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

[howandwhy99]

Flatter statistical progressions and bounded accuracy actually lay a good bit of the ground-work for old schoolers to run games in D&D next with 1e/2e multiclassing again. As a reminder, in those edition characters were only balanced against each other by placing them within those same boundaries as well as requiring all to start at the beginning. 1st level characters were built to adventure with 10th level ones. The idea that 1st and 10th level characters were equal in ability was like saying an 18 strength had the same exact ability as a 3 strength.

What was rigorously balanced for was the balance of the game world to the PCs. They began in a 1st level area / dungeon, but they could progress down (or up in civilized areas) deep into hostile territory. That meant greater threats, but also the opportunity for greater rewards. Better treasures, higher XP awards.

The challenges for D&D Next with old editions are many and largely unaddressed. I mean, I like the attempt to bring back the feel and art and adventure design. It's popular again. What we need to watch out for is the trap of thinking different ways of being than our own are simplistic because they don't delve as deeply into the parts of life we are currently alive in. Early classes were designed to survive and grow into the parts of the world they were designed for. That may appear like they then have static abilities rather than a diversity of options, but the options weren't the game or the choosing of them the point of play. It was enabling the player to explore the levels of the world more capably because their character's level appropriate abilities enabled them to do so.

All that means is multi-classing and character abilities in early editions really has more to do with the campaign setting adventure creation rules (not guidelines) that have largely yet to be included in the playtest. Whether they are in a future module or not their balanced combination is one of the keys to designing a game for old school play. And old school multi-classing supports that design. Knowing how they support it is important or we run the risk of thinking early multi-classing is a simple option rather easily achieved for player vs. player balance.

 

[Gorgoroth]

Howandwhy...I played extensive 2e, with innumerable classes and a revolving door of players and campaign arcs over the years, and the best thing about 2e was the ability for a 10th level party to lose one PC, have him re-roll a level 1 character, and catch up to 5th level within a session or two (if he didn't die outright), due to the exponential XP allocation. That makes it a game of catch up, and with a non-linear XP chart, you CAN catch up to a large extent in power with the higher level guys, who will really start upping slower (or if the XP awarded also goes up proportionately, it just means that by the time a wizard is at 14th level a goofy / reckless fighter or rogue-focused player could have died 3-4x and be almost caught up).

I really liked the disparity of XP progression. That's the most detestable thing they introduced in 4e. The idea that all professions are equally difficult to master. Not so in the real world, not so in fantasy. If you think so, you haven't lived enough to outgrow a career and move on to a greater one with vaster horizons. Wizardry should be utterly more difficult, and the way to achieve parity in levels should be to work that much harder than the fighter, in your spellcasting, to overcome obstacles in creative ways given various constraints such as you shouldn't cast fireball in a crowded town or be labelled an arsonist and enemy of the state, or even in the woods and brandished as an enemy of the woods when you start a massive forest fire and the druids put a price on your head. There is a cost to using all your spells, which was lost in 4e...because the effect of a spell is mutable and fluff, without out of combat mechanical repercussions. A fireball in 4e does not set the granary on fire. It's basically wimpier than a match === fail.

What I'm trying to get at in XP awards is this : Reducing enemy HP for a wizard = 0 XP past, say, level 5. It is simply not a challenge to overcome that is worthy of increasing your aptitude. What I'd like to see is each class is awarded xp according to its own standards. A fighter might benefit for every orc he kills, and much more so for every dragon he kills, but a wizard pew-pewing fireballs at inconsequential enemies receives 0 xp. He must use his spells creatively to gain knowledge from their application, and new insights allowing him to grow intellectually. Bottom line is : if you play your wizard like a 12-year old, a DM should not award you enough XP to progress in levels beyond, say, 7th, to keep up with the rest of the group. You should have to play a wizard intellectually as a player to advance. XP should not be awarded to how many mooks you blasted with your nukes. This is NOT an MMO. And I write this as a former MMO developer with 17 videogames to his credit!!! (not to brag, hem hem). I see great things and terrible things in 2e, 3e, and 4e...and want the best parts elaborated on further. I simply cannot fathom why anyone thought it was "balanced" to have the same XP required to a fighter who can slaughter 8000 orcs without dying with one who can literally stop time. Does not compute. Make the wizard player, not the PC, earn his XP and levels. If you're not smart enough (in real life!!!) to overcome obstacles in creative ways, you do not deserve level 20 as a wizard, period. Brainiacs should gravitate to playing wizards and people who like smashing stuff or talking their way out should focus on those things, and act them out....trust me, a 10th level fighter PC is doing to deliberate whether to jump on that dragon's back, heroic or no there is a likelihood of success calculation that goes into people's heads (as PCs or in the character's minds), given their experience in-game or their knowledge of stats OOG.

I say all this stuff, in another semi-drunk post...shoot me. I want DDN to be bloody, brutal, and unforgiving. If reality is harsh, D&D should be harsher. Can't deal with D&D death? Try living life instead, kids. Let's model our games more intricately and with more implications than a 2-dimensional set of MMO rules or a board game. The PCs are not meant to win. This is the credo of D&D. Or should be. They should be fodder. You survive, play smart, maybe you'll live...but you'll still probably die an agonizing, brutal death. That's what D&D means to me, from a young child, looking at those numbers for the XP charts of a wizard....I was like...wtf, this is crazy. you have to survive with so low HP AND get so much XP to get high enough to do really crazy things...for so long. The odds are really against you. Take the challenge : "never tell me the odds". Be brave, bold. To live life, taste death. Repeatedly. Not every 1st level PC should expect to live to 5th level, like 4e assumes. I'm sorry, but 4e killed D&D so bad. It assumes as a default that players will cry when their PCs die. No, you should fear that dungeon. You should buy that guard dog and 10-foot pole. Life is tough, dangerous, and brutal. Expect to die. Often.

Mod Edit: Folks, let's not go about questioning the intelligence of others, or suggesting that there's some moral value of "deserving" based upon that. Being smart doesn't make you a better, more deserving person - some very bright people can be real jerks. ~Umbran

 

[GX.Sigma]

I really liked the disparity of XP progression. That's the most detestable thing they introduced in 4e. The idea that all professions are equally difficult to master.

Didn't they introduce that in 3e, to make the multiclassing system work?

 

[Blackwarder]

Didn't they introduce that in 3e, to make the multiclassing system work?

Yes they did, I also hated it.

Warder

 

[pemerton]

A fireball in 4e does not set the granary on fire.

I don't know why you say that. It has the [fire] keyword, and as per the DMG discussion of damaging objects, a granary is the sort of thing that might take extra damage from fire.

It's possible you've been misled by the target line (Target: creatures in burst) but in this respect 4e follows the economy of OD&D and Moldvay Basic, both of which also describe the damage of Fireball as applying to creatures, and don't elaborate beyond that. 4e is like classic D&D in that respect - it relies on the participants at the table to join some of these dots between explicitly called out effect, keywords, and other consequences within the fiction. I didn't need the Moldvay Basic rulebook to point out that a Fireball might set flammable material alight, but worked that out for myself. Same thing in 4e, and the DMG rules reinforce and elaborate on that.

 

[jadrax]

It's possible you've been misled by the target line (Target: creatures in burst) but in this respect 4e follows the economy of OD&D and Moldvay Basic, both of which also describe the damage of Fireball as applying to creatures, and don't elaborate beyond that.

OD&D doesn't do that, none of the spells refer to creatures - just areas effected. The stupid creature stuff turned up in basic iirc.

 

[Prickly]

Howandwhy...I played extensive 2e, with innumerable classes and a revolving door of players and campaign arcs over the years, and the best thing about 2e was the ability for a 10th level party to lose one PC, have him re-roll a level 1 character, and catch up to 5th level within a session or two (if he didn't die outright), due to the exponential XP allocation. That makes it a game of catch up, and with a non-linear XP chart, you CAN catch up to a large extent in power with the higher level guys, who will really start upping slower (or if the XP awarded also goes up proportionately, it just means that by the time a wizard is at 14th level a goofy / reckless fighter or rogue-focused player could have died 3-4x and be almost caught up).

I really liked the disparity of XP progression. That's the most detestable thing they introduced in 4e. The idea that all professions are equally difficult to master. Not so in the real world, not so in fantasy. If you think so, you haven't lived enough to outgrow a career and move on to a greater one with vaster horizons. Wizardry should be utterly more difficult, and the way to achieve parity in levels should be to work that much harder than the fighter, in your spellcasting, to overcome obstacles in creative ways given various constraints such as you shouldn't cast fireball in a crowded town or be labelled an arsonist and enemy of the state, or even in the woods and brandished as an enemy of the woods when you start a massive forest fire and the druids put a price on your head. There is a cost to using all your spells, which was lost in 4e...because the effect of a spell is mutable and fluff, without out of combat mechanical repercussions. A fireball in 4e does not set the granary on fire. It's basically wimpier than a match === fail.

What I'm trying to get at in XP awards is this : Reducing enemy HP for a wizard = 0 XP past, say, level 5. It is simply not a challenge to overcome that is worthy of increasing your aptitude. What I'd like to see is each class is awarded xp according to its own standards. A fighter might benefit for every orc he kills, and much more so for every dragon he kills, but a wizard pew-pewing fireballs at inconsequential enemies receives 0 xp. He must use his spells creatively to gain knowledge from their application, and new insights allowing him to grow intellectually. Bottom line is : if you play your wizard like a 12-year old, a DM should not award you enough XP to progress in levels beyond, say, 7th, to keep up with the rest of the group. You should have to play a wizard intellectually as a player to advance. XP should not be awarded to how many mooks you blasted with your nukes. This is NOT an MMO. And I write this as a former MMO developer with 17 videogames to his credit!!! (not to brag, hem hem). I see great things and terrible things in 2e, 3e, and 4e...and want the best parts elaborated on further. I simply cannot fathom why anyone thought it was "balanced" to have the same XP required to a fighter who can slaughter 8000 orcs without dying with one who can literally stop time. Does not compute. Make the wizard player, not the PC, earn his XP and levels. If you're not smart enough (in real life!!!) to overcome obstacles in creative ways, you do not deserve level 20 as a wizard, period. Brainiacs should gravitate to playing wizards and people who like smashing stuff or talking their way out should focus on those things, and act them out....trust me, a 10th level fighter PC is doing to deliberate whether to jump on that dragon's back, heroic or no there is a likelihood of success calculation that goes into people's heads (as PCs or in the character's minds), given their experience in-game or their knowledge of stats OOG.

I say all this stuff, in another semi-drunk post...shoot me. I want DDN to be bloody, brutal, and unforgiving. If reality is harsh, D&D should be harsher. Can't deal with D&D death? Try living life instead, kids. Let's model our games more intricately and with more implications than a 2-dimensional set of MMO rules or a board game. The PCs are not meant to win. This is the credo of D&D. Or should be. They should be fodder. You survive, play smart, maybe you'll live...but you'll still probably die an agonizing, brutal death. That's what D&D means to me, from a young child, looking at those numbers for the XP charts of a wizard....I was like...wtf, this is crazy. you have to survive with so low HP AND get so much XP to get high enough to do really crazy things...for so long. The odds are really against you. Take the challenge : "never tell me the odds". Be brave, bold. To live life, taste death. Repeatedly. Not every 1st level PC should expect to live to 5th level, like 4e assumes. I'm sorry, but 4e killed D&D so bad. It assumes as a default that players will cry when their PCs die. No, you should fear that dungeon. You should buy that guard dog and 10-foot pole. Life is tough, dangerous, and brutal. Expect to die. Often.

I dont use XP, so the supposed balance that different XP progression gives to classes doesn't work for me.

It always appeared to be an element of bad design anyway. The thief is much weaker than all the other classes so it levels up faster. Yeah, that really solves the problem then.

Also, I think a group of friends playing a game in their leisure time should get to play DnD they want to play.
none of this "Sorry Dave you're to stupid to play the wizard. You must play the fighter and protect Carl. He deserves to be the wizard and you can watch him do all the cool stuff while you get hit with arrows."

And lastly Dude, you have your own style of DnD and thats cool. But other people play DnD in different ways and I'm tired of people knocking it with disparaging comments like "2-dimensional set of MMO rules or a board game" and expecting eveyone to play dnd like its Warhammer Fantasy 1st Ed.

 

[Li Shenron]

Howandwhy...I played extensive 2e, with innumerable classes and a revolving door of players and campaign arcs over the years, and the best thing about 2e was the ability for a 10th level party to lose one PC, have him re-roll a level 1 character, and catch up to 5th level within a session or two (if he didn't die outright), due to the exponential XP allocation.

I am not sure I would like it to be that fast, but in general I would certainly like the game to support something like that, even if there is some limit on the level spread.

I really liked the disparity of XP progression. That's the most detestable thing they introduced in 4e. The idea that all professions are equally difficult to master. Not so in the real world, not so in fantasy.

This part I really don't endorse... Different XP progressions make no sense, because you could always put more (or less) into each level.

In other words, if you want the Fighter and the Wizard to play the same campaign together, you're going to have them more or less advance together, i.e. they should be "compatible" in terms of overall substantial power all the time.

If they are not, it means you cannot have these 2 characters play the same adventures from the start to the end of a campaign. It means some player will have to stop playing his Fighter and play something else until the Wizard catches up, otherwise playing the Wizard will be unsatisfactory if the lag behind is large.

This could make sense in the fantasy world, but not so much at the gaming table. In the gaming world you can have a Wizard take 10 years to learn the first few spells that make her ready for her first dungeon while a Fighter is ready in 1 month of training. But unfortunately after that, you are going to have them advance at the same rate if you want to continue the game with both of them! You can't say that the Wizard needs 10 more adventures for next power boost while the Fighter needs 1, unless the player of the Fighter is comfortable about putting aside his PC when he's too good compared to the Wizard, playing another PC and resume the Fighter later.

This applies when talking about general "power". "Levels" can be a different thing. You can have like BECMI different level progressions, but the general idea to make them work is that if after 10 adventures the Fighter has reached level 10 and the Wizard is still level 3, this must mean that a lv3 Wizard is in fact roughly as powerful as a lv10 Fighter, so that they can continue adventuring together without one of them feeling lagging behind. "3" and "10" are just labels, what matters is the real effectiveness of the characters.

That said, there is then no major reason to stick to those labels. It doesn't matter that much if THAT degree of wizard power is called 3rd level or 10th level. And if it doesn't matter, why not just having the same labels for all classes?

What I'd like to see is each class is awarded xp according to its own standards.

This is an interesting idea. I would definitely be in favor of a system that emphasizes this, probably this is material for an optional module, mostly because when you award xp individually, the DM is charged with the extra responsibility of providing the same opportunities to everyone, which means she needs to adapt the adventures to the current PCs somewhat. It is probably too harsh to require this from all DMs.

 

[howandwhy99]

[MENTION=6674889]Gorgoroth[/MENTION], exponential XP requirements and disparity amongst class XP totals are ideas I've been expressing for a few years now. I don't find it necessary to hate 4e as it wasn't designed with such game play in mind. If you want to dig into where those ideas originated for D&D take a look at the original Dungeon! boardgame. They have variable class XP ratings for characters by class and yet balanced play for all players because of the variable dungeons levels on the board. EDIT~ balanced between players starting characters as it's a competitive game.

Also, my thinking is Druids don't really put prices on heads - but maybe they do in their own way. I don't think animal intelligences operate on a trade principle, but there are other ways to convince them to aid you, especially if you're a druid and that does seem like trading action for something like affection.

Lastly, you're coming off over the top in your post. I think early D&D tried to make character death a real possibility any player needed to actively heed or die and roll up a new one. However, the odds on how often that could happen if you were being cautious sort of match up with the Resurrection chances. Yes, you could roll a low CON score and, yes, you could lose a character to multiple character deaths, but overall most characters could make it to at least middle level with a modicum of intelligence. Making it to high level meant either upping one's game, showing how good a gamer they already were, or just boringly repeating grind battles long enough versus significantly weaker and XP poor opponents. Logarithmic XP and aging penalties also worked against this small ball stuff, but it was a strategy within the rules. In the end, it's the journey that's tells the story of player's proficiency though, not how often their characters overcame brutality.

 

[Gorgoroth]

To this thread, I must apologize for the brusqueness of my post, however in my defense (not to sidetrack), I was a little out of sorts. I programmed MMOs for years and I have, I believe, a different perspective on their functioning than most on the other side of the table (i.e. there's a difference between seeing the wizard behind the curtain, pulling your strings, and being that wizard). And as for wizards earning more XP, I will stick by the substance of my opinion, even while distancing myself for the abrasiveness of its tone, to simply that that a smart person should be able to earn more XP playing a character class that thrives on creativity and intellect (that's not to say a warlord might not be the best tactician in the land and a genius as well), I'm just saying, that over the years you tend to see patterns. And even though I love smashing stuff metaphorically by playing melee characters (especially barbarians), because my work is so logical and calm and cerebral, that I need a change. There is, however, no reason to pretend like smart people don't have both advantages and disadvantages, and I certainly never meant to insinuate that this board isn't populated by lots of very smart people, with differing opinions...I just find it funny to get reprimanded for the outlandish proposal that real life intellectual prowess often yields superior results while playing certain D&D classes over others. I prefer playing dumb fighters because it gives me a rest...and I would never take it personally if some guy on a message board somewhere insinuated or even outright said that my PC's stats in some way reflected my own.

For anyone who might think I implied playing stupid fighters == stupid player, I take that back. But please, let's all grow some thicker skin here...after all, why would anyone care what I or anyone else thought about your general gaming preferences? I just don't have time to write caveats for every little thing I write to avoid offending someone, that would be incredibly annoying and time consuming. My only point was that it's easier for a smart person to roleplay dumb than the other way around, since a less bright player being the brains in the party (in-game) doesn't need to just roleplay smart, he needs to make smarter decisions.

I just want a version of D&D that does not merely treat Int as a pew-pew DR-overcoming stat for wizards, and make you realize, you actually need a decent IQ to begin with, to pull off playing a genius-level character. In 4e, a genius-level intelligence makes far less a difference in the outcome of the game, simply because there are only so many permutations of slowing/pushing/pulling things around a chessboard you can achieve. The mind is far more powerful than that. I found personally hamstrung into thinking square, mechanical thoughts, where the rules themselves got in the way of what I wanted to do so often that I just gave up and played meleer's exclusively. In Pathfinder or AD&D or 3.5, the cool stuff you can do to affect the world around you with magic, is simply mind-boggling. What I meant about the "MMO" mindset is a template-based, cookie-cutter flow chart of predetermined, pre-approved outcomes to every decision point, every possible use of your powers (which usually implies just damage or you move this or that around the board). I'm just saying, I liked 4e but the strategy was rigid, like chess, and stifling after a while. I hope D&D goes back to its roots, and makes things deadly, rewards people for creative use of spells, and doesn't try to put in rules like that mundane items are worth 0gp in the shop. It just felt very stuffy and fake. I didn't like that a wizard can fly for maximum 5 minutes per day, at level 16. Eeek. Nerf city. That's one way to keep magic users' feet on the ground compared to melee classes, by literally keeping their feet on the ground.