Min/Max Boards

My group played 3e, 4e, and 5e.

We liked 4e the best, and it has most of my fondest memories for gaming at a con (Origins) as well as the coolest characters I ever played in pretty much any system ever.

5e kind of lost us. We’ve recently discussed trying it again, but basically they copy/pasted a ton of 4e (you could actually find identical paragraphs) and screwed some stuff up so they could release a new edition for some money. After that it was just a matter of new systems not having as much material as old systems, so why bother?

Also only 2 of our players knew the game well enough to run it, and one of them left. AND we loved going as a team to Origins and laying the smack down. When half the GMs left, and the version that lets us show off in public is smaller and plainly shittier, we ran out of enthusiasm for it.

Perhaps when I have some time tomorrow I’ll include descriptions of my favorite 4e characters. Not just because I love talking about them, but because it helps to understand what the system allowed on the street level.

I loved all my Shadowrun characters, and it’s amazing what you could do. It’s all well below the power level of D&D, but the delight is in the details. You don’t compare an Avengers movie to Enter the Dragon. They’re both action, but they’re not trying to do the same things at all.

I'd rather get an apology from every single person who still hates on elves to this day because they got all butt hurt a few decades ago about some stupid splat book and act like in 3E elves are still overpowered when in fact they're probably the worst core race in the game that doesn't have split heritage.

I think you're mistaking the source of most hatred toward elves, especially considering the amount of people who have never heard of the Complete Book of Elves.

I definitely agree with the negative sentiment toward builds that just slow the game down. Each system has a rhythm, and each system has builds that completely destroy that rhythm. I tend to dislike these builds no matter how powerful they are, because I'm always thinking of the other people at the table.

I was horrified recently to find myself being the amateur summoner who halted the game every time it was my turn because I had to flip through the book find out whether I could do something (I'm playing a summoner with the possession tradition in Shadowrun). My solution was to borrow the books for a week as well as hitting up forums and such to learn my damn business, now when the GM asks me a question about my character's capabilities I've got an answer for him or I can tell him that it's up to him because it turns out the developers did a lousy job of fleshing out my concept. None of us knew that until I did my research, but now that we do my character's turns are the simplest.

It is for this reason that I have always despised D&D's magic system. It's too much about preparation, which sounds fantastic and intellectual in theory, but when everyone else can just pass 8-hours in-game by saying "We rest 8 hours" and you've gotta crack your damn tome to figure out whether you'll need a flashlight today, I lose interest. It doesn't take that much longer, but it shakes you out of the flow of the adventure, and I've always hated it for that.

Yeah I have a helluva time getting my GF to go see movies, she tends to see it as a lot of time spent sitting quietly not paying attention to each other. She is a bit extreme in her inability to sit still, but it's not a bad point to make.

As for actually going on dates to feel someone out I've done very little of that, which I think can work out to your advantage some times. So long as you're honest and attentive I'm not sure it matters where you go, just so long as she can trust that you'll reward her attention by being youself (honest) and that you'll return the favor (attentive).

I also saw a quote once saying something like "You can make more friends in one week by getting interested in people than you can make in one year by trying to get them interested in you."

I wouldn't worry about specific rules like "No kissing on the first date" or "pay for everything" because people love to play with those types of rules (I thought a kiss on the first date was the way you knew it was a good date) and adjust their boundaries just to throw you off guard, you don't want to play that sort of game. Some aren't bad assumptions though (Like people never mind when you plan to pay for things).

I would hate to have to fight a bunch of sexy naked women. I wouldn't find it especially distracting, I just hate the idea of making a world with LESS sexy naked women. It's one of the reasons I don't understand why young women are so disproportionately the victims of murder and other violent crime, don't the criminals have any sense of preserving great works?

As for rules for it, I think I would perhaps increase the crit range of everyone who was fighting them by 1 or 2, and make the non-naked fighters succeed on a sort of composure test (If they weren't immediately threatening I think a lot of combatants would struggle to justify attacking naked people). I think the composure test would be a will save vs. (10 + Cha Mod + Con Mod or the target's diplomacy check, if you want it to be a sexual thing remove the con mod for foes that don't fit the player's sexual preference). They aren't making an auto-seduction check, they're making a check to see if you count them as defenseless/harmful, or at least to see if you'd rather take prisoners than go for kills. A lot of times it isn't a sexual thing, but I think I'd have an easier time striking down naked dudes than I would have striking down naked women.

I think once you've made your first slash into naked flesh though, destroying its appeal, you really don't need to make another test to see if you can do it again. It's a lot less appealing now that it's bloody and missing some of the best parts. You see a sexy naked person who fits your sexual orientation and you think "Damn it would be shame to ruin that" but once you hit it with a sword your feelings probably switch to disgust very quickly and you'd like to make it stop writhing and moaning ASAP. No arguing for your character's fetishes because we aren't playing THAT game. I do like that BoEF introduces an appearance score though, saves me from using the con mod.

As for things like naked undead and other things that are clearly outside your racial category, they don't really get a check. A naked dead person coming at you is just as appalling as any other dead person coming at you, and if you don't see a creature as anything like you then you will not sympathize with it no matter its state of dress.

When it comes to Supernatural abilities and similar such things, I don't really see it as the same discussion. In addition to plenty of such rules being present in-game, their primary effect is ignoring any preferences player characters bring to the table.

There's a 3rd party source book called "mercenaries" I think that offers more of what should have been in the game to begin with regarding martial weapons and craftsmanship.

Something that annoys the hell out of me with D&D is that crafting is the realm of wizards and "well-made" = "magic." The best a smith can do is make something "masterwork" or "dwarvencraft."

I like non-magical power, it's harder to detect, harder to dispel, and more cost-effective (Although since 3.5 hates non-magic it's also extremely easy to destroy with level 1 spells).

So that mercenaries book gives you options like laminated weapons (I think it's "laminated," but it's layered steel) that add +1 damage I think and serrated weapons that add +1 crit range (Again, going on my memory here).

The point is there just isn't a lot of room for mundane improvement in D&D, and mundane improvement is exactly what made feudal weapon technology special. Katanas were a brilliant design for their time and location, but the superior craftsmanship and all that were what made things special. There were great craftsman all over the world making weapons for the combat appropriate to their time and place too, comparing them is silly.

It's not apples and oranges, it's the craft skill making a difference instead of being magic, and the differences in mundane power being irrelevant compared to magic. Weighing the value of +1 damage vs. +2 potential damage is exactly the problem with the non-magic classes. It's completely irrelevant past level 2 and you aren't getting a big boost one way or the other. Who cares if your weapon is better at slashing than piercing? You still suck because you brought a sword in the first place. Nothing about D&D 3.5 supports debates like these. It's a black hole in the system.

When another game does something better I copy it.

In one RPG I play the players are typically contacted as a team because they're known for functioning as one (Kinda like a security firm).

In another (Shadowrun) typically only one player gets the mission pitch and they recruit the others from their contact list or otherwise (Sometimes the NPC assigning the mission has their own specialists they want you to bring along, these are other players).

In multiple other systems you begin as members of an organization. You are typically "recruit" level characters and you're on a first assignment that will turn out to be bigger than anyone expected.

In D&D we've gravitated toward a "disaster brings exceptional individuals together" scenario where there is no NPC in a tavern with a mission, we're just all around an area at the same time something tremendous happens and we band together to fight it off. Even large Medieval cities won't have been THAT big, and so it's not too strange to have a few exceptional individuals within ear-shot of a zombie attack.

Typically we make characters with the other characters in mind, and while I don't mind a scenario in which we haven't met each other I get irritated when players or the GM don't appreciate the anti-catalytic nature of such a meeting. As another RPer once put it "If you guys don't work together, we don't have a game." So as long as players are willing to put aside stupid things like the idea of elves and dwarves hating each other, then this type of approach can work. If everyone starts roleplaying too hard too early though then you really don't have a game, and for those of us who never gave a shit about fluff (Me), this can get annoying.

My pet peeves at character creation are:

Wanting backstories on entry-level characters. "My backstory is I just graduated from fighter college and I'm about to spend the rest of my life hating myself for it." I can't stand the idea of people having epic back stories when they've never been on a single damn adventure yet.

Now if the GM was willing to back up their demand with an Exp reward between 0 and 1000 for a good back story (With a limit on length), then it would make sense. Instead of "Yeah some orcs killed my family but I fought them off when I was 12" from a level nothing punk, I actually like the idea of "Yeah so I killed some orcs once, but I made it sound cool in my backstory, so now I'm level 2 bitches. Suck it!"

That gives you a more diverse group experience-wise (believable), satisfies the backstory fetish, and gets players who have a knack for storytelling a leg up. I'm very big on rewarding good behavior and punishing bad behavior. If you simply set yourself up to "train" people, they'll all learn very quickly what works and what doesn't. Any power discrepancy gets sorted out over 1-2 sessions.

Another pet peeve of mine is players who make decisions at character creation which will adversely affect everyone else's options. I got to my group one night and we were supposed to be playing some WoD game, and the first two guys there had chosen to play hunters. That meant all of us had the choice of also playing hunters who were weak, or playing something supernatural that the hunters would hate. That pissed me off.

I like freedom, I like choices, and I like variety. So when someone else at the table is making a character with an attitude of "if they don't like it, to hell with them" they're putting the whole group in a tough situation. I played a Ravenloft game where the sorceror character decided ahead of time to be evil and to be greedy about every bit of power we found, our characters fought multiple times. In another game the same player wanted to play a rapist, you can guess how well that went. In another he played a child-rapist, which he argued none of us should have had a problem with because we were all evil characters that game, but if you go to prison for raping children that's the one offense all the other bad guys won't tolerate. That player as you can imagine was a consistent source of dischord within the group, especially with me.

GMs have to be realistic about their demands on players at character creation, and players need to keep in mind that the other people at the table are as essential to the success of the game as they are. GMs have the power to reward and punish players, other players have that power as well as the power of their characters who are actually within the game (So if players dispense justice and save the GM the trouble, the GM doesn't lose face. Unfortunatey group-wide punishment denies the punished player a scapegoat, so they don't handle it nearly as well).

Got to play with 5 people tonight, definitely a lot busier. Luckily everyone but me drew tickets on the East Coast (Playing the U.S.A. version), which is basically a nightmare for everyone there, so I didn't have to get involved in their rat race. However I DID get to watch them fighting each other like mad for every bit of track.

I mostly just screwed around collecting cards and buying the 15 point tracks, but eventually their fight spilled over to the West Coast and they immediately were cancelling each other all over the place again. I only got blocked two or three times the whole game, but I still lost horribly because I made no effort to get any of my tickets done (It just seemed like more fun to build the big 6 train lines ). The amount they suffered at each other's hands just made me so glad I wasn't in there with them. One guy spent the whole game building around the blockades people had dropped on him (Probably always by accident). He couldn't get anything down with minimal effort, what sucked is it was his first time playing too.

By the end of a 5 player game though there isn't anyone who can do things the way they originally intended. You can't see most of the board for the trains all over it.

If you actually like kobolds that's fine, but for me kobolds were always the pathetic ratty dog people who I would annihilate idly (kinda like drumming your fingers on a table or desk). At their peak they might be a punchline. I believe WotC actually shares my view, and thus laughed their asses off when they tricked optimizers into loving kobolds. I have not fallen for their trick.

I remember awhile back I either arrived late to a campaign or my character died, I don't remember which. Either way it resulted in me having to make a new character mid-game. My first encounter was with kobolds who had a lot of elevation on the party and were raining crossbow bolts on us. I realized I'd failed to put a ranged weapon on my character, so I picked up a garden stone (we were in a courtyard of some kind) and threw it, killing one of the kobolds. We used appropriate rules for improvised weapons and cover and all that, kobolds are just that bad. I recall I had to roll well, but I don't think it was a nat 20 or anything, just about what you'd expect.

When I've played there isn't a LOT of deliberate route cutting, it hurts pretty hard when people do it to you though. Typically if I have a route that requires a specific easy-to-take piece of track I buy it within my first few turns.

The trouble is there's no really hiding what you're doing, it's just a matter of pure luck whether or not it's convenient for them to kill you or not. If it is, then you're fucked. You can pretend to bluff or whatever, but it doesn't really work that well if someone is in the mood to hit you and they have the cards to do it. Usually the spot in which they'll cut you off is a handy piece of track to have anyway. Also if you have certain high-traffic tickets and they do too, there's a good chance they'll cut you off without even knowing it.