Quote from: Thor's Nads on March 31, 2024, 03:59:38 AM

As a fan of Gamma World since the original edition it is hard to put into words how badly White Wolf's Gamma World was. Everything was wrong, almost as bad as KK Disney Star Wars. Such a disappointment because the author had previously written a great Pulp RPG. The only designer of that era who "got" Gamma World right was Jonathan Tweet in his "Omega World" game he wrote for Polyhedron magazine.

I was thoroughly unimpressed with Tweets OW, but it was still not the complete botch of 4e D&D GW. "hilarity ensues"

Only in the RPG world could you make substantial textual revisions a few years after the fact, and claim it's not a new edition. What RPG publishers call printings would be equivalent to new editions in some corners of the publishing world.

I don't get the really inconsistent position some of y'all take on queer characters. Apparently, if you make a character non-binary, you should make them a female character because it doesn't matter. But if you take a female character and make them non-binary, suddenly it does matter to you.

Quote from: SHARK on April 01, 2024, 12:52:33 AM
...
At High Noon, the evil gay sorcerer was publicly burned at the stake, for all to witness the fierce wages of Darkness and embracing Wickedness.
...

Once again, SHARK shows us the way.

Quote from: pawsplay on April 01, 2024, 02:32:14 AM
Only in the RPG world could you make substantial textual revisions a few years after the fact, and claim it's not a new edition. What RPG publishers call printings would be equivalent to new editions in some corners of the publishing world.

I don't get the really inconsistent position some of y'all take on queer characters. Apparently, if you make a character non-binary, you should make them a female character because it doesn't matter. But if you take a female character and make them non-binary, suddenly it does matter to you.

Like, that's just your opinion, man.

Quote from: Jaeger on March 31, 2024, 03:16:13 PM

The Future of D&D is that it will be Fake and Gay.

That's the present. The future will be worse!

Quote from: Spinachcat on April 02, 2024, 03:34:29 AM

Quote from: Jaeger on March 31, 2024, 03:16:13 PM

The Future of D&D is that it will be Fake and Gay.

That's the present. The future will be worse!

Their future will be bankruptcy and death... so is that worse? Or BETTER?

Quote from: Slipshot762 on March 31, 2024, 08:54:33 PM
You find the magic sword you've always wanted, it's intelligent, it grants flying and teleporting and summoning and can shoot a freakin laser 3 times a day...

...but it's racist and homophobic and has tourettes. come on, earn that roleplay xp...

Reminds me of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Jm-WwZnvLY

Quote from: MeganovaStella on March 30, 2024, 07:23:18 PM
DND will stay bad until they give us options to decide the power level (and type of power) of our homebrew worlds. Superhuman martials and wimpy casters in one campaign, wimpy martials and superhuman casters in another, or both or neither.

But of course no one at WOTC will do this. They're too stupid.

I actually kind of agree with this. If D&D is going to aspire to be the universal fantasy game, it really needs to be more of a toolkit. The sales pitch has always been that the D&D classes are universal fantasy archetypes you can fit into any setting with at most minor re-flavoring. This has essentially never been true, but it's even less the case with 5e, now that almost every class is defined by very specific powers with all the setting implications those inevitably carry.

Of course doing this would require a ground-up redesign of the system, which at this point is about the only thing that would me interested in a new official edition of D&D. The reason they won't do it is that there are more than enough people out there who are lazy or have limited imaginations, and are happy to accept that every fantasy setting they play in really is just D&D with slight re-skinning. For those people, not having to learn any new rules or class features to change setting is a feature rather than a bug.

Quote from: Chris24601 on March 28, 2024, 08:47:38 AM
All you really need are three classes; Fighter (fighty guy), Mage (casty guy) and Expert (skill guy); and free multi-classing between them.

Classes are weird.

Another thread got me thinking of Savage Worlds and it's Fantasy Companion (or SW Pathfinder if you prefer).  There you build your character.  Want to play a monk?  Take these Edges.  Cleric?  Take those.  Want to play a hybrid?  Choose which parts of both you want and make yourself a Ascetic or a Dervish or whatever.  Similar approaches exist in Fantasy Hero and other games with a DIY attitude. 

But people like Classes to the point they're iconic to D&D games.  "Elven wizard", "halfling thief", "dwarven fighter", "human cleric", you know exactly what I'm talking about.  They provide consistency (ideally) and make it easy for new gamers to "jump in" and for new GMs to work around their powersets.  If I talk about a 2nd level fighter in any edition of D&D, you know what that character's class abilities are.  Compare that to me talking about the barbarian I built in SWADE; you might have some idea of his field of expertise, but no idea what his build is because there is no set build in SWADE.  I could make a barbarian in SWADE and send him down the path of shamanism, developing all sorts of spells and such to go with the combat focus he also has.  However, this approach also requires players to invest more into systems, understanding why they might want to take X now, Y later, and never bother with Z.  (It's a shame SW/SWADE has so many wonky little bits to it.)

Personally, I don't care for Classes any more, but I can see the appeal.   

Quote from: Habitual Gamer on April 02, 2024, 12:58:55 PM

Quote from: Chris24601 on March 28, 2024, 08:47:38 AM
All you really need are three classes; Fighter (fighty guy), Mage (casty guy) and Expert (skill guy); and free multi-classing between them.

Classes are weird.

Another thread got me thinking of Savage Worlds and it's Fantasy Companion (or SW Pathfinder if you prefer).  There you build your character.  Want to play a monk?  Take these Edges.  Cleric?  Take those.  Want to play a hybrid?  Choose which parts of both you want and make yourself a Ascetic or a Dervish or whatever.  Similar approaches exist in Fantasy Hero and other games with a DIY attitude. 

But people like Classes to the point they're iconic to D&D games.  "Elven wizard", "halfling thief", "dwarven fighter", "human cleric", you know exactly what I'm talking about.  They provide consistency (ideally) and make it easy for new gamers to "jump in" and for new GMs to work around their powersets.  If I talk about a 2nd level fighter in any edition of D&D, you know what that character's class abilities are.  Compare that to me talking about the barbarian I built in SWADE; you might have some idea of his field of expertise, but no idea what his build is because there is no set build in SWADE.  I could make a barbarian in SWADE and send him down the path of shamanism, developing all sorts of spells and such to go with the combat focus he also has.  However, this approach also requires players to invest more into systems, understanding why they might want to take X now, Y later, and never bother with Z.  (It's a shame SW/SWADE has so many wonky little bits to it.)

Personally, I don't care for Classes any more, but I can see the appeal.

I'm in roughly the same boat. I'm kind of over the standard classes, but I do see a use for the concept. To my mind, the point of a class/profession etc. is to "do what it says on the tin". It's so a player can make the kind of character they want without needing an intimate knowledge of the game system. In simplest terms, it should be that if a player picks "fighter" they can count on the character being pretty good at fighting. I've seen novice players in more open systems think they're making a fighter and accidentally make one that turns out to be bad at fighting. In fairness, that's mostly down to bad system design and presentation, but it's the kind of thing a class system reliably prevents. As a player, I tend to prefer a hybrid approach: broad starting packages or archetypes and then a lot of freedom to customize through character progression.

What I like about classes:

• Quickly tells the player the character types that fit in the world.
• Provides a package of stuff for new characters that speeds up creation.

What I don't like about classes:

• Tracking experience points to gain levels.
• Stuck on a track to only play that class.

Classes are the IKEA furniture of RPGs; prepackaged sets of components used to build a specific concept without having to go find all the parts you'd need to build it yourself and leave you reasonably confident it will provide everything needed to end up with the desired piece, even if there were a few bits in the box you never figured out how to make fit.

As such, they are extremely useful for newer and/or uninspired players (and we're all uninspired some days), but can be annoying for craftsmen with the skill to create something better from raw materials.

The trick is to figure out what works best for your group because there is no one-size-fits-all answer.

Getting the class list down to only three options is a little too much for me.  If those are generic, then I'd just as soon the system remove the classes altogether.  If they aren't generic, then three isn't covering the setting as well as I'd like--or it's covering some parts of it in a more limited sense.  I'm fine with fighter, wizard, cleric (or fighter, wizard, thief even) for a party of dungeon delvers, but when we get out into the larger world, I'd like something akin to druid or bard or along those lines, if not necessarily those exact options. 

Plus, don't get me started on false symmetry.  The "one class for each attribute" idea is brain-dead design.  The whole point of having attributes and classes is so that the mix and match of the two axes will produce some variation from a limited list.  If the "melee" guy is just going to buy a lot of Strength for everything and ignore the rest, then it's all just cosmetics.

OTOH, I very much dislike the laundry list of classes that seem to be rather narrow archetypes encoded in specific abilities.  Not least because such things tend to leave all kinds of gaps and still manage to overlap in ways that aren't very helpful.  I'm not sure whether the WotC wizard/sorcerer thing annoys me more because of the overlap or because it cuts out using a core class slot for something with a more differences.  I guess embrace the power of "And"?  I can accept it in early D&D and some of the early D&D clones because its organic out of what was wanted at the table, at the time.  In such a system, the answer for "druid" doesn't fit my world is to drop the druid in favor of some other simple class that does fit.  Once a game is purportedly designed to cover more ground than that organic growth, that reason goes out.

It seems to me that classes work best when they are either a limited list custom fitted as archetypes to mostly cover the setting, OR they are a limited list designed to provide clear character types with recognizable differences.  In both cases, it is critical that the list be short enough that a player can absorb the options.

Quote from: ForgottenF on April 02, 2024, 12:22:16 PM
I actually kind of agree with this. If D&D is going to aspire to be the universal fantasy game, it really needs to be more of a toolkit. The sales pitch has always been that the D&D classes are universal fantasy archetypes you can fit into any setting with at most minor re-flavoring. This has essentially never been true, but it's even less the case with 5e, now that almost every class is defined by very specific powers with all the setting implications those inevitably carry.
...

This has been the disappointing thing with the spate of 5e "conversions" of other games in the past few years.

Every single one has been a conversion of the other games setting to the 5e core mechanics.

Not once has there been a conversion of the 5e core mechanic to another setting. They are all just 5e D&D in a setting skinsuit.

The Dark Souls RPG actually gave an honest effort, but fell short in other ways.

Quote from: pawsplay on April 01, 2024, 02:32:14 AM
Only in the RPG world could you make substantial textual revisions a few years after the fact, and claim it's not a new edition. What RPG publishers call printings would be equivalent to new editions in some corners of the publishing world.

I don't get the really inconsistent position some of y'all take on queer characters. Apparently, if you make a character non-binary, you should make them a female character because it doesn't matter. But if you take a female character and make them non-binary, suddenly it does matter to you.

I could be wrong but I think the issue is that none of that belongs in the rules. And when it has been put into modules it feels like a lecture and forcing 21st century opinions into a world where it doesn't belong. If you make a character you'd have to ask the folks at your table what they think because nobody else should care, and you shouldn't care what anybody else thinks about it.