April 3rd, Rule of 3

[BryonD]

That's the guy who stands around saying "If you don't give me what I want I won't play your game."

I COMPLETELY agree with you that it is critical to provide good justifications and explanations of positions in a manner that can be understood and responded to.

HOWEVER

to be clear it is also true that

Not only "If you don't give me what I want I won't play your game."

But

If you don't give me something SUPERIOR to what I already have elsewhere I won't play your game.

 

[Sunseeker]

I COMPLETELY agree with you that it is critical to provide good justifications and explanations of positions in a manner that can be understood and responded to.

HOWEVER

to be clear it is also true that

Not only "If you don't give me what I want I won't play your game."

But

If you don't give me something SUPERIOR to what I already have elsewhere I won't play your game.

Basically. Critique doesn't work as an ultimatum. Even if whoever you're critiquing takes your idea and plays with it, there's no guarantee you'll get exactly what you want. Compromise is the name of the game.

You obviously have skipped over my suggestions in many other thread then. (FYI, my "healing is in, I'm out" was in direct reference to the post about giving up on 5e already, aka hyperbole)

Either way, I don't feel the need to justify my participation anymore. If you find my posts out of line, please report me and move on.

I'm not going to report you for having an opinion, you're not edition warring and you're not being a jerk, I just think you could give better critique.

Honestly there are SO many threads on here about healing and whatnot, you'll have to direct-link me.

Also: It's hard to tell something is a reference when you don't mention it's a reference. Saying "I would prefer this solution I developed over here {link}." is a much better statement than "More money in Paizo's pockets!", how is that a reference to anything other than "Paizo is great!"?

 

[Argyle King]

At first glance I like this:

" In the next iteration of the game, though, we’re looking at shifting the focus more to the adventure, as opposed to individual encounters, and that will likely mean that we want to increase the sense of danger, which I think improves the experience during the exploration portions of the game."

However, when I think about it more, I find myself curious if the Facebook game was a test of some of the 5E ideas.

 

[BryonD]

Basically. Critique doesn't work as an ultimatum. Even if whoever you're critiquing takes your idea and plays with it, there's no guarantee you'll get exactly what you want. Compromise is the name of the game.

I made no claim to the contrary.

I simply pointed out that critique and ultimatums can be compatible.
This is particularly true when the ultimatum isn't anything more than simply stated the reality of the situation.


WotC may be required to dance on the head of a needle.
But *MY* obligation for compromise is ZERO.

WotC wants more fans than they have now.
In order to get that they MUST offer something BETTER than what their missing fan base currently has.
Yes, they certainly need to keep 4E fans as well.
But if they want to grow then they need to make us want them.
We will play the best game there is.
Compromise means willingly choosing less than the best.
That is off the table.

 

[n00bdragon]

There's nothing substantive in this Rule of Three. I'm getting kind of tired of the evasive "Oh, we're cooking up something really cool and you'll totally like it but we can't give you any specifics because it's SO EARLY IN THE PROCESS".

No WotC, it is not early in the "process". There is no process going on here whatsoever. Spill some beans and let people honestly criticize what you've done and then fix it. Otherwise it's just going to end up as "Oh, we're cooking up something that's really not as bad as you're making it out to be but we can't fix it now because it's SO LATE IN THE PROCESS."

I've seen it happen to better companies.

 

[BryonD]

There's nothing substantive in this Rule of Three.

THIS is the real truth.

They didn't actually say ANYTHING.

 

[FireLance]

It's alright with me. If they decide to try to dress up 4e in old school terms, it will likely do as well as 4e.

Just means more money into Paizo's pockets

There is a difference between "You can play 5e like 4e" and "You must play 5e like 4e". Rejecting 5e on the basis of the latter makes sense to me; rejecting 5e on the basis of the former mystifies me.

 

[FireLance]

THIS is the real truth.

They didn't actually say ANYTHING.

It said enough to make me happy, and that's something.

 

[Mal Malenkirk]

They continue to realize my worst fears...

A laser focus on a "core game" built for the fighter/wizard/cleric/rogue team with only humans, elves, dwarves, and halflings as the races is a terrible way to go about the designing the game and building it to leave room for more race and class concepts.

Are you suggesting they start by designing, say, simulteneously 14 classes and 8 races?

Trying to do everything at once would seem to me to be a terrible way to go about designing anything.

 

[Verys Arkon]

I'll be very interested to see how they balance an "adventure" based game vs an encounter based game.

The problem with adventure based games in earlier additions were things like:
- only the last combat feels challenging because only then are you low on resources. The rest are trivial.
- if you do find yourself low on resources, cast rope trick, and blow through the last encounter too
- hoarding rare resources so they never get used, OR
- blowing rare resources in a single encounter, making it a cake-walk. The 5-minute work day.

Encounter-based structure in 4e has some problems too though, particularly healing. However, if the alternative is just to crack out the wand of cure light wounds, where HP=GP, I'd rather skip the wand route.

I think if WotC had done a better job connecting healing surges with HP, there wouldn't be quite so much angst. If you converted all your surges to their HP equivalent, and then said "an adventurer can only take x damage in a short amount of time before they are too fatigued to avoid serious harm", would that have been better received?

I don't want to have a game where the only healing option is for someone to have to play a cleric. It is restrictive, and I think we've seen that there are several archetypes that involve healing heroes.

Verys Arkon