D&D 5e: For real this time?

[veekie]

Well...caps help, but there are enough options to dodge around the matter, so yeah. It's a game toolkit, not quite a game.

[Unbeliever]

In defense of M&M (and similar systems), some of that game imbalancing stuff is inevitable given the genre choices.  If you really want to make a game with that kind of flexibility you are going to run into the risk of bathroom telepaths and so on.  More generally, if you want a game where there is the richness offered by modifiers -- autofire, reaction, etc. -- then you are going to have, to some degree, some circumvention of the hard caps. 

Rank 10 Autofire Attack is more powerful than just vanilla Rank 10 Attack.  On the other hand, Autofire, and especially Reaction (which doesn't actually work the way Bard is describing, but that doesn't invalidate the thrust of the argument), is really expensive points-wise.  So, you're supposed to be making a semi-meaningful tradeoff.

That being said, despite my affections for M&M -- and I do find it's the best superhero game for my preferences, and I would use it for some (and maybe some related genres as well) for my preferences -- it does not quite have the richness of gameplay and the real differences between characters that something like 3E D&D does.  I suspect that the caps have something to do with that; even among characters that in my humble opinion are "balanced" against each other there tends to be a lot more difference in roles, abilities, etc. in D&D than there is in M&M.  Although in a lot of ways that's probably driven by genre conventions.

it's tons of fun as long as the party compares characters and balances them before playing.

I find that this is necessary in literally every RPG I play. 

Well...caps help, but there are enough options to dodge around the matter, so yeah. It's a game toolkit, not quite a game.

I'm not quite sure what this means.

[bhu]

This is actually a good example of a game that's totally unbalanced but it's tons of fun as long as the party compares characters and balances them before playing.

In my experience, and this is just based off where I live, parties don't do that.  Everyone's had at least a half dozen asshats they know of in their gaming experience who are in it for pvp, and as a result no one I know compares PC's.  They try to ensure no one else ever knows what their PC can do, to the point of always taking their character sheet with them and never letting it lie around where anyone could see it.  They even hold off on using abilities "until it's necessary" to avoid letting people know what they can do, often at the expense of the party.  It's why I end up in groups where everyone but me is a fighter/melee type because everyone but me decided "I'm playing Conan this time!"  And then when they can't beat simple encounters because they all fight as individuals as opposed to actually thinking, they scrap the game and start over with a situation just as likely to fail.

[Bard]

Reaction (which doesn't actually work the way Bard is describing, but that doesn't invalidate the thrust of the argument), is really expensive points-wise.

I may be wrong, but iirc it was a free action you could take any number of times (read: until the GM smacks you with the really heavy M&M corebook), even in other people rounds, in response to something else happening. It was back in second edition, I'm unsure if at a later time they fixed it. Iirc with 7 points you'd get a rank 1 reaction teleport that teleports you up to 30m away when you get attacked. But if you avoided exploits it was fun. (even if at the end of the day most attacks were the same)

it's tons of fun as long as the party compares characters and balances them before playing.

I find that this is necessary in literally every RPG I play. 

I never felt the need for that in games with high mortality or with limited customization choices (like Cyberpunk with poor people and CoC)

[Ananse]

I might be too used to D&D, but I don't mind if the "wizard" of the situation is more powerful and versatile of my sword and board crusader. He is using magic, I'm waving a stick. If we had the same level of power or usefulness it'd make me feel like magic was not powerful enough

Very few people react the way you've described; most would be unhappy that they didn't get to play alongside the wizard in a meaningful fashion. It's important to note that, in d20, the vanilla fighter as written is completely redundant, not merely weak, and it's only incompetence or massive house-ruling (including self-nerfing) that pulls him into playability vis-a-vis the wizard. Ars Magica is a much cleaner, much more honest example of this phenomenon.

In my experience, and this is just based off where I live, parties don't do that.  Everyone's had at least a half dozen asshats they know of in their gaming experience who are in it for pvp, and as a result no one I know compares PC's.

Ugh. Been there. I hate heaping duties on the GM, but this is something that he could stop if he wanted to. The main problem with this sort of thing isn't that it happens, but that it happens a) in the wrong system and b) in the wrong games.

d20 is a Bad Place for this because its intraparty balance is so utterly crazytown. Suggestion alone pretty much can end PvP conflicts, and immunities to various shticks aren't to hard to come by. Winning a fight with another PC is ultimately pretty random, depending on the books allowed.

The wrong place is far more important, though. The fact of the matter is, stock fantasy adventuring is a terrible, terrible place for hard-core paranoid intraparty conflict. You wouldn't even bother adventuring with people that were this dangerous to yourself (hence the sheer unplayability of kender). You're forced into a railroad before you enter the game, having answered "Do you want an adventure?" with "N" from jump. Now everything that follows is contrived and stupid.

This would be way more useful in games like VtM, but, weirdly enough, I've (almost) never had this level of conflict in a oWoD game or any other political skullduggery game. The intraparty conflict types seem to gravitate to the very kind of game they shouldn't be playing to scratch that itch.

Meanwhile, I sit down to run a game about psychotic rape cannibals with chronic backstabbing disorder, and everyone holds hands and sings kumbayah.

"Let's send an emmisary to the Lupines and form a mutual protection pact!"
"Games over, everyone take your sourcebooks and burn them. Seriously. Burn your motherfucking books."

[Unbeliever]

Reaction (which doesn't actually work the way Bard is describing, but that doesn't invalidate the thrust of the argument), is really expensive points-wise.

I may be wrong, but iirc it was a free action you could take any number of times (read: until the GM smacks you with the really heavy M&M corebook), even in other people rounds, in response to something else happening. It was back in second edition, I'm unsure if at a later time they fixed it. Iirc with 7 points you'd get a rank 1 reaction teleport that teleports you up to 30m away when you get attacked. But if you avoided exploits it was fun. (even if at the end of the day most attacks were the same)

That's probably true, and hilariously broken.  It might not be entirely game-breaking in some fashion -- you'd probably have to specify where you teleport (e.g., 30 ft. directly away from the attacker) -- but that's a quibble next to what is an obvious exploit.  You made a comment regarding what sounded like arrays that could be reconfigured as reactions, which isn't quite right. 

I totally agree with the sentiment, though, the system is eminently breakable.  Although there seem to be few that aren't.  One slight virtue in M&M's favor -- and it's not unique in this regard -- is that it's relatively hard to break it by accident.  White Wolf games are riddled with game balance land mines just waiting to demolish a game, even by a well-meaning player. 

it's tons of fun as long as the party compares characters and balances them before playing.

I find that this is necessary in literally every RPG I play. 

I never felt the need for that in games with high mortality or with limited customization choices (like Cyberpunk with poor people and CoC)
[/quote]
That's probably true.  Although given the attention I like to lavish on character creation, such games don't really attract me.

That being said, I am a strong proponent of intraparty parity.  Doesn't have to be precise, but niche protection and cool abilities that are unique are usually very good things. 

@Interparty Conflict
I generally think troupe play is a bad place for interparty conflict.  White Wolf games notwithstanding.  While LARP is a fine forum for interparty conflict -- player v. player is often the only way to really run it -- the practical difficulties always seemed quite large.  I'm not saying it's impossible, but the trouble to reward ratio has struck me as unsatisfying in the run of the mill case.

I tend to think it's best to design a party (or pack or coterie), and one with motivations that can be sufficiently simpatico not to derail the game. 

[Bard]

Although given the attention I like to lavish on character creation, such games don't really attract me.

I agree and usually I don't play many of those either, but sometimes the party wants to
Cyberpunk anyway is a strange beast, at character creation there's not much to do, just some stats and skills (and an hilarious random lifepath system). Then if you play it well you get MONEY (eurobucks!) and then it becomes worse than any other game 
Basically ALL CP splatbooks are list of stuff to buy and components for other stuff. There's even a whole book of pieces to assemble power armors (patlabor-style mechas).
(Then a hobo with a shotgun gets a lucky headshot on you from a window of an abandoned building because you were loud and you die. True story.)

That being said, I am a strong proponent of intraparty parity.  Doesn't have to be precise, but niche protection and cool abilities that are unique are usually very good things.

That's it for me too. Even when I help coordinate sheets for a party I usually leave weak points in all builds that the other members can fill, so even if someone is slightly weaker than the others there's always something needed that only he can do.

[bhu]

d20 is a Bad Place for this because its intraparty balance is so utterly crazytown. Suggestion alone pretty much can end PvP conflicts, and immunities to various shticks aren't to hard to come by. Winning a fight with another PC is ultimately pretty random, depending on the books allowed.

The PVP guys here usually play casters while most everyone else is rogue/fighter.  In 2e a campaign ended because a Cleric didn't get his way so he cast Hold Person on the Party and coup de graced one each per turn.  To the DM's shock no one showed up the next week.   

[littha]

I was once in a drop in game at a con, the PVP guy there was a rogue. A really badly built rogue at that. I think I had my animal companion eat him when he inevitably decided to pick a fight with my super optimised druid.

[Keldar]

@Interparty Conflict
I generally think troupe play is a bad place for interparty conflict.  White Wolf games notwithstanding.  While LARP is a fine forum for interparty conflict -- player v. player is often the only way to really run it -- the practical difficulties always seemed quite large.  I'm not saying it's impossible, but the trouble to reward ratio has struck me as unsatisfying in the run of the mill case.

I tend to think it's best to design a party (or pack or coterie), and one with motivations that can be sufficiently simpatico not to derail the game.

LARP is great for player conflict, paranoia tends to run so rampant the GM's only job is to hand the idiot ball off whenever things get slow. 
Anyone can cause so much crap with just one word; Ravnos.  Though it helps to use it in a proper sentence.

[brujon]

@Interparty Conflict
I generally think troupe play is a bad place for interparty conflict.  White Wolf games notwithstanding.  While LARP is a fine forum for interparty conflict -- player v. player is often the only way to really run it -- the practical difficulties always seemed quite large.  I'm not saying it's impossible, but the trouble to reward ratio has struck me as unsatisfying in the run of the mill case.

I tend to think it's best to design a party (or pack or coterie), and one with motivations that can be sufficiently simpatico not to derail the game.

LARP is great for player conflict, paranoia tends to run so rampant the GM's only job is to hand the idiot ball off whenever things get slow. 
Anyone can cause so much crap with just one word; Ravnos.  Though it helps to use it in a proper sentence.

To be fair, Malkavian and Brujah seem to be the go-to clans for really bad and disruptive roleplayers. Seriously. Venture, Tremere and Toreador are usually the more "hardcore" roleplayers and there's the goth sabbath guys. There's the stereotypes!

[Complete4th]

This is actually a good example of a game that's totally unbalanced but it's tons of fun as long as the party compares characters and balances them before playing.

In my experience, and this is just based off where I live, parties don't do that.

This has been my experience too.

Everyone's had at least a half dozen asshats they know of in their gaming experience who are in it for pvp, and as a result no one I know compares PC's.  They try to ensure no one else ever knows what their PC can do, to the point of always taking their character sheet with them and never letting it lie around where anyone could see it.  They even hold off on using abilities "until it's necessary" to avoid letting people know what they can do, often at the expense of the party.  It's why I end up in groups where everyone but me is a fighter/melee type because everyone but me decided "I'm playing Conan this time!"  And then when they can't beat simple encounters because they all fight as individuals as opposed to actually thinking, they scrap the game and start over with a situation just as likely to fail.

This has not, and I wish to express my deepest sympathies. Maybe I'm just lucky, but I've never encountered the 'PvP guy' in 20ish years of gaming.

*knocks on wood*

IME, players don't compare characters before playing -- other than race and class -- simply because they want to get to the game!

[Complete4th]

@Complete4th

I think we get it.  You don't like fiddly chargen systems.  That's a preference, and that's fine. 

You might add that 3E marries its fiddliness to trap options and a lack of transparency -- say what you will about the complex point-buy systems (M&M, Champions, GUPRS, though I'm working from long memories on the latter two) but they tend to be relatively transparent.  I, for example, find the execution of Burning Wheel's lifepath system fiddly to the point that it ruins chargen, which is something I typically enjoy. 

In my limited experience I found 4E fairly fiddly and riddled with many, many trap options.  Class and race are easy enough, but choosing powers/spells/whatever they are called I found tremendously opaque.  So, it's pretty weird for me to hold 4E up as the game with not so fiddly chargen, especially when there are much better exemplars out there. 

Odd, I've never heard anyone express this perception of 4e before. I'm not claiming that 4e is some paragon of chargen simplicity, but I'm surprised to hear this from a BGer -- someone who presumably enjoys parsing the swirling torrent of the 3.x ruleset.

4e's trap choice is to not take an Expertise feat and Improved Defenses at some point, so it is not without its glaring design mistakes. I can't imagine how 4e options can be opaque to someone well versed in WotC editions, but maybe that's a failure of imagination on my part. It's probably gamer specialization at work.

[littha]

4e's trap choice is to not take an Expertise feat and Improved Defenses at some point, so it is not without its glaring design mistakes. I can't imagine how 4e options can be opaque to someone well versed in WotC editions, but maybe that's a failure of imagination on my part. It's probably gamer specialization at work.

I thought 4e's trap choice was not taking every single accuracy bonus possible, which in turn makes the fights take like 12 hours of real time. Something to do with Dwarf Warriors with Warhammers if I recall.

[Libertad]

I thought 4e's trap choice was not taking every single accuracy bonus possible, which in turn makes the fights take like 12 hours of real time. Something to do with Dwarf Warriors with Warhammers if I recall.

To be fair, the designers realized how long combats took and drastically reduced monster hp in the Monster Manual 3 and Essentials books.  Better late than never.

[Bard]

In my experience, and this is just based off where I live, parties don't do that.

IME, players don't compare characters before playing -- other than race and class -- simply because they want to get to the game!

I guess that depends on the party, the game and a lot of things, maybe even necessity after having too many games broken or characters suddenly suicide after a round of DM-nerfstick.

I'd take that since you mention that "they want to get to the game" you're using a "let's make the character sheets during the first session" approach instead of a "we start a game of X in 2-3 weeks, start reading up rules and making characters"?  With weeks to spare comparing character often comes naturally while players talk to each other or start giving "trial characters" to the DM for approval.

[veekie]

That's basically why the game should be engineered such that you can arrive at an acceptable median state without requiring assumptions of player behavior. Equal linear power, comparable usefulness across challenge types, leave no one locked out of the game entire. Everyone should contribute to any challenge to some extent, while perhaps one character or another will be the best at a given challenge, nobody should be just sitting things out.
Build for that and inter-player difficulties will diminish.

[Complete4th]

4e's trap choice is to not take an Expertise feat and Improved Defenses at some point, so it is not without its glaring design mistakes. I can't imagine how 4e options can be opaque to someone well versed in WotC editions, but maybe that's a failure of imagination on my part. It's probably gamer specialization at work.

I thought 4e's trap choice was not taking every single accuracy bonus possible, which in turn makes the fights take like 12 hours of real time. Something to do with Dwarf Warriors with Warhammers if I recall.

I think you're taking the general 4e charop wisdom, throwing it into a blender, and then topping it with a specific charop build that may or may not have been errataed since you read it.

In other words, yes, accuracy bonuses are generally sweet deals in 4e. The expertise feats especially because 1) they grant a consistent and scaling +1/2/3 bonus, and 2) they're required to make the game math actually work the way it's intended. Charop puts a heavy emphasis on getting even more accuracy bonuses, but the others are circumstantial and not necessary. (And accuracy bonuses tend to shorten fights, unless you're using them just to stunlock solos.)

And as Libertad mentioned, the 4e team cut down on monster HPs and elite/solo defenses after two MMs of looong combats. MM3+ monsters are much more fun.

[Complete4th]

In my experience, and this is just based off where I live, parties don't do that.

IME, players don't compare characters before playing -- other than race and class -- simply because they want to get to the game!

I guess that depends on the party, the game and a lot of things, maybe even necessity after having too many games broken or characters suddenly suicide after a round of DM-nerfstick.

I'd take that since you mention that "they want to get to the game" you're using a "let's make the character sheets during the first session" approach instead of a "we start a game of X in 2-3 weeks, start reading up rules and making characters"?  With weeks to spare comparing character often comes naturally while players talk to each other or start giving "trial characters" to the DM for approval.

Sometimes we did chargen before session 1, sometimes not. In both cases I didn't push strategies like "Hey everyone, let's talk about everyone's chargen details" because I can count on one hand the number of players I've had who wouldn't mentally check out or start moaning about the "extra homework" I was asking them to do. Most simply weren't into the nitty gritty of system mastery.

Instead, my solution to the issues that cropped up was to boost or nerf the most broken options into a semblance of sanity, and giving my players chargen tips. Player is disappointed in his TWF fighter? Free retraining into warblade! Casters turning the game into Russian roulette with dispel magic tactics? Give everyone innate bonuses so nobody becomes a glass canon every time one goes off!

[Unbeliever]

@4E
I can only speak from my limited 4E experiences. So, I wouldn't defend my stance to the death or anything.  It's based on creating more than a few characters and spending a non-trivial amount of time with the sourcebooks.  I recall it being distinctly difficult to figure out what was a good or useful power and what wasn't, and I felt there were serious differences. 

Part of this depends on what the purported virtues of a system are.  3E D&D is a clunky mess, and I take one of 4E's goals was to make things easier and more user-friendly.  Hence the more 2E style character creation.  My contention is that hid a lot of complexity and trap options that were hard to parse.  They were hard for me, at least, and I think it's fair to call me a veteran gamer.  They moved a lot from the class picking stage to the power picking one, just how in 3E Conjurer or Druid 20 can still be deceptively difficult to build given that spells range from the suck to the game-breaking. 

Given that I felt -- not entirely unfairly I believe -- that one of 4E's goals was to streamline things and help mitigate Ivory Tower Game Design, I was disappointed.  That's one man's opinion and experiences. 


@Party Construction
It has been ages since we created characters during the first "session."  It's hard enough to get together to play to begin with, we aren't going to waste that time with character creation.  Most of us also like to have a chance to ruminate on our ideas to begin with. 

I wanted to underscore something, though.  It's not just about character parity.  That's part of it, too, but we are extremely upfront about our sensibilities so everyone is on the same page (and most of us have been gaming together for years, now, which helps).  It's that the goal is to create an interesting party that will troupe along the plot together.  That's especially important for an ongoing plot and character driven campaign, and probably less for a dungeon crawl for a few sessions. 

None of this necessarily involves system mastery.  In fact, it can sort of be the opposite if one of the more build-oriented players wants to help out one of the less-inclined.  It'a annoying to have the DM be entirely responsible for all of this.


Just as

...
LARP is great for player conflict, paranoia tends to run so rampant the GM's only job is to hand the idiot ball off whenever things get slow. 

Love it.  That was usually my ideal when I GMed LARPs, as it was one of those places where players could really get at each other's throats without it becoming too impractical.