D&D (2024) Do players really want balance?

[payn]

I mean... yeah. There's multiclass feats. But there's also "Build your own Barbarian" with a list of ancestry feats, class feats, general feats, and skill feats every time you level up.

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I'm personally not a fan of that class structure is what I'm saying, there, while making a loose joke about being wounded!

Not every time you level up. It looks daunting when you list them all out by name but go by level. Level 2 for example, class feat and skill feat. Both of those will be a very small list of 3-5 choices based on what you picked at level 1. Its not ala carte at all. You will have basically built your barbarian at level 1.

Some of the encounter design I find particularly choice, yeah... I also really like the "3 actions" structure with V/S/M each being an action for spellcasting. Freaking -love- that, myself, even if it's not super popular in the wider design community.

But yeah, PF2e is definitely the 4e of 3e if that makes any sense whatsoever!

It does, and I agree.

My main thought is to try and maintain the short rest/long rest structure through the use of "Cinematic Short Rests", wherein a short rest can take an hour or a minute or a whole night. And then a "Long Rest" is just a rest in town/safety/etc where you recover hit dice expended during short rests or to get rid of lingering effects (since those make the game more dangerous!)

So there'd kind of be a hybrid but not -really-? You'll spend most of your time taking short rests between fights to recover abilities (including cleric spell slots that can restore your hp before the short rest starts) but you have HD to fall back on if the cleric's down or whatever...

But also you eventually run out of HD and need to take a long rest somewhere safe to recover it and get rid of things like fatigue or other long-term effects...

I like the pacing in the GMs purview, but then HD sort of makes it a limited day/period anyways. Dont get me wrong, I dig what you are laying down here. Just trying to picture it working out at the table.

'Cause I'd -still- use those things. And I'd still have mechanics where you can expend hit dice to do things other than healing, like some sort of blood-mage sacrificing HD for more damage or stealing HD from enemies and things of that nature.

'Cause you never wanna -remove- a lever from game design, y'know? You just wanna increase or decrease it's prominence but keep it in your back pocket to play with later. >.>

I love the idea of expanded HD!

 

[Micah Sweet]

The one in 13th Age seems to work reasonably well, but only if people accept the stylization of the "adventuring day" used there.

13th Age's system works quite well mechanically, but the execution is too gamist for my tastes.

 

[Thomas Shey]

13th Age's system works quite well mechanically, but the execution is too gamist for my tastes.

That would be why I qualified it with "if you accept the stylization of the adventuring day".

 

[Lanefan]

I just want to say that, to me, that is a bizarrely large conglomeration of mouthers. I tend to think of them as solitary. Or perhaps closing in as a pair, one from each end of a corridor.

But not six. That's like a phalanx of mouthers!

The only Gibbering Mouthers I've run in the last 20 years were a colony of about 10 of them living in the hills near (but not all that near) an unrelated adventure site; a few got picked off as "wandering monsters" in the forest then the PCs decided to go looking for more of them, and took on (5? 6? I forget the number now) at once in/near their lair.

When talking of battles where fleeing is the best option, this one was a prime example. They lost a couple of characters on that first attempt, then did some recruiting, tried again (much more cautiously!), and eventually knocked off the whole colony. After that, they remembered they had in theory been hired to do something else, and got back to the original adventure.

 

[Lanefan]

You're never, ever going to get a game that sells well and reaches a lot of people by telling them that they not only can, but will be subject to story-ending, random, uncontrollable consequences. It doesn't matter that real life is full of story-ending, random, uncontrollable consequences. People don't want real life. They want drama and adventure, and if that requires dismissing significant parts of what makes real life work the way real life works, so be it.

Re the bolded: I'd posit that people do in fact want real life, only overlaid with fantastic elements like dragons and magic and four-sun worlds in order to make it a different (and maybe more enjoyable and certainly more interesting) version of real life than what they get the rest of the week.

 

[Lanefan]

I really don't think it is. As @pemerton noted, both sides have perfect information about the state of play. You can't hide anything on the chessboard. The only "psyching out" you could even theoretically do is making a bold/risky play--but all of your cards are face-up.

Unless you mean to say that there's some other way a person could "bluff" in chess? I'd be curious to hear about that.

Psyching out in chess involves far more than just bluffing.

Staring intently at your opponent (rather than the board) while said opponent is thinking on his turn. Shifting or fidgeting at just the right moment to potentially disrupt your opponent's thought process. Making your moves in a hesitant manner when in fact you know exactly what you're doing. Capturing a piece with a little bit of showboat flourish and a smart-ass grin. I could go on at length.....

Been there, done (and received) that. You can't tell me there's no psyching in chess.

 

[Lanefan]

Write the foundation for the fresh-faced new players.

Write the supplements for the old hands. (The MMO equivalent would be "write the raids for old hands", generally speaking.)

Or - and I'll bang this drum yet again - put out two parallel and inter-compatible versions of the game. They might be called...let's see...how does Basic and Advanced sound?

 

[payn]

Or - and I'll bang this drum yet again - put out two parallel and inter-compatible versions of the game. They might be called...let's see...how does Basic and Advanced sound?

They could have just made the game modular like they talked about in NEXT.

 

[Voadam]

Or - and I'll bang this drum yet again - put out two parallel and inter-compatible versions of the game. They might be called...let's see...how does Basic and Advanced sound?

Intercompatible? Yes and no.

I'm a level 3 fighter with a 14 strength and constitution. What do I roll for determining hit points and how much of a bonus do I get with a longsword and how much damage do I do when swinging against an ogre?

The ogre is mostly the same in Basic and Advanced.

DM stuff is mostly interoperable, player stuff has a couple different baselines.

 

[Lanefan]

Intercompatible? Yes and no.

I'm a level 3 fighter with a 14 strength and constitution. What do I roll for determining hit points and how much of a bonus do I get with a longsword and how much damage do I do when swinging against an ogre?

The ogre is mostly the same in Basic and Advanced.

DM stuff is mostly interoperable, player stuff has a couple different baselines.

The player-side basics would have to be more directly compatible than the 1980-era Basic and Advanced D&D were, sure, but the idea of there being both a relatively-simple (yet complete) version of the game for new players and DMs sold side-along with a more advanced version for the experienced types still IMO makes huge amounts of sense.

Ideally, the two games would be compatible enough that a DM could pick and choose elements or subsystems from one to incorporate into the other.