Heh I like how hocus put it there, and its a good way of looking at it.
Even if D&D were dead, and this is the end, do people really have to shout about it and take the I told you so attitude once its done? Let us "sinners" who do the right despicable act of still enjoying D&D live in our blissful ignorance till the rapture actually happens.
Heh I like how hocus put it there, and its a good way of looking at it.
Even if D&D were dead, and this is the end, do people really have to shout about it and take the I told you so attitude once its done? Let us "sinners" who do the right despicable act of still enjoying D&D live in our blissful ignorance till the rapture actually happens.
[/quote] You can avoid system bloat by concentrating on adventures, campaign settings and horizontalfeats. Basically focus on new backgrounds, specialties, prestige classes that gives different options, not better options.[/quote]
what the heck does "horizontal" mean in this instance,
for example... in PF they have a "power attack" feat that scales as you level but is generally -1 to hit for +2 damage, and if you use it you must use it for all attacks. another feat is "piranha strikes" which gives the same bonus, but you must be small sized using a small weapon to gain the bonus and it specifically isn't useable with "power attack"
HOWEVER there are other feats that may be used in combination with piranha strikes which can make it much more disgusting powerwise than power attack. (halfling "risky striker" feat cannot be used with power attack but can be used with Piranha strike etc)
that is the problem I see with this horizontal feat issue, if a new feat has a slightly more benificial use for a different build, all those slight bonuses can build up to some serious power creep,
it also makes it extremely annoying when if you want to build a "small fighter" and there are 500 official feats that are available, many repetitive but each having a slightly different game effect, you'd have to know and read all of them to select the "best" or most effective feat for the build your trying to pull off.
now add 500 new backgrounds, 500 new specalties, 500 new archtypes etc. and its going to take reading a small library if you want to really focus on some specific tatic, or just select the best feats background specality and archtype the game allows for the concept you had.
does not matter if this was intended or not, new rules + new feats etc, lead to system bloat. always.
totally unavoidable.
It also means that likely once every three to five years, they will kill off the old edition with a re-write or an "update" (if thats what perkins wants to call it now) that will force you to buy all new books and cut way back on the bloat... until they do it again (and that by the way is the tatic Games Workshop has used for years to its great success... and why I wont play any games workshop games.)
"The secret we should never let the gamemasters know is that they don't need any rules." Gygax
If WOTC want to make an impact with Next, eliminate levels altoghether. Good dungeon masters, like professional screen-writers can adapt and make endlessly incredible adventures using simple level one characters. That's where everybody starts, and that's what everybody loves.
Interesting idea. A lot of RPGs can be enjoyable without levels, and some have even been successful with no experience or advancement stytem, at all (in old-school Traveller, for instance, your character not only never advanced after character creation, but would eventually get worse due to aging). I remember finding that apalling at the time.
The sense of advancement does trigger some sort of positive feedback response in our little nerd brains, I think, and accounts for some of the success of D&D and RPGs in general (and a lot of video and on-line games, for that matter). Doing away with that gimick, while it might produce a purer and philosophically superior game, probably wouldn't boost its apeal.
There are also games like E6 which have a very low level cap and alternate advancement after.
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TSR "Real" D&D never died(Still played and ran by "real" dungeon masters), though wotc's game that uses the title D&D died long ago, no matter how much they try to keep it up it is dead "SAGA".
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?
