say plus or minus 3 levels/CRs. That gives a relatively narrow range. The Bounded Accuracy system has the goal of making monsters viable over a much larger range of PC level. Thus, you can shake up the encounters a lot more and the monsters will still be hittable, or vice versa, so will the characters. This means that you don't need to worry so gull-darn much about finely tuning your ACs and DCs and whatnot. So a 5th level monster is still worth something against 11th level PCs and a 5th level PC still has a fair chance to hurt an 11HD monster.

This is something I very much hope 5e can pull off, as it's been one of my major gripes with the last couple of editions.

Lanefan

Crazy Jerome · Jul 10, 2012

Ratskinner said:
Not forgiving to the characters, forgiving in the math. That is, 3e/4e only work well with opponents within say plus or minus 3 levels/CRs.

If you know what you are doing, you can got -3 to +5 easily enough in most of 3E (though this may break down in upper levels, I'm not sure). And out of the box, reading the advice in the 4E DMG, you can easily cover a wider range, though with a few exceptions that came out early after release (e.g. avoid soldier at the upper end of the range, avoid brutes at the lower end). So it's not quite as bad as you've stated here.

Nothing in the ranges makes nearly as big a difference as having 1 or 2 extra or less characters, for example.

Nevertheless, I agree that with bounded accuracy, those same systems could have covered a wider range than they did.

Lanefan · Jul 10, 2012

Crazy Jerome said:
Nothing in the ranges makes nearly as big a difference as having 1 or 2 extra or less characters, for example.

Forked to a new thread as this opens up yet another can o' worms...

BobTheNob · Jul 10, 2012

(Wow, I came to this one late...)

Two thumbs up for removing items from the math of the game (or at least turning bonus into a feature, and not a pre-requisit) and moving them into the "interesting" area.

Sounds good

Steely_Dan · Jul 10, 2012

Crazy Jerome said:
Was the DM, whomever it was, running the rules as written or pulling stuff out of his behind?

See, why does it need to get insulting ("out of his behind"); the DM can make valued judgement calls within the framework of the rules (I know, shocking, like not letting a power called Sand in the Eyes work in a completely bare, hermetically sealed adamantium chamber), like ability/proficiency checks, etc.

Patryn of Elvenshae · Jul 10, 2012

I don't think "pulling stuff out of your behind" is insulting. I do it all the time as a DM.

Crazy Jerome · Jul 10, 2012

Patryn of Elvenshae said:
I don't think "pulling stuff out of your behind" is insulting. I do it all the time as a DM.

Me too. It's a necessary skill for great DMing. My point was that when when you doing that, you aren't using the system. Thus, the nature of the experience produced in that environment doesn't really say anything about the soundness of the system. (Well, if you are forced to pull something out of your behind when you don't necessarily want to, it might say something negative about the system. But it never says anything good about the system, as system. It is, at best, system neutral.)

Though I also have to admit I'm a little nonplussed by the same poster claiming within 24 hours that 2E--a game notable for not even mapping to its own settings mechanically--was a great system for running a wide range of genres, but also that the possible presence of a word like "controller" in an appendix was such a negative that it could potentially harm the running of a Next game. I'm not sold 100% on the "system matters" meme, nor on the opposite, but I do think that to the extent that "system matters," it matters.