I can’t tell, did you just badmouth Paranoia? That’s treason, dude.
Not really. Paranoia and D&D had two very different philosophies towards characters, IMNSHO.
In D&D a character was something you invested a lot of effort and thought into, as your alter ego for campaigns. You’d keep coming back to a favorite character time and time again. The sense of accomplishment for having a character succeed and survive was in direct proportion to the risks that one’s character took.
Contrast that with Paranoia where I’d never finished a single bloody adventure. (I use the word bloody with malice aforethought, btw.) Even with six clones I’d seen parties and adventures that never got out of R&D because they ran out of clones. And I’ve never seen a Paranoia campaign. You don’t get involved with a Paranoia character - you just use one to enjoy the setting and the free-for-all.
I actually have enjoyed both games, a lot. But I don’t think that D&D is going to be improved by removing the element of risk from one’s character.
I have played 3E in plain, text based online chat, sans maps or anything, in combat, with about twelve people and fifty monsters in one scene.
It ain’t that hard.
Why are the other systems easier to do combat in without a visual representation of the area?
A friend of mine just told em that the player’s handbook will not contain all of the base classes? That to have all the base classes you’ll have to buy another book? Is this true?
4th Edition was expressly written spread over multiple Players Handbooks and Dungeon Master’s Guides, as well as splatbooks (I’ve seen an Amazon entry for the first splatbook, due out in 4 months or so).
I speculate that they plan three PHBs and three DMGs, each focussing on a different “tier.” But that’s just my uninformed speculation.
Will they also have the ‘Directors cut’ and ‘Widescreen’ versions? And then later the ‘Dungeon Master’s Collection’ with resin bookends and a commentary by the writers?
Or maybe they’ll have ‘Booster packs’ where you don’t see which version of the book you paid $40 for until you open the wrapping. The books with the rules for magic items will be a rare.
I have heard of a Paranoia campaign. But that was because they got so good at killing each other they never got past breakfast. Eventually, they decided to work together (!) since they got bored with offing the party members. (!!)
Most of them are vastly less iron-bound about radiuses and distances and so forth. It virtually never comes up in most games. There’s rarely a need to know where exactly characters are located, and if the GM wants to vaguely sketch something you still don’t need a grid. And people tend to be much more inventive when they don’t have the flat, dull, featureless map grid in front of them.
When people don’t move in 5 foot incredments, and powers and abilities don’t offer pre-set bonuses specifically to halflings in a 10’ radius and humans in a 15’ radius, it’s not that important. The only big factor is range, and basically comes to melee range (where you can move up and attack someone in the same round), short ranged, and long ranged.
You sound pretty pissed off with that. You aren’t alone. I can’t keep up with it either.
Just so that you know, there will also be online content and toolboxes, available on a subscription basis.
I know about the splatbooks because Amazon lists them. About the additional core books, I’ve seen discussion on the WotC site, but haven’t got any specific cites, yet.
2nd Ed was an improvement on 1st in may ways. 3rd Ed was a vast improvement on 2nd. 4th compared with 3rd? I don’t feel the love. Not yet.
Well said. Especially when dealing with characters that love to improvise (e.g. Character: “I tie one end of the spool of silver wire to the hitching post and put on my ring of flying and fly up to hide in the rafters, tying off the other end of the wire, and then cast “heat metal” on the wire. How many of the imps are going to take damage when they fly into it when I try and push them with my wand of telekinesis?” DM: “Umm…rifles through 3.5ed books…”)
Exactly. Regarding Feng Shui, you never have to worry about exact distances to an enemy; if what you want to do is suitably cool, the GM will let you do it. In D&D, I’ll frequently have an utterly badass idea, but if I come up one square short of where I need to be and my dimension shift boots have no more charges, I’m screwed.
You can do D&D/D20 in a text chat, but it involves throwing out a lot of rules and fudging others, and then what’s the point of using D20 anyway?
It seems to me that a lot of things that were hard-wired into 3.X are left up to the DM’s discretion in 4E. I’ve read the PHB and many of the previews, and I don’t mind the vague definition of an encounter; it allows me to make a judgement call as is appropriate to the needs of the given adventure.
Define base classes. Different versions of D&D have always had different selections of classes in the PHB. The only truly “base” class missing in the PHB, in my opinion, is the Druid. However, I do think they’re trying to drive people to buy more of the books, and making more of them required. The selection of the powers in the PHB in some cases seem really limited. There are very few of certain kinds of magic items (less than 20 wondrous items, for example).
I’ve done this with D&D. I generall find people are more creative with the specific than with the general. If you describe a scene at the beginning of a battle as having a well ‘over there’, how many people are going to remember it 10 rounds in? But if that well is on the map, then people always know its there and can plan around t.
How do you know you’re close enough to move up and attack? How do you know your weapon is in range? These are all things that can be handled abstractly by D&D just as well. It works the same in any system. The player says ‘I’m gonna shoot him with gun, am I in range?’ and the GM says ‘No, you’ll have to move up.’ or ‘Yes, roll to hit’. This is on the GM, not the system. Every game I’ve played had some kind of details given for things like weapons: Range, damage, ammo count, whatever. I’ve never seen a game where all of these numbers are listed as ‘ask the GM’ or ‘whatever’.
There, fixed that for you. The rules are there so the DM doesn’t have to make judgement calls. That way everyone knows how things should work. Every single thing the players do shouldn’t require a GM decision. Yes, if the players do wierd things, and they will, the GM makes a call. It’s a poor GM who can’t, and has to rely on the books like that.
Attacks of Opportunity and Flanking are the major reason D&D3 is so much more position-driven than previous editions.
4E reportedly has AoOs, but I’m not sure about Flanking. It does, apparently, have a crapload of abilities that involve letting players change an enemy’s position or swap positions with a foe.
Yeah, if the players can get a +1, they’ll go for it every time.
But you can see this problem in more abstract games too. I’ve seen players do things to try to get advantages in situations. ‘I jump up on the table and attack him, do I get a bonus?’ At this point, if the GM says ‘Yes’, then the players all think that being higher than your target gives you a bonus, and will go for it when they can. Once they learn you can do things to get bonuses, they might start looking for bonuses everywhere. But now, instead of having a ruleset to define everything, it’s all spur of the moment calls by the GM which define things. Not the best situation.
Can’t believe I’m answering this (given that, you know, i haven’t actually played DnD at all yet :p), but according to the “4th Edition Quick Start Rules” in the copy of H1: Keep on the Shadowfell which Amazon just dropped on my desk, both are present:
And:
Also, for those asking about Encounters, here is the definition it gives:
These apparently take on two forms - Combat encounters (fight shit) and Noncombat encounters (deal with shit - e.g. puzzles, traps, skill challenges).
Except then that’s all they do. Yes, if you note something specific they pay attention to it. In my games, if the players want to grab a table in a barroom they can and will, because even when I don’t specifically draw things in, they can use their imagination and realize such things exist. They never do this if I draw a map beyond a quick layout sketch, because then their attention is focused on the map and only on the map.
Not quite. DnD is very, very strict about its ranges and so forth. Most games are not. More importantly, it’s even faster for the Gm to just say “you’re all at close range” rather than everyone having to count their distances and see if they can make a path of 5’ steps.
That’s extremely insulting. I ask that you tak that back.
Yes, the rules are nice for covering things, but the fact that would even say this tells me you are not reading. The situation described was ridiculous, absurd - and it might come up in any game. Who knows how much damage that would do? I don’t, and I don’t expect the game writers to know either! It’s a rulebook, not a completel description of all actions possible.
Which is one reason I disliked the spell system in 3rd edition* and 4th edition combat. It’s all about denying you the ability to do things in the former case and only allowing very specific things in the latter. Look, in 4th edition, you are not even allowed to pick up a handful of sand and toss into tomsebody’s eyes unless you are a Rogue with the right ability, and even then you can only do it once a fight! (And oddly, even if there is no dust around…)
- Specifically, I disliked the targetting rules, which were very strict and oftne made no sense. Plus, many of the spells were hamstrung or nerfed specifically to prevent anyone from using them creatively, which made me a very sad Bandit indeed.
No. The fact that you think a 3.5 DM would be caught speechless by this tactic and have no recourse but to look at his books is the insult. No game system is going to have this situation covered in it’s books. But somehow, GMs for other games would be able to come up with an answer no problem, but the 3.5 DM couldn’t? Why? 3.5 is a rigid absolute rules system yes. But only an idiot would run the game and not be able to make decisions on things not in the books. Hell, that applies to any game.
Now you’re getting into problems within the system itself. Yes, those rules as written seem ridiculous. They’re granting abilities with specific effects rather than defining actions. It’s a overly simplistic system. Anyone can throw dirt in an opponents face, but generally, only a rogue type is going to do this, and generally only in certain situations. Otherwise everyone would be walking around with bags of dirt, and goggles would be mandatory adventuring eq.
I’m not a huge fan of the magic system and think it could use some improvement too. I never liked the way the spell abilities seemed to be haphazardly defined. Some effects only occur in narrowly defined ways, and there is no progression or other way to achieve them. Detect Undead is a 1st level spell that only works until you stop concentrating. Why isn’t there is a 2nd level Detect Undead that alerts you when undead get within X distance? Or a 3rd level Detect Undead that shows relative power levels of the undead you can see? Etc. The only choice you have when it comes to detecting undead is a fairly useless 1st level spell. GURPS is better in this, but has it’s own problems.