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5 months ago ::
Dec 30, 2012 - 1:31AM
#51
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Date Joined:
Jan 29, 2012
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These are my opnions and are meant to voice what I personally would like to see done to D&DNext as an active and interested party in the development of the game, not an attempt to force my opinion on others.
First I don't like CAGI. If the player wants to call an enemy out on the field of battle the DM should be allowed to use the monsters Intelligence, Alignment, motivation, risk and reward and if the PC has a reputation or previous history / grudge that could be calculated using judgment to decide whether or not the NPC will run starking raving mad across a field of battle at all costs.
One of the reasons this ability confounded me is that people have said recently that Wizards are over powered (personally I don't get that but that is for another post/thread). So why would the leader of the enemy troope peel off the caster to attack the warrior just because the PCs know that the fighter is a dead end tactically for the enemy and don't want the enemy to have a tactical advantage?
Secondly, I agree with a previous poster that feigning weakness is not going to provoke some kind of change in tactics because, you are no longer a threat. I will coup de grace you after I kill the squishy but "high" damaging target first.
The debate that a fighter's high endurance and survivability is magical is not necessarily the case. Calcification can make bones more resilient to breakage, nerve damage from years of physical assault makes a person more accostomed to and resistant to pain and years of combat experience give the warrior the ability to read the battlefield and assess threats and avoiding damage accounts for the skill that equates to hit points as well as the physical issues.
Not to trivilalize stats affect on combat in earlier editions because they helped but they were also tools for role-playing. The stats gave you a gauge on how smart, charming, wise and tough your character was so you could roleplay the personality appropriately. This was a double edged blade. Some people like to have fate decide their character (we did start by rolling 3d6 and going down the list assigning, we didn't even pick which stat the number went to), it forced us to step outside of our comfort zone some. "I have the stats to be a Thief even if I wanted to play a Ranger" challenged us to find a way to improv and that can be fun. Sure there were times when I wanted to play a specific character and in that case it was frustrating and for that I am glad we have options with point assignment.
I think stat weight has grown with MMOs (I know I went there) because the min/max mindset you get from them is so crucial to viability in those games. You cannot be a good combatant if you don't have a high strength and constituion/stamina and all the gear that is Best in Slot. There is a reason that everyone is cookie cutter in MMOs. All the end game characters from the same class look the same, they don't have personalities assigned to high end gear (very few items have intelligence or ego or even a detailed background about the elven king who donned the suit of fine chain mail). That is because your characters viability doesn't subsist on role-playing, it is all stat driven.
I guess the thing is what is D&D Next going to be? A tactical game or a roleplaying game? Does it have to be one or the other? Can it really be both? As I have put more time under my belt in gaming I find that most every incarnation of D&D has had things I didn't like but I am still here. I have used house rules and tweaked the system to best serve myself and my player's interests. It boils down to compromise, not what i have to have in the game. If they put CAGI in I just make it clear to the people in my game that we need to find a way to work around it for our campaign. My only complaint being, that if it is in the rules, it sets a precedent that players expect. It is hard to take things from the players once they are in a system, it is easier to give them to players if you group decides they want it. I would rather have a modest, in the middle rule set, then an extreme system for either the role playing or the tactical side of table top gaming. Compromise happens in the middle, not from extreme orientation.
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5 months ago ::
Dec 30, 2012 - 2:05AM
#52
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Date Joined:
May 27, 2012
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But while ability scores do anything on a character sheet besides sit there and look pretty, whether they're randomly generated or determined in a reliable fashion, there will exist a spectrum for them: "Not good enough-Appropriate-Way too good". Point buy just expands the Appropriate portion of the spectrum.
Except, that's not the effect point-buy has actually had. It might seem like the ability to decide your own stats in a reasonable manner has increased the chance that you'll end up with stats you need for the character you want, but it's not the case. It's actually had the opposite effect.
In AD&D, you could play a perfectly competent fighter with strength 9-16, and only strength 18(51) or higher (or dexterity 17+) really pushed the "way too good" end of the spectrum. That was a huge range of "appropriate" and the only "not good enough" was when you were literally prohibited from something - the fighter needed a minimum of strength 9 to even join the class.
By 3E, however, the line was moved. Suddenly, a 9 or 10 or 12 wasn't cutting it anymore. In part because of point-buy, but also because you could now assign your stats wherever you wanted them, the new assumption was that you'd start with a 15 in your prime stat every time, and increase that stat every four levels. This is where your limits on stat increases started to hurt character concepts, because you just couldn't play an effective two-weapon fighter unless you put a 15+ into dex (for example). Wizards were expected to start with at least a 15 in Int and increase it every four levels (as this was necessary to cast level 9 spells).
By 4E, the expectation is that you'd start with an 18 in the prime score for your class. I'm not sure whether this is when point-buy became the default assumed method, but it wouldn't surprise me. Even then, your hit chance was barely breaking 50% - imagine how a strength 9 fighter would feel in that edition! Again, though, there's an incredibly tiny range of "appropriate" with a huge range of "not good enough" and I'm not sure that it was ever possible for anyone to reach "way too good" for ability scores in that edition.
So you see, increased control over character design has actually reduced your chance to play the character you want, by raising the bar to make certain stats mandatory. Before you had that sort of control, they couldn't assume that you would have any high stats, so anyone was allowed to be competent regardless of how low their stats were (again, assuming 9+).
The metagame is not the game.
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