Insta- death spells (WARNING!! Rant with vulgar language)

andakitty · Post by **andakitty** » Wed Aug 22, 2007 6:41 pm

You know, I love rpgs mostly because you can get together with friends and 'experience' your favorite fiction by playing through it in a sort of group story telling experience. Nothing I have heard about this 'new' edition gives me the faintest idea that it is in any way going to simulate the kind of stories I like or rpg experience I enjoy. DOA, I will never even look at the books.

jman5000 · Post by **jman5000** » Wed Aug 22, 2007 7:08 pm

andakitty, just wondering, what have you been reading that is contradictory to your way of telling stories??

for me, MOST rule systems contradict in some way or another my ability to simulate the kinds of stories that I like to tell - even rules lite systems.

Cheers,

J.

gideon_thorne · Post by **gideon_thorne** » Wed Aug 22, 2007 7:09 pm

jman5000 wrote:
funny, thought this was exactly was C&C was as well
Cheers,

J.

Well.. sort of. It was a compromise between Davis's rules mania and Steve's absence of same.
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andakitty · Post by **andakitty** » Wed Aug 22, 2007 8:10 pm

jman, I was referring to 3.5, tetsnbn. C&C is great, I am just having a little slippy-slide trouble with integrating some sort of skill system. I need to run some sort of playtest. To get a grasp.

Treebore · Post by **Treebore** » Wed Aug 22, 2007 8:49 pm

andakitty wrote:
jman, I was referring to 3.5, tetsnbn. C&C is great, I am just having a little slippy-slide trouble with integrating some sort of skill system. I need to run some sort of playtest. To get a grasp.

Just have them write down the skills they want, within reason, and have their skill level equal their level + whatever stat you want to be relevant to the skill. I used 3E for those decisions.

Simple, works.
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Dyne · Post by **Dyne** » Wed Aug 22, 2007 9:26 pm

I agree completely. The dumbass whiners and wimps that write and play "new D&D" are the biggest reason I got out of that whole scene. I am sooo sick of people min/maxing their stats and focusing on "builds," leaving all adventure and storytelling in the gutter. If all you care about is being able to deal as much damage as possible, you don't belong in my games.

andakitty · Post by **andakitty** » Wed Aug 22, 2007 10:33 pm

Amen to that. I have gone to the game store and watched 3.5 games, and not joined in because I could see how very alien it was to what I wanted to play, and so never have played it. Heartburn city.

I ran 3.0 up to 5th level when it came out, and found the system severely lacking anyway.

And 3.0 has the distinction for me of my not being able to make a character I was happy with, whenever I've tried. It always felt like those little dolls girls play with where you have a figure and dress it up with clothes. Just a set of recipes, do this and do that and you have an 'iconic' whatever. Bah. and bah again.

Dyne · Post by **Dyne** » Thu Aug 23, 2007 6:19 am

It's ironic 'cause I was actually introduced to D&D with 3.0 (yep, I'm a young'un). Rented the books from the library, got a few friends together, and we had a blast. Of course, all we had was the core rulebooks, and we tended to forget rules quite a bit: combat was faster because we forgot about AoO's most of the time, and we had lots of interaction with NPC's because I forgot about the skills like Diplomacy and Gather Information, which would cut it all down to a single die roll (who would've thought, forgetting some rules actually made the game better). I ran the game in the style of Sword & Sorcery that I was familiar with; evil cultists trying to recover an ancient artifact of great power, a lost city underneath the sewers, fighting goblins and kobolds and rats.

And then my group fell apart, and so I took to the net for my RPG needs. This is when I was introduced to 3.5, the concepts of min/maxing and powergaming, and dozens of splatbooks. Eventually, the whole scene lost its appeal.

Zudrak · Post by **Zudrak** » Wed Aug 29, 2007 2:25 pm

Too much to read through, but I agree with the OP, Treebore. I heard that the spell "Disintegrate" is changing to "Dent Person". Thanks for the hilarious rant (in my best Homer Simpson voice: It's funny cause it's true!).
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JRR · Post by **JRR** » Wed Aug 29, 2007 6:31 pm

Halastar? Is that you?

Treebore wrote:
So KIDS stay out!!

Another fundamental difference between me and the panzy 3E and 4E players,

Insta death spells are game breakers.
DUUUUUHHH!!!!

I guess since its so HARD to make a new character in 3E and 4E it wastes too much of their valuable time (how about getting rid of the need to refer to the books every 5 minutes?).

Gee! It sucks to die because I failed one roll! Guess you have never been shot! Or even shot at?

Or played WoW and had your character die again, within seconds after you spent 5 minutes walking back to where you died last time.

They want realism, but not too much! Dying is a bit too real, ain't it?

Sorry! But I just read how they are tweaking more game breakers like Etherealness and Scrying. Its too hard to account for such spells! I guess no one at WOTC or who plays 3E ever read the spell book !!! Plenty of ways to counter Etherealness and Scrying, etc...

I guess too many people are weak in the areas of planning , fore thought, and foresight!!

I guess thats why a DM should never run a game past levels he has ever played a character at.

Of course if you run a DM PC so you can learn how to play such characters as you run the game the all knowing players get upset at the DM's cheating and abuse of the game.

I think I have come to realize my real problem with 3E, and soon 4E, is the mamby pamby whimp players who cry every time their character gets a paper cut!! Plus the DM's who insist they are "facilitators" who are not antagonists, they are not trying to kill the PC's, etc... ad nauseum mamby pamby whimp crap!

What happened to real games? Where your PC's life was really on the line? Where the only thing between your PC and death was a bit of luck and quick thinking?

No wonder they lambast Tomb of Horrors and Ravenloft so much, their such whimp a** cowards they can't even deal with imaginary death!

Grow up whimps!! At least have enough guts to die an imaginary death!!

Have enough guts to deal with the fact your PC died because you were dumb s**T and took on those 6 monsters by yourself! Or that your the idiot who insisted on going off by yourself! Or that, yes, you had a spell that could have made you immune to disintegrate, or greatly increased your save, or made your castle immune to etherealness or Scrying, but you were TOO MUCH OF A DUMB SHIT TO USE IT despite the warnings given to you by your DM!! Despite being too stupid to consider the fact that you have enemies that are just as bad ass as you are, so defend against them like you would defend against yourself!!

Get your collective heads out of your collective arses and try and use that pea someone saw fit to stick inside your skull!!!

Plus, are DM's too stupid to warn their players? To have NPC's give them advice on defending themselves? To point out they have high level enemies who can go invisible (Improved), who can walk through walls!! Who can plane travel and by pass defenses with ease?

No, DM's can't be expected to do that. DM's and players are too stupid to read up on defensive spells and USE THEM!.

No! Instead the game wll be whimpified even further so thatthe stupid players and inexperienced and pathetic DM's might be able to run a "fair game"!!

I say take this whimp ass game and shove it up their asses!!!

/END RANT!!!

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JRR · Post by **JRR** » Wed Aug 29, 2007 6:33 pm

Jk, Tree, I am so in your corner on this one.
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Treebore · Post by **Treebore** » Wed Aug 29, 2007 7:02 pm

Gee, I sure was irritated that day, wasn't I.
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serleran · Post by **serleran** » Thu Aug 30, 2007 2:59 am

Maybe it was the lack of PMs that Steve had?

RakintheBlue · Post by **RakintheBlue** » Thu Aug 30, 2007 10:14 am

I think I had a rant, on some other forum, somewhere, that matched this only it had to do with video games...

Only in video games now, it's not about making it harder but looonger and extremely easy. But not too long just long enough to get people to buy it, but short enough where they can pump a new crappy game out in 2 weeks and get that one sold.

Sigh, give me a Kid Icirus or a megaman anyday.

I'm guessing WOTC doesn't WANT to make the perfect system they want a system that can be "beat" or "figured out" in order to sell the slew of new PHBs and in order to do this they need folks to reach the "top of the feat tree" with their first character, or some such nonsense.

jman5000 · Post by **jman5000** » Thu Aug 30, 2007 11:55 am

What I find funny, had this new game been called "Galactic space bunnies fighting demons from Hell", we'd have for the most part said either Meh or wow, I'm willing to at least kick the tires of this system.

But because it has the title "dungeons and dragons" for some reason that makes so many people fly off the handle...

[shrug]

I haven't played D&D in over 15 years [that's a lie, a couple of 3.5 games, but I don't think of that as D&D], so it's no big deal to me what they do, and what they call it.

Would it make you feel any better to just not think of it as a Dungeons and Dragons game?

Cheers,

J.

RakintheBlue · Post by **RakintheBlue** » Thu Aug 30, 2007 12:13 pm

I think the problem is that they have such a huge following and therefore will have a lot easier time shaping what tabletop will become.

"I want to make money, wotc is freakin huge and rich...let's follow their buisness model!"

jman5000 · Post by **jman5000** » Thu Aug 30, 2007 12:34 pm

RakintheBlue wrote:
I think the problem is that they have such a huge following and therefore will have a lot easier time shaping what tabletop will become.

"I want to make money, wotc is freakin huge and rich...let's follow their buisness model!"

I'm wondering why that is a problem?

if enough people don't like what the current thought leader is doing, there will be a backlash, and out of it will emerge a new thought leader.

Cheers,

J.

RakintheBlue · Post by **RakintheBlue** » Thu Aug 30, 2007 12:40 pm

Ah but people that don't know any better won't not like it.

Plus the question is not if what wotc is doing is "better" but what folks like us here like, and what everyone else thinks they like.

Just like there are no more, 3 lives and you start from the beginning, takes 12 minutes to beat but 5 months to figure it out, video games around.

Although there are some that can see through the BS and hype there seems to be 10 people who can't for everyone that can.

Although they hate to admit it, people like to follow the crowd, it seems a lot easier and it strokes their ego to know 1,000,000 other people enjoy what they enjoy.

It doesn't really bother me, just spouting out thoughts.

jman5000 · Post by **jman5000** » Thu Aug 30, 2007 12:49 pm

Quote:
Although there are some that can see through the BS and hype there seems to be 10 people who can't for everyone that can.

See, that's the funny part, for the most part, I'm assuming that people who visit this forum have either decided that C&C is their primary game, or a game they play - in this fora, it shouldn't matter one whit if WofC decided to turn D&D into a game about Barbi and Ken - it has no material impact on the game we have chosen to play...

Let them do what they want. Fresh ideas are always good and sometimes they will trickle down to make other games better.

Cheers,

J.

RakintheBlue · Post by **RakintheBlue** » Thu Aug 30, 2007 12:53 pm

I agree.

Just have to work hard to keep communities like this one thriving, for the sake of the light side.
Plus I don't really play C&C, LA is my game, but I got tired of being pelted by tumbleweeds over there.

Mythmere · Post by **Mythmere** » Thu Aug 30, 2007 2:46 pm

Treebore, you've GOT to stop watching the train wreck happening over there. It's not good for you.

gideon_thorne · Post by **gideon_thorne** » Thu Aug 30, 2007 2:55 pm

jman5000 wrote:
See, that's the funny part, for the most part, I'm assuming that people who visit this forum have either decided that C&C is their primary game, or a game they play - in this fora, it shouldn't matter one whit if WofC decided to turn D&D into a game about Barbi and Ken - it has no material impact on the game we have chosen to play...

Let them do what they want. Fresh ideas are always good and sometimes they will trickle down to make other games better.

Cheers,

J.

Quoted for Truth.

Yet another 'look at what the big bad corporation is doing now' post serves naught more than to give WOTC free advertising. If you don't support the company, don't help them by talking about their stuff. ^_~`
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RakintheBlue · Post by **RakintheBlue** » Thu Aug 30, 2007 3:49 pm

Let me take some deep breaths...

ok, I'm done talking about it, I promise.

Craig C · Post by **Craig C** » Thu Aug 30, 2007 6:03 pm

I agree Treebore.

Nothing like having a 3E player joining your game and dying and dying and dying due to his dumb a**e, "ha the DM wouldn't kill me", crap. No the DM (sorry at my table being called an CK = instant death) doesn't kill, stupidity does. And the way that that the new editions play stupid players are being molly coddled into remaining stupid. At least 1E and C&C allow for the principles of darwinism to take hold. Characters that reach high levels in my games ARE HEROES with epic tables to tell, the rest die trying to become heroes but hey they often have a great last battle for the player to brag about. They aren't hand held until they can reach high levels.

The nerfing process has been going on since 3E was released and looks set to continue with the new AD&D (that's A for Anime D&D).

As for instant death, one of my biggest shocks with C&C has been no SLAY LIVING!!!!

I've been interested in the Enworld threads on 4E purely because I haven't read anything about the WOTC game in a long long time. Makes me glad I've got C&C cos from what I've gleaned from Enworld there ain't no way that that game they are developing should ever be called D&D

Craig

slimykuotoan · Post by **slimykuotoan** » Fri Aug 31, 2007 1:55 pm

seskis281 wrote:
Seriously, to some extent its a generational thing - a lot of gamers out there were produced in the era of save and restart quickly so "death" in a computer game has no meaning, so please god don't dare let it happen in an RPG!

I think this is exactly the issue; WOTC is using the video game model to make the game palatable to that crowd.

I think it will flop.

jman5000 · Post by **jman5000** » Fri Aug 31, 2007 2:05 pm

slimykuotoan wrote:
I think this is exactly the issue; WOTC is using the video game model to make the game palatable to that crowd.

I think it will flop.

why?

Cheers,

J.

slimykuotoan · Post by **slimykuotoan** » Fri Aug 31, 2007 2:38 pm

Well, they're trying to adopt 'video game characteristics' and apply them to an RPG.

Less death -or quick re-starts- video game characters (the cleric who heals others when he scores a 'mighty forward strike', speedier combat at all levels of play ("the sweet zone's now also at level thirty...I hit with my sword for 300 points of damage").

While it's interesting that they adopt similarities to video games in order to hit that younger market, I think that 'something similar' still won't be as attractive as the actual thing.

I think their marketing guys should've looked at whether video gamers were similar to paper rpg gamers...

Why does one play predominantly one style over another?

Do rpgers want their games to be more like PC games in style? (and I'm talking mechanics here, not the computer assisted stuff).

gideon_thorne · Post by **gideon_thorne** » Fri Aug 31, 2007 2:55 pm

What it boils down to , boys and girls, is being proactive in promoting the style of play you enjoy. Which means going out to game shops, book stores, local schools and colleges if you can manage it, and set up clubs.

If you can present the educational angle to schools, research, reading, history, most of the sensible Principals will fall all over themselves to help you set up a club. "Research and education thats fun? Lets get it going."

Hell, even check out your local ren faire. I have about 50 odd new players within a 45 minute drive of me because I made friends at the local faire. A good 90% of the cast have played or still play one kind of an rpg or another.

There is nothing that sells this game faster than sitting down and showing people how it works.

Oh yes, you also need to put on a good 'face' to the public for this sort of thing. There's nothing more off putting than the 'my way or your not cool' attitude when it comes to trying to promote an idea or hobby. ^_^
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jman5000 · Post by **jman5000** » Fri Aug 31, 2007 3:00 pm

I think an ~16bln/year industry has something to teach, WotC does well to listen.

because I don't care for the changes that they are making, doesn't make it wrong, it just means that I'm no longer their target market and audience (which I'm not).

things are changing just too damn fast these days, so I actually give decent kudo's to the Wizards for stepping out there and disenfranchising many of their old guard supporters to try and keep up with the times. Its no longer sufficient to coddle along and make changes every 15 years.

when, in 5 years, technology or whatever causes the next big titanic shift in the way consumers consume.. I would expect them to adapt and modify as well, if they don't, they're Intellivision
near where I live, there is a store that sells only Xmas stuff all year long. you walk into the store and it's only playing xmas songs, all day long. a neat novelty - fun for me to walk into the 2 times a decade that I might. a niche of a niche of a niche store, it does quite well (evidenced by its continued existence). I would never ever expect this store to put in digital POS systems, with RFID inventory tracking and implement JIT distribution theory. I do expect that from Walmart though. it's 2 very different shopping experiences. 2 different expectations, 2 very different target markets.

C&C is the xmas store, D&D is walmart. they have to keep up to the changing time, but more importantly, keep up to the changing youth and their expectations.

but that's just my opinion on the whole matter..

Cheers,

J.

kaomera · Post by **kaomera** » Sat Sep 01, 2007 4:07 am

slimykuotoan wrote:
I think this is exactly the issue; WOTC is using the video game model to make the game palatable to that crowd.

I'm sure there is some truth in that. WotC has been pretty heavy on the video-game / computer / electronics terminology in discussing 4e so far. Part of that I think is unavoidable (every industry does it; I work in a restaurant and have heard the corporate big-wigs talk about "upgrading" a dish...), and part of it is because they are really only pushing 4e at an online audience right now (because with no Dragon magazine there can be no big 4e-announcement issue... ), but part of it does probably indicate a bias.

However I think part of the trend to design the game away from random lethality (and that's all I've seen real direct evidence of so far) is one of (IMHO) the most fundamental differences in "old-school" vs. "new-school" playstyles. And that is the jump between running the character you roll and seeing where it goes and "designing" (or "building" or whatever...) your character. For me this change came during the 1e era (and was independent of UA or the SGs), so I really don't think that it's in any way an issue of editions.

There was a point where I decided (or possibly realized) that I was not ever going to play "enough" D&D, or where I realized that I wouldn't be playing forever (let alone with the same group). (And part of that was when I went from playing at least as much as I DMed to primarily DMing.) As my time gaming became much more of a precious resource I felt like I wanted to play a cool character every time I sat down to play D&D.

Rolling a purely random, 3d6 in order character is fine if you don't have any specific expectations of what you're going to end up with. As I played more I realized more and more that there where certain types of characters that I just enjoyed a lot more than others. And while 1e (and C&C, too) was much better about not making high ability scores nigh-mandatory (something I think 3.5 kind of tends twords), it was still nice to have a goodly Int score if I was going to play a smart / clever character. And so we started to use 4d6, drop lowest, arrange as desired.

Eventually we where actually starting most games at first level. This was a combination of A) we almost always started with B2 if we where 1st level (which, given that it was getting boring, was a stupid habit to keep up...), and B) the more we could decide what our characters would be like (the more control we had over generation), the more we spent at least a bit of time and effort on backgrounds, etc. that we previously would have skipped.

Now I think that a certain amount of background is good. (And given the number of decisions a player has to make in generating a 3.5 character, there's a tendency for most players to come up with quite a bit of it.) And when your character dies off and all of those lovely plot hooks get nipped in the bud it kind of sucks. The problem comes from forgetting that it's supposed to suck. If losing your character really was no big deal there would be not much incentive to learn to play better.

One of the funny things about all of this is how so many claim that old-school play is so much deadlier than new-school. Certainly the difference is there, but there seems to be an assumption that 1e (or at least that style of) games included the DM rolling a die on a whim and killing off PCs based on nothing else. Part of the issue, I think, is that there is a tendency to project the deadliest part of 3.5 (1st level play) onto old-school games. I had someone suggest once (semi-seriously) that instead of applying criticals against 1st-level characters you should just roll d%; on a 01-02 the character has died before reaching 2nd level and you should roll a new one rather than wasting your time...

One thing that could be cool (not that I'm suggesting that I know of, or that there even is, any good way of accomplishing this) to bring to table-top from the realm of computer games is the idea that you start out (1st level) at the lowest difficulty and the game gets harder as you go on. One obvious problem is that 1st-level characters are just so fragile, and they are on the low end of any adventure's "power curve" (ie: it's easier to do a "5th to 7th" level adventure at 7th level than at 5th). The other, possibly less obvious one is that (for me at least) I have more invested in higher-level characters and I don't want them dying off every other adventure...

In any case, trying to remove random death is a slippery slope, nevermind removing not-so-random deaths. I think that a lot of new-school players don't view "you went into the dungeon" as a legitimate factor contributing to a character's death; after all, you're supposed to go in the dungeon, right? But take too much risk away (and it's easy to do) and the game isn't challenging and therefore isn't fun anymore...
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Insta- death spells (WARNING!! Rant with vulgar language)

Re: Insta- death spells (WARNING!! Rant with vulgar language