Author Topic: D&D Edition Battle Royal (There Can Be Only One?)  (Read 9291 times)

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archangel.arcanis

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Re: D&D Edition Battle Royal (There Can Be Only One?)
« Reply #20 on: October 25, 2011, 03:57:25 PM »
I am shocked that I still find interesting things to play and new and interesting combos in 3.5 D&D, which I play in a moderately house-ruled gentleman's agreement variety.  It's helped a little bit that I'm with new players, who are still trying stuff out -- my gf started playing her first real wizard character just recently. 

@archangel.arcanis
You may want to check out Wild Talents/Godlike.  I like the system quite a bit, and it's very different from D&D and d20. 

That being said, I have found absolutely no other gaming system where it's as easy to whip up adventures as D&D.  In part, it's a genre thing:  D&D plots are real easy to put together.  But, I think it's really just the big fat monster manuals that I know reasonably well.  In other games, I have to spend the time making NPCs and the like, which is a huge time sink.
This is my biggest complaint about most other systems. As one of the Arcanis devs said they didn't want just a bucket of monsters, well unfortunately that is exactly what I want. I don't want to have to sink in the time to build every single enemy from scratch
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veekie

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Re: D&D Edition Battle Royal (There Can Be Only One?)
« Reply #21 on: October 25, 2011, 05:05:12 PM »
I am shocked that I still find interesting things to play and new and interesting combos in 3.5 D&D, which I play in a moderately house-ruled gentleman's agreement variety.  It's helped a little bit that I'm with new players, who are still trying stuff out -- my gf started playing her first real wizard character just recently. 

@archangel.arcanis
You may want to check out Wild Talents/Godlike.  I like the system quite a bit, and it's very different from D&D and d20. 

That being said, I have found absolutely no other gaming system where it's as easy to whip up adventures as D&D.  In part, it's a genre thing:  D&D plots are real easy to put together.  But, I think it's really just the big fat monster manuals that I know reasonably well. In other games, I have to spend the time making NPCs and the like, which is a huge time sink.
This is my biggest complaint about most other systems. As one of the Arcanis devs said they didn't want just a bucket of monsters, well unfortunately that is exactly what I want. I don't want to have to sink in the time to build every single enemy from scratch
Damned right. Pathfinder was a good sell to me in a large part because the PFRD had a good variety of searchable monsters and variants, I can forgive a lot of inconsistencies with a system if it simply gave me easily modified monster ammo and default fluff to go with the base stats. That it worked like 3.5 was the other big sell.

Systems where you have to forge all your antagonists from scratch alone have a major barrier to entry. Staying entertained as a GM is much harder when you're sinking hours each week just making antagonists who'd last all of half an hour at best.
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[spoiler]
"Just what do you think the moon up in the sky is? Everyone sees that big, round shiny thing and thinks there must be something round up there, right? That's just silly. The truth is much more awesome than that. You can almost never see the real Moon, and its appearance is death to humans. You can only see the Moon when it's reflected in things. And the things it reflects in, like water or glass, can all be broken, right? Since the moon you see in the sky is just being reflected in the heavens, if you tear open the heavens it's easy to break it~"
-Ibuki Suika, on overkill

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Epigenentheto, apoleia keraune hos timeis pteirei.
Hekatonkatis kai khiliakis astrapsato.
Khiliarkhou Astrape!
[/spoiler]

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Unbeliever

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Re: D&D Edition Battle Royal (There Can Be Only One?)
« Reply #22 on: October 25, 2011, 07:18:39 PM »
+1

Sadly, game designers seem to have failed in this regard.  To some extent, it can be a difficulty in doing it with a really broad genre.  M&M runs into this, I think, though they've striven mightily to give you so many NPCs that one of them is bound to work.  But, a lot of times I'll want something particular that fits the mood of my campaign, and it isn't handy.

But, for god's sake, why is this something that game designers fail so hard at?  White Wolf was impossible to run b/c their NPCs were unusable and I had to craft every unique little snowflake my damn self.  Likewise, you'd think systems would just churn out books of bad guys for me to use, or even just templates/archetypes with easy modification systems so that I could whip them up.

Endarire

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Re: D&D Edition Battle Royal (There Can Be Only One?)
« Reply #23 on: October 25, 2011, 10:12:25 PM »
Unbeliever: Perhaps this NPC deficiency is due to wanting NPCs to be GM-built.  Maybe it's NPC envy.
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Speaking of which:
Don't even need TO for this.  Any decent Hood build, especially one with Celerity, one-rounds [Azathoth, the most powerful greater deity from d20 Cthulu].
Does it bug anyone else that we've reached the point where characters who can obliterate a greater deity in one round are considered "decent?"

SneeR

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Re: D&D Edition Battle Royal (There Can Be Only One?)
« Reply #24 on: October 26, 2011, 04:03:57 AM »
Would people prefer it if there were several NPC archetypes that one could pick from and combine together?
The answer to everything:
[spoiler][/spoiler]
SneeR
[spoiler]
I don't know if the designers meant you to take Skill Focus for every feat.
Sounds a little OP.

The monk is clearly the best class, no need to optimize here. What you are doing is overkill.

It's like people who have no idea what a turn signal is. They ruin it for everyone else.
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[/spoiler]

veekie

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Re: D&D Edition Battle Royal (There Can Be Only One?)
« Reply #25 on: October 26, 2011, 06:32:25 AM »
Not me, I want usable, out of the box NPCs, most systems have ways to assemble one, but if your players take an unexpected angle, you want to be able to flip to a particular page and have something ready to use in under 5 minutes.

If I had the time to construct based on archetypes I could just build the things myself.
The mind transcends the body.
It's also a little cold because of that.
Please get it a blanket.

I wish I could read your mind,
I can barely read mine.

"Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. At 2:15, it begins rolling up characters."

[spoiler]
"Just what do you think the moon up in the sky is? Everyone sees that big, round shiny thing and thinks there must be something round up there, right? That's just silly. The truth is much more awesome than that. You can almost never see the real Moon, and its appearance is death to humans. You can only see the Moon when it's reflected in things. And the things it reflects in, like water or glass, can all be broken, right? Since the moon you see in the sky is just being reflected in the heavens, if you tear open the heavens it's easy to break it~"
-Ibuki Suika, on overkill

To sumbolaion diakoneto moi, basilisk ouranionon.
Epigenentheto, apoleia keraune hos timeis pteirei.
Hekatonkatis kai khiliakis astrapsato.
Khiliarkhou Astrape!
[/spoiler]

There is no higher price than 'free'.

"I won't die. I've been ordered not to die."