Best Version of DnD?

[Auberon]

@Sylverthorne, why you should give someone on ebay your money for a 4E book even if you don't play 4E. 

 

 

 

[Sylverthorne]

14 minutes ago, Auberon said:

@Sylverthorne, why you should give someone on ebay your money for a 4E book even if you don't play 4E. 

 

 

Thank you, I think. I'll take a look... and we have crash and burn in the first five minutes.

First, anybody who says that dragons are a bag of fire-breathing and hit points is ... not playing them well. They're centuries-old, flying armored spellcasters, and if they manage to live to Great Wyrm status, they've seen most of the tricks. Leaving aside that IIRC, dragons that old either have built in, or can get a fire aura (depends on setting, in some cases). 

Second, any party that goes up against a red dragon without fire resistances/immunities deserves to become barbeque.

I didn't get past that, because listening to that guy made my brain hurt.

 

That having been said, and while I do appreciate your desire to help, I'm getting the impression you're pushing me to play a system I'm largely uninterested in, and that bugs the crap out of me. Please stop.

Edited April 21, 2017 by Sylverthorne

[Auberon]

Aww, well if I can't actually get across what I'm trying to then I guess I'll have to give up.

 

But now you make want to actually try to misbehave. 

[Unruly]

2 hours ago, Sylverthorne said:

First, anybody who says that dragons are a bag of fire-breathing and hit points is ... not playing them well. They're centuries-old, flying armored spellcasters, and if they manage to live to Great Wyrm status, they've seen most of the tricks. Leaving aside that IIRC, dragons that old either have built in, or can get a fire aura (depends on setting, in some cases). 

Second, any party that goes up against a red dragon without fire resistances/immunities deserves to become barbeque.

I didn't get past that, because listening to that guy made my brain hurt.

 

In 5e, they sort of made dragons a flying bag of HP and breath weapons. They took away the spellcasting in their default form, and made that a variant of them that's optional. However, breath weapons recharge much faster, because you roll a d6 at the start of every turn and it recharges on a 5 or 6. And they get like 3 Legendary Actions once they hit a certain size, which means they get to act up to 3 times during other character's turns to attack or whatever. And those big ones literally alter the terrain around them. So while they took away the casting, they gave them a pretty nice bag of other tricks. If you keep a dragon airborne, any party is going to struggle with bringing them down quickly and they're probably going to get hit multiple times with breath weapons.

[Sylverthorne]

1 hour ago, Unruly said:

 

In 5e, they sort of made dragons a flying bag of HP and breath weapons. They took away the spellcasting in their default form, and made that a variant of them that's optional. However, breath weapons recharge much faster, because you roll a d6 at the start of every turn and it recharges on a 5 or 6. And they get like 3 Legendary Actions once they hit a certain size, which means they get to act up to 3 times during other character's turns to attack or whatever. And those big ones literally alter the terrain around them. So while they took away the casting, they gave them a pretty nice bag of other tricks. If you keep a dragon airborne, any party is going to struggle with bringing them down quickly and they're probably going to get hit multiple times with breath weapons.

 

 *sigh* Leave it to WotC to un-dragon dragons to the point where somebody has to retrofit stuff from old systems onto the 'current' builds. I'm not sure you gain anything with the d6 thing either; even if you don't have my luck with the dice.

 

.... Y'know, I think I will stick with Pathfinder, and continue to avoid WotC's products. I really am not hearing anything that makes me want to spend money on their stuff. >.<

 

 

[Unruly]

1 hour ago, Sylverthorne said:

 

 *sigh* Leave it to WotC to un-dragon dragons to the point where somebody has to retrofit stuff from old systems onto the 'current' builds. I'm not sure you gain anything with the d6 thing either; even if you don't have my luck with the dice.

 

Oh, you gain with it, or at least I did. Instead of a "you can use X once every Y rounds," I had a half-dragon ettin get to use his lightning breath 3 turns in a row to devastating effect. Throwing a 4d6 AoE out 3 turns in a row against a level 6 party is pretty amazing. Sure, it can backfire in the same way by making it so you get to use the breath weapon once in the encounter, but at the same time it should average out to be at least as good as the "only usable once every 6 rounds" or whatever.

[Pingo]

I found a couple of old threads of Blasts From the Past, especially interesting now that Hasbro has wiped the records from the old D&D forums:

 

An announcement from WOTC that they are discontinuing random mini packs as of the end of 2008*, with some undertones of anxiety for Reaper's plastics line as it then was.  This thread is short (3 pages):

 

 

A very long thread (32 pages) begun four months after* the initial release of 4.0:

 

 

 

 

*and now I find myself wondering how much of the upheaval of 4.0 and the seemingly odd decisions made had to do with the worldwide economic crash of the time.

Edited April 21, 2017 by Pingo

[VitM]

@Auberon I normally like Matthew Colville's videos, but that particular video strikes me as an inadvertent indictment of both 4e and 5e.

 

"5th edition is great!  Except the combat; that's kind of dull.  I know, I'll take combat inspiration from 4th edition!  I loved 4th edition!  Not enough to keep playing it now that 5th edition is out, mind you.  But the interrupts!" 

 

[BlazingTornado]

4 hours ago, Unruly said:

 

Oh, you gain with it, or at least I did. Instead of a "you can use X once every Y rounds," I had a half-dragon ettin get to use his lightning breath 3 turns in a row to devastating effect. Throwing a 4d6 AoE out 3 turns in a row against a level 6 party is pretty amazing. Sure, it can backfire in the same way by making it so you get to use the breath weapon once in the encounter, but at the same time it should average out to be at least as good as the "only usable once every 6 rounds" or whatever.

I almost TPK'd a party of adventurers with a young white dragon because his breath weapon kept recharging!

 

He ended up running away after deciding his small hoard wasn't worth the damage he was taking. I should have him come back to antagonize the party.... Or have mommy dearest come bring the pain....

[etherial]

1 hour ago, VitM said:

@Auberon I normally like Matthew Colville's videos, but that particular video strikes me as an inadvertent indictment of both 4e and 5e.

 

"5th edition is great!  Except the combat; that's kind of dull.  I know, I'll take combat inspiration from 4th edition!  I loved 4th edition!  Not enough to keep playing it now that 5th edition is out, mind you.  But the interrupts!" 

Well, just about every gaming system has cool ideas that could be mined for other games. Frex I love love love how Psychic Powers work in Conspiracy X and I'm likely to port that system to just about any game where I want to add Psychics. But 4E has the most new different stuff for D&D style roleplay for people running 5E.

[BlazingTornado]

9 minutes ago, etherial said:

Well, just about every gaming system has cool ideas that could be mined for other games.

I agree. I love 5E but checking older modules they have cool concepts where it takes more than just a successful DC check to solve a thing.

I loved the secret door in one of the orc caves in Keep on the Borderlands that required a roll of 12 on 2d6 in order to successfully get the latch to work.

[Gargs]

53 minutes ago, etherial said:

Well, just about every gaming system has cool ideas that could be mined for other games. Frex I love love love how Psychic Powers work in Conspiracy X and I'm likely to port that system to just about any game where I want to add Psychics. But 4E has the most new different stuff for D&D style roleplay for people running 5E.

 

This.  For me, I think in some ways the biggest problem 4ed had was that it was such a drastic departure from previous editions of D&D that it didn't really feel like D&D.  That didn't mean it didn't feel like a fantasy rpg, it was just a completely different system.  Which was odd in some respects because I remember around the time of the launch/announcement some of the WotC devs said things like "Well don't worry, 4ed really could have been called 3.75 because its so similar."  This was then compounded by their initial official module offerings which were tailored to a fairly classical D&D style (i.e. a good ole fashioned dungeon crawl) but which didn't work real well within the confines of daily powers and such.  

 

I didn't really have a problem with the concept of encounter and daily powers etc., but it did cause angst for a lot of people (again, not entirely WotC's fault there).  For example, I think it really exacerbated the concept of the 5 minute work day.  If a party used a lot of their daily powers early on, they would then want to rest.  This was somewhat different than a spellcaster that used a powerful spell early in the day but still had several spells available.  I think it was the fear of "What if the next encounter is a hard one that requires the use of dailies and we don't have any left?"  Of course this is all very metagamey on the part of the players, but its also a fairly natural reaction.

[Dr.Bedlam]

Meh. I'm old. I worry about stuff. I gripe about other stuff. And I find I don't like it when they change something I liked. Except when I feel otherwise. I like cantrips. First edition cantrips were a bad joke, but fifth edition, they're actually useful powers that make a wizard type worth a drat, as opposed to "shoot your Magic Missile and then hide." But I hated Healing Surges, because to me they seemed like an excuse not to bother with a cleric (it was pointed out to me on this board that if you viewed them as "adrenaline surges or second wind," they made sense; I was just being an old grouch. This is, in fact true.) So I'm old. And picky. I understand this comes with the gray hairs.

I've played every iteration of the game. I've relearned the game more than once. But Fourth was ... I dunno. It didn't feel like D&D. I didn't understand why the game introduced Minions with 1 hp to make things easier for the DM, but then introduced the concept of DOTs (damage over time conditions) that made DMing a bigger headache than ever. It seemed to me to be a scheme to sell little token sets and spell cards and things.

And no DM wants to hear a player say, "All right, we'll do an area damage that'll clean out the Minions, and send in our tanks to draw aggro, then target the hard guys." Yeesh. If I wanted to play "World of Warcraft," I'd get a computer out here.

 

[Lars Porsenna]

Well, IMHO healing surges didn't mean you didn't have to bother with a cleric; what it meant is that the cleric wasn't there simply to be the healbot. In a lot of our older games the cleric didn't bother with clerical spells except for the bevy of heals, because that is what he would be doing most combats. Healing surges, whether you liked the concept or not, allowed cleric players to do something other than deciding whether to use cure light wounds or cure moderate wounds, etc.

 

Damon.

[TheAuldGrump]

1 hour ago, Lars Porsenna said:

Well, IMHO healing surges didn't mean you didn't have to bother with a cleric; what it meant is that the cleric wasn't there simply to be the healbot. In a lot of our older games the cleric didn't bother with clerical spells except for the bevy of heals, because that is what he would be doing most combats. Healing surges, whether you liked the concept or not, allowed cleric players to do something other than deciding whether to use cure light wounds or cure moderate wounds, etc.

 

Damon.

You know, I always hear people saying that, then look at my own experience, and wonder what the *BLEEP* game those other people were playing.

 

I do see clerics dropping more heals in 3.X - but that is because they can swap out any spell for healing, on the fly, not because they are loading themselves down with healing spells. (And in Pathfinder, I see Channel Positive Energy being used more often for healing - but that is mostly because not every adventure is laden down with the walking dead.)

 

Spells that see the most Clerical use in my games has always been things like Hold Person and Spiritual Hammer - offensive, rather than defensive, spells. Spells like Bless and Sanctuary coming in second.

 

Perhaps it comes down to the clerics being healbots because they are only loading up on heal spells? Self fulfilling prophecies are not all that uncommon.

 

The Auld Grump

Edited April 21, 2017 by TheAuldGrump