Wizards start out with the Quake II blaster pistol? What literary source is this emulating?

Now, to be fair, it's not like the old-school Magic User is this powerful, all-encompassing archetype of wizards, sorcerers, magi and soothsayers from a great variety of mythological and literary sources. It highly specifically emulates "some of Jack Vance's novels", and that's about it.

Meh... it's a subjective judgement, but when I read Conan stories and he encounters some sorcerer douchebag, I find myself thinking "sans the set dressings I can easily emulate this with D&D as is."

It's not the Vancian memorization so much as the arbitrarily limited castings; book wizards generally seem to be operating under some sort of limited resource with the magickings. Generally if some magic jerk is zapping folks every round they're a high level dude.

Quote from: Planet Algol;542436Wizards start out with the Quake II blaster pistol? What literary source is this emulating?

Quake.

Non-randomized monster hit points? You, WOTC, are the real monsters good sirs.

You want minion and elite monsters in a large group for an encounter? You dice up the hit points for the group of monsters. The ones with crap hit points are the minions, and the ones with the extraordinary hit points are the elites. Because they're tougher the elites get to bully their hands onto the best weapons as well. Any magic arms in their loot?  The elites are using them.

Hell, just roll a d8 for each one and multiply the result by their hit dice and add any pluses to make it swingier.

In encounters with groups of monsters, I love the emergent narrative that occurs due to varying hit points. "Holy crap, this guy has almost max hit points, he has a boat load of them. He's obviously some kind of big deal!"

Quote from: Benoist;542446Quake.

I will than kindly direct those who are interested in playing wizards need to be able to "do something cool" every round to the Modern Warfare franchise...

As an active D&D player with a middling level magic-user PC, I absolutely love the resource management game of my limited spell slots. When he busts out the magic missiles and fireball, it because he needs to. Meanwhile he's farting around with invisibility and levitation to stay clear of the scrimmage. And if things degenerate to the point that he has to start stabbing, well adventuring is a bloody game...

I honestly believe that I would be bored if I was shooting magic missiles every round. "I'm playing a turret/magic archer? Awesome..."

Quote from: Planet Algol;542447Non-randomized monster hit points? You, WOTC, are the real monsters good sirs.

You want minion and elite monsters in a large group for an encounter? You dice up the hit points for the group of monsters. The ones with crap hit points are the minions, and the ones with the extraordinary hit points are the elites. Because they're tougher the elites get to bully their hands onto the best weapons as well. Any magic arms in their loot?  The elites are using them.

Hell, just roll a d8 for each one and multiply the result by their hit dice and add any pluses to make it swingier.

In encounters with groups of monsters, I love the emergent narrative that occurs due to varying hit points. "Holy crap, this guy has almost max hit points, he has a boat load of them. He's obviously some kind of big deal!"

Yeah, I agree.  I don't like it when you know exactly how many hit points it takes to kill every single monster of the same type.  I prefer it when players only have a general idea, that way they don't game the system*.


* "That monster only has 9 hp left, so I'm not going to use this spell/attack, instead I'll save it and use this other one instead since I know I will do exactly 9 points and that's all I need."

Quote from: Sigmund;542371I have the opposite opinion but for apparently the same reason. "Vancian" magic has always felt very much like they were done that way for game mechanics purposes (and yes, I've read Vance and Dying Earth). To me, a wizard being at least able to do minor magics "at-will" comes across in "feel" more like wizards I read about in other fantasy novels or see in movies than the iconic D&D magic system. I can work with and tolerate the old school magic system, and accept that allowances for game issues need to be made, but if some sort of minor "at-will" system can be included to let playing a wizard feel more consistently like playing a wizard without hurting the game, then I'm all for it. To repeat, this does not mean I think making magic missile an "at-will" spell is also a good idea. I'm tending to agree with the argument that it's a bit too powerful for that.

After thinking on it having Magic Missle at-will may be a bit too powerful but with the hitpoint inflation still in I'm not totally convinced.  As for minor magics that aren't expressly made for combat at-will? That's a stroke of pure genius to me.

I find the shocked aftermath when some badass terrifying monster had absolute shit hit points and gets fucking worked right off the bat to be a beautiful thing, from either side of the screen.

Some people would claim that it's not cinematic enough, that it's an anticlimactic disappointment. Those people do not understand drama.

EDIT: Hell, as a player, realizing that we just wasted the last charge of the rod of zapping death and our remaining plasma grenades on a monster that was made out of tissue paper may elicit some good natured "God damn it!"s, but we'll be laughing our asses off and remembering it as D&D being totally fucking awesome.

The "great" thing about hit point inflation is that it further fucks over people with poor math skills.

Quote from: Planet Algol;542436Wizards start out with the Quake II blaster pistol? What literary source is this emulating?

D&D's literary source for wizards has been "Marvel Comics" for a matter of decades now.

Quote from: Mistwell;542416Ah, thanks for that.

Do you know what happens if a PC has two causes for an advantage, and one cause for a disadvantage?

Not sure, at least not in the sense of an official ruling.  I would think that to me the point of a mechanic like this, though, would be to reduce "official rulings", so I'd say it depends on the GM's call, it could lead to everything cancelling itself out or it could lead to "2 advantages plus 1 disadvantage still adds up to advantage".

Do you really want to encourage official rulings?

RPGPundit

Quote from: jasmith;542435You mean like this?

For the record, you've been pranked. The Bat-slap is not allowed here, on account of it having at one point been grotesquely overused and often as a way to shut down conversation. Ditto some of the other "meme images".

Don't worry, though, we're pretty lenient about things, especially since you clearly didn't know.

Thedungeondelver, on the other hand, gets an official Slap On the Wrist.. this time. Don't fuck around like that again.

RPGPundit

Regarding the monster HPs, I think its seriously preferable as I see it that monsters have a lot of hit points than that they have so few as to be mooks in disguise.  Trust me that the current HPs are an improvement over what came before.

RPGPundit

The more and more I think about it, the advantage/disadvantage system is what ruins things for me. Not the mechanics for it necessarily, but the amount of "mother may I" inherent in their application.