A somewhat non Enchanted Worlds update today. I recently discovered Matthew Colville on youtube. He creates some great videos that detail tips for running games. He is very eloquent and has worked in the game industry so he has the ability to address games from multiple perspectives. If you are thinking about running a game there is a plethora of invaluable tips in his videos.
I bring this up because I found him because of a video that actually puts into words the things that I loved about 4th edition. You can watch the whole video here:
Now this is a long video, clocking in at almost an hour. I watch youtube at 2x speed so its not as long from that perspective. But again it is crammed with information. He even touches briefly on some of the strengths of 5th edition that I can actually respect. I will most likely come back to this video again later but for the sake of brevity there is one main point I want to discuss.
The first, and one of the main things I loved about 4e( 4th edition) was the problem which he refers to as “Linear fighters and quadratic wizards.” He brings this up at 30:33 if you want to skip to it. Essentially this describes that a fighter character has a slow stable progression of power over the course of the game, whereas wizards increase in power exponentially. As they increase in experience and power a fighter learns how to swing their sword more quickly or in a flashy way. On the other hand a wizard learns how to warp the laws of reality and grant wishes. This disparity was completely nullified in 4e, and was a sour point for a lot of people who were used to being the wizard master race, looking down on the peasantry of combat classes. I am completely biased in my feelings on this, I have no misconceptions about that. I have played melee combat centric characters most of the time in the editions of the game that I have been lucky enough to play in. There always comes a point where it just isn’t fun anymore because of the difference between what the wizard could do like rolling TWENTY SIX 6 sided dice for a fireball or instant death spells. Before fourth edition came out I found a book that let you come up with what amount to sword spells for a fighter and that was band aid for a time. But I never felt that way in fourth edition. We all had cool things we could do and no significantly outclassed the other. There were situational times where a character was the “most useful” but my DMs were really able to spread that out amongst the group.
This is important because this is also the approach that both Dungeons and Delvers and it’s Dicepool variant use. Which, by extension, means Enchanted Worlds: Dice Pool uses a more flat system as well. A quick preview of the Enchantress/Enchanter class, which is the stand in for the wizard in Enchanted worlds, can illustrate this. In fact it and the Heritage system both do. In the Dice Pool iteration of Enchanted Worlds magic spells are taken as talents. Offensive elemental spells are found specifically tied to bloodlines, not to a mage character. The enchantress class does start at level one with a talent called Enchanter’s Dart that lets them attack from a distance with magic. But from there they can choose to create magic bubbles, illusions, and/or infuse their words with magic. If I ever create a D20 based variant of Enchanted kingdoms the talents may expand some, but the progression will remain. If you want to see a really good mid-point between 3rd, 4th, and 5th editions of D&D check out the “Dungeons and Delvers: Black book” by Awful Good Games. Its only $7 and it contains a ton of classes and races. Currently they only go up to level 5 but this is more of a preview. A red book that contains levels 1-20 is forthcoming and they will give a discount to people who bought the black book on the red book when it is released. Check it out: http://drivethrurpg.com/product/212664/Dungeons--Delvers--Black-Book
Ok so after writing all of that there was another thing Matt discusses in the video that I wanted to talk about after discussing with my friend and DM David Guyll the other night. At about 27:30 he brings up magic items. This was actually big drag for me about 4e, one of the few. The way magic items are relegated to math boosts. I love magic items and the ways that a good one can help a player evolve their character. I play tabletop games to experience cool moments to create cool stories. I am not a fan of super low magic games, but I am also not enamored with the system that distills a magic item down to a literal number bonus. I think it is important to give out cool magic items, I think you should give characters something they will permanently associate with their character. David suggested instead of a ring that gives you a +5 to stealth rolls, why not give the players a ring that lets them temporarily flatten down into a shadow. Now they have an interesting item that they can figure out different creative ways to use it. It may give them a bonus to when they sneak around, but they can be seen, and they can possibly use it to slip underneath doors or through cracks. I really like the ideas of a character keeping their gear for a long time instead of throwing it away as soon as the new +2 model becomes available. This is why I worked on a “gem socket” system for my worlds that are based in 3e and Pathfinder. The idea was that the static bonuses could be transferred onto a gem and then attuned to your existing item. That way you could start and end a campaign using your father’s sword without it having to be magical from the beginning.
Well that ended up really long for a quick Friday post. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!
Thanks for posting Adam!
ReplyDelete"You've been playing for a year and a half, your party is about 16th level." My party made it to 8th is roughly that time?... I think I may not care about leveling as much as other DMs. As long as everyone had fun right? I like to hope I succeeded there. But I did warn players routinely to build the character they wanted to play, not the foundation for the character they would play in 10 levels, because I never expected to get that high.
It took until my players clamored for 5e for me to start running it. My preference was actually to run Pathfinder, though at the time we had been running a Sci-Fi homebrew in a hard* science setting called "Dark Matter/s". We had finished the space game, and wanted to do something fantastical**, and they wanted to do it in 5e.
While learning 5e's rules, I slowly realized I missed the tactical layer of 4e. The positioning, the movement, the choice between AoE or not AoE and the threat of TPK by minions while the boss was a no-show. 5e just isn't a tactical game in the same way. It's also less of a thinking game from my DM perspective, most monsters lost a ton of abilities going from 3e to 4e, and that trend continued to 5e. In 3e monsters had feats and skills as though they were players, and often access to a slew of spells, but that was gone in 4e and didn't re-appear after tactics were removed for 5e. As a DM there have been more than a few 5e monsters who were boring for ME to run simply because all they did was attack. So absolutely, 5e combat is pretty boring compared to 4e, which had the best combat system.
I also didn't really like 4e though compared to 3e, it made the fighter powerful (good) by making all classes feel incredibly samey (yuck). As though really there were only 4 classes, and they all used the same undifferentiated foundation. Then it (to my perspective) tried to put lipstick on the pig by making each ability way overly dramatic and over the top. That's probably my biggest beef about 4e, that it had an ingrained sense of comic/superhero genre that I simply didn't want in my fantasy, but couldn't remove.
One good thing about 5e, is the Concentration system, which effectively nerfs most casters from going "god mode" because it's hard to be a god with only one duration spell on at a time. Another good thing is that they put the fighter (and warrior types) firmly over casters in terms of pure damaging abilities, as long as that is true, then casters can't get the 3e "better at literally everything" mentality. Lastly, bounded accuracy is a brilliant concept, and though often ignored to the game's detriment it generally keeps the system from devolving into stacking bonuses to infinity just to stay competitive (the "math boosts" you mention), which was a sin from at least 3e-4e (including Pathfinder).
I agree totally with you that +3 Swords are boring. At some point in the past few years I basically just stopped handing out +X items if that is all they did. I still used them, but I always tacked on extra weirdness. For example my players kept a Spear in their backpack called "The Spear of Light and Ashes" +1 spear, +1 fire damage when in sunlight, and if you burned a corpse to ashes with it then +1 against that type of creature. Most importantly, a kingdom of halfling, gnomes, and dwarves considered it a sacred relic and would periodically show up to claim it and "remove the stain to their kingdom's honor" (fight).
*As hard as a non-scientist like me who still needs to make it feel like a space adventure game could make it.
**I can rarely find enough players who actually want to run science fiction besides Star Wars.
Thanks for your response David! I feel like i am a bell curve dm on leveling. I like getting a few levels in and am ok to slow down from there. I really honestly, hate level 1. But that's just me, it's hard to be heroic when you are so squichy haha. I would love to see your homebrew sci-fi game if you have a consolodation of the rules. I was using a apocolypse/dungeon world hack to run a few games of Eclipse Phase a while back. I love, LOVE their lore and world. But the game had to have been made by a mechanical engineer. Way too many D100 tables....
ReplyDeleteI have yet to play 5e, but I chafe at how constrained the classes are. Choose this at level one, choose at level 3. Thats it your done unless you get spells. There are things i like about it too though. I like some of the simplification of and overal streamlined combat. It appears that it may be possible to take those streamlined portions and sprinkle back in more of the tactical stuff. I like the tactical stuff for 4e but it was so laden with it that combat bogged down sometimes.
Once I am done with the Enchanted World stuff I am thinking I will either create a D20 Seibronne setting, the world i was running 4e and Pathfinder in college. That or make an Isekai based game, where the players have characters that are built with 2 versions to be played both in a mystical world and in a mundane world. Also the mystical world would have tongue in cheek connections to video game rules of reality. Something like Konosuba, Tower of Duraga, Is it wrong to pick up girls in a dungeon, and the Adventurers Wanted books.
The homebrew was basically old World of Darkness (human rules, not monsters) multiple d10, extrapolated to be based around science fiction. Several skills changed, and the players were encouraged to make up skills if they felt they needed it. The setting itself was highly collaborative, but the biggest influence was the book Star Ship Troopers (not the movie). I GMed, but convinced the players to each create aliens for the setting. The players took on the role of heroic "Blitztrooper" officers, Space Marine/Storm Trooper types tasked with fast military action. The specific campaign mission being to impress an alien alliance with humanity so as to promote humanity joining the alliance. There were special "Representative" scores such as Honor, Recklessness, and Unity that tracked alien opinion of the players.
ReplyDeleteThe biggest work was that I had to establish a ton of items and machines to make the setting feel legitimate. That makes it difficult to consolidate my system changes, because most of them are special rules attached to items.
It was those item rules really created the feel. Ex: guns are far more dangerous in the future. If you are shot without armor you are automatically incapacitated, with armor you might survive and so take damage as normal. It informed players of the setting and created real worry anytime they had to take gear off.
However I mitigated the lethality of the setting by making another rule that running out of hit points didn't kill their characters, only I could declare a character dead.
The weakness of the setting was that the military backdrop pushed the d10 system way beyond its intended range. Some weapons the players could use would throw 20+d10 on a single attack. If I ran it again I would have to find some way to represent the massive numbers, but still recognize that it was in the same system as handguns which might attack for 4d10 or less. That said, the system worked, and being willing to deal with bigger weapons than most RPGs lent itself to spectacular moments, like the time a combat drone (think attack helicopter) scythed a skyscraper in half with multiple rocket fire while trying to get a player.
If you'd still like I could make the resources available to you, but they are in no way condensed. Just looking up Old WoD and removing supernatural abilities is the clearest explanation.
Because I write too much apparently.
DeleteLow levels are fun for me, and there is so much there that I never go through all the monsters. We never even fought goblins in a 1 1/2 year campaign (they kept paying them off). While by 5-8th level the players were starting to feel like big deals, tougher than 99% of the humanoids they ran into, and with kills and stunts that left peasants skeptical, like the barbarian shooting himself from a catapult.
On the other hand, you remember the 4e game I ran that took use up to about 20(ish), that's the only adventure I've been in that actually got that high, though it took about 3+ years.
I agree that 1st level is not the right level to feel powerful, except for 4e where you still have a ton of HP and 60% of the population has 1 HP.
5e does limit your choices, sort of. Fighters get to choose their fighty focus, ex big weapons, shooting, etc. There are some tactical options, like a Defender style ability. Though honestly, first level spellcasters have "options" usually what element they'd like to attack with. I'm currently playing a Necromancer 6th level. Most of my combat is choosing a Concentration spell for board control, and then zapping enemies with spammable cantrips. Any of my cool spells all require Concentration, so there is only room for 1 a combat usually. I don't like playing primary spellcasters usually though, because I find them dull, and running out of powers, or waiting for the "ideal" timing for your 1 big spell is often frustrating since it leaves you plinking most foes while other characters get their big scene. They do get lots of options every two levels when each spell level comes available, but 5e has dramatically toned down the power levels of most spells.
Those settings sound like fun. I especially find the 2 worlds idea intriguing, if it could be connected clearly enough.