New page! A little late, but my friends made me play D&D! XO Not sure how I feel about 5th ed. It’s so easy to understand and well designed. Where’s the fun in that?!!! The players are penetrating the bureaucracy!
I’m running a ‘warrior’ (fighter) called Astrid who’s mostly good at absorbing enemy attacks (sword and board Dexy fighter in leather armour). We have an elf ‘Treasure Hunter’ (rogue) who’s our DPS and a ‘Wanderer’ (ranger) whose tougher than the rogue and better at damage than me-so somewhere in the middle.
Zeen seems quite good for throwing-very aerodynamic. He should put that on his CV 🙂
Next update will be the Valentines day pinup. I may use Vaznev. Past characters have been Kazu, Tamauran, Goret and Moroz so Vaznev seems like a good choice (though a suitable suggestion may sway me in another direction). I’m probably going with a ‘warrior of love’ theme again as I enjoy designing skimpy pink armour 😉
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5e strikes me as “3e for idiots.” I’m not saying people are idiots for playing 5e—rather the game’s writers assumed that their audience is too dumb to do simple addition and subtraction, and based their design decisions on that assumption. “Bounded accuracy” just boils down to “math is hard, yo.” So they got rid of those nasty, impossible-to-calculate single-digit modifiers and replaced them with advantage and disadvantage. And somehow didn’t realize what giving players TWO chances to succeed or fail on a roll would do to probability. If their goal was really to reduce randomness, why not eliminate the rolling and have advantage represent an automatic natural 20 and disadvantage represent an automatic natural 1?
Sorry for the negativity… To compensate, here’s how I imagine Kazu’s comment sounding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPE47IpJkY4
Lol-Good call XD
I think 5th ed works pretty well as a system but I prefer Pathfinder 🙂 My group has drunk the Cool-aid unfortunately 😉 Rolling two dice is massive.
I don’t know anything about 5e and I played 3.5e for about 10 years, but a few years ago my group tried out 50 Fathoms (which is based on Savage Worlds) and we currently prefer it to D&D, because there is so much less math and thus the fighting can be done way more quickly and we can focus more on roleplay.
But we Germans also have a lot of fans of what is probably the polar opposite of 50 Fathoms. It’s called DSA (Das Schwarze Auge, meaning The Black Eye) and its so needlessly complex in every regard that it’s a perfect example of our bureaucracy. 🙂 E.g. each ability roll has to be done with 3d20, each of them tries to have a lower number than a certain threshold (depending on circumstances) and you can distribute your ability points any way you want between those three rolls to make each of them easier as needed.
If you want to create a hero for DSA there is an entire software for it and you’re pretty much required to use it, because there are too many talents, abilities and preconditions for each of those.
I actually like Math, but I hate having to remember 1000 rules. Again, I don’t know D&D 5e at all, but I respect Wizards for at least trying to make the game easier. They really should do that with Magic The Gathering, too, instead of stacking up more and more rules each year, plus exceptions to existing rules. The time from 7th to 10th edition was my personal sweet spot between “too simple” and “too complex”.
I heard the original ‘Lord of the Rings’ RPG by ‘Iron Crown Enterprises’ was very complicated-though that could be said of most of the older RPGs. I prefer a balance. 3.5 and Pathfinder are about right. The basic core is very easy to understand but there is a lot of depth.
5th ed is a good game but it’s a bit lacking in options.
There’s a big difference between games that are complex due to lots of rules and options, and games that are complex due to difficult math.
The former category (to which 3.5e belongs) only appears complex to an outsider or beginner, who is daunted by the thickness of the rulebook and doesn’t realize that no RPG requires you to use ALL the rules at once. Most of the time you only need to memorize the most basic rules of combat and the rules that pertain to your own character. The rest can be referenced as they come up in play. A thorough index is helpful in this regard, and over time you’ll find yourself needing it less and less.
As for the latter category, 3.5e’s math should be simple for anyone with an elementary school education. To simplify it any further is unnecessary and ridiculous, but that’s exactly what 5e’s authors have done. It’s downright insulting to see how low an opinion they hold of their audience’s intelligence.
I was mostly overwhelmed with the amount of available spells. At the beginning you have so much crap to choose from and at the end there are so many actual options. And then there are summon spells that let you have a large variety of beasts at your disposal. It’s so dizzying that I mostly chose to play just a tanky fighter. Math was never a problem for me, but there’s no need to feel insulted by easy math. Saying that they must have a low opinion of their audience’s intelligence is kiiiiinda jumping to conclusions. I think they just reacted to feedback of people who switched over to savage worlds and the like. 3.5e is still playable, so maybe they figured they’d want to please as big an audience as they could. Because they’re business people.
I just remembered a friend of mine tried 5e and he mentioned that he liked the change in the level progression curves, because in 3.5e wizards start out too weak and end up too strong, but not anymore in 5e.
Yeah-It’s a good system overall-Just a bit lacking in flexibility. Definitely a better option for people that have less time to play RPGs though-Which I think is a limiting factor to a lot of people. They want to play but time is too tight to get into a more complex rules set like ‘Pathfinder’. Not that Pathfinder takes any longer to run once you’re used to it but the entry requirements are a bit higher as far as spending time learning the rules 🙂
I love Zeen’s face in panel 2.
Also, is this the first time Kazu was ever aroused in the comic?
She kind of fancied Galanesh until he started acting like a dick 🙂
Oh, I completely forgot about him. Maybe I’ll read up on him later.
It was a long time ago now 🙂
Zeen so cute here