Lanefan
Victoria Rules
All the optimism I built up from reading the seminar notes yesterday kind of evaporated today on seeing this one.
As soon as they start talking about what choices have to be made at each level (abilities, feats, powers, whatever name they get) I turn away, because between the lines that tells me that the term "character build" is still in play. Which means by extension the continuation of the meta-games of system mastery and optimization - neither of which has any place in D&D.
As for the class list, assuming it stands up, I'm glad to see Illusionist back. Having never seen a Warlock in play, can someone please tell me what differentiates it from a Wizard or Sorcerer or Bard? (or can it relatively easily be melded into one of those three?)
Vancian casting is fine with me for arcane types. I'd prefer to see the divine casters on a Sorcerer-like system where if they have a slot available of a given level they can cast any spell of that level on their list.
At first glance I'm very dubious about this idea of trading out low-level powers-abilities-feats for higher-level ones, but I'll leave the jury out until I see more hard facts on it. Still sounds far more complex than required, however.
And for the love of mushrooms the game is about more than just Damage Per Round!!! If everything in the game is being reduced merely to how much damage it represents (e.g. Charm Person = 105) the designers have lost sight of the forest because they just face-planted into a tree!
And finally, not a fan of timing things by encounter as the definition of what is an encounter is still far too fuzzy. Per-day or per-hour or whatever is fine as those can be measured and tracked at least to some extent.
Lan-"warm and fuzzy one day, cold and spiky the next"-efan
As soon as they start talking about what choices have to be made at each level (abilities, feats, powers, whatever name they get) I turn away, because between the lines that tells me that the term "character build" is still in play. Which means by extension the continuation of the meta-games of system mastery and optimization - neither of which has any place in D&D.
As for the class list, assuming it stands up, I'm glad to see Illusionist back. Having never seen a Warlock in play, can someone please tell me what differentiates it from a Wizard or Sorcerer or Bard? (or can it relatively easily be melded into one of those three?)
Vancian casting is fine with me for arcane types. I'd prefer to see the divine casters on a Sorcerer-like system where if they have a slot available of a given level they can cast any spell of that level on their list.
At first glance I'm very dubious about this idea of trading out low-level powers-abilities-feats for higher-level ones, but I'll leave the jury out until I see more hard facts on it. Still sounds far more complex than required, however.
And for the love of mushrooms the game is about more than just Damage Per Round!!! If everything in the game is being reduced merely to how much damage it represents (e.g. Charm Person = 105) the designers have lost sight of the forest because they just face-planted into a tree!
And finally, not a fan of timing things by encounter as the definition of what is an encounter is still far too fuzzy. Per-day or per-hour or whatever is fine as those can be measured and tracked at least to some extent.
Lan-"warm and fuzzy one day, cold and spiky the next"-efan