Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.


Messages - Unbeliever

Pages: [1] 2 3 4 5 6 ... 114
1
Hmm. I think I've just found a way to make my rakshasa boss encounter sufficiently challenging...
Multiheaded Rakshasas have a distinguished pedigree:  example is about as old as they come.

2
D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder / Re: If you were DMing..
« on: July 26, 2016, 03:45:14 PM »
Got that right, I HATE level 1 starts.
Umm, /thread, then? 

3
Off Topic Fun / Re: The Politics Thread v3
« on: July 26, 2016, 03:42:31 PM »
While there is evidence of Russians hacking the DNC, what there is no evidence of is them helping Trump.  Basically the whole thing was essentially "uh....LOOK THE RUSSIANS EVERYONE PAY ATTENTION TO THAT".  It reeked of using a foreign "other" to sway politics, the 'otherism' that defined McCarthyism.
I'm going to brush past your repeated invocations of McCarthyism as internet hyperbole.  It does a disservice to the actual harms that McCarthy caused.  Although I'm not disputing what you're saying about the tactic of the Dems, I didn't really pay that much attention to it.  The false equivalency thing, which has plagued us for decades now, does bug me, though. 

I'm also old enough to remember the 2000 election.  I'd venture a guess to say my feelings on it are different?  I don't blame Nader for Gore's loss, at all.  I think it's wrong to blame him for it.  If he didn't run, it's likely Gore would have won, but there were a lot of other problems.  Gore wasn't a strong candidate for one, and you can blame the SCOTUS a bit as well.  In other words, much like all politics, it wasn't a simple 'who's at fault'.  Bush was a very strong candidate that year.  2004 was much different, but defeating an incumbent is very hard to do.
Listen, you and I can't actually talk politics.  I mentioned a personal feeling about a major past event, one that informed my current feelings, and you jumped to this blame game nonsense.  I've read enough of this thread to understand the passionate, but frankly combative and high-minded perspective you take on these issues.

4
Off Topic Fun / Re: The Politics Thread v3
« on: July 26, 2016, 10:58:03 AM »
We've hit Peak McCarthyism.  The (R)s are doing it in the neo-McCarthy method of accusing people are secret Muslims and such.  The Dems are now doing it the old school way, blaming the WikiLeaks hack on the Russians to try to help Trump.
The crucial difference, as always, is that there is some actual evidence that Russians were involved in the latter. 


To bad the race is mostly between Trump and Clinton. If any of the third party candidates had a real shot at winning I'd vote for one of them instead. I really hate this election cycle.
I'm old enough to remember the 2000 Election Cycle, which informs my feelings on this quarter.

5
D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder / Re: If you were DMing..
« on: July 25, 2016, 03:56:40 PM »
I'd throw a CR 40 Orcus at them, kill them, reanimate their corpses, and then point out I said that if I'm DMing we're not starting at level 1.
Amen!  Friends don't let friends play level 1 D&D.  If Orcus is what's required to prove that point, then SO BE IT*.


*tangentially, "so be it" is pretty much what amen means anyway. 

6
D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder / Re: If you were DMing..
« on: July 25, 2016, 11:22:49 AM »
I hate level 1 because it is almost impossible to even guess whether they will win or it will be a TPK, unless they're fighting rats (individuals, not swarms) or something equally inane...
+1.  The OP is pitched at too high a level of generality to really usefully answer.  You could ask it at any level, and you'd still get a lot of the same responses.

What actually are you asking?  There's no reason to be opaque about it.

7
D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder / Re: alt Tiers definition (?)
« on: July 15, 2016, 04:50:24 PM »
Quote
This is one of my pet peeves.  Not that I'm calling you out on in it Eggy; it's really common, your comment just made me think of it.  With the exception of the Paladin trading out for much better casting, which arguably means you're not really playing a Paladin anymore, the other optimization options, like Inspire Courage, are at least as easy to find and use as picking a decent spell list is for any caster class.  The latter takes a lot more work, as there are a stultifying number of spells to pick from. 
The sources for inspire courage are pretty obscure. You need to be all the way down in champions of valor, and the champions of valor web enhancement. Druid spells are right there in core, and right in the spell compendium, and so on. Getting the right list might be hard, but it doesn't take that kind of obscure searching, and specific book having.
Or, y'know, 45 seconds on the internet.  I haven't looked at the Paladin's Handbook here in forever, but I'm pretty sure it's mentioned there prominently.  Along with other options that are even more straightforward. 

And, now we're introducing some whole other metric.  You're going to have to assess some sort of "obscurity of resources" metric, which strikes me as silly to begin with, against an "information overload/proliferation of trap options" one.  Can we really say that it's easier to find out about Champions of Valor than it is to sort through however many spells there are in the PHB + SpC?  That strikes me as dicey, and introducing the kind of implicit bias that I'm calling out, to presume one way or the other.

8
D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder / Re: alt Tiers definition (?)
« on: July 15, 2016, 12:30:24 PM »
I'm telling you that the tier system has as a somewhat unstated assumption an average optimization level. Characters make use of their available class resources decently, and don't crush the universe into tiny bits with them. The paladin does reasonable damage and charges in, supported by some minor spell use, but doesn't trade out that casting for way better casting and start using inspire courage, or spend their feats utterly pointlessly and fail to do anything in combat. It's all just how the system was designed.
This is one of my pet peeves.  Not that I'm calling you out on in it Eggy; it's really common, your comment just made me think of it.  With the exception of the Paladin trading out for much better casting, which arguably means you're not really playing a Paladin anymore, the other optimization options, like Inspire Courage, are at least as easy to find and use as picking a decent spell list is for any caster class.  The latter takes a lot more work, as there are a stultifying number of spells to pick from. 

Making a Paladin go from "reasonable damage on a charge" to "holy hell that's a lot of damage on a charge" doesn't take much work at all.  And, that's with a Paladin, a notoriously weak class (and for good reason).  The effort in optimizing a spellcaster comes largely from choosing their spells rather than build.  For classes that don't rely on a huge subsystem like that, it goes back into their build. 

There often feels like an apples to oranges comparison here.  The hypothetical Druid is a straight Druid, a really solid build, but has a reasonably optimized spell list.  The hypothetical Paladin doesn't have the same effort put into the things that can be optimized for it. 

My usual guidelines for comparing anything, to the extent it ever comes up (rarely in my actual gaming life ... like ... never, maybe?) is Practical Optimization, which I'm going to operationalize as reading a handbook or two on this site. 

9
D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder / Re: alt Tiers definition (?)
« on: July 15, 2016, 12:19:48 PM »
The Druid class has spells that could potentially help with such a negotiation. Spells such as Control Weather can be used to very good effect (Eberron has an entire guild build around such a concept), and because it costs the Druid 0 permanent resources to actually use most of those the system gives the class an appropriate treatment. While everyone can potentially do these same things ONCE by using the WBL guidelines, the Druid merely expends a spell slot.
I contend that this is a cheat.  Control Weather does not in any obvious sense help a negotiation.  I'm not saying that's totally cool and awesome use for it.  I'm just saying that you could strike Control Weather from the same sentence and replace it with "win a test of strength with the chieftain" or "slay Grendel" or "credibly threaten to kill the entire opposing army in single melee combat."  All of those would potentially function the same, and to be fair, are examples of a lot of the stuff Samwise has been mentioning in this thread. 

Indeed, in a straight social negotiation, bracketing any of the creative stuff (which I hesitate to do, since I do happen to like some role-playing in my RPGs ...), the Barbarian and the Druid are about equal, maybe slight edge to the Barbarian.  They both have a social skill available to them, Intimidate and Diplomacy respectively, but the Barbarian has an easier time and more incentive to optimize his.  It's different if we consider a Wizard since Charm spells, etc. can directly play into social encounters.  Although at this point we may be at such a remove from actual D&D gameplay that the heuristic is losing its utility.

10
D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder / Re: alt Tiers definition (?)
« on: July 13, 2016, 07:13:53 PM »
EDIT:  TiaC captured my thoughts on this topic pretty perfectly in the response in the above post (that was written while I was typing the spoilered bit).
(click to show/hide)

EDIT:  back to Tiers and versatility and my issues with the Tiers system
My original point, stated clearly I think, was that the Tiers ranking overstated the importance of versatility.  If your point is just that it "matters," well, sure.  But, that's not a response to what I said at all.  I said that the Tiers generally weighted versatility too heavily, not that the weight should be set to 0. 

Like TiaC said earlier, if you're concerned with intraparty parity, which is what the Tiers system is emphatically focused on, then the ability to utterly trivialize combat, even without anything else, will really skew that.  Hence the criticism. 

There's more I could say, but I think this is more straightforward.  What does the Tiers system really tell you that you didn't know before?  I find a handful of maxims would probably be much more useful, and would eliminate the false implication of precision that the Tiers seem to carry with them.  Maxims like the following generally hold true: 
  • The most versatile and powerful ability in the game is spellcasting.  Things that are very similar to spellcasting, such as usage of a variety of magic items which often simply duplicate spells, follow similar logic.
  • Action economy is extremely important.

And ... actually that's kind of about it.  You could add in one more about how easily a character/build can just end encounters.  Going back above, I don't necessarily think 19 ways to end encounters is a much bigger deal than having 2, provided those are all reasonably generally applicable. 

What I think the Tiers system sets out to do is translate some charopp accumulated wisdom to people who are knew to the game/system.  That's the thought exercise that I subject it to, and I don't think it really succeeds at that, which is what the ubercharger type of counterexample is meant to illustrate.

All the rest asks questions about niches and niche protection, which are a fundamentally separate issue from "power," which is what the Tiers system purports to speak to. 

11
D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder / Re: alt Tiers definition (?)
« on: July 13, 2016, 04:35:00 PM »
What exactly is the Orc supposed to do in a social encounter (where threatening to kill them won't help), or in a mystery, or when the party needs to sneak? The problem goes the other way too, I've seen too many skill monkeys that only hit monsters on a 18 just check out during combat. Narrow characters mean you can play in less of the game.
This is, at best, hyperbolic.  It clearly seems to imply that niche protection or even niches at all are a bad thing.  This would be inimical to a game like D&D.  The principle here seems that only characters who can do everything can play most/a lot of/enough of the game.  That doesn't really work in any troupe game, ranging from D&D to White Wolf to anything else that occurs.

One does need to be able to meaningfully participate, somehow, in key group scenes.  In D&D combat is the iconic one.  Other games might have other examples.

12
General D&D Discussion / Re: Your Adventure Wish List
« on: July 11, 2016, 10:39:18 AM »
See, Way of the Wicked leaves me utterly cold.  Mostly b/c I think that all the conceits to make an evil campaign long-running enough to make it sustainable over an adventure path would rob the idea of its novelty.

It might also be that the whole idea leaves me kind of cold.  I can get behind the 40k Black Crusade game, although it's not my favorite.  But, evil for the sake of evil, especially in a fantasy environment, doesn't do much for me.  I've played it, and had a ball once as an evil character in a not entirely evil campaign (it can work, you just kind of have to get lucky).  And, I've run a purely evil campaign, too, which people seemed to enjoy.  But, it's not something that I find intrinsically interesting. 

I was always partial to the Bloodstone trilogy.  I'd play an update of those epic things if it was on offer. 

13
D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder / Re: alt Tiers definition (?)
« on: July 11, 2016, 10:35:37 AM »
Like I said, I don't think the Tiers system is entirely useless.  But, it puts a thumb on the scale for versatility, and from a game balance or intraparty parity perspective, that's not as important.  Or, that's my contention. 

More or less what TiaC said. 

So, as a heuristic I've always found it lacking.  Having 19 different ways of breaking the game or whatever (where "whatever" is the measure we're looking for) isn't a ton more important than having 5 ways of doing so.  A lot of this, I suspect, is driven by the fact that the most rules-laden and one of the most important aspects of D&D is combat.  Which is fine, it's an action game.  That's part of its appeal. 

And, this is all taking into account some roughly equal level of practical optimization.  I don't think an ubercharger is all that more esoteric and complex than somebody who reads the God Wizard guide.  And, I just picked that as a fairly straightforward low tier example.  A better one is a Warblade Ubercharger. 

All of which is just to say that I don't love the Tiers as a heuristic.

14
D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder / Re: alt Tiers definition (?)
« on: July 10, 2016, 09:04:11 PM »
I've been sort of boggled when I've seen games that say "aiming for Tier 3" or something like that.
Well, there're a number of other reasons behind that. Tier three is notable because it's massive, and it has a massive number of subsystems. You can find just about any character type in tier three, and most of the subsystems in the game are likewise represented. Also, characters in that tier are obviously at least reasonably balanced, allowing for discrepancies in people's opinions of tiering. So, there's a lot of incentive to hang around tier three.
I will bet you good money that if I show up to a game that is Tier 3 or below with a Barbarian that does an arbitrarily large amount of damage reliably, it will be considered gauche.  Likewise, pick your favorite blaster or other mid-tier character.  And, before you say it, such a character would be not a glass cannon, able to survive multiple encounters, deal with range on occasion, etc.  It doesn't take too much work to do all of that. 

This, among other things, is all the stuff that the Tiers system really wants to address but kind of glances off of it obliquely. 

15
D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder / Re: alt Tiers definition (?)
« on: July 10, 2016, 06:22:45 PM »
I've long not thought the Tiers system is particularly helpful.  But, and related to the OP, my general complaint is that they seem to overprize flexibility.  Having a handful of good tricks, especially if we call "combat" a good trick, can make a perfectly awesome D&D character b/c that's such a big part of the game.

I've been sort of boggled when I've seen games that say "aiming for Tier 3" or something like that.

16
^ that all sounds about right to me.  I think one place of disagreement, which came up before, is the Evard's Black Tentacles example.  How many monsters are there -- barring the ones where you have to construct their spell list whole cloth -- that have it?  I have no idea (and please don't waste the time looking it up), but I think that's kind of what it comes down to. 

Although, as Eggynack notes above, this is all controlling for "can still do terrible things to the bad guys."  But, all the brutal AC characters I can think of -- gishes, druids, etc. -- do that in spades.

17
You seem really intent on making this point. 
Indeed I am. If high AC needs all these other things around it to make it harmful, then how can we say that it's harmful in the first place? It could just be all those other elements causing that disruption, rather than the AC. And, indeed, it seems like this anecdotal case had a lot of other optimization as its main feature.
This isn't a hard argument.  I think you're making it hard by dragging in all sorts of orthogonal points.  It's simple.  Lots and lots of bad guys punch things.  Having a super duper high AC is one way to nullify being punched.  It is not the only way.  It may not even be the "best" way, whatever that means (hence the scare quote).  But, that's one of its effects. 

You can disagree with the key premise "lots and lots of bad guys punch things."  Color me skeptical, and I doubt it's worth the effort in either of us marshaling enough counterexamples to convince the other.  Suffice to say that if you buy that premise, to some reasonable degree, then the rest of the argument follows.  If you don't, then I'm happy to agree to disagree. 

Instead, you seem to want to push things into "AC is neither necessary nor sufficient for being overpowered."  That's the structure of your argument.  No one, of course, is saying that AC is necessary for being overpowered.  That is an absurd claim. 

So, we're talking about sufficiency.  If the above punching things argument holds, then it might be sufficient.  Or, nearly so.  Or, perhaps it needs to be softened a little bit, to include some commitments to other defenses, like saving throws.  You characterize these as so much other parts of optimization as to be the "main feature."  They strike me instead as trivial.  On the order of a handful of scrolls for niche encounters and having decent saving throws; pretty basic stuff.  But, this is another point where I'm happy to agree to disagree. 

Other considerations are pretty much orthogonal.  For instance, this:
Yeah, but that's kinda my point. If the wizard is using its abilities to anything approaching their fullest, AC is gonna be pretty close to the least of this DM's problems. It's a really low order disruption, if it's a disruption at all.
isn't relevant.  That there's some other readily available way to break the game -- or just really annoy a substantial subset of non-shitty DMs (which is a lower bar than "break the game") -- is beside the point.  Every gish could be replaced with a god wizard, and every character could I suppose be replaced with Pun-Pun or something. 

For the record, since I've kind of gotten pushed away from my original point, here are my feelings:
  • I just don't like Luminous Armor b/c of it's extra 4 point bonus to AC in most cases.  I also treat all the exalted stuff with kid gloves, so very much ymmv.  It also might just be too easy for me, compared to other options, and so offend my delicate charopp sensibilities.  I freely admit that this is mostly a personal bias.
  • When considering whether something is overpowered, I look to more or less off the rack monsters.  If the DM has to custom design encounters to challenge you, then you are potentially making their life harder than it has to be.  There are exceptions, but that's a good measuring stick for most campaigns.
  • As a corollary, I could certainly see it as possible that a DM would be annoyed if she can't lay a hand on a PC.  This does not strike me as some major indictment of the DMing.  It's not "lazy" to want to use off the rack monsters.  My sympathy for DMs usually leaves me to want to leave some holes in my defense somewhere, but I also make characters who have plenty of offensive and debuffing options.

18
But I don't think it disproves my initial claim, that a high AC is not, in itself, going to break much of anything. Defenses in general aren't either, because of the issues I stated. You need a good offense, pretty much no matter what, to have something really potent, and then AC may or may not be a part of a larger defensive plan that can usually deal with most, but definitely not all, threats that come your way.
You seem really intent on making this point.  But, I feel like you're only arguing against yourself.  You yourself have already pointed out at least once in this thread that getting a high AC, as well as other defenses, is kind of a trivial investment.  So, I don't really see "high AC, no other defenses, no other abilities, this is all I do, I'm a rock" as a realistic option on the table.  At least not here in these threads.  I mean, the initial discussion was in the context of an Abjurant Champion, i.e., nearly full Wizard casting. 

But, I'll gladly admit that high AC with few other defenses won't annoy DMs too much.  You'll have obvious glaring weaknesses that they can exploit, even if only with a lucky shot (that delivers poison or some other rider). 

19
I didn't really mean a manufactured encounter that could absolutely destroy this character. Though yes, that could be done. I meant the masses of creatures in the monster manuals that attack along those axes. There are tons of castery monsters, or monsters with save attacking abilities. All would get past this AC, and, while it'd be more difficult to get past these new defenses, there are definitely existing monsters that could do it.
Do you have an actual example, barring something like a Lich (i.e., "create an NPC") in mind?  I think of most monsters, even high level ones, as pretty biased towards "stab you in the face" or "trigger some save" abilities.  There's a handful of exceptions, which mostly have something like "cast as an Xth level wizard" or whatever on their abilities, which, to be fair, I do heavily discount since it's not like they are off the rack at all.  But, I could be wrong, I haven't run D&D in a while. 

20
AC very much can be high enough to threaten the integrity of the game... especially if you are unarmored... yes being unarmored can infact allow you to have enough AC to completely triviallize any encounter.
...
When your AC is high enough that nothing can even hit you unless it rolls a nat 20 you can basically just steam roll everything... Honestly, I only started optmizing my AC after he killed 2 of my characters with heavy damage roles on low attack roles... wanted to give my 3rd character a better chance of survival with a higher AC total... and it kinda ruined the game since she couldnt even be hurt anymore...
There are so many attacks that don't touch AC at all. Stuff that hits saving throws, or touch AC, or that don't really allow a defense in the first place. I have no idea how a campaign could be trivialized by a rather narrow defense like AC.
I believe there is a metaquestion here.  Could I, if I worked at it, make a monster/encounter to challenge virtually any D&D character?  Almost assuredly.  But, one of the great joys of running D&D is the ease of the Monster Manual, freeing me up from designing interesting enemies, or at least making it much easier.  I can focus on other things. 

If you use monsters mostly "off the rack" a high AC can sometimes be frustrating for the DM.  There also might be something psychological to it -- the DM gets annoyed if she can't even lay a scratch on you.  I'm not necessarily judging one way or the other here -- although I've personally pulled back on an AC with a gish but that's a judgment call -- but I've definitely seen it, and among very good DMs. 

Also
Besides AC is usually the first line of defense anyway, you wanna supplement it with things like ray deflector or anything that offers miss chance.
People who commit resources to having a badass AC rarely stop there.  So, you've hardened your defense in all sorts of ways, including, but not exclusively, AC. 

Pages: [1] 2 3 4 5 6 ... 114