Do you DnD?

Sarathai

Birthright is great, but I prefer Planescape.

Partly because I get all the settings that way. One of my favourite campaigns was one where we used to hang out in the World Serpent Inn during our off-time, so adventures were sometimes about what setting we were visiting that week.

We were the weirdest bunch, too. By the end, I think we had tricks, items, powers and such from maybe a dozen different worlds that I can remember, and probably many others I've forgotten.

Synbios

Does it count if I like DnD for the edition wars?

Anedhel

The nerd battling going on here fills my little heart with joy.

Greys

@Anedhel Its by far the most constructive and least trolling argument thread I've seen yet.  I spent most of my time in 3rd edition. 4th felt to me too much like a squad based combat game. At least with the people I play with, we usually are looking for ways to solve things other than direct combat (though I will admit that can frequently default to set something on fire). 

My favorite 3rd edition moment DM'ing was how my players managed with the right combination of spells/powers/equipment and the fact 2 of them were small to get the entire party flying on a single pegasus. Given they went through a lot to get that beast and the combo was clever, I let them do it. Though I may oneday commission the art of what that party would look like actually doing it. Think water skiing in air with a halfling on your shoulders. 

Sarflus

Dungeon of Slyn, Nethack and The elder sign come first in mind.

Anedhel

I actually meant it, no sarcasm! It's wonderful to see people have a debate over minutiae and not get uber-annoying about it  

Jukilian

I'm not familiar enough with D&D to contribute to the nerd Battle Royale  

Aerek

4e is an MMO ported to tabletop, and is every bit as repetitive and boring as an MMO. There's a reason Achaea is the only online RPG I play, and it's the same reason that 3.5/Pathfinder are the editions of D&D I enjoyed most: anything is possible and players aren't limited by simple mechanics. 3.5/Pathfinder might be bloated with rules and options, sure, but that means there's enough material there that you can always find something new, and you can play for years without ever feeling like you're caught in a re-run. Haven't tried 5e, but I'm skeptical. Any time an RPG gets "more streamlined", I tend to feel that's usually code for "dumbed down and bland".

I don't play anymore because I lack the time, and because I'm picky about my DMs and groups. A good D&D group can be a rare thing to find because real, open-end roleplay requires a high level of trust between all parties not to troll, control, or steamroll each other; one jackass really can ruin the whole experience. But when everything lines up right, and you have a group of friends that mesh well together, and the DM is there to challenge and entertain the players, not just play against them, it's a magical thing.

Anedhel

3.5 is magic. It does, however, require a game-runner who understands the rules fairly well and players willing to accept compromises from time to time, to keep it entertaining. For the most part, I've found that going over what you plan on doing before you do it with your group can really help cut down on the aforementioned trolling; the beauty of 3.5 is how much flexibility you have to adapt and adjust with conditional modifiers, environment factors, and ability restrictions (not to mention it being fairly easy to give monsters player classes in the case of humanoids, makes it easy to provide tailor-made encounters to challenge your players in a good way, rather than a 'this is the same thing as before, it just hits harder' kind of way). 

I've never had a bad game experience when I've had a sit-down with people I'm running a game for beforehand, specially when we've played what I like to think of as 'grittier' campaigns (for instance, upping DCs and average roll for success to 13 instead of 10, with a very experienced group of players, or nixing all Divine magic entirely, including scrolls and potions (but compensating for that with better class abilities or bonus feats for those classes that had partial Divine magic), stuff like that). If you set the expectations early, people generally come to the table more willing to accept the challenges they run into, and that feeling of being a team before the game even starts can work wonders for new players who might otherwise have a tough time getting into thinking as part of a team, from what I've seen. 

Trey

Aerek said:

4e is an MMO ported to tabletop, and is every bit as repetitive and boring as an MMO. 

Here's the argument against it I've never understood. The only way 4e is boring and repetitive is if your DM or players make it like that.

I would definitely agree that they took some cues from MMOs in that they adopted roles and made every role relevant at every level, but that only made the game better. 3.5 was a mess, for example. Nothing is worse as a player than to be King Shit of Turd Mountain at level 1 as a fighter, only to be completely irrelevant by level 6 if your party has a competent Wizard or Cleric.

Dortheron

Former just because I haven't had any recent games. Brief stint as a DM that ended in a TPK because instead of trying to free the monster with magic resistance against a high-level wizard, left it in it's cage as they Leroy Jenkins it . Needed to set up the situation a bit better.

I wouldn't mind joining a game at all. Played on 3.5e, Pathfinder, and a single session of 5e that went nowhere (DM got busy). Hit me up in Achaea if you're interested in me joining (just because I'm almost never logged onto the forums anymore)

Armali

According to this thread, I played DnD wrong for years.

Siduri

Trey said:

Aerek said:

4e is an MMO ported to tabletop, and is every bit as repetitive and boring as an MMO. 

Here's the argument against it I've never understood. The only way 4e is boring and repetitive is if your DM or players make it like that.

I would definitely agree that they took some cues from MMOs in that they adopted roles and made every role relevant at every level, but that only made the game better. 3.5 was a mess, for example. Nothing is worse as a player than to be King Shit of Turd Mountain at level 1 as a fighter, only to be completely irrelevant by level 6 if your party has a competent Wizard or Cleric.

As a DM, one of the most annoying things of 4e was that status effects like stun or daze were so prevalent that, in many cases, boss monsters would simply get slaughtered if they lost intitiative. The fight would last a few turns due to hacking away at HP (because monster math), but with some of the stuns being at will, welp.

The campaign was helluva fun in the end, but I had to spend a lot of time custom-tailoring every monster so they could pose a challenge in some way.

Fair warning to 5e DMs: Careful with gold/treasure generosity. It doesn't take much to artificially bump up the party's level, and the monster math means that very quickly, some critters won't be as dangerous or deadly (because their damage doesn't scale, only their hp).

My party went evil down the way, and they'd tend to just make deals and kill their contact to get back the gold and the items. Issue is, they were smart enough not to get caught, or strong enough to overpower guard squads. And the power creep went out of hand.

Sat down with them and we agreed to fade to black the running campaign and start a new module with a more ethical group. Currently playing the Storm King's Thunder module. Levels are gained as story advance (cutting the temptation to butcher everyone), and I've agreed with them that loot passed over due to ethical reason would be compensated in some way as part of their org's pay scheme.

Greys

@Siduri I had that in the latest campaign we participated in. Was an overpowered flying item the party was using. But on a critical miss, they landed funny and borked it so now its only good for a limited duration.

Anedhel

Trey said:

Aerek said:

4e is an MMO ported to tabletop, and is every bit as repetitive and boring as an MMO. 

Here's the argument against it I've never understood. The only way 4e is boring and repetitive is if your DM or players make it like that.

I would definitely agree that they took some cues from MMOs in that they adopted roles and made every role relevant at every level, but that only made the game better. 3.5 was a mess, for example. Nothing is worse as a player than to be King Shit of Turd Mountain at level 1 as a fighter, only to be completely irrelevant by level 6 if your party has a competent Wizard or Cleric.

The same counterargument goes for your assertion that 3.5 is a mess! It's up to the game-runner to make it interesting for everyone, and there are tools for that!

Trey

Anedhel said:

Trey said:

Aerek said:

4e is an MMO ported to tabletop, and is every bit as repetitive and boring as an MMO. 

Here's the argument against it I've never understood. The only way 4e is boring and repetitive is if your DM or players make it like that.

I would definitely agree that they took some cues from MMOs in that they adopted roles and made every role relevant at every level, but that only made the game better. 3.5 was a mess, for example. Nothing is worse as a player than to be King Shit of Turd Mountain at level 1 as a fighter, only to be completely irrelevant by level 6 if your party has a competent Wizard or Cleric.

The same counterargument goes for your assertion that 3.5 is a mess! It's up to the game-runner to make it interesting for everyone, and there are tools for that!

Name some? AFAIK the only thing that came remotely close was the Book of Nine Swords, and that was more or less a playtest of the first concept for 4e.

Anedhel

The easiest one is to just make spell resistance blanket for monsters (10 + HD +/- modifiers depending on the type of critter, so that you're basically giving monsters an armor class against spells. Course, the spellcaster still has an edge, since the modifier is class level +3 for a pure spellcaster, due to skill ranks, but it means you'll get a lot of misses all the same, and that makes it more interesting, since people have to pick and choose their opportunities, rather than just go all ballistic and blow a gajillion spells in one encounter). You can also extend the requirement for what counts as 'resting' to get spells back (for example, decreeing that sleeping in a dungeon you might get eaten in is not actually resting), so that not every time you play, you're at full spells (which is more or less what it ends up looking like, for the most part, in my experience). The other one I like is giving certain critters antimagic fields or some similar ability that requires it be brought down before the spellcasters can really do damage to the other enemies in an encounter, making it more about teamwork (since the initial conditions require that something change before magic is really effective), and less about 'who gets to blow the thingy up first.' 

ETA: Obviously, I'm addressing the point that spellcasters blow other classes out of the water. Magic items and good teamwork can already make most martial classes pretty crazy, all a matter of character build! Book of Nine Swords characters are straight up goofy, though, and it's amazing  

Nazihk

The big reason 4e won me over was because in my very first 4e game ever I played a level 2 fighter. Human, longsword and shield, it was the classic boring fighter kit. And it was so much fun! I had ways to defend my squishier mage and rogue friends that couldn't be trivially bypassed by just walking away from me. I could shove enemies around with my shield, reposition people, knock the prone. I got in there, controlled the battlefield, took a few hits, and I came out of that fight feeling like a total badass. And there are tons of ways to build a fighter and each of them actually plays differently than other versions of that fighter.

At L2 in 3.5 I would have spent pretty much the entire fight using the same basic attack action endlessly, and I'd have kept using that same attack action while my wizards were busy getting root access to the structure of the universe. 4e won me over by giving my fighter things that he could do, and those things kept on being relevant throughout the entire game so that there was never a point where I felt like all I was doing was hauling the loot for my wizard.

Sure, you can fix up 3.x and change a lot of that. First you axe a lot of the more dominant spells, so that you don't run into that situation where fighters scale linearly and casters scale exponentially. Then you go give fighters and rogues and rangers and paladins and barbarians and monks and all the non-casters interesting and varied things to do in place of their basic attack actions. And then you go through and you axe a lot of the non-combat spells, so that casters aren't able to dominate the non-combat scenes with their batman belt. And then so on. Caster dominance is so heavily baked into the game that you basically have to rebuild large parts of the game, both to bring the other classes up  and to pull the casters down a bit.

Anedhel

I'm sorry, but I don't see that, at all. 

In fact, at level 2, martial classes are a lot more interesting than spellcasting ones. Limited pool, very small spells-per-day list, and underwhelming effects. Nothing you listed is something you couldn't do in 3.5. The combat options are actually very varied, from the special attacks (bull rushes, trips, grapples, aid another, fight defensively, holding your actions/turns for an advantage, etc. etc.); it should've been up to the person running the game to make that clear, and give you opportunity and incentive, both, to do that. 

Altering rules and modifying encounters is not really an overhaul of the game, so much as it is using the discretion built into the role of DM. 3.5 never read to me as a 'this is the rules, use them or don't play.' In fact, a lot of the books have side-notes and tabs detailing variations and alternatives if the options they give you don't fit with your current game. The DM's rulebooks got really great after a few years, opening up a ton of options for customisation. 

I don't mean to sound like an ass, but if your time as a fighter was boring, it might be because you assumed there was nothing to but spend ' pretty much the entire fight using the same basic attack action endlessly, and I'd have kept using that same attack action while my wizards were busy getting root access to the structure of the universe.' Maybe reading up a bit and learning your options would've made your experience better, as would having a game-runner who made a bigger effort to make encounters fun for everyone on the team, not just the magicians! 

ETA: There's also a big portion of the later-issued encounter options and monsters dedicated to making life difficult for spellcasters. Anything that disrupts spellcasting and makes it a bitch to succeed on the concentration checks is kind of a nightmare for them, and since a lot of the nature of spellcasting is fire-first-or-die, although they -can- be crazy powerful glass cannons, a lot of level 15+ stuff can one-round murderate a spellcaster that's being goofy, no problem. 

ETA2: Re: giving rogues more interesting things to do in combat besides basic attack- I'm not really sure what you mean here. Playing the position game, trying to stay hidden to make super-ouchy sneak attacks, using a million different skills at the same time, activating magic items as if they were a spellcaster without being able to cast spells intrinsically... what do you mean by them not having anything to do in combat? Kind of seems like a very limited, and narrow view of that class. 

Nazihk

Anedhel said:
The combat options are actually very varied, from the special attacks (bull rushes, trips, grapples, aid another, fight defensively, holding your actions/turns for an advantage, etc. etc.); it should've been up to the person running the game to make that clear, and give you opportunity and incentive, both, to do that. 

The thing is that in 3.5 about every one of those options is awful.  I mean, yeah, you do have all those various options but none of them are as good as a Full Attack Action and on top of that most of them are objectively terrible in pretty much all circumstances. 

1. Bull Rushing gives up my entire attack for a no-damage push and gives the targets a AoO on me unless I spend a feat on improving that zero damage push.
2. Trips provoke an AoO(unless feated or using a tripping weapon) so that you can make a touch attack that lets you make a strength check that lets you do a zero damage trip if you pass it. If you fail it, of course, they get to trip you back.
3. Disarms provoke an AoO unless feated, and if it does damage you fail outright. If you get past that you get to make an opposed attack roll to disarm. If you fail that they get an attempt at disarming you back. And disarm carries with it the innate advantage of only applying to people with weapons; you can't disarm dragons.
4. Aid Another is literally "I'm giving up a whole turn to give an ally +10% hit chance on his next attack" and it requires a roll against AC10. Sure, pretty much everybody should be able to make that, but it's still a 5% failure chance due to natural 1's.

So while, yeah, those are all technically things that you could be doing instead of an attack action, they're almost always going to be worse than using a straight attack, putting damage on a target, and progressing towards the kill.

Anedhel

Well, yes. It won't work on everyone, and it requires character-building, but AoOs shouldn't be that scary against average encounters for a character with access to very high AC (heavy armor + shield for your longsword/shield build, even without a dexterity modifier of +1 to add to it is AC 20-22, depending on the shield, means that an average level 2 critter requires 17+ on its roll to even touch you, since average attack value for HD2 critters is +3, so I'm not entirely sure it's such a big deal to risk the attacks of opportunity) and low-level, which is exactly what the kind of character you were playing affords you. 

I somehow very much doubt you can push around, trip, disarm, or otherwise maul a dragon in -any- version of DnD at low or mid-level, so I'm not sure what that argument is meant to convey. 

You're kind of overlooking the notion that not every encounter -should- be winnable by just going for attacks all the time. Just like not every encounter should be winnable by casting maximized fireballs all the time. If the game you were playing was boring enough to encourage nothing but rolling the dice and trying to do damage, at the expense of literally all the other options available, then that's the fault of a boring setup, not a problem with the rules  

Dortheron

@Anedhel It wasn't the magical creature that was the problem...because the monster was suppose to HELP them fight AGAINST a wizard...the problem was that they charged in instead of doing anything resembling subtly, roleplay, or information gathering. First time in the driver seat, so I didn't properly set it up so that a TPK wasn't as easy to accomplish as it was.

Anedhel

I'm not really sure how that's a rulebook's fault, though o_O 

Dortheron

Anedhel said:

I'm not really sure how that's a rulebook's fault, though o_O 

Oh, silly me. You're arguing mechanics, when I thought you were trying to help me. I'll just slink back to my corner now...

Anedhel

Oh. Sorry, I thought you were somehow implying that there was no recourse for that. 

I try to stack encounters and roleplaying/information gathering/planning sessions at 1:1, so that the games end up being half development and half fighting. What's your session-to-fight ratio? I find that if you put encounters in each time you sit down to play, people get a go-in-and-smash attitude pretty quick, since it's expected that it's a slugfest, rather than a more nuanced game. 

Also, making use of divination magic, plot devices like dreams, investigative scenes (some of my favorite moments have been in this kind of scene!), fortune-tellers, straight up coincidences that nudge people towards an epiphany regarding an upcoming encounter, prophecies, etc. etc. can really help people get into a figure-it-out-first-THEN-kick-in-the-door mentality! 

But without knowing more about the way you run your game, I can't give super specific advice. We can chat about it, though, for sure, if you'd like! 

Dortheron

Nah, it's fine. It was me being inexperienced I think. That group was a little more on the hack-n-slash side and not the RP side of the spectrum, so I didn't have as many roadblocks from stopping them from trying to either kill everything or kill themselves.

Anedhel

Oh. It's challenging, when you run into a group like that, but, in my experience, if you have a sit-down before you start playing and gauge what people want, and it turns out they DO want a hack-n-slash adventure, just look up critters appropriate to their level, figure out which one you'd like to have fun with, and turn it loose on 'em every week, see how they handle different monsters!  

ETA: For the record, if you want to join up, I'm running a game with other Achaeans on Fridays at 1200 CST, if you're interested in playing. We're up for joiners!

Devran

I would play D&D if I knew anyone near me that played. For sure.

Drinks and pizza and tabletop with good friends. Sounds like an absolute blast.

Alas, I live in Perth. The end of the world where fun things come to die. :<

Anedhel

That's what the internet's for!  

Dortheron

https://roll20.net/ among others is your friend