alexandraerin | Notes all over the place.

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Notes all over the place.

Hey, if you're looking for a good cause to give to this holiday season, there are a couple of them linked to in this article about the problems facing women returning home from combat duty overseas. Highlighting this is not meant to diminish the reality that all our armed forces personnel and veterans need support, but so much of the existing infrastructure and good will is directed towards "our boys in uniform". Our boys are not alone, and in the midst of insurgency and guerrilla warfare, there is no "front line" to keep women away from.

I'm tempted to say something about the ETA of me having a working desktop computer again, but I don't want to jinx anything. I've run out of how many times bitten and how many times shy I am at this point. If I don't have a working computer on hand at the end of the week, I'll come up with alternative arrangements for some of the things I've been putting off.

Random note: now is a great time to get into 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons... they're offering a limited release holiday bundle of the first two players' handbooks at $34.95. One of the more common laments from people who thought the new edition looked cool was that several classes that were core under 3rd Edition weren't present at launch. With PHB 1 and 2, you get all the 3E core classes except Monk, plus several nifty original ones.

The next PHB that comes out (I think in March?) is going to be a major game-changer. The test version of the rules it includes for making hybrid character classes are already accessible online and through the character creator. I love the game as it is, but I think this upcoming release is going to really cement its place and bring its full potential into fruition. Buying the bundle now could save you money in the long run if you think you might get into the game eventually... you can avoid having to buy every splatbook that comes out and still get all the various foo for your characters through the character generator, but having the core PHBs actually on hand adds a lot to the experience of learning the game and making characters, in my opinion.

The Q&A is more work than I expected... I didn't expect as many responses, and I didn't realize how many I had when I started compiling them. Don't be fooled by the fact that the first two updates both spanned about three letters... the characters' names and the number of questions per character are far from evenly distributed across the alphabet. The whole thing is actually a little under half done. In case people are curious about why I included the "Dear Amaranth, why do you suck so much?" questions, it's because I felt the character deserved a chance to answer them in her own words. I also had a feeling that posting them would bring her supporters... who often get drowned out in the comments... out of the woodwork.

My day started off very nicely today, despite a lack of sleep the night before: I got a confirmation/reminder email from Priceline.com about my flight to Maryland, which leaves two weeks from today.

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My main problems (2) with 4th Ed. are pretty simple:
1) Even the warrior classes have lots of special abilities with (what appears to a beginner to be) complicated rules governing their usage. In previous D&D, there was always a nice easy "starter" melee class - Fighter. All you had to do was focus on learning the basics of movement and combat. No flashy abilities (until later levels at least) and no worries about running out of energy, i.e. spells/day or stuff like that (*cough, cough* /per combat, /per day/ per adventure powers *cough, cough*)
4th Ed. is probably more balanced, but mainly just because all of the classes work very similarly, which while good and simple in some ways, is boring in others.
2) The Open Gaming License (at least on original release) was hugely nerfed from the 3rd and 3.5 edition OGL's, effectively shutting out 3rd-party publishers.

All that being said, there's lots of interesting stuff in 4th, just not enough for me to jump onboard yet.

One player's bugs is another player's features. I'd rather not play a game that reduces an entire heroic archetype to training wheels for newbies.

I say, why have one "starter" class? Why should newbies be relegated to something boring? Why should fighters be made obsolete by druids and wizards who can win any fight by showing up? To me, it makes more sense to make low-level play simple for everybody and allow them to grow into their abilities, as 4E does. The "loads of abilities" that you start out with are in fact four abilities, two of which are distinct in which they can be used at-will.

So basically every warrior class now has a choice between making *this attack* or *that attack* instead of saying "I ATTACK THE ORC!" every turn. There's a small learning curve involved in figuring out which of the staggering two attacks is best in which situation, but the HP scale makes the game forgiving towards mistakes.

The once-per-encounter and once-per-day powers are sparse at the low levels, so they don't really throw a curveball at new players... and they make the game more interesting for them by creating memorable moments in combat when they succeed or fail.

By the time the player has loads of powers to keep track of, they will have played through scores of combats, learning how each new power fits into their repertoire one by one.

And this is true for every character. Despite vast differences in how they actually handle due to the differences in what their powers do and how they interact with other abilities, each class is as simple to use at level 1. There is no "starter class" and there is no class that is made obsolete at higher levels of play and no class that blows the rest out of the water. I don't see what's boring about that.

And you're right that the OGL is not as expansive, but it doesn't shut out 3rd party publishers. It just limits what they can do to (in essence) creating new content that doesn't contradict or replace the canonical stuff. This makes sense to me... for 3E they were trying to create a generic and moddable system, for 4E they were trying to create a unique game with a distinct identity.

Argh!! There's a maximum comment length?!

I certainly see the points you're making in both of these replies. That being said...

I said "effectively" shutting out third-party publishers - not that I don't understand why it was done. I liked the generic moddable base - and there was no reason that they couldn't have included that with plenty of expanded, non-moddable, distinctly identifying stuff coming later. Except for the whole profit thing of course, and it's hard to blame a company for not following the money. I was just saying that it was one positive aspect of 3/3.5E.

I feel (and from some literature that I read online at the time of release, plenty of 3rd-party publishers feel) that the restrictions on 4E were too expansive to allow them to switch - at least not immediately - to the new system.

Like I said, I'm not saying you *can't* make 3rd-party content, just that it's much more limited. From my memories of looking at it, I would even call it crippling. Of course, 3rd-party content is almost never as good as official anyway, but it does still have value.

As to the "training wheels for newbies"... Fighters weren't just training wheels for newbies in 3E. They were power-houses, starting at level 1 and continuing through the progression.

Give me an intelligently-geared fighter, and I'll take out the wizard or druid of the same level and gear power, almost every time (with the almost part referring to me failing my fort or die save, and the always part referring to me killing them in the first or second round from massive damage.). Like I said, 4E is probably better balanced. That is a good thing.

But it would be nice if the balance didn't come at the expense of some old D&D standbys. I'll admit that some of the features sound interesting, and sure most fighters end of developing signature moves in anime over the course of their careers, but I'd prefer if it was an optional investment, not an assumed one. Like the feats for leap attack and such in 3E - those made for some very interesting character choices, but you could also invest in things with constant bonuses, but smaller one-round effectiveness.

Sometimes when I play, I have my mind primed for strategic casting. Sometimes when I play, my mind is too brain-dead from exhaustion for me to enjoy anything but rolling dice and watching stuff fall down. I know most people have those moments - and if they frequently coincide with your D&D schedule, it's nice to have a class available to fulfill that need to not make any choices other than what to hit next. (Like I presume Belinda feels in a battle)

I'm not saying that *all* warrior classes should be that way. But I think having one that is - or having the option to craft one that way - is a good thing, not a bad thing.

As long as it is neither over-powered nor under-powered either at end-game or in the beginning.

Which has been D&D's problem since the beginning, hmm? I know that balance has been a huge problem since 1E.

They started off saying that Fighters should be easier in the beginning but less useful in the end. They continued this line of thought in 2E.

Then 3E came along, and they thought that they fixed it by making Fighters have a steady power progression, without realizing that they nerfed the capabilities of magic with a poor magic defense (fort, ref, will) system.

I call it poor, because monsters ended up being designed to be hittable by a fighter of the correct level, but with enough hit points to survive a blow - which meant either more HD (which pumped all of their magic defense like crazy) or more Con (which pumped part of their magic defense like crazy, and weakened the stat pool for Str).

In 4E, they really tried to build the classes off similar and mostly equal templates (from the brief look I gave it), which would certainly be more balanced than the "Half-Giant Barbarian crushes Gnomish Sorcerer in the first round of combat" concept of gaming.

I wasn't trying to say that 4E didn't have it's perks - I even said originally "there's lots of interesting stuff in 4th" - I was just expressing that my main problems with it were not the same one you mentioned in your post.

It's certainly an interesting and different direction, and I think that the genre will grow from it, but I also hope that the "slugger" makes a reappearance.

And having a character that is only good at "the basics" of gameplay, but is FAR better at them then other classes, doesn't have to *just* be training wheels for newbies. But it can be a comfortable way for them to get into the game, while also being a refreshingly simple character concept for a veteran who's tired of slinging meteors or turning into trees and beasties.

Your experience of Fighters being powerhouses is very different from that of most people I know who played 3E, and I suspect it comes down to playing style. In a "dice battle" (start combat, roll until someone's dead), Fighters can devastate. The meme of spellcasters as the classes that render everybody else obsolete, though, is based in Batman-style play: you win the fight by being ready before it starts.

Yeah, the Half-Giant Barbarian could win the fight in one round, but what do you do if the fight's effectively over before that?

Either approach can be fun, but they're not what I'm interested in. What I like about 4E is that the battles are won and lost based not on what spells are prepared and cast before the battle starts or what you roll but on the tactical decisions made round by round. You will never win any but the easiest fights on autopilot... especially at higher levels, where by design monsters' base combat numbers scale up faster than PCs.

If the party is working together, not everybody has to think... when I'm not DMing, I usually end up in a leader role and part of what I end up doing is figuring out the strategy that the members of the party who would be the "sluggers" implement. We fought one battle where our Barbarian's player was half-asleep from driving all day. She was just "Who am I hitting this time?" It worked.

But you are right that resource management is not something you can get away from any more no matter what you choose, but I think it's still not all that complex, especially if you're playing with cards so you have a visual and tangible reminder of what you can choose from.

And yes, if you glance at them, the characters will seem to be very similar because all their abilities do fit into the same templates instead of being separate and unrelated subsystems. But actual play is very different, and in fact the character classes still vary considerably in their complexity. Wizards still have a vestige of spell preparation that means their resource management extends beyond combat. Arcane and Divine characters still tend to be more complex in their capabilities than Martial ones. Fighters are still towards the shallow end of the pool... though I won't deny that the shallow end is deeper than it was.

and there was no reason that they couldn't have included that with plenty of expanded, non-moddable, distinctly identifying stuff coming later

I feel like that's exactly what they did, though. They released a generic, expandable, easily moddable system: the d20 system. People have had years to play with it. Some people (see: Pathfinder) are still playing with it.

Then when that was established, they came out with a distinctly branded, more interdependent and less generic game that's built on that system (yes, 4E is still a d20 game).

I'm glad that the restrictions mean that new developers can't just start cranking out new material immediately... the game's pretty intricate compared to previous editions (I don't consider 3E to be "intricate"... it had a bunch of unrelated subsystems, with more ones coming out as they had to sell more splatbooks) and you really have to get to know it pretty intimately before you can create things that will work well with it.

In the time since it launched, the dev team has been very forthcoming with commentary about their design choices and with tips for people who are creating custom content. If a 3rd party developer cares about making sure their content "works" with the game then they have now had more opportunities to learn how, and if they don't... well, the official content has now had enough of a head start that they're unlikely to damage the brand.

Alright, alright! You've convinced me that I need to give it more of a chance - the next time I have $34.95 lying around - assuming the deal is still going on - I'll drop it on some 4E books. Maybe I can still make enough of a slugger that it won't be *too* big a deal.

Moving on to the OGL issues - apparently Wizards received enough complaints that they announced in Aug 2008 (according to Wikipedia) that they were revising the 4E OGL (called GSL). This was significantly after I'd read the old one, so my info is a bit out of date. I'll need to read the new one I guess =\ Hopefully it resolved some of the stifling issues.

PS - I don't see a 3rd-party developer with bad content actually damaging 4E. If you buy a bad remote for the Wii from a 3rd-party developer, do you think, "Man, Wii sucks" or "Man, should've bought from Nintendo - oh well"?

[no graphical or textual depictions of:](b) sexual situations, sexual abuse, pornography, gratuitous nudity of human or humanoid
forms, genitalia, or sexual activity;

*grumble, grumble,* no more manual of erotic fantasy *grumble, grumble*

I don't see it damaging 4E now, because they've had a couple of years to build up their own library of player content. Back when it was just the eight classes in the original PHB with only their original two builds, I feel that a truly open license would have encouraged developers to try to fill in the gaps with the 3E core classes that hadn't been put in the first PHB and equivalents to popular prestige classes and such and of course some players would have jumped on the opportunity to play their favorite classes... if the results were bad, some players might go "Oh, well, I guess we'll have to wait until we get an official Sorcerer or Bard"... but if the class looks cool on paper but breaks the game, I think some people would suspect the game is at fault especially if they don't have a lot of experience with the new version.

So what you're saying here is that, because the 4E was released before it had a "full" listing of core classes, that 3E could have damaged it? Doesn't that just mean Wizards should have waited to release 4E until they had a "full" listing? =p But yes, I realllly get this point, too. Oh well, guess I get to wait for student loans, and see if I can sway the wife to consider letting go of our shelf-full of 3.5...

I realize this comment is almost a month old, but I'm re-reading old entries and I must not have seen this comment the first time around.

No, what I was saying is that because the core classes at launch did not include all the same classes as were core in 3E, then 3rd party developers could have rushed to market with poorly thought out versions of those classes and damaged peoples' impression of the game.

(And to me, there are only four core classes that are mandatory. If you've got a Fighter, you've got a Rogue, you've got a Wizard, and you've got a Cleric, that's all you need to call it D&D.)

Whoops, that "3E" I wrote was supposed to be "3rd-party developers"

I'd say that half of how you play a slugger in the new game is how you make the character and the other half is... well, how you play them. When you pick your two at-will powers, pick one that's straightforward and focused on damage and think of that as your default attack. Any time you'd go "I attack the owlbear", you're going to be using that. For your encounter and daily powers, look for the ones that boil down to "hit hard" and then expend them against the toughest opponents to help take them out of the fight early on.

The Fighter is slightly less of a slugger as you define them because the formalization of the "meat shield" role into Defender adds tactical considerations, but compared to other Defenders their marking mechanic (the means by which they keep enemies engaged with them) is very simple. The Paladin is, in my opinion, slightly simpler than it was, due to the fact that it's no longer a Fighter/Cleric class but more of a pure warrior type. You can make a Paladin that does nothing but smite evil with a sword.

Strikers tend to be simplest because their role is "do a lot of damage quickly and bring the big guys down". Most of them have a mechanic that lets them do extra damage to one opponent, often tied to being the closest one to the target or the target being closest enemy to you, but since you generally attack the enemy you're closest to when you're on autopilot it's a pretty easy adjustment.

While they are Strikers, Barbarians are probably the class that underwent the biggest change in complexity. They're still very HULK SMASH in flavor, but the fact that they have so many different abilities that can trigger a charge or a second attack encourages you to think tactically from turn to turn, and the way Rage works gives them resource management concerns that most classes don't.

But they're great fun, especially as they (along with Druids in beast form) are one of the few classes that have a lot of powers that can be used with a charge. It was a Barbarian that caused us to observe that the division between ranged Strikers and melee Strikers is a false one: there are ranged Strikers and ranged Strikers who forgot to let go of the weapon.

So in other words, the Fighter is like the too-little, too-late Knight class was supposed to be in late 3.5 (PHB2)? I say too-little, because his crowd-control abilites were once agan based on the failure of a saving throw system >.>

That's certainly something that's needed doing in a play environment that regularly involves small dungeon rooms where the "mobs" can hit the wizardly types from round one, and could KILL them in the first round if it weren't for death-shy DMs. A mechanic of some type to prevent that is certainly needed so that DMs don't have to come up with reasons why the shiny warriors look tastier.

Lol @ the ranged striker stuff.

Heh, I'd wondered about the Amaranth inquisition.

Yeah. I find it easy to see where the people who are so harsh on her are coming from, but they tend to be just as judgemental as they think she is, when the come down on her so hard. I'm definately part of the Amy fan club overall.

I, on the other hand, find it hard to see where the people that were so harsh on Amaranth were coming from (see the comment from Amy in AE's Character Q&A post).

I have been a part of the Amaranth fan club ever since there was enough posted about her to 'flesh her out' into a person. (And it has nothing to do with her and I having the same nickname.)

Cool, I'll make a Fighter/Rogue/Magic-User/Bard/Monk/Ninja/Sage. I'll need someone to roll a Cleric/Druid/Paladin to keep me healed. Any takers?

The hybrid rules actually only cover two classes... though you can train into a third class using the existing 4E multiclass rules.

And if you were a Bard you could heal yourself. Bards are a Leader class in 4E, which I love... instead of being a weaksauce Fighter/Rogue/Wizard combo, they're bards: poets and tricksters and musicians who inspire and uphold their allies in combat while bringing their foes down through cruel wit and cunning prophecy.

Squeee!! Bards are decent now?! Hooray! I started a redesign of 3E rules when I saw the original 4E GSL, and Bards were one of the biggest things I hit, because originally they sucked except as a pure role-play character. Not that you *couldn't* do one effectively, but they certainly *were* weaksauce.

Yeah, the Bards are their own creature now and they better fit what I personally expect a Bard to be. For their attack powers, there's a mixture of implement (read: spell-like) and weapon powers to choose from, so you can go for the "dashing swordsman" or the spellcaster type, or mix and match between them. The Arcane Power supplement adds bows and prophecy to their repertoire. One of my favorite utility spells in the prophecy vein lets you roll 3 d20s at any point in an encounter and save the best result, which can then be switched for an ally's roll at a later point... that might not seem like much, but it usually means you can all but guarantee that someone in the party will hit with one attack, chosen by you. We've set up some pretty impressive chains of events to wrap up a battle based around that.

The implement-based attacks are a mixture of things that are all very distinctly bardic... one of my favorite PCs I've used carries no weapon, she insults her enemies to death.

(A Paragon tier feat, Arcane Admixture, lets you add a second damage type to any arcane attack... I used it to change her Vicious Mockery from psychic to psychic/fire... she cusses people out so hard they catch fire. It doesn't change the use of the spell directly that much, but fire damage is more often specifically useful than psychic damage so it's good mechanically to have... but I mainly took it for the image.)

All their attack powers are magic using Charisma for hit and damage bonus, even if they're weapon based, so you can switch between them with few optimization issues.

Bards are also the only class that can double (or triple, or quadruple, or so on) dip into the game's multiclass feats, retaining the "jack of all trades" feel. They can also take a feat to use Charisma for hit rolls with any other class's powers that they've acquired through multiclassing.

Outside of pure combat, Words of Friendship gives them a +5 to Diplomacy once per encounter, which combined with their Charisma generally makes for an impressive roll. A feat extends this to cover Bluff as well.

As a Leader class, they can heal twice per encounter using Majestic Word (think a rousing speech or words of encouragement bolstered by magic) and they can boost healing while the party is at rest if they play music.

The musician aspect is also highlighted with bardic rituals... Bards have a special subset of rituals that they can perform without expending costly reagents but which require the Bard to play music for the ritual's casting time.

*drool*

As for D&D, I haven't played it since it was AD&D (1st edition). The face-to-face gaming group I played with fell apart due to people moving off. I haven't even looked at any of the D&D products since then.

Besides, I spend so much of my on-line time IMing with friends that I probably wouldn't have time to play it.

Still, if you recommend it ... that makes it tempting.

I'm in the conceptual stage of development of an online gaming project that could be used as a medium for playing any pen-and-paper game (at least that's the goal), which would be nice for people who spend lots of their time online.

That being said, there's no need to wait. Apparently "Wave" has tons of role-playing groups that have already set up shop, so to speak. I've heard some good things, so if you're interested, you might want to check it out. You can probably come into one of the chat areas as an observer and get to watch some action to see what it's like. (I know that that's a functionality I'm going to add to my game engine, and I suspect those on Wave allow it.)

Well, I don't spend a lot of time on-line. It's just that what time I do spend on-line is usually chatting with friends.

Still, I may give "Wave" (whatever that is) a look. Is there an address for it?

It's google's latest visionary dream - they're hoping it'll eventually replace emails, even. Think of it as a mix between email, IM, and probably a few other concepts as well.

It's not released to the public yet, though, so you need an invite. I don't think they're hard to get, though - I have 25 to hand out, myself, so...

http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html

I was about to mention that. I've got a friend with an invite they've offered me, just haven't taken it out yet.

The invite thing is probably just to make you feel like part of an exclusive club, so you push it yourself. A rather ingenious marketing tactic if I'm right...

I was urged into it so did my own research, and that's where my info comes from, not from direct participation in it.

Nah, betatesting is betatesting - it still has kinks in it. The ingenuity lies in getting people to find all the bugs without being paid, except though the feeling of exclusivity inherent in taking part in the Next Big Ting first - and that is a pretty common betatesting ploy. The only marketing they need is "OMFG, it's Google! And it's revolutionary!" Those two snippets alone will get half the planets tech geeks' interests peaked. What more could you need?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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