Quote from: Batman;978932Ive never tried Savage Worlds. In hear its a fun RPG. How well did it mesh with the Forgotten Realms, magic wise? I just downloaded the free Test Drive SW documentcand looks like a lot of playing cards vernacular.

The core book is only $8. The Fantasy Companion for it $20. There is a *shit* ton of conversions straight from various D&D settings and bestiaries already out there.

Magic - Magic in Savage Worlds is a package of effects that you re-skin based on the type of magic you do. They call them "Trappings". To explain it, you have to understand a couple of mechanical principles to SW. It's a classless system, but advancement has no limit. Every 20xp (which is adjustable) you get what they call an Advance. This advance can be used to raise Stats, Skills or buy an Edge. And "Edge" is like a D&D "Feat" - but in terms of mechanical weight it's *far* beefier.

Savage Worlds makes Magic-Use a Edge. Once you purchase that Edge, you pick your Trapping: Arcane Magic, Divine Miracles, Weird Science, Necromancy etc. This is your "style" of magic (and yes you can learn the others). Each style gives you specific effects that overlay specific spells that each Trapping has access to. *Each* spell is, itself, a new Edge. Each style becomes its own skill, so when you cast a spell, you pay the points to power that spell and roll your skill for the effect.

The vast majority of the spell-effects in D&D can be duplicated with relative ease. But here is where the rubber hits the road: Casters are now beholden to the same progression as every other "type" of character. Sure caster can whip out some powerful effects, assuming they've slapped all their Advances into their spell-lists. But that will leave them vulnerable to everything outside of spellcasting. Most of the magic stuff, even the fluff, can be modeled in Savage Worlds with less mechanical tweaking than D&D. Plus every subsystem in the game has rules for creating pretty much everything you could want.

It's a ridiculously flexible system and it scales amazingly well. Case in point - Savage Worlds now powers *RIFTS* (and does it very well imo). It's not a "perfect" system, of course, I have some small quibbles, but they're just that - quibbles.

For Realms purposes, I can sit very comfortably in the "Sweet spot" of D&D gameplay- relatively 7th-13th level for a *loooong* time. And if the game needs to go higher-powered, it is pretty effortless. The game DOES play differently, it can feel a little more deadly, but it also feels more cinematic.

Card Rules - The only thing Cards are used for is Initiative, and some Edges. It sounds dumb, I know, but 1) I started my experience with Savage Worlds playing Deadlands, so it made sense, and it got me over my natural skepticism 2) It actually works! And it's not like you have to buy funky dice (FFG), 3) You could house-rule them away pretty easy.

Otherwise 98% of the time you're using plain ol' standard D&D dice.

The other BIG plus. All the Savage Worlds games are cross-compatible if you like going *gonzo* with your campaigns. There is ridiculous amounts of support for this system.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;978414Even 5e, with its supposedly bounded accuracy, runs into a problem with save DCs eventually hitting the 20s. Tiamat has DC 27 saves on her breath attacks, making it impossible for anyone who is non-proficient in DEX saves to pass.

Doesnt that mean you should instead sanely stay out of the path of those breath attacks instead of complaining you cant save against them like the person proficient at saving against that sort of stuff can??? And even with proficiency you might still fail if you arent a particularly nimble character. Because you are, oh I dont know, TRYING TO DODGE A GOD? nah, that couldnt possibly be it.

Note that some magic items add to your saves. And theres resistances from items and spells and skills about, and both the Rogue and Monk can sidestep some damage even with what would have been a failure otherwise.

Quote from: Batman;978932looks like a lot of playing cards vernacular.

Aces, Wild Card, etc, just annoying terminology, has nothing to actually do with cards or assumes anything about playstyles or gaming systems involving cards.  Like Tenbones said, it's only initiative, and you can roll dice instead.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;978414Even 5e, with its supposedly bounded accuracy, runs into a problem with save DCs eventually hitting the 20s. Tiamat has DC 27 saves on her breath attacks, making it impossible for anyone who is non-proficient in DEX saves to pass.

Your mistake is not bringing a ring of evasion to a breath weapon fight. And a squad of very high level vengeance paladins, preferably with the Sentinel feat.

Or possibly just the assumption that it is bad math instead of perhaps a design philosophy that people without Dex proficiency aren't supposed to make that save. That certainly seems to be what they were going for with the make-saves-progressively-harder-but-each-failed-save-less-crippling rules.

I've been running 5e for a few years, and I think it's just not very good design. Your high-level fighter will eat nearly every magic spell bad guys throw at him, especially if you don't play with feats (Resilient will grab him either DEX or WIS saves, but can only be taken once).

Quote from: Willie the DuckThat certainly seems to be what they were going for with the make-saves-progressively-harder-but-each-failed-save-less-crippling rules.

I wouldn't say the effects are less crippling. There are plenty of spells and effects at high levels that will one-shot players, especially if they haven't put much in CON.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;979900I wouldn't say the effects are less crippling. There are plenty of spells and effects at high levels that will one-shot players, especially if they haven't put much in CON.

It almost has to be less crippling than oD&D through 3e, where there are a huge number of 'make this save or your character dies' spells. Most of the 5e spells fall into a few broad categories

• 'make the save or lose your action', and either have to successfully save to end the effect (Hold Person), get to make the save every round and each round you save you get to act (Stinking Cloud), or the effect ends when you take damage (Hypnotic Pattern)
  
• 'used to be save or die, now just damage' these spells, like Finger of Death and Disintegrate, are now just damage spells with special effects like auto-die if you hit 0 hp or come back as a zombie.
  
• 'no save allowed spells' like Sleep, Power Word, Kill, and Forcecage - which usually have some other qualifier rather than a save (whether that is good or bad, it means it isn't the saves at fault)
  
• 'multiple checks before you are killed/taken-out' such as Contagion (with ruling on when effects occur, yes the wording is bad) or an Intellect Devourer's attack.
  

There might be a spell or effect I am forgetting, but overall there are significantly fewer things that fall under the category of make-this-save-or-your-character-is-either-dead-or-will-have-no-agency-in-this-battle.

None of this changes your actual-play experience, of course, and if you say isn't working well, nothing I can say about design intentions matter. I just think they were being deliberate in the idea that you weren't expected to make every save, and modified the outcomes of failure to match.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;979902It almost has to be less crippling than oD&D through 3e, where there are a huge number of 'make this save or your character dies' spells. Most of the 5e spells fall into a few broad categories

• 'make the save or lose your action', and either have to successfully save to end the effect (Hold Person, get to make the save every round and each round you save you get to act (Stinking Cloud), or the effect ends when you take damage (Hypnotic Pattern)
  
• 'used to be save or die, now just damage' these spells, like Finger of Death and Disintegrate, are now just damage spells with special effects like auto-die if you hit 0 hp or come back as a zombie.
  
• 'no save allowed spells' like Sleep, Power Word, Kill, and Forcecage - which usually have some other qualifier rather than a save (whether that is good or bad, it means it isn't the saves at fault)
  
• 'multiple checks before you are killed/taken-out' such as Contagion (with ruling on when effects occur, yes the wording is bad) or an Intellect Devourer's attack. There might be a spell or effect I am forgetting, but overall there are significantly fewer things that fall under the category of make-this-save-or-your-character-is-either-dead-or-will-have-no-agency-in-this-battle.
  

None of this changes your actual-play experience, of course, and if you say isn't working well, nothing I can say about design intentions matter. I just think they were being deliberate in the idea that you weren't expected to make every save, and modified the outcomes of failure to match.

Dragon's breath in particular does enough damage to drop appropriate-level casters to zero. This is actually across all levels, but it's worse at high levels. If your wizard has 10 DEX, a 4th-level wizard has a 40% chance of making the save against a CR 4 red dragon and thus surviving a (7d6)/2 breath attack. Your 17th-level wizard, by contrast, automatically fails the save against a CR 17 red dragon and will take 18d6 damage. Yes, the damage didn't scale linearly, so a 17th-level wizard has a much better chance of surviving 18d6 damage than a 4th-level wizard does of surviving 7d6, but the wizard is down on the next Legendary Action.

I think most players don't realize how much 5e DMs tend to pull punches. There are so many monsters that can easily take out the caster in a single round, and time and time again, I've seen DMs simply not do this, having the monster focus on the tank or spread out its attacks for no real reason. Maybe we should be playing harder and forcing players to adjust.

That certainly sounds right. I was thinking more of save-or-die, save-or-suck effects, not direct damage. Is the 17th level wizard expected to have a ring/spell to protect them, or a 20 con, perhaps? Otherwise, it does sound like a 2-round-to-drop.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;979908I think most players don't realize how much 5e DMs tend to pull punches. There are so many monsters that can easily take out the caster in a single round, and time and time again, I've seen DMs simply not do this, having the monster focus on the tank or spread out its attacks for no real reason. Maybe we should be playing harder and forcing players to adjust.

I'm not sure that's 5e-specific. I think in most editions the pure mechanical output of level appropriate monsters will quickly take down the spellcaster/wizard/magic user. Honestly, level appropriate monsters, just looking at the stats, seem like they should take down the PCs (not just spellcasters) quite a bit of the time. Even 3e, what many say is the height of giving things to the PCs, 12th level parties vs. CR 12 devils, demons, etc. seem really really challenging (unless you are those 3e optimizers who can ride the rules off the rails into near godhood status by level 10). I think that this overall might be by design. The game is set up to be hard, so that the PCs, to win, have to be 1) smart, wiley, full of guile, etc., or 2) the DM pulls punches.

It would be neat if the game was designed such that the PCs playing smart would work, but the DM pulling punches didn't. I haven't seen that game though. As to whether we should be playing harder and forcing players to adjust, I don't know about we (each group has different goals), but I would recommend it to you if you are finding the gaming experience unsatisfactory.

QuoteI've seen DMs simply not do this, having the monster focus on the tank or spread out its attacks for no real reason. Maybe we should be playing harder and forcing players to adjust.

Coming back to this, there's a line of reasoning (that I think that I agree with) that in a real fight, a monster who lunges past the front line of capable martial combatants to attack the people behind them, ought to be a dead monster. Likewise, if each of the orcs ignores the guy in front of them to all gang attack one martial (so that they will go down in a round), they will likewise die a quick death. If the system doesn't reflect that (perhaps because of insufficient teeth in the opportunity attack mechanism), then that is the flaw in the system, not that the DM is making the monsters not act intelligently (because the proposed action shouldn't be the intelligent choice).

Quote from: fearsomepirate;979900I've been running 5e for a few years, and I think it's just not very good design. Your high-level fighter will eat nearly every magic spell bad guys throw at him, especially if you don't play with feats (Resilient will grab him either DEX or WIS saves, but can only be taken once).

I've had my concerns about 5e save progression (and attribute dependence) since first reading it. I always thought Saves would have been cleaner to add Proficiency Bonus to all Attributes, and class-based save proficiency just provided Expertise (double PB). It immediately mitigates Attribute whinging, as the PB quickly outpaces. And it makes PB tier level more of a guesstimate-able difficulty comparison (basically check tierage between PCs and mobs).

One of these days I'll test my theory out in a homegame...

Quote from: Willie the Duck;979913That certainly sounds right. I was thinking more of save-or-die, save-or-suck effects, not direct damage. Is the 17th level wizard expected to have a ring/spell to protect them, or a 20 con, perhaps? Otherwise, it does sound like a 2-round-to-drop.

There are no expected magic items in 5e. You'll probably have some magic weapons and armor, but nothing like "oh yeah, everyone has Ring of Protection +N by level 12, of course!"

QuoteI'm not sure that's 5e-specific. I think in most editions the pure mechanical output of level appropriate monsters will quickly take down the spellcaster/wizard/magic user.

Prior to 3e, the damage output seemed to be governed more by a high chance to hit rather than throwing down piles of damage dice. And, of course, saves didn't have a DC. Part of it is a holdover from 3.x's ill-thought linear modifiers. I don't think Cook et al. really thought very hard about what having modifiers go as high as +5 (or more!) really implied in terms of being able to key dice rolls to targets. I mean you can effectively double your HP for most classes just by putting points in CON. That's stupid. The math in AD&D is much more intelligible because the modifiers to HP and damage rolls largely stay in a tight range.

QuoteIt would be neat if the game was designed such that the PCs playing smart would work, but the DM pulling punches didn't. I haven't seen that game though.

4e did this well. It was really easy to put together solid combat encounters where you really had to play well to challenge the players, and you didn't have to worry that being smart would come off as being an asshole. If I put a 7th-level encounter up against 7th-level players, they were unlikely to get TPK'd unless they played stupid. And if I played stupid, they would just breeze through it. Other than the whole "90 minutes to run a combat encounter" thing, it worked well.

QuoteComing back to this, there's a line of reasoning (that I think that I agree with) that in a real fight, a monster who lunges past the front line of capable martial combatants to attack the people behind them, ought to be a dead monster. Likewise, if each of the orcs ignores the guy in front of them to all gang attack one martial (so that they will go down in a round), they will likewise die a quick death. If the system doesn't reflect that (perhaps because of insufficient teeth in the opportunity attack mechanism), then that is the flaw in the system, not that the DM is making the monsters not act intelligently (because the proposed action shouldn't be the intelligent choice).

Yeah, the other big flaw in 5e is there is technically no reason the mummy lord shouldn't just walk past the fighter and beat the piss out of the wizard. We 5e DMs just don't usually do that because it feels unfair and contrary to the spirit of the game.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;980063Yeah, the other big flaw in 5e is there is technically no reason the mummy lord shouldn't just walk past the fighter and beat the piss out of the wizard. We 5e DMs just don't usually do that because it feels unfair and contrary to the spirit of the game.

He'll at least take a Reaction attack. If the Fighter has Sentinel feat like the Barb IMC he'll also be stuck with Speed 0. Even without that, the Wizard often lurks too far back for a 30' speed monster to reach in one round. Or if quarters are tight the Wizard has a solid block of defenders in front. And the Bladesinger Wiz IMC usually has a pretty ridiculous AC, anyway.

Past a certain point, a single weapon attack isn't a big deal. I've seen Sentinel in actual play a total of zero times so far. Also haven't seen a Bladesinger (and probably won't, since I don't run AL games, and it seems everyone at the table just uses my books).

Trust me, there have been plenty of times where if I or the DM I was playing with went as hard on the players as I did in 4e, it would have easily resulted in at least one player death. Shoot, just having zombies munch on downed players tends to cause a tidal wave of player tears.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;980063Yeah, the other big flaw in 5e is there is technically no reason the mummy lord shouldn't just walk past the fighter and beat the piss out of the wizard. We 5e DMs just don't usually do that because it feels unfair and contrary to the spirit of the game.

That's the same in all versions of D&D, though.  Except maybe 4e with it's 'marking' mechanism.  Most Mummies/Mummy Lords have the ability to soak whatever hits the Fighter/Thief(Rogue) can dish out and run up to the Wizard/Magic Users.  And given that often, you're fighting on its territory, there's no real way to bottleneck it, preventing it's movement.  Even worse, if it has spells, it should ignore the melee guys, by sending minions to engage those, while it targets the Wizards/Clerics/Magic Users with all the firepower it can muster.

There's a reason why I say that players and DMs are trained to have a 'gentleman's agreement' to target the least effective members of the PC's first.  It's to give the Magic Users a chance, otherwise you often end up with TPKs every major fight as the main damage dealers/fight enders are removed in the first few rounds.  That's all the tactics it needs.  Arrange map in favour of bad guys (because they can, as most never leave them), send minions to engage the front liners, throw everything at casters, stand back and watch everything die.

At least that's how it works with AD&D 2e and later.

Cue Gronan coming and yelling at us for 'doing it wrong'.  Again.

I've often thought that it would be interesting to try some kind of "anti focus fire" mechanic in D&D where a creature that is not engaged gets some kind of moderate bonus to its actions.  That is, the more of the other side you leave to their own devices, the more effective they are.  As with many such ideas, though, the devil is in the details.  

Instead, I always wind up deciding that I'll focus fire about as much as the players do, and thus let the players set how much tactical stuff they want to do versus how they want to pretend that leaving people unengaged is a bad idea.  If the players want to push it, and think they can play smart enough to make pushing it come out in their favor, more power to them.  I'll let them have it when they give me the chance.  If they back off, I'll play the creatures according to their motivations.  I prefer the latter, but can easily handle the former.

I think the problem with a rules-based "focus fire" counter is that anything simple but effective also needs some other tweaks in the game, that D&D just isn't well equipped to accept (at least, not without side effects that are worse than the issue).  The game already skews towards the party mobbing a single tough creature anyway, and anything that counters "focus fire" in general tends to make that effect even stronger.