Quote from: Sacrosanct;548685You've never heard that term before?

It's from the military, regarding the standard issue glasses you had to wear:

Of course, when I was in 7th grade, I had a pair just like them.  They're called "rape preventative glasses" because they make you so ugly you don't have to worry about getting raped.

Nope. New to me.

I guess the English version is National Health glasses, but that doesn't have the same zip to it.

I think "Birth Control Glasses" may be more common around here; I'd never heard 'em as "RPGs", only "BCGs" til today.

These character sheets are actually looking pretty nice to me.

I prefer to keep explicitly background/narrative based mechanics out of D&D (but of course they exist, ie pick 'Wizard' at first level and you can safely assume you  somehow learned that), so it's cool to see them here in a similar, but separate game. The hooks and flexibility of them seem really nice, and subtle compared to a super-special character that's got another Bigby's Wall of Limited Summon IX memorized.

The main thing I'm not feeling is how stuff like the Fighter's powers activate, having to keep track of rolling an even number for +2 to AC or whatever just seems overly fiddly for such a minor benefit. And what is a Fighter's 'ward'?

QuoteOf course, when I was in 7th grade, I had a pair just like them. They're called "rape preventative glasses" because they make you so ugly you don't have to worry about getting raped.

lulz

Quote from: Ladybird;548626It depends on what you want to model, really.

As fights wear on, people get tired and they make mistakes, especially in a tight melee where you have to be paying full attention, all the time, else you're dead. Representing this as an escalating penalty makes the characters flail around ineffectually; they make mistakes, but it doesn't really come back to punish them, other than the fight dragging on for longer. It gives you a longer period to think "this hasn't worked, time to back off", and that's perfectly fine.

If the penalties apply to defences, later rounds should be pretty lethal.  Especially if the monsters don't have the same penalties to hit from the escalation.

QuoteAn escalating bonus from everyone in the fight getting tired, though... now it gets deadly. The characters are making mistakes, absolutely daft bits of footwork, poorly-judged swings, and lapses of concentration, and that's what you can represent with a bonus; your opponents are handing you an advantage. Lethality of the fight goes up, because your opponents are making it easier for you to kill them - not so much at a player level, but at the level the character experiences.

I think I see my previous miscalculation; if the bonus applies to the players' attacks, the monsters will tend to go down faster.  I am just not sure that simulates 'escalation' so much as 'let the Wookie win'.

QuoteNow, you need some sort of mechanic to represent combat training (Which, in a class-based system, could easily be a class feature - say, combat classes get to nudge the "escalation" one step in their favour, while non-scholarly classes have to nudge it one step worse), and it absolutely has to affect PC's. Now you've got a system with even more weight put on the decision of when and where to fight (And if you need to!), because the "shit got real" step comes around even faster, your "safe" period is shorter. And the reason you'd do it this way, rather than just reducing everyone's hit points, is to make combat more dangerous and unpredictable; afaic, melee combat should be a deadly mess, and the absolute last place anyone sensible would want to be.

Exactly.  That is escalation to me, escalating the stakes.  Make it increasingly dangerous/lethal to press the attack unless you really really know what you are doing.  As in, 'playing the Fighter'.  For everyone else, it's like you say: the last place they want to be.

Quote from: VectorSigma;548690I think "Birth Control Glasses" may be more common around here; I'd never heard 'em as "RPGs", only "BCGs" til today.

I am aware of the term 'RPG', but 'BCG' was pretty much the only phrase I ever heard used.

Quote from: One Horse Town;548688Nope. New to me.

I guess the English version is National Health glasses, but that doesn't have the same zip to it.

No one can ever accuse the military for being too PC in its terms

Quote from: John Morrow;548651Of course not.  If there was, then the game would be "incoherent" and that's bad, according to Uncle Ron's cult.

My point was if Ben is going to actually talk about why GNS is bad he should at least understand it first.

QuoteAs Ryan Dancey explained, that was intentional with 3e.  At some point after that, they apparently decided that success of overrated and they'd rather write a niche game that caters to a smaller audience.  It sure is a lot easier to print and sell 5,000 copies like the more successful Forge-influenced games generally do than 50,000 or 500,000, after all.

How many copies do you think 13th Age is going to sell?

I don't know, how many copies of non-D&D or D&D-derived games move these days?  If you're not Justin Bieber, you're a nobody in this industry.  Regardless of actual talent, very few people can challenge D&D's place (even 'failed' 4e dwarfs most things).

But while I don't know how 13th Age is going to do, I do think that sales of everything, even the larger name brands, will continue to go down.  5e might manage better numbers than 4e for a short time if they market it right, but it will never reach 3e numbers -- 3e was a perfect storm of events, a lot of which had nothing to do with the game itself (LotR movies bringing in newbs, long-timers being fed up with 2e, etc.)

Unfortunately that perfect culturally storm was negatively affected by the buyout of WotC by Hasbro, but I think that has more to do with them cutting Adkinson's attempt to sink money in community-building projects (like the WotC stores) than it does with the redesign of D&D.

QuoteCan you name me one designer on the team of either 4e or 5e that you think understands or "gets" playing by interpreting the setting and events through the eyes of the player's PC?

I don't know, all I can tell you is that as someone who came in with early 3e, the rationale behind 4e didn't strike me as too far from what I observed culturally surrounding 3e play, both in Living Greyhawk and at home games.

Quote from: VectorSigma;548690I think "Birth Control Glasses" may be more common around here; I'd never heard 'em as "RPGs", only "BCGs" til today.

Yep.

Quote from: StormBringer;548700I think I see my previous miscalculation; if the bonus applies to the players' attacks, the monsters will tend to go down faster.  I am just not sure that simulates 'escalation' so much as 'let the Wookie win'.

Both sides in the fight should be getting the "opponent tired" bonus, though, not just the players; which means it applies to the monster's attacks, so the players go down quicker too.

QuoteExactly.  That is escalation to me, escalating the stakes.  Make it increasingly dangerous/lethal to press the attack unless you really really know what you are doing.  As in, 'playing the Fighter'.  For everyone else, it's like you say: the last place they want to be.

The fighter should definitely be the best at exploiting the escalation mechanic, yeah. But they shouldn't be immune to it, and should still be aware that the front lines are deadly - because they'll be going up against people like themselves.

I guess what I'm arguing for is a deadlier variant of WFRP1.

Quote from: Peregrin;548730My point was if Ben is going to actually talk about why GNS is bad he should at least understand it first.



I don't know, how many copies of non-D&D or D&D-derived games move these days?  If you're not Justin Bieber, you're a nobody in this industry.  Regardless of actual talent, very few people can challenge D&D's place (even 'failed' 4e dwarfs most things).

But while I don't know how 13th Age is going to do, I do think that sales of everything, even the larger name brands, will continue to go down.  5e might manage better numbers than 4e for a short time if they market it right, but it will never reach 3e numbers -- 3e was a perfect storm of events, a lot of which had nothing to do with the game itself (LotR movies bringing in newbs, long-timers being fed up with 2e, etc.)

Unfortunately that perfect culturally storm was negatively affected by the buyout of WotC by Hasbro, but I think that has more to do with them cutting Adkinson's attempt to sink money in community-building projects (like the WotC stores) than it does with the redesign of D&D.



I don't know, all I can tell you is that as someone who came in with early 3e, the rationale behind 4e didn't strike me as too far from what I observed culturally surrounding 3e play, both in Living Greyhawk and at home games.

I hate having any agreement with you but as a 3e person when you're right you've right.

I've now added to my previous post a link to the cheat sheet I used for our 13A campaign. For convenience's sake, I repost the link here:

http://postimage.org/image/4f86cw3nn

This will let you see how monster design in 13A looks like, if fed into 4E formatting (which I adore). I bet 13A monster stat blocks will try hard to look less 4E-like, if the playtest document is any indication (e.g. their insistence to put a lot of salient info OUT of the statblock and into the creature's description).

Quote from: Peregrin;548730I don't know, all I can tell you is that as someone who came in with early 3e, the rationale behind 4e didn't strike me as too far from what I observed culturally surrounding 3e play, both in Living Greyhawk and at home games.

I'm sorry, I don't understand what you were getting at here.  Could you elaborate?

Quote from: Ladybird;548780Both sides in the fight should be getting the "opponent tired" bonus, though, not just the players; which means it applies to the monster's attacks, so the players go down quicker too.

That would be about the only way I would do it.

QuoteThe fighter should definitely be the best at exploiting the escalation mechanic, yeah. But they shouldn't be immune to it, and should still be aware that the front lines are deadly - because they'll be going up against people like themselves.

The core is quite intriguing, and I might start fiddling about to make it more interesting mechanically.  Give the Fighter some additional fun stuff, give certain monsters extra things to do, and so on.

QuoteI guess what I'm arguing for is a deadlier variant of WFRP1.

Well, looks like you have your solution, then.  

Quote from: daniel_ream;548842I'm sorry, I don't understand what you were getting at here.  Could you elaborate?

Not 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.