Say what you will about the D&D3/d20-era avalanche of games and supplements (the infamous "d20 glut"), but it had some interesting things going on. WotC's own Star Wars, Mongoose's Conan, Monte Cook's Arcana Evolved and Iron Heroes, Privateer Press' original Iron Kingdoms, AEG's original Spycraft, GR's M&M and True20, FFG's Midnight and Dawnforge...
It is entirely possible that there's a thriving third-party 5e scene that I am unaware of, but Adventures in Middle-Earth is the first one that shows up on my radar, and Opaopa's off-hand comment here (http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?35950-5e-UA-Playtest-Artificer&p=941440&viewfull=1#post941440) makes me wistful for the good bits of the d20 age.
What, if anything, would you all like to see done with the 5e ruleset?
I would like to see Classes, Backgrounds, Archetypes, Feats and Spells and general abilities re-balanced against one another with the assumption that we shouldn't lower the "powercurve" to the lowest common denominator, but rather raise the curve upwards. There should be solid point-value templates for every ability and feature and limitation. This way making new versions of these things becomes an orderly process.
This would make 5e more of a toolkit and give GM's and designers a stable platform with which design things without inadvertent power-creep which will happen - but this should happen in sub-system development based on setting conceits.
The same needs to be done for Magic Items - but kept separately and not assumed to be part of class-balance.
That's where I'd start.
The basic stuff that WoTC puts out is great, except that it doesn't have the Feats list, that's all I would do with it. Anything else is gravy.
Quote from: tenbones;941501I would like to see Classes, Backgrounds, Archetypes, Feats and Spells and general abilities re-balanced against one another with the assumption that we shouldn't lower the "powercurve" to the lowest common denominator, but rather raise the curve upwards. There should be solid point-value templates for every ability and feature and limitation. This way making new versions of these things becomes an orderly process.
This would make 5e more of a toolkit and give GM's and designers a stable platform with which design things without inadvertent power-creep which will happen - but this should happen in sub-system development based on setting conceits.
The same needs to be done for Magic Items - but kept separately and not assumed to be part of class-balance.
That's where I'd start.
That's a powerful first step... and a daunting one. Point valuing every power and feature is one of those things I find tempting but rather elusive in practice. But it's never a bad idea to try establishing some baselines.
I would have started with a [Material] Age breakdown tied to both gear tech & magic tech. That way you can have a sense of what Stone Age gear tech and magic tech would be. Then you could decide how to alter those dial powers to different combinations: Space Age w/ nascent psionics = Space Age gear + Stone Age magic w/ psionic skin, Biblical Egypt = Bronze Age + Apocalyptic magic...
Probably just as hard and ambitious to categorize as tenbones. But it works on a macro to micro development with looser relation to micro point valuations. That way weird mash ups have a removed perspective to eyeball assess.
In certain settings fixed point values will become hopelessly skewed due to outlier setting context. Instead of struggling over each last detailed point, worry about the basics of blocking in the major shapes. Sorta like how painting does blocking first, then value, then shading, then textured detail, that would be my looser, less strenuous way to approach SRD development.
It'd also give an open explanation of D&D 5e world conceits, where they see default Forgotten Realms society's gear tech and magic tech currently. That way people can eyeball adjust suites of powers, spells, and features to their own FR taste.
edit: It'd essentially be point valuating in another form, as it would be placing tech on a hierarchical scale, wouldn't it? :) Also you'd have to deconstruct Tech Age value compositional pieces, e.g. Ritual Casting, flexible Prep versus fixed Casting Slots, cantrip frequency, spell focus, spellbooks necessity, etc.
Quote from: tenbones;941501I would like to see Classes, Backgrounds, Archetypes, Feats and Spells and general abilities re-balanced against one another with the assumption that we shouldn't lower the "powercurve" to the lowest common denominator, but rather raise the curve upwards. There should be solid point-value templates for every ability and feature and limitation. This way making new versions of these things becomes an orderly process.
This would make 5e more of a toolkit and give GM's and designers a stable platform with which design things without inadvertent power-creep which will happen - but this should happen in sub-system development based on setting conceits.
The same needs to be done for Magic Items - but kept separately and not assumed to be part of class-balance.
That's where I'd start.
I assume this was done with 4E? (actual question here, not a snipe).
Quote from: cranebump;941981I assume this was done with 4E? (actual question here, not a snipe).
That was the attempt. And If I remember correctly, BDSM D20 also did the same thing with the 3.x classes (And boy did they find out some things, even though they had to eyeball most of the assumptions. Fighters were undercosted and Wizards were way overcosted for the assumed 'balanced' cost.)
I'm assuming BESM, not BDSM. :)
Quote from: Opaopajr;942091I'm assuming BESM, not BDSM. :)
Oh right. I'll correct that, although... Nah, it's too funny. I'm leavin' it. Just next time... Remind me to not post things when sleep deprived.
But yeah, BESM D20. I was looking at the section too.
I'd love to run a 5E Modern style game, so I guess that would be one of my top "wish list" items for the SRD. (Actually, I'd like to run a modern-day urban magic campaign like Dresden Files, so it would be ideal if one could mix spellcasters with modern.)
Quote from: cranebump;941981I assume this was done with 4E? (actual question here, not a snipe).
As Opaojr mentioned it was attempted - but it was poorly done (I'm not a fan of 4e at all).
My stance on what I'd do derives from two modern games that I think have done it right: Fantasycraft and Savage Worlds.
FC is far far far more granular than Savage Worlds - but they both do something that I think is invaluble, they take their mechanic-components for their very different systems and codify them with a value. This may sound "gamey" - but in my experience it has a very different effect than 4e, where all the classes are "samey". When you have these kinds of mechanical in play in balance, it allows you as the GM to fine-tune how you want those mechanics to be be expressed in the game without worrying about going "too far" or worrying that the spellcasters have exceptional powers that put them far out of line of non-casters.
It also has the benefit of allowing you to create your own customized content that tucks perfectly into the system because the values of the abilities are already balanced - even when you want to make them imbalanced for the purposes of "fun" - you'll know exactly how "imbalanced" you've made it.
Fantasycraft has a metric shit-ton of knobs and levers to make your campaign as low/high-powered as you want while keeping the PC's and NPC's in the same general powercurve while not making them samey. Savage Worlds accomplishes the same with their Edges and Advancement mechanics. Neither of these games play like 4e, but they both have a much wider range of scale than your typical D&D game because of their toolkit nature.
5e could get a huge benefit simply by doing the same thing with their component parts. Clearly define them. Clearly attribute values to them. Then let the GM's go wild. As it stands, they define them, then create content that doesn't quite match in value nor expression what those definitions might otherwise be. Feats aren't balanced against one another. Spells aren't balanced against Feats etc.
Dear Fluffy Batter-y Goodness, why do Feats always work like orthopedic shoes at one's Sophomore Prom? They clash with everything you could ever hope to wear, and you're only going to look back at those memories and laugh. Attribute Level Gains sit there, lonely, knowing that there is this butterfly inside that caterpillar... but they only got orthopedic shoes to go out with!
Oh, it's a travesty!
Quote from: Opaopajr;941684That's a powerful first step... and a daunting one. Point valuing every power and feature is one of those things I find tempting but rather elusive in practice. But it's never a bad idea to try establishing some baselines.
This is concisely what I think 5e needs.
Quote from: Opaopajr;941684I would have started with a [Material] Age breakdown tied to both gear tech & magic tech. That way you can have a sense of what Stone Age gear tech and magic tech would be. Then you could decide how to alter those dial powers to different combinations: Space Age w/ nascent psionics = Space Age gear + Stone Age magic w/ psionic skin, Biblical Egypt = Bronze Age + Apocalyptic magic...
Probably just as hard and ambitious to categorize as tenbones. But it works on a macro to micro development with looser relation to micro point valuations. That way weird mash ups have a removed perspective to eyeball assess.
I would LOVE to see all of these things. I think if they addressed the core Class/Background/Archetype/Feat/Spell-balancing mechanics, all of these would be very easy to implement if the design foundation was completed as described.
Quote from: Opaopajr;941684In certain settings fixed point values will become hopelessly skewed due to outlier setting context. Instead of struggling over each last detailed point, worry about the basics of blocking in the major shapes. Sorta like how painting does blocking first, then value, then shading, then textured detail, that would be my looser, less strenuous way to approach SRD development.
It'd also give an open explanation of D&D 5e world conceits, where they see default Forgotten Realms society's gear tech and magic tech currently. That way people can eyeball adjust suites of powers, spells, and features to their own FR taste.
edit: It'd essentially be point valuating in another form, as it would be placing tech on a hierarchical scale, wouldn't it? :) Also you'd have to deconstruct Tech Age value compositional pieces, e.g. Ritual Casting, flexible Prep versus fixed Casting Slots, cantrip frequency, spell focus, spellbooks necessity, etc.
Yes to all of this too. There is a danger in trying to balance things free of context and you can end up with a mish-mash of shit that ruins your implied setting. I think this is exactly the problem D&D faces with its menageries of freakshow races and stuff that have crept into the editions. But if you did it setting by setting - much like Savage Worlds does with its setting-splats, married to a core of mechanics that lets your turn the dials up/down to your desire, then we'd have a much better results in my opinion. I play as granular as I want in SW games. I find that I could get closer results to this in D&D by using 1e or 2e than using 5e.
Contrary to what a lot of supporters/detractors of 5e have said I think there is a really sweet spot that is totally ignored with this new edition. It just happens that I, personally, don't want to put that work in to fix it for the sake of playing D&D. At least not for free. Case in point - I'm running Savage Worlds Forgotten Realms right now and having a blast without having to anything at all.
Quote from: Opaopajr;942139Dear Fluffy Batter-y Goodness, why do Feats always work like orthopedic shoes at one's Sophomore Prom? They clash with everything you could ever hope to wear, and you're only going to look back at those memories and laugh. Attribute Level Gains sit there, lonely, knowing that there is this butterfly inside that caterpillar... but they only got orthopedic shoes to go out with!
Oh, it's a travesty!
Attribute-level gains is another way of threading that needle. I *feel*<-- note that it's a feeling, nothing more, that it would require more work to do this than to do what I'm proposing - but I feel it could accomplish the same thing (edit: technically you could do BOTH. But I'm not convinced there wouldn't be some minor unnecessary redundancies). The primary reason why I feel this is because the abstraction of level-gain is, itself, a redundancy of implied Feat requirement levels. I.e. I think it's a vestigial byproduct that exists only because of Tradition, not unlike Vancian magic. Etc. I concede that it would probably resemble D&D more than what I suggest (because Levels!) but I feel that the "Level" mechanic has taken a bad beating from MMO's.
Levels, in my understanding, have come to represent a progression track that relatively new players have come to see as some kind of denotation to their end-destination of MAX LEVEL CAP!!!! It's lost its original meaning where it was merely a signpost indicator of ones general advancement, where making such advances beyond a certain point was procedural thing. Hence the level-names etc. And beyond 10th you had normalized progression.
I think Attribute Level gains could definitely work. I haven't given it nearly as much thought about it as you, mainly because I've pushed my thinking in the other direction. I'd certainly play the shit out of it, over what we currently have in 5e.
Quote from: tenbones;941501I would like to see Classes, Backgrounds, Archetypes, Feats and Spells and general abilities re-balanced against one another with the assumption that we shouldn't lower the "powercurve" to the lowest common denominator, but rather raise the curve upwards. There should be solid point-value templates for every ability and feature and limitation. This way making new versions of these things becomes an orderly process.
See, I want the other direction, with the power curve lowered. I want a game where when the 3nd level warrior sees 4 orcs he goes "hmm, I'm going to have to think of a way to beat them, because my character doesn't have 20 buttons on his sheet that give me wins."
It's not just I'm a DM and want to screw players, but my players have so many buttons and nozzles and whistles on them that I honestly have no idea if this is the 4th, or 5th, fireball of the day, or the 3rd, or 4th, trip attack, or the 2nd or 3rd sorcery point since the last short rest, or whatever. I'm not saying I worry about cheaters, but that's a lot of crap to keep track of, and honest mistakes get ever easier as the level of complication goes up.
And, of course, a sheet full of buttons to press means the players are too busy looking at all the buttons to even think of trying outside of those buttons.
Quote from: Doom;942156See, I want the other direction, with the power curve lowered. I want a game where when the 3nd level warrior sees 4 orcs he goes "hmm, I'm going to have to think of a way to beat them, because my character doesn't have 20 buttons on his sheet that give me wins."
It's not just I'm a DM and want to screw players, but my players have so many buttons and nozzles and whistles on them that I honestly have no idea if this is the 4th, or 5th, fireball of the day, or the 3rd, or 4th, trip attack, or the 2nd or 3rd sorcery point since the last short rest, or whatever. I'm not saying I worry about cheaters, but that's a lot of crap to keep track of, and honest mistakes get ever easier as the level of complication goes up.
And, of course, a sheet full of buttons to press means the players are too busy looking at all the buttons to even think of trying outside of those buttons.
With what I'm proposing you could do *exactly* that. When I say I want the power-curve to go up, I'm only in speaking in reference to other sub-systems. From a class-based perspective in D&D this means class-to-class. In my proposition it's ability-to-Feat-to-Spell etc.
The idea of what I'm talking about reduces a lot of the assumptions and fiddling a GM might have to do on the backend. I merely point to Savage Worlds as an example. Compared to 5e - it's much more light on mechanics, but offers the GM a lot of control on advancement, power-curve, setting options without having to do any extra "fiddly" stuff. You can put your character on an index-card and it has all the same expressions a standard 5e character does with 1/3rd of the mechanical stuff.
Conversely - Fantasycraft takes the assumptions of 3.x and runs with it (this is the stuff you're wanting to avoid). But it manages to capture the same effect without sacrificing the scalability of the game.
Quote from: Doom;942156See, I want the other direction, with the power curve lowered. I want a game where when the 3nd level warrior sees 4 orcs he goes "hmm, I'm going to have to think of a way to beat them, because my character doesn't have 20 buttons on his sheet that give me wins."
It's not just I'm a DM and want to screw players, but my players have so many buttons and nozzles and whistles on them that I honestly have no idea if this is the 4th, or 5th, fireball of the day, or the 3rd, or 4th, trip attack, or the 2nd or 3rd sorcery point since the last short rest, or whatever. I'm not saying I worry about cheaters, but that's a lot of crap to keep track of, and honest mistakes get ever easier as the level of complication goes up.
And, of course, a sheet full of buttons to press means the players are too busy looking at all the buttons to even think of trying outside of those buttons.
This is me as well. If I want my players to have lots of stuff they can do (I like your term "buttons") I can always ramp up the level of the adventure and of the characters, but when I want low-level I need to be able to run that as well. If characters advance too quickly, I think we lose the fun of lower levels. (An example of this is when in 5E's Adventurer's League you reach 4th level you can spend downtime to catch up and pop up to 5th level. My feeling is: slow it down a little!)
Quote from: tenbones;942154Attribute-level gains is another way of threading that needle. I *feel*<-- note that it's a feeling, nothing more, that it would require more work to do this than to do what I'm proposing - but I feel it could accomplish the same thing (edit: technically you could do BOTH. But I'm not convinced there wouldn't be some minor unnecessary redundancies). The primary reason why I feel this is because the abstraction of level-gain is, itself, a redundancy of implied Feat requirement levels. I.e. I think it's a vestigial byproduct that exists only because of Tradition, not unlike Vancian magic. Etc. I concede that it would probably resemble D&D more than what I suggest (because Levels!) but I feel that the "Level" mechanic has taken a bad beating from MMO's.
Levels, in my understanding, have come to represent a progression track that relatively new players have come to see as some kind of denotation to their end-destination of MAX LEVEL CAP!!!! It's lost its original meaning where it was merely a signpost indicator of ones general advancement, where making such advances beyond a certain point was procedural thing. Hence the level-names etc. And beyond 10th you had normalized progression.
I think Attribute Level gains could definitely work. I haven't given it nearly as much thought about it as you, mainly because I've pushed my thinking in the other direction. I'd certainly play the shit out of it, over what we currently have in 5e.
Oh dear, I think we may be talking in cross purposes... ALGs as in
the levels where you get stat increases -- or a new feat.
Could you run me past what you were thinking about in another way? :)
Quote from: Opaopajr;942237Oh dear, I think we may be talking in cross purposes... ALGs as in the levels where you get stat increases -- or a new feat.
Could you run me past what you were thinking about in another way? :)
Ahh! I thought you meant that you wanted something like Attributes/Abilities rise as you level granting you other sub-system abilities via natural skill or with gear!
In this case - yeah, as written, 5e Attributes and Feats are languishing while they focus on strange and arbitrary class-archetype-background mixing without any apparent definition.
Quote from: cranebump;941981I assume this was done with 4E? (actual question here, not a snipe).
Magic item proliferation, aka the Christmas Tree effect, was enforced and expanded upon in 3rd Edition and carried over to 4th edition. 4th Edition had attempted to "fix" it by introducing inherent bonuses that didn't rely on Magic items (they're build into the advancement of characters instead) in which a game could be played magic-item free or with a greater rarity than before.
Quote from: finarvyn;942102I'd love to run a 5E Modern style game, so I guess that would be one of my top "wish list" items for the SRD. (Actually, I'd like to run a modern-day urban magic campaign like Dresden Files, so it would be ideal if one could mix spellcasters with modern.)
Theres been some tenative work with US articles on recreating Urban Arcana in 5e by adding some notes for modern armour and then refferencing back to the DMG entry and in general just renaming classes so far.
If they ever get that hammered down a little more then things like Urban Arcana and Dark*Matter are possible.