alexandraerin

These people... gah. They insist that it's so blindingly obvious that there's only one way to play each class (those few classes they judge to be playable), that being whatever maximizes "Damage Per Second", that there's only a handful of powers worth taking and there's no reason to not just keep using your "best" at-will power over and over again...

...and then they turn around and complain about the following:

1. That combat takes too long.
2. That it lacks any tactical depth.
3. That there are no fun or interesting character combinations and the builds are all too similar.
4. That there's nothing to do but kick in the door and start swinging.
5. That it's too video gamey.

Yeah. All of that would be true if you really were restricted in choices to the builds they claim are the only playable ones and then played them the way they say to play them. And I'm a big advocate of "no wrong way to play", but they clearly don't enjoy playing the game that way... they're just locked into this min-max thinking. If somebody suggests they try something a little more freeform, they start going on about how they're giving up this advantage at level seven and how from level nine there are no optimal powers for that build and if it's such a grind to defeat monsters with their "optimal" build then how can a suboptimal character have any hope?

Jesus. I'll crunch numbers right alongside them, but at the end of the day combat's more than numbers. Monsters do stuff. And if we're not supposed to be playing this like it's a video game, maybe then sometimes the monsters will be behaving like monsters (or mercenaries or brigands or whatever) and not like game pieces being controlled by a number cruncher so you have to crunch numbers just as hard to have any hope of beating them.

Is that so crazy an idea? But anybody mentions anything like that and the rallying cry is, "This system is so fragile that if you don't play it exactly like the devs it breaks!" No, you FUCKTARDS, it's so robust that as long as you don't play it like a bunch of anti-immersive, video game simulating, "ROLL"-playing munchkins it works out just fine.

I'd be content to say "You play your way, I'll play mine.", but when it's, "NO! EVERYONE MUST PLAY MY WAY! AND MY WAY THE SYSTEM IS BROKEN!", I'm going to call you a fucking idiot.

It goes beyond them overlooking the inconsistencies in their own arguments. They bring them up themselves. One minute they're saying that the Cleric power of Righteous Brand, being an at-will attack that gives an ally an attack bonus that can start at +5 and go up to +9 or 10 by the epic levels if it hits is soooooo obviously overpowered that there's no reason not to take it or to ever use any other at-will attack power... and the next moment they're complaining about how lame it is that Clerics have to hit with it in the first place to confer the bonus.

Ohhhhh, so it's not an autowin power?

Of course they don't go so far as to imagine that this might mean there are circumstances where another ability would be better to use in its place, so they go on complaining about how 4E combat is "nothing but spamming the same attacks with no tactics" in between complaining about how "combat is a boring grind that takes too long." Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah. I'm not surprised that some of these fuckwits need to be told that immersion can't come from the rules, but TACTICS CAN'T COME FROM THEM, EITHER. If you sit there "spamming the same attack", of course it's going to be boring.

I never played much 3E, but if I had to guess I'd say they're so used to being able to collapse everything down to a simple mathematical advantage where one build is clearly superior to all others (which I doubt is itself an insurmountable flaw of 3E, but is at least in some regard a byproduct of how they play it) and haven't quite grasped that 4E doesn't work that way.

But... gah. This is just stupid. "Righteous Brand sucks, because if it hits it gives too big an advantage... and it also sucks because it doesn't hit often enough."

What if your ally needs health more that turn? What if it's more important to make sure an enemy misses/can't attack a particular ally that turn? These are tactical considerations. If you're too distracted by the shininess of "OH BUT I CAN GIVE AS MUCH AS A +5 TO HIT AT LEVEL ONE IF I HIT WITH THIS POWER!" to consider the needs of the moment, then there's no use complaining that the game is "tactically poor".

And one person, complaining about the lack of out-of-combat mechanics, took some unrelated numbers from 3E's DMG to try to extrapolate how the world economy would work in terms of a player running a tavern. He used the population center size rules, the income rate for unskilled laborers to figure out disposable income, the cost of buying a house-sized building, the cost of hirelings, etc., the cost of alcohol... he figured out that according to all those rules as presented, if someone bought a tavern and ran it, they'd make almost no money and it would take forever to pay off the initial investment.

He then concluded that the system was badly flawed but the fact that you could extrapolate this much was a start, and better than 4E.

But you know what? I think he's not giving 3E enough credit. I think the numbers he came up with are pretty realistic. There's a reason in Ye Old Average Sized Medieval Fantasy City, commoners don't just scrounge up 10,000 gold crown and then erect a Money Making Mill, aka a tavern. Shit costs money. A private individual has a hard enough time capitalizing a venture in the modern world with a first-world information economy with things like venture capitalists and IPOs... and even if their venture is successful it could be years before they turn a profit.

We need rules for this? We need to pay for the privilege of having pages of a rulebook devoted to telling us that most people will just barely squeak by, that the average person can't afford to open a tavern on their own and that if they take out a loan for it their kids'll be paying it off?

This guy did the math, he had it all added up, and he backed away because he didn't like the answer he got. I guess he was looking for something more exploitable, something that didn't just add up to some background color for his character.

You want rules for a non-adventuring economy? Here they are:

You will never, ever, ever make any amount of money that seems significant from using your non-adventuring skills, when compared to the stuff you found in the vault of the mad mage you killed at the end of your big level one adventure arc. If you grab one hundred people you see on the street at random, by the time you made it out of the heroic tier, you have accumulated more wealth than any of them will see. If you really want to make money based on your background characteristics, this means trading your life of adventure and the pursuit of knowledge, power, and/or excitement and becoming another peon who's just scraping by. At least if you have the money to buy your premises outright, you won't be in debt. Good luck.

There's your non-adventuring economy! Do we really need to spend a paragraph printing that somewhere in a book that costs real world money?

I've said it before in other posts, but I'll say it again here: if a PC wants to make appreciable money doing something, it can very easily be fitted into the level-based wealth paradigm. You just handwave routine revenues and expenses as canceling each other out and give gold if the PC does something significant/noteworthy to boost business.

Oh, and of course, I'm talking about out of combat encounters, so here comes the refrain: "Skill Challenges are a shitty mechanic." As written originally, they were too difficult, so they got fixed in errata... but some people contend the fix is too much and now they're too easy, even approaching automatic. The same people who complain about this also complain that they can't take 20 on breaking down a door any more... but I digress.

Like I said, I haven't used Skill Challenges much myself if only because I've been trying to break my group of the habit of reaching for their dice when there's a roleplay situation afoot. But I'm looking hard at them and I think they're a good way of finding a middle ground between "I roll my Diplomacy check. I got a 27." and "[Player makes a big persuasive and passionate speech with very good points, but has no Diplomacy skill]".

The people who approach combat as a DPS calculation where you "spam your best attack until you win" and then complain that doing so is boring look at a skill check as an excuse to roll a d20 a half dozen times and wonder why you don't just do it once. They miss the point that in all the examples, there is interaction... including the players who don't have the obvious relevant skill coming up with the ways to make their skills contribute. Of course we who are reading the examples can see where it lists examples of what each skill is good for, but in an actual game that's a player innovation.

The specific example in the DMG of finding a temple in the wilderness involves a Cleric using Religion skill to remember where the temple would likely be built, being told that the sect favors locations near water, like a river, and the Fighter saying, "I use Athletics to climb a tree to look for a break in the trees that could be a river valley", or something like that. That's not "spamming skill rolls". It's an example of one player coming up with something that proved to be an innovation another player could build on.

Now that I've got my players past the "pick up dice and start naming skills whenever they find something" phase, I'm definitely going to be posing some challenges like this in my sessions. I'll see how the mechanic plays out before I start making any modification to it, but if you're not treating the game as pure numbers to be gamed and beaten with "spam techniques", it looks to me like it does exactly what it's intended to: get multiple players involved in solving problems, and get them to use their skills in interesting combinations.

If the result of the Skill Challenge system will be successes more often than its failures, so what? Good ideas should be rewarded. Working together should be rewarded. A system that limits the amount of random disastrous failures as punishment for Trying Something Out isn't broken..

And if you sit down at my game table and say "Sucks to your Skill Challenge, I roll Arcana 6 times and I make my check so I win.", I'm going to ask you what you're doing each time. And if you say it doesn't matter because you have the Arcana skill and that's all it takes to beat the Skill Challenge, I'm going to tell you to get the fuck out and go play some World of Warcraft or something because at this table, grown-up people are trying to play a roleplaying game, something that involves actually immersing yourself in a persona and imagining what you would do in a given situation.

Gah. Almost eleven now. I'm going to write some Jamie.