D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[ezo]

Skill issue.

He wasn't making himself enough of a problem if that was happening!

No, he was doing everything he could, but due to the other PCs being higher damage dealers and easier to take down, they got targeted as much as possible once the enemies realized this.

Also his decision to make himself nigh-invulnerable rather than more of a tactical threat is another skill issue. He took Toughness (a Feat he clearly did not need, by your own account) when he could have taken Sentinel, for example. Sentinel would have let him do his job significantly better. I suspect he didn't need HAM either, and would have been better off with something that let him punish people attacking others better.

Yes, this was a concern. He didn't take Tough until late (8th) and if he continued playing Sentinel was his next feat. In fact, he already took Sentinel for his new monk PC! HAM was his 1st-level feat.

But yes, it was a perfect storm type of situation. The combination of insane HP and shrugging off damage due to HAM and Hill Giant rune was just too much. If the player had choosen Battle Master, for example, he would still have been powerful but not to the point he was when it came to taking the brunt of the damage. Couple all that with the Half-Orc and Relentless Endurance... sigh.

He threw himself into the front all the time, often surrounded by 4 or more opponents. Due to his Strength and proficiency in Athletics, and Giant's Might advantage, attempts to knock him prone failed as well.

That sort of thing makes the optimization issues worse too - he's optimized himself to not die when he already couldn't die and thus can't really keep people off the squishies (admittedly that can just be impossible if too many people want to play low-HP frontliners).

By the end that was the result, yes. I can't think of a single instance when he actually went down and stayed down. A couple times he dropped to 0, but Relentless Endurance kept him up and then the fight ended before he had to risk going down again.

Yeah I feel like if they'd had AEDU as the base structure but had a couple of classes not use it initially, rather than not until much later, it might have worked out better.

And yeah IIRC 9 even at L20 - you just replace abilities rather than getting more and more (I think there might have been a way to swap them back in and out, I forget, but any time you were actually playing, there were 9 that were potentially available).

Like I said, I like the concept, I just wish there was a more "organic" way to achieve it.

 

[ezo]

That's what I'm saying. To me, "unhappy" means "less than happy". Par, as they would say in golf. "Sad" is worse, and "miserable" is worse than that.

Hole-in-One - Over the moon! / First round is on me!
Albatross - Thrilled
Eagle - Excited
Birdie - Happy
Par - Satisfied
Bogie - Disappointed (unsatisfied)
Doube-bogie - Unhappy
Tripple-bogie or worse - Miserable and/or pissed off

There is a difference between "believe" and "know". In the past, I have avoided a lot of things I believed I didn't like, but these days it's been so long that I don't know anything. The test need to be repeated.

Hey, whatever works for you. Once I'm informed, I can make a decision if I care to try something or have enough certainty to know I won't care for it and therefore don't waste my time on it.

As I mentioned upthread, the time/investment is also a factor. I would be willing to put in the time for many of those systems as a player if I found a group playing them, but frankly it isn't worth it to me to risk the time/money to teach myself and run them.

So, similarly, one issue I have with the English language (to be clear, I say this as someone whose first and only language is English) is that, where I'm from, there's no real word for the middle group between "like" and "dislike". The former is positive, the latter is negative, but there's no real neutral word in the set (in my area, we tend to use "meh", which my spellchecker refuses to acknowledge is a word).

Where I'm from, both unhappy and not happy imply a negative emotional mindset, not a neutral one. I would hazard a guess that the people you've been debating with would say similar. " Not happy" can be used neutrally in context, but I've never heard unhappy used neutrally IRL.

Edit: Eh, between me starting to write and posting a few others said the same thing. Did not intend to dogpile, feel free to ignore.

neither 'unhappy' and 'not happy' are as extreme as 'miserable' but they're both beyond the point of neutrality for me, indicating negative satisfaction with a situation.

Yep and yep to both these.

 

[Faolyn]

It's in definition of a compromise. A compromise is an agreement in which all parties give up something they want. Giving up something you want is what is meant by "being unhappy" in this context. If you are not unhappy it was not important.

OR! Slightly less happy.

Happiness is a continuum. You don't go from 100% happy to 100% unhappy, after all. At least most people don't.

 

[Faolyn]

The second paragraph talks about things unrelated to the first. The pitching of a pig product (or campaign) has nothing to do with the intended difficulty of said campaign and more to do with the known shortcomings of that product (or game system) which you have to pitch anyway.

For example, if somebody double-dog-dared me to run a 5e (or more extreme, 4e) game and I took them up on that dare, I'd then have to pitch that game to people in our potential-player crew and try to convince them to buy in to it even though I-as-the-pitchman know the problems I am (and, probably, they are) going to have with it. And yes, that's going to negatively affect my pitch; fact of life.

Same as when I sold wireless phones for a living: I sometimes had to pitch and sell phones I knew to be garbage simply because I had a quota to meet for that model. And yeah, it's not a good feeling; and whenever I could I'd steer people to models I knew to be solid and reliable and worth the money.

OK, these aren't very comparable, because whether a game is good or not is almost entirely a matter of opinion, whereas with phones, there are actual, objective reasons one model is better or worse than another.

You don't like 4e or 5e, which is fine, but that's not the same thing as it being garbage. And quite frankly, even if you truly believe with all your heart the 4e or 5e system sucks, you are still capable of using it to tell a good story, especially if you have players who are willing to play their characters well. Which means, ultimately, whether or not the game sucks is up to you.

A more common case IME would be, to use a gaming example, where two mutually-incompatible changes to a rule have been proposed and each has support from some of the table but not all. The fairly obvious compromise is to leave the rule as is and adopt neither change, but hard experience tells me to be cynical: whoever says "let's compromise by leaving it as is" (usually someone who realizes their position is currently the less-supported) is in fact punting the discussion down the road to provide time to lobby their opponents into changing their minds...or lobby enough of them at least that if it ever comes to a vote they'll win.

Can you give an example of two mutually-incompatible changes to a rule that have actually happened at your table?

 

[KYRON45]

I do that all the time, as the GM no less. My wife hates sandbox play

Sandbox play is a lie. In the end the players always end up doing what the DM presents.

There….i said it.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Sandbox play is a lie. In the end the players always end up doing what the DM presents.

There….i said it.

That really is up to the players. If they want to reject offered adventure hooks (and there's always more than one) and do their own thing in the world, they absolutely can and I will support it. The option is there, even if they don't often take it, and I make that clear.

 

[KYRON45]

That really is up to the players. If they want to reject offered adventure hooks (and there's always more than one) and do their own thing in the world, they absolutely can and I will support it. The option is there, even if they don't often take it, and I make that clear.

In the end; the DM still has to prepare and run encounters though right? Encounters that have something to do with the greater game at large I suppose. So I stand by my statement.
Are sandbox style games really just 100% randomly improvised encounters shoe horned together?

 

[Azzy]

OR! Slightly less happy.

Happiness is a continuum. You don't go from 100% happy to 100% unhappy, after all. At least most people don't.

Laughs in bipolar

(Yeah, I know it's not like that, I just couldn't pass up a self-deprecating joke.)

 

[The Firebird]

In the end; the DM still has to prepare and run encounters though right? Encounters that have something to do with the greater game at large I suppose. So I stand by my statement.
Are sandbox style games really just 100% randomly improvised encounters shoe horned together?

Is Skyrim a sandbox game? It's certainly not linear in the sense that Mario is.

 

[KYRON45]

Is Skyrim a sandbox game? It's certainly not linear in the sense that Mario is.

I don’t play video games.

Even if the encounters are engaged “out of order” aren’t some encounters not encountered until previous encounters are?
So sandbox games are just…less linear?