Monte Cook back at wizards

[Argyle King]

senseless when feats compete with more flavourful feats or mechanical better feats... this needs to be seperated

This is actually one of the changes which ties into what I was talking about with my posts. In the beginning, there seemed to be a belief that feats should generally be used to refine your character; not used so much to define your character. Look at PHB1; the feats which do provide a mechanical bonus are tied to themes or certain weapons and various other things rather than simply being flat bonuses. As the game has grown, it has grown further and further away from that and become closer to showcasing the same faults 3rd Edition had toward the end within 4th Edition's house.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This is actually one of the changes which ties into what I was talking about with my posts. In the beginning, there seemed to be a belief that feats should generally be used to refine your character; not used so much to define your character. Look at PHB1; the feats which do provide a mechanical bonus are tied to themes or certain weapons and various other things rather than simply being flat bonuses. As the game has grown, it has grown further and further away from that and become closer to showcasing the same faults 3rd Edition had toward the end within 4th Edition's house.

I think part of the issue here is that it was an untenable vision. It sounded good in theory, but when each feat is tied to a very narrow set of options the result is (and 4e shows it well) massive feat bloat. They recalibrated slowly and found that it made more sense to write more general feats, and with Essentials we see the final evolution of that, with a relatively svelt feat list. I get what you're after and I sympathize entirely with you. It just was one of those cool but fatally flawed ideas.

I think 4e in a lot of ways is like that. It is a good system. It is just very hard for a group of game designers to fully comprehend how such an extensive game is going to feel when it is all done. They had certain goals. Those goals might not have been entirely met, and some of them probably couldn't actually be met within the context of the design. The problem is you have to at some point nail down the broad outline of the mechanics of a game so you can get on with it, and often you find out towards the end that a lot of decisions you made 2 years earlier didn't exactly contribute to your goals, or even undermine them. Other things are just "this is off a bit" (like monster damage and certain other things). Those can be fixed. 4e, being almost a ground up new game design, came with a lot of areas where I think the developers going back 2 years in time would say "no, that won't get you what you want, maybe do this instead", so it is something of a prototype. Unfortunately you don't get easy do-overs and revisions are costly.

I rather agree with Nemesis on the feel thing. I'm working up ideas now for another campaign and one of the things that I want to do is a much more radical take on Points of Light. The world isn't just one where the 'Empire of Nerath' fell apart and the roads are bad. This is a world where the very existence of humanity was and is in doubt. Getting to the next town is not something you attempt lightly. In fact nobody is even sure if the next town still exists. You'll be lucky to get word once in a year from someone who's gone that far. If you wander around in the woods at night (the woods that surround the edges of every field) you're not likely to come back. 4e can handle that. It just isn't Nentir Vale as presented in the DMG. It is a lot more like a fairy tale, the world is big, hostile, and largely unknown. Only the toughest adventurers venture out into it, and even they step carefully.

 

[Argyle King]

I do try to cut 4E some slack because I consider that a lot of ideas were new. However, that's one area where I personally feel the original design failed. I think there should have been more of an effort to attempt to understand why things were done the way they were in the previous edition instead of just out and out dismissing the previous edition as horrible design.

That does not mean I am saying 4E should be more like 3E. Only that I think they should have taken more time to explore why the previous team made some of the decisions they in regards to the previous set of rules. Even if they looked at a previous rule and decided they felt it was total crap, I still feel as though taking that little bit of extra time to look at 3E in various stages of its life (beginning, middle, and end) would have lead to a more informed game design process behind 4E.

I also feel there are a lot of 4E ideas which work well, but aren't used enough. The disease track system is one of them. I feel that a lot of granularity could have been added to the game by using that model for more things. Imagine if a save against mind control was less yes/no; less binary than it currently is. Imagine if you instead had a starting position on a condition track -dazed for sake of example. On your turn you then make some sort of mental roll to resist; if you make the roll you improve; if you fail, perhaps you fall to being stunned.

A little may bookkeeping? Maybe a little, but I feel it would be a smoother experience overall than being so yes/no, and it's already something which we sometimes see with effects that have aftereffects once saves are made. My point not being to debate the virtues of the disease track system, but being to showcase why I feel as though there were 4E ideas which seem to have been abandoned along the way for no obviously visible reason. In some cases I feel as though those abandoned mechanics work better for something than the things which are normally used.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yeah, it is hard to say. They threw a LOT of different ideas into the pot and it is difficult to tell why they've developed some and not others. In some cases like feats it clearly seems like they ran into issues. With others like the disease track things are less clear. I think they just devised it as a way to deal with diseases, and haven't thought much about other uses, or felt like it would be a real change in consistency of design to start using it in really different ways. I just don't know. There certainly are a lot of tools out there though for people to pick up on and do things with.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

That does not mean I am saying 4E should be more like 3E. Only that I think they should have taken more time to explore why the previous team made some of the decisions they in regards to the previous set of rules. Even if they looked at a previous rule and decided they felt it was total crap, I still feel as though taking that little bit of extra time to look at 3E in various stages of its life (beginning, middle, and end) would have lead to a more informed game design process behind 4E.

I believe this is the most important thing why hiring Monte Cook has been a great Idea! He knew, why he implemented something.
Even if it was adding "Timmy" feats. He knows about it, he can show the game designers, which feats were not meant to be useful for powergaming etc.

I also feel there are a lot of 4E ideas which work well, but aren't used enough. The disease track system is one of them. I feel that a lot of granularity could have been added to the game by using that model for more things. Imagine if a save against mind control was less yes/no; less binary than it currently is. Imagine if you instead had a starting position on a condition track -dazed for sake of example. On your turn you then make some sort of mental roll to resist; if you make the roll you improve; if you fail, perhaps you fall to being stunned.

This usage of the disease track seems great for me. It should not be that diffcult to take 2 or 3 conditions and combine it into a track...

I could see:

free -> CA -> dazed* -> stunned
free -> CA -> dazed* -> mindcontrolled
free -> CA -> dazed* -> stunned -> helpless
CA -> prone
slowed - > Immobilized -> restrained

Encounter powers could just be reduced by one step of the end of the creatures turn. Dailies need a save.

Granted saves also work for Encounter powers to further reduce the effect of the condition. (And you can´t worsen your condition)

Oh, and add Rituals to the List of undderused good ideas.

 

[Nikosandros]

Whenever it does matter, because something can be directly measured like a long jump, the DCs are absolute and stated that way. It would be erroneous to conclude things like "climbing a wall is always a moderate DC check of your level". It is correct to conclude that "all the walls that the DM is going to care about if I climb them or not are pretty much my level." Given that the DM can either set specific DCs for unusual situations, or add modifiers for unusual difficulties when the check is called for, etc, the difference actually is close to immaterial in play. It just would have been nice if they had actually said that in words instead of implying it in a way that you have to study the skill system to infer.

In general, I agree with you, but if you look at the DC table for acrobatics, it really seems that the difficulty of balancing across a narrows surface of a given width does scale with the character level.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

In general, I agree with you, but if you look at the DC table for acrobatics, it really seems that the difficulty of balancing across a narrows surface of a given width does scale with the character level.

On the other hand the exactly analogous Athletics skill gives exact fixed DCs for each and every thing you can do with it, climbing being a situation EXACTLY analogous to balancing. Nor does the writeup for Acrobatics in any other material ever mention any kind of level relative mechanics. Every adventure ever published specifies DCs for anything along these lines that the PCs have to do etc. I can only conclude that the system was designed around fixed DCs that are generally intended to be proportionate to the character's level based on that being the challenging way for things to be and fluffed out as more risky and outrageous situations.

I think RC was just in some areas poorly edited. The way they reworded things like free actions are equally nonsensical if taken literally.

 

[Argyle King]

I could see:

free -> CA -> dazed* -> stunned
free -> CA -> dazed* -> mindcontrolled
free -> CA -> dazed* -> stunned -> helpless
CA -> prone
slowed - > Immobilized -> restrained

Encounter powers could just be reduced by one step of the end of the creatures turn. Dailies need a save.

Granted saves also work for Encounter powers to further reduce the effect of the condition. (And you can´t worsen your condition)

Oh, and add Rituals to the List of undderused good ideas.

That's exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about. I feel that is a great model to use for all sorts of things; it can even be used outside of combat. Let's say you have a weapon which has been sundered. (I know that's not in 4E, but I am illustrating how some pre-4E ideas could be given a place in 4E without breaking the system; in fact by using the existing 4E model.) Alright, so now your weapon has the 'sundered disease' and starts at the broken end of the track. If by chance your character has a skill at fixing weapons (this might be where backgrounds and character themes could come into play more; perhaps granting a special fluff ability to fix weapons or cook or any manner of other things,) you could make a roll akin to the endurance roll to recover from a disease, but based on an armory skill instead. On a success, the weapon improves a step toward being restored; on a failure the repairs are too far beyond your current skill, and you'll need to venture into town to find a blacksmith.

My idea isn't perfect, but I'm not a game designer either. Maybe I'm completely off base, but -from my point of view- that seems to be a good way to incorporate a lot of elements which were cut from 4E design because they were said to not fit (or in some cases said to not fit without breaking the game in some way.) That could also be one of the optional layers of rules which the L&L articles have recently spoke of. If you are a group which does not want to bother with that extra layer, just ignore it and also ignore monster abilities which interact with it. I feel the tools are there to build a better game; instead of fumbling around with creating new subsystems and new mechanics to tack onto the game, why not use what is there? Why not use what already works?

 

[ourchair]

You know, if 3e/PF fans get upset by whatever comes out in the 4e branch - get angry over developments in a game they no longer play - well, then I think they can be dismissed as being silly.

Really. It'd be like getting up in arms because writers kill off a character in a TV show you don't like and don't watch. I mean, that's just plain silly. No other word for it.

At first, I thought, you're absolutely right.

And then I thought *shrug* I dunno, what happens if a 3e/PF fan gets upset when something 3e/PFey comes out in the 4e branch and then he or she is all like NERDRAGE!? because now 4e is more like the edition they like and that makes her unhappy!!111

Hey, it could happen.

 

[Argyle King]

At first, I thought, you're absolutely right.

And then I thought *shrug* I dunno, what happens if a 3e/PF fan gets upset when something 3e/PFey comes out in the 4e branch and then he or she is all like NERDRAGE!? because now 4e is more like the edition they like and that makes her unhappy!!111

Hey, it could happen.

"Rawr! I hate when more games are made to cater to my tastes."

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