I'd say a lot of it is not observable or disprovable, perhaps insightful. Theories such as infinitely expanding and collapsing universe, universes. And various other ideas often taught have serious lacks on disprovability. But there is no issue in teaching or discussing these in class. Be careful with terms like "observable" or "disprovable". We can't observe the creation of the universe, but the Big Bang theory does make testable predictions that we can observe, and thereby infer some level of evidence for it. If we observe a universe that matches the universe we would expect from a Big Bang event (which by and large, I think we have, though I know less about cosmology than about other fields), the theory gains credibility; if we observe a universe that doesn't, then it loses it.
This is where I disagree. First off, I think that hypothesis and tests can be cited for intelligent design. I think statements to the nature of discovery of design patterns across species and various levels is just one good prediction for testing. No worse than Darwin's proposition that transitional forms should exist. Name one. Seriously, the ID creationist movement has been remarkably un-forthcoming about these testable predictions. The closest we've gotten are Behe's "irreducible complexity", which is essentially an argument from personal incredulity, every known instance of which has been debunked, and Dembski's "specified complexity", which is mostly just a hideous misunderstanding of information theory. There's a profound lack of solid, testable claims coming out of ID-c, and that's very telling.
The so-called "design patterns across species" are being explored right now in the very cool field of evo-devo, by the way, and turn out to strongly support our modern understanding of genetics and evolution.
One man mentions "neo-Darwinism" which I've never heard about before. Just for clarity - "neo-Darwinism" (or, more completely, "the neo-Darwinian synthesis") is actually a common term in evolutionary biology. It refers to the field's incorporation of "classical" natural selection with modern theories of genetics, evo-devo (evolutionary developmental biology), cladistics, and similar ideas that make up our current understanding of the means and methods of evolution. In essence, evolution is an observable fact; the neo-Darwinian synthesis is our best theory to account for how it works.
(I'm not a biologist by vocation, but I have a layman's interest in the field and try to keep up on the literature. A lot of it is really fascinating stuff, especially evo-devo.)
Thank you for that smug and yet entirely pointless addition to our shared discourse.
Is there a lot of bad television on? Oh, hells yes. But let's remember Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap, and believe me, I have read some truly *awful* books in my time. Just like there are plenty of good books, there's plenty of good television being made, especially in the last few years. It may not be to your taste, but that doesn't mean it's not well crafted. I don't particularly like procedural dramas, so House holds little interest for me; but it is a really well put-together show, with writing that ranges from good to fantastic (even when the medicine's dodgy).
So spare us the posturing. No one's coming by to take your geek card away just because you get cable.
There are a lot of interesting media happenings going on under the surface, and this strike is one of the more interesting clashes. These are the kinds of dustups that will determine how media production and ownership evolve in the next few decades, and it's definitely worth paying attention to.
I can never quite understand how people think that making a copy of themselves means they personally will live forever. The copy is a separate individual from you and when you die, you are dead. Granted there's now a copy of you running around but that's all it is, a copy. It isn't you.
Think of it in the converse; if someone made a copy of you and the copy died would you be dead?
Scan and download doesn't have to mean copy. Consider the "Moravec transfer" (named for Hans Moravec) - neurons could be replaced one or a few at a time by nanoscale devices that mimic their function. At what percentage of digital neurons have you "died"? I submit the answer is never - you are the same person, complete continuity of consciousness, just as if your arm had been replaced with a prosthetic one. And once your consciousness is operating on digital hardware, there are all kinds of cool things you can do with it.
Now, questions further out than that, like backups, copies, merges, and other kinds of post-upload consciousness manipulation raise other, equally interesting and valid questions. But the upload process itself doesn't have to be destructive. The question of how far we have to go before we can successfully complete a Moravec upload is left as an exercise to the reader.
(I do leave aside the question of dualism, in particular, the existence of a soul, as irrelevant, since I don't believe in them and there's no evidence for them; I similarly leave aside various notions that consciousness can only exist on a biological substrate, since none of the arguments I've seen in favor of that position made any sense.)
The SR4 book is hideously poorly organized: chargen, especially for new players, is an exercise in frustration, as the bits you need are scattered throughout the book, and referencing a rule at the table brings play to a screeching halt as you try to stalk it through the forest of subheaders. The table of contents is at best a vague guide, and the index is a sick joke.
That aside, the core system is the best Shadowrun has ever been. With very few exceptions, it's well-balanced (technomancers are slightly underpowered, and with some system abuse, you can do terrible things with spirits), plays smoothly if everyone knows it, and is generally a tight, fun play experience. Bonus points: it does a much better job of previous editions at avoiding the hacker problem, where everyone goes to get sandwiches while the hacker does his thing.
It does advance the metaplot quite a bit in some controversial ways, but the system's good enough that even if you don't like the new metaplot, I'd buy it to backport the system to your favorite spot in the timeline.
Oh, yeah, fixing 3.X is a crapton of work. I have pages of house-rules, most of them just spot-fixing stupid bullshit, because I don't have the patience to overhaul the whole thing. I think I'm the only human being alive who actually LIKES Vancian magic, though, so I anticipate having to find a balanced way to wedge it back in to 4th.
Bo9S actually gives me a little bit of hope, since far from being broken, I thought it actually went a long way toward making melee fighters competitive with casters, particularly in the 5-16 game (once casters get 9th level spells, all bets are off). There's some stuff in there that's dumb, but nothing I'd describe as broken, except possibly for some extremely dubious interpretations of White Raven Tactics.
Fortunately, I believe there is no "default setting" - the "points of light" is kind of a default mood or theme, not tied to any particular world. Which is great, because I can't stand Eberron. Bring back Planescape, damnit!
First, it's a lot easier to fit rules into an existing setting (whether a published or homebrew one) if they don't come with a flavor of their own. It's up to the GM to decide if the warblade is a martial arts master channeling ki energy, blessed by the sword gods, or simply just that awesome, and that makes it easier to fit the mechanics into whatever setting he likes. Compare that to a lot of the flavor-specific prestige classes, which you often have to twist or re-write entirely to fit into any alternate setting.
Second, IMO, the core of a game should always have the tighest, most solidly constructed rules. And the core of D&D is breaking into a dungeon, killing everything, and taking its stuff home in santa sacks. So it needs a combat engine that facilitates that by being clear, extensible, and balanced. Social interaction and world-building are the jobs of the GM and the players, who can tie it much more closely to their specific game than any corebook that must, by definition, encompass everyone using it.
Third, it's not enough to say the fighter does "non-magical things" as opposed to the "magical things" wizards do. That got us the full-caster vs. sad-panda divide that plagues 3.X. Fighters and other non-caster classes need abilities that let them compete on an even playing field. That means they get to break the laws of physics too - maybe they're not doing it with magic (or maybe they are in some games, but it's a different kind), but it's definitely something a normal person couldn't do. Anyone can swing a sword. A fighter with class levels needs a little more oomph, and some extra BAB just doesn't cut it.
I'm not saying 4th will succeed in all of these (in fact, as I mention elsewhere in the thread, I'm fairly pessimistic). But it's not doomed on the face of it.
Was looking at it from Druid v Fighter point of view - Druids have an annoyingly large number of Reflex save-or-lose, but okay, Rogue levels, fine on Reflex. Granted. Not so great on Will, but there are ways around that.
Why do we care about their base AC? The druid has wild or bestial dragonhide full plate. His AC is just fine. And I probably don't care about their crappy base attack damage, I care a lot more about their ability to frontload a charge, grapple an enemy caster, or just flat-out avoid attacks, which many wild shape forms do just handily, and the druid gets to pick freely between them. (Oh, sure, limits on wildshape per day, except for the ways around that.)
Druids have plenty of save-or-lose spells, and surprisingly good damage spells (though it's the former you care about), and Natural Spell means no trouble with components as they're unloading from altitude. Oops, sorry Mr. Melee Closet Troll, you didn't bring a ranged attack to the party - there are more ways past the fighter than there are ways to get into the air.
And we're still talking about wild shape. The druid still has the animal companion, which is like having an extra fighter in your back pocket only this one is actually good at stuff, and is still a full caster on top of that, which means he gets access to the real Velveeta like shapechange. Oh, and they can spontaneously convert to summoning spells, which is pretty much Bonus Round! at this point.
The best part is that except for Natural Spell, we haven't even spent a single feat. The druid only gets better from there.
That's the druid's advantage. He's incredibly flexible out of the box, reasonably good at practically everything, and still has room to specialize. Sure, a really dedicated, purpose-built character can edge him out in one thing, but the druid can turn around and pull yet another trick out of his hat.
That quote on magic items substantialy pre-dates this design article. And that article does NOT fill me with hope, for reasons I addressed elsewhere in this thread.
Good for them for trying to address these points, and best of luck, but more important will be succeeding. I don't think they will, given the poor playtesting and general lack of well-tuned mechanics that have marked 3.5, but time will tell.
Look, when people see "Cure Light Wounds" on your spell list, they're going to think "oh, you're the healer" and go off and roll fighter, wizard, and rogue or whatever. Sorry. That's just how it works. Nobody else is going to step up with the heals, because they're all assuming you're going to do it.
So, you're going to be the healer.
Well, tell them to cut that out. Say "hey, going druid here because they rock on toast, you want the heals, play a cleric or buy some potions". Abilities are things you can do, not things you have to, and any sane group will acknowledge that and work with each other to put together a capable party
Maybe your DM is doing it wrong, but Wild Shape limits you to animals, plants, and elementals. The creatures you're talking about are, at best, magical beasts. Strength 30? What animal of Large or smaller size are you talking about? You don't get Huge Wild Shape until level 15 and by then the fighter has Str of 30 just from magic items.
Dire Tiger, Large Animal, Strength 27, good grapple and charge. Rhinoceros, Large Animal, Strength 26, fantastic charge. Shambling Mound, Large Plant, Strength 21, fantastic grapple. I'm not even reaching there, those are core SRD monsters that are not particularly hard to come up with.
Okay, 30 was a bit of hyperbole, but if it takes you to level 15 to hit it, who cares? The fighter has Strength 30 too, but you have that, spells, animal companion, and oh yeah, other wild shapes. The fighter hits things until they fall over. Woo.
Flight isn't that great except for loser DM's who think that a huge chasm with no bridge constitutes the height of dungeoneering, and the rest of those are hardly game-breaking abilities.
Or you're fighting any of the boatloads of monsters that can't do dick against a flying opponent, particularly at the low levels. Grapple is THE way to take out spellcasters all the way until they have Freedom of Motion, and charge/pounce is excellent frontloaded damage at low levels.
At high levels, you have high level spells, and can do pretty much whatever the hell you want.
Yeah, you're right! I mean, he only shines against creatures that have legs, after all; for everybody else he's two-handed Power Attacking several times per round and making a bazillion attacks of opportunity. Compared to 1d6+3 bite damage, or whatever? I'm still not impressed. But maybe I just don't get it. Does anybody really own with druids playing the game? Because otherwise it's pretty much only theoretical ownage.
Oh no, he's doing hit point damage with his sword. Too bad he failed a Reflex save and is suddenly out of combat. Want to guess how many save-or-dies the druid can throw? Can he fly? The druid can, and if you spot the fighter a magic item to get into the air, you spot the druid the same GP worth of extra advantage, and flying items ain't cheap.
At low levels, the druid competes on HP damage and has WAY more flexibility. At high levels, the fighter is the world's saddest muppet because he's not on the full-caster train, and the druid is out front will full-casting, free awesome shapeshifting, and an animal companion that can probably beat up the fighter.
I have played most of the core classes in different games, and many of the non-core classes, and although I like playing wizards MORE, druids are hands-down the most dangerous, with clerics only a bit behind.
Addendum: I have no complaints about this, the GM wears the viking hat and his rule is the rule of the table. But please, please, please tell your players when the game starts that this is the intention.
As someone who has played and run both no-powergaming, story-centric games with frequent dice-fudging, and twinked-to-hell, whatever you can get away with games where the dice are LAW, very little breeds more ill will at the table then expecting one kind of game and getting another.
1 - Flexibility and improvisation. No MMO can adapt to unexpected character choices as well as even a novice GM can, which lets you come up with different approaches to problems.
2 - Lower aggregate moron level. With a good group, you can do your thing without ever dealing with the legions of subliterate idiots who seem determined to bring the level of practically every MMO down. Instancing helps with this, granted, but it's not a panacea. I'd say bonus: no guild drama, but there's table drama, oh yes there is.
3 - It *can* run smoothly. Even D&D 3.5, for all its fits and starts, unclear rules, and stuff that just makes no damn sense, can run smoothly. Everyone involved has to know it pretty well, but that's no different from learning a new, for example, raid encounter.
4 - You're not obliged to buy every book that comes out. Some people do. Some people just buy the core books and have a good time with just that. The meat of the game is what the GM and players come up with; more books are just more inspiration.
There are things MMOs do that tabletop games don't. They make the engine transparent, and handle the math for you. But you can never check out "Here there be dragons" or deal with the giant by dropping a cliff on him instead of having to tank his blows, off-tank his adds, and burn him down with DoTs and nukes. Neither is a perfect hobby, but both bring things to the table, and I think it's a mistake to shrug off what tabletop RPGs can do with "WoW does it better".
If the druid is the party healer, he's failing. If the party healer is healing in combat, he's probably failing. If the party healer is healing the fighter in combat, they're both failing.
Wild Shape is so stupidly great, it makes me cry real tears when I play other classes. Okay, it takes a feat slot to cast while wildshaped. Big whoop, every druid ever born takes that feat because it's a ticket to winsville. Wild shape is the privilege, the right, indeed, the DUTY to dumpster-dive through every Monster Manual you have on hand and find the winning form for whatever you want to do right now. Need to charge? Need to pounce? Need to grapple? Need to fly WAY before everyone else in the game can? You can do that.
Bad AC? Get an armor buff, or hell, get wild or bestial armor, they're not that expensive.
You're not casting Bull's Strength or Bear's Endurance on yourself, because you're wildshaped into something with a Strength of 30, and you're not casting it on the fighter because you're too busy eating someone's face off. Sure, if you're determined to poke someone with a spear, you're not going to do that very well, but "the most damaging weapon you can wield" is teeth the size of railroad spikes.
Not even getting started on their spell list, which is good in core and insanely great with Spell Compendium.
The tripmaster fighter is, like practically every fighter, a one-trick pony. The druid is the class in the corner singing "Anything you can do, I can do better".
Here's the thing: even at 3 "primary slots", I think that's too many. The idea that you need to keep upgrading your Sword/Staff/Rod/Pony of Foo means that gold still buys power. Ideally, I'd rather they do this: "If you're ninth-level, whatever armor you're wearing is +2 armor, because you're just that awesome". Then dragons can go back to having enough shiny gold dubloons to sleep comfortably on without the GM having to worry that the players will use that gold to buy themselves into victory. I mean, look at the neck slot? Sure it's one slot, but now "An item in the neck slot increases your Fortitude, Reflex, and Will defenses, as well as usually doing something else snappy." - that used to be three or four slots, consolidated into one, and it's heavily implied that's four slots worth of win on a single item. That's one step forward, and four back.
Their approach to secondary slots is similarly terrible. Either the items provide a meaningful benefit, in which case everyone will need them and you're buying power with gold again, or they provide no meaningful benefit, in which case, why bother with slots or balancing them at all? They're by-definition not important enough to matter, and are at best a convenience.
C'mon: "These items don't have enhancement bonuses. That makes them essentially optional."? That's on-face wrong and stupid. Check out Magic Item Compendium items like the Belt of Battle (which may appear in that very article, though we have no way of knowing if it does the same thing) - more standard actions? Sign me the hell up. The Candle of Invocation is a core (DMG) one-use disposable item with no stat enhancement, and is the single most broken piece of equipment in the game.
You can have a game about hardcore dudes who are awesome with whatever they have, or you can have a game about regular schmucks who are awesome because they have totally sweet magic pants. Trying to go both ways is doomed.
The stacking bonuses problem is separate from the magic items problem, and they have to solve both of them. Even if they're making a start on the former (which I'm not convinced they are), they have a long way to go on the latter.
I really hope you're right. The item slot article I saw, though, was very disappointing. I think they removed something like two slots, but it's pretty clear the implicit assumption continues to be "want to compete at your level? You NEED the following shinies, or you lose and fail and die". I haven't seen any clear sign of moving towards clarity. Someone coming out and saying "alright, there is ONE bonus type, it does not stack, and that means no more +80 to bluff checks because you've got a Cloak of Swank, a pimped-out Marshal, a wand of glibness, and two bags of unicorn bits" would go a long way towards demonstrating it.
Similarly, they've stated that Tome of Battle (Book of Nine Swords) and Star Wars Saga Edition were testbeds for some 4th ed ideas, and that concerns me. Book of Nine Swords was a desperately needed boost to melee classes, but still suffered from a lot of design issues, like lackluster Strikes that were never worth giving up a full attack for; Saga Edition did skills about as well as I've ever seen D&D do them, but the talent trees were deeply underwhelming.
As for playtesting, from what I've read, they're pretty much only tracking class balance by damage output. This is pointless and stupid, since battlefield control and save-or-lose effects have a MUCH higher impact on the fight and are being completely glossed over.
I could be wrong. I hope I'm wrong. But after almost ten years of idiotic design decisions from Wizards, I'm far from optimistic.
Uh... no. Paladins are competent, with a few useful abilities and a lot of bad ones. You can make them good, but it takes a lot of effort to get there. Their spellcasting has a few gems, but is overall lackluster, and the only thing their turning attempts are good for is burning for Divine feats.
Clerics and Druids, hands down, are the "most powerful" core classes, with probably an edge to druids, because making a good one requires almost no effort.
Overall, it's a reasonably good review that is, in my view, overly optimistic about how 4th ed will turn out. He's definitely right about combats: "3.5 fights tend to be either bloodbaths or total routs, with little room in-between for contesting the outcome." is exactly how a lot of fights turn out, particularly when players discover the joys of Save-or-Die. Part of the problem with the "four encounters per day" balance idea was that the fourth was the only one that was actually challenging, because it's the only time the players would be getting low on resources.
1: The keywords here are "simple" and "straightforward". The current grapple rules are painful, many conditions make no sense (can a construct be nauseated? the answer may surprise you), and what exactly does polymorph do these days? You don't know. No one knows. It's been errata'd like eight times. If a rule takes longer than two or three sentences to explain, people have already stopped caring.
2: Fix stacking and inherited bonuses. The days of sixteen different kinds of bonus all adding up to push a character WAY off the random number generator have to end; at the same time, feats that provide an advantage so small you frequently forget about it also must end. Feats and abilities need to provide meaningful options without turning rolls into "no lose" situations.
3: Get rid of gold = power. The 3.5 conceit of assuming characters of level X would have Y gp worth of Magical Stuff ruined a lot of flavor and a lot of system. Let the GM handle the distribution of magic items, and let the PCs spend their gold the way it was intended: on ale and whores.
4: Fix the phrase "level appropriate ability" firmly in mind. At every level, every character should gain new abilities appropriate to that level. Every one. It's WAY too easy in 3.5 to fall off the level appropriate ability train for life.
5: Want to playtest? Recruit the twinkiest, most outrageous powergamers you can find. They're the ones that spot inane bullshit like Balor mining, chain-binding djinni, and the truly stupid amount of awesome that 3.5 clerics and druids bring to the table.
Since based on what I've heard so far, not one of these is actually happening (with the possible exception of #1), I am not optimistic.
Yea, I'll miss G'Kar, but at least JMS has said that he just won't tell any stories with him; if they tried to do one with someone other then Katsulas, I would be deeply unthrilled.
First off, even if we never find life out there, the mere existance of SETI@home helped get the idea of massively distributed computing out there as a viable option.
Second, I don't think anyone is claiming that radio waves are a viable method of intersteller communication (frankly, all the options there suck, barring the discovery of handwavium or similar magic-tech).
The point isn't to find a race out there to chat with. The point is to find evidence that, at some point in the past, *someone* out there emitted radio signals. Are they still around? Can we call them up and discuss deep, philosophical questions? Maybe, and probably not. But proving that intelligent life exists or existed off Earth, even if it went extinct long ago by our reckoning, is a worthy enough project, in my less-than-humble opinion.
In order to do that, every jurist is required to vote guilty only when they have absolutely no doubts that you did it. If they have any doubt at all, they are required to vote innocent.
Not actually true. IANAL, but as I recall it, the burden of proof in a criminal case is "beyond a reasonable doubt", not "beyond any doubt". Cases have been won or lost on the strength of circumstantial evidence, although direct evidence is, of course, considered good.
Incidentally, I seem to recall civil cases (like copyright infringement) having a lower burden of proof referred to as "preponderance of the evidence".
Actually, I think the examples you cite imply exactly the opposite conclusion, that some sort of event horizen will come eventually. Consider the time between Neanderthal man and the Egyptian civilization, the time between the Egyptians and Gutenburg, etc.
Technological advance is accelerating, and will probably continue to do so, barring unforseen disaster or unknown physical restrictions.
James.
Not bad, but no Vernor Vinge
on
Altered Carbon
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· Score: 1
It wasn't a terrible book. Actually, it was quite readable, and had some very interesting ideas. Unfortunately, it suffered from some severe issues. The major problem I had with it was the graphic sexual explicitness - the book verges on pornography at times, and most of these seemed extremely vulger and gratuitous.
It also seemed very unpolished, somewhat like John C. Wright's The Golden Age, which came out last year in the same genre (trans-human sf). Both have interesting ideas, but both are clearly very rough. Compare them to the seminal work of the genre, Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep, and the differences are profound.
Read Wheel of Time up through book 3, then stop - that's Jordan's best work, and going any further commits you to a morass of slow and tedious writing.
But Goodkind? Ick - not only is his plot cliched and his prose stilted, but calling his characters two-dimensional is to insult the fine polygons of Flatland, and his world is populated by people so mind-numbingly idiotic that they take seriously a villain who wants to outlaw fire.
Slashdot Mirror
The so-called "design patterns across species" are being explored right now in the very cool field of evo-devo, by the way, and turn out to strongly support our modern understanding of genetics and evolution.
(I'm not a biologist by vocation, but I have a layman's interest in the field and try to keep up on the literature. A lot of it is really fascinating stuff, especially evo-devo.)
Thank you for that smug and yet entirely pointless addition to our shared discourse.
Is there a lot of bad television on? Oh, hells yes. But let's remember Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap, and believe me, I have read some truly *awful* books in my time. Just like there are plenty of good books, there's plenty of good television being made, especially in the last few years. It may not be to your taste, but that doesn't mean it's not well crafted. I don't particularly like procedural dramas, so House holds little interest for me; but it is a really well put-together show, with writing that ranges from good to fantastic (even when the medicine's dodgy).
So spare us the posturing. No one's coming by to take your geek card away just because you get cable.
There are a lot of interesting media happenings going on under the surface, and this strike is one of the more interesting clashes. These are the kinds of dustups that will determine how media production and ownership evolve in the next few decades, and it's definitely worth paying attention to.
I can never quite understand how people think that making a copy of themselves means they personally will live forever. The copy is a separate individual from you and when you die, you are dead. Granted there's now a copy of you running around but that's all it is, a copy. It isn't you.
Think of it in the converse; if someone made a copy of you and the copy died would you be dead?
Scan and download doesn't have to mean copy. Consider the "Moravec transfer" (named for Hans Moravec) - neurons could be replaced one or a few at a time by nanoscale devices that mimic their function. At what percentage of digital neurons have you "died"? I submit the answer is never - you are the same person, complete continuity of consciousness, just as if your arm had been replaced with a prosthetic one. And once your consciousness is operating on digital hardware, there are all kinds of cool things you can do with it.
Now, questions further out than that, like backups, copies, merges, and other kinds of post-upload consciousness manipulation raise other, equally interesting and valid questions. But the upload process itself doesn't have to be destructive. The question of how far we have to go before we can successfully complete a Moravec upload is left as an exercise to the reader.
(I do leave aside the question of dualism, in particular, the existence of a soul, as irrelevant, since I don't believe in them and there's no evidence for them; I similarly leave aside various notions that consciousness can only exist on a biological substrate, since none of the arguments I've seen in favor of that position made any sense.)
The SR4 book is hideously poorly organized: chargen, especially for new players, is an exercise in frustration, as the bits you need are scattered throughout the book, and referencing a rule at the table brings play to a screeching halt as you try to stalk it through the forest of subheaders. The table of contents is at best a vague guide, and the index is a sick joke.
That aside, the core system is the best Shadowrun has ever been. With very few exceptions, it's well-balanced (technomancers are slightly underpowered, and with some system abuse, you can do terrible things with spirits), plays smoothly if everyone knows it, and is generally a tight, fun play experience. Bonus points: it does a much better job of previous editions at avoiding the hacker problem, where everyone goes to get sandwiches while the hacker does his thing.
It does advance the metaplot quite a bit in some controversial ways, but the system's good enough that even if you don't like the new metaplot, I'd buy it to backport the system to your favorite spot in the timeline.
Oh, yeah, fixing 3.X is a crapton of work. I have pages of house-rules, most of them just spot-fixing stupid bullshit, because I don't have the patience to overhaul the whole thing. I think I'm the only human being alive who actually LIKES Vancian magic, though, so I anticipate having to find a balanced way to wedge it back in to 4th.
Bo9S actually gives me a little bit of hope, since far from being broken, I thought it actually went a long way toward making melee fighters competitive with casters, particularly in the 5-16 game (once casters get 9th level spells, all bets are off). There's some stuff in there that's dumb, but nothing I'd describe as broken, except possibly for some extremely dubious interpretations of White Raven Tactics.
Fortunately, I believe there is no "default setting" - the "points of light" is kind of a default mood or theme, not tied to any particular world. Which is great, because I can't stand Eberron. Bring back Planescape, damnit!
Different strokes and all, but a few thoughts.
First, it's a lot easier to fit rules into an existing setting (whether a published or homebrew one) if they don't come with a flavor of their own. It's up to the GM to decide if the warblade is a martial arts master channeling ki energy, blessed by the sword gods, or simply just that awesome, and that makes it easier to fit the mechanics into whatever setting he likes. Compare that to a lot of the flavor-specific prestige classes, which you often have to twist or re-write entirely to fit into any alternate setting.
Second, IMO, the core of a game should always have the tighest, most solidly constructed rules. And the core of D&D is breaking into a dungeon, killing everything, and taking its stuff home in santa sacks. So it needs a combat engine that facilitates that by being clear, extensible, and balanced. Social interaction and world-building are the jobs of the GM and the players, who can tie it much more closely to their specific game than any corebook that must, by definition, encompass everyone using it.
Third, it's not enough to say the fighter does "non-magical things" as opposed to the "magical things" wizards do. That got us the full-caster vs. sad-panda divide that plagues 3.X. Fighters and other non-caster classes need abilities that let them compete on an even playing field. That means they get to break the laws of physics too - maybe they're not doing it with magic (or maybe they are in some games, but it's a different kind), but it's definitely something a normal person couldn't do. Anyone can swing a sword. A fighter with class levels needs a little more oomph, and some extra BAB just doesn't cut it.
I'm not saying 4th will succeed in all of these (in fact, as I mention elsewhere in the thread, I'm fairly pessimistic). But it's not doomed on the face of it.
Was looking at it from Druid v Fighter point of view - Druids have an annoyingly large number of Reflex save-or-lose, but okay, Rogue levels, fine on Reflex. Granted. Not so great on Will, but there are ways around that.
Why do we care about their base AC? The druid has wild or bestial dragonhide full plate. His AC is just fine. And I probably don't care about their crappy base attack damage, I care a lot more about their ability to frontload a charge, grapple an enemy caster, or just flat-out avoid attacks, which many wild shape forms do just handily, and the druid gets to pick freely between them. (Oh, sure, limits on wildshape per day, except for the ways around that.)
Druids have plenty of save-or-lose spells, and surprisingly good damage spells (though it's the former you care about), and Natural Spell means no trouble with components as they're unloading from altitude. Oops, sorry Mr. Melee Closet Troll, you didn't bring a ranged attack to the party - there are more ways past the fighter than there are ways to get into the air.
And we're still talking about wild shape. The druid still has the animal companion, which is like having an extra fighter in your back pocket only this one is actually good at stuff, and is still a full caster on top of that, which means he gets access to the real Velveeta like shapechange. Oh, and they can spontaneously convert to summoning spells, which is pretty much Bonus Round! at this point.
The best part is that except for Natural Spell, we haven't even spent a single feat. The druid only gets better from there.
That's the druid's advantage. He's incredibly flexible out of the box, reasonably good at practically everything, and still has room to specialize. Sure, a really dedicated, purpose-built character can edge him out in one thing, but the druid can turn around and pull yet another trick out of his hat.
That quote on magic items substantialy pre-dates this design article. And that article does NOT fill me with hope, for reasons I addressed elsewhere in this thread.
Good for them for trying to address these points, and best of luck, but more important will be succeeding. I don't think they will, given the poor playtesting and general lack of well-tuned mechanics that have marked 3.5, but time will tell.
Look, when people see "Cure Light Wounds" on your spell list, they're going to think "oh, you're the healer" and go off and roll fighter, wizard, and rogue or whatever. Sorry. That's just how it works. Nobody else is going to step up with the heals, because they're all assuming you're going to do it.
So, you're going to be the healer.
Well, tell them to cut that out. Say "hey, going druid here because they rock on toast, you want the heals, play a cleric or buy some potions". Abilities are things you can do, not things you have to, and any sane group will acknowledge that and work with each other to put together a capable party
Maybe your DM is doing it wrong, but Wild Shape limits you to animals, plants, and elementals. The creatures you're talking about are, at best, magical beasts. Strength 30? What animal of Large or smaller size are you talking about? You don't get Huge Wild Shape until level 15 and by then the fighter has Str of 30 just from magic items.
Dire Tiger, Large Animal, Strength 27, good grapple and charge. Rhinoceros, Large Animal, Strength 26, fantastic charge. Shambling Mound, Large Plant, Strength 21, fantastic grapple. I'm not even reaching there, those are core SRD monsters that are not particularly hard to come up with.
Okay, 30 was a bit of hyperbole, but if it takes you to level 15 to hit it, who cares? The fighter has Strength 30 too, but you have that, spells, animal companion, and oh yeah, other wild shapes. The fighter hits things until they fall over. Woo.
Flight isn't that great except for loser DM's who think that a huge chasm with no bridge constitutes the height of dungeoneering, and the rest of those are hardly game-breaking abilities.
Or you're fighting any of the boatloads of monsters that can't do dick against a flying opponent, particularly at the low levels. Grapple is THE way to take out spellcasters all the way until they have Freedom of Motion, and charge/pounce is excellent frontloaded damage at low levels.
At high levels, you have high level spells, and can do pretty much whatever the hell you want.
Yeah, you're right! I mean, he only shines against creatures that have legs, after all; for everybody else he's two-handed Power Attacking several times per round and making a bazillion attacks of opportunity. Compared to 1d6+3 bite damage, or whatever? I'm still not impressed. But maybe I just don't get it. Does anybody really own with druids playing the game? Because otherwise it's pretty much only theoretical ownage.
Oh no, he's doing hit point damage with his sword. Too bad he failed a Reflex save and is suddenly out of combat. Want to guess how many save-or-dies the druid can throw? Can he fly? The druid can, and if you spot the fighter a magic item to get into the air, you spot the druid the same GP worth of extra advantage, and flying items ain't cheap.
At low levels, the druid competes on HP damage and has WAY more flexibility. At high levels, the fighter is the world's saddest muppet because he's not on the full-caster train, and the druid is out front will full-casting, free awesome shapeshifting, and an animal companion that can probably beat up the fighter.
I have played most of the core classes in different games, and many of the non-core classes, and although I like playing wizards MORE, druids are hands-down the most dangerous, with clerics only a bit behind.
Addendum: I have no complaints about this, the GM wears the viking hat and his rule is the rule of the table. But please, please, please tell your players when the game starts that this is the intention.
As someone who has played and run both no-powergaming, story-centric games with frequent dice-fudging, and twinked-to-hell, whatever you can get away with games where the dice are LAW, very little breeds more ill will at the table then expecting one kind of game and getting another.
Couple of reasons:
1 - Flexibility and improvisation. No MMO can adapt to unexpected character choices as well as even a novice GM can, which lets you come up with different approaches to problems.
2 - Lower aggregate moron level. With a good group, you can do your thing without ever dealing with the legions of subliterate idiots who seem determined to bring the level of practically every MMO down. Instancing helps with this, granted, but it's not a panacea. I'd say bonus: no guild drama, but there's table drama, oh yes there is.
3 - It *can* run smoothly. Even D&D 3.5, for all its fits and starts, unclear rules, and stuff that just makes no damn sense, can run smoothly. Everyone involved has to know it pretty well, but that's no different from learning a new, for example, raid encounter.
4 - You're not obliged to buy every book that comes out. Some people do. Some people just buy the core books and have a good time with just that. The meat of the game is what the GM and players come up with; more books are just more inspiration.
There are things MMOs do that tabletop games don't. They make the engine transparent, and handle the math for you. But you can never check out "Here there be dragons" or deal with the giant by dropping a cliff on him instead of having to tank his blows, off-tank his adds, and burn him down with DoTs and nukes. Neither is a perfect hobby, but both bring things to the table, and I think it's a mistake to shrug off what tabletop RPGs can do with "WoW does it better".
If the druid is the party healer, he's failing. If the party healer is healing in combat, he's probably failing. If the party healer is healing the fighter in combat, they're both failing.
Wild Shape is so stupidly great, it makes me cry real tears when I play other classes. Okay, it takes a feat slot to cast while wildshaped. Big whoop, every druid ever born takes that feat because it's a ticket to winsville. Wild shape is the privilege, the right, indeed, the DUTY to dumpster-dive through every Monster Manual you have on hand and find the winning form for whatever you want to do right now. Need to charge? Need to pounce? Need to grapple? Need to fly WAY before everyone else in the game can? You can do that.
Bad AC? Get an armor buff, or hell, get wild or bestial armor, they're not that expensive.
You're not casting Bull's Strength or Bear's Endurance on yourself, because you're wildshaped into something with a Strength of 30, and you're not casting it on the fighter because you're too busy eating someone's face off. Sure, if you're determined to poke someone with a spear, you're not going to do that very well, but "the most damaging weapon you can wield" is teeth the size of railroad spikes.
Not even getting started on their spell list, which is good in core and insanely great with Spell Compendium.
The tripmaster fighter is, like practically every fighter, a one-trick pony. The druid is the class in the corner singing "Anything you can do, I can do better".
Here's the thing: even at 3 "primary slots", I think that's too many. The idea that you need to keep upgrading your Sword/Staff/Rod/Pony of Foo means that gold still buys power. Ideally, I'd rather they do this: "If you're ninth-level, whatever armor you're wearing is +2 armor, because you're just that awesome". Then dragons can go back to having enough shiny gold dubloons to sleep comfortably on without the GM having to worry that the players will use that gold to buy themselves into victory. I mean, look at the neck slot? Sure it's one slot, but now "An item in the neck slot increases your Fortitude, Reflex, and Will defenses, as well as usually doing something else snappy." - that used to be three or four slots, consolidated into one, and it's heavily implied that's four slots worth of win on a single item. That's one step forward, and four back.
Their approach to secondary slots is similarly terrible. Either the items provide a meaningful benefit, in which case everyone will need them and you're buying power with gold again, or they provide no meaningful benefit, in which case, why bother with slots or balancing them at all? They're by-definition not important enough to matter, and are at best a convenience.
C'mon: "These items don't have enhancement bonuses. That makes them essentially optional."? That's on-face wrong and stupid. Check out Magic Item Compendium items like the Belt of Battle (which may appear in that very article, though we have no way of knowing if it does the same thing) - more standard actions? Sign me the hell up. The Candle of Invocation is a core (DMG) one-use disposable item with no stat enhancement, and is the single most broken piece of equipment in the game.
You can have a game about hardcore dudes who are awesome with whatever they have, or you can have a game about regular schmucks who are awesome because they have totally sweet magic pants. Trying to go both ways is doomed.
The stacking bonuses problem is separate from the magic items problem, and they have to solve both of them. Even if they're making a start on the former (which I'm not convinced they are), they have a long way to go on the latter.
I really hope you're right. The item slot article I saw, though, was very disappointing. I think they removed something like two slots, but it's pretty clear the implicit assumption continues to be "want to compete at your level? You NEED the following shinies, or you lose and fail and die". I haven't seen any clear sign of moving towards clarity. Someone coming out and saying "alright, there is ONE bonus type, it does not stack, and that means no more +80 to bluff checks because you've got a Cloak of Swank, a pimped-out Marshal, a wand of glibness, and two bags of unicorn bits" would go a long way towards demonstrating it.
Similarly, they've stated that Tome of Battle (Book of Nine Swords) and Star Wars Saga Edition were testbeds for some 4th ed ideas, and that concerns me. Book of Nine Swords was a desperately needed boost to melee classes, but still suffered from a lot of design issues, like lackluster Strikes that were never worth giving up a full attack for; Saga Edition did skills about as well as I've ever seen D&D do them, but the talent trees were deeply underwhelming.
As for playtesting, from what I've read, they're pretty much only tracking class balance by damage output. This is pointless and stupid, since battlefield control and save-or-lose effects have a MUCH higher impact on the fight and are being completely glossed over.
I could be wrong. I hope I'm wrong. But after almost ten years of idiotic design decisions from Wizards, I'm far from optimistic.
Uh... no. Paladins are competent, with a few useful abilities and a lot of bad ones. You can make them good, but it takes a lot of effort to get there. Their spellcasting has a few gems, but is overall lackluster, and the only thing their turning attempts are good for is burning for Divine feats.
Clerics and Druids, hands down, are the "most powerful" core classes, with probably an edge to druids, because making a good one requires almost no effort.
Overall, it's a reasonably good review that is, in my view, overly optimistic about how 4th ed will turn out. He's definitely right about combats: "3.5 fights tend to be either bloodbaths or total routs, with little room in-between for contesting the outcome." is exactly how a lot of fights turn out, particularly when players discover the joys of Save-or-Die. Part of the problem with the "four encounters per day" balance idea was that the fourth was the only one that was actually challenging, because it's the only time the players would be getting low on resources.
Want D&D to run smoothly again?
1: The keywords here are "simple" and "straightforward". The current grapple rules are painful, many conditions make no sense (can a construct be nauseated? the answer may surprise you), and what exactly does polymorph do these days? You don't know. No one knows. It's been errata'd like eight times. If a rule takes longer than two or three sentences to explain, people have already stopped caring.
2: Fix stacking and inherited bonuses. The days of sixteen different kinds of bonus all adding up to push a character WAY off the random number generator have to end; at the same time, feats that provide an advantage so small you frequently forget about it also must end. Feats and abilities need to provide meaningful options without turning rolls into "no lose" situations.
3: Get rid of gold = power. The 3.5 conceit of assuming characters of level X would have Y gp worth of Magical Stuff ruined a lot of flavor and a lot of system. Let the GM handle the distribution of magic items, and let the PCs spend their gold the way it was intended: on ale and whores.
4: Fix the phrase "level appropriate ability" firmly in mind. At every level, every character should gain new abilities appropriate to that level. Every one. It's WAY too easy in 3.5 to fall off the level appropriate ability train for life.
5: Want to playtest? Recruit the twinkiest, most outrageous powergamers you can find. They're the ones that spot inane bullshit like Balor mining, chain-binding djinni, and the truly stupid amount of awesome that 3.5 clerics and druids bring to the table.
Since based on what I've heard so far, not one of these is actually happening (with the possible exception of #1), I am not optimistic.
Yea, I'll miss G'Kar, but at least JMS has said that he just won't tell any stories with him; if they tried to do one with someone other then Katsulas, I would be deeply unthrilled.
Well, I'm running XP Pro, so that's sure as hell not it.
I checked, I'm showing the last time I used Windows Update was the 10th. Was the patch out that far back?
James.
Okay, I've read about three emails so far, plus this article, about this new security hole. So of course, I go to download the patch.
And there is no patch. Headed to http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com, hit Scan for Updates.... nothing shows under Critical Updates.
Anyone know what's up with this?
James.
First off, even if we never find life out there, the mere existance of SETI@home helped get the idea of massively distributed computing out there as a viable option.
Second, I don't think anyone is claiming that radio waves are a viable method of intersteller communication (frankly, all the options there suck, barring the discovery of handwavium or similar magic-tech).
The point isn't to find a race out there to chat with. The point is to find evidence that, at some point in the past, *someone* out there emitted radio signals. Are they still around? Can we call them up and discuss deep, philosophical questions? Maybe, and probably not. But proving that intelligent life exists or existed off Earth, even if it went extinct long ago by our reckoning, is a worthy enough project, in my less-than-humble opinion.
James.
In order to do that, every jurist is required to vote guilty only when they have absolutely no doubts that you did it. If they have any doubt at all, they are required to vote innocent.
Not actually true. IANAL, but as I recall it, the burden of proof in a criminal case is "beyond a reasonable doubt", not "beyond any doubt". Cases have been won or lost on the strength of circumstantial evidence, although direct evidence is, of course, considered good.
Incidentally, I seem to recall civil cases (like copyright infringement) having a lower burden of proof referred to as "preponderance of the evidence".
James.
Actually, I think the examples you cite imply exactly the opposite conclusion, that some sort of event horizen will come eventually. Consider the time between Neanderthal man and the Egyptian civilization, the time between the Egyptians and Gutenburg, etc.
Technological advance is accelerating, and will probably continue to do so, barring unforseen disaster or unknown physical restrictions.
James.
It wasn't a terrible book. Actually, it was quite readable, and had some very interesting ideas. Unfortunately, it suffered from some severe issues. The major problem I had with it was the graphic sexual explicitness - the book verges on pornography at times, and most of these seemed extremely vulger and gratuitous.
It also seemed very unpolished, somewhat like John C. Wright's The Golden Age, which came out last year in the same genre (trans-human sf). Both have interesting ideas, but both are clearly very rough. Compare them to the seminal work of the genre, Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep, and the differences are profound.
Overall: Good, not great.
James.
Read Wheel of Time up through book 3, then stop - that's Jordan's best work, and going any further commits you to a morass of slow and tedious writing.
But Goodkind? Ick - not only is his plot cliched and his prose stilted, but calling his characters two-dimensional is to insult the fine polygons of Flatland, and his world is populated by people so mind-numbingly idiotic that they take seriously a villain who wants to outlaw fire.
No, give Goodkind a pass.