Community

Jan 28, 2010 -- 5:07PM, math_geek1 wrote:

I definitely hate the whole ability score remodify every 4th and 8th level thing.  It just doesn't seem remotely in the spirit of the game.

Then don't do it.

/thread 

Jan 29, 2010 -- 1:33AM, Cailte wrote:

Well I'm fine with the retrain rules, they are the ones I use as a DM for my homegames anyway, and it hasn't hurt them ... It is far more likely that most players will simply ignore the rules ... Finally if your group is doing something specific with the Minis why would you throw it away just because of the update? Or are you really saying that you don't trust the other players you play with to honor your groups original ideas? Certainly the CCG isn't forcing you to do anything to your character at all.

For me personally and the groups I play with I have no worries. Heck, I personally won't even take advantage of the death rules (except maybe at epic...) -- I decided a while ago that I dislike easy death and so if my character dies in an LFR game, almost certainly they will stay dead. I think that easy death rules also devalue story, but because they help the game so much, I don't have any problems with rules for them. 

My issue is with the direction this sets for the campaign. It leads away from a living campaign where characters develop over time to one where they transmogrify monthly. As Keithric stated "If I look at my fighter at 1st level and 10th level, there's a pretty big difference" -- that's the way it should be; a character should have major changes over their life. But not between mods.

My main character is also a fighter, started at Thursday, 8am gen con 08. He called himself a barbarian because there was no class of that name at the time. The concept was that he was sent from his tribe to learn magic because their fighters kept getting clobbered by this magic thing and they wanted revenge. Until he hit level 4 or so he was not a great fighter, because he was evenly stated STR and INT, and because I had ritual feats and stuff like that. I believe he was fun to play with because of that. As he progresses, the wizard multiclassing became more and more useful and I ended up taking a wizard paragon class.

If I wanted to do the same thing now, it would be strongly tempting to start him as a standard 20 STR fighter, all fighter feats, and then suddenly switch him (probably about level 6 or so) to 18/18 by rejiggering stats and swap out the weapon feats for MC feats. And although I personally might have had more fun with this, I believe the people I play with would have had less fun, and the campaign suffer. It's a minor version of the tragedy of the commons; if the campaign promotes an always minimized model, then everyone always minimaxes (otherwise they personally will have less fun as they are less effective), but in the end, everyone has less fun than they would if NO-ONE was playing a minimized character. 

It's a fairly simple logical proposition: Assuming that (a) people like their characters to be as effective as the other characters they play with, and (b) people enjoy playing with unusual or quirky characters more than optimized characters, then rules that make it easier to minimax will lead to a situation where everyone is having less fun than they could, because as soon as most people are minimaxed, then if you don't minimax, you will have less fun, so you minimax, and so everyone ends up with less interesting characters.

People may disagree with (a) -- and some do -- but they are in a small minority. I don't think anyone disagrees with (b), although a valid viewpoint is that the role-playing ability of players is more important than their character stats. That's a good counter-point, and I do hope it's enough to keep the game interesting. I am concerned that the proportion of "Iocane Powder" characters ("tasteless, odorless ... and deadly") will increase. As evidence, I would like people to think of the characters they met in the last cons they went to. Do you remember any details of any of them? In Living Force and LG I can think of many unique characters. In the last gen con I remember only one -- a beastmaster ranger with a rooster companion (a notably non-optimal path).  The rest were a featureless mass of orb-lock wizards, daggermaster rogues and generic unremarkable and deadly characters. It's a sad state when the box-text NPCs have more personality than the characters. I used to describe LG as an ongoing campaign where characters develop and have personality while playing in sets of linked adventures that are as close to a home game as possible for organized play. LFR I cannot describe like that. Instead I would describe it as a set of polished one-off adventures that feature fun tactical situations that you can play with a character that gradually increases in power.

But enough whining. If I haven't made my position clear I'm not going to. Instead let me make some concrete suggestions for the next version of the CCG:

• Do not let people retrain stats except when they are re-fixing a class that was previously a preview class (e.g. when bards came out in PHB2 and when monk is released in PHB3).
• Do not people retrain class features, except as above or when retraining to a new feature that was not previously available (so when something new comes out, they can switch to it)
• Put in some general guidelines, like "The campaign is more fun as a whole when characters maintain continuity. Players are on the honor system to use these rules as little as possible. The intent is not to use them to continually optimize their characters, but to use them when necessary to allow a player to play the character the way they envision it best within the current rules"

Jan 28, 2010 -- 6:30AM, Joe_Shill wrote:

• Your character race (you may retrain race-based options that you chose)

So if you're a revenant, you can retrain your past life from minotaur to halfling?  That's just weird.