Cheers.
Some kind of “Coming Soon” Notice somewhere wouldn’t have fucking killed them.
Sorry - as a Web Developer and a Games/Software Journalist this type of behaviour offends me on multiple levels.
The only good thing I have to say about D&D Insider is that they haven’t started charging for it yet. (At least, I can still log into it, and I’m not going to be paying). I believe they realise they won’t get much revenue or traffic if they impose the charges now.
They’ve never claimed that you have to have D&DI to play D&D, just that it will simplify preparation and make gameplay better. But for me that’s not worth whatever they ask.
I had the book in front of me. I’m sorry, I just think you’re entirely wrong. Those last two passages you quote are firmly Neutral Good. “Simply doing the right thing.”
True Neutral has been clearly defined, but it included two kinds of people - the peculiar ‘balanced view’ types, and the undecided. That latter subset, particularly, corresponds to unaligned. So, again, I think you’re entirely wrong.
By the plain logic of the alignment text as presented in the book, a Good outlook is more like a Lawful Good outlook than an Unaligned outlook is like a Lawful Good outlook. Lawful Good is presented as “Good, but also orderly.”
What they should have done was either abandon alignment entirely, or stuck with Good/Unaligned/Evil.
To be fair, I’m not crazy about the current alignment system, either. However, it’s so loosely tied into the rules that its removal will cause no damage to them whatsoever. A DM could rule that every PC is automatically unaligned, for example, and it would have no effect. It’s no longer a game mechanic so much as a roleplaying guide. Not a very good one, but that’s still all it is.
No more protection from alignment spells. No more spells whose damage is based on your alignment. No more detect alignment. No more Use Magical Device to imitate an alignment. In 3E, if you wanted to remove alignment, you had a lot of work to do. Now, its removal couldn’t be simpler.
Daniel
My biggest dislike so far in the game: poison rules. Most poisons do minor ongoing damage, and often have a secondary annoying effect, ranging from slowing you (which just reduces your movement, unlike 3E slow) to stunning you (no actions), or worse.
The thing is, you save at the end of every turn, and saves are a flat 10 or better on a d20. Which means that if the poison hits you, you’ve got a 55% chance to suffer its effects for one round, a 24.75% chance to suffer the effects for two rounds, and just a 9.1% chance to suffer it for three or more rounds. That’s discounting the various powers that give you bonuses or rerolls on your saves.
Poisons are wussy and short-acting, even the very worst ones. I don’t like it.
I’m considering using instead a modification of the disease rules, which kick ass. Diseases attack you at the end of every extended rest, using their initial attack value vs. a certain defense (usually fort, I think). Each disease has a disease track, ranging from “cured” to “final stages” or something. Final stage can be death, permanent blindness, permanent Daze, etc. You have to resist the disease several times in a row to make it to the cured stage; several failures in a row end you up on the Final stage, which always sucks.
Anyway, I’m thinking of making poisons work just like this, except that instead of attacking you after each extended rest, they’d attack you at the end of each short rest–and that an extended rest would only be made possible by repeatedly rolling the poison’s attack until you were either cured or in the final stage.
That would fairly well approximate the speed of real-world poisons, would add a nice touch of urgency to getting a poison out of your system, and would make them scary without being AD&D Save or Die mechanics.
Daniel
:eek:. I’ll NEVER be able to wrap my head around this. It’s basically a 90 degree turn from Basic D+D, where Lawful = old Lawful Good, and Chaotic = old Chaotic Evil.
I may be opening up a can of worms here, and appologies if I am, but I think the new alignments may simply be reflection of modern sentiment over ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Our heroes in fiction and media these days are the ones who work outside the law, and more often than not, our villains are ones who bend laws to their own wills. Thus, good = chaotic (from a D&D standpoint), and evil = lawful (again, D&D standpoint.)
But pre-Unearthed Arcana D+D, when it wasn’t hack n slash, was about recreating old High Fantasy, either Tolkein-specific or generic medieval fantasy, one of the chief conceits of which is that Lawful Rulers are Just, and the Bad Guys like killing for no reason whatsoever.
That isn’t the way the world works, or even our perception of how the world works, but that’s the point: it’s escapist.
ETA and it had a trippy feeling at times due to being so out of synch with the rest of popular culture. Sort of like playing in the Holy Grail movie with more airbrushed wizards included.
Yeah, you might be dead… but you’ll be cured!
Heh. Actually, the note to the effect that it might cure a random disease that you didn’t know about was kinda good, too.
GM: “Well, actually, that cured your rhinitis. You should have said you wanted the Mummy Rot cured. At least you can breathe freely. For the few hours you have left.”
Sigh Alright everyone, pool your magic weapons, we need some residuum for ANOTHER ritual…
A friend pointed me towards this: Killjoy Cooking With the Dungeons & Dragons Crowd | WIRED
It really sheds a new light on gamer culture. 