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1 year ago ::
Apr 15, 2012 - 9:47AM
#31
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youre aware you could create magic items in every edition right? bc it sure doesnt look like it.
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1 year ago ::
Apr 15, 2012 - 9:48AM
#32
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Date Joined:
Nov 13, 2004
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I think powerful pre-4e spells by themselves are generally okay, with a few notable exceptions. The problem is that the implied balancing aspect of having superpowers, limited uses per day, was easily bypassed at low levels and nonexistant at higher. At entry levels, 3e casters sort of feel the limitation imposed by their awesome specialness...until they spend some of their loot to make scrolls. At some point the limitation of spells per day becomes laughable, as even the guys with the fewest spell slots have more than enough to last an entire adventuring day. As a guess, I'd say both of these aspects cropped up to make up for a lack of At-Will magic.
I'd bet 3e casters wouldn't be the egregious spotlight-hogs if the following were true:
* Scrolls have a casting time long enough to be unusable in combat. 1 minute, + 1 minute/spell level.
* After hitting 8-10 spell slots per day, casters stop gaining new spell slots, instead replacing lower-level slots with higher-level.
* Wands are usable only a few times a day (like Eternal Wands). Staffs are expensive enough that perhaps the Pathfinder fix is good enough.
* "Defensive Casting" doesn't exist, but Touch and spells that originate from the caster don't provoke (4e-style). The "Combat Casting" feat would grant a +4 Dodge bonus to AC (as the Mobility feat).
* Perhaps to compensate for lack of spells, have a few At-Will spells; an attack spell that slowly becomes about as good as a crossbow (lower damage & range since it hits more easily), and then a few cantrip/orison-level abilities.
4e D&D is not a "Tabletop MMO." It is not Massively Multiplayer, and is usually not played Online. Come up with better descriptions of your complaints, cuz this one means jack ****.
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1 year ago ::
Apr 15, 2012 - 10:17AM
#33
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There is an aspect of Caster Superiority I think you may have left out: targets.
4E wizards, despite being as linear as martial classes, are still overpowered. Their secret is in AoE. They have the best AoE and hit as well as a Fighter does. While their damage per shot is lower, they shoot so many more times that martial classes are just token players even before paragon. It doesn't matter how much damage you give Twin Strike if the mage is hitting 6 or more mobs with every Thunderwave. This stacks with the OP mentioned "save vs. hahaha" advantage (still present in 4E), making a Fighter trying to hit AC (often the highest defense an opponent has) look absolutely ridiculous.
I don't want to degrade into edition bashing. I just want to point out that 4E is no better than 3.5E at addressing this basic flaw of the mechanics. I think the OP does a very good job of showing how the base assumptions behind D&D magic make balancing it so hard.
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1 year ago ::
Apr 15, 2012 - 10:26AM
#34
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Date Joined:
Apr 23, 2009
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youre aware you could create magic items in every edition right? bc it sure doesnt look like it.
Not the way you could in 3e,4e. There was no system in 1e,2e other than DM judgment. The DMG's advice was to make it cost far more than it was worth. It was an epic quest kind of thing and not a routine act.
So in theory yes. In practice almost never.
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1 year ago ::
Apr 15, 2012 - 10:35AM
#35
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Fictional Space - I disagree here a lot. It sounds good but my experience differs. My high level fighters in all previous editions felt like gods.
Emerikol, this isn't about your previous edition fighters. I know you liked them, I did too. I'm a chump that way, I'll play anything you label "Fighter" even if the mechanics are a steaming pile pressed against a page. But this isn't about fighters. It's about wizards being everything, and getting away with it because arcane magic in D&D only has one limit: Don't touch the heals.
The dark necromancer with an army of undead. The fickle enchantress spinning a web of lies and glamours. The wise oracle divining the future. The shapeshifting master. The summoner with a pack of enslaved creatures at his beck and call. The blaster with the forces of nature crackling at his fingertips. The grand trickster with his illusions. The warder, with his counterspells and alarms and wards. These are wildly different characters, each one has enough fictional space(as Cirno put it) for an entire class. But they aren't eight classes. They're one class. Wizard mixes all these together and can go between them from day to day.
Try to put that in fighter terms for a moment. It would be like if I presented you with one class, we'll call it "Hero". Hero can:
- Be the best defended guy in heavy armor.
- Be the best defended guy in no armor.
- Be the best(most accuracy, damage and amount of tricks) with melee weapons
- And with Ranged weapons.
- And with no weapons.
- Be the strongest in terms of feats of strength like breaking down doors or lifting boulders.
- Be the stealthiest
- Pick locks
- Find tracks
- Survive the wilderness
- Have an animal companion
- Brew and use poisons
- Get a hefty bonus for attacking an unaware or distracted foe
- Scale walls
- Be as swift as the coursing river
- With all the force of a great typhoon
- With all the strength of a raging fire
- Mysterious as the dark side of the moon
- Be the master of social situations
- Act as an expert scholar
- Create alchemical items that can put people to sleep, stick them in gunk, or blow them up
- And anything else cool we can ever, ever think of, and print in a supplement.
It'd be flat out ridiculous. No one would be cool with it, ever. You'd turn your nose up in disgust, and I wouldn't even be able to blame you. But that is what Wizard does, and the only difference is that when we're talking about the Wizard, well, it's magic. That trumps any other concern, apparently.
So, so, SO MUCH this.
I can't find anything there that I don't completely agree with. Break the wizard into separate classes. The wizard is Ma Bell, it's time to bring the anti-trust laws down on his robed behind.
Why Mechanics-Alignment Integration is Bad
Show
so why even play a fighter if you can play the paladin the exact same way behaviorally and get added power to boot. "Paladin" is about accepting better game-enhancing mechanics at the price of more rigid in game behavior.
Really? So it goes something like this?
Fighter: "I want to be a paladin."
NPC: "Really?"
Fighter: "Yes."
NPC: "Very well." Starts reading from a holy book while still in-character "Do you accept having to choose and stick to the lawful good alignment, eventhough neither of us actually knows that it exists or what it is?"
Fighter: "I do."
NPC: "Do you reject good game balance because you accidentally rolled a high Charisma?"
Fighter: "What?"
NPC: "I don't know what it means either."
Fighter: "Oh. Umm, ok I do."
NPC: "In the name of all that is metagamey and broken, accept these better game enhancing mechanics."
Fighter: "These what?"
NPC: "Just get out there and try to fulfill a million different people's notion of good while not violating and part of any of them."
So the system is designed such that every single hit needs to be described to avoid confusion? Here's a scenario. The players are nudists, everybody in the world are nudists, it's not weird, it's totally normal in this land. They are naked and they fight drakes taking damage throughout, but healing up with surges. Later they meet the guy who raised the drakes.
Part 1: I didn't describe any of the hits. What does he see?
Part 2: Lets say I described the drakes as biting the players, yet they healed up. What does he see?
D20 Modern Toon PC Race.
Mecha Pilot's Skill Challenge Emporium.
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1 year ago ::
Apr 15, 2012 - 10:40AM
#36
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youre aware you could create magic items in every edition right? bc it sure doesnt look like it.
Not the way you could in 3e,4e. There was no system in 1e,2e other than DM judgment. The DMG's advice was to make it cost far more than it was worth. It was an epic quest kind of thing and not a routine act.
So in theory yes. In practice almost never.
uh yeah, no, youre just flat out wrong dude. theres dm judgment in any game of dnd but to say there isnt a system just means you dont know what youre talking about. or havent read the books. im thinking based on a lot of your posts its a mixture of both
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1 year ago ::
Apr 15, 2012 - 10:47AM
#37
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youre aware you could create magic items in every edition right? bc it sure doesnt look like it.
Not the way you could in 3e,4e. There was no system in 1e,2e other than DM judgment. The DMG's advice was to make it cost far more than it was worth. It was an epic quest kind of thing and not a routine act.
So in theory yes. In practice almost never.
uh yeah, no, youre just flat out wrong dude. theres dm judgment in any game of dnd but to say there isnt a system just means you dont know what youre talking about. or havent read the books. im thinking based on a lot of your posts its a mixture of both
I do recall that there was a system in AD&D 2e, the only pre-3e edition I have played. I don't have the AD&D DMG anymore or I'd quote it.
Why Mechanics-Alignment Integration is Bad
Show
so why even play a fighter if you can play the paladin the exact same way behaviorally and get added power to boot. "Paladin" is about accepting better game-enhancing mechanics at the price of more rigid in game behavior.
Really? So it goes something like this?
Fighter: "I want to be a paladin."
NPC: "Really?"
Fighter: "Yes."
NPC: "Very well." Starts reading from a holy book while still in-character "Do you accept having to choose and stick to the lawful good alignment, eventhough neither of us actually knows that it exists or what it is?"
Fighter: "I do."
NPC: "Do you reject good game balance because you accidentally rolled a high Charisma?"
Fighter: "What?"
NPC: "I don't know what it means either."
Fighter: "Oh. Umm, ok I do."
NPC: "In the name of all that is metagamey and broken, accept these better game enhancing mechanics."
Fighter: "These what?"
NPC: "Just get out there and try to fulfill a million different people's notion of good while not violating and part of any of them."
So the system is designed such that every single hit needs to be described to avoid confusion? Here's a scenario. The players are nudists, everybody in the world are nudists, it's not weird, it's totally normal in this land. They are naked and they fight drakes taking damage throughout, but healing up with surges. Later they meet the guy who raised the drakes.
Part 1: I didn't describe any of the hits. What does he see?
Part 2: Lets say I described the drakes as biting the players, yet they healed up. What does he see?
D20 Modern Toon PC Race.
Mecha Pilot's Skill Challenge Emporium.
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1 year ago ::
Apr 15, 2012 - 10:51AM
#38
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Date Joined:
Jan 23, 2012
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The Jimmy Olsen comment of course is a real anger trigger for me. I hear the 4vengers comment about it a lot but I've never seen it.
I wish you guys could see the 3.5e campaigns in my area. No question the kill count leaders are fighters. Don't need to count it's obvious. I might agree Rogues are too weak but not fighters. Yes they do have a decent wealth by level appropriate set of magic items but nothing outside RAW. Wizards do some neat utility stuff and they help the group but they are by no means Gods. They are by no means superman and the fighter Jimmy Olsen.
I think if you play the game using RAW and your DM is competent you have a fun game where the spotlight is spread around just fine. I agree if you fail in these areas you end up with less of a game and maybe new inexperienced DMs sometimes get in trouble.
(sidenote: we played vancian 1e through 3e and never introduced spell points. I saw dozens of campaigns over the years.)
I prefer the 1e way of balancing magic to the 3e way of doing it. I want drawbacks and chances for the wizard to get disrupted. You do realize that if the wizard was hit his spell was disrupted no save no concentration in 1e. I also don't want scrolls and wands with charges. Take that away and you won't have to give out as much magic to everyone else. You can do it either way but I prefer the 1e way in this regard. While I like some of the innovations of 3e,4e, I really want AD&D with some improvements.
Agreed. In the 3.5 Ptolus game I'm running, we don't have spellcasters dominating anything at all. In fact, it's the Fighter and the Barbarian that are usually kicking some serious ass at the moment. We have one Wizard in the party, and he doesn't do anything super over-the-top. The worst two things he can do are cast Dimension Hop (from PHB2 if I recall properly), and he took an alternate class ability (again from the PHB2) that allows him to teleport 10 feet as an immediate action a number of times per day equal to his Intelligence bonus. I think he's used it once, maybe twice.
The characters are presently 6th level, so the natural argument I expect to see is that they aren't high enough level for the Wizard to have any of his really powerful spells yet. Even so, the last time I ran Ptolus, we got into the teens level-wise, and the spellcaster there still wasn't overpowering the rest of the party. He could absolutely do some damage, but he more often was pulling buff/debuff/healing duties (he was a multi-class Cleric/Wizard who then went Mystic Theurge).
While I'm certainly not saying the problem doesn't exist - with such outcry, it absolutely does - I'm just saying I've not personally run into it, and have never had a problem balancing other classes with the existence of Vancian magic. That's not to say that I wouldn't like to see some changes, though.
For those confused on how DDN's modular rules might work, this may provide some insight: http://www.tor.com/blogs/2012/11/the-world-of-darkness-shines-when-it-abandons-canon
@mikemearls: Uhhh... do you really not see all the 3e/4e that's basically the entire core system?
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1 year ago ::
Apr 15, 2012 - 11:06AM
#39
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frothsof: The system prior to 3e is: Cast enchant an item. Perform a series of tasks created from whole cloth by the individual DM, entirely at his judgment. Use permanency if you want it to be something besides an expendable item.
Enchant an item has a 'system' for how it works - but that system is a bunch of saving throws built around the central task, which is "find materials and perform tasks at the whim of the DM".
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1 year ago ::
Apr 15, 2012 - 11:12AM
#40
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Strider1276, many players do not play casters to their full potential in 3.xE. Many don't want to. I know I never wanted to.
While DM fiat helps to prevent OP feats and prestige classes from creeping in, the math geeks over at brilliant gameologists have pretty conclusively shown how OP casters can get in 3.xE. If you are unfamiliar, doing a Google search for "JaronK tier guide" is an excellent beginning.
Brilliant gameologists helped me to see how OP Wizards still are in 4E. Many of the critical issues were never addressed between the editions.
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