D&D 5E New L&L for 22/1/13 D&D Next goals, part 3

[TwoSix]

Where's the videogame? What I see there first and foremost is immediacy - in the situation that the GM is describing things are happening to my PC now. There's no time to faff around with encumbrance, or planning spell books - I have to act, and because the NPCs are interesting, and because a passageway to Hell has just opened, and because I'm the biggest ass-whupper around, when I act it will matter. Stuff will happen.

At least for me, the emotional experience of playing a spell-stocktake game is something like the emotional experience of doing a crossword, or winning at Connect-4. It's puzzle-solving. I think TwoSix is looking for a more visceral experience, one that is closer, in play, to reading REH's Conan (minus the virulent racism, I guess) or to watching John Boorman's Excalibur. It's about players and GM collaborating to create a drama rather than a spreadsheet.

Immediacy and visceral are both excellent ways to describe what I'm looking for. Thank you.

It's not that I don't enjoy some of the intellectual aspects of play, I just prefer them to be more solo endeavors, and thus prefer to move them off-table. Which is why I still prefer crunch-heavy games like 4e (and even Pathfinder!). I can get all the intellectual challenge I need from the character building aspect of the game.

 

[Gorgoroth]

Why wouldn't a wizard use 5 minutes of flight to (say) fly up a cliff to explore a cave?

In my game the PCs have never had 16th level fly, but 10th level daily Arcane Gate has seen both combat and non-combat use.

Also, you seem to be ignoring the ritual rules: when you want to travel long distances you don't use fly spells, you use Phantom Steeds!

We did see a couple rituals used here and there, but the strict delineation of casting time between the two, non-overlapping magesteria is what causes the disconnect. You can't fly using overland flight and fire a single arrow, because overland flight rules force you to land or crash if you use any other action than your move. I know the 4e flight rules (aka kludge) well, because I built a dragonborn character around the idea of flying, and it sucked. I would never be able to do a fly-by and fire off my dragonbreath at a couple kobolds.

And...5 minutes is nowhere near long enough to explore even a couple rooms. Exploration pillar = explicitly separate from Combat pillar. The overland flight vs fly utility power are explicitly mutually exclusive by design, to enforce a strict play style. I.e don't waste your 5 minute duration power on exploration, use a ritual. You just said it. What if I fly up alone the side of a cave and a bat flies out? I have to land and start combat, even with my steed on, because I can't defend myself using overland flight. It is asinine.

And bringing up the rituals as a defense for why utility powers are always limited to encounter duration or 5 minutes max in no way compensates for how the ritual rules were unbalanced (worse than other editions in some cases) and underutilized. Heck, they removed them entirely from Essentials, which should tell you something right there. I detest the strict casting time of rituals to be 10 minutes or so...it ruins the spontaneous use of many types of things, and makes me feel like my options for dynamic storytelling are limited. Way more limited than other editions.

Not to kick a dead horse...but rituals were pretty much universally panned and even the game designers admit they were poorly implemented and almost a tacked on afterthought. The casting times and inapplicability inside combat made them annoying to even think of purchasing. We get it, there's no teleportation back to a safe spot from the middle of a combat. There's no flying and fighting. There's no shooting an arrow from a phantom flying horse or even from my dragonborn who took a PP to grow wings. WTF!!. etc etc. Those are serious flaws that put unnessesary restrictions on what you can do in-game mechanically that other editions didn't have, and negatively impacted my fun.

In Keep on the Shadowfell, one thing we only realized later on after playing a few months, is that the ritual to summon Orcus would have taken so long, his henchman should have entirely stopped casting it the second we showed up. It just beggars belief that no matter how long we took upstairs, he would *always* have been, no matter what...*this close* to finishing up his minimum 10 minute ritual (probably several hours long). 10 minutes is a lot of rounds, the odds of landing in his room right near the end of his casting, given the duration.....ugh. This is an official module. I mean...broken much? It makes no sense that he would continue his ritual and try to finish it given that combat started. Would a player? Never. You're essentially saying a wizard PC would stand still in the midst of combat and do nothing, rather than pause the ritual, fight, then resume once the threat is dealt with.

 

[I'm A Banana]

It is asinine.

If ye can't engage the conversation without getting insulting, it might be best to step back from it. Rule #1: Don't Be A Jerk.

 

[Obryn]

In Keep on the Shadowfell, one thing we only realized later on after playing a few months, is that the ritual to summon Orcus would have taken so long, his henchman should have entirely stopped casting it the second we showed up. It just beggars belief that no matter how long we took upstairs, he would *always* have been, no matter what...*this close* to finishing up his minimum 10 minute ritual (probably several hours long). 10 minutes is a lot of rounds, the odds of landing in his room right near the end of his casting, given the duration.....ugh. This is an official module. I mean...broken much? It makes no sense that he would continue his ritual and try to finish it given that combat started. Would a player? Never. You're essentially saying a wizard PC would stand still in the midst of combat and do nothing, rather than pause the ritual, fight, then resume once the threat is dealt with.

It's using action movie or dramatic timing. It's something I've been using for a long time - following the rule of storytelling rather than strict determinism, and pushing for interesting outcomes.

It makes for a better story if the heroes arrive in the nick of time; it's generally how movies ramp up the tension and give the threat immediacy - the whole "stop the bomb at 0:01 on the obvious red timer" shtick. This has nothing whatsoever to do with editions or even specific RPGs, and it's hardly the first published adventure to use it.

-O

 

[pemerton]

It's using action movie or dramatic timing. It's something I've been using for a long time - following the rule of storytelling rather than strict determinism, and pushing for interesting outcomes.

Yes. I remember a year or two ago posting about the principle of "no failure off-screen". It's the same rationale.

 

[pemerton]

What if I fly up alone the side of a cave and a bat flies out? I have to land and start combat, even with my steed on, because I can't defend myself using overland flight.

That's what your athletics skill is for. Or maybe you should fly the fighter up instead.

There's no flying and fighting. There's no shooting an arrow from a phantom flying horse

Phantom Steeds are not limited to overland fight. (They are vulnerable to being shot down, though. From my point of view that's a feature rather than a bug.)

 

[Garthanos]

Phantom steeds and rituals = good stuff.

Some of the problems rituals do have is that at high levels the low level ones are really really cheap. (its effectively the Quadratic Wizard poking his noes in)

 

[Gorgoroth]

Phantom steeds and rituals = good stuff.

Some of the problems rituals do have is that at high levels the low level ones are really really cheap. (its effectively the Quadratic Wizard poking his noes in)

So, on the one hand, you hate quadratic wizards in earlier iterations.

On the other hand, rituals, which you do admit allow virtually any class in 4e to become quadratic-wizard-like, is "good stuff" ? Worse still, since the rituals are virtually free as you just wrote, the problem is actually worse in 4e than in AD&D.

/scratches head...apparently something that's bad if done in non-4e is worth disparaging to no end, but when the exact same thing is done, but with a different name, in 4e...that's great. There's a word for that. A very precise one in the english language.

Mod Edit: Comment on moderation removed. If you've got a question about a moderator action, rather than derail the thread with it, please take it up in e-mail or PM with the moderator. Thanks. ~Umbran

 

[Libramarian]

I find this example very instructive of the differences in play style, and what people are looking for when they play D&D. Why? Because this example of play: I hate it.

If this sort of stuff went down at a table I was playing at more than once, I'd leave. I hate the strategic, spell loadout, "let's look up the weight limits of our stuff!", everyone is referencing books to find new spells to use, style of play. And this isn't some internet abstraction. I've been in groups where this has happened. In one game, the group spent 3 hours trying to figure out a way to get a pile of treasure they discovered while time traveling back to the present. I almost left then, but I managed to calm down, stayed for one more session (where something similar happened, if not quite as time-intensive), and then politely left the campaign.

I know to many people, that's what D&D is all about. (To borrow Armchair Gamer's D&D flavors, that's a Simulation and Spellcasters game.) Since I'm much more in the Paladins and Princesses mindset, to me, it's the antithesis of what D&D should be about.
I want to use my powers.
I want to interact with interesting NPCs.
I want to fight. Not fight as a last resort, but fight because there are bad guys that need whupping, and I'm the biggest ass-whupper around.
I don't want to be cautious; I want to assume my character can handle almost anything I throw at him short of pure suicide.
I don't want to assume my character is going to die. Not unless I think it's better for the story that he does.
I want to travel the planes, not because I got the right spell, but because the party managed to complete the ritual at the altar of the fallen temple that opened a passageway to Hell.

A well run 4e (where the DM and players know that your powers are not the end-all and be-all of your abilities) is the best expression of what I feel D&D should be.

Nice stark description of different priorities. To me, I would be wary of the type of game you describe unless I knew the DM was really, really good. It's funny to me whenever people say that old style D&D requires an exceptional DM to pull off. For me I'm much more choosy over the DM in a story-based game than a challenge-based game. I don't really like the idea of being the hero all the time. I'm not 100% over to the other side (eg Dungeon Crawl Classics' marketing: "You're no hero. You're a reaver, a slayer...") but I like the idea of just kind of wandering around trying to make it, like a 1930s S&S character. Or a 1930s hobo.

 

[Hussar]

As an old B/X, BECMI player who missed out on 3e and thus has no lingering war wounds about it, I have often found myself of late arguing against my fellow fans of 4e, pointing out where I think 4e is deficient and could be improved, and extolling the virtues of older editions as legitimate virtues, not accidental by-products of immature or haphazard design.

/snip for brevity of great stuff

What got me into 4e in the first place was AICN's Massawyrm's review, wherein he wrote about a player diving under a table a goblin was standing on, and kicking it out from under him. Massawyrm thought about it for a moment and then said, "Athletics check vs Reflex". A simple, elegant ruling making use of a solid rule structure that encouraged and rewarded creativity. And nothing that was the result of a special, highly-skilled DM. That's 4e. I said, I have to get me some of that. If you didn't get that from 4e, you were playing it wrong. And not "wrong" in a "not optimized" meaning, or "not using Forge concepts and reskinning to turn abstract mechanics into a fully realized genre", but wrong as in not using the basic tools the game gave you. As wrong as someone playing Basic D&D, charging into 15 goblins, saying "I attack," "I attack" over and over again, and then when they are killed in short order, saying, "This game is stupid. It's not role-playing. You can't do anything and you're character gets killed too easy."

I just wanted to say that THIS is precisely what I wanted to say a few pages back, but, got tripped up by my own snark. Apologies for the snark and raising the tension level of the thread and thanks to Iosue for stating my point much, much better than I could.