Ratpick's page

Personal preferences I guess. I've played with the Mutant Chronicles a little bit, and I find the zone thing makes playing without maps harder, because players want to know exactly which zones they're in, and you have to work out how long it takes them to get from zone to zone. I find you need a much better defined map layout.

Savage Worlds I just say if they're at short, medium or long range, tell them if there's any cover, and for area of effect weapons/powers I roll a die to see how many people they hit depending on if the AoE is small, medium or large. I play fairly free-form so this works far better for my groups.

I think even games with really abstract distance and positioning systems still benefit from some degree of visualization, because it's hard for players to keep track of all the narration given to them by the GM without a single visual cue.

I recommend a simple trick from Fate if you don't want to rely on maps: use index cards. The only thing that really matters is the relative position of the zones to each other as well as relative distance (in zones). Index cards provide a pretty simple way to represent all that information. You can laminate them and write on them with markers to add extra details to the terrain as the combat goes on.

I just wanted to quote the entirety of Jessica's post but the forums software makes that really difficult, but damn, that was a good post.

Note to self: seriously question purchasing anything from Alderac.

I saw they had a card game called Greedy Greedy Goblins and did a double take.

Hey, I'm not sure if anyone ever actually reads this subforum, but this should be relevant to all of you good people on the Paizo forums: recently a boardgame called Star Traders was Kickstarted and, you know, just managed to hit funding. I'm not really here to talk about the game, because it's not really my thing. What I'm here to talk about is the art of the game, some of which seems oddly familiar.

So, basically, their artist photoshopped new heads over art he found floating around the internet and applied a bunch of filters on them to make them look more cartoony. That alone is pretty scummy and bad, but when this was brought up with the game's developers they doubled down on it and claimed that any similarity to his reference images was just due to the artist's style (lol) when even a cursory glance at the pictures used in the Kickstarter and the images they're copies of reveals that very little by way of modification has been done to the images.

Furthermore, the developers said that this issue having been brought to their attention they were going to change the images, which really sends a mixed message: on one hand they are saying that their artist just has a unique style and did nothing wrong, but they're still going to change the images? I don't get it.

Anyway, the reason this should be relevant to the interests of Paizonians is that one of the images being traced photoshopped used as a reference image is, quite clearly, by Eric Belisle, specifically a piece he made for the Pathfinder RPG.

EDIT: I hit submit too early but then realized I didn't actually have anything more to add so carry on I guess!

EDIT: Here's a pretty good side-by-side comparison: Star Traders art on the left, original Pathfinder art on the right!

Yeah, I can kind of tell. You know there are TotM systems that use abstracted "bands" and "zones"; you know there are grid-default systems that describe positions/distances in feet; and you see that 5E uses the latter terminology rather than the former and think you know what that means about how it's designed.

Meanwhile, I demonstrate that 5E's functionality is actually nearly identical to what you point to as the "abstracted" camp, differing only in terminology; and you won't even respond to the comparison?

Did you overlook it? Ignore it? Assume that since you already believe you know which camp 5E falls into, any claim to the contrary must be the result of "playing fast and loose with the rules" despite you not actually knowing those rules well enough to know whether I'm being fast and loose with them or not?

Let me lay it out one more time, as plain as can be:

By playing the 5E rules as presented in the PHB, it is functionally much more similar to abstracted/TotM systems than it is to grid-reliant systems.

If you think I'm wrong, then please refute that claim directly, with actual fact-based discussion of what I just said. Thanks.

I'm going to concede this discussion to you, not only because I agree with you on the point that in practice 5e runs perfectly fine when it's abstracted (it's more the minutiae that we seem to disagree on), but also because I've realized I'm doing what I've always hated, critiquing a game without actually having played it, something which I ran into a lot when I still used to play 4e. I'm sorry, I should've reflected on that before I got into this discussion. I hope I didn't seem too much of an ass.

And yeah, I do realize that in practice 5e probably runs a lot like a more abstract combat system, as this is my experience with the systems I mentioned in my post (BECMI, AD&D, Rolemaster). So, it's a fair cop.

Bluenose wrote:

Having seen people who had't played D&D before going through a module and the rules, I very much suspect that the default assumption is that the 5' grid and the movement speeds and ranges and defined areas of effect mean something and are meant to be used. Certainly their response was, "I can't keep track of all this in my head." And if WotC really wanted people to not bother with a grid, there are much better ways to make TotM easy than to provide a lot of rules that work best with a grid and then expect you to ignore them while providing no alternatives to letting the GM handle it.

I'm confused. You say there's an assumption that "the 5' grid" means something and is meant to be used, but there is no 5ft grid in the PHB. So what is it you're saying means something and is meant to be used?

Similarly, you say the same about movement speeds and ranges and AoEs, but none of those things require a grid at all. Speeds and ranges are entirely linear, requiring nothing but knowing how far away the destination/target is, which is easy as pie in TotM. AoE templates are presented with the plain-English meanings of "cone" and "cylinder" and so forth, with visual examples being basic 3-D drawings rather than square-based templates. How do the AoE rules in any way suggest the need for a grid?

You mention "provid[ing] a lot of rules that work best with a grid and then expect you to ignore them while providing no alternatives". Which rules are you talking about? I don't remember any rules in the PHB that work best with a grid. I don't remember anything that I would need to "ignore" in order to go gridless. In the PHB sitting on my desk, using a grid is explicitly a variant alternative, not the baseline assumption. So what rules are you talking about? Can you be specific?

I think Bluenose is not talking about the grid explicitly but the fact that 5e measures everything in 5-foot increments.

Like, the moment you start measuring things in absolute distances, distance and relative position become important. Otherwise you're going to have arguments about how Steve's character could totally fit all those goblins into the area of his fireball and that's not how I imagined it, dude, how about you just, like, draw this situation out so we know where everything is relative to each other?

So, it's not like 5e absolutely requires a grid and it certainly doesn't have as many rules that interact with the grid as 3.PF and 4e, but the big point is that it still deals with absolute distances (instead of abstract distances which I'll get to shortly) which means that a visual representation is the easiest and most unambiguous way of modeling the situation.

Like I said above, 5e could work as an abstract Theater of the Mind game if the rules were actually built like that. A lot of new games do this: Fate has combat divided into zones, some of which might be connected, some of which might not. You can punch a dude in the same zone as you, shoot a dude who's in an adjacent (or with the right abilities and equipment even further) zone, and if the enemy's in an adjacent zone and the edge between the zones is on fire you can run from your zone to their zone to punch them but you need to roll a test to avoid being burned by the fire.

Fantasy Flight's Star Wars RPGs use abstract range bands, which are basically punching range, close enough to throw a rock at, pistol range, and so on. 13th Age by Pelgrane Press (which is very close kin to D&D) has a similar system, with the distances being engaged, nearby and far. It even deals with the fireball situation pretty elegantly: when you throw your fireball at a mess of enemies you'll be able to catch 1d3 of them in the fireball, or you might want to gamble and cast it recklessly, getting 1d3 more enemies in the blast but potentially hurting your allies as well.

Of course visual representation helps keep track of things like range bands and so on in those games, but when you're playing 13th Age the moment you tell your player "The orc shaman is far away, the berserker and the grunts are nearby, between you and the shaman" you immediately know what you can do in that situation and what'll happen if you cast fireball on the berserker and the grunts (you'll probably catch most of them in the blast!) or if you try to run towards the shaman (you'll run into the berserker and the grunts in the middle!).

Bringing this back to 5e, supposedly 5e is supposed to be run the same way, without really caring about absolute distances, but everything about the design and its reliance on measuring everything in 5-foot increments runs counter to this.

When I run something like D&D these days (usually B/X or something) I sprinkle advantage and disadvantage over it liberally. It's actually fundamentally easier in older editions than 3e and 4e, because there aren't all that many circumstance bonuses going around, and when there are they're usually pretty huge (for an example, the Thief gets +4 on attacks that come from behind, which is almost perfectly represented by Advantage).

Similarly, I use Disadvantage to replace miss chance, whether from concealment or incorporealness or whatever. Miss chance in 3e/PF always felt like a bit of a cheat: no matter how well I just rolled, there's a flat chance that I'll fail simply because the GM rolled some dice behind the screen and said "Actually that hit is a miss now." Even knowing that I have to use the lower result of two dice, Disadvantage feels a lot less cheaty simply because I get to add my relevant modifiers on both dice.

Wait, so you're the DM in this case?

Look, if you don't like 5e but your players are insistent on it it's okay to talk about it with them and say "Look, I get that you like 5e, but it's just not my game, I'd rather run Pathfinder if it's okay with you." You'll save yourself a lot of trouble that way: you won't be stuck running a game you don't like, and since your friends seemingly want to play 5e they might not be receptive to your ideas of house-ruling it into something more like 3.5.

Like, if they insist on 5e then it's not like you're under duress to run it? I mean, let's be frank, if you end up grudgingly agreeing to run a system you really don't enjoy, it's not going to be a good experience for you and might actually sour the game for your players as well. No gaming is always better than bad gaming, and this sounds like you're headed straight to bad gamingsville simply due to pressure on you to run a game you don't enjoy.

Tell your old group you're not really enthused about the idea of running 5e, they might find someone else to run it for them, and meanwhile keep looking for those people who actually want to play Pathfinder. It'll be a win/win for all parties involved.

What the hell happened O.o

Dreams.

Dreams happened.

Looking at those successees the DEISGN had to do 2 things differently:-

* Emphasize Paizo Pathfinder Community 1st
* Not go after the PvP Combat mmo crowd - wrong crowd to go for to create a community based product with Pathfinder brand IP.

But that's sort of my point: compared to the sort of numbers you need to sustain a healthy MMO community the section of the Pathfinder community that is also interested in playing an MMO (nevermind the type of MMO) is really small. Even if you go after just the Pathfinder community there's only so many people in that community who really absolutely want a Pathfinder MMO, and those numbers are simply too small to sustain any kind of MMO community.

And that's pretty much the crux of the matter: no matter the technology or design you've got, it's pretty much nothing unless you've got the players. The sort of numbers that you'd need to sustain a healthy community in Pathfinder Online are simply unfeasible, especially since, as I said, Pathfinder as a brand does not have a lot of recognition outside of the tabletop RPG market.

I know hindsight is 20/20, but I think the failure of Pathfinder Online to get off was not due to technology (although that did play a part) but even more inherently one of concept.

Let's be frank: MMORPGs already have to compete among themselves for customers. Pathfinder Online's problem from the outset was that it targeted itself towards the segment of potential MMORPG players who also had an interest in Pathfinder. Even though Pathfinder is a big name in tabletop RPGs, that particular segment of the market is still really tiny. Pathfinder as an RPG doesn't have the same amount of name recognition outside of the tabletop market as D&D does, and even D&D has struggled in the MMO market. While DDO and Neverwinter have both found their comfortable niches in the MMO market, neither really took the market by storm. If the biggest name in tabletop RPGs can't make it big in the MMO market, what hope did Pathfinder ever have?

And this really is the root of the problem: MMOs, whether themeparks or sandboxes, live and die with their community. Actually, I'd say that it's even more of an issue with sandboxes, because when you're given a wide open sandbox to play in, a lack of a large community only emphasizes the fact that the sandbox is actually just full of sand and doesn't have any toys in it.

There is potential in a sandbox MMO, but Pathfinder Online was always marketed towards Pathfinder players first and MMO players second. This is pretty clear when one looks at the Kickstarter rewards for Pathfinder Online's two crowdfunding runs: while some of them offered in-game benefits, there were also many things offered in those Kickstarters that were only of benefit to you if you were already invested in the tabletop RPG.

I mean, beyond the name Pathfinder, what did PFO offer to sandbox MMO players that other games weren't promising? The only big name attached to this game was that of Ryan Dancey, and most people outside of tabletop RPG circles only know him as that guy who worked on EVE Online for a while. There were no big names on display who had any credits for working on MMORPGs in the past, so what was there really on offer to the crowd who should've been the game's primary target?

Pathfinder as an intellectual property and a game has its strength in adventures with really well written narratives and a world that has really sparked the imaginations of tabletop players. Pathfinder Online leveraged none of those strengths, instead focusing on a wide and empty swathe of Golarion. It lacked all of the color of Pathfinder.

Given the fact that the potential market was already small enough as it was and the fact that the game never really leveraged the strengths of the IP it was based on, in hindsight it might have been better for Pathfinder's first foray into the video game market to have been a single-player RPG in the style of the classic Infinity Engine games like Baldur's Gate. Sure, they couldn't have been able to replicate the mechanics of the tabletop game one-for-one because of limitations in the OGL (and I would actually argue that this would've been a good thing, because simply copy-pasting tabletop RPG mechanics into a video game is actually dumb and bad), but that would've been secondary: Pillars of Eternity proved that you could make a game that felt like a spiritual successor to those games without aping all of their mechanics.

Or I don't know, I might just be talking out of my ass, I never invested in this game beyond checking the news on it for developments (man, that was a wild ride), and as I said, hindsight is 20/20, but everything about this project just seems really weird retrospectively.

This whole "group comes first" business feels odd to me... I read the examples of play in 1st edition, where the talking was between the DM and the lead character, with the others only rarely getting even to talk. It struck me that this is wargaming. For fantasy stories and all other such things, we have an individualistic narrative, and I doubt many can, and are willing to, go beyond that. Simply put, the group is not priority one, and I don't think it should be.

What you have to understand that RPGs pretty much developed from wargames. It was a group activity where your group was pretty much a military squad going into a dungeon to overcome the obstacles therein while trying to keep the casualties to a minimum. Each group had designated positions like the caller (the one who relays the group's actions to the GM), mapper (the one who maps the GM's description of the dungeon) and probably other functions as well, such as the treasurer, someone who keeps notes of monsters and their abilities, and so on.

The playstyle was also completely different from modern adventuring: you were there to beat the dungeon that the GM threw at you. There was no separation of combat, exploration, and roleplaying encounters, because all of those things were seen as properties of what roleplaying was at the time. Most players didn't identify with their characters in a sense of having to immerse themselves with their character's mindset, characters were pretty much playing pieces. The fact that a lot of memorable characters from Gary's original group had jokey names (including Melf, who got his name from the fact that he was a Male Elf, and Rary was named so that once he would reach 3rd-level his player could retire him as Medium Rary) also shows that not a lot of players thought much of their characters as personas.

A lot of the stuff we consider roleplaying these days (including play-acting our characters and immersing ourselves in their personalities) only arose after players from non-wargaming backgrounds started playing D&D, and as they became designers and writers for D&D the game became less focused on "fantasy military squad dungeon adventures" and more on something larger in scope.

Obviously I'm generalizing and painting in broad brushstrokes here, because even the very first iteration of the game had the implication that a high level character would retire and build their own keep, but the game was completely different in tone from the way most people regard the act of roleplaying these days.

To me the most obvious change would be to change the name of the "Daring-do" deed to "Derring-do."

https://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/daringdo.html

That sounds legit amazing. BECMI is one of my favorite iterations of D&D and love what little I've seen of the Mystara Gazetteers. It'd be great to see this come to life so I'd have a setting for my future Basic D&D-a-like games straight out of the box.

Also, there's no mention of halflings in that post. My favorite B/X clone, Adventurer Conqueror King, has no halflings. Seems like a match made in heaven. (Oh my god, to play ACKS in a world of airships would be boss.)

I don't think it's really a system concern. I've had AD&D sessions entirely without combat. It's mostly a matter of the kind of plots the GM is designing, and the kind of game the players want to be in.

I both agree and disagree: while you can definitely run D&D without it revolving around combat, the very fact that the majority of the rules volume in pretty much all versions of the game is dedicated to combat rules pretty clearly says that the game has a combat focus. You can absolutely run games of social intrigue and manipulation in D&D, but the system itself provides very little support for those activities beyond binary pass/fail skill/ability checks and/or reaction rolls.

And that actually raises an interesting question: what is Time's Memory specifically looking for in terms of a game that doesn't revolve around combat? There is a lot of ground to be explored outside of combat, like exploration and survival, courtly intrigue and espionage, diplomacy and trade, and investigation and discovery just to name a few. The thing is, coming from a viewpoint informed by D&D we tend to lump all the latter non-combat activities under one huge umbrella, simply because D&D (and a lot of other RPGs for that matter) have portrayed the situation as "Rules for Combat" and "Rules for Everything Else."

That said, when you say you want a game that doesn't revolve around combat there's a lot of systems around that can support activities outside of combat with rules focused towards specific activities. To name a few:

The Burning Wheel has the Duel of Wits system, which can be used to model debate and negotiation. The game does have a very detailed combat system, but it's one of those systems you can opt to only use if it becomes really important to find out the result of the combat blow-by-blow. You could easily run a game of medieval fantasy intrigue using The Burning Wheel never having to touch its tactical combat system and the game's system would support the intrigue and politics beyond it being just a simple pass/fail skill check.

Mouse Guard uses a simplified version of The Burning Wheel's system, and while it's a game where combat can happen by my understanding it's more about travel and exploration. Can't talk about how much focus the game's rules actually give to these activities, since I haven't actually read it.

Fate is not so much a system as it is a toolkit, and you can model almost any activity with its system. The game has a number of layers to its mechanic, and depending on the sort of game you're going for you could choose to use the more detailed mechanics for what you want to focus on. Say you want to run a game of crime-scene investigation with next to no combat, you might say that "Okay, physical combats will just be handled as a simple contest where the winner gets what they want, whether it's to get away or to catch whoever they're trying to get, but actually investigating the crime scene will be an extended contest requiring a number of successes with your investigative skills before you find what you're looking for, and interrogating witnesses will be handled through the combat system but mainly through trying to deal mental stress to the target."

Monsterhearts is my guilty pleasure: it's based on emulating a genre that I hate (teenage monster melodrama in the style of Twilight, Buffy, Charmed, etc.) but the system is just so good at supporting that particular genre that I love it. Also, it's really fun to play a stupid teenager whose main concerns are petty high school politics and gazing wistfully at the cutest boy/girl in class. The game does allow for physical combat, but it's not really the game's main focus: most of the game is about exploring teenage life, the struggles of growing up, and not quite fitting in, and a lot of the mechanical weight in the game is given to playing games of teenage drama by gaining emotional leverage on other people and pulling their strings. Okay, you still play as werewolves, vampires, witches and such, but you're still playing stupid petty teenagers who are really volatile and unsure of themselves, and the game's system does a great job of supporting that kind of play (even though it might not be to everyone's tastes, understandably).

Also, since somebody mentioned Call of Cthulhu, I need to mention Unknown Armies. Unknown Armies is basically post-modern Call of Cthulhu. There's magic in the world, but it doesn't flow from mystical alien entities, but from human consciousness itself. It's mostly focused around perfectly normal people getting involved with the occult (which is really, really weird in this game) and eventually going insane as a consequence, while gaining more power through their insanity. It's got probably the best insanity system of any RPG out there, and it's very much meant to be a game about paranormal investigation rather than combat: the game's section of combat rules actually begins with a list of things you should consider doing before you get into combat, and for a good reason: combat is very deadly and ugly in the game. The game also has a very clear theme of agency: while in Call of Cthulhu humans are pretty much victims, beneath the notice of the eldritch monstrosities that are actually in charge of the universe, in Unknown Armies humans run the show and have full agency, and that makes it all the more scary. "You dedicated yourself to a magical discipline that requires you to develop an unhealthy obsession for something, and it's all on you! You can't blame it on anyone other than yourself, you were the one who could've said 'No, maybe I shouldn't do this,' but you still did it. YOU DID IT."

I think another important (although slightly unrelated) issue as far as portrayal and representation goes is just how closely will Goblinworks want to adhere to the almost standard appearance of female armor in MMORPGs.

I'm talking about stuff like how in many MMORPGs, the same suit of armor will look dramatically different on a male avatar and a female avatar. I'm not even talking boob-plate (which is it's own can of unrealistic and verisimillitude-destroying worms), but of the fact that a perfectly ordinary suit of chainmail suddenly turns into a two-piece bathing suit when worn by a female avatar.

And seriously? In the year of our lord 2012, that sort of pandering to the male audience shouldn't take precedence over parity and fairness in representation.

I read it waiting for the funny to start...

Perhaps if you put in <laugh here> tags?

I guess you have to understand where the satire is coming from.

Pretty much any time there's a new edition of a popular game coming out and the designers intend to streamline the system, a segment of the gaming population reads "streamline" as "dumb down for stupid babies." A part of this mindset comes from simple resistance to change, but there's also a degree of a false sense of intellectual superiority to it. ("They said they're changing the rules so that casting a spell no longer requires you to triangulate the exact positions of each of the four elemental planes and to roll on four different charts. Well, we're smart enough to use those rules and they're not all that complicated, so they're just dumbing down this thinking man's game!")

It was the most apparent when 4e came out, but the same criticisms were fielded against 3e when it came out. I recall a particularly vitriolic blog post from someone who was of the opinion that 3e was nothing but a money-making scam from WotC with the intent of getting a bunch of stupid kids who couldn't understand the beauty of THACO and Save vs. Wands to play the game. Also, it was tabletop Diablo 2 or something.

The Cracked article is written as an over-the-top satire of that mindset, with demands to make the game more unapproachable and complicated than ever, like the way it should be.

Also, what's up with all this resistance to Undercommon in the game? For an intellectual like myself, it wasn't all that hard to learn that completely unnecessary language. Why do you guys want them to dumb down the game?[/smugness]

One of the positive outcomes of the Slayer theme I can see is that, if they keep using hit points as an encounter-scaling tool like they've implied, the Slayer will be able to reduce some of the grind of fighting enemies with lots of hit points by being able to deal at least some damage every round.

A far better solution is to say that a miss is a miss, and damage can't be done on a miss.

It's very simple and it doesn't violate common sense.

But then again, in a system where a "hit" may be a bunch of blows that don't connect but only tax the enemy's stamina and ability to reliably dodge blows and a "miss" may actually connect but just not make a scratch, as is the case with a system where AC and HP are as abstract as they are, what doesn't violate common sense?

To me, dealing damage on a miss only builds upon the already abstract nature of the combat mechanic in a way that breaks immersion no more than hit points that represent everything from physical resilience to luck and ability to turn a blow into a scratch and armor class that represents everything from ability to avoid blows to how much protective gear you're wearing AND how thick your skin is.

Besides, the Slayer theme is the only exception to the rule of "no damage on a miss" within the game that we know of. If dealing damage on a miss stays within the realm of one feat granted by one theme, I don't really think it's that bad.

I mean, beyond fireballs, dragon breath, burning hands and other area of effect attacks dealing damage on a miss, obviously.

EDIT: Really, the only thing that a hit in D&D represents is that "the opponent takes damage." The only thing that a miss represents in D&D is "the opponent doesn't take damage." HP only represents "how much damage you can take." Beyond that, damage can be anything from a minor scratch, forcing the enemy to go on the defensive, loss of stamina, loss of divine favour, and decapitation, depending on the circumstances as is appropriately narrated by the DM.

Well, one of the immediate implications of things being more up to DM fiat is that it discourages players from gaming the system, which I see as one of the immediate consequences of a rule set with hard and fast rules.

I've personally come to realize, having started with 3e and having mostly played 3.5, that a system that sets things in stone in the system causes players to start playing the system above the game. Players will rarely come up with novel solutions to situations when the system comes with prepackaged implications and rulings for pretty much every situation under the sun. Such a system also reduces the DM's role to an arbitrator of rules, the guy who makes sure that all the rules are being followed.

In running Labyrinth Lord I've come to realize that a system that has fewer rules set in stone players will often come up with solutions to overcome challenges outside of what the rules have to offer. While this could be seen as a bug (i.e. there aren't enough rules to cover all the things players might want to try out, so they'll try them out to see how the DM deals with them), I see it as a feature: a system that has room for improvization inspires out-of-the-box thinking and creative problem-solving, both of which I find that more modern, hard-coded systems don't really encourage.

Basically, it comes down to the old-school "rulings" vs. new-school "rules" philosophy. I find that both styles can be supported by the same set of rules, but it's much easier to build hard and fast rules on top of a loose set of guidelines (through, say, rules modules) than it is to strip a hard and fast set of rules into a system that supports more improvization. Because of this I find that in any system it would be better to provide a loose set of guidelines before giving a number of (optional) absolute rules. That way people who enjoy a more DM-reliant game can have their game without all the extra work required to strip the game to its basics.

EDIT: Also, I don't really understand why you take up computer games in your post. If anything, computer games are representative of a genre where there is absolutely no room for improvization or working outside of a hard and fast set of rules. I understand what you're saying about not knowing the rules in a computer game, but at least mostly there is some transparency in computer games that you at least know what the implications of whatever you may attempt in the game are within the system built by the programmers.

EDIT #2: Related to your point about not knowing the rules; one of my best role-playing experiences was a game of Call of Cthulhu that I played in where our GM kept our sanity scores out of our sights, so we couldn't game our characters' loss of sanity. He instead narrated our characters' loss of sanity as hallucinations, forcing us to make perception rolls even when there was nothing to see there, and so on. The effect was positively disconcerting and the game was one of the most horrific experiences of my life in a good way. None of that would've been achieved if we, as players, would've been able to see all of the moving parts of the game. The point is that in a game about dangerous adventures like D&D, you don't really get an immediate sense of danger and risk if you already know the odds of succeeding at everything from the get-go.

That said, D&D:Next may have arrived a little late for our group. I've recently discovered Swords and Wizardry and I think that's going to end up being my system of choice for the next few years, at least.

I have a similar sentiment, except with Labyrinth Lord in place of Swords & Wizardry. While I like a lot of what I'm seeing in D&D Next, I'm not sure if it's novel enough to pry me away from Labyrinth Lord.

Still, if I ever get it in my head to try playing a "modern" iteration of D&D, I will strongly gravitate towards D&D Next over Pathfinder, for many of the reasons others have expressed: the game's insistence on greater DM empowerment coupled with no need for a battle-mat really speaks to the old-school nut in me.

At the risk of sounding like a total heel, I'm so tired of a small and overly vocal group of gamers wanting to make fun games more complicated than they really need to be. If you really need a system that covers every little thing in verisimilitude, then please, just go play FATAL and stop ruining everyone else's fun.

I don't think there's any need to suggest that anyone EVER even look at FATAL, beyond reading one particularly good review of it on RPG.net.

Besides, I hear HârnMaster is very crunchy and verisimilar without being a crime againts humanity.

RE: modules. I think their line of thinking is more along the traditional lines, but in addition to that they have talked about trying some more novel things with modules. For an example, campaign modules, that are basically optional sets of rules that you can use to alter the feel of your campaign ever so slightly (campaign modules they've mentioned include low-magic, where cantrips and orisons become 1st-level spells, and high-magic, where all characters get access to a couple of cantrips/orisons). So, modules are not just going to be "Here's a new subsystem and a bunch of classes that make use of it."

I can actually see them doing lots of interesting things with modules, provided they run with this idea wholeheartedly. For an example, an idea that struck me yesterday that could be possible as a rules module would be monster themes: basically like themes for PCs, these could be used to turn the average mook into a different type of creature with a simple template, without having to go through the various steps of monster customization. So, if you wanted to turn an orc footsoldier into a more brutish, heavy-hitting type, you'd just give the orc the Brute theme, make the necessary adjustments and be done with it.

At least I hope they do that with monsters, because a simple system of minor templates that can be added on top of creatures to modify them on the fly would be terrific.

We don't bring up "Stormwind Fallacy" rants in discussions on Storyteller.

Clearly you haven't heard of Lupus Stargazer Ahroun.

Just kidding. I mostly agree with your points, except for the fact that D&D is, by far, not the most crunch-heavy system on the market. I think that D&D gets weird looks both from players of crunchy, rules-heavy systems (like Rolemaster, HERO and others) and more story and interaction-based systems (like Storyteller and Amber) simply due to its position as the most popular game. The logic being that if it's popular it's because it caters to dumb people, therefore it's dumb.

I don't agree with this assessment myself, but I think there's some truth to the fact that D&D is by far the most by-the-numbers traditional RPG property on the market. It doesn't help that D&D is quite slow to pick-up on modern game design. (D&D got a unified task resolution system in, what, 2000? And only now, with Next, are we seeing some manner of mechanic for story-based benefits for characters beyond "make something up based on your background story." Neither of which are examples of novel game design, except in D&D.)

Looking at the playtest rules, I think Next has a simple enough framework to at least make converting adventures into it simple, with monsters mainly requiring some eyeballing. Feats and classes, however, I'm not certain of. While the Cleric and Wizard look very much like their 3.5 versions, the Fighter and Rogue are quite dramatically different.

Also, as far as feats go, the feats that the pregen characters get are quite different from standard 3e and 4e feats. Most 3e and 4e feats are numerical bonuses to certain things, while Next feats, based on the pregens, seem to be "Completely new stuff for you to do!"

Which is actually an approach that I vastly prefer to both 3e and 4e. I think character customization should be about gaining more options, not about shifting the math around.

Runequest and GURPS players generally don't hang out with D&D players on forums. Even on RPG.net there is a separate forum for D&D players.

I think it's got at least something to do with the mentality that D&D, being the most popular RPG, is baby's first RPG. It's often not stated as such, but I assume there is a bit of elitism on the part of players of non-D&D systems towards D&D players, stemming from the idea that "At least we don't play D&D."

I can actually attest to this phenomena: I started role-playing with MERP and Rolemaster, and even though I'd never played D&D it was somehow ingrained in my mind as a less refined RPG than the obviously superior Rolemaster system that we used. I mean, D&D didn't even have critical hit charts and task resolution tables!

I like it as a way to make fringe weapons viable parts of the game. One could extend the idea to particular cultures using odd weapons without being mechanically disadvantaged.

Absolutely. It's a simple way to make certain weapons more advantageous to certain races without having to resort to 3.5's and 4e's exotic weapons, which I saw rarely used beyond the dwarves always wielding dwarven waraxes for greater damage if they were proficient in martial weapons.

I hope this is an indication that exotic weapons in general are history. Good riddance, spiked chains and double swords. You won't be missed.

Less math is always good. I play to have fun and roll dice, not to do algebra or math, like i'm in school again, or worry about statistics and what my chances are with this or that mechanic. I'm really impressed with alot folks around here ability to break the game down into percentiles and bar graphs and complex math formulas, but that's just not playing a game to me. Therefore, I highly enjoy the advantage/disadvantage rules. I also like the very much so stripped down list of conditions and how hardly any of them give a (+/-) modifier....just 2 or 3 sentences that says what happens and usually disadvantage.

Yeah, the advantage/disadvantage rules at least reduce the amount time spent subtracting and adding modifiers. Time spent not adding up modifiers for various circumstances is always good in my book.

Also, to give an alternate viewpoint: I love statistics and probability, and one of the reasons why I love the advantage/disadvantage system is that, in addition to reducing the amount of subtraction and addition you need to do in game, it ever so subtly alters the probability distribution to make a part-time math geek like myself absolutely giddy. ;)

I don't see edition wars ending. But what I see as a hilarious possible consequence of D&D Next's modular design is module wars within the D&D Next playerbase.

Man, I'm really torn on the OGL. On one hand, it produced awesome stuff like Pathfinder, Mutants & Masterminds, Arcana Unearthed/Evolved, Fantasycraft (and its predecessor, Spycraft) and Conan d20, but on the other hand we got Deadlands d20 and other d20 conversions of games that didn't need any converting.

Also, as far the industry is concerned, the OGL was, at the time, completely without precedent and even today, aside for a handful of indie games (including Spirit of the Century/Fate) and a few OSR games (OSRIC and Labyrinth Lord spring to mind), very few RPGs have any kind of licence for third party support. Paizo and WotC are the only two major corporations with any kind of licences for third party material for their games. Fantasy Flight doesn't have any kind of licence for producing third party material for their extremely successful 40k RPGs.

Theoretically, there is nothing preventing anyone from making such material, because game mechanics can't be copyrighted, but at the same time one would have to really skirt around the fact that the material is compatible with, say, Dark Heresy, by using prose like "Compatible with role-playing games set in the dark future of the fortieth millenium" and watching out not to use any words and phrases that would be considered Product Identity. (i.e. no Space Marines, Eldar, Imperial Guard, or pretty much anything)

But yeah, lots of people into D&D seem to think that because 3e was the biggest game at its time and it had an open licence that such a thing is the norm in the industry, and then denigrate WotC for dropping support for the OGL with 4e. The thing is, WotC has the GSL which, while not as open as the OGL, is a lot more than what most major players in the industry have as far as third party support is considered.

That quote doesn't really matter, because at no point have they said that those core elements would be the only ones present in the playtest.

The first playtest round is testing the very basics of the core of the system. That core does not consist only of the things that are common to all the various editions of D&D, but of a number of things that have been chosen by the designers to be implemented as core. As such, you will find some nods to 4e mechanics that have made it into the core of the system.

Had they just gone for things that are consistent with all editions of D&D, we wouldn't even have skills, because they simply didn't exist in certain versions of the game outside of Thief skills. Also, no feats. Even some of the classes would be a bit iffy. There's no Wizard or Fighter class in OD&D (they were called Magic-User and Fighting-Man respectively). Even the Rogue/Thief would be something of a borderline case, because Thieves didn't exist in the very first iteration of D&D, the only classes being Fighting-Man, Magic-User and Cleric.

As far as dealing damage on a miss goes, if you look at the Fighter's character sheet you'll see that the ability is labelled as a feat that comes from their theme. Dealing middling damage on a miss (I mean, the damage is just your ability modifier) is well in line with some of the abilities granted by feats in 3e and 4e. So, not all characters will have that, just characters that picked that particular theme and thus received that one feat to go with it.