Dragon Editorial: Fearless

[Thyrwyn]

It also helped that it took about five minutes to go from blank notebook paper to brand new character.

73 characters the summer I learned to play AD&D. . .good times. good times.

 

[TerraDave]

Hmm, ya. On principle I agreed with a lot of it:save vs. die overdone in 3E, excess player caution no fun, I prefer to punish players but not kill them to often, just to have them raised back from the dead...but then again, you could run your 3E game pretty much the way he said 4E could be played. And I just didn't love it that much (except maybe the armor at the start).

I agree that the various playtest reports have done a much better job of "selling" the game (Lizard: I really disagree with your "example", Le Rouse: that would be TerraDave's Trap Fun thread...).

The most interesting thing for me were the uses of the Arcana and Dungioneering skills.

 

[Nahat Anoj]

Considering that "this" means: Doing stupid stuff only because it looks cool without there any risk for doing stupid stuff. I disagree.

I think what you like is stupid, so I guess we're even.

 

[helium3]

To be fair, that's an equally inaccurate characterization of the expected 3e playstyle as the suicidal lemming comment. I'm sure most players didn't take 20 searching every 5-foot square they encountered during play.

What most players might have done is to take take as few risks as possible, and choose the safest (most logical, most tactical) option over the alternatives. If the 4e rules make risk-taking as viable as playing safe, then we might see more players taking more risks, and enjoying it.

Yeah. I'm not sure how the 3E system causes this sort of hyper-paranoid behavior. It's always seemed more like an artifact of the way DM's are occasionally encouraged to play and bad adventure designs. I got to fairly great pains to make sure that traps exist only on things that look like they'd be trapped.

 

[Wolfspider]

save vs. die overdone in 3E

This also mystifies me. (I guess I'm a mystified fella these days.) I can only remember offhand a couple effects that cause instant death with a failed saving throw: Slay Living (of course) and Wail of the Banshee. I haven't run games at super high level yet, though, so that may be my problem.

So what causes instant death in D&D v.3.5?

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I expect people to use it as often as necessary to return to full health, limited only by what the rules will allow. Once they've gone through their reserves for the day, I expect them to retreat and rest.

The corollary to that is that characters will throw all their 'dailies' at the first one or two encounters of the day, because they know they'll recharge them at the same time. Initially, they will find that 'balanced' encounters are a pushover, but DM's will adapt by upping the difficulty of those first two encounters to compensate...

and everyone will wonder just why 4e plays exactly the same way as 3e.



Unlike a lot of anti-4e folks, I am in favour of per-encounter balancing of the game. But mixing per-encounter and per-day abilities is a bad idea.

I wasn't so convinced at this at first, either, and there are still some aspects that I want to see (namely: Per Day spells) to gauge how they effect things.

But I have hope. There was one post (I don't know if blog or on this board, but I suspect the latter) that described that, while _theoretically_ a character had still a Second Wind ability, it didn't mean he (or anyone else) could actually trigger it before he died.
So, even if you have still 3 Second Winds left, if there are no more per encounter powers available to trigger them, you can't use them. So you can still suffer a real threat of death, despite being able to recover from it after the encounter.
That sounds like a sensible way to mix per day and per encounter powers. The question is how this is transposed to spells or other per day abilities (if that has been done).

 

[Derren]

I think what you like is stupid, so I guess we're even.

For me sitting in a mine cart which races towards a gap in the rails and the only thing you do is cheering is a stupid idea (especially when you later say that jumping out of the cart is wrong).

 

[Cadfan]

I find people's comments to the tune of "finally! no more deathtrap dungeons" mystifying, considering that the frequency of such dungeons plummeted when the "save or die" poison damage was supplanted with ability damage. It's like people are clapping because we are solving a problem that has already been solved.

This is true, but it misses the second point. While random traps that kill you outright are mostly gone, there are still random traps. Now they just do hit point damage, or inflict ability score damage. Meanwhile the party has a cleric who can cure hit point and ability score damage. The stake is lower- the deathtraps used to make you concerned with character death, and now they make you concerned with using up a cure spell, but its still annoying.

That's a fundamental flaw of the isolated, encountered-in-a-vacuum trap, which historically has been perhaps the most common kind. If you have functionally unlimited time to prepare for encountering a trap, and functionally unlimited time to remedy the traps effects after the trap is over, you end up in this dichotomy where either the trap kills you (bad and overpowered) or does curable damage (lame and impotent). The solution is to only use traps in the context of larger scenarios, such as by creating huge death traps that the whole party must enter at once, or by using the traps in conjunction with monsters and other challenges. This requires different encounter design, because you don't have the time to do Search checks in the middle of a fight, but its usually more rewarding.

 

[eleran]

For me sitting in a mine cart which races towards a gap in the rails and the only thing you do is cheering is a stupid idea (especially when you later say that jumping out of the cart is wrong).

I don't think that Chris was saying the act of jumping out of the cart was wrong except in an "after the fact, hindsight being 20/20" sense. It may have been the "right" thing for the character that jumped to do at the time of the action, but looking back at the result it was the wrong move.

Or, that is how I read it anyway.

 

[Psion]

This also mystifies me. (I guess I'm a mystified fella these days.) I can only remember offhand a couple effects that cause instant death with a failed saving throw: Slay Living (of course) and Wail of the Banshee. I haven't run games at super high level yet, though, so that may be my problem.

So what causes instant death in D&D v.3.5?

I dunno. Maybe TerraDave's DM throws the party into dungeons full of Bodaks, Beholders, and Medusae?

I don't know either, man. I've killed far more PCs with HP damage under 3e than save-or-dies. And do run high level games.