1701 Pretty Expensive.

Oh ba gawd senpai noticed my RPG group on the discord :D

I like this woman, I like her a lot. now if only i could have a woman like her in my life

For me, I only recently really got into the role-playing scene. So I looked at the most recent D&D edition. From what I understand people who are upset with it because it either a) got rid of their favorite classes b) nerfed classes that in their opinion didn’t need nerfing or c) generally was more difficult to play than 4th ED because of changes to game mechanics. So then I looked into Pathfinder and Shadowrun. But one thing that always annoys me about Pathfinder and D&D type games is the way they handle the Ranger class. Because when I think “Ranger” I think “Aragorn son of Arathorn” or “Faramir son of Denethor”, aka Medieval low-fantasy guerilla fighters fighting bow and sword in accord, laying waste to enemy hordes with only their skill, wits, and survival skills, more at home in the wild than in a city. Not some dual-wielding elf with a pet pather (literally two thirds of the players who had Ranger characters I encountered). And some of the homebrew classes and races you find out there are both awesome and reasonably balanced.

Listened to the beginning of the podcast, and you sound fine. I’ll listen more later, but I think you share the same paranoia I do about how bad recordings of me sound. I assure you, from an outside standpoint, that your voice sounds good, and your mannerisms are within normal tolerances.

When it comes to D+D the animated series universe gets all my love.

Recently I was able to get involved in a quest from the Animated Series on Skype. We played Beneath the Blade of Sword Mountain, the episode from the D+D box set that would have been the episode before ‘The Dragons Graveyard’ in the series proper.

I’ve even asked IDW (who does the current D+D comic) at Botcon (the former Official Transformers Convention before it was/will be replaced by Hascon later this year) if they could do an animated series comic, but they said getting the rights for it are a nightmare.

Rules? Schmules!

Total improvisation.

Example, starting with character generation.

Me: Who are you?
Player: I’m a lemon-yellow rock. And I’m friends with the whales.

Proceed to improvise with a lot of fun.

I’ve played straight games in 1.0, 2.0, and 3.5, running games for a shop. Having the book be the authority takes the reins from me a bit, and I don’t prefer it, but it does let me slap down rules-lawyers because, fuck it, I’m better at it than they are.

I also use CP2020’s books mostly to the letter (only homebrew when the manuals literally don’t account for shit… like a player building armor out of those “Merc Service Rescue” break-cards (Snap in half, and mercs show up and save your ass… made into armor. Expensive, but yeah, I let it work)).

But what makes a good Shop-GM and what makes a good DM are two different skillsets, and I say that having developed both. Very few things work the same way between groups. In a shop, there’s more control/static functions for the DM because the playerbase is constantly changing, even maybe a dozen times in the same fight/session. Having static rules is a must, especially for unfamiliar players.

Betraying my age, but I started with the box set…you know, basic D&D. It was a good intro but needed work, thus AD&D came about. I have to say that, having played up through 3.5, my favorite system was 1.0. I’ve heard players whine about THACO, but in my humble opinion, if you can’t do enough basic math to figure it out, you should spend more time in Remedial Math than roleplaying.

What most players forget, as far as I can tell, is the rules were *intended* for homebrew. When the DMG flat out states that the DM is supposed to make judgment calls and that the rules are only guidelines to be interpreted by the DM…that’s pretty much Gary Gygax and TSR saying, “Dudes and dudettes, just roll some dice and have some fun, okay?”

The problem I’ve noticed, and that got me away from playing, is very few people wanted to spend any time learning. They wanted the answers and the loot *now*, and the monster to be dead in one hit. I loved when a rules-lawyer would state triumphantly that s/he was doing this because s/he knew *that* and had *this* skill and blah-blah-blah…and I’d get to tell them it didn’t work. “Why?!?” they’d cry. “You don’t know, do you?” I would reply. Later, I’d explain that as a 1st lvl Dwarven Paladin from the Mountain Hold of Crydee, he had zero chance of recognizing stonework from the 3rd Jennian Dynasty, since Jenni was an island nation halfway around the world. “Why *can’t* I play a half-naga/half giant?” “Um…the same reason you can’t have a dog-snake in this world. The two species can’t cross-breed.” “But…magic!” “Isn’t going to fit a giant’s willy into a naga’s vagoo.”

I’m of the opinion that if the DM is willing to spend the time making sure his/her world makes sense, the players shouldn’t have much problem with homebrew. The DM, by the same token, has to make sure the rules *make* sense, and aren’t based off which player bought the pizza or s/he wants to see naked.

I’ve thought about getting back into it; I’ve heard good things about Pathfinder, so I might look into it. Some of my fondest memories are of weekends spent around the gaming table with dice, friends, and laughter.

I broke 3.5 so horribly hard, and Pathfinder didn’t fix the fundamental flaws inherent within the system. It couldn’t, not if it wanted to use the same chassis, because it was the chassis itself which was flawed.

The problem I had with 3/3.5/3.p from 2e and previous eras was the class imbalance, or rather, how the system dealt with the class imbalance.

In 2e and prior, every class had a different xp chart. Fighters went up the fastest, casters went up the slowest. So you ended up with a party in which you had a level 10 fighter hanging out with level 6 wizards.

In 3rd ed, they chucked that out the window, and built the entire experience system on the foundation that every class is created equal and thus all level the same rate, which means they could make level-based calculations to do other things, like Level Adjustment and Challenge Rating. Unfortunately, that only made the already strong casters even stronger, which is where we get Linear Fighter, Quadratic Wizard from.

Furthermore, the key to truly breaking the game comes in two forms: Breaking the action economy, or employing lose conditions.

In 3.5 and 3.P, most lose conditions are applied with saving throws, so the goal there is to crank up your DC’s to the point where no one can reasonably make their saving throw save on a natural 20. Most players consider a 5% failure rate for a 95% chance of an ended encounter to be acceptable. And this was fairly trivial to accomplish simply through stat-stacking your casting stat without employing the dozens of other methods of doing so.

Therefore, spells like Grease, Stinking Cloud, and Slow were considered key ‘save or lose’ spells. Grease, because it was a Reflex save, and required balance checks which inherently denied you dex bonus to AC unless you had 5+ ranks in a skill that no creature ever had by the core rules, which means they got eaten alive by the rogue’s sneak attacks. Stinking Cloud was a Con save or Nauseated, which is ‘take no actions’, and thus can be seen as a lose condition because if you cannot take actions and your opponent can, you aren’t going to live very long. Slow was a Will save or Lose, or at least have so few actions available that you are eventually going to lose due to action economy imbalance. The reason I mention specifically these three spells is that each one triggers a different save, so if you had all three, then you could target an opponent’s lowest save in any potential situation.

Spells like Haste were also seen as highly powerful because it broke the action economy in your favor. Every attack your beat-stick did with Haste basically counted up to more damage you did, which almost invariably is going to be higher than the damage you would have done with a Fireball or Lightning Bolt or similar blasting direct damage type spell.

But those of us on the old 623 and CharOp boards were not most players. We went beyond that. We discovered ways of getting several turns worth of actions in a single turn. Created recursive loops of Spell Matrix through metamagic shenanigans for arbitrarily high numbers of spells being cast in a given turn.

5e has fixed at least part of that. It nerfed casters and boosted melee. More specifically, it nerfed the ways a player can break the action economy, and it significantly nerfed the ability to stack DC’s to the point of non-viability. If anything, it went the other direction, and now save-or-lose spells are nigh-worthless because they are never going to land on anything due to how DC’s scale slower than saving throws. And there are too many ways to gain advantage on saving throws, with relatively few ways to inflict disadvantage. In other words, it’s the defender’s contest to lose, and he typically won’t. Which makes save or lose type spells completely worthless.

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