Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7751349" data-attributes="member: 996">I found it ubiquitous and insistent with 3e, though the DM's defense was "Core Only!"  With 4e it was mostly a non-issue, but that's because I ran 4e for a much larger proportion of new & casual players who weren't invested in the system being a certain way.   Nothing stops you from kitbashing any edition, but I find some things discouraging.  For instance, in 3.5, the game was pretty well broken, so if I tinkered a bit, I was unlikely to break it worse, possibly make it better - but no 3.5 player was going to accept the 'better' version, because their build was for the standard version, so good luck /running/ that.  ;(   In 4e, the design was so transparent and balanced you could "see the strings" so if I went to tweek something I'd see, oh, this is going to screw up this, that, and the other.. oh, never mind. But, in 5e, the game really does invite you to just do stuff.  Every time a player declares an action, the game is like "uh, boss, whadda we do?  Is the outcome uncertain?"  You get used to that, to making rulings instead of always just following a rule algorithm (however good or awful), and your /players/ get used to it, so when you want to do something different, you just do, and they hardly notice, let alone complain.  MM calls it Empowerment.  We could as well call it "D&D." "Fire & Forget" also references the old Vancian /Memorization/ mechanic.  The classic game used n/day (often 3/day, for some reason), pervasively, for special abilities, for items, for terrain features, for oddball situational checks, it was really pretty arbitrary that way.  3e, did, in fact, give out 1/day stuff that wasn't spell casting, nor even supernatural.  The rogue's defensive roll was 1/day.  The Monk got Stunning Fist 1/day/level, and a Fighter that took Stunning Fist - it was a Fighter Bonus Feat, so virtually a class feature - got it 1/day.  None of those had the (SU) tag. Except, not post-hoc, if I understand how you're using the term, more ground-up.  The intent of the design was to let everyone be awesome, you can't be awesome all the time, so... gamist contruct: 1/day.  And I don't see how 'gamist' is bad, in itself - it's just a Forge epiphet for remembering, 'oh, yeah, we're designing a game, maybe we should try to make it not suck,' which has never gone over well in the sense of moving books.  The adoption of Vanican was done for playability, it was, itself, a gamist construct, and one entirely at odd with genre.  It's only tollerated because of long familiarity - and the excessive advantages of playing a Tier 1 Vancian caster, of course. 5e's fixed magic items in a precipitous way:  by largely eliminating them from the calculus of the game's design.  They're back to being wildcards the DM can throw in to mix things up if he wants.  In a sense it's also fixed the economy, since gold no longer smoothly/fungibly translates into power through the codified make/buy of 3.x/4e.  The economy is now whatever it is in your setting, that could be hard-luck 11th level mercenaries fighting for a handful of silver and a week's rations, or 1st level nobles with retinues setting up a pavilion for them every night.   Really, a lot of what you've been saying has just been very inside-out ways of saying it was a very well-designed game, indeed.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />   Nod.  What I mean by "his own fault" was not 'he should suffer for it' (because, as you point out, everyone else is, too), but that he should try to improve.  What 4e did that made rounds and combats seem to take so much longer was to move decisions into combat, from pre-combat strategizing, and to give everyone more 'agency' in that combat.  Instead of some players taking seconds on their turn, and one 15 minutes (and one or two bending the DM's ear for an hour before combat even began), you have everyone getting their turns done in a minute or few.  The guy used to taking 15 minute turns feels cheated, and everyone notices it takes longer for their turn to come up, and the combat goes more rounds, too, because the combats are bigger & more involved, and can't be ended by a Nova. Nod.  There's a lot of customization in 3e, as there was in 4e, and that should let players take a character concept they want to play, and tailor it to play well with their style.  But, some folks just don't realize what they're good at... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> It was a little on-the-nose, with it, really.  I mean, you could try to 'abuse' 4e the way you might have 3e or 1e, and set up a 'Nova' with the intent of winning a combat in round 1.  But monsters were tough, had big bad tricks of their own, and might get meaner when bloodied, so it often backfired:  you'd burn down a standard monster or bloody a solo, and then the monster hits you with its best stuff, you're hosed, and it's whittling eachother down with at-wills for the rest of the combat (of course, depending on the monsters and the tactics, it could also work).  If you were more circumspect the first round, saw how the monster worked, and deployed a good set of tactics against it, you'd get beaten pretty hard, at first, need a Second Wind or help from a Leader, but pull out the victory in the end.  The 'tactics' side of 4e were compartively deep, but only compared to D&D, which has tended for a long time, to be dominated by a more 'right spell for the job' rock/paper/scissors/lizard/Spock kind of dynamic.  You pull out fire for the troll, you don't hit the shambling mound with lightning, you cast move earth on the clay golem, take a mace to the skeletons, etc, etc, etc......it builds up 'player skill' and creates an impression of a world where these things are facts of life.  You half expect there to be idioms like "you look like a troll in a burning house' or 'who put the potion of super-heroism in your gruel?'  Monsters that stunned you for any length of time were quite rare at heroic (daze or slow or imobilize, OTOH, all over the place), but sure, it's bad to sit out part of a fight because you keep failing your save every round. It's probably about the worst way you could handle such things in D&D - except for all the others.  It's not as bad as missing one saving throw, up-front, and sitting out the whole fight (or dropping dead instantly), for instance, or, for that matter, just having no option that can make an impact the whole time.</blockquote>

Verification