As much as I enjoyed 3rd Edition (or more accurately, 3.5 and Pathfinder), there were a couple of rules and mechanics that bugged.
First and foremost, Spell Resistance. I hated it. Mostly because it seemed to climb at a faster rate than the Caster Level Check to overcome it. No matter how many feats I took or whatever things I did to boost my chances at beating SR, time and time again I hear Crwth say, "Sorry. Your bad ass spell fails to get past it's spell resistance." I wanted to punch him in the face. A lot.
Next on my list of 3E peeves was the way skill ranks and the various bonuses tended to make doing the impossible into the trivial. With a decent INT modifier or a few feats and/or a bit of focus on a couple of skills, and it wouldn't be long before beating a DC 20 was only a matter of not rolling a natural 1. Rogues were the worst with the insane number of ranks they had to spend every level. By the time they hit their teens in terms of level, they can tumble across a football field covered in razor blades and not get a scratch.
Finally, dinosaurs. Why the hell does a fantasy game need stats for dinosaurs?
Anyways, while I'm mildly disappointed that dinosaurs have reared their extinct heads in the playtest Bestiary (yeah, I skimmed it), I am loving that all the checks and saves seem to go back to the character's six core stats. Those stats that go up maybe one point one at time every four levels; barring magic items and temporary boosts from spells.
Seriously, whoever came up with that idea deserves a big fat raise and a freshly baked cookie on their desk every morning.
Showing posts with label saving throws. Show all posts
Showing posts with label saving throws. Show all posts
Thursday, August 1, 2013
Thursday, May 31, 2012
Some first impressions on the playtest stuff
Funny thing, how life gets hectic and things that held my interest end up pushed to the back burner. DnDNext was that thing and one day I couldn't read enough about it, and the next it wasn't even on my radar.
Then, along comes the playtest materials.
Yes, our group got in. No, I don't think it's all that exclusive of a thing.(My impression is that anyone who asked to be in, got in.)
Anyways, I read the guide on how to play and skimmed over the supplied characters. Not a lot of meat but the bones are shiny and white and new.
The materials do give a pretty good sense of where 5th Edition is going, and I think I'm gonna like it. DM Samuel at RPGMusings wrote up a really good summary with some good insights. I'll try not to simply rehash what he wrote but a tip of the hat to his spotting of the three pillars of 5th Edition.
Unfortunately, our group's first official playtest won't happen until this Saturday (June 2nd) but I thought I'd throw out my initial thoughts on the good, bad, and ugly.
Right off the bat, I really dig the concept of Advantage/Disadvantage. It's simple but a powerful tool and full of tactical goodness. This guy here breaks down the math quite nicely.
I'm also a big fan of the simplification of checks being made against each stat. As much as I might miss the old Will, Reflex and whatever that third save was, it only makes sense to treat them as ability tests instead. Plus, as an added bonus, it makes all six stats important in different situations. Charisma might not be the default dump stat any more.
The idea of Backgrounds and Themes for characters also seems like a welcome innovation. I'm a little worried that having feats embedded inside is a recipe for disaster. I, for one, create a character with one concept and very often end up playing him/her/it as something totally different. In 3rd Edition, that wasn't much of a problem as I'd just change up my feat selections and/or spell choices. If a background in 5th Edition gives you two or three feat trees to chose from, at best I'm going to feel restricted. At the worst, I'll end up stuck with a character I don't like.
I'm a little put off by the Cantrips and Orisons. They seem to take those iconic 1st level spells like Magic Missile and turn them into the dreaded At-Will powers of 4th Edition. After reading everything else and seeing not even a nod towards the-edition-that-shall-not-be-named, they drop the At-will thing on me. Ugh!
I'm hoping the feedback on that will get them to come up with something else. While I agree that there's no harm in the wizard/sorcerer/cleric/bard/etc... having a couple of piddly spells that they can fire off as many times as they want. The Light spell is a great example of something that's nice to have limitless uses of, but being able to machine gun Magic Missiles is a bit much.
Am I really in that small of a minority that I don't mind my spellcaster having to resort to swinging a sword or shooting a crossbow when he's out of spells?
On another note, Crwth spotted an interesting bit of wording in the How To Play guide. In the Stealth section, it seems to imply that one roll is made and that all contested rolls are compared against it.
He interprets that as the player announcing he wants to be sneaky, rolling a Dex check, and then using that roll for the rest of the week as he creeps across the country. I, uh, might be exaggerating that a little bit.
Still, even if it means that a character can creep along a 100' of hallway past multiple guards on one roll, that needs to be dropped. I know. Rolling a stealth check every 15' is tedious. And a lot of the time the DM knows there's nothing there to hear/spot the character but the DM can't let the player know that, so the dice clatter away for the next hour.
Doing it on one stealth check is not the answer. Sure, it speeds up play. Sure, it simplifies the task. But it's a cure looking for a disease. There's tension inherent in every die roll (or there should be) because there is a risk of failure. Rolling a lot of dice is not necessarily a bad thing. Especially not when checks seem to be simplified down to an Ability score plus a modifier or two plus Advantage or Disadvantage.
Crwth's nightmare example was of a player rolling a natural 20 and deciding that his character will simply stealthy move all the way through the dungeon unopposed. Or, he'll roll a 5 and decide to stop moving before trying again.
I can see doing that. I can't see getting away with it, but...
Then I read that section again, and I think the wording suggests that when trying to sneak past a bunch of guards/monsters, the player rolls a single stealth check instead of a check against each guard/monster.
Hopefully, it's just a case of poor wording that will be clarified sooner or later.
Then, along comes the playtest materials.
Yes, our group got in. No, I don't think it's all that exclusive of a thing.(My impression is that anyone who asked to be in, got in.)
Anyways, I read the guide on how to play and skimmed over the supplied characters. Not a lot of meat but the bones are shiny and white and new.
The materials do give a pretty good sense of where 5th Edition is going, and I think I'm gonna like it. DM Samuel at RPGMusings wrote up a really good summary with some good insights. I'll try not to simply rehash what he wrote but a tip of the hat to his spotting of the three pillars of 5th Edition.
Unfortunately, our group's first official playtest won't happen until this Saturday (June 2nd) but I thought I'd throw out my initial thoughts on the good, bad, and ugly.
Right off the bat, I really dig the concept of Advantage/Disadvantage. It's simple but a powerful tool and full of tactical goodness. This guy here breaks down the math quite nicely.
I'm also a big fan of the simplification of checks being made against each stat. As much as I might miss the old Will, Reflex and whatever that third save was, it only makes sense to treat them as ability tests instead. Plus, as an added bonus, it makes all six stats important in different situations. Charisma might not be the default dump stat any more.
The idea of Backgrounds and Themes for characters also seems like a welcome innovation. I'm a little worried that having feats embedded inside is a recipe for disaster. I, for one, create a character with one concept and very often end up playing him/her/it as something totally different. In 3rd Edition, that wasn't much of a problem as I'd just change up my feat selections and/or spell choices. If a background in 5th Edition gives you two or three feat trees to chose from, at best I'm going to feel restricted. At the worst, I'll end up stuck with a character I don't like.
I'm a little put off by the Cantrips and Orisons. They seem to take those iconic 1st level spells like Magic Missile and turn them into the dreaded At-Will powers of 4th Edition. After reading everything else and seeing not even a nod towards the-edition-that-shall-not-be-named, they drop the At-will thing on me. Ugh!
I'm hoping the feedback on that will get them to come up with something else. While I agree that there's no harm in the wizard/sorcerer/cleric/bard/etc... having a couple of piddly spells that they can fire off as many times as they want. The Light spell is a great example of something that's nice to have limitless uses of, but being able to machine gun Magic Missiles is a bit much.
Am I really in that small of a minority that I don't mind my spellcaster having to resort to swinging a sword or shooting a crossbow when he's out of spells?
On another note, Crwth spotted an interesting bit of wording in the How To Play guide. In the Stealth section, it seems to imply that one roll is made and that all contested rolls are compared against it.
He interprets that as the player announcing he wants to be sneaky, rolling a Dex check, and then using that roll for the rest of the week as he creeps across the country. I, uh, might be exaggerating that a little bit.
Still, even if it means that a character can creep along a 100' of hallway past multiple guards on one roll, that needs to be dropped. I know. Rolling a stealth check every 15' is tedious. And a lot of the time the DM knows there's nothing there to hear/spot the character but the DM can't let the player know that, so the dice clatter away for the next hour.
Doing it on one stealth check is not the answer. Sure, it speeds up play. Sure, it simplifies the task. But it's a cure looking for a disease. There's tension inherent in every die roll (or there should be) because there is a risk of failure. Rolling a lot of dice is not necessarily a bad thing. Especially not when checks seem to be simplified down to an Ability score plus a modifier or two plus Advantage or Disadvantage.
Crwth's nightmare example was of a player rolling a natural 20 and deciding that his character will simply stealthy move all the way through the dungeon unopposed. Or, he'll roll a 5 and decide to stop moving before trying again.
I can see doing that. I can't see getting away with it, but...
Then I read that section again, and I think the wording suggests that when trying to sneak past a bunch of guards/monsters, the player rolls a single stealth check instead of a check against each guard/monster.
Hopefully, it's just a case of poor wording that will be clarified sooner or later.
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Rolling of the dice
I'm glad this blog post came up, because it is an issue that I have -- surprise, surprise -- an opinion on, and it's something that we've discussed quite a bit at our game table.
For those that are too lazy to click the link above, the general gist is that over the years, melee combat has given the deciding factor -- the die roll -- to the player, rolling to-hit to overcome AC - THAC0, BAB or whatever system you like. Spellcasters and the like instead had to combat Saving Throws, but it was the DM's lucky dice that determined the outcome of that, not the players'. This gave all the drama (good and bad) to the melee characters, and the rest just had to sit back and be told whether their idea worked out.
We tried a few different solutions to this, including systems found in various other games, such as Oriental Adventures, Pathfinder, 3rd edition and 4e. Some of my players and I had come to the same conclusion as Monte Cook did, that they were getting gypped, and I must say, I liked the idea that the spellcaster had that variable in their spell's strength, combatting against their target's innate ability to resist it. We even toyed with moving the randomness of an NPC's attack against the party into the players' hands, turning AC into a defensive roll against a very static attack value that the enemy had. It sure made things easier on my side of the table, but in the end it felt a little unbalanced -- the players shouldn't really have that much "control" over their fate, and having the DM (whether deceptively or honestly) widening his eyes at a roll just made behind the DM shield can add to the suspense of the story as it unfolds. Not knowing if the goblin keeps missing because of low rolls by the DM or because the goblin isn't a threat is fun to leave to speculation; seeing that the goblin didn't hit you when you rolled a 6 on a defense roll tells you right out that you can turn your back on the goblin and focus on the hobgoblin captain instead.
That being said, I'm not vehemently opposed to any one method. They all work, and it was fun to dabble with different systems to stir things up. My voting in the polls that followed the blogpost weren't weighted to either extreme; I might have a preference for the players' fates being more in their own hands, but if the game design can keep the spellcasters engaged without it, I'll be fine with that too.
For those that are too lazy to click the link above, the general gist is that over the years, melee combat has given the deciding factor -- the die roll -- to the player, rolling to-hit to overcome AC - THAC0, BAB or whatever system you like. Spellcasters and the like instead had to combat Saving Throws, but it was the DM's lucky dice that determined the outcome of that, not the players'. This gave all the drama (good and bad) to the melee characters, and the rest just had to sit back and be told whether their idea worked out.
We tried a few different solutions to this, including systems found in various other games, such as Oriental Adventures, Pathfinder, 3rd edition and 4e. Some of my players and I had come to the same conclusion as Monte Cook did, that they were getting gypped, and I must say, I liked the idea that the spellcaster had that variable in their spell's strength, combatting against their target's innate ability to resist it. We even toyed with moving the randomness of an NPC's attack against the party into the players' hands, turning AC into a defensive roll against a very static attack value that the enemy had. It sure made things easier on my side of the table, but in the end it felt a little unbalanced -- the players shouldn't really have that much "control" over their fate, and having the DM (whether deceptively or honestly) widening his eyes at a roll just made behind the DM shield can add to the suspense of the story as it unfolds. Not knowing if the goblin keeps missing because of low rolls by the DM or because the goblin isn't a threat is fun to leave to speculation; seeing that the goblin didn't hit you when you rolled a 6 on a defense roll tells you right out that you can turn your back on the goblin and focus on the hobgoblin captain instead.
That being said, I'm not vehemently opposed to any one method. They all work, and it was fun to dabble with different systems to stir things up. My voting in the polls that followed the blogpost weren't weighted to either extreme; I might have a preference for the players' fates being more in their own hands, but if the game design can keep the spellcasters engaged without it, I'll be fine with that too.
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