I was reading a "Previews" column on the Wizards web-site a few minutes ago, and was reading about the upcoming "Book of Exalted Deeds" and the "Miniatures Handbook". For both books, the sample material was in the form of a monster from the book. I didn't read the specifics of the monsters, so can't comment on them, but my response was, "Big deal".
It seems that every D&D book, and a large number of d20 books, contain lots and lots of pages of Prestige Classes, Feats, Monsters and Spells. I'm sorry, I don't want any more.
The thing is, I already have the Monster Manual, Monster Manual 2, Fiend Folio, Creature Collection, Creature Collection 2, the Tome of Horrors, Legions of Hell and Armies of the Abyss. I have enough monsters for a million and one adventures, and only ever use about 20 of them in the course of a campaign.
In terms of spells, I have the Players' Handbook, Relics & Rituals, Relics & Rituals 2 and Magic of Faerun. PCs in my games have never strayed beyond the PHB, and are unlikely ever to use all these spells.
And, for feats, I have the Players' Handbook, Ultimate Feats, and all the Wizards splatbooks. I also have all the Quintessential books dealing with core and psionic classes, except Ranger.
Now, I feel somewhat sorry for game designers in this: I just don't want any more feats, monsters or spells. Until 4th Edition, you should feel free to never publish another one of these things. The reason I feel sorry is that there are some wonderful ideas out there that I'm rejecting out of hand, and there is the problem that those were probably the easy bits of the books to fill. But, I don't want them.
This leaves the question at the top of the post: what's left to do? What do I want to see?
Well...
I don't particularly want more settings, or more information on any existing setting. I usually create my own settings anyway, and would rather use a 'sparse' setting than a 'packed' one like the Forgotten Realms anyway (not that I have anything against the Realms - I just don't intend to use it).
I don't want an epic dungeon campaign, like Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. I can't see my players going for a campaign of nothing but dungeoneering. And I don't want any books describing alignment - my views on the topic don't seem to match those of the current crop of designers, and in my game, my way rules. In any event, if we don't agree, your book is useless to me.
What I would love to see, although it would probably die a death on the market, is a serious book on campaign development, dealing with everything from cartography to altering the rules, to creating new races, to setting up 'realistic' cultures and religions. Ideally, this would contain a CD-ROM containing cartography and campaign-management programs, and a proper character generator (which would need to be scalable, and fully licensed to use any d20 materials).
I would also like to see a mega-campaign adventure that doesn't deal with dungeon crawling. I'm not sure that's actually possible, though, without becoming hopelessly nebulous. It would need to include extensive advice to the GM on tailoring the material for his game.
And, that's about it. I'm starting to think I might not be spending much money on RPGs in the next few months :-)
Any thoughts?
Archived comment by Mort:
ReplyDeleteNo! Feats are good! We want more feats! Think about the muchkin potential!
Feats for the Munchkin! Skills for the throne of Powergaming!
No, seriously...
Last Saturday made me realize how much I hate having things spread out between different books, making characters in Exalted is a pain in the back in this regard, I realized when everyone was trying to muchkin up their characters that I should just have let them pick the backgrounds and I would have assigned useful things based upon them, it would have been much quicker and less farting around.
Or I should have made a short list of all the available heartstones and artifacts. Then again, I think this is something that the games developers should think about doing themselves. They should provide a clear and concise list of all the stuff they insist on spreading out amongst a never ending number of splatbooks, and keeping it updated as new relases are produced. This of course won't happen, as less people would buy the books if they could get the crunchy stuff for free on the net. So it's left to the GM as a boring, but necessary thing to do.
On a different point, why did everyone feel it was necessary to be a good fighter in Exalted? Did I pitch the game in the wrong way or something? We have a so called trader who has more dots in brawl than he has got in bureaucracy, does he bang the merchants head in until he can sell his stuff or what? And even the sorceror has got three dots in martial arts. Fat lot of good that is gonna do without any charms to back it up...
Oh well, I'm hoping for a good game anyway, just hope people will accept the fact that there won't be tons of fighting.
I'll stop rambling now.
Archived comment by me:
ReplyDeleteMy character's a fighter because, well, my character's a fighter :-)
That said, when running Storyteller games, I have often found that characters with good combat skills and weak skills elsewhere seem to be superior to characters with their abilities set otherwise. Inevitably, combat seems to ensue, and tends to rapidly get to close range. Moreover, since it's easy to build a strong offense in Storyteller, but generally quite hard to build a strong defense, there's a lot of importance necessarily placed on attacking (to put the enemy down before they can do the same to you).
Of course, that could just be the kind of games I ran :-)
Archived comment by me:
ReplyDeleteI think the problem there is that the publishers have no plan what items are going to be in which books when they start. Since they want the game to be playable with just the core book, they need to put some of each type of thing (spells, magic items, monsters) in the main book, and then they add to this with each supplement. The problem then becomes, where do you put the global index?
It can't go in the main book, since they don't know what's coming in a year's time, and they can't put it in the last supplement, since very few people will get that far. Finally, they can't print it in each sourcebook as it comes, since that would lead to a lot of reprints.
The solution, as I see it, is for companies who do a lot of supplements to periodically release an "Encyclopedia Magica" type book, which simply collects the existing spells, magic items and monsters together (okay, maybe three books). However, TSR lots lots of money on those books, so maybe not...
Archived comment by Mort:
ReplyDeleteDue to the rather high power level of Exalted it's not necessary for each member of the group to be a super kick ass fighter. This is also quite impossible, if you want to be able to fight good you have to sacrifice charms towards this, leaving you quite charm-less (pun intended) in the areas that are supposedly your specialty.
Ideally you'd want two or three good to decent fighters in a circle, this makes it easier to plan encounters, as you don't have to pour in tons of enemies to fight. All you need is enough to keep the heavy fighters occupied, while the less powerful fighters act as support. There is a reason Archery and Throw exist.
Fact is, in Exalted you don't want to get near any fight unless you have at least one defense charm and one soak charm to help you out. Getting hit is not a good thing.
I agree that characters with good combat skills tend to be more useful than other characters, but I'll try to avoid that in this campaign. There's no saying I'll actually succeed, after all, it does depend on what type of game the players want as well. And judging from the characters, they want to fight a lot. No use in trying to push them into something they don't want to do. Maybe after they end up with a daiklave embedded in their foreheads they'll realize combat isn't the ultimate solution to everything. We'll see.
As for offense being better than defense, it's true to an extent in Exalted. The system as it stands works on initiative basis, so you are not allowed to split your dicepool before it's your turn. So if someone attacks you before you act, you can either take it like a man or default to parry or dodge. Defaulting to parry only lets you parry once though, while default to dodge lets you dodge multiple times. I don't particularly like this system, as someone who splits his attack is almost guaranteed to hit a good melee fighter (good parry, low dodge) and it doesn't make much sense that you can't go full defense with parries. But on the other hand there is more charms that allows for a perfect defense than there is for perfect offense, and they are usually available earlier and cheaper to use. I think I'll try out letting people default to parry and parry multiple attacks, and see how it works.
I'm not quite sure how things will go when the circle sets out in combat, but I guess we will find out tomorrow.