Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crimson Longinus" data-source="post: 8157689" data-attributes="member: 7025508">[USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER]I have played a lot of 4e, and GMed it a bit. And I don't hate it. It was certainly better than incoherent messes that were the previous editions. But it has certain design assumptions that rub me the wrong way and I was hardly alone in that. (Though I think a lot of that could have been at least somewhat alleviated with a differnt presentation.)Forget the antimanic field. I have never used an antimanic field and I don't remember ever encountering one in any edition. (Though it probably has happened. It seems that I am far worse at remembering details of games that took place a long time ago than many other people here.) But in any edition the GM can introduce elements that screw the characters over. You seem to think that it is 5e's fault that the mechanics allow super unfun 'disadvantage to everything and everything has magic resistance' to exist. That's just silly. Every edition also allows infinite tarrasques to exist, doesn't mean it is the game's fault if the GM does this. A lot of your talk about the GM force seems to relate to similar idea too: that the game should stop the GM from doing the things you don't want the GM to do or that you don't want to do as a GM. Well, it's not the system's job to do that, this is a people issue.As for DCs and such, I'm not gonna unpack my dusty 4e books. My recollection was that the initial presentation was really muddy, and certainly lead to many people assuming that the DCs should literally scale instead of just the opposition scaling which then lead to the DCs scaling. Introduction of things like minions, which meant that a literal same creature could have differnt rules depending of the level of the PC it was fighting reinforced this image. I think the tried to clarify it in some later books. And regardless of how you do it, too much 'level appropriateness' is a bad idea. It leads to the situation that happens in MMOs: the numbers get bigger, but nothing really changes. At least in theory I really like the 5e bounded accuracy concept, which actually keeps the low level enemies relevant longer (without awkward hacks like the minions) and lets you actually feel that you're getting more powerful.As for subjectiveness of DCs, I'd love if there was more concrete example in 5e to set the baseline more solidly. You of course cannot cover all situations, but once you have a good amount of examples the rest gets easier to extrapolate consistently. However, ultimately it doesn't matter whether you, me and [USER=29398]@Lanefan[/USER]  would all assign a different DC to a task X, all that matters is that the DC assignment remains consistent within one campaign. I really think this is important, and some GMs overlook this and just assign DCs randomly; that's a bad practice; you need to have a consistent framework. And of course one could intentionally use different frameworks for differnt campaigns to promote differnt genre. If I wanted a rather down to earth, gritty campaign, I would probably assign crazy acrobatic stunts higher DCs than if I was aiming for more anime/wuxia inspired feel.</blockquote>

Verification