New Legends & Lore

[S'mon]

I'm in the excluded middle - I like simple PC creation, I don't need to be different from other Fighters, but I do like to have the ability to 'nova', which 4e gives non-spellcasters for the first time. I'm not too fussed if other PCs have the same nova ability I do; but I do like having Encounter powers & Action Points as well as at-wills.

 

[Tortoise]

seems to exclude a middle ground

Having worked in market research, it is frequently an attempt by those requesting the polling (not necessarily those conducting the poll) to introduce a certain bias into the results. Mearls may not be guilty of such a thing so take it for what it is worth. He could be passing along a poll from higher up, or if he created the poll, the middle ground didn't occur to him.

Polls missing options (middle ground), or slanted toward an outcome always irk me no matter what they are about.

 

[LostSoul]

If I was ever to turn my 4E hack into its own game, I would do something like this:

FIGHTER
You are skilled in the martial arts.

Veteran: You are a veteran of at least a few battles. Over this time, you've developed your own fighting style. Choose your fighting style from the list below.
Fighting Styles
* Feints and Tricks: You draw out your opponent by feinting, stutter-stepping, head-faking, etc.
* In-Your-Face: You like to get right into your opponent's face, stabbing with knives or small weapons, grappling, and biting.
* Two-Handed: You make powerful, sweeping blows that smash your opponent.
* etc.

Weapon Specialization: Each fighter specializes in a particular weapon. Choose the weapon you specialize in from the weapon list. When you use this weapon in accordance with your fighting style, you deal an extra [WS] points of damage.
Weapon List
* Axe, great
* Bow
* Longsword
* Mace
* Shield bash
* Short sword
* etc.

Background: Where did you come from? Who raised you? What did you do before you took up arms, if anything? Choose a background from the list below.
Background List
* Barbarian: You come from a barbarian tribe. You know how to survive in those harsh climes. What customs and taboos do you have that others think are strange?
* Mercenary: You grew up in a mercenary company. You know about the drudgery of soldiering - marching, digging latrines, scavenging for food, smoking out fleas, sleeping in the rain, etc. Why did you leave?
* Savage: You were raised by wolves or some other fantastical monster. What did they teach you? Why did you leave? How do they feel about civilization?
* Street Urchin: You grew up in the back alleys of a large city. What were you forced to learn in order to survive?
* etc.

Action Resolution
When you take an action that requires a roll, use the following procedure to determine the modifiers to that roll.
* Choose the applicable stat modifier based on your action*
* Add one of:
- +[FS] if your fighting style is obviously related to your action
- +[BK] if your background is obviously related to your action
* Add one of:
- +[fs] if your fighting style is vaguely related to your action (if you haven't already added +[FS])
- +[bk] if your background is vaguely related to your action (if you haven't already added +[BK])

* - I'd probably drop stats for a physical description and a personality description.

 

[Tortoise]

I took a look at the poll and I agree with some others that Wizards seems to fishing for a way to make something that will fit what a majority want. Most likely they're getting geared up to work on a new edition.

 

[Alaxk Knight of Galt]

The chart Mearls provides is horribly flawed for level of complication.

Fill in / Calculate are not steps in character creation. They are steps in game management. Suggesting that filling in saving throws or calculating Thac0/BAB add to the total steps in character creation is silly.

So, lets strip out those and present the chart again, looking at unique choices.

1st Edition - 1 Unique Choice
• Weapon Proficiencies: 4

2nd Edition - 3 Unique Choices
• Weapon Proficiencies: 4
• Weapon Specialization*: pick 1 at the cost of 2
• Non-Weapon Proficiencies: 3

3rd Edition - 2 Unique Choices
• Feats: 2
• Skill Ranks: 8

4th Edition - 8 Unique Choices
• Feat: 1
• At-Will Powers: 2
• Encounter Power: 1
• Daily Power: 1
• Background: 1
• Skills: 3
• Fighter Talent**: 1
• Theme: 1

*Calling weapon specialization a choice is a bit of a stretch. For my buck, it's part of the weapon proficiency selection.
**I don't know why the fighter's talents are not mentioned. This selection is very important to the style of fighter you play


Just for fun, I'll list the current number of options for each 4th Edition choice (as suggested by the compendium)

• Number of Feats (Fighter or Martial Heroic only) - 187
• Number of At-Will Powers - 17
• Number of 1st Level Encounter Powers - 18
• Number of 1st Level Daily Powers - 17
• Number of Backgrounds - ??
• Number of Skills - 5 (or 6 depending on the background) to pick from
• Number of Build Options - 6 (Arena, Battlerage Vigor, Brawler, One-Handed, Tempest, Two-Handed)

That is 250 items to select from (without picking any backgrounds or darksun themes).

3rd Edition had it's problems as well. Feat selection rapidly gets out of hand when the DM says "all WotC products allowed." Picking two feats might require examining 200+ feats.

On top of that, those choices grew only more complex. Choosing weapon proficiencies is fairly simple. You can look at the weapon table, find a few armaments you like, and write those down on your character sheet. A feat, on the other hand, requires you to read through a dozen or so choices, consider their effects, and note the modifiers or ability that each chosen feat adds to your character. A feat is active—or at least requires an active calculation or modification to a character; as you gain more of them, they build on each other. In contrast, choosing a weapon proficiency focuses your options, and occupies roughly the same mental space and time as buying gear. You could just as easily instruct a player to buy no more than four weapons

Absolutely!

In 1st Edition, the system asks the Fighter what weapons do you fight with.

In 4th Edition, the system asks the Fighter what weapons do you fight with and how do you fight.

The "how" is very complicated. How much do we gain from knowing how the fighter fights anyway?

 

[Mercurius]

On the flip side, one nice thing about the 4ed 1st level PC is that it, in theory, provides more incentive for players to actually think about their character's backgrounds from the outset. A lot of the players I have played with in the past never really bothered with background until at least a couple levels had passed. Too many PCs wound up in the graveyard right off the bat for them to get too invested in their characters too early.

Good point. Again, I think a middle ground is possible between 1E weaklings and 4E seasoned adventurers. I think it should be very, very rare that a 1st level character is killed in one blow, but that it could happen. The same goes for monsters - why do all orcs have 40+ HP? Maybe I'm exaggerating but it seems that even low-level monsters are too hard to kill. I'm not crazy about the minion idea because it just seems a bit silly, not to mention immersion-threatening, when you kill a death knight minion with one blow. I'd rather have a death knight be surrounded by a bunch of weakling skeleton warriors, some of whom might have higher attack bonuses.

With regard to the aspect/talent thing: I think we already have the essential mechanic for this, it just needs to be redesigned a bit. Backgrounds seem to fit the bill pretty well. Just change them so instead of stacking on other mechanics (+2 to this skill, that skill is a class skill, resist random damage type), they're defined on their own terms. Something like:

Noble Birth: You start the game with two suits of fine clothing, your choice of warhorse or riding horse, a donkeyhorse, and a non-combatant maid or manservant. If the DM allows it, you may have a connection to a noble house; you cannot use this as a source of money (your family either cannot afford it or is unwilling to indulge your habit of going out adventuring), but you can request aid and shelter from your family when in their territory.

This is obviously just a rough sketch. Admittedly, handing out free equipment is a kind of stacking mechanic, but I don't think a free horse and spiffy clothes are too big a deal.

I like that a lot. I would probably add some kind of mechanical benefit, like a bonus to certain skills (diplomacy), and maybe some kind of valuable heirloom item. It could also be a kind of "legacy" background that improves over time.

This sort of thing would be easy to make up and could be central to the character building collaboration between the DM and player. The player comes up with a concept based upon the campaign world, and the DM puts it into game terms. Or a player could just choose from a pre-determined list.

Although, I would suggest they would do well by first setting a baseline, probably using a standard human guardsman, then set the 1st level Fighter to be "a cut above" that. And then balance the 1st level Wizard against that. Trying to establish the fantastical class first sounds like it could cause problems.

Good point. A standard human guardsman might be an equal match for a standard orc warrior, so a 1st level PC would be slightly above that. A standard human guardsman might go down with one blow from an orc, while a PC would either take a crit to fell or two solid hits.

I do feel that between over-optimisation and (especially) stat inflation, the game has ended up compressing the low end of the scale to a point where PCs really get too much too soon. IMO, the game should either recalibrate the DC values to be a bit higher, or (perhaps better) undo some of the inflation that has occurred.

I've never liked the fact that a high level PC could slaughter hundreds of 1st level PCs in a straight up fight. I'm not so sure this is the case anymore with 4E which, I think, softened the curve a bit from 3.5.

On the other hand, if we want to make D&D more realistic than advancement should be quicker and first and then slower later on, in the same sense that if you are mastering any craft or art then you advance quickly and make slower and slower increments. To put it another way, there is more of a difference between a 1st year pianist and a 5th year, then a 5th and 10th year. I would even say that the advancement one makes halves each year, sort of like Zeno's arrow, or maybe reduces by a decreasing percentage, so that a 2nd year (or level) pianist is 50% better than a first; a 3rd 40% better than a 2nd; a 4th 30% better than a 3rd; etc.

In game design terms, one can do this by either increasing the amount of experience and time between levels or decreasing the power increases at each level. D&D has, by and large, taken a rather flat approach to advancement and done neither, although I suppose level advancement used to take longer at higher levels, not so much in recent editions, especially 4th. In 1E characters dropped in power around 10th level and started getting less increases, especially with regards to HP.

3.x seemed to be the worst offender in this regard; the difference between a 20th level character, with potentially 300 HP (a high CON dwarven fighter or barbarian), with that of a 1st level character being greater than in any game. The difference between a 20th level wizard and a 1st level wizard is even more extreme.

I think WotC would do well to give some serious thought to what DC represents the pinacle of real-world human achievement (DC 30 actually seems pretty good), and then some further thought to what level PCs should be able to achieve this DC. IOW, what are the equivalent levels for Einstein, or Tiger Woods, or Bill Gates, or Bill Clinton?

Yes, true. Part of the problem is the twenty-sided die itself: it is a huge range of possibility, although this makes more or less sense depending upon the situation. For example, in D&D you always have a 5% chance of success and a 5% chance of failure. This works in most cases, but I can tell you that I wouldn't have a 5% chance of hitting a 105 MPH Aroldis Chapman fastball, and a master bowman would have less than a 5% chance of missing a point-blank shot.

Perhaps a more realistic approach would have been to use a d10 and have a natural 10 give another roll and add (etc), and a natural one be a -10 and roll again. Then you could have set DC without needing to have automatic hits for anything.

Of course the d10 has less charm than the d20, so I wouldn't want to change it!

Indeed. With the exception of Conan, that pretty much ties up with my feel of where these characters should be. (Conan's a bit more tricky, as you say.) I would suggest also that the characters in the Black Company should mostly be low-mid Heroic, Batman is high Paragon, and Achillies is an example of the Epic. Does that seem about right?

Yeah, that sounds about right. Hector, on the other hand, might have been high Paragon with the rest of the major heroes being mid-Paragon. If Hector had defeated Achilles he would have made it to Epic.

Yep, no argument there. It's just that I would feel rather better if, when designing 5e, they did spend a bit of time with real-world achievements, and calibrated the DCs (and level range) accordingly. As I said, I know D&D isn't in any way a reality-simulator, but I'd still feel better if it had a bit more of a grounding in reality.

Agreed. But again, I think the d20 is inherently awkward in this regard with too wide a range of outcomes. Of course that adds more chance to the game and, well, it is a game.

Having worked in market research, it is frequently an attempt by those requesting the polling (not necessarily those conducting the poll) to introduce a certain bias into the results. Mearls may not be guilty of such a thing so take it for what it is worth. He could be passing along a poll from higher up, or if he created the poll, the middle ground didn't occur to him.

Polls missing options (middle ground), or slanted toward an outcome always irk me no matter what they are about.

Maybe so. On the other hand, at the end of the poll it was very clearly stated:

Is there an option in the poll we’ve missed? Then let us know how you feel at dndinsider[MENTION=17465]Wizard[/MENTION]s.com.

That seems like an invitation to speak our minds!

 

[Dausuul]

Then apparently you're making my point.

Unless I misunderstood... you originally said you wanted a streamlined, easy-to-use D&D game that was class-based but designed from concept first... with enough game mechanics in the background to support those concepts. Because apparently you couldn't do that with 4E because you had to come at it from game mechanics first point of view, and there were just too many options to choose from and made your eyes glaze over.

And my point was always that you can't have it both ways. You can't have a streamlined game that is class-based AND has enough game mechanics to support what you come up with. The fact that we have 4E as-is with every splatbook thus far published and you rightly point out several concepts (like your necromancer) that still can't be made... tells us that what you originally posted about wanting is statistically unlikely (if not impossible) to design and put into a single book.

If I'm genuinely misrepresenting what your original desire to see a new D&D game to be was... please let me know because I'd be happy to amend my comments.

I think you're assuming I expect this system to support every conceivable concept. I don't. No RPG can do that, whether class-based, point-buy, or anything else. What I want is a system that a) supports a wide array of concepts and b) makes it easy to translate concept into mechanics.

IMO, the vast majority of 4E's concept choices are provided by its archetype mechanics: Class, race, "build," background, paragon path, epic destiny. The mix-and-match mechanics--feats and powers--are mostly crunch elements without much associated flavor. So I would like to see them scaled back or eliminated.

 

[Riastlin]

Personally, I am rather certain that they have begun work on 5ed. After all, the entire design, development, testing, etc. process would take several years. I believe it was stated that 4th Ed was about 3 - 5 years though cannot recall off the top of my head. As such, even though I think it is too early to see 5ed next year, a few years from now might be about right. Somebody starting up a campaign today, and playing on a regular basis (i.e. every 1 - 2 weeks) could probably run a 1 - 30 campaign in that time. Plus, much as we hate to admit it, at some point WotC will likely need that influx of cash that is inherent with a new edition (even skeptics will likely run out and by the new core book(s)).

As for the constant 5% chance of success/failure, keep in mind that only applies to attacks, not to skill checks. Although I still agree with the idea that it is hard to imagine a master archer missing a point blank shot at all, much less 5% of the time. I do like the idea of the "exploding dice" though. i.e. a 10 or 20 grants another roll. Shadowrun did this up until 4ed, making it so that anything was theorhetically possible, but superhuman feats really were extremely rare.

The 1-hit death possibility is interesting. I think that is at least pretty close to what I would consider ideal, though it still might be a bit much. 1-hit unconscious maybe, I just think that even limiting it to a crit could still result in too many 1-shot kills. Heck, I've only started a few campaigns and in one of those, the very first combat roll of the game was a crit by a charging goblin spear-wielder (3.x) on the mage. The player had not even had a chance to do anything yet. Of course, I suppose you can always implement Rule 0 as I did there.

By the way, since I mentioned Shadowrun earlier, I will also mention it with respect to the rate of advancement. One of the nice things about Shadowrun is even the lowly random guard remains a danger for a long time. Sure players get slowly better, but their health remains relatively stagnant, its great for providing tension and realism. Frex, somebody might be able to really work out until they look like Conan, but an axe to the head is still going to be just as deadly as it was to the pipsqueak. Conan gets the advantage of being harder to hit, but when you do hit him, he still should bleed just as thoroughly (realizing of course that fiction rarely follows this rule).

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

By the way, since I mentioned Shadowrun earlier, I will also mention it with respect to the rate of advancement. One of the nice things about Shadowrun is even the lowly random guard remains a danger for a long time. Sure players get slowly better, but their health remains relatively stagnant, its great for providing tension and realism. Frex, somebody might be able to really work out until they look like Conan, but an axe to the head is still going to be just as deadly as it was to the pipsqueak. Conan gets the advantage of being harder to hit, but when you do hit him, he still should bleed just as thoroughly (realizing of course that fiction rarely follows this rule).

Yes, this is one of the things I like about Shadowrun as well - everyone is fragile - and that keep tension, and some amount of realism in every conflict. You can't afford to discount the rent-a-cop with a light pistol, because he can still kill you just as dead as the Red Samurai with the assault rifle (even if it is much less likely).

What killed Shadowrun for me were the dice pools. The moment one of my players said, "I guess I shot him in the Combat Pool," I lost all enthusiasm for the system (this was SR3).

It's also one of the things I liked about Palladium systems, and it's an idea I think was way ahead of its time. Everyone had a small, crummy amount of hit points. That was your health. Then, you also had a certain amount of SDC, which represented your ability to shrug off hits, near misses, and other such things. Most attacks had to deplete your SDC before it would eat into your actual hit points (which were very hard to recover). Occasionally, some attacks could bypass your SDC and hit straight to your HP, and those attacks were very dangerous.

Sound familiar? Bloodied? Coup de Grace?

Palladium's MDC/SDC/HP system is something I have not seen executed nearly as well anywhere else, though I think the d20 Star Wars RPG used something similar with Wound Points, and Unearthed Arcana for 3.x did also. Too bad about the rest of the Palladium system :/

So as not to get too far off-topic, if they are working on 5e already (which I don't doubt), I would like to see them play with and refine this concept a little further. How things like Healing Surges affect you, how it interacts with your actual health as opposed to an SDC-like concept of hit points, how a CdG interacts with your health vs hit points, etc.

This gives me a good idea for a houserule...

 

[RangerWickett]

I'd have a modular system, with example classes.

For instance, at 1st level you'd pick 5 options, and you'd get a new option every level. You could build your own weird character at 1st level with mage cantrips, a brute fighting style, no armor proficiencies, magical luck, and a pet falcon. Or you could pick a premade class that tells you what you get.

If you use a premade class, you can still customize with what weapons you want (sorta like Gamma World), and what your background is.