Any sort of tournament/public play is cancer, and the game should not be designed to facilitate such.  When we play privately, we play with friends, and we have our own set of house rules, and the DM is given trust as an adjudicator, both to make rulings and change rules as necessary.  Public gaming relies on uniform game presentation, which is anathema to role-playing games.  The RPGA/Living Whatever requires universal rulings that carry across every single game played in order to make the game "fair" to everyone involved.  Because of this, the games require highly-specific rules that offer no leeway for interpretation or alteration.

This is idiocy because such an act attempts to replace the DM with a cold logic processor.  In such a game style, there is no room for customization.  There is no room to tailor the game to your group.  Such gaming conventions push RPGs toward something resembling a videogame, where the players offer input and the DM produces a calculated output.  Stupidity.

Quote from: Benoist;548528The only thing I find interesting in all this is the idea of the escalation die.

There's a blog post at Roles, Rules, and Rolls you may find enlightening.

Quote from: VectorSigma;549027Not to speak for Peregrin, but my guess is he's saying "the choices made in implementing 4e make sense as an outgrowth of the play-culture I saw in Living Campaigns with 3e".

Which is something I've heard several people say, actually.

Vector has the right of it.

Sorry if I wasn't clear, I've been doing a lot of overtime at work as I've been managing a migration to a new software system and my brain has been completely fried the last few weeks.

But yeah, as I've said before in other threads in the past, I almost didn't get into RPGs at all.  I read the 3e books and was completely enamored by the seemingly endless variety of possibilities, and a want to play a cool character in interesting situations, but I was immediately met with conversations about charop, builds, stupid broken rule combos, with very few people talking about the actual adventures and fantasy.  This struck me as completely backwards, and I almost walked away because I just wasn't interested in that sort of stuff (and I have another hobby more suited to that type of play).  If it wasn't for a home 3e game a high-school friend ran where we largely ignored the rules, I probably wouldn't be playing any RPGs today (unfortunately many other home games I've played in do emulate the Living campaigns).

The reason 4e interested me so much, and the reason I actually like it more than 3e, is because the mechanics were transparent enough that I could create an extremely good character without investing a ton of my time reading mechanical options, more than half of which I would probably never use in actual play.  I could focus more on actually playing and less on what some people find to be lonely fun (and there are still large swaths of people spending more time building characters for d20 based games than actually playing).

4e's still not my choice system, and I'm not sure about 13th Age yet, but I'm willing to give the latter a chance because it may be a nice balance between the things I enjoyed about 4e and other games I like better.

Quote from: MarleycatI hate having any agreement with you but as a 3e person when you're right you've right.

Uh...thanks I guess?

I could be wrong (there are a lot of gamers out there I've never played with), but I just speak about what I've witnessed personally.

Quote from: Peregrin;549045Sorry if I wasn't clear, I've been doing a lot of overtime at work as I've been managing a migration to a new software system and my brain has been completely fried the last few weeks.

That's quite all right; head office took my lovely EMC2 SAN away and I've spent the last week kit-bashing together an iSCSI target out of FreeNAS, a handful of 1 TB desktop drives and a five year old DL380 chassis.

QuoteI could focus more on actually playing and less on what some people find to be lonely fun (and there are still large swaths of people spending more time building characters for d20 based games than actually playing).

So the problem then was that 3.x as played in the Living campaigns was dominated by charop taken to an extreme?  We didn't have a big Living whatever presence around here at the time so I don't quite know what the culture everyone'e referring to was.

Quote4e's still not my choice system, and I'm not sure about 13th Age yet, but I'm willing to give the latter a chance because it may be a nice balance between the things I enjoyed about 4e and other games I like better.

It's interesting.  The escalation die mechanic is fascinating - reminds me a bit of MasterBook's MasterDeck - and I see a fair bit of FATE on those character sheets.

Quote from: daniel_ream;549050So the problem then was that 3.x as played in the Living campaigns was dominated by charop taken to an extreme?  We didn't have a big Living whatever presence around here at the time so I don't quite know what the culture everyone'e referring to was.

Living Greyhawk was a strange beast.  Partly because it was a mix of normal folks who just wanted to take part in organized play, and those who couldn't, for whatever reason, get (or keep) a home game going.

QuoteIt's interesting.  The escalation die mechanic is fascinating - reminds me a bit of MasterBook's MasterDeck - and I see a fair bit of FATE on those character sheets.

I'm a tiny bit optimistic that the kit-bashing will work out, but I'm probably going to wait for the full rules to come about before deciding to put down money.

(Also, I had to Google your first sentence -- I'm more of an operations manager than a tech specialist -- I'm mostly handling training and minor tech-work as needed, but that's in addition to my normal routine. Mostly communicating with our different partners and seeing how we can integrate the new stuff with our current accounting procedures and whatnot and making sure their reporting software can do what we need, hire devs and come up with specs for reports they don't have built-in, etc.)

If you want to use the escalation die, it needs to be something more than a bonus on attack/damage rolls, and I think that both sides need to have access to it.

Quote from: Halloween JackI don't really care what direction Wizbros goes with 5th Edition. I'll still be playing the real D&D; it's just called 13th Age now.

:rotfl:

Oh my god that's hilarious.

I, the Tyrant of Fun, hereby officially declare that funny.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;549062

Quote from: Halloween JackI don't really care what direction Wizbros goes with 5th Edition. I'll still be playing the real D&D; it's just called 13th Age now.

:rotfl:

Oh my God. Did he really post that?

Quote from: Benoist;549072Oh my God. Did he really post that?

Yup.

Looks interesting.

The implied setting and your PC's role in the setting feels very inspired by Birthright and emulates modern fantasy novels like Games of Thrones and Sword of Shannara and Harry Potter where characters are major players on the world stage (or destined to be) from the start of the story.

I'd definitely play a demo at a con.

And I am happy for each gamer to find their own "real D&D"

Quote from: B.T.;549031Any sort of tournament/public play is cancer, and the game should not be designed to facilitate such.  When we play privately, we play with friends, and we have our own set of house rules, and the DM is given trust as an adjudicator, both to make rulings and change rules as necessary.  Public gaming relies on uniform game presentation, which is anathema to role-playing games.  The RPGA/Living Whatever requires universal rulings that carry across every single game played in order to make the game "fair" to everyone involved.  Because of this, the games require highly-specific rules that offer no leeway for interpretation or alteration.

This is idiocy because such an act attempts to replace the DM with a cold logic processor.  In such a game style, there is no room for customization.  There is no room to tailor the game to your group.  Such gaming conventions push RPGs toward something resembling a videogame, where the players offer input and the DM produces a calculated output.  Stupidity.

This coincides with my experience as well. Something is definitely lost in translation from home games to RPGA/Living X games. The latter leaves me exhausted and wishing I just stayed home playing video games.

Quote from: Benoist;549072Oh my God. Did he really post that?

Pretty sure he was just parodying what people say about Pathfinder though.

"Wizbros isn't getting my money; I'll be playing REAL D&D, which is called PATHFINDER!" etc.

Quote from: StormBringer;548579If it applies to both sides, then you have a mini-game of 'always fighting orcs'.

Depends what the bonuses apply to. If they apply to offense and not defense, and both parties can get the bonus, then combat will feel different as attacks become more dangerous over time.

It's the opposite of the death spiral some games have, where fatigue is modeled, but hurts offense as well as defense. This can cause the pace of late combat to crawl.

Additionally, people are suggesting conditional increases in power. So the rate of increase can be asymmetrical and based on decisions and luck in combat.

So the opposite of always fighting orcs really, in that relative numbers actually change conditionally and asymmetrically.

Not a fan of what I've seen of 13A, just sick of people misusing the "always fighting orcs" meme.