Honestly, I've tried to get into playing P&P DnD ... and it's just not streamlined enough. I don't know why tabletop D&Ders want to spend hours playing out a single battle, but there needs to be a way of playing the game which makes things faster to do.
Honestly, I've tried to get into playing P&P DnD ... and it's just not streamlined enough. I don't know why tabletop D&Ders want to spend hours playing out a single battle, but there needs to be a way of playing the game which makes things faster to do.
Sadly, that's a problem for virtually any tabletop game. A big part of the problem is table preparedness, people just not paying attention, not rolling in an efficient manner, or not planning out their turn while they wait for it to come up. If everybody focuses on the matter at hand and your group develops some best practices, it goes a lot faster.
Honestly, I've tried to get into playing P&P DnD ... and it's just not streamlined enough. I don't know why tabletop D&Ders want to spend hours playing out a single battle, but there needs to be a way of playing the game which makes things faster to do.
This is part of the reason why I've grown to prefer other PnP systems over D&D. There are several systems where combat can be done in a much more streamlined fashion because they tolerate a higher level of abstraction, which lets you use the same rules to resolve a fight as an argument. D&D, on the other hand, is too much in love with the nitty gritty details of killing monsters with weapons to allow that level of streamlining. Imagine if D&D approached combat the same way it did convincing an NPC: "Here are some rules you can use to to arbitrate the results but you might as well just talk it out and ad hoc an outcome."
@Schneidend I haven't actually played FATE, but I've played several RPGs that have taken quite a few lessons from it.
Yeeeesss, excellent.
Though, as much as I love Fate and other, more collaborative games like it, I would hesitate to praise one approach over the other. There are simulationist games and then there are more abstract games, and both appeal to different people. Obviously, in the interests of conceptual evolution the two should trade ideas as much as possible, which is part of how 13th Age came to be, but I think it's important that there be those two distinct genres.
Agreed. I like D&D and I like systems like Mouse Guard or The Shadow of Yesterday, but for different reasons and because they fill different needs. As a GM, I really dig collaborative systems where there's some real sharing of narrative power/responsibility. As a player, sometimes I really just want to sink my teeth into a complicated simulationist system and make it hum.
Honestly, I've tried to get into playing P&P DnD ... and it's just not streamlined enough. I don't know why tabletop D&Ders want to spend hours playing out a single battle, but there needs to be a way of playing the game which makes things faster to do.
This is part of the reason why I've grown to prefer other PnP systems over D&D. There are several systems where combat can be done in a much more streamlined fashion because they tolerate a higher level of abstraction, which lets you use the same rules to resolve a fight as an argument. D&D, on the other hand, is too much in love with the nitty gritty details of killing monsters with weapons to allow that level of streamlining. Imagine if D&D approached combat the same way it did convincing an NPC: "Here are some rules you can use to to arbitrate the results but you might as well just talk it out and ad hoc an outcome."
To be honest, that sounds awful as well. You have to have SOME rules for combat, otherwise you don't have a game. You just have people sitting round a table doing an acting exercise. Might as well play Once Upon a Time or Fiasco if you're going to do that.
To be honest, that sounds awful as well. You have to have SOME rules for combat, otherwise you don't have a game. You just have people sitting round a table doing an acting exercise. Might as well play Once Upon a Time or Fiasco if you're going to do that.
You misunderstand. What Kaigen was describing was not a lack of rules, but something more streamlined, like FATE, which is what you asked for.
Acting does play a part, though. FATE, for instance, has a Fate Point economy, where you can cash in a Fate Point for a little extra narrative control over the scene. So, where normally you'd just shoot at a guy by rolling your Guns skill and he'd roll to defend with Athletics, you could spend a Fate Point and say "hey, there's a crate suspended on a rope above this guy. I shoot that down, but it's too big for him to avoid so he rolls his Endurance to try and survive it."
By that same token, though, the GM can bribe you with Fate Points by compelling your character's Aspects, basically personality traits and background facts you come up with yourself, in order to get you to do stuff that makes your life a little more difficult and exciting. The GM could, for instance, say "hey, your character is Used To Be A Cultist of Shadow, so you think this demon's offer is miiiiiighty tempting," and offer a Fate Point. It can get really fun when the players start getting into it, negotiating Aspects (and what they can and cannot do) on their characters and the Scene, compelling the Aspects of other characters with Fate Points, and compelling themselves so the GM gives them Fate Points.
To be honest, that sounds awful as well. You have to have SOME rules for combat, otherwise you don't have a game. You just have people sitting round a table doing an acting exercise. Might as well play Once Upon a Time or Fiasco if you're going to do that.
Think of it this way: In D&D, if the player really wants to haggle a merchant over the price of his meal, and it's not really adding anything to the session, you can skim over it by calling for an opposed Charisma check (or skill check like Diplomacy) and move on. If a character wants to pick a fight with someone, on the other hand, the system expects you to look up the NPC's vital statistics, roll initiative, and play out the fight; whereas in something like The Shadow of Yesterday, it'd still just be an opposed check, because the random encounter isn't worth spending 30-60 minutes resolving. You only bring out the complex resolution system (Bringing Down the Pain) when there's some real dramatic meat to be had or the players really want to stick it to an NPC.
And yes, any DM in D&D can leave the rules behind and just say "This fight isn't important, you beat the crap out of the mouthy peasant," but the baseline expectation is that all of those combat rules are there to be used.
The way you handle the system is as important as the system itself. For example, let's take a dualwielding, high level Fighter in 3rd Edition D&D (or, well, 3.5).
With all Dualwielding feats, he has 7 attacks at level 16 (whoah). An ineffecient player would roll his first attack, then roll the damage for that attack, then roll his second attack, then roll damage for that attack, etc. Or, he gets a bunch of different coloured d20's, notes down which colour is for which attack and does the same with damage dice (for ease of use, the same colour as the d20 it's connected to). He rolls all dice at the same time and immediately sees which ones hit and how much damage they do. This changes his turn from probably 4-5 minutes to around a single minute.
In that same time, the wizard can plan his spells (and look up its specifics) and the rogue can plan his positioning, getting out the dice he needs.
In my experience, a LOT of time is wasted by people sitting around doing nothing until their turn comes up. Then they suddenly snap back to attention, get their books out and start looking for things they might possibly do. This also saps the patience and attention of other characters, exacerbating the situation. This is system-independent. Get that fixed in your group and it won't really matter what system you're using.
i liked that sitting around together with friends and playing for hours and hours forgetting time and space. IT was more a gathering and we had breaks for eating and smoking etc. Great times of a much slower and calmed consciousness:) Preparations for going into adventure alone took an hour at times.
@Drugar I agree with your sentiment that a lot of time is wasted by people at the table being unsure of the rules or what they should do next, but I add the caveat that combat will always take longer in D&D because even for the most mundane of fights, D&D is concerned with the fine mechanical details of how you go about dismembering the opposition, which takes time compared to a simple opposed check and a quick narration of how you handily defeated your foe.
Even with players that knew what they were doing, when initiative got rolled in 3.X or 4e I could count on spending at least the next 30 minutes on that combat.
(It could be much worse, though. I played in a game of Only War where a battle against a group of Orks took three two hour sessions to finally resolve.)
As a GM, I thrive at story telling and preparation. Preparation. This is the key to keeping YOUR SIDE of the gaming table running smoothly. If the GM is slowing the session down, some players are going to get bored. I am great at keeping every players character(s) engaged, and feeling like whatever it is they do, is going to change something for better or worse.
As a player, I calculated ahead of time. My dwarf Braulk Bloodbeard used axes. Every style. So I would have almost every possible combat bonus calculated ahead of time for each and every style. My sheets were many pages, but I moved quickly.
Out core group was awesome but we had a hard time finding new members that didnt piss is off.
I've seen them marked down 20% already. I skimmed through the PHB and the editing and art work is great. I think it's tremendous, but I wont buy it yet either.
I got the PHB for $30 off of Amazon, and I look through it almost every day. The rules are solid and efficient, and the combination of Race + Class + Background makes for characters that are both fun to play and multidimensional.
I've been a fan of Pathfinder the last several years, but for the first time in a long time I feel like I'm holding a proper D&D product and thinking about how I would build characters with lives, rather than coming up with character concepts and trying to flesh out the details of their history afterward.
Can the infinity engine be rejigged to use it Dee?
I'm not a programmer, but I'd say noooooooooooo.
I got my 5th edition Player's Handbook from GenCon this year for $50. I usually wouldn't pay more for it than I have to but I got...
Troy Denning: One of the lead designers of the Dark Sun Campaign setting, Ed Greenwood: Creator of the Forgotten Realms and author of the Elminster novels, & R. A. Salvator: Author of the Drizzt and Crystal shard books,
to sign my book. Troy and Ed in the inside cover. Salvator next to the pic of Drizzt on the Elf page (pg 21).
I like the PHB, lots of variety in terms of character options even before you get onto multiclassing and feats.
When I've played 5e, it feels nice and fast in a way 4e didn't. Advantage/Disadvantage is a great way of getting rid of 90% of the situational modifiers, with mechanics that give you an extra, smaller dice handling the rest. In a three hour session, we blasted through four combats with a fair amount of roleplay and exploration between them.
Basically all the art of halflings and gnomes (it's hard to tell what is what) is really, really ugly. They all look like mean-spirited caricatures of real life midgets now. It's a horrible offense against all shortie-kind.
Basically all the art of halflings and gnomes (it's hard to tell what is what) is really, really ugly. They all look like mean-spirited caricatures of real life midgets now. It's a horrible offense against all shortie-kind.
lol Not entirely sure I see it that way, one of the pics kind of looks a bit like he's hoofin it to some pan pipes but that's reaching.
Anyways, I'm gonna buy the book and use 5e for my annual campaign. It's what 4e SHOULD have looked like. 4e is good in it's own way, just too far of a leap from the much beloved 3.0/3.5.
Basically all the art of halflings and gnomes (it's hard to tell what is what) is really, really ugly. They all look like mean-spirited caricatures of real life midgets now. It's a horrible offense against all shortie-kind.
I kinda agree, I prefer the 'plump' stature of halflings rather than the current 'shorty stick model'. Also the female halfing bard in the halfling or bard page looks like she has a bobble-head syndrome.
However, the rest of art is wonderful and I like the gnome drawings. I, however, don't regret my purchase.
Got my PHB, and I'm surprised (and pleased) by how much they got right. They came up with some new things that have really impressed me. They managed to make the game play smoother while enriching it a great deal. The building blocks for each class are well thought out, so much so that I have a hard time looking away from classes that I have shun in the past (monk, barbarian, and druid) and I imagine them in a new light. Each class is very interesting, from level 1 - 20. Seems like I could easily create 10 fun characters within each class that all have their own ID. Can't wait to play it, and I'll run out and buy the first PC game that is backed by this rule system.
So I've skimmed the Player's Handbook and I have to say: This is the only edition I've been even remotely interested in after 1st and 2nd edition.
It's very tight, elegant. It puts the focus on role-playing your character to form your class choices rather than the opposite way around (which hasn't been the case for a long time, sadly). It seems to take the simplicity of 1st and 2nd editions and throw in a few of the more popular elements of the editions onward. I dunno. I'm just all around impressed. I'm going to be buying my own Player's Handbook soon.
I feel like I'm holding a proper D&D product and thinking about how I would build characters with lives, rather than coming up with character concepts and trying to flesh out the details of their history afterward.
You'll be surprised at how much content is in there for free. It covers all of the mechanical bits, gives you 4 races and 4 classes and some backgrounds. The DM pdf has a decent number of monsters. There's enough in those pdfs to run a game.
Also I could never pay for anything that portrays halflings like that
I too dislike the halfling art in the PHB. The gnome art seemed OK to me, most of the rest I really liked. The MM has some really nice art and beasties in it too.
Comments
Are you...perhaps...talking about Fate RPG? *excited*
Though, as much as I love Fate and other, more collaborative games like it, I would hesitate to praise one approach over the other. There are simulationist games and then there are more abstract games, and both appeal to different people. Obviously, in the interests of conceptual evolution the two should trade ideas as much as possible, which is part of how 13th Age came to be, but I think it's important that there be those two distinct genres.
Acting does play a part, though. FATE, for instance, has a Fate Point economy, where you can cash in a Fate Point for a little extra narrative control over the scene. So, where normally you'd just shoot at a guy by rolling your Guns skill and he'd roll to defend with Athletics, you could spend a Fate Point and say "hey, there's a crate suspended on a rope above this guy. I shoot that down, but it's too big for him to avoid so he rolls his Endurance to try and survive it."
By that same token, though, the GM can bribe you with Fate Points by compelling your character's Aspects, basically personality traits and background facts you come up with yourself, in order to get you to do stuff that makes your life a little more difficult and exciting. The GM could, for instance, say "hey, your character is Used To Be A Cultist of Shadow, so you think this demon's offer is miiiiiighty tempting," and offer a Fate Point. It can get really fun when the players start getting into it, negotiating Aspects (and what they can and cannot do) on their characters and the Scene, compelling the Aspects of other characters with Fate Points, and compelling themselves so the GM gives them Fate Points.
And yes, any DM in D&D can leave the rules behind and just say "This fight isn't important, you beat the crap out of the mouthy peasant," but the baseline expectation is that all of those combat rules are there to be used.
For example, let's take a dualwielding, high level Fighter in 3rd Edition D&D (or, well, 3.5).
With all Dualwielding feats, he has 7 attacks at level 16 (whoah). An ineffecient player would roll his first attack, then roll the damage for that attack, then roll his second attack, then roll damage for that attack, etc.
Or, he gets a bunch of different coloured d20's, notes down which colour is for which attack and does the same with damage dice (for ease of use, the same colour as the d20 it's connected to). He rolls all dice at the same time and immediately sees which ones hit and how much damage they do. This changes his turn from probably 4-5 minutes to around a single minute.
In that same time, the wizard can plan his spells (and look up its specifics) and the rogue can plan his positioning, getting out the dice he needs.
In my experience, a LOT of time is wasted by people sitting around doing nothing until their turn comes up. Then they suddenly snap back to attention, get their books out and start looking for things they might possibly do. This also saps the patience and attention of other characters, exacerbating the situation. This is system-independent. Get that fixed in your group and it won't really matter what system you're using.
Even with players that knew what they were doing, when initiative got rolled in 3.X or 4e I could count on spending at least the next 30 minutes on that combat.
(It could be much worse, though. I played in a game of Only War where a battle against a group of Orks took three two hour sessions to finally resolve.)
As a player, I calculated ahead of time. My dwarf Braulk Bloodbeard used axes. Every style. So I would have almost every possible combat bonus calculated ahead of time for each and every style. My sheets were many pages, but I moved quickly.
Out core group was awesome but we had a hard time finding new members that didnt piss is off.
I've been a fan of Pathfinder the last several years, but for the first time in a long time I feel like I'm holding a proper D&D product and thinking about how I would build characters with lives, rather than coming up with character concepts and trying to flesh out the details of their history afterward.
I got my 5th edition Player's Handbook from GenCon this year for $50. I usually wouldn't pay more for it than I have to but I got...
Troy Denning: One of the lead designers of the Dark Sun Campaign setting,
Ed Greenwood: Creator of the Forgotten Realms and author of the Elminster novels,
& R. A. Salvator: Author of the Drizzt and Crystal shard books,
to sign my book. Troy and Ed in the inside cover. Salvator next to the pic of Drizzt on the Elf page (pg 21).
When I've played 5e, it feels nice and fast in a way 4e didn't. Advantage/Disadvantage is a great way of getting rid of 90% of the situational modifiers, with mechanics that give you an extra, smaller dice handling the rest. In a three hour session, we blasted through four combats with a fair amount of roleplay and exploration between them.
Anyways, I'm gonna buy the book and use 5e for my annual campaign. It's what 4e SHOULD have looked like. 4e is good in it's own way, just too far of a leap from the much beloved 3.0/3.5.
However, the rest of art is wonderful and I like the gnome drawings. I, however, don't regret my purchase.
It's very tight, elegant. It puts the focus on role-playing your character to form your class choices rather than the opposite way around (which hasn't been the case for a long time, sadly). It seems to take the simplicity of 1st and 2nd editions and throw in a few of the more popular elements of the editions onward. I dunno. I'm just all around impressed. I'm going to be buying my own Player's Handbook soon.
You'll be surprised at how much content is in there for free. It covers all of the mechanical bits, gives you 4 races and 4 classes and some backgrounds. The DM pdf has a decent number of monsters. There's enough in those pdfs to run a game.
I too dislike the halfling art in the PHB. The gnome art seemed OK to me, most of the rest I really liked. The MM has some really nice art and beasties in it too.