Quote from: Lunamancer;968613I'm confused as to why these things are even seen as problems in the first place.

There are a couple of reasons why some of us consider save-or-lose effects as problematic:

1. Being effectively removed from an entire encounter due to a single die roll can be anticlamactic and pretty boring. As a DM, I particularly don't want to get a brand new player interested in the game, go thru the process of matching everyone's schedules to a single game day, run the player thru even the barebones basics of chargen and roleplaying, and then have then have them effectively KOed as part of their first ttrpg experience. Generally speaking, this is not good for making return players.

2. Save-or-die effects add insult to injury, because not only do you get removed from an entire encounter due to a single roll, you may lose a cherished character depending on circumstance and access to resurrection magic. Note that many D&D gamers, even those who play a sandbox style, do get attached to their characters, rather than playing by the 'life is cheap, don't even name your PC until he hits 3rd level' style.

Quote from: Lunamancer;968613An asp with a bite that does 1 hp of damage but with a save or die poison is not so ridiculously powerful for 1st level characters. In fact, they're probably even a lesser threat than a creature that just deals a good amount of straight-up damage. Yet even a 50th level character has a 5% chance of being killed by one bad roll, meaning the creature still poses a significant threat. Level drains are a pain no matter how high your level is--perhaps even more of a pain as it represents greater XP loss the higher level you are. This means certain undead provide a good, healthy fear of the living dead for parties of all levels.

These are the things that make the game work at high levels.

If you like level-drain effects more power to you, but including level reduction effects in a list of things that makes high levels work seems contradictory.

Quote from: Omega;968623Its not to me and most others. But there is a vocal faction in D&D and some other RPGs that flip their wheels at the idea of "save or die" elements. Hence the derogatory "save or suck" phrase some use.
Different viewpoints and play styles. Which is perfectly fine until someone starts trying to force their "one true way" on others.

Depends on the usage most of the times i've heard it it's in A discussion of mage issues.
As A whole I don't think save or suck is the issue spells that say make A save or bad shit happens are fine where I tend to find issues pop up is with spells that say save or suck and if you don't suck blow.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;968625Did you ever play Fire Emblem or Final Fantasy Tactics? 4e combat is that, but on a tabletop. Biggest killers:

1. Enemies have a fuckton of hp
2. Players have a fuckton of healing
3. Hardly anyone does a lot of damage on a round without stacking auras, bonuses, and other effects
4. Player powers are significantly more effective when the players optimize their positioning, combat advantage, and even turn sequence, leading to every round generating tedious analysis and discussion of the board position, not unlike Risk, Axis & Allies, and other complex board games.

FE isn't the best example FFT is though.
The biggest offenders on your list are number 3 and 4.
With 1 I will point out it is hugely dependent on 3 to say it another way the amount of hp something has is irreverent if the party can do enough damage to make the fight reasonable.

Quote from: Omega;968623Its not to me and most others. But there is a vocal faction in D&D and some other RPGs that flip their wheels at the idea of "save or die" elements. Hence the derogatory "save or suck" phrase some use.

Different viewpoints and play styles. Which is perfectly fine until someone starts trying to force their "one true way" on others.

Force their one true way on others? I have yet to experience or even so much as hear of someone being raided by the game police. If people aren't having fun at high level D&D, or anything they're not having fun at, it's not because someone forced their one true way on them. They only have their own play styles to blame.

It's not a question of IF a group is playing wrong--if they're not having fun, they clearly are. It's a matter of hey, let's address the elephant in the room, get to it's core, and find a solution.

Elephant in the room: The game once worked at high levels. Then it got improved. Then it started working not so good at high levels. Obviously someone's idea of what "improved" means isn't quite what Websters had in mind.

It's core: I can't say with absolute certainty that it's level drains and save-or-dies that made old D&D fun. But it does seem to serve a function that relates directly to the topic at hand, which was the meat of my expressed confusion of why treat that as a problem.

Solution: Bring it back. Stop hating it. Embrace it. See if it works. It's worth a try. What do you really have to lose?

Quote from: kosmos1214;968639With 1 I will point out it is hugely dependent on 3 to say it another way the amount of hp something has is irreverent if the party can do enough damage to make the fight reasonable.

The point is that 1. means without engaging hard on 3. means you are pissing in the wind. Lemme put it in concrete terms. Let's take everyone's most favoritest pal ever, the Ancient Red Dragon. The 4e dragon is a Level 30 solo with 1,390 hit points.

A level 30 rogue's sneak attack does +5d6. His daily powers do 6[w] to 7[w] damage. At-will is a piddly 2[w]. Without any other tricks, rogue dailies are doing like 60 damage on a hit. You're thinking, "Okay, not so bad...I guess that's 5 or 6 rounds to take down the dragon if 4 people can hit that hard, like maybe if you've got a Fighter, a Warlock, and a Warlord." Except now here's where 4e gets really terrible: monster defenses scale more rapidly than player attacks. So if you're not doing anything fancy and didn't take the right feats, your hit chance is a good clip below 50%. So think 15 rounds or more.

Thus all the haggling, debating, and discussion ever round over how to properly trigger your powers to max damage. Because if you don't take all night studying the board to kill the dragon...it'll take all night rolling piddly damage to kill the dragon.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;968660The point is that 1. means without engaging hard on 3. means you are pissing in the wind. Lemme put it in concrete terms. Let's take everyone's most favoritest pal ever, the Ancient Red Dragon. The 4e dragon is a Level 30 solo with 1,390 hit points.

A level 30 rogue's sneak attack does +5d6. His daily powers do 6[w] to 7[w] damage. At-will is a piddly 2[w]. Without any other tricks, rogue dailies are doing like 60 damage on a hit. You're thinking, "Okay, not so bad...I guess that's 5 or 6 rounds to take down the dragon if 4 people can hit that hard, like maybe if you've got a Fighter, a Warlock, and a Warlord." Except now here's where 4e gets really terrible: monster defenses scale more rapidly than player attacks. So if you're not doing anything fancy and didn't take the right feats, your hit chance is a good clip below 50%. So think 15 rounds or more.

Thus all the haggling, debating, and discussion ever round over how to properly trigger your powers to max damage. Because if you don't take all night studying the board to kill the dragon...it'll take all night rolling piddly damage to kill the dragon.

Sorry that post was hurried let me explain I was agreeing with you.

I also should have made my self clear I was looking at your points from A design stand point with some caveats thrown on to your points.
hence your 3rd and 4th points are the biggest issues with 4e and point 1 is very much relays on point 3 being true.
For example if that rouge was doing more like 5d12 (32.20 avg vs 17.50) and could hit reasonably say 65 to 70% of the time (ie A reasonably good hit rate) that 1390 wont last long even though it looks big.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;968660The point is that 1. means without engaging hard on 3. means you are pissing in the wind. Lemme put it in concrete terms. Let's take everyone's most favoritest pal ever, the Ancient Red Dragon. The 4e dragon is a Level 30 solo with 1,390 hit points.

A level 30 rogue's sneak attack does +5d6. His daily powers do 6[w] to 7[w] damage. At-will is a piddly 2[w]. Without any other tricks, rogue dailies are doing like 60 damage on a hit. You're thinking, "Okay, not so bad...I guess that's 5 or 6 rounds to take down the dragon if 4 people can hit that hard, like maybe if you've got a Fighter, a Warlock, and a Warlord." Except now here's where 4e gets really terrible: monster defenses scale more rapidly than player attacks. So if you're not doing anything fancy and didn't take the right feats, your hit chance is a good clip below 50%. So think 15 rounds or more.

Thus all the haggling, debating, and discussion ever round over how to properly trigger your powers to max damage. Because if you don't take all night studying the board to kill the dragon...it'll take all night rolling piddly damage to kill the dragon.

Did you play after Essentials fixed the monster math by substantially increasing monster damage and reducing monster HP?

Quote from: Haffrung;968691Did you play after Essentials fixed the monster math by substantially increasing monster damage and reducing monster HP?

Now I get to innocently ask "What is Essentials"? I assume from various mentions that its something like a Basic set for 4e?

Quote from: Omega;968699Now I get to innocently ask "What is Essentials"? I assume from various mentions that its something like a Basic set for 4e?

More like "Holy Fuck, Paizo is killing us, how can we make this shit remotely resemble D&D again?"

Quote from: CRKrueger;968700More like "Holy Fuck, Paizo is killing us, how can we make this shit remotely resemble D&D again?"

So 4e D&D GW, without the slapstick and circus freaks?

Quote from: fearsomepirate;968625Did you ever play Fire Emblem or Final Fantasy Tactics? 4e combat is that, but on a tabletop. Biggest killers:

1. Enemies have a fuckton of hp
2. Players have a fuckton of healing
3. Hardly anyone does a lot of damage on a round without stacking auras, bonuses, and other effects
4. Player powers are significantly more effective when the players optimize their positioning, combat advantage, and even turn sequence, leading to every round generating tedious analysis and discussion of the board position, not unlike Risk, Axis & Allies, and other complex board games.

I found the big offender was players taking ages over their turns, so #4. I halved elite & solo hp and reduced standard hp so the actual number of combat rounds per battle wasn't so bad, but each player could take several minutes per turn. 5 players & GM at 5 minutes each and you're looking at 30 minutes per combat round.... I don't think it was always quite that bad as some players were faster, but generally my group was fairly rules-weak which did not help for Epic 4e - one guy who now plays in my level 2 game still doesn't grok the 4e action economy even after 5 years! So a big fight could be 6 rounds at 30 minutes/round = 180 minutes, 3 hours. We were averaging 2 hours even on quite routine fights. When I ran uplevelled 'Assault on Nightwym Fortress' as the final assault on the Orcus-occupied Towers of Night, I cut the 30 book encounters down to 9, started with
http://frloudwater.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/session-95-3-641485-dr-against-carrion.html in April 2016 and ended with http://frloudwater.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/session-103-941485-orcus.html in August 2016. 9 fights, 9 sessions, 4.5 months of fortnightly play at levels 26-29. It's doable, but definitely sloggy, and coming out of that I have no desire to run Epic 4e again.

Edit: Actually looks like in this session http://frloudwater.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/session-97-741485-in-tomb-of-sartine.html we actually got through 2 fights in 3 hours! So 10 fights in 9 sessions.

Quote from: Omega;968707So 4e D&D GW, without the slapstick and circus freaks?

TL;DR version: they switched out the AEDU model for more At-Wills, especially for the non-casters, which cut down on a lot of the dissociation since 1/day powers went back to being more supernatural powers as opposed to, say an Uppercut or Lunge.  Combat moved faster, but was less complex, also without the wtfpwnbbq powers they had to reduce monster HPs, so to keep them competitive, they did more damage.  So faster, cleaner, and tactics closer to D&D than WoW.

Quote from: Robyo;967721It says levels 1-20 on the tin, but rarely have I seen a game that went over 10th without starting to show it's seams ripping.

And I've honestly never had a campaign last long enough for it to matter. If you start at 1st level, stacks of the PCs die before you get one that lasts, and then it's up to 5th or so. I think the best I've done was 7th, and that was in ToEE which is a total hackfest, and the DM was being soft. A campaign with a soft DM has more problems than what things are like at 26th level.

Aside from that it's making high-level characters for a particular module like ToH, and then it's just a one-off so who cares if it's all mental.

Quote from: Tequila Sunrise;968634There are a couple of reasons why some of us consider save-or-lose effects as problematic:

1. Being effectively removed from an entire encounter due to a single die roll can be anticlamactic and pretty boring. As a DM, I particularly don't want to get a brand new player interested in the game, go thru the process of matching everyone's schedules to a single game day, run the player thru even the barebones basics of chargen and roleplaying, and then have then have them effectively KOed as part of their first ttrpg experience. Generally speaking, this is not good for making return players.

Well, I don't know that anything happens "due to a single die roll." The asp poisoning the high level fighter, for instance, takes no fewer than three die rolls--the asp must first either gain first strike or else avoid the fighter's attack (die roll), then the asp must then score a hit against the fighter with all of his defenses (die roll), then the fighter must fail the saving throw (die roll). I'm not seeing how this is different from an orc winning initiative against a newb (die roll), scoring a hit (die roll), then rolling damage high enough to deplete all his first level hit points (die roll).

It seems like the real* gripes are:
1) That a single party member can die without taking the entire party with him,
2) Coordinating a new person's schedules with everyone in the regular group is a drag,
3) Character creation needs to be less involved for new players.

When I was first introduced to the game, all I was allowed to play was a human fighter. So character creation consisted of just rolling 3d6 six times and then rolling for hit points. Nothing could be easier. It was also just me and the DM, so there was no trouble working out different peoples schedules. That also meant if my character died, that was it. The game was over, and I wasn't left out of anything. And yes, my character did die my first time playing. I fought an orc, fought a skeleton, rested by a stream, found a pegasus, lassoed it, took to the skies, met a dragon, it breathed fire at me. Failed my save. Died. Of course, fire breath is not actually a save or die effect, it's straight up damage, save for half. So the whole "due to a single die roll" thing is really rhetoric than reality.


* I've deliberately left out "Extreme luck is somehow anti-climactic and boring" and "Bad stuff might happen your first time out" because I'm assuming if you really meant that, D&D probably isn't the game for you at all. No sense in trying to tweak it.

QuoteIf you like level-drain effects more power to you, but including level reduction effects in a list of things that makes high levels work seems contradictory.

What makes you say that?

Quote from: Omega;968447That goes wayyyy back too. TSR staff had some stories of GenCon sessions and players just not freaking understanding things other than attack. They never tried to run away, surrender, bribe, or just say "Just wandering through." Others made no effort to check for traps or test things first.

My irks is with DMs who drop some TPK capable monster on the group "because the table told me to!" and dont give the group any options. If I rolled up a red dragon on some 1st level PCs then Im sure as hell not just going to have it vaporize them. Check surprise. Maybee it didnt see them? Maybee it lands and talks or extorts money from them, or asks directions to the nearest princess.

Or, one of my favorite uses one... It was a dead dragon. The players spent alot of time afterwards worrying about what killed the dragon and trying not to get its attention.

Of course if the players screw up and attract the dragons attention, insult it, fail to freaking hide before it spots them, etc, then that is their own choice and roll new character when the smoke clears.

All good points.

This brings up another problem TSR/WotC introduced in later editions when they dropped reaction rolls from monsters.

Wandering dragon? Roll 2d6 and add your Charisma bonus. 11? Guess what - he's bored, looking for someone to talk with, and takes a liking to you. Roleplay!

Eliminating the reaction roll was another de facto endorsement of the "kick open the door, kill the monster" style of play that players will default to without clear steering otherwise.

It also means that at high level, the challenges become "same but with more hit points".

Quote from: fearsomepirate;968625Did you ever play Fire Emblem or Final Fantasy Tactics? 4e combat is that, but on a tabletop. Biggest killers:

1. Enemies have a fuckton of hp
2. Players have a fuckton of healing
3. Hardly anyone does a lot of damage on a round without stacking auras, bonuses, and other effects
4. Player powers are significantly more effective when the players optimize their positioning, combat advantage, and even turn sequence, leading to every round generating tedious analysis and discussion of the board position, not unlike Risk, Axis & Allies, and other complex board games.

All true.

Also add to it that many MANY monster and player powers are about stunning/immobilizing, which ends up prolonging fights.

Ironic, given that they started out with a good idea by giving PCs and monsters abilities to maneuver themselves and their opponents on the grid to make combat seem more dynamic. Then they added twice as many abilities that prevent that movement.